I Just Watched (Films)

[Abs_McBain]

It’s a great film that managed to pretty much show a lot more of the world than I expected. Talking of films with long quiet\silent panning shots with little dialogue I stumbled across an old anime film from 1985 called Angels Egg, which is a trip.
I dunno if it happened or not but I think I may have watched it yeaaaaars ago on BBC2 around midnight…it was either that or Akira. Catching something like that on TV in the middle of the night was pretty damn surreal back then, kinda lost that "magic" or that feeling of unexpected discovery nowadays with instant streaming services and YouTube.

[Achtung Englander]

The King (Netflix)

I really enjoyed that and learned a lot to.

8/10

[Alan]

Antebellum

I thought this was really good and Jenelle Monae is a great actress. She plays a slave on a plantation not having the best of times with confederate soldiers but she also plays a modern day author and activist and it’s about how they are linked. Seems to be sitting around 50% ratings on all the major sites but I thought it was great.

[Raid]

The Great Gatsby

It's not often that I genuinely don't want to bother finishing a film, but this was one of them. I've had it on my watch list for a while, and noticed it was leaving Prime next week so decided it was nor or never. I think I only stuck with it out of stubbornness and the hope that it would actually get interesting at some point. Imagine the roaring twenties stripped of all of their charm, leaving nothing but criminal decadence from people who have more money than they know what to do with. I dislike every single one of these characters, they're all entirely unsympathetic. I could potentially have liked Carraway who seems to be intended as the more grounded everyman narrator, but he was played by Tobey McGuire and so had that trademark bemused look on his face for the entire film, and the script gave him little in the way of real insight.

I went into this knowing almost nothing about it, something I'm trying to do more often to broaden my cinematic horizons rather than staying in my comfort zone. I really expected the story to involve the Wall Street Crash to give it some impact, not realising that the book it's based on was written four years before the event giving this pursuit of unimaginable wealth a feeling of hideous optimism. I also didn't realise Jay-Z was an executive producer, and so the incongruous hip-hop (a genre I'm generally not keen on) soundtrack that I'm assuming he's responsible for replacing more era-appropriate jazz (a genre I'm generally very keen on) did absolutely nothing for me.

I'm not suggesting it's a bad film, but it's everything that I would usually try to avoid, and I hated almost every minute of it.

[Alan]

Killer Sofa

I could review it but instead I’ll just drop the trailer.

[Raid]

Yeah, I think that adequately describes the film.

Is there actually a killer sofa in it? It looks like it's about a killer recliner, and those are two very different things. 0 stars.

[Alan]

Yeah I’m not sure why they called it killer sofa when the actors say recliner about a thousand times and never once use the word sofa! It was bad but I was entertained for most of its 80min runtime.

[Raid]

The Amazing Spiderman

Watching this reminded me of the biggest reason I loved the MCU Spiderman films; the people who wrote Homecoming and Far From Home appear to have met a teenager at some point in their lives. Holland's Peter Parker actually sounds like he's the age he's portrayed as, while Andrew Garfield's portrayal is in "How do you do fellow kids?" territory (he even has the skateboard draped over one shoulder). Garfield was 28 or 29 when this was filmed (nearly 10 years older than Holland when he did Civil War), and he had brow lines even then. He's supposed to be playing a 16 or 17 year old if my knowledge of the American school system is reliable.

But what the MCU films haven't really bothered with is the... pathos of the Spiderman franchise, that both the Maguire and Garfield films focused on. I actually re-watched Far From Home earlier this week, and although they did a little of the balance between super heroics and personal life that the MCU almost entirely abandoned right from the start, the "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" angle does feel strangely absent now that I've watched a film that included it.

Anyway, this was... alright, but I think it's probably the least effective of the three attempts. Captain Stacy feels like he's channelling Willem Dafoe's Norman Osborn... and actually I'm now realising that all three first live-action Spiderman franchise films have a menacing father figure in them. Rhys Ifans actually makes for a really good sympathetic villain for what little screen time he gets. I'd have thought Martin Sheen would have made an excellent Uncle Ben, but his performance is a little underwhelming, and I'm not sure if he was phoning it in or whether it was the direction and script. The visual effects are the big let-down though; Lizard looks absolutely awful, as if someone took the full-CGI characters we got in the 90s and put them through an AI upscale. They also never really manage to portray the thrill of swinging through New York that every other Spiderman film does so well.

