Going to the Pictures (V)

It’s pretty much November. In about 6 weeks I’ll have had my Cineworld card for a whole year. Apparently I get a replacement card in black, more discounts, and all the sales jazz. However, it’s becoming apparent that getting this card in the first place was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time.

But that’s a post for another day. What we want here is reviews, right? Plus a record of what I’ve seen and how I felt about it. So on with the show:

Blade Runner 2049 (28th September 2017)

Warning: this review contains SPOILERS.

Skip to the verdict if you don’t want to know.

I was really looking forward to this. Being a fan of the original (how many times have I used the ‘too bad she won’t live - but then again, who does?’ line on people?), and having rewatched it just the week before, I had hopes that we were in for something of the same. Well, SPOILERS, but yeah, it was pretty much the same - insomuch as Harrison Ford gets the girl and all the replicants die. Same-same. And it took 2.5 hours to get there. It felt like the film was 6 weeks long - and for the most part I felt it totally missed the point on why the film was there and went after other plot threads. For example, I thought the idea of the original, and hopefully this sequel (so glad it wasn’t a reboot) was that we were supposed to be exploring the difference between humans and replicants - what makes humans better, or superior? Why do some people believe that slavery of ‘lesser’ species is ok? Do replicants count as a species, and is that because they now come with implanted emotions to make them easier to handle? Do replicants just follow their programming or do they have limited free will, the same as humans? Does Ryan Gosling’s character, K, have a digital girlfriend in his pocket because he wants love, or because he thinks he should want love because it’s what a human might do and he thinks he should be emulating them? And why does he regard humans as something to emulate? Because he was programmed to, or because he likes any of them? And the girlfriend in the pocket - is she only following her programming doing what she was created for, or does she genuinely feel anything for him, a replicant? Is such a thing possible? The idea that replicants have somehow become the slaves of the human race, made by a completely unnecessary bordering-on-cameo by Jared Leto (who I swear is only hired these days to be weird on set and method-act his way through a few lines that would have been better-used coming from another character that we cared about), was disturbing - as anything is when the word ‘slave’ is used. But then the film veered off into a murder-mystery-cum-resistance flick while only paying lip-service (or camera-service) to the bigger themes, and the point of the movie. And it took its time. I mean, when we got to the point where Harrison Ford shared his feelings for cheese in what amounted to a conversation with absolutely no plot-steering or in fact use in the film, I sat there thinking ‘that’s all very nice, Deckard, but can we have a movie now?’. I could have watched 3 episodes of Star Trek (any Star Trek) in that time and had more metaphysical questions or head-scratchers posed to make me wonder. It was beautifully shot, excellently put together; the CGI department, the wardrobe, make-up, physical effects and all other people involved behind the scenes should all get Oscars. I’m not joking. It was atmospheric and wonderfully executed. Only the plot and the floundering, swimming-through-treacle timing of it all let it down for me. That, and the blatant disregard for why we’re here in the first place.

Verdict: 5/10. And those 5 are for the effects and the effort everyone put into it.

The Death of Stalin (12th October 2017)

I cannot remember the last time I laughed so much in a movie theatre (after things like Kingsman movies). This reconstruction of the power struggle that must have occurred after the actual death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was hilarious, insightful, and downright slapstick minus the pratfalls. A mixture of English, American and Russian actors with complete disregard of accents or acting styles brought so many belly-laughs from the audience that there were moments when we missed the next line, so loud was the enjoyment. Michael Palin, Steve Buscemi, Jason Isaacs (HILARIOUS), Jeffrey Tambor, Paddy Considine - effortless fun and a brilliant way to bring a version of history to life. And if the English actors play the pawns, the Americans the back-stabbing politicians and the Russians ‘the people’, then who’s to read into that? It was so much fun I cannot wait for the blu ray.

Verdict: 9.5/10; would recommend to anyone who enjoys comedy, history, a fun night in/out, wordplay, witty dialogue, or just plain unashamed entertainment.

The Lego Ninjago Movie (19th October 2017)

A kids’ film, yes. However, it also had quote a few references to keep older people happy. Not as much fun as The Lego Batman Movie, this was however enough to keep up giggling all the way through. Jackie Chan is excellent as Master Wu, and while some of the film was predictable, we do have to remember the target audience.

Verdict: 7.5/10; would recommend as a Sunday afternoon movie or to anyone under 9.

Thor: Ragnarok (24th October 2017)

Fun, bright, colourful, cheerful, hopeful, and a sense of humour a mile wide. It feels completely disposable, except that the ramifications of what went down in the end will, I suspect, have a big impact on what happens next in the Marvel cinematic universe. The only thing that bugged me was that, at times, it felt like Thor was a little out of character; a few too many Earth-isms, maybe, a few too many quips and very Earthlike idioms. However, Jeff Goldblum was Jeff Goldblum awesome as always, and the unexpected characters were a delight. A perfect antidote to more serious (and more soul-destroyingly meaningful and dreary, distopian bollocks.

