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. 

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. 

DVD of the Week: Anomalisa

One of the two movies we got to watch on Saturdays quiet day around the house was Captain America: Civil War, which irrespective how much I like it - and I do like it a lot - is very much a modern blockbuster in many of it's habits. It's franchise-dependant, hugely expensive, full of shouting and banging and tons of characters and colour and excitement. Yay! And then Robert went to bed, and Ewan went to lurk off upstairs, and got to watch the other one, the low-budget, three-cast stop-motion movie Anomalisa. I'm struggling to think of a stranger double bill. 

DVD of the Week(s): Speed Review Blow-Out!

My only real aspiration for this blog is to be my own small corner of the internet where I can record my thoughts on the meandering cultural journeys I end up taking through screen and page. I don't have to worry about posting frequency, or if my opinions are half-formed rubbish, because they're mine, and this gives me something to look back on. Sometimes I surprise myself, looking back, at how kind, or mean, I was to something. Anyway, the point is that it's been a rough summer, all told, and so this has dropped off a little bit, so it's time for a bit of an epic catch-up on movies we've seen recently. Here we go. 

Movie Review: Star Trek Beyond

As part of a build-up to an exceedingly geeky weekend at Nine Worlds Geekfest, Z and I snuck out to the cinema to see Star Trek Beyond, a movie whose initial trailer made me gnash my teeth and fanboy anger, despite all my attempts to prevent such ardent knee-jerking. It's safe to say that I've enjoyed both rebooted Trek films - I was pretty kind to Star Trek Into Darkness, looking back - but they're relentless in their attempt to push the films into slick, shallow, modern formulas, further away from the more thougthful source material. I'm not wholly against that either, as franchise need to move forward to live, to keep reengaging audiences, and become new things. I did see in that early trailer the step too far though, a line fatally crossed. Thankfully, it seems like that trailer is almost the exact opposite of the finished movie.

Movie Review: Ghostbusters

I've been a bit lax on updating here in the last few weeks, as I'm running to an exam and that's eating a fair bit of my spare time. Hopefully once that's done - and the frantic summer holiday scheduling is over with - things will settle back to normal. I am, of course, still consuming a fair bit of culture, and this weekend I took the Teenager to the cinema for the first time in what seemed like ages, to go see Ghostbusters. Now, I'm a huge fan of Ghostbusters '84, which came out when I was 11, but it's also a film with a good many "of it's time" flaws and a dissapointing sequel, so it's probably no great surprise that the Remake Train eventually reached that stop. This time, they've handed it off to Paul Feig, swapped a cast of male ensemble comedians for a cast of female ensemble comedians, and raised the ire of some of the darker cesspools of the internet. On this latter point I will only say - if this film is part of your "childhood" then you're my age, right? So grow the fuck up. Right, onto the review. 

DVD of the Week: Mr Holmes

It feels like ages since I reviewed a movie here, although looking back it's only been about a month since the dissapointing Mockingjay Part 2. We got heavily derailed by The Hollow Crown, I guess, which is no bad thing. But it was nice to get back to it this weekend with Mr Holmes, yet another take on Sherlock Holmes, who never seems to go out of fashion, nor ways to be reinvented. Mr Holmes is an adaptation of a book called "A Slight Trick of the Mind", which I've never read, and from the outside it's looks to be a showcase for Ian McKellen and the sort of small budget awards/festival fodder that can be a little hit and miss. Thankfully, Mr Holmes is mostly hit. 

DVD of the Week: Mockingjay, Part 2

So here we are at last, as The Hunger Games trilogy closes off with it's fourth movie. Yes, yet again  the final adaptation on a series of films has been cut in half, alledgelly because there is just so much story, but really because they want everyone to pay twice. I reviewed the first half a while back, and pretty much liked it, with the caveat that I'd need to see Mockingjay Part 2 to really form a proper verdict. This weekend I got to see it, and indeed form a verdict, and that verdict, sadly, is pretty much "meh". 

Movie Review: Captain America: Civil War

It's strange how conversations on the "geek internet" create consensus around movies, or franchises, and how bubbled that can get. We decree movies as "success" or "failure" on different metrics than say, studios, or wider audiences, and the driving need to get a distinctive opinion out there means that we have to sort films into "love" or "hate" with little room for just sort of liking something. And it means that a film like Avengers: Age of Ultron, which made a lot of money, was a lot of fun and generally pretty well received, is now commonly described as "dissapointing" or a "failure". (There's another film, out now, which I could reference but i won't, because I've not seen it and there is enough bandwagon jumping on that front as it is). AoU clearly struggles under it's franchise obligations, and I liked it well enough, although it left a worrying sense that it was all going in a troubling direction. Leave it Captain America: Civil War to save the day.

DVD of the Week: Pride

It's strange to think of the 1980s as "history". As I commented when I was talking about Deutschland '83, the 1980s is my childhood - the music, the telly, the politics and look, I'm not that bloody old! But it's completely alien to Ewan, for instance, to talk about Nuclear War, or in the case of this weeks movie Pride, the struggle for Gay Rights, or the Miners Strike. The former, I must admit, I was only dimly aware of until I got to university, but with the Durham Coalfield to the North and the Yorkshire Pits to the South, the latter pretty much local news even in the death of the Teeside Steel Industry was the more immediate to my family. But even without that direct awareness, I do suspect it was all slightly less cosy than this film offers. 

