MSU

080 Run Lola Run -- Back for its 25th anniversary -- even if 1998 + 25 = 2023, but whatever -- I didn't see this at the time and not only that, I've managed to avoid it for quarter of a century. It's always been a movie that's intrigued me, although the blurb consistently managed to put me off. Well, I'm glad I finally got round to it because this is great fun. Franka Potente is incredibly engaging as Lola, no mean feat considering how much of the movie she spends sprinting, and Moritz Bleibtreu puts in a great turn as the frantic Manni. The direction and soundtrack, though, elevate matters with invention and care, throwing in animation for some scenes and using a grainy stock for some amusing and some touching And Then moments for the people Lola comes in contact with. 8/10 081 The Watchers -- There comes a moment faerly early on in this Nepobaby movie, after the Thing That This is All About has happened where I just asked myself, why am I sitting watching this? I'm still not sure of the answer. A woman tries to drive from Galway to Belfast, which somehow involves going down a single-track road in a forest, where her car breaks down and she's chased by an unseen presence to a house in the woods where she and three strangers are visited by malevolent beings in the night. It's like the hatch in Lost, but stupider. 2/10 082 Under Paris -- The problem with shark movies is that it's always going to compare poorly to the shark movie, by which I mean of course, Jaws 2. This French attempt tries to introduce some environmentalism at the start which is quickly forgotten as a freakishly large mako shark makes its way into the Seine round about the time that, wouldn't you know it, there's a triathlon event about to take place with the swimming segment taking part in the river. It takes a long time to get to that part of it and some dodgy CGI doesn't really make it a worthwhile wait. The end seems more determined to threaten a sequel than it does a resolution and is quite peculiar, even for a French movie. 3/10 083 Inside Out 2 -- Inside Out was perfect. This isn't that, but it comes pretty close. Riley's story continues as she and her friends qualify for a hockey camp where they will mix with high school girls and have a chance to impress the coach. But puberty hits just as she learns that her best pals will be going to a different high school, and a clutch of new emotions take over head quarters, sending the original gang to the back of Riley's mind. It has the regular aspects of a Pixar movie with great visuals and a sparkling script, but in my showing anyway, the jokes seemed to land better for the adults than the young kids in the audience. The focus on mental health in our youth perhaps pitches everything to an older group, and it's a brave decision that I found relevant and accurate, but maybe the cost of that is an experience that's a little over the heads of those for whom High School lies somewhere in their distant future. For me, overall it was lovely, heartwarming, it made me cry several times -- once just because Riley's friends seem so nice -- and just about lived up to some very demanding expectations. 9/10 084 Tuesday -- What a strong debut from Daina Oniunas-Pusić who borrows from The Seventh Seal, Alice in Wonderland, and perhaps unwittingly the book I wrote in 2008 (published in 2018) called The Scottish Book of the Dead, to create something unique of her own. Stories about grief and parenthood are always going to push a few of my emotional buttons, and this seemed to hit the lot. Tuesday, played brilliantly by Lola Petticrew is a terminally ill teenager, visited by Death, which is represented by a talking parrot whose size seems to change according to his mood. Tuesday convinces Death to give her time to say goodbye to her mother, Julia Louis Dreyfus, who is struggling to come to terms with her daughter's illness and pending fate, and who seems to prefer to spend time on her own. Dreyfus is just extraordinarily good in this and the arc she goes through from being the worst mother in the world (kinda), to how she is at the end is mesmerizing. There's also a lovely little metaphor going on in the background as the rest of the world contends with the fact that Death's pretty busy right now, which I thought perfectly articulates how the world can fade away because nothing is so important as what's right in front of your face. The end dragged a little bit and maybe it could've ended a little earlier, but a surprise hit that will stick with me for a long, long time. 9/10

