MSU

Every single day... My iPhone in the evening: Hey! Just a quick heads-up to let you know that there's an iOS update that's come out. It's a hefty one so I'm going to download and install it for you during the night so it doesn't interrupt you tomorrow going about all your important business and "stuff". How does that sound? Does that work for you? Me: That sounds great, iPhone. Thanks very much. My iPhone the next morning: Yeah, I didn't do that.

That's fair, and I can be a snob with some franchises while absolutely and willfully ignoring the shortcomings of others. I definitely went into this with lowered expectations. Mrs MSU who has more of a connection to Transformers, although mostly the cartoon when she was a kid and through Bumblebee, enjoyed it more than I did but still came out of it fairly non-plussed, and the wee laddie that was sitting next to us in the packed IMAX screening somehow fell asleep. I dunno if I could recommend it, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it if you do go see it.

119 Carmen -- This version of Carmen has little in common with Bizet's opera. Rather than a tale of obsession and jealousy in Spain, it's transported to be a story of escape and renewal set in the borderlands between Mexico and the US. Melissa Barrera, who we remember from the recent Scream sequels, is captivating in the lead role. Carmen's mother is murdered by, we assume, a Mexican drugs cartel, and she flees across the border into the US. There she runs into Paul Mescal, whose American accent is so good, I forgot he was Scottish for a moment, before further forgetting that he's actually Irish. He's Aidan, an Afghan vet running away from his own demons. He's working Border Patrol and one of his colleagues gets a little trigger-happy. Aidan intervenes, the colleague is killed, and he and Carmen join forces as they flee to Los Angeles. The story isn't much heavier than that, but where it veers away from the expected is in its use of dance. The movie's director, Benjamin Millepied, is a choreographer and his film is punctuated with expressive dance that ranges from the balletic to the flamenco dancing of Carmen's mother in the breathtaking opening sequence. It's all very impressive, even from Mescal who has a dancing background. I don't know if he seemed less accomplished just from the skill of the people around him, particularly Barrera, but he did give me the vibe at times of a celebrity on Strictly Come Dancing who probably gets voted out in week six. Honestly, I preferred his dancing in Aftersun. The cinematography is amazing, as is the score, I just wish the story had a bit more going for it. It feels quite thick and oddly stationary at times, and even when it does get moving, it's brief and quite surface-level, and that's going to be a bit of a problem for a two-hour movie. Still pretty decent. 7/10 120 ¡Three Amigos! -- Kurosawa's Seven Samurai premise has never been redone with a Singing Bush before or since. The trio of Martin Short, Chevy Chase, and Steve Martin are, at times, hilarious and genuinely engaging enough throughout as the mercenaries hired to come to the aid of lowly villagers in dealing with an evil warlord. But for a story so formulaic and predictable, it's just not funny enough and the chemistry between the three seems to work better in some places than others, and oftentimes they're at their best when operating on their own. Contrary to this is the aforementioned Singing Bush scene, and the campfire song with the accompanying animals. A few quotable lines aside, Alfonso Arau and Tony Plana as the dastardly El Guapo and Jefe are frequently the funniest things in the movie, but at least it manages to avoid feeling too much like an extended SNL skit, which can't always be said for something Lorne Michaels is involved in. 6/10 121 The Jerk -- I don't know that Steve Martin has ever been funnier than he was here. It's quite an uneven watch and there are sections where the jokes are flying and landing hard and fast and then there'll be long spells where nothing is even really even meant to be funny. However, the movie has an abundance of heart and (I think) good intentions. There may be few scenes in cinema more adorable than Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters singing Tonight You Belong To Me, or a dog called Shithead. 8/10 122 Dreams of a Life -- Carol Morely's documentary about the life and death of Joyce Vincent, who lay undiscovered in her London bedsit for three years, was seemingly made without the involvement or blessing of Vincent's family. Instead, Morely relies on Vincent's friends and co-workers in the years leading up to her death and they all paint a picture of a charming, attractive, successful and intriguing individual, someone who had, at least briefly, been part of circles that included Gil Scott Heron and Ben E King, which makes her fate all the more intriguing. The documentary uses actors to reconstruct scenes from her life that may or may not have happened and this disconnect, while unavoidable due to the lack of concrete details, simply accentuates its own shortcomings. Surprisingly, it spends very little time asking why she wasn't missed by friends or family, or how a soul can disappear in the middle of one of the busiest cities on earth, or how protective services can let someone down so badly. 6/10 123 Transformers: Rise of the Beasts -- I had successfully navigated 49 trips around the sun without seeing a Transformer movie or accumulating any real information on the matter other than Michael Bay is creepy, and these robots can turn into cars for a reason that may or may not have been explained at some point. If there had been ANYTHING ELSE new in the cinema this week, this run would've been extended. The plot, such as it is, is about an important thing that will allow something to happen that might be good or might be bad depending on which color of eyes the possessing robot has. Half of that thing has been found in a New York museum which brings the two humans who give a shit about any of this stuff together. Anthony Ramos is Noah, who has been tasked to steal a car that's been parked in the museum for reasons. Dominique Fishback is Elana who works at the museum and is underappreciated and she's the one who finds the thing. Upon discovering alien robots that can turn into cars and stuff, neither of them seem remotely fazed by the experience so they all go to Peru where a number of UNESCO world heritage sites will be destroyed, and I will be encouraged to feel an emotional connection to a dead robot. I have no idea if this finished product is anything like director Steven Caple Jr's vision -- although I've seen Creed II so I can guess -- and I can't estimate the joy any of the five writers experienced while hearing their overly earnest words brought to life. It's hard to imagine that any of them thought their efforts represented time well spent. 2/10

