MSU

040 -- The Captive (#12 in the A24 series). Ryan Reynolds literally the only decent thing in this oddly sanitized story of child abduction. A24 would go on to cover this topic much better in Room. Reynolds plays a dad who leaves his daughter, Cass, unattended in the back of his truck while he goes into a store for pie and when he comes out, she's gone. The police, particularly a rookie in the Child Protection Unit, are instantly suspicious of him, and they continue to be so over the next few years, while he is estranged from his wife who blames him for her daughter's disappearance regardless of his involvement. We learn very early on that Cass is alive and being held captive by the ringleader of a dark web child sex ring. For reasons not entirely clear, the story is told in a disjointed, non-linear fashion, over a number of years but in every scene it's snowing so it's not exactly obvious right away that this is happening. A bit of a struggle to get through. 2/10

Really enjoyed those episodes. The opening scene had so many Easter eggs in it as well as a golden toilet. This all bodes well for a mental wrap up.

8-bit version of And Justice For All.

He got a bonus point for all that counting and then won the series by a point. Frank and Romesh still seething about that.

039 -- Cow. In the last year or so, Mrs MSU and I have seen Pig, Wolf, and Lamb, so we were always going to see this. It's a documentary about a dairy cow on a farm in England. It's an oddly moooooving (sorry) and heartfelt look at what a cow's life really looks like and although it seems to be a well-run farm with people who love the animals, it's still a bit depressing. 6/10

There's often confusion about whether Bobby Sands is alive or dead. Turns out he's deid, apparently.

038 -- The Rover (#10 in the A24 series). Guy Pierce and Robert Pattinson in a western that just happens to be set in Australia after some apocalyptic event. Guy's car is nicked by Robert's brother and his gang after a robbery and Guy isn't having any of it. It's quite weird in places and tries to hide its secrets a bit too hard in others but great performances from the two leads cover up most of the cracks in a fairly thin plot. 6/10 039 -- Life After Beth (#11 in the A24 series). It's a RomZomCom that didn't make me think of Shaun of the Dead once, so extra point for that. Zack's girlfriend, Beth, dies unexpectedly and in his grief he spends time trying to process everything by hanging out with her parents. But they've secretly been hiding Beth from him and the outside world when she came home after digging herself out of her grave. It's an odd little comedy of manners type thing as they all attempt to hide the fact that Beth is a zombie from her. Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, John C Reilly, Paul Reiter all make pretty good work of a script that made me laugh out loud several times. An enjoyable romp. 7/10

036 -- Locke (#8 in the A24 series). A wonderful gem of a movie that kinda redoes Phone Booth where the Phone Booth is a BMW X5, the sniper is everything that can possibly go wrong in your life happening at the same time, and Colin Farrell is Tom Hardy with a Welsh accent. Hardy is a construction foreman, Ivan Locke, on the night his company will be pouring an enormous amount of cement ahead of building a skyscraper, his family are expecting him home for a football match, when a one-night stand he had months ago unexpectedly goes into early labour. The entire movie is Hardy on the phone to his wife, the mother of his new kid, his own kids, his boss, his apprentice as he tries to juggle everything in real time. I loved it. 8/10 037 -- Obvious Child (#9 in the A24 series). God, I hated everyone in the movie. Jenny Slater is Donna, a crappy New York stand-up comedian who gets dumped by her boyfriend because her act is their relationship, gets knocked up from a one-night stand and decides to have an abortion. It's vaguely interesting in the way it tackles this still difficult subject, but the words that fall out of everyone's mouths are so post-ironic and knowing, it's like it was written by Diablo Cody trying to parody herself. 3/10

Same. Absolutely loved it.

Watching ITV Hub through a VPN typically means each commercial break is made up of three or four outings of the Sky Glass advert with the wee c**t dressed up as a wizard shouting, "Liverpool Chelsea ... Paddington 2 ..." etc. back to back. A particular low for the 21st Century.

Ha! Aye, I saw Seven and The Usual Suspects at the cinema on the same day back in the 90s but these two take the biscuit, I reckon.

