Year: 2016 Director: Dan Trachtenberg

A rare trip to the pictures for us this afternoon and to see a film that was released that day! Unheard of! But only because we are on holiday and what a pleasure it was.

Trailed as a ‘blood relative’ to the 2008 found footage film Cloverfield (which was OK in a cheesy, aren’t this people really annoying way) this is Dan Trachtenberg’s first directors job.

Basically a three-handed starring John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead & John Gallagher Jr with Goodman & Winstead (who generally lifts the films she appears in, see The Thing prequel) turning in top rate performances.

There isn’t much I can say about the plot except you will change your mind about the Goodman’s true nature and whether the world is as he says. There are three times we jumped out of our seats and the suspense is ratcheted up to breaking point in places.

Some may feel the final act is a massive gear change too far but we both bought into it and walked out with smiles on our faces.

This a brilliant movie with a great performances, superb direction and a gripping story.

Might appeal to people who » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: The Coen Brothers

There are in my mind at least two types of Coen pictures. The ones with tightly wound plots and thrilling suspense. Fargo, No Country, TRrue Grit, Miller’s Crossing. Then there’s the shaggy dog movies, where what passes for a plot ambles along as a peg on which to hang snappy dialogue, goofy characters and exercises in style. Lewbowski, O Brother! Have their mcguffins, but surely it’s the other stuff where the true enjoyment lies. It’s fair to say that Hail Ceasar belongs in the second, in fact it’s their most extreme baggy movie to date. Ostensibly it’s a day in the life of Eddie Mannix, studio boss of Capitol Pictures in the late forties/early fifties, as he negotiates the many trials that errant stars, demanding directors and ungrateful writers put him through. In practice the film throws out plots at seemingly random intervals, some of which turn out to be fairly important, others are discarded or resolved abruptly offstage. What perhaps passes for a main plot – the kidnapping of George Clooney’s Kirk Douglas-esque leading man during the filming of a biblical epic, turns out to be a surprisingly mellow experience for George as » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: S Craig Zahler

Sorry Quentin, but Bone Tomahawk is probably the best Western starring Kurt Russell that’s been released so far this year. We open with a close up of a throat being slit. It’s a shocking start, but calculatedly so. The next ninety minutes are going to be fairly slow paced and incident free, but this reminds us that this kind of messy violence is part and parcel of the Old West setting, and it leaves a little ripple of disquiet that becomes a raging sea in the final act. The opening bloodshed sets in motion a train of events that end with the kidnapping of a murderous drifter, along with the nurse treating him and a sherriff’s deputy, by a nearby tribe. A local Indian warns of their savagery, but, unfazed, a small team saddles up and rides out to the rescue. This middle section takes up the lion’s share of the film. It’s a showcase for the lovely arid cinematography, and writer / director Zahler’s superbly novelistic dialogue. There’s a great amount of pleasure to be had from the interactions among the four man posse, as their characters are revealed by incident and conversation. » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Nicholas Hytner

My daughter’s current boyfriend is from Leeds while I, in case it had escaped your notice, hail from the mighty steel city of Sheffield. Last time I saw said boyfriend we played a kind of Yorkshire Top Trumps, each trying to outdo the other with the artistic and cultural achievements of our respective cities.

The entire county of Yorkshire doesn’t have a football team worthy of the name, so we quickly skip past sport and move straight onto music and the arts. My opening gambit of Def Leppard, Arctic Monkeys and Joe Cocker looks strong and is met with the frankly feeble response of Kaiser Chiefs, Jake Thackray and (snigger) Jimmy Savile. Actually that last one may have been my suggestion, thrown in with the intention of queering the boyfriend’s pitch, so to speak. But then, just when I think it’s in the bag for the Steel City, the bf plays his trump card – Alan Bennett – and suddenly it’s all over. That’s game set and match to Leeds, then. I can’t name anyone from Sheffield (not even Michael Palin) to match the great humorist/author/playwright. No one comes close for me.

From all » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Robbie Fraser

If you are Scots, you really should know Hamish Henderson. If you are a republican. A socialist. A nationalist (yes, he was). Into history. Poetry. You should know Hamish.

