Movie Review: Doctor Strange

It's almost getting to the point where the release of a new Marvel Studios Movie is greeted with a wave of reviews that almost copy/pasted from the last one, along with the usual barrage of "hot takes". After all,  Doctor Strange is the fourteenth film in the MCU, a movie franchise with patterns just as strongly established as say, James Bond, so to an extent if you like the others (to lesser or greater degrees) you can be confident you'll like this, and vice versa. Marvel has a process, and a template, that it know works, and it's not going to change those fundamentals until it can be demonstrated that they don't work. Maybe this sounds defensive, but it's not supposed to - I like the MCU films, I get out of them what I want from them, but at the same time much of the commentary around is superfluous, unless something radically differnet happens. And Doctor Strange isn't radically different, not really, attempted appearances to the contrary. 

Book Review Catch-up!

One of the reasons I keep this blog is that I have a record of what I thought about something in the immediate period after experiencing it. I find it useful and interesting to flick back because I can think of a lot of Books, Films, or other media that I've grown to dislike through memory or social influence, and others where they've lived with me for a long time, making me appreciate them more. It's also just a useful channel for my urge to "talk about stuff" lets me get it out of my head and move on a little bit. I guess that's the diarists main driver, even if this is (mostly) limited to cultural consumption. Anyway, on the reading front I've been heavily distracted by Stephen King's The Dark Tower series (now on Book 5!) but here's a quick run down of what I've been reading as refreshers in between.

Games Review: Destiny

One of the games I was most looking forward to on the PS4 was Arkham Knight, which I'd avoided on the PC due to it's extremely buggy release state. I'm sorry to say that it's a crushing dissapointment, deciding quite deliberately to move away from what was fun the earlier games - hanging around on rooftops being Batman - towards being an underwhelming Batmobile driving simulator and anti-tank shooting simulator. What good ideas and execution it has is lost on constantly being forced to use a bloody car that is no fun to use, and in the end I gave up in disgust, a sad end to a pretty great series. On the plus side, I've been playing a lot of Destiny, which I'm finding pretty damn great. 

DVD of the Week: Trumbo

Last week we caught a rewatch of the Coen Brothers rather excellent Hail, Caesar, which is probably best described as a quirky take on the Hollywood of the late 1940s and early 1950s, if that era was telling the story itself. It's sharp, and tongue-in-cheek and I suspect there is a lot of gags I don't get at the expense of Hollywood fixtures of the period, although I certainly got a few, not least thanks to the excellent You Must Remember This podcast which covers the period. In a serendipidous moment, the movie we had for this week also covers the same period, that of the Blacklist, and the late "Golden Age", Trumbo. 

DVD of the Week: The Jungle Book

I'm pretty wary about Disneys new "big idea" to go back and remake it's animated classics as live action pictures. I guess it's a decent way to keep these legacy properties (and their relevant merchandise) in the public eye, and it's easy to market to adults likely to bring their kids along due to nostalgia for the originals. But Alice in Wonderland was rubbish, and Cinderella was workmanlike, and now they've done The Jungle Book with realistic looking animals (mostly) and if it wasn't for the fact it got actually decent reviews I don't think I'd have bothered with it on principle. That said, I do have a nostalgic fondest for the original and I do have kids, so at the very least that part of the plan worked for Disney.