Movies

Tár is brilliant. You should watch it.

While suffering from a bug last week, caught up on a couple of streaming movies :

7 Kings must die - Rounds off the Last Kingdom TV series, if you haven't watched that then don't watch this. A bit lacklustre, but nice to catch up with the old characters.

Clerks 3 - Better than I thought it would be, again, one to watch for nostalgia reasons.

Going back a couple of weeks, Went to the cinema to see Mario Bros. Great fun if you have kids. And bonus for adults is it runs less than 90 mins.

I'm all for long kids movies to be honest. Get a bit of peace and quiet.

Mario is dull. And the first 10 minutes of the plumber back story is excruciating.
Jack Black is fine though.

On the plane I just watched Ocean's 8 (forgettable silly fun), Dr Sleep (surprisingly good, although it's Mike Flanagan so I shouldn't have been surprised), and Scott Pilgrim (still ace).

Recent in-flight movies:

Black Adam - total waste of time.
Palm Springs - time loop movie, great fun
King Richard - can see why Will Smith won the Oscar, really enjoyable
Brian and Charles - weird comedy thing. Didn't quite work for me but could see what it was trying for.
Nobody - Bob Odenkirk finds redemption through murder. Not sure why he's in it, except for the chance to be an action hero but it's a thin B-movie.
Red Notice - quippy, twisty, nothingness.
Luther - doesn't bear much resemblence to the tv series as it's now basically a superhero movie with appropriate level of villian.
Quiet Place 2 - decent continuation from the first one

(they were long fights.)

Went to see Return of The Jedi at the cinema last night.
Still works on the big screen and shows once again how piss poor the majority of the prequel/sequels are.

7 Kings must Die was OK but really felt like writers who were used to doing a series getting seriously confused by trying to fit it all into a film.
I liked Nobody. The idea of non descript person having the mentality to do the terrible things.
Clerks 3 was certainly worth the time.

Except he's not actually non-descript in the film. Owes a lot to John Wick and Taken but seemed low rent compared to either of those (although probably a better film than Taken for exactly that reason).

I liked Nobody too - not as good as John Wick - but still enjoyable

That's hardly a criticism. Few films are that good (in that genre).

Apart from The Raid, and The Raid 2.

Few indeed. The Raid is, for me, better.

Thought the Raid was a knock off of the Second Judge Dredd film (Dredd was written before the Raid even though the latter came out first) but the Raid 2 is ace.

That kitchen fight scene is something else.

Chicago: Brawler.

Oh FFS.
Dredd was great, but come on. A Welsh guy putting together a low budget actioner in Indonesia got a look at the Dredd script and thought "hey, I can do that"?

The Raid 2 isn't a better movie than the original but the kitchen fight is the best scene in either one.

The only reason to compare The Raid with Dredd, which I love greatly, is because they're both fighting their way up a tower. Neither one was ripped off from the other.

Watched The Batman. It's ... not for me. Too dark (in terms of being able to see the images), too stupid (supposedly realistic but about a dozen clearly fatal events that people walked away from), too annoying (didn't mind Pattinson but Paul Dano was awful). Genuinely, the worst Batman film I've ever seen - Clooney and Swarzeneggar; Kilmer and Carrey both had more going for them.