Apart from writing four songs that are part of the Scottish Folk Repertoire, one of which I hope will be our national anthem when the time comes – as it surely will – he took the Italian surrender in WW2 and has a better claim to starting the Edinburgh Fringe than anyone else. The man is a hero.

The film is great too. The archive stuff is superb (Hamish leading the pipes and troops into Rome) and the interviews are very moving. I was in floods at the end. This was the premier, his family were there, the place was packed with auld folkies and auld commies. My type of people.

The film will tour Scotland and other territories and will play on BBC Alba in the Autumn. But you should see it in a cinema.

Scottish Cringe, no more.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

Folk song, Scots culture, world history……..

Year: 2016 Director: Ben Stiller

Ah the comedy sequel. Significantly trickier than the action sequel methinks. Action sequel – bigger budget, more of the baddies, better FX, bigger cast and the odd star cameo and generally do all the things you’d have done in the original. Aliens 2, T2, Mad Max 2, The Matrix Reloaded. Ok maybe not the Matrix. All of which equals bigger box office. Even for The Matrix Reloaded.

The comedy sequel? Didn’t you tell all the good jokes about your creations first time around. Yes there’s a bigger budget and more star cameos. But are there more good jokes to be told? And so to Zoolander 2. Zoo2. Z2 even. We were the target audience, as all here were in agreement that Z1 was generally a work of genius, but are Hansel and Derek still hot right now?

There’s a bigger budget. There are loads of celebrity cameos – from the ‘do a bit of acting here’ ones – Bieber, Sting, Cumberbatch – to the one-gag visual punchline (Susan Boyle, MC Hammer). The plot is really not the point, but such as it is it consists of the ‘one last mission’ return from the wilderness followed » Continue Reading.

Year: 2013 Director: Roman Polanski

2nd viewing for me and just as wistful as the first. If you don’t know anything about this it’s basically Polanski shadowing the great Jackie Stewart as he prepares for the Monaco Grand Prix of 1971. The footage is unbelievably hi res and a fantastic time traveling portal into the past. It’s so real you can smell the rain drying on the tarmac when the sun hits it! Ringo’s even in it!

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

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Year: 2015 Director: Quentin Tarantino

Unlike Forest Gump’s box of Dairy Milk without the helpful map, when it comes to the films of Quentin Tarantino, you invariably know what you’re going to get. A skipful of violence -bloody and graphic – a non-linear storyline, cross cultural, anachronistic references, snappy, whip-smart dialogue and the odd mcguffin thrown in, just because he can. In anyone else’s hands, this would be boring and predictable – some say it is – but for this viewer, QT’s excesses and compulsions make his work anything but – and always, but always watchable. As ever, there’s not much of storyline to work with. Two bounty hunters and an aspiring sheriff convene in the snowy wilds of Wyoming, a totally unlikely premise given the surroundings, but one which serves not only to introduce the characters but also to depict the desperation and randomness of Western life circa 1870. John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth, a grizzly Kurt Russell, is travelling in a stagecoach with his latest prize, Daisy Domergue, a blood spattered punching bag wanted dead or alive in the town of Red Rock for crimes as yet undisclosed but indubitably – to judge by her insolent, sassy demeanour – » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Adam McKay

Declaration of interest straight up. I work in the financial markets in the education area these days, so I know a lot about what happened during the global financial crisis, the shenanigans that went on and I know the jargon. So I am coming from a different angle to someone either wanting to have a stimulating night at the movies or learn about what caused the GFC. The Big short is a reference to shorting the market. which means you sell something you don’t own and hope to buy it back at a lower price before you have to settle.So you sell higher than you buy which is the reverse of buying something then hopefully selling it when it goes up. At the time the markets were in a major bull run ( rising market) so people taking a negative view was very much going against the tide. The movie focusses on a few characters that latch onto the realisation that the mortgage market in america is extremely vulnerable due to por lending practises and the financial markets are ,in turn extremely vulnerable because of the many financial instruments created based on these underlying mortgages. » Continue Reading.

Year: 2016 Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

It’s January and after the Christmas blockbusters here come the Oscar-friendly movies. It is well-known that a sure path to that best actor statuette is to suffer for your art/play someone who suffers in their life. So Leonardo Di Caprio goes all frostbitten here in search of glory, playing early nineteenth-century guide and trapper Hugh Glass whose true story of abandonment in the South Dakota wilderness after a bear attack has inspired many re-tellings, of which this is the most recent. It’s clearly one of the founding stories of the American frontier, stressing the will of the individual to overcome all obstacles and beat the odds.