034 -- Enemy (#6 in the A24 series). Jake Gyllenhaal plays a boring old history professor whose colleague recommends he watches a movie that seems to star his identical twin. Sure enough, it does and History Professor Jake Gyllenhaal becomes obsessed with Actor Jake Gyllenhaal to the point where they meet and discover that they even share scars. For the longest time it was a pretty confusing experience, and there's a lot of stuff about spiders that doesn't appear to make a whole lot of sense, but there are a few throwaway lines of dialogue (in a film that doesn't have many lines in its script) that help stuff fall into place because obviously all is not what it seems. The end really took me by surprise. 7/10 035 -- Under the Skin (#7 in the A24 series). Out of the opening few movies on the A24 list, this was the first I'd heard of and I'd seen bits of it, although I don't think I'd ever seen the end. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who drives around Scotland in a white van, boffing lonely young men (aka Hibs fans) to death. Kinda. There's a bit of pleasure from seeing places I know, streets I remember crossing and all that good stuff, and while it was interesting and Scarlett Johansson and everything, it was starting to get a bit repetitive until she picks up the bloke with the facial tumors and then the whole thing found its heart. Quite incredible and kudos to Jonathan Glazer or whoever it was who managed to get this premise green-lit. Well worth it. 9/10

033 -- Everything Everywhere All At Once. Came out of the cinema feeling the same way I did at the end of Scott Pilgrim and Kill Bill Vol 1, figuring that I've just seen one of my favourite movies ever and I'm going to go back to it many many times. 10/10

032 -- The Spectacular Now (#5 in the A24 series). A fairly straight forward coming-of-age drama that sees Miles Teller (out of the new Top Gun if it ever comes out) at the prime age of 25 try to pass for a high-schooler in what at first appears to be a piss poor Ferris Bueller. Generous casting aside, a sparkling script that doesn't try to make every teenager's line of dialog full of irony makes this the first of the A24 movies I've genuinely enjoyed. A supporting cast that includes Bob Odenkirk, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Brie Larson, and Shailene Woodley all seem to be buying into it and giving it their best. 8/10

A hover-over on the movie's Wiki page is all that's required.

032 -- The Bling Ring (#4 in the A24 series). This is the first movie I've ever seen that's based on an article in Vanity Fair, and claims to have its basis in fact where a group on fame-obsessed teens in LA track the whereabouts of their favorite celebrities and then burgle their homes when they're out. It's weirdly interesting, especially considering that the majority of the movie feels like it's young girls and a boy cooing as they discover Audrina Patridge's handbags, Megan Fox's home security, or Paris Hilton's pet monkey. It's like the world's most pointless crime heist movie. Imagine Ocean's Eleven were planning on stealing Andy Garcia's moisturizer and you're not far off. In its favor, the look and music of the movie are both fabulous, and Emma Watson's turn as a vacuous Hollywood wannabe is pretty convincing, as is her accent, but the whole thing has a pet project feel to it, particularly as it comes 10 years after Lost in Translation. It's like the main objective was to just get it made and concerns about quality were much further down the list. I wish I knew if it was meant to be funny. 5/10

031 -- Spring Breakers (#3 in the A24 series). God, I hate James Franco. Here he plays a Florida white-rapper who bails out four largely interchangeable and unlikeable college girls who have robbed a restaurant to get a week of debauchery in St Petes. I think if I was 13 this might just be the best movie ever made and I'd be blind before by 14th birthday. As it is today, in 2022, there are other places to go for this sort of thing. Directed and written by the bloke who wrote Kids for Larry Clark 30 years ago and it kinda covers similar ground of apathetic, disaffected youth, only this time in the sun and with fancy teeth. 3/10

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. I loved Station Eleven and quickly read up her back catalogue which I enjoyed to a greater or lesser degree but nothing was as good as Station Eleven. Her follow-up, The Glass Hotel, was a bit of a disappointment for me, mostly because despite the crisp, exact prose, the subject matter of a Ponzi scheme was just a bit dull. Sea of Tranquility is very much a return to form and is as good as, if not better, than Station Eleven. I pre-ordered this a month or two ago, it downloaded itself to my Kindle this morning, and I was done a few hours later. It's a novel about time, colonization, plague, love, fate, that spans a few centuries and a light-years but despite the scope, it's all pretty much about being human, and how while we suck as a species in a lot of ways, there's beauty in life no matter where it's found. A triumph!

