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Dune: Part Two (2024)
Wow - Such a Brilliant movie, even better than the first
I was put off by the trailers, long views of sand dunes.
And while I remember loving the first one, I cant quite put my finder on why. So I was blown away when I just happened to be next to a cinema with a showing in 30 minutes and I didn't even realise it was imax until I got in and sat down.
It was an absolute beautifully made film, people who so obviously love the books - and for my money its even better than the first one.
While I was watching it, I was thinking 'this is grown up' and what I was thinking, was not that this isn't a move suitable for kids - I was thinking this is a movie that is all in, it didnt try to pander to the sci-fi movie lover in all of us, it keeps Dune where it is in the book, and it did that by absolute immersion in things like scale, costume, set design, sound, detail.
There were so many times while watching Dune Part Two - that you were just awed by the momentousness and scale of the scenes.
I wont spoil which scenes were like that - but I'm sure people can imagine.
I completely forgot that it was 3 hours long, but what I just witnessed was art, creativity, story masterfully rendered.
Bad Education: Reunion (2022)
You know when somethings off
I love Bad Education, so was excited to suddenly see a new episode.
When I started to watch this - I had one of those moments, when you feel like, hangon, I recognise the people - but the lines are all off, have they got rid of the writer.
A bit like watching Tony Hancock when he thought he was too good for the writers of Hancocks Half Hour, and ended up killing himself while making some dreary 'comedy' in Australia.
You recognise the faces, the mannerisms are all there - but absolutely not a single one of the lines rings as funny.
Then I googled it, and find that Alfie is one of the writers, so how can it possibly be this cringey.
You forgive the kids having grown up, and no longer able to play quite the little teen horrors that they once were - but even the adults dont seem to be able to get it together.
Mathew Horne seems to be able to stay on point. Replacing Pickwell with Bernadette Hobum who play the delightfully deranged Princess Anne in the Windsors looks possibly good on paper - but she's not as off the wall, or comedic as Michelle Gomez.
Jack Whitehall has done some brilliant brilliant things, and Bad Education series as a whole is fantastic (screw the reviewers who dont get it) - but the Reunion probably DOES deserve the comment from one of the tabloids which a reporter attributed to the entire series but I do just this one episode - that Jack White just phoned it in.
Andor (2022)
Wow a refreshing surprise
I think we all know that Star Wars has always had a formula - It's essentially a fairy story with an evil 'king', 'emperor' and his massive evil army - battling against a small group of quirky miscreants who find they can do magic along the way 'the force' - and find themselves in scrapes to defend against the forces of evil.
Inside that fairy story - George Lucas injected a sort of recognisable otherworldliness, by taking recognisable often cultural symbols, turning them upside down and sticking them in as decoration.
The millennium falcon has gun turrets from a world war II bomber, storm troupers are strangely Germanic in their uniforms.
The most recent films have been called 'resets' but were actually just the original movie made over - but with an almost pre-pubescent set of players, designed to assure the franchises continuation for as long as Disney can milk it.
Luke Skywalker - became a girl.
R2D2 - became round.
Han Solo - became black.
Then the spinoffs. Mandalorian to me was barely watchable. Boba Fett, looked like someone had squeezed an overweight Hollywood movie producer into a suit because it was his childhood dream, and filmed it.
Obi-Wan got a little more on track, because it at least had some absolutely iconic Darth Vader moments, and Ewan McGregor was great.
But Andor is such a refreshing surprise.
I'd put off watching it for a long time, as I thought 'Christ - if they can't get the main characters spin-offs looking half decent, then what chance for a minor character'.
But Andor is something different. It's got grit, it's got humour, it's intelligent. It feels like Starwars for adults.
I think a lot of that is down to the British movie making.
Nothing smacks of Hollywood quite as much as that tendency when creating an alien planet of supposed wild tribes people - of having them all wandering around immaculately dresses in their ironed sacks without a spot of dirt anywhere. Or their unrealistic market places and background characters.
Here we see fantastic British made sets and scenes - which give the series more of a Dune flavor or Blade Runner.