The pre-release guff about The Revenant focused on how much Di Caprio had really been mauled by a bear, and more credibly the general extreme weather conditions of the shoot. The bear attack is quite extra-ordinary and caps a quite brilliant first act that – IMHO – the rest of the movie struggles to live up to. The chaotic breaking up of the fur-trapping expedition that has brought Glass and his comrades to this extreme environment is a brilliantly paced mixture of violence and emotions.

In many » Continue Reading.

Year: 2012 Director: Shinichiro Watanabe

(We worked our way through this earlier this year, and I meant to do a Nights In then, but life (apathy) interfered. Tigger’s jazz thread has bought it back to mind, so here goes.)

Kids On The Slope (Sakamichi no apallon) is a twelve part anime series based on the manga of the same name. Taking place in early 60s Kyushu, it is the story of Kaoru, a timid high school student who has to start at a new school thanks to his father’s move to a new job. He is a classical pianist, but soon falls in with Sentaro, a wild and undisciplined student who is also a drummer. Sentaro introduces him to jazz, and they begin to play together in the basement of the local jazz record shop, with the store owner joining in on double bass. The owner’s daughter, Ritsuko, becomes the third main character, and the narrative of the series is driven by the shifting relationships between them. These various love triangles can get a bit wearyingly adolescent, but the plot is secondary to the joy in music that is expressed in every episode. Jazz fans will recognise a parade of » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Robert Gordon & Morgan Neville

This is a documentary about the 1968 Television debates between liberal Gore Vidal and Conservative William Buckley centred around the Republican and Democratic conventions. These debates were an idea that ABC had because they didn’t have the money to cover either convention fully like CBS & NBC.

Both Vidal and Buckley were failed politicians, having both run for office earlier in the sixties and lost but otherwise had become successes as authors and social commentators. This finds Vidal just after the publication of Myra Breckinridge had become a cause célèbre, and Buckley cosying up to Ronald Reagan as he tried to define Conservatism for the future decades.

Both men came into the debates detesting each other and coming from polar opposites, Vidal gay ultra-left & Buckley Catholic establishment right-wing so from the first debate sparks flew and the animosity just grew until a flashpoint which shocked America and troubled Buckley until the day he died. That outburst probably set the tone for the political debates (or non debates) that we suffer today.

The film has plenty of wonderful archive footage especially the 1968 Democratic convention riots and is very enjoyable look » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Francis Lawrence

I didn’t sign on for the Harry Potter films, as the kids mostly saw them on DVD. Lord of the Rings too. We bailed from the Hobbit after the first one. I have however made it to the end of The Hunger Games with the minimoles. Mockingjay Part One’s end felt so abrupt it was if the editors decided ‘2 hours 20 – ok we can fade to black now’ . So on with Part two. I wonder how survivors of the full Hobbit felt, as this was another 2 hours 20 minutes of film with an hour of story to stretch to fit.

Focus on the positives you say. Well it looks good – all grey post-industrial war zone. Donald Sutherland continues to be an absolute hoot as the evil president. He gets way too little screen time. There’s two shocking sequences that one reviewer correctly identified as pushing the 12A envelope – one in a tunnel, and one which Andrew Eldritch would describe as a slight case of overbombing. Peeta is much more entertaining as a Homeland-style will he/won’t he human bomb than as a weepy love interest.

But it is so slow. » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Frank Spotnitz (Writer)

Based on the Phillip K. Dick counterfactual novel this 10 part series is available on Amazon Video, but probably coming to Blu-Ray/DVD at some point next year. It shows world where the Allies lost WW2 and the Nazis and Japanese control most of the world (not sure about South America), Nazis control Europe and Africa & Japan Asia but they share the US (Nazis-East Coast, Japs-West Coast) with a ‘Neutral Zone in the middle.

The story revolves around Julia Crain, whose half-sister is involved with the resistance, Frank Frink her boyfriend with Jewish ancestry, Joe Blake a new recruit to East Coast resistance, Nobusuke Tagomi the trade minister of the Japanese Pacific states and Obergruppenführer John Smith an SS officer in New York.