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro -- I've read and adored The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, and like them, Klara and the Sun is beautifully written, achingly so quite frequently, and deals with people's inability to deal with people in a different way. But this time, with robots! Set at some vague point in the future, Klara is Josie's Artificial Friend, which is such a loaded term in and of itself. A Fake Friend? And if so, what makes a friend real? Is there a difference between a friend that we know and meet and drink with and hug, and a friend we only know online? The novel kinda explores around the edges of this before coming up with a conclusion that came as a realization I don't think I've appreciated before and made me lay the book down and stare at the wall for a bit. Anyway, Klara is essentially a robot charged with taking care of Josie, an ill teenager, and ensuring she's not lonely. Klara has a relationship with the sun and its glorious nourishment and thanks to this, robotic Klara jumps to some internal conclusions about the sun's powers that she never articulates and so are never corrected. So despite Klara's nature, or lack thereof, we still have examples of characters not saying things to each other and in many ways I found Klara to be an artificial version of Stevens from The Remains of the Day. The first-person narrative from a non-human character is engaging and precise, and gives a detached view of the human characters and humanity in general around her. After Never Let Me Go, which this seems a natural follow-up to, I thought Ishiguro deals with speculative or alternate realities in a fascinating way and satisfyingly draws conclusions on what it means to be human and Klara and the Sun just cements that opinion.

Just back from an author’s event in Grand Rapids with Emily St John Mandel, she of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility. She’s my fave writer so I was a bit star struck when me and Mrs MSU bumped into her outside the venue before it started. It’s inspired me to read her back catalogue again and maybe have a look through my unfinished folder of my own writing.

Cheeky wee OFFSET & MATCH gets you round that.

I became my department's Excel Guy when the former Excel Guy left, his holiday sheet broke, and I was his mate. Twenty odd years of such wizardry across two continents. If it wasn't for Excel I'd be on the dole.

Plum Vision, at Ottawa Tavern, Toledo Ohio. I was put on to Big Girl's Blouse by a kind soul on this thread, which eventually got my 15 year old daughter into them. A few months ago, Spotify led her to a bunch of similar bands with fewer than 500 followers and fewer than 1,000 monthly listens and so she stumbled upon Plum Vision, an all-girl garage punk band from Boise, Idaho. I rather liked them too so when they announced a midwest tour with a stop around 120 miles from us, we were in. So last Wednesday night, I drove two hours to Toledo to a wee dive bar and maybe 50 other attendees. The band were awesome and afterwards, my kid made friends with them at the merch table. Seems they weren't used to people driving two hours to see them. Live music is fucking incredible, isn't it?

Yeah, it's a bit of an acquired taste.

078 In a Violent Nature -- I was reminded of Skinamarink quite a bit while watching this, which is a little odd because the two movies are pretty different. Both, though, are keen to get mileage out of nothing much happening, and when things do happen they're frequently quite dull. If you've even played Red Dead Redemption 2 and had Arthur just wander through a wooded area for an hour and a half randomly killing the occasional person, you could be mistaken for thinking you've seen this before. That said, there are spells where what Chris Nash's movie does is pretty effective at subverting what people expect from slashers. It seems to begin in its own sequel as the theft of a necklace from an abandoned shack in the middle of a wood is enough to stir our villain, Johnny, from his grave in search of bloody revenge. The teens generously supplied for dispatch have snatches of conversations that we can only partially hear and we really know nothing about any of them. Their friendships and histories and motives are treated as unnecessary complications and I quite like how the film has the courage to go with that. The kills, when they eventually get going, are inventive and practical and there's one in particular that'll linger in the mind. The final ten to fifteen minutes are going to be contentious among horror fans, I imagine. For me I appreciated Nash attempting to make us fill in our own denouement, but an hour or so after leaving the cinema, I'm still not sure how successful it was. The camera work is great, the music is non-existent, the acting is almost uniformly dreadful, unaided by a sloppy script, but overall, much like Skinamarink, I think I'm quite impressed. 7/10 079 The Dead Don't Hurt -- It looked like this might be a bit more than your typical western. The timeline isn't linear, the protagonists are immigrants from Europe and Canada, and there are lots of Joan of Arc references and armored figures on horseback. The movie starts near the end with a couple of events that increase in stature the further we go back into things, which ends up doing the movie a bit of a disservice. For all the flashbacks and Joan of Arc and speaking in French, and despite the fact that Viggo Mortensen just fucks off to fight in the civil war at the drop of the hat, while this might looks like being Vicky Krieps' story, it really isn't. And that's a shame as she's by far the most interesting character. Far more interesting than the Danish man in her life, far more interesting than the dastardly man in black, far more interesting than the dastardly man in black's daddy with the big plans to take over the whole gosh darn town. As well as acting in a lead role, Mortensen directed, wrote, produced, composed the score and probably did the catering, and he does a decent job of most of these things. Just a pity he didn't see where the real story lay. 5/10