113 Top Secret -- Doesn't quite have the same joke per minute rate as Airplane, or probably Naked Gun, but with the space this affords it, instead it has something pretty close to a plot. It's from the mid-80s so of course some of it doesn't feel entirely comfortable in the 21st century, but there's plenty that still hits the mark; the cow in wellies, the singing horse, the definition of indispensable, and, of course, Skeet Surfin'. 7/10 114 Airplane II: The Sequel -- Essentially a carbon copy of the first movie that even has chunks of it repeated, but not as good. That said, it still has more jokes than most comedies and a decent proportion of them land about as well as they did 40 years ago. I still don't think I'll ever get over Macho Grande. 6/10 115 The House -- It's a guilty pleasure of mine, and I can understand why some people don't like, even hate this movie, but I kinda love it. There's a background storyline about financing a kid's college tuition and something about corruption in small-town local government, but really, it's just an excuse to build jokes on the framework of the question, "What would happen if we had a casino in our house?" A lot of the jokes land, some of them are wrung out a bit too much, and some just totally miss the mark but overall, I love the premise and I really enjoy the trio of Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, and Jason Mantzoukas and their collection of oddball neighbors. The stand-up comedian and the fight club scenes, as well as The Butcher, will never not make me laugh. A sorry-not-sorry 7/10 116 Fletch -- Last year's Confess, Fletch made me think back to the original movies from the 80s and if I'm honest, I suspected that Chevy Chase's wise-cracking investigative reporter character and his ways probably hadn't aged all that well. Surprise surprise, then, to discover that Fletch, for the most part, is as good now as it was almost 40 years ago. Posing as a junkie, Fletch is investigating a drug ring on a public LA beach when he's approached by millionaire Alan Stanwyk who claims to be dying and wants Fletch to kill him so his family can pick up the insurance. There's obviously more to it than it seems but Andrew Bergman's script, based on a novel Gregory McDonald's novel, has enormous fun as these two threads slowly come together. There are a few plot points that jar -- Alan Stanwyk claims to have been watching Fletch on the beach for two weeks and then suddenly just stops his surveillance, and does every woman have to throw themselves at his feet -- but this was a hugely entertaining rewatch, and Chevy Chase has rarely been so good. 8/10 117 Fletch Lives -- Ah, so *this* was the Fletch movie I was worried hadn't aged well. Yeah, it hasn't. Fletch Lives, perhaps ill-advisedly, breaks away from the Gregory McDonald novels to go on an original adventure where the stereotypes do most of the writing. Fletch is disillusioned with working on the newspaper with Frank when he learns that his aunt has died and left him with her mansion and 80 acres, so he ups sticks to Louisiana. The mansion isn't the palace he'd imagined, the local evangelical theme park is looking to expand into his property, and his poor realtor sleeps with him then winds up dead leaving him as the prime suspect. There are laughs to be had, I guess, but Fletch punches down quite a bit, and a bit of that goes in the direction of Cleavon Little's Calculus Entropy, his aunt's housekeeper and slave descendent, although everyone seems keen to avoid investigating that aspect of the story too much. There's something about the Fletch character and Chevy Chase's portrayal that I can't help but enjoy, but as a sequel, and compared so closely to the first movie, it's impossible not to be disappointed, and in the four years in between, it really should've been much better. 4/10 118 The Boogeyman -- Teenage Sadie and her younger sister Sawyer, try to deal with the death of their mother while their distant therapist dad, Will, is somewhat present. For a therapist, Will doesn't really even try to help his kids through this trauma, passing them on to a colleague, but when a mysterious man comes for an unplanned session, he brings with him an evil entity that threatens to destroy what remains of Will's family. In keeping with every decent monster flick, Rob Savage wisely keeps the monster lingering in the shadows as much as possible and I was reminded of Skinamarink at several points where I wasn't even sure if what I could see at the edge of perceivable vision was a shape or just my eyes playing tricks on me. And in this regard, the monster has lucked out because the family house here seems to have been furnished with 20 watt lightbulbs so plenty of shadows are created. There are many moments where its PG13 rating feels like a terrible error, 15 in the UK feels far closer to the right call. Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair are great as the kids and while Chris Messina puts in a good shift as Will, he's a kinda frustrating character and it's hard to warm to him. The script, though, based on a 50-year-old Stephen King short, is sharp and fleshes the characters out well, even if it does take itself very seriously. I suspect this will fly under the radar for lots of people thanks to the competition this weekend, which is a shame. It's worth checking out. 6/10