030 -- Ginger & Rosa (#2 in the A24 series). Much better than that Charles Swan shite. It's one of those British indie movies that's full of American and Australian actors putting on British accents while Timothy Spall broods in the corner somewhere, pronouncing things properly. Elle Fanning and Alice Englert are the titular friends, born at the same time in neighbouring beds at the end of WWII, who find themselves 17 under the shadow of nuclear destruction. Their friendship is put to the test when Ginger's creepy af dad attracts the attention of Rosa. It's quite interesting from a perspective of kids behaving like adults while their parents behave like kids, and it doesn't resolve everything it sets up, but the central performances are so good, particularly Fanning, it's just about worth a watch. 6/10

029 -- A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (#1 in a series of working my way chronologically through movies distributed by A24, just coz) Ooft. One wonders what it was about writer and director Roman Coppola that got producers to greenlight this heap of keech. The influence of Wes Anderson is pretty clear in this tale of a graphic designer, Charlie Sheen, who is dumped by his girlfriend and tailspins into a midlife crisis told through a series of barely related fantasy sequences. The only thing worse than the movie is how it obviously thinks it's great and hilarious and worthy. Actually impressive how Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Patricia Arquette, Aubrey Plaza and Mary Elizabeth Winstead could all be involved in something as bad as this. The first movie since Your Highness that I've wanted to punch. 0.5/10

028 -- Compartment No. 6. One of the best things about the pandemic seems to be that foreign-language movies have a far better chance of making it to my wee town in the midwest. I've no idea what the co-relation is but it's definitely a thing. But for every The Worst Person in the World, there's a Compartment No. 6. This Finnish / Russian effort is about a Finnish student living in Moscow who goes on a train trip north 1,200 miles to Murmansk to see some petroglyphs and in doing so has to share a compartment with a gruff Russian miner who tries to sexually assualt her within five minutes of meeting her. Over the course of the journey, they develop an unlikely friendship. I feel like I missed something in this and came out with more questions than answers, and little in the way of enthusiasm to find out. A generous 4/10 because it was interesting, I suppose, seeing parts of Russian life in an unspecified year that I'd never seen before.

027 -- The Lost City. Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum embody Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in a bit of a Romancing the Stone reboot. This film has been made so many times -- Uncharted and Jungle Cruise just in the last few months -- but Bullock and Tatum have incredible chemistry, the script is witty and zippy without being overly self-aware, although could maybe have done with just a few more thrills. Brad Pitt's contribution to the movie was amazing. A bit of a reinvention of the genre and probably the most fun I've had at the cinema this year. 9/10

026 — X. Six friends go off to make a porno, renting out the guesthouse of an isolated Texan farmhouse that’s home to a strange elderly couple who overreact somewhat when they discover what’s going on. A pretty decent slasher that borrows quite a bit from Texas Chainsaw Massacre but is let down by a lack of invention in the second half and a really bizarre choice of casting for the old woman. 5/10

025 — Umma. Korean woman was abused by her mother and worries that she’ll pass on the generational trauma to her own daughter. Pretty dreadful supposed horror movie that threatens to do the occasional interesting thing but then bottles it. The soundtrack is convinced it’s terrifying. It isn’t. The biggest shock is that Sam Raimi produced it. Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, and the bloke who played Gavin in Friends deserve better. 2/10

Think I would've been more disappointed in this five years ago. Still, Kermode and Mayo were pretty much my gateway into podcasts (along with Armstrong and Miller's Timeghost). Maybe the shift to the independent format will restore it back to being predominantly about film and not the cult of the show.