Movies

The Odyssey is obviously a good film but but didn't really work me. All of the big set pieces seemed to end too quickly (mostly with some good, old-fashioned, Holy Grail-style running away), despite the length of the film. Definitely in the bottom half of my Nolan ranking.

The Death of Robin Hood - Hugh Jackman as an ageing Robin Hood. Beautifully shot and a decent revisionist version of Robin Hood as a character, but it's really fucking slow and ponderous, made it to the end without falling asleep, but only just.

They had the trailer for that before the The Odyssey. It did not look like a must see.

If it's the same set of trailers then I don't think any of them looked great.

Spider-Man Brand New Day was pretty good. Not sure how I’d stack it against the other ones. It has the requisite MCU “setting up other films” plot but not in a way that you have to have watched everything else to get it. It felt different from the others and much more like a limited run story of the comic books.
They’ve done an excellent job keeping one character’s identity secret. I certainly didn’t guess it beforehand.
It’s also a love letter to NY, which I liked.

I've just started rewatching all the previous relevant films to get myself ready for watching it. Gemini told me there's 12. I'm halfway thru the first.

Mrs BW (who's a big fan of the Spiderman movies) took Little Miss BW and a friend on Friday. They all really enjoyed it - Mrs BW to the point that she's already talking about wanting to go back and see it again in 3D.

I've seen a couple of films years ago in 3D and they were a bit disappointing, but I'd imagine an action film like Spiderman would really lend itself to that kind of treatment, what with all the springing around between buildings, etc.

You only really need to have seen No Way Home and even then they recap most of the salient plot.

To date, the only film I’ve ever felt was a real success in 3D was Dredd (2012). Every other film it’s been maybe a single shot or two at most. Dredd really leaned into it and over-saturation during a lot of the Slo-mo drug scenes and I thought it worked brilliantly and didn’t feel like a gimmick.

Sadly, I think I’m one of the few people who actually got to see it that way as it was incredibly poorly marketed and hard to see in 3D unless you lived in a big market and went opening week.

Big fan of Dredd. Sadly dont have a 3D TV. Only let down for me was that the exteriors didn't quite match the vision.

Dredd was ace. A shame it ended there in a world of every other shite IP getting a Netflix series.

They Will Kill You is an absolute riot. 95 minute long cross between Kill Bill and Evil Dead.

Persuaded Little Miss BW to watch The Matrix with me tonight. She seemed to quite enjoy it. Must be at least 20 years since I last saw it.

Wanting to watch this one. I’ve seen some decent horror the last few years that tried to do something a little different (Barbarian, Weapons*, Obsession).

*I think this got the director the Spider-Man job.

Make sure you tell her they never made any sequels.

Ah, she already spotted those. I've not seen those but presuming they're a disappointment? That would be a shame as I think she was keen to watch them.

Definitely a disappointment.
Currently rewatching Ronin. Definitely not a disappointment.

Just secured extended release tickets for The Odyssey in 1.43:1 70mm IMAX. An absolute fucking ordeal on the website and near impossible to get two seats together (life if sometimes much easier when you're on your own). One thing increasingly pissing me off about Melbourne is that anything good sells out quick as a motherfucker. I even heard people are flying in from Hawaii for this shit. And even after all that I'm pretty sure I'll still favour this unsurpassed podcast series on the epic instead odysseythepodcast.com/

Even in Manchesterfor the fancy proper big IMAX, tickets are released at the beginning of the week and it just sells out. Quite the phenomenon.
So went to see The End of Oak Street for some lightweight entertainment. If you like endless screeching and screaming instead of acting then this is the one for you. Wait for it to get to streaming.