Verdict: 9/10. How much fun can you have at Marvel’s expense?

Geostorm (26th October 2017)

Full disclosure: we saw the trailer for this before another film and went ‘that looks so shit! We have to watch it!. It truly appears to be a Syfy Original Movie in the vein of Piranhaconda, Two-Headed Shark Attack, or Zombeavers. Unfortunately, it has nothing of the self-deprecating tongue-in-cheek humour, and doesn’t seem to realise it’s not supposed to be a real movie. I would only recommend this film if there’s a drinking game to go with it, centred around manly man having manly male emotions (such as Emo Tears of Unshed Man Pain), wasting time with manly emotional dialogue, and saving the ‘golden retriever’ of the movie when he was clearly slated to die. The only saving grace(s) was the Secret Service agent who was almost comically badass, and the bafflingly always-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time women in charge of the International Space Station. Finally, will someone explain to me why people keep taking projectile weapons such as GUNS onto a pressurised space station?

Verdict: 4/10. I think that’s a new low.

That’ll do me a for a bit. We have more to come, believe me.

Soopytwist.

On Star Trek Discovery, and all things new

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for Star Trek Discovery up to series 1 episode 5!

At time of writing, we’re up to episode 5. I have to say, it’s living up to the hype - that it’s going places no other Trek show has been.

How? Two things:

First of all, it’s not following a ship (or a station) - it’s following a character. Just as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (of five) tells the story of a book by showing you its adventures as they concern humans, Star Trek Discovery is telling us the story of Michael Burnham as she causes conflict by interacting with ships, their captains, and their enemies.

Two: it doesn’t say ‘here are your bridge crew characters - now make stories about them’. It says ‘here’s a story and we’ll involve people as and when we need them’. For this reason, there’s no ‘episode as a vehicle for this character’ - apart from Michael, who, lest we forget, is who it’s all about.

I’m happy with these choices. I’m ecstatic that it’s breaking from tradition and going forward. When I first heard that CBS/Paramount were determined to keep going backwards in terms of the year it was set, I was pretty pissed off, to be honest. Star Trek is about moving forward, and that means you don’t write yourself into the past, a past before Kirk joins Starfleet, and box yourself in with what you can and can’t have because Kirk didn’t have it.

(As an aside - who else is waiting for the literal mirror-verse version of Stamets to bring about the end of spore-drive tech? When it’s discovered that it causes what I think is replication of the human spore-host as a mirror-version, Starfleet will have to abandon it - hence why Kirk doesn't have it. I’m so excited for this!)

However, this show has already been more progressive than its predecessors, and I’m happy about that. I’m also happy that these humans we have on this show are not the fully-formed, fully-balanced people of the 22nd or 23rd century. They’re in 2256 - 2 years before the events of the ‘The Cage’ - 11 years before Kirk takes command of the Enterprise. People are still humans - rough around the edges, living through a war with the klingons - a race they hardly know as they haven’t had to deal with for the past hundred years (since the time of Enterprise - around the 2120s). This is a hundred years before DS9's controversial episode ‘In The Pale Moonlight’ - and it shows. It’s commonplace for these people to do things they never would have considered had the situation not been one of dire need and absolute life or death. It’s people having to get on with it, without the benefit of a well-known and respected Federation behind them. The idea that the klingons think they know what will happen to them, their culture, their way of life - because they’ve seen other races ‘fall’ to the ‘assimilation’ of the Federation - feels very real and very current. Every generation gets the Star Trek they deserve - and we have one about identity, about preserving your own culture at any cost, about standing up and saying ‘nope - you can’t whitewash/airbrush me - this is who I am, deal with it - we exist and you can’t deny us’. That makes the klingons on the side of the current anti-Trump and anti-status quo section of our world population - they are sticking it to The Man, and that makes me happy. Of course, that makes Starfleet either The Man or very misunderstood. And I'm ok with that - it’s about the possibility of sides, after all. Picard would have looked at it both ways - Sisko would have asked Dax and she would have said she’s lived both ways. Kirk would have said it’s a risk to jump either way - but ‘risk is our business’ and to carefully decide if a side should even be chosen.

Basically, this is pure Star Trek that no-one wanted but everyone cried out for. Something new, something a little daring, something to challenge. And if Star Trek isn’t challenging people, it’s not doing it right.