There is humor in the characters, and great acting - and while you occasionally forget its a Starwars franchise, that's actually for the better.
At no time do you feel like a Sesame street, Muppet alien is going to pop-up. Every robot doesn't have to be instilled with some degree of cuteness. You dont feel like things that happen, are largely to set the stage for a spin-off Christmas mini-figure or computer game.
Andor feels like a real exciting move, and is one that restores my interest in the Starwars saga.
The King's Man (2021)
FFS - What a lot of stupid cliches in one movie!
It's like someone sat in a pub - and threw every single vaguely historical nonsense they could into this movie.
It is just so cringingly on-the-nose in every single historical aspect, the characters are so mind blowingly over the top, it's just toe curlingly bad.
Whether its rasputin the mad monk, lord kitchiner being the bluff general, duke ferdinand and his assassination. On top of that you have a bald villain living up a ridiculously high mountain in some sort of Buddhist retreat who sounds like he's straight out of a Glasgow gangster movie.
There is not an original idea in this entire movie - It is like the entire thing was written by someone with the goal of creating a kingman movie using nothing but things that happen in a primary school childs history book, but re-remembered by some drunk bloke down the pub.
The Book of Boba Fett (2021)
Disneys milking of this franchise is Horrific
On the face of it, this paint by numbers effort by Disney - wouldn't be so unpalatable if they injected anything slightly new or exciting into the franchise.
Instead what we get, is not only a going through the motions - but so horrifically stilted and obvious, that it makes you squirm just watching it.
Every few minutes you sense that something infuriatingly obvious or straight out of year of 1 cinema school is going to happen - and you brush it aside thinking, no they wouldnt do that - that would be stupid.
And instead, up whatever horrible cliche comes - then for a brief second you might think, oh it will be ironic and there'll be a twist.
And you wait....
And you wait...
and instead of a twist, it just gets worse, and worse and worse.
From the moment, Boba Fett is revealed as a fat overweight 60 kiwi, something felt off.
Then every single cliche of the original star wars is thrown in our faces in the matter of minutes.
The whole thing feels like a San Francisco cinema school project - although I would expect that to be a little more inventive.
There's a ninja fight scene which while you're watching it - you think - Christ this is being acted out for some future game element.
Then you have an original startrek style monster fight - with the obligatory strangle it with the chains on your ankle - followed by a squirm in your seat hero worship moment, worse than any movie I've ever seen.
Boba stands like a fat 60 year old kiwi on the killed beast - striking a toy figure pose, before being taken back to his once captures with the head of the beast - to now be worshipped like a hero symbolised by the sand creature giving him some water.
At that point - I felt a bit of sick come up in my throat and came on here to review how bad it all is.
Cosmos (2019)
Could of so easily been much much better
The film had its moments - and the technical stuff was done very well.
The moment they discovery there's a ship above them, blocking their view of a satellite was great - it's just such a shame, that in trying to create a bit of pointless drama they had to add in so much embarrassing nonsense.
First contact not being exciting enough - we are then put through an entirely stupid and unnecessary race against time, including a jumping of traffic lights, and a high speed chase - with the MOST AWFUL repetitive music, all in order to avoid, as far as I could make out, a laptop running out of power.
Without that last bit, I was quite enjoying the movie - and I was prepared to think - oh that's cool, they've made a really nice sci-fi movie, without having to have a giant budget, and being 3 guys basically in a car.
However the last ten minutes, was as though some low budget Tom Cruise movie was doing a countdown to defuse a bomb.
It was a shame - because the movie went down in my estimations only in the last ten minutes.
The Cleaner (2021)
Wow - More please
The UK has an increasing body of works of quality wry dramas written by people we think of as comedians.
People in the reviews giving this 5 stars of less - because it's not 'laugh out loud', 'roll on the floor' funny are missing the point of these sorts of gems.
Peep Show, Inside no.9,Saxondale,Camping, Truth Seekers - and so on.