Their stories revolve around some Newsreels which may or may not be real and add the Science fiction element of the story.

We really enjoyed this, the first episode ends with a cracking twist and the last with multiple stories coming together in a pretty satisfying way. And with other couple of twists that we didn’t see coming (but that may be just us!). It is fairly grim and complicated » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Sean Evans

This is the dvd version of the cd reviewed elsewhere on the site recently. At two and a half hours plus, it is quite lengthy , but then there is a lot to fit in – the full live concert performance of The Wall, interspersed with the ‘travelogue’ sections where Waters visits sites of personal significance throughout Europe, accompanied by friends and family. Additionally, a couple of short bonus films are thrown in for good measure as extras.

Those who were lucky enough to witness the concerts in person will know that this is a show where you really can see where every penny of the ticket money was spent. A spectacular performance, beautifully filmed and captured in state of the art sound quality.

It would have been nice if perhaps an extended version of the ‘Who Do We Think We Are’ style documentary footage had been included as an extra on the dvd where it could be viewed as a completely separate entity, rather than interrupting the flow of the concert.

The bonus features on the blu-ray version include footage from the O2 concert featuring appearances from a certain Messrs Gilmour and Mason.

Might » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Jeanie Finlay

The King Is Dead, Long Live The King? When Elvis P shat himself to heaven in 1977 millions cried for him along with their lost youth and memories. Yet how can Elvis be dead when we have his music – the people cried, particularly when a new disc from Jerry Lee Lewis arrives with an Elvis-y sounding singer billed as ‘Orion’ duetting with The Killer. Then a masked man with swirling cape, slicked back quiff and that voice is ‘Reborn’ on the front of an LP showing him also prone in a coffin. Can this be real – is the Pelvis back from his toilet break?

In this intriguing documentary we find that Jimmy Ellis was given the dream he had always wanted – to be a star with adoring and willing girls at his feet, big selling records (but not in the traditional sense) and sell out concerts but with a hefty price. He would have to wear the mask whenever he was in public and would only be popular because he sounded like andor people thought he was Elvis back from the dead. Signed to Sun Records by the unscrupulous (and that’s being » Continue Reading.

Year: 2014 Director: Justin Roiland/ Dan Harmon Producers

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Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

Futurama, Galaxy Quest, Doctor Who, Family Guy, Community

Year: 2015 Director: Brian Helgeland

In my final years at school, the non official text of choice was ‘The Profession of Violence’ by John Pearson, the semi-official biography of The Kray Twins. Pearson, it seems, was given the nod by Ron and Reg to tell their story around the time they were finally banged up, fully aware a long term was about to be worked up them, courtesy of an establishment keen to be perceived as still fully in the political driving seat of late 1960’s Britain. The author however, exceeded his brief by delivering a book that successfully perpetuated the Kray myth by putting their rise in a sociological context without wholly kowtowing to the glamorous image the twins apparently craved. Despite its ambiguous, slightly diffident, possibly aleatory comedic tone, the book became the undisputed bible for all Kray aficionados. For example, Pearson’s quirky timbre is perfectly, wantonly, echoed in the Monty Python tale of The Piranha Brothers, one of whom (Dinsdale) used violence whilst the other (Doug) favoured sarcasm: ‘he knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire …’ ‘Legend’, a truly awful title which in and of itself provides an instant review » Continue Reading.

Year: 1981 Director: Penelope Spheeris

One night in the late eighties, BBC2 had a Metal Night (think of what BBC4 do on a Friday these days) presented by Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark (parodied in The Simpsons as “Boobarella”) and they screened ‘The Decline Of Western Civilisation Part II: The Metal Years’. A documentary, or if you will, rockumentary on the LA metal scene in the late 80’s which threw up bands like Guns N Roses. Footage of almost made it new acts is interspersed with comments and “skits” with stars like Lemmy, Ozzy, Paul n Gene from Kiss and infamously a sizzled Chris Welch from WASP floating in a pool watched by his mother. Years before MTV, Spheeris knew the sight of Ozzy making breakfast in a leopard-skin dressing gown was gold.