This is not your mother’s sci-fi. This is born of new ways of telling stories, of modern TV styles, and new ways of engaging (pardon the bad link) with its audience. The Expanse, Killjoys, Dark Matter - they’ve all pushed the envelope - and personally I don’t think Star Trek will ever be as shamelessly celebratory of diversity as Killjoys. But that’s not the only reason for Star Trek - it’s also about discovery. Though it’s hard to do that going back in time, it is easy to do if you’re thinking in terms of exploring the human condition and how it changes under stress, under the threat of death for many millions of souls - because of something you decide at that moment. What makes you, you? What makes you act in defence of or against someone else? That’s what they’re exploring here, and that’s what I’m looking forward to seeing more of.

Lorca may have scuttled his own ship (the Buron) and taken all hands but himself with her, but he did it because the needs of those many crew members outweighed the needs of the one. People are railing about how he has no soul, but didn’t he do exactly what Vasquez and Gorman did in Aliens when surrounded by xenomorphs and no ammo? Didn’t Picard do the same to a crew member lying on the floor asking for his help in Star Trek: First Contact? Ask Miles O’Brien if he’d leave someone alive to be taken prisoner by the Cardassians. And as for leaving Mudd behind - he had already proven himself to be a spy and someone only able to look out for himself. And he did brag about being a survivor. To be honest, I would have left him too.

On that subject, it’s obvious Tyler is a spy for the klingons (he escaped physical harm for how long? And his klingon captor was taken down much too easily for anyone to believe) but that’s why Lorca’s taken him along, isn’t it? He probably smelt it a mile off and is going to try to play him at his own game. After all, if he has a spy on board sending messages to the enemy, all you do is follow the message.

Time will tell if any of my musings are correct, but then that’s the fun. For the first time since DS9, there’s Star Trek on telly. I wasn’t in the UK for Enterprise, but compared to DS9 and Discovery it was weak. The characters were wasted and some of the stories were recycled from DS9 anyway (the Enterprise episode ‘Oasis’ and the DS9 episode 'Shadowplay', anyone?).

For me personally, I’ve seen more Star Trek in the first five episodes of Discovery than a whole season of Enterprise. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not hating on Enterprise and we needed it to keep the TV versions of Star Trek ticking along. But it was all starting to get a little stale, and this new idea of following a person and not a ship is what I think Star Trek needed to keep up to date - so far in the past that’s still yet to come.

Your mileage may vary - but for me, it’s yipping along with all the right signs. Long may it continue.

Going to the Pictures (IV)

I’ve been lagging behind in my movie-watching. Not the watching bit, but the keeping-it-straight-in-my-head by making-a-note-of-it bit. So here we go:


The Big Sick (Unlimited Screening, 24th July 2017)

Pretty funny in places, semi-autobiographical in others, this was an eye-opener that was a nice change from the usual Hollywood output. Kumail Nanjiani is excellent playing pretty much parts of his own real life here. Add in Holly Hunter and Zenobia Shroff and you have some very strong scenes that resonate with anyone trying to reconcile either parents and/or lifestyles. A Sunday afternoon kind of movie, but a good one.

Verdict: 7.5/10

Captain Underpants (27th July 2017)

I’ve read and re-read so many of these books, mostly to students of English as a foreign language. However, as I’m reading I’m enjoying the fact that the books are about kids, for kids, not what adults think kids should like. Friendship, escapades, getting away with sticking it to the man adult - it’s all in there. The movie was a faithful and definitely very fun adaptation that had me giggling for the entire 80 minutes. The end theme song, written by Weird Al Yankovic, did it justice too. All in all, a fab day out for all the family. And I’m not even sorry.

Verdict: 9/10

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2nd August 2017)

I was so excited for this - I love The Fifth Element and finding out that Luc Besson had been developing this for a while to exist in the same universe, I couldn’t wait to see it. A shame, then, that the best part of the movie was literally the first 15 minutes as they show you how Earth came to be part of the thousand planets of the title. Clive Owen and Rihanna were awesome - you can’t go wrong with those two. However, the two leads left me cold and I felt no chemistry between them or in fact them and anyone else. I just didn’t care about them at all, and felt the movie meandered all over the shop. I left thinking it had been a waste, apart from Clive Owen’s ee-vil general and of course Rihanna’s pleasure model.

Verdict: 6/10

Atomic Blonde (10th August 2017)

Fun, a little dirty, a little messy, and best of all, a little ambiguous. There seems to be no limit to what Charlize Theron can pull off, and I enjoyed pretty much all of this. The only let-down was finding out who the ‘villain’ actually was at the end - I was looking forward to a further double-cross and certain characters walking away with everything, but Hollywood again saw fit to keep things within certain boxes. Hmmf. For that, and the fact that there was not a single Debbie Harry / Blondie track in the whole film, I’ve given it a lower mark than the rest of the film deserves.