Really enjoyed the series and Mae was definitely a worthy winner. I think the S16 line-up is the first one where I haven't heard of most of the contestants. ETA -- I've just checked the list of contestants by series and I'm havering pish. I've not heard of most of the contestants plenty of times.

I've never felt more American.

Been a really interesting thread to catch up on. I'll be 1,000 hangover-free mornings in a couple of weeks. I don't know if I was an alcoholic, and I'm not sure the term is all that useful anyway, but drink was definitely becoming a problem in my life, and the shiftiness I was developing in order to downplay that problem to those around me was turning me into someone I didn't particularly like. I couldn't remember the last time I'd actually enjoyed a drink, and listening to Lee Mack and Limmy's stories about stopping definitely helped me say cheerio to Mr B. First week was tough, since then I've been surprised by how much I don't miss it all. Ice cold ginger ale, as mentioned above, has been useful. Of course, this would've been a good conclusion to come to before I got a Tennent's T tattooed on my leg. Oh, well.

110 Robots -- The conceit of this movie is something Adam Sandler would probably pass on. In the near future, immigrants have been replaced by robots to do all the work the immigrants did. The robots are humanoid but are clearly robots. Somehow, Jack Whitehall's character gets his hands on one that looks and sounds EXACTLY like Jack Whitehall and because Jack Whitehall is a very lazy character, he uses his robot to go on initial dates with women before moving in and fucking them himself. He's a lovely guy. Then we have Shailene Woodley who also somehow has a robot who looks EXACTLY like Shailene Woodley and she uses her robot to go on dates with men and dig some gold out of them before dumping them when they stop splashing the cash. Due to an entirely predictable mix-up with dates and addresses, the two robots meet up, fall in love, and f**k off to Mexico. The problem for Jack Whitehall and Shailene Woodley is that possession of robots is STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, and this is the case to make sure the movie can happen, so the two of them head off to track down their robotic counterparts, and wouldn't you know it, they also fall in love on the way. Shockingly predictable but there's a half-decent joke at Moby's expense that I quite enjoyed. 3/10 111 You Hurt My Feelings (#134 in the A24 series) -- When A24 isn't making the same drug movie over and over, it's quite good at making these wee character studies, and this is pretty decent. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies are Beth and Don, a long-married, successful and comfortable couple whose son works in a pot store, while Beth's sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins) is an interior designer and her husband, Mark (Arian Moayed) is a struggling actor. Beth is a writer, Don is a therapist, and their marriage is given a shock when Beth overhears Don tell Mark what he really thinks about her latest book. The movie as a whole is all about characters seeking validation, but it seems only the kind of validation they want to hear. Beth wants Don to tell her he loves her book and mean it. Don struggles to be appreciated by his client list, a couple of whom actively hate him. Sarah can't find the perfect lamp for a particular customer, and Mark just wants the shortcut to fame. This is a problem as everyone seems to want the same thing, but it's maybe not so much of a problem as these are all fairly rich, comfortable white folks complaining that people aren't loving them in the right way. Still, pretty good fun and I chuckled quite a bit throughout. 