077 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga -- I don't remember all that much about Fury Road other than there was an awful lot of driving between places, and while my own experience isn't nearly as apocalyptic and nor does it feature as much fire or sand or impressive make-up, I do enough driving between places in real life to be all that bothered by a movie about it. This prequel to all that driving between places also features quite a bit of driving between places, although there is something more of a story filling in the gaps. Chris Hemsworth is great as the larger-than-life baddie who kills Furiosa's mum and sparks a years-long tale of revenge. Anya Taylor-Joy plays the adult Furiosa and says about 100 words in the whole movie but the kids they get to play younger versions look so appropriate that it's difficult to pinpoint the moment where Anya Taylor-Joy's work begins. It's very long and two-and-a-half hours of the same note wears thin after a while. Funnily enough, after we left the theater and I was waiting in the foyer outside the IMAX screen for five minutes, all I could hear was the soundtrack and it was impossible to tell where in the movie it was. Some of the special fx were pretty ropey and elasticated, but it's the dynamic between Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy that maintains the interest. For a big summer blockbuster, though, it's hard not to be a little disappointed by it all. 5/10 078 The Garfield Movie -- I honestly don't know who this is aimed at or who it will work for. Mild peril. 3/10

076 Back to Black -- Cockney songstress says words that go on to appear in songs, gets tattooed, takes drugs, and then dies. 4/10

075 The Kingdom of the Bathroom of the Planet of the Apes -- I saw the first of the new collection, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, on release and remember being relatively bored by it. I think Dawn came and went and I couldn't muster up the energy to go see it, and I have no memory of War existing whatsoever. So I'm not exactly a die hard fan of the series, but I'd heard enough positive buzz about this and comparisons to Silo that got me interested. I don't think I've missed anything by skipping two of the previous movies and I ended up kinda enjoying this despite it doing quite a bit to turn me against it. The talking apes use a cadence that is utterly believable but it becomes an enormous pain in the ass the longer it goes on. The CGI while impressive in lots of places, fails to sell many of the more complicated sequences and nothing at all has any heft as it jumps about the screen. And the storyline definitely gets a bit ploddy in the middle and the Silo stuff wasn't really what I was expecting. That said, I thought the religious/authoritarian metaphor worked more or less in the shape of Proximus, I thought Freya Allan was good as the sole human surrounded by apes although her wardrobe confused me, I liked the footprint of humanity being reclaimed by nature, and the action sequences were pretty thrilling. I don't know that it's enough to get me to fill in the blanks, though. 6/10