Verdict: 8.5/10

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (19th August 2017)

Hilarious and fast-moving - this film felt about 45 minutes long. Wall-to-wall solid scenes and one-liners, this made me laugh out loud several times. Salma Hayek is perfect and on-form - worth watching just for her, but then there’s Ryan Reynolds being Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L Jackson being Samuel L Jackson. I liked that it was shot 90% in Europe, and that when shit was going down, Ryan Reynold’s character took the proper, logical option, and not the Hollywood option that Samuel L Jackson’s character wanted. Ace. Oh - and watch out for the bloopers on the end credits.

Verdict: 9.5/10

The Dark Tower (24th August 2017)

A good film, with solid leads and people you rooted for. However, it all felt like there was no question about who would win in the end, and the winning of that was too easy by a long chalk. Strange, but there it is. And no disrespect to any writer, producer, or director - but again it was all about men having men times with more men doing men things. Why the original couldn’t have been written about a woman, her mother, and a young girl, I don’t know. Oh wait, yes I do.

Verdict: 8.5/10

American Made (31st August 2017)

Sheer fun and frolics for 80% of the film, until it starts to sink in that you know how it all has to end. Tom Cruise is very good as Tom Cruise based on a real-life story not about Tom Cruise, and everyone else in it is very convincing. Funny, moving - a cautionary tale, indeed.

Verdict: 8.5/10

The Limehouse Golem (7th September 2017)

A tale of a sequential killer in London; a tarnished detective moved in to be the department scapegoat when he hopefully fails to find the culprit, the backdrop of the shady side of showtunes and bawdy theatre of Victorian London - characters you don’t expect, twists you think you see coming and then realise you’ve been set up - a lot to appreciate here. An excellent movie, it was a just a shame that more people weren’t even aware it was out. You’d think names like Bill Nighy, Douglas Booth, Eddie Marsan and Olivia Cooke would make them advertise it better.

Verdict: 9/10

American Assassin (Unlimited Screening, 12th September 2017)

Wow. I will admit, I was lured into this with the promise of Taylor Kitsch, and he didn’t disappoint. However, the film as a whole most certainly did. It was the most TEAM AMERICA - FUCK YEAH! film since Team America. Moments of definite cheesiness and painful attempts to justify black ops in defence of ’Murica, we stuck it out only because Michael Keaton deserves better. Feel a little sorry for the little Teen Wolf / Maze Runner dude, Dylan O’Brien, but when you’re getting your feet on the ladder you can’t be too choosy about which rungs they are, I guess.

Verdict: 5/10

Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle (21st September 2017)

What can I say? Critics have given it bad reviews, but I don’t care for other people’s opinions before I’ve seen a movie for myself, so I went anyway. Like anything was going to stop me from seeing a Kingsman movie. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it - fun, well-paced, well-acted (and it looked like people were having fun filming it), and just as much hilarity as the first one. While I knew it was going to hard to beat my top two moments of the first one (the Freebird in the church scene, and people’s heads exploding to the tune of Last Night of the Proms), there were plenty of moments in this new one that had me either laughing out loud or chuckling loud enough to drown out other cinema-goers’ laughter. Note: Chilean Burt Reynolds (otherwise known as a face morph of Jeremy Renner and Burt Reynolds from Smokey and the Bandit) is actually Pedro Pascal. There; you're welcome. It’s safe to say there are moments of that film that will live with me the next 10 years, and every time I think of them I will giggle. What more can you ask of a film?

Verdict: 9.5/10

Young Frankenstein (Special Anniversary Screening, 27th September 2017)

A blast from the past - and still just as much fun. How can you go wrong with a Mel Brooks / Gene Wilder film? The jokes were all still there, the spirit of the piss-take was strong with this one, and a good time was had by all.

Verdict: 8.5/10

Blade Runner: Final Cut (1982) (Special Screening, 28th September 2017)

A reminder before we see the sequel next week, the fact that this was Ridley Scott’s own favourite version he put together a few years ago was a pleasant surprise. There are more versions of this film knocking about than the Bible, so being able to watch what Scott considers the best version was a relief. It still had it (but luckily, did not have the voice-over or 90% of the dream sequence), and the restoration of the night scenes, the overshots of the rainy city, and the Vangelis theme were just incredible. Worth watching just for the cleaned-up cinematography alone, this version made things more stream-lined and, thankfully, shorter. Although I still want to know how Edward James Olmos’ characters knew to make a unicorn out of a gum wrapper and leave it at Deckard’s door.

Verdict: 9.5/10

That’s it for now - all up to date for the time being. As always, there will be more to come.

Soopytwist.