7/10 112 Kandahar -- If you're a filmmaker in 2023 who wants Gerard Butler to star in your movie, you need to be prepared to answer four questions: Where is Gerard Butler currently? What is Gerard Butler's occupation? Where is Gerard Butler trying to go? Which holiday or celebration is Gerard Butler intending to share with his estranged daughter upon arrival? The second Gerard Butler movie I've seen this year is very much like the first one I saw, Plane. Except here, he's a CIA operative rather than a pilot, he's stranded in Afghanistan, rather than a SE Asian island, he's trying to get home to the UK in both movies, and his daughter is graduating rather than wanting to see in the New Year. It's a decent, if derivative couple of hours as Butler's character's cover is compromised after he destroys an Iranian nuclear facility, and he and his interpreter race to get to a CIA base in Kandahar, some 400 miles away. In hot pursuit, we have the Taliban, Pakistan's ISI, ISIS, and the BBC License Fee Collections Agency. The landscapes are amazing and there are a couple of decent setpieces that keep the interest afloat. 5/10

I think this is most people's pick of the bunch. Nothing about the series, particularly the books, really stands up to much scrutiny, but it really starts to drop off a cliff after this one.

So I *think* she's going to a Taylor Swift concert but doesn't want to? Is that what this is?

Just last week I did my very best Al Pacino impression as I muttered "stupid fucking c**t" at something that was pissing me off. Apparently it needs work.

Only time I've been the only c**t in the screening was Saw IV and when the Cineworld boy poked his head in to make sure I wasn't recording it on my phone, I shat myself. (Also enjoyed Missing -- good fun)

"No-one should endure an extended period under arrest, just because they're an innocent bystander." She seems dangerously close to getting the point.

Agreed. Saw this a few weeks ago and still don't quite know what to make of it. So much of it didn't make sense (or rather I couldn't make sense of it) but I don't know that I've seen a better representation of a nightmare or a panic attack. Phoenix is awesome either way.

107 STILL: A Michael J Fox Movie -- Still as a literal and figurative concept is something the movie tackles as it covers Fox's early life and rise to fame and diagnosis with Parkinson's disease. The documentary rather cleverly uses footage from Fox's movies and TV shows to reconstruct real moments from his life, which always serves as a reminder that in a lot of ways, the Michael J Fox we see is the version that Michael J Fox wants us to see, but when this is contrasted with more contemporary interviews, there is no such facade. The man who left his wife to raise his children, who became an alcoholic, who hid his horrible illness for as long as he could, is suddenly laid bare. Michael J Fox comes across as a good guy, but he's flawed and he doesn't hide away from those flaws. He's an arsehole just like everyone else in the world and because of this, he's more relatable. 10/10 108 The Great Ziegfeld (#9 in the Best Picture series) -- Two and a half hours of overblown, bloated extravagance as MGM proved they had tons of cash to burn on this biopic of Flo Ziegfeld, a big-time producer at the turn of the 20th century. Something to be endured rather than enjoyed or admired. 1/10 109 Hypnotic -- Ben Affleck seems to have been forced to play Danny Rourke, a cop whose daughter has been kidnapped and is missing, presumed dead. When he's given a tip about an upcoming bank heist, he discovers some strange clues that suggest she's still alive and comes across a mysterious bad guy who appears to be able to control people's minds. Through the confusion, Alice Braga shows up as a medium who is on hand to provide a running commentary for everything that's happening without once saying the words Inception, Memento, Tenet, or Scanners. The exposition from Braga was already enough to anger me, but the movie insists on really pushing my buttons with absurd dialogue, and a constant soundtrack that is there to tell you exactly how you're supposed to feel at all times. Robert Rodriguez directed, wrote, produced, made the tea, swept the floor, switched off all the lights on his way out, and got his daughter to write the score, and maybe half the problem is having one person behind these elements, and not enough people to tell you that what all this control is creating is shite. 2/10