Rock and Roll's Greatest Failure: Otway the Movie (2013)
Otway is an inspiration
John Otway is a just a remarkable ball of inventiveness, energy, optimism - all coming out of left field.
You just marvel throughout the entire movie, at the mans - childish wide eyed, alternative universe - and you just want to be on the journey with him.
Otway doesnt have an ounce of consumerism, an ounce of greed, an ounce of polish or fakery about him - He is just mad as a bag of hammers.
People like John make you glad to be alive.
Alistair1918 (2015)
How Odd
Seems very strange.
"What do you think?"
a person says, one time to the camera man busy filming the time traveller
"What do I think about what?".......
"Oh what do I think about him"
This entire thing is about the quality one would expect if you were in a drama class at school - and the teacher threw this scenario at the class, and said 'Everyone Go'.
Red Tails (2012)
Wow - So many missed opportunities
Crazy film - that within the first few minutes slams down your throat the idea that Americans stereotyped its black squadrons as lazy and useless, and while you're watching this play out - it lurches into stereotyping Germans as evil complete with scars on their faces and evil stares.
I don't really care about the inaccuracy in the flying scenes, I mean it looks good.
Color Out of Space (2019)
Throws everything at you - and mostly misses
The first part of the movie was watchable and entertaining.
It was interesting and there was enough weirdness build up for us to be intrigued about what would happen next. Nicholas Cage was better than I expected.
Then once the horror set in - it seemed to give up any subtly or any story and instead just seemed to dig deep into the bag of horror ideas from other movies - and flung them at you.
They were well done, but there was just too many of them - and they didnt all belong in the same movie.
You can take the monster from The Thing and put it into this movie, by why also take a tree monster, or why also take peoples skin bubbling, why also take something at the bottom of the well, why also take something weird in the water they drink, why also take some weird looking insect creature, why also take the pink cloud, the throbbing purple under the skin, the alien eyes, the weird talking, the sound under the floor, the mutated animals.
So way too much - and probably should have stayed a short story
The Midnight Sky (2020)
What a wasted opportunity
Many a movie could be said to be let down, by lack of funding. lack of quality actors, lack of big enough topics.
How in gods name, is it possible for a movie to so demonstrably have every single one of those things in spades - and yet not be able to produce a single coherent intelligible even vague sniff, at anything approaching a story line.
I can only assume this movie was designed to deliberately be rubbish as part of some elaborate tax rip off. Either that or someone has been into the movie and deliberately cut out what ever scenes may have been needed to string the thread of random consciousness together into something resembling some sort of meaning.
41 (2012)
Lovely idea with some great moments but some of the amateur elements are jarring
The premise of the movie is great, and the reveals are great
There was a lot to like about it, and for a while you could suspend the belief that it was a little amateurish in the acting. But every now again, you got the feeling that someones dad, had been roped into a speaking role. At other times you'd have a long pan on an expressionless face - and you'd realise that someone had decided this was a moment to show grief but either hadn't told the actor or they couldn't convey it.
Also like many time based scifi movies, it struggles with itself. Right from the get go - my first thought was, he's gone back in time, wants to stop a car accident - simply let the air out of the tires of the car as you walk past it.
That doesnt seem to occur to him. So the movie starts down the road of showing us how you cant change time, and in fact it is going back in time which causes the events you witness.
You think you're going to do something to fix the car crash, such as jump in front of the car - but that's what caused the crash.
It holds onto that premise for a long while.
Then a little later - his grandfather who in a bizarre premise, died seemingly because he swam out to get a golf ball from a lake that he'd been knocking golf balls across - How do you think our hero should influence that death, which we've now decided we can save. Of course by putting a golf ball in grandfathers pocket, so he's got a spare.
That was a little hard to swallow - as the only impact of restoring his grandfather to life appears to be him miraculously appearing in the hospital next to his dying grandmother.
The police also bizarrely seem to be out of some new york gangster movie. This is Australia I assume, and the hero recently in hospital after being in a car accident - is beaten up and chased by the cops because he didn't stay in hospital like he was told.
