MSU

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.

Went to see the five short films nominated for the Oscars. A depressing, somewhat overly worthy bunch. 019 -- On My Mind. Danish movie about a man wanting to sing a song on karaoke for the special woman in his life and prevented by a grumpy bar owner. Quite funny in spots before the premise becomes obvious. 6/10 020 -- Please Hold. Kafkaesque piece about a retail worker stopped and arrested by a police drone and dropped into a nightmarish automated jail system. Maybe the most entertaining nominee, even if it did feel like a fictionalized version of a Last Week Tonight segment. 8/10 021 -- The Dress. Polish drama about a housemaid with dwarfism at a dingy motorway hotel looking for love or, at a push, any kind of sexual encounter. Crushingly depressing stuff, although the acting is great. 6/10 022 -- The Long Goodbye. Really strange short with Riz Ahmed. I expected so much more. It's part domestic terrorism, part slam poetry with nothing much of a story that seemed to demand that we get angry about something that isn't happening, like Fox News attempts to get us angry about stuff that isn't happening. 4/10 023 -- Take and Run. Krygyzstan woman goes to the city to study and winds up being kidnapped and forced into an arranged marriage. Fairly bleak again, but I love the landscape of the country where if you're not in the city, you're in the middle of nowhere, with no chance of help, and little chance of escape. Beautifully acted as well and had something of a glimmer of hope in the end. 8/10 And then... 024 -- The Worst Person in the World. I enjoyed this at the time but the more I thought about it, the more I decided that I really loved it. Renate Reinsve is captivating as Julie, a woman who finds it hard to commit to every aspect of her life until she meets comic book writer Aksel and the pair fall in love. It's a bit Harry Met Sally where Harry isn't really asked to contribute too much and there are a few set pieces that will live long in the memory, such as when Julie meets a guy at a party and they decide to see how far they can go without cheating on each other, and a fantasy scene where the world stops. Only minor complaint is really that the timeline is a bit confusing and when it announces at the start that it's a story told in 12 chapters, it's made me a bit impatient to be an hour in and only on Chapter 5. Probably my favourite movie of the year so far. 9/10

018 -- The Batman. Nolan's trilogy will always be the bar for Batman movies for me, but this came close. Robert Pattinson is a pretty great actor when he's not pretending to be a vampire and makes a far better bat. Colin Farrell is utterly unrecognizable even though I knew Colin Farrell is in the movie. Matt Reeves direction is spot on and for a dark movie where most every scene is at night, it's lit beautifully. The story is decent, although maybe some of the Riddler's riddles are kinda simplistic, and the whole thing (and particularly a bit around the two hour mark) reminded me an awful lot of Seven. It doesn't feel like a three hour movie, but that said it definitely doesn't feel like a 90 minute movie. 8/10

Had a spare couple of hours so went to see a screening of the five Oscar nominated animated shorts. First time I've been to a screening like that and I'll definitely try and do so again. It was really interesting to see the diversity of the stories and if one didn't hit the mark, there'd be another one along 15 minutes later. Anyway, the movies were: 013 -- Robin Robin. A wee Christmas tale by Aardman Studios about a robin's egg that's saved from a city dump by a family of scavenging mice who raise the bird as one of their own but who later discover it's not quite as good as being unseen as the rodents. Richard E Grant turns up as a helpful magpie and Gillian Anderson gets more money from her Thatcher (deid) impression as an evil cat. It's probably the most traditional story out of the five, and as beautifully animated as you'd expect, but it seems to do less with double the run time of the other nominees. Still, a few chuckles to be had and younger members of the family will get a kick out of it. 014 -- BoxBallet. A Russian short about the relationship between a heavyweight boxer who's a bit of a punchbag for his opponents and a ballerina who falls victim to a scuzzy producer. It's told in a bit of a disjointed fashion and it feels rushed, so it wasn't the pick of the bunch for me. Most interesting, perhaps, is it's setting at the fall of the Soviet Union which then doesn't really end up amounting to much. The animation is a bit on the nose with how it deals with beauty and the beast. 015 -- Affairs of the Art. Beryl is a fifty-something woman who has found a love of art later in life, despite admitting it's been a constant since her childhood. She reflects on her upbringing with her sister, Beverly, who was always more into earthier pursuits and who found fame as a taxidermist to the stars, and how their lives took very different trajectories. Don't know how well the Welsh accents landed with the Midwestern US audience but I thought it was really funny and the hand-drawn animation was gorgeous as we learn more about the addictive personalities who make up this dysfunctional family. 016 -- Beast. When I saw this was made in Chile, I wondered if the days of the Pinochet regime would play a part and it did. Rightly or wrongly, I associate animation with stories for a younger audience but this is about as far removed from that as possible. It's a very adult, very harrowing story that's made all the more chilling by the protagonist having a ceramic doll's head that is utterly emotionless. This combines with the subject matter of torture and murder to produce an incredibly affecting piece of cinema. Has a bit with a dog that I could've done without seeing. 017 -- The Windshield Wipers. A series of vignettes all based around a central question posed by a middle-aged character in a cafe. What is love? The vignettes cover the spectrum from initial attraction through courtship and sex, all the way to death. What is particularly telling is the modern-day means of finding people comes across as disconnection and disassociated as being alone. The animation style looks and feels like it may have been shot traditionally as live-action and then later processed and rendered to appear as animation. I have no idea how else it could be done because the realism is just absolutely on the mark, but it feels a bit cheaty. And the Oscar goes to ... Beast. (The one I enjoyed most, though, was Affairs of the Art)