074 Challengers -- Surprisingly, this isn't the hot and sultry throuple tennis movie the trailer had me believe, which is a shame because at least that might have been interesting. Instead, this is a bit of a snoozefest, or it would be if it wasn't for all the booming techno music that accompanies the smoochy bits, the argument bits, the people playing tennis bits, and the people talking about playing tennis bits. Apart from Zendaya, I just didn't believe anyone here is a tennis player or for that matter anyone that Zendaya's character would be remotely interested in. The non-linear method of storytelling forces you to keep track of a few threads which gives the impression of the presence of a complexity that simply isn't there. It's all pretty straightforward stuff and spanning more than a decade isn't going to convince me otherwise. For two hours it goes nowhere you don't expect it to go. While the movie is doing that, it also tries to distract you with some really bizarre camera choices and just when you think there's going to be nothing quite as weird as a sudden switch to first-person, director Luca Guadagnino decides to show us tennis from the perspective of the ball. Sections of slow-motion in the denouement surely designed to generate tension just generated frustration because none of this is so interesting I wanted it to last longer. The less said about the final few moments, the better. All in all, I'd have been happier watching actual tennis. 4/10

073 The Fall Guy — Somewhere in amongst the 126 minutes there's an eight, maybe even a nine out of ten movie trying to get out. For long sections of the runtime, it's a movie that succeeds in being quite a lot of fun. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt make an interesting couple and both are quirky enough to make the slightly complicated dynamics of their relationship work, she’s a director and he’s the stuntman. As much a love letter to stunt performers, director and former stuntman David Leitch really knows how to get his point across while also engaging the audience. The stunts here are plentiful and dramatic and breathtaking in places, but there's an awful lot of them and by the time we rolled into the third false ending, I'd kinda had my fill. The two main threads of the story are a bit uneven. There's the romantic story of how long the movie can reasonably prevent Gosling and Blunt from hooking up, and then there's the supposed main thrust of the movie which sees Gosling trying to track down the wayward star of the movie Blunt is trying to make. This latter strand isn't really as interesting but the movie really shines when the two combine, as they do perfectly in a wonderful karaoke sequence with a French speaking dog. So a fun, enjoyable watch that plays around with the formulaic action movie tropes but takes so long to finish its story, it makes the denouement of Hot Fuzz appear brief. That said, I'm up for a sequel. 7/10

The 3D-ification of Jaws turned out alright. I'd have preferred it in 2D on IMAX but missed that showing. I also saw Jaws 3D when I was a wee boy, in Cinema 2 at the ABC in Falkirk, IIRC, and the 3D wasn't working but they still gave us the glasses. Utter shite.

072 Alien -- Not a new movie, obviously, but it's the 45th anniversary and this was my first time seeing it on the big screen. I saw Jaws at the cinema last year and it was amazing and this was no different. Everything I love about the movie feels better, the tension and mood and the lighting etc, the exploration on LV-426, the organic-industrial feel, it was all great. The puppet bursting out of John Hurt's chest has looked a bit silly for years and the bigger screen does it no favors, same goes for the explosion at the end which has always looked painted on, but so many of the effects still stand up, like Ash when they jump-start him. The screening started with an interview between Ridley Scott and Fede Aldavez who's directing the upcoming Romulus and I don't know how much I'm looking forward to that now, but the original and the sequel are still pretty much perfect for me. 10/10

070 Sasquatch Sunset -- It's never a good sign when an 88 minute movie feels like 2 hours and this disjointed tale of a pod of sasquatches out in the wild going about their weird sasquatch business of pissing and shitting on things. This might have been a decent short, but even then I'm worried that the premise just doesn't hold up for anything more than a 5 minute SNL skit. On the positive side, the make-up and costumes are great, the scenery of the forest and the wilderness is amazing, and Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough do a decent enough job, but there isn't much of a plot and then it tries to be funny and just ruins whatever little suspension of disbelief it had built up. There were six people in the showing I was at including me and Mrs MSU. By about midway, it was just me and the missus. A generous 4/10 but depending on whether you can tune into its wavelength it could be anything from 1 to 7. 071 Abigail -- A group of six criminals are hired to kidnap Abigail, the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a mysterious underworld figure. They have to hold on to her in a mansion for 24 hours and then will get the payday of their lives, if they can survive. It's a simple enough premise and the movie takes its time introducing its characters and the little girl and as it moves through the first act, we discover that there's plenty of distrust among the gang and Abigail herself may not be the helpless victim in all this. The movie is a huge amount of fun, frequently hilarious, and has a Danzig needle drop that might just be my favorite sequence of the entire film. It's bloody and tense and shot superbly with lots of wirework that I understand the wonderful Alisha Weir, as Abigail, did herself. With a supporting cast of Kathryn Newton, Giancarlo Esposito, Dan Stevens, and Scream's Melissa Barrera, it has an enormous amount going for it. Fun fact, Alisha Weir is Jessie Buckley's daughter in Wicked Little Letters. 9/10