I enjoyed it, for what it's worth, and I'm probably going to watch the sequel, but it's disappointing for a superhero film released in the same year as Avengers Assemble, and not only does it not differentiate itself enough from the two Tobey Maguire ones, it's also just not as good.

[Animalmother]

Funnily enough I watched Homecoming today for the first time. Apart from Into the Spiderverse I don't really have much regard for Spiderman films .It's been so long since I last the Toby Maguire ones I can't really remember them and I quit midway through the Andrew Garfield one. I enjoyed this, nice pacing and it didn't take itself too seriously. As a villain Vulture was a bit underwhelming but he sure looked cool. On the whole it was pretty good.

[Raid]

I think I'm going to rewatch the Maguire films at some point. I have very fond memories of them, I think they were the first good modern superhero films, but we've had so many in the last 20 years that it'll be interesting to see if they stand up.

[Sly Boots]

Free Guy (Disney+)

It's... fine. Decent, even. But still felt a bit disappointed after watching it, perhaps because the premise is really good, but they didn't do an awful lot with it and it felt a bit light on laughs. And much as I love Taika Waititi, I just found him a bit annoying here.

The premise, for anyone who doesn't know, is that Ryan Reynolds is a background NPC in a GTA Online-style game, who one day breaks his programming and eventually becomes self-aware. I'd give it about a 6/10, but it could have been a lot better.

[Wrathbone]

The Battle of Britain

I’ve been watching some classic WW2 films recently and somehow I’d never seen this supposed classic with an all-star cast, including Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier, Ian McShane and Christopher Plummer. By all accounts, I expected it to be one of the greats.

It’s… not very good.

As a spectacle of dogfighting and technical accomplishment, it’s reasonable, and I expect it was breathtaking and groundbreaking when it was released in 1969. Doubtless it paved the way for things like Star Wars (I seem to recall Lucas used similar footage as a placeholder for the Death Star assault on his first private screening). But it makes up 60-70% of the film and it rarely tells anything remotely like a story in the action. It’s just a load of planes being shot down for two hours.

The remaining scenes on the ground are uneven and incoherent, again not really telling a story. It’s conveyed that the RAF was vastly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe and that their only advantage was the Spitfire, and nothing changes in that regard. There’s no progression, just a lot of “tally-ho!” from the Brits and “gott in himmel!” from the Germans, and lo and behold the Germans are defeated because they don’t have Spitfires. The end. I’m fairly sure the historical situation was somewhat more complex and nuanced than that.

The stellar cast is woefully used too. While everyone runs around shouting “what-what, old bean!”, Olivier constantly looks forlorn and whistful, like he’d rather be giving a Shakespearean soliloquy. Michael Caine’s character makes little impact and then dies unceremoniously and is never mentioned again. Lovejoy has a character arc which lasts all of 6 or 7 minutes.

Not one for the history books. Next up today is Tobruk, another supposed classic which I’ve never seen. I’ve better hopes for this one as it’s a commando film with George Peppard, so I’m expecting it to be the A-Team.

4/10

[Animalmother]

Classic 60's war movies do tend to be a bit on the dull side alright. Watched Guns of the Navarone a few weeks ago and nearly fell asleep. I remember enjoying Tobruk, the action scenes are pretty good as long as you ignore the German vehicles are all just American ones painted grey.

[Raid]

I think there's a reason that classic war films tend to be a boxing day afternoon staple; everyone's in a food coma and they can drift off to long stints of nothing but boring dialogue. Honestly I'm not sure I could bring myself to watch them these days as I can't separate them from the jingoist attitudes of Brexiteers.

[Wrathbone]

Classic 60's war movies do tend to be a bit on the dull side alright. Watched Guns of the Navarone a few weeks ago and nearly fell asleep. I remember enjoying Tobruk, the action scenes are pretty good as long as you ignore the German vehicles are all just American ones painted grey.

Guns of Navarone has its moments but it is a bit dull. Where Eagles Dare is much better, but the ending drags out too much. For me, the ones that have never felt dull are The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Bridge on the River Kwai and A Bridge Too Far, although we’re stretching into the 50s and 70s there. If I can push into the 80s, The Big Red One is an excellent film which has the feel of a 60s war film.

EDIT - I’ll add The Dambusters to that list. It holds up surprisingly well.