012 -- Studio 666. Dave Grohl and the other Foo Fighters turn one of their five minute videos into a 100 minute movie as they head to a spooky mansion to record their difficult 10th album. Baggy in places, particularly in the middle and toward the end, but I thought it was pretty funny and gloriously gory. Borrows an awful lot from Evil Dead, Halloween (John Carpenter wrote the score), The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scooby Doo, and that episode of South Park that had Korn in it. Grohl and the band aren't about to win any acting awards but they come across really well, unafraid to poke fun at themselves. Has a hilarious cameo and a brilliant turn by Kerry King out off of off Slayer as an impatient drum tech. 7/10

Titane that came out last year was quite reminiscent of Crash, but it's French where that kind of thing is more or less expected rather than stuck on a Daily Mail list.

Amazing stuff.

010 -- Sundown. Had been really looking forward to this from the trailers. Tim Roth appears to be on a luxurious holiday with his family in Acapulco when a death back home sends the others back, but he fakes losing his passport so has to stay on but moves into a fleapit hotel in a nastier part of town, sits on the beach drinking Dos Equis all day, starts shagging the bird from the bodega, and generally ignores all the calls for him to go home. It guards its cards so tightly to its chest for such a long time that the explanation of what's going on was always going to come as a disappointment, and it did. Remarkably short these days at under 90 minutes and a pretty great central performance from Roth, but a bit of a damp squib at the end. 4/10 011 -- Uncharted. I haven't been arsed with PlayStation games for years, but even I've played Uncharted, so it made me wonder why this was being released now. Turns out it's been in development hell for 15 years, David O Russell was lined up to direct at one point, and Mark Wahlberg was initially supposed to be the lead but got too old and was relegated to supporting actor in favour of Tom Holland (who has also been signed up for five years). It's an adequate movie for a Saturday night with a couple of thrilling sequences, but you've seen it done before and you've seen it done better before. Nothing makes much sense, people constantly run and jump about and try to explain their take on the plot so far, and who'da thunk that 16th century Spanish sailors would be so adept at building enormous traps and puzzle rooms to hide clues to their gold? 5/10

Yeah, this one does its best to inject a bit of interest in the opening but lots of the first 45 minutes is introducing the characters and there's only so much you can do about that.

009 -- The Tinder Swindler. Pretty interesting Catch Me If You Can style documentary of a fake diamond trader who successfully hoodwinks a series of unsuspecting victims to finance his lavish lifestyle. Gets a bit samey after a while, maybe runs a bit too long, but has an entertaining sting in its tail. 8/10

008 -- Death on the Nile. It seemed the 1970s version of this with Peter Ustinov was always on TV on a Sunday afternoon so I knew the story and had a vague idea of whodunnit, although not quite sure of the why or the how. The Kenneth Branagh version is solid and steady enough, but maybe a bit too uniform in pace, a bit lacking in excitement, and has the odd curiosity value of having an incredibly understated performance from Russell Brand. It suffers from the fakery of all the CGI backdrops and the fact that no one seems to be having an awful lot of fun. Still, a decent enough way to spend a couple of hours. 6/10

A week ago, I got a recommended video on YouTube of the scene from S1 where Mike punches the guy in the throat with his own gun before taking the pill guy to meet Nacho. Watched that. Watched the next one that was recommended. And now I've gone back to the start and I'm halfway through S4. What a show.

007 -- Moonfall. Utter shite. And not in a good way. 1/10

You're absolutely right. It was late. I wasn't thinking. I'll redact.