Almost a decade before the same filmmaker had explored another youth cult in the same city as the fledgling LA punk scene crawled out of basements and squats in bands like X, Black Flag, The Germs, Circle Jerks and Fear. The gig violence, attitude and lifestyle depicted so enraged the LA police chief Daryl Gates that he called for the film to be banned within the » Continue Reading.

Year: 2010 Director: Michael Madsen

100,000 years is a long time. Just consider how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly long it is. I mean, you might think it would take you a long time to read Douglas Adams’ four Hitchhikers books, listen to all the radio shows, watch the spinoff series and endure the movie, but that would be peanuts compared to 100,000 years. Coincidentally, 100,000 years (give or take a couple) is how long we believe nuclear waste will remain hazardous to human life. With this in mind the Finns have begun construction of a repository, burrowing 5km underground into bedrock to safely store their nuclear waste. This is an unprecedented undertaking. The site must remain intact for a thousand centuries; the entire history of large scale construction is less than a tenth of that. Danish Film-maker Michael Madsen speaks with those involved in this extraordinary operation which will not be complete for a hundred years. They are confident the Finnish bedrock will be indifferent to likely wars and environmental catastrophies, but they do worry about human intrusion. Among the dilemmas the builders face is how to communicate the danger of the site to the citizens of an inconceivably distant future » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Chris McQuarrie

Let’s get something straight from the start. This is a movie reaching a broad demographic – represented in our party by three parents and four children aged 9-13. It’s a broad movie, offering thrills, a few laughs and two hours of entertainment in the dark. It’s not Haneke and several years of taking children to big Hollywood action movies have taught me to:

Forget about the plot. The world will be saved. Tom will not fall off the building/airplane/motorbike and smear himself all over the tarmac. Here there is a convoluted Skyfallesque plot about a secret organisation of rogue agents, which Tom and Simon and Jeremy and Ving have to fight by going rogue. It’s called Rogue Nation. We get it. Everyone is rogue. I bet if they went to Caffe Nero the baristas would have gone rogue.

Enjoy the set-pieces. There’s a pre-credit one on a plane. The best one in this is done very stylishly at the Vienna State Opera – all kinds of assassins turning their brass instruments into weapons, and surely they’ve seen the Marx Brothers A Night At The Opera when we get everyone swinging from the fly floor on » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Olivier Megaton

You wouldn’t say the original Taken was great, but it had its moments, most of them in the first thirty minutes. Liam Neeson simultaneously essaying twitchy, nervous parent and special forces badass was cool, and his ‘particular set of skills’ speech can still tingle the spine.

However, the film went downhill from there. For all his talk, Neeson’s skills weren’t especially particular. If you were looking for spycraft you’d come to the wrong place. He was all brawn and no Bourne. Things continued in the same direction for Taken 2 (more of the same, only with shit action scenes) and they pretty much reach rock bottom in number three.

The one thing to recommend Taken 3 is that it doesn’t simply rehash a kidnapped-family-member plotline. No, one of them is dead this time, and murder-suspect Neeson is trying to escape capture (by dogged cop Forest Whitaker, the only good thing in this mess) while simultaneously investigating/avenging the death. As stories go, it’s not exactly original and it only nods at what was appealing about the » Continue Reading.

Year: 2015 Director: Henry Hobson

Me, I love zombies, but even I have to admit to being a bit over them by now. And after ‘Zombieland’, ‘In The Flesh’ and ‘Warm Bodies’, I’ve had my fill of ‘a new take’ on the genre as well. However, for one reason or another, I made an exception for Maggie, ‘a new take’ on the zombie genre starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m always a bit wary of praising performances in films but Arnie is really good in this, like maybe the best he’s ever been. Really it’s only the accent to reminds you that he’s Sir Arnold of I’ll Be Backshire. Otherwise he pretty much inhabits the role of a loving father who must come to terms with his daughter’s impending zombie transformation, not to mention his inability to do anything about it. As you might imagine, seeing the man who played John Matrix made powerless in the face of a mere virus is the real kicker here, adding a layer of autumn-years nuance that really lifts the film, while Abigail Breslin as the pre-zombie in question is outstanding. Nevertheless, the film itself doesn’t quite rise to the level of its stars. The zombie-integration » Continue Reading.