What about the secret hole - to take you one day into the past. Our hero at one point seems to go back days - popping out every single day in strangers bathrooms without issue, and later goes back to the 1950's by repeatedly climbing in and out of the hole.
This would take him 14 days if he did it every single minute of every single day constantly. He then lives his life to an old man, simply so that he could achieve what he would have achieved if he simply let the tires down of the car.
It might make sense if he seemed to have a great love interest, but the characters seem to only have a mild interest in each other. If you in one scene can miraculosuly return your grandfather to life, I dont know why you wouldn't do something greater like learn to drive more safely ensure your girldfriend puts on a seatbelt when she gets in the car you're driving.
But the movie has some great polished moments, it just seemed to not quite know what sort of time travel paradox it did or didnt want to do - and I just wish some of the more awkward acting and dialog could have been cleaned up.
Avenue 5 (2020)
Clever Comedy at its best
You have to get past the first 2 or 3 episodes to really get a handle on what this comedy is doing.
There is no way that this series deserves anything less than an 8 - and with it being here currently a 6 (the same as the appallingly drab and unfunny Spaceforce) which it towers above; people need to watch if before they comment.
It's clever, sophisticated and if you dont concentrate you miss it. There must surely be an audience out there in America for this - after all, they 'got' Fraser.
1917 (2019)
Absolutely astonishing
I've been putting off seeing this movie for a while - I think largely because I feel that British cinemas golden age with big budgets was in the past, and where as many years ago a Lawrence of Arabia or Zulu wars could demand a massive spectacle and a huge array of extra - Modern, poorer Britain has for me, a tendency to make paltry looking movies, which tends to rely on the superior acting rather than Hollywood style budgets.
Hollywood - tends to suffer from the opposite extreme, which is massively too much money, slapped unrealistically onto scenes with cookie cutter costumes, and paint by numbers, buildings. In Hollywood you feel someones just gone to a giant warehouse with the year you want to portray on it - and rolled out all of the correct bric-a-brac.
So I imagined I knew what this film would be like, before I'd seen it.
So putting it on, I was absolutely blown away.
There's not many movies where I could say that I kept rewinding and rewatching the first 6 or 7 minutes ,three or four times before continuing simply because I couldn't believe the staggering set design, the imerisive camera. This was even before any shooting starts.
There was none of this close up camera work, to hide the lack of extras and protect the budget. There was none of that scooby doo running down corridors thing, with the same things going past every few seconds.
Instead - what we get is something that feels immense, authentic - and you spend a lot of the movie - just thinking HOW in gods name did they do that.
It also didnt suffer from any of that British vanity, that all of its soldiers were cheerful cockneys with their chums, or stiff upper lip stoic officers - so you get a measured feeling that this could be taking place now, and a little part of me thought that perhaps it would have been nice to have had the actors date their accents a bit to be more authentic.
As it was the actors could be anyone you met in the pub - where as the reality is, you've only got to listen to a movie of people talking from the 1940s and you know absolutely that they talk differently.
That for me would have improved the movie, but I guess viewers may have felt less involved.
But a staggering technical achievement that I've never seen in any movie before.
Loved it
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The Janitor Always Mops Twice (2019)
Wow - Just Wow
One of the best things I've seen on TV.
This level of observation to recreate this early movie style is breath taking.
Camera work is gorgeous, music is perfect, dialog is astonishing and acting is amazing.
Blade: Trinity (2004)
How is it possible to waste this much money and this much opportunity
Opening three minutes of the movie, before anyone spoke was really cool.
Then people started speaking in a mind numbing, ridiculous dialog that made you squirm. So then your brain sort of goes, well OK - dialog is going to be ball achingly bad, but at least its an action movie and the fight scenes will be good.
Then about ten minutes in, you realise they're not.
Fight scenes are ridiculous, the good guys and the bad guys are all ridiculous.
It's as though someone was paid to sabotage the movie.
A Boy Called Sailboat (2018)
Absolute gem of a film
There are some films are just art, and this is one of them.