Thanks to the VPN, Bottom: Exposed on Gold. A couple of hours of Ade Edmonson talking about the show and Rik and it's just bloody delightful and lovely and sad.

Started Baby Reindeer last night and finished it today. Dark as f**k, creepy, thrilling, and funny, and something to ponder over now it's done. There was an awful lot of it I really loved but I'm not sure how I feel about it overall.

068 Scoop -- Great performances from Gillian Anderson, Billie Piper, Keeley Hawes, and Rufus Sewell but this BTS of the lead-up and negotiations to Andrew Windsor giving THAT Newsnight interview and Pizza Express endorsement is too well-known and too recent to be much more than a bit of well-executed cosplay. 5/10 069 Civil War -- This is a movie I've unwittingly had in my dreams since, oh, I dunno, round about 2020. Dreams of cities on fire, civilians being shot dead, chaos. How nice of Alex Garland to put the nightmares of my subconscious onto the screen and make matters worse by giving Jesse Plemons a gun and some funky shades. Brilliantly acted, directed, scored, and shot, it cleverly refuses to nail its flag entirely to the mast, although there are clues, and it makes the story about photojournalists who are there simply to record events and let others decide what's good or bad. As the movie says in one of many unbearably tense scenes, there are no good guys or bad guys a lot of the time, there are just two sets of people trying to kill each other. It kind of reminded me of a war movie (The Thin Red Line, maybe?) where in the midst of battle the camera focuses on a wee insect going about its day, blissfully unaware of anything going on around it and there's a shot here that almost looks like it's going to emulate it, but that to me felt reason enough not to give too much political detail away. A road movie at heart, it's also a story of the journeys Kirstin Dunst as Lee and Cailee Spaeny (so much better here than in Priscilla) as Jessie take, Lee being the hardened veteran and Jessie the naive rookie but every beat the movie takes to evolve these situations feels real and when they happen upon Jesse Plemons and those shades and that little scratch of his chin, five minutes feels like an hour and no one in the cinema dared to breathe. I can't remember a movie where something as mundane in fiction as a man being shot dead has shocked me so much, or been accompanied by a sound I felt in my feet and my stomach. It gave me cause to think of 20 Days in Mariupol with real Lees and Jessies, as well as The Road, which are both fantastic movies that I also never ever want to see again, and which have started trains of thought in my brain that will need to be derailed if I'm going to get to sleep tonight. 10/10

065 Wicked Little Letters -- I was surprised that this reminded me of Paddington 2 as much as it did, but there’s such a small stakes quaintness and quintessential Britishness to it that maybe it isn’t so surprising after all. Jesse Buckley and Olivia Colman are on fantastic form here as they become embroiled in a case of vulgar poison pen letters set in a small English town in 1920. But it’s Anjana Vasan who really steals the show as WPC Moss. Wide-eyed in more ways than one, she has everything to prove to everyone as an Indian woman police officer and her triumphs are fabulous. There’s humor from the letters and the childishness of it all, but the movie doesn't rely on it for its jokes. The supporting cast are wonderful so the laughs really come from all directions and while the mystery factor is perhaps underplayed, it gives proceedings a fun air that just helps everything along beautifully. Loved it. 10/10 066 Monkey Man -- It's interesting to see an Indian revenge movie like this, but for all the chat from Devl Patel about how it's about nationalism, corruption, the caste system, and false gods, the whole thing felt so flimsy. I did appreciate the fight sequences where Patel with his director's hat on resists the temptation for quick cuts and instead focuses on almost balletic choreography, but it felt incomplete and thin to me. 5/10 067 The First Omen -- The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Bill Nighy to be in this. On reflection, I preferred Immaculate, and I’m good for religious horror movies for the rest of the decade, thanks. 5/10