DVD(s) of the Week: Electic Boogaloo, Trainwreck, Cinderella

Right, time for another quick catch-up round. This time it driven more by the fact that these are three movies that I don't really have a lot to say about, but for completeness, here they are. They're all fine; they've all got merit, but at the same time they each in their own way won't be to everyone's taste, and perhaps are lacking that extra but that would take them over the line. So without further ado, lets get into it. 

DVD(s) of the Week: Brooklyn, Penguins of Madagascar

In the interests of catching up on my watching, it's a double header review this week, with two pretty contrasting movies. I like it when that happens, to honest, because whilst TV-land has become a barrage of superhero fare I'm starting to struggle to distinguish between, at least my movie-watching fare is remaining diverse and interesting. I'm going to spend a lot more time on Brooklyn than Penguins of Madagascar, but the latter is included here for completeness, and because it's actually OK, as far as these things go. But first, the properly good film!

Movie Review: Zootropolis

This weekend was the weekend that Social Media seemed to go (more) insane over a Comic Book Movie and whether it was right/wrong to like/dislike it. On one level the response to Batman v Superman has been fascinating, and on another it's been eye-wateringly stupid. I look forward now to months of pointless, circular arguments raging about it, lit only by the buring of Strawmen, illuminating nothing and no-one. Thankfully, I haven't seen it, so you are spared my thoughts on it for now. Instead, we took the kids (including the teenager, who preferred this to the chance to see BvS, go figure!) to see Disney's latest offering, Zootropolis. 

Movie Review: Hail, Caesar!

I think it's safe to say I'm a pretty die-hard fan of the Coen Brothers and a new film from them is always a cause for celebration. I love then in part because they seem to pretty much do what they want, moving from blood-soaked dramas, to light comedy, and picking up all sorts of other genres to play in along the way. They've had occasional misfires for sure - although I don't always agree with critical consensus about which films those misfires actually are - but even the Intolerable Cruelty's of this world I've found interesting and entertaining. This year we are back with farce after the excellent Inside Llwellyn Davis, alighting on the Hollywood of 1951, in Hail, Caesar! 

DVD of the Week: Crimson Peak

So I was planning on writing up "Spy" last week in a quiet moment between bouts of half-term childcare, but instead I felt it better to come down with a stinking headcold, and yeah, that didn't happen. So I'll try and do that later this week, and this time talk about this saturdays viewing, the Guillermo del Toro helmed Crimson Peak. Expectations were high, because it's del Toro, and he's the sort of director that makes consistantly fascinating film with massive attention to detail, that then not enough people go on to watch. This time we are promised a period-set ghost story, with all the trappings. 

Movie Review: Deadpool

So with a rare chance to get out to the cinema - on Valentines Day, no less - then going to see a "grown up" movie was one the cards. Given it's Oscar season, there was quite few on offer, but Z wanted to see Deadpool, and thats a grown up romantic movie for a night out, right? Right? Aside from good early reviews and promising trailer, I can't say that I have been itching to see it based on the property alone; Deadpool isn't a character that has ever grabbed me, and I think I've mentally filed him away other hyper-violent 90s creations whose fans are always a little bit too enthusiastic about the "blood and swearing" element of the character. Which I admit is narrow-minded of me, and I guess it's a credit to the marketting around the movie that it got me past that hurdle in the first place. Z, to her credit, just watched the trailers and though "Yes, I want to see that." And I'm glad we did. 

DVD of the Week: Tomorrowland

Before I get onto this weeks film, a quick bonus recommendation. We also settled in with Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD, which is a documentary covering the long and (mostly) glorious history of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic from it's inception in 1977 to today. In places it's a bit of a helicopter view, and can't quite decide if its explaining for newcomers or existing fans, but it's full of the actual people behind key moments in the comic's history, speaking for themselves. It's interesting and engaging, and I really enjoyed it, so yeah, go watch that if you've ever picked up a copy of 2000AD in your life. Which of course you should have. So on with the main review, for Tomorrowland: A World Beyond. 

DVD of the Week: Song of the Sea

Sometimes you'd be forgiven for thinking that there were only two schools of animated movie in the world, those from Japan, and those from Hollywood. Both are pretty diverse, to be fair, and it's certainly not a slight on them, but they both have evolved into distinctive visual styles that are so familiar they almost define what an animated movie should look like. Which is nonesense, of course, as the occasional breakthrough features from across the globe prove, even if they often have to fight their way out of both the "foreign language" and "animation" boxes to get there. One recent success is the Irish feature Song of the Sea, which wound up as our tea-time viewing this Sunday .

DVD of the Week: Jurassic World

So this week, for movie night, we watched Die Hard, in honour of Alan Rickman and his general awesomeness. Which was cool, because it's a great film, and it's been many years since I last saw it, and we let Ewan stay up with us and watch it too, as part of an ongoing project to expand his cultural education. We also took Robert to see The Force Awakens, which he really enjoyed, applauding the appearance of X-wings, covering his eyes at Kylo Ren and yelling "No Way!!" at that moment.  All very successful. And for anyone keeping score, then yes, thats a 13-year-old watching an 18-rated movie* and a 5-year-old at a 12A. Don't tell my mum! So I'm going to take this post to go back and catch up a movie we watched over the Xmas break; Jurassic World.