Beautifully filmed and wonderful story - It doesnt try to be something other than what it is - Just something with heart.
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
Deserves more than a 7
This is a great sci-fi.
Some of the criticisms in here about the dialog or the acting, must be from people who've never enjoyed a comic, never enjoyed a scifi book.
It's not supposed to be hi-art - at least not in the sense that the criticisms seem to be coming from. The beauty in this film - is in the fantastic character designs, and brilliant sci-fi touches. This movie is for those people who enjoyed comics like Judge Dred, who love the colour and vividness of fantasy comics.
This entire movie is a fantasy comic made more vivid by becoming CGI.
Cloak & Dagger (2018)
Depressing, and skow
Im about four or five episodes in and there's been absolutely nothing.
I dont mind a slow story but also every scene is dripping with depression.
I'm not even sure what the powers are.
Extraction (2020)
Good fight scenes but ridiculous attempt to put a moral twist on it
The movie was great until about half way through.
The idea that a mercenary paid to rescue a drug lords son, gets shafted but ends up rescuing the seemingly nice kid any way after flashbacks to his owns sons premature death is trite but OK, we can love with that.
The idea that the drug lords second in command is also making the ultimate sacrifice helping the rescue because otherwise his own family will be killed is also trite but OK.
Whats not OK - is that while this moral premise is being played out, of a rescue of an innocent, there seems to be several hundred innocent police offices ruthlessly slaughtered along the way, with a sort of deliberate unemotional distancing.
All the police, almost universally have their faces covered - almost as though the director is trying to turn them into simple targets that you're not supposed to think about.
So while we watch literally hundreds of police - who are presumably just following instructions to track down a mercenary, have their throats cut open, blown up, crushed by cars and riddled with bullets - the movie at the same time is trying to create a situation, where you feel this is OK because the mercenary isnt doing this any longer for money, but is doing it to protect the drug lords son from a bad man.
We know this is a bad man, because we see his henchmen throwing children off a roof - but were you to tally up the death toll in this movie, it would seem the baddies kill about 4 innocent people, and the goodies several hundred.
The movie even sinks lower into its moralising by finishing off with an assassination of the baddie leader at the end as though that keep the boy safe and then stupidly does a shadowy figure behind him as though 'but is he really safe'.
For a brief second, the movie looked like it was going to flirt with realism, and then it descended into a pure body count and that thing that happens in a movie where despite being injured hundreds of times, the hero gets up and still kicks ass.
But oh well, first 30.minutes were watchable.
Smoke (1995)
My Number One Favourite Movie of All Time
This is a movie that is pure art.
You almost feel the heat of the time of the year, and the characters are real and compelling. The stories within stories are beautiful and the events that unfold are wonderful. Just such a compelling movie - and this movie on its own - shows what is wrong with Hollywood.
Intelligence (2020)
Superb
Great lines, great acting.
I dont know why there are so many low reviews on here - Perhaps the comedy is too British and a little too subtle for some people.
I love some of the little office references here - like the fact that GCHQ has bake sales, or that everyones trying to get the printer working.
The Limehouse Golem (2016)
Just wrong
The stilted acting, over the top accents, the silly cheap technique of imagining every suspect as the murderer with a digital audio effect to make their voice sound monstrous.
Bill Nighy brings absolutely nothing to the role, and is robotic and characterless, his side kick policeman is slightly more interesting but has some weird unnecessary dialog.
Its as though someone writing the stilted pointless dialog of a marvel super hero - has decided to have a go at writing a BBC style period who-dun-it. But has completely failed to work out what that requires apart from throwing some murders and some suspects at the screen.
Wonder Woman (2017)
Dull Dull and More Dull
There are absolutely no redeeming features in this film.
It looks as though someone simply opened all the standard moulds for a comic hero movie - and then poured the money/dialog/acting into those.
It's horrible that movies like this seem to do well, while really great sci-fi like Valerian gets down voted.
As far as I can see - the difference, is that films like Wonder Woman are hyped with franchises and have a greater selling potential simply as an idea, rather than being a good movie.