I do love a bit of Bret Easton Ellis and Lunar Park might just contain the most beautiful passage I’ve ever read at the end, but Imperial Bedrooms was such a letdown and then I made the mistake of listening to his podcast. It’s been 13 so I guess all of his other books are his older stuff now but I worry that this would just annoy me.

Probably makes me a big wean, but Season Three of Alex Rider dropped this morning and it looks very much like I'm going to finish all 8 episodes today. I love the Anthony Horowitz books and this on focuses on Scorpia, probably the pick of the bunch. Young Jimmy Bond story has no right to be as good as this. Banging theme tune too.

McCoist isn’t a bigot, but he guarantees he’ll be committing a hate crime at Ibrox on Sunday along with 48,000 Rangers fans. So much for that minority angle.

061 Road House -- Much like the 1989 version, it's best if you don't take it too seriously, or at all. This one wears its ridiculous heart on its preposterous sleeve a little more obviously and teeters on the brink of outright stupidity quite a bit of the time, but it's a lot of fun. Jake Gyllenhaal is a pleasantly more self-aware version of Patrick Swayze's Dalton and there's a comedic henchman played by Arturo Castro, from The Menu, that I enjoyed an awful lot. Conor McGregor was a peculiar choice but he was sufficiently over the top to just about make up for the fact that he can't act a jot. I don't doubt for a moment that I'll watch it again. 6/10 062 Immaculate -- f**k around with a nun from Michigan and find out, ammarite? I enjoyed this more than I was expecting. As a nunsploitation meets Rosemary's Baby type thing, the first half relies far too much on jump scares to keep us engaged but the craziness of the second half made up for it. Sydney Sweeney is a compelling lead, what it has to say about some body autonomy issues is pretty clear, and the final sequence is absolutely bonkers. I think I'd have preferred it to be a bit scarier, but it more than passed the time and made me feel guilty for munching on my popcorn during some of the more questionable moments. 6/10 063 Imaginary -- Started out a decent Blumhouse PG13 bit of hokum but by around the halfway point, I wanted the bear to kill them all. Especially the neighbor. 3/10 064 Late Night with the Devil -- I'm of an age that not only do I remember BBC's Ghostwatch, I remember watching it live and I remember shitting my pants just a little bit at it. Anyway, Late Night with the Devil is very much from the Ghostwatch school of mockumentary although given we have to go to the cinema to see it, it's far more obvious as it goes about its business. Presented as a 1970s Late Night show hosted by troubled Jack Delroy, it follows the conceit of the late-night genre brilliantly and in a special Halloween episode, Delroy looks to test the boundaries of the supernatural and, of course, it all goes horribly wrong when a possessed little girl is his main guest. The confines of the show and the transitions between on-air and behind the scenes make it feel like a cross between This Time with Alan Partridge and Scanners and there's a lot of fun to be had in the conversations and the conniving that goes on. When the shit hits the fan, the movie delivers with some genuinely creepy moments and then in the close, just when it threatens to veer off the tracks, it brings everything back in a pretty satisfying way. David Dastmalchian is great as Delroy, Rhys Auteri was born to play a talk show sidekick, and Ingrid Torelli as the creepy wee lassie is just perfectly off-kilter all the way through. 1970s production design is spot on and its directed with enthusiasm by Cameron and Colin Cairnes. All in all, between this and Talk to Me, Australian horror is in pretty rude health. 9/10

I'm about to have a picnic in the park. Can a screaming Irishwoman sell me a tent, please?