Foreigner at the Kalamazoo Wings Event Center last night. The missus got tickets for our youngest's Christmas last year, who just wanted to go to a concert and wasn't too fussed about who it was. They were pretty good and their singer Kelly Hanson, who is in his sixties, was like a yellow-spandexed ferret whipping around the stage (brave for a man that age). I didn't realize that I knew so many Foreigner songs and although I wasn't particularly looking forward to it, I had a ball. Live music is just that fucking awesome. It's funny, though, that the band encouraged the audience to participate in an atmosphere of love, and togetherness, and commune, and unity, and we sang along, and high-fived strangers, and danced, and raised the roof, and did as we were told, then 5 minutes after it's done, six lanes of traffic are merging into one to get out of the parking lot and everyone turns into a p***k again.

Espedair Street was my first Iain Banks, then Complicity, and then The Bridge. Never really got The Bridge or why everyone seemed to think it was his best work, so it's probably time to revisit it. Those black and white covers still look great.

I'm in.

101 Romy and Michele's High School Reunion -- I forget how much I love this stupid movie until I watch it, and so it always seems to be years between viewings, giving me enough time to forget the jokes and the little looks between Lisa Kudrow and (Academy Award winner) Mira Sorvino and Janeane Garofalo. The story of two stereotypical airheads in LA heading back to Arizona for their 10-year High School reunion is simple enough but the movie has a wonderfully good and honest heart and there are many, I think, universal truths of acceptance and nostalgia and how the hierarchy of school means that we were all somewhere in the middle, simultaneously being treated like shit by some while treating others like shit in return. 9/10 102 Die Another Day -- Pierce Brosnan's tenure as 007 ends with a whimper and very much the sense of what could've been. I maintain that he's a good, maybe even great Bond, but he's had a couple of absolutely stinking stories to work with, and this is the bottom of the barrel. The story is poor, but the dialogue put around it is criminal. There's a scene where our villain is being questioned by a British press pack and honestly, the questions that are asked sound like they've been devised not only by someone who has never seen the British press in action but also by someone who has never heard a question being asked out loud. By the time Madonna, in her Cockney phase, and Oliver Skeet turn up in cameo roles, I had long given up. Not even a reasonable turn by Rosamund Pike is enough to save this calamity, and that's before I mention an invisible car. 2/10 103 Mutiny on the Bounty (#8 in the Best Picture series) -- There's an awful lot to like and enjoy in this epic historical/nautical romp with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as the dastardly Bligh. Acting in the 30s is to a different standard than these days but once you get used to it and adapt to the slightly odd way people talk to each other, it's something that can easily be tolerated. The production and location work is quite impressive for the time -- parts of it really were filmed in French Polynesia -- which must've seemed like extravagancies. Historically, apparently there are plenty of inaccuracies -- for example, Bligh was nowhere near as ruthless as depicted and the number of floggings on the Bounty was below average -- but what it left makes for great entertainment and it's easy to see why it picked up Best Picture. Oddly, it lost out to The Informer in other categories, and having three actors up for the Best Actor gong resulted in the birth of the Supporting Actor category. So that's nice. 8/10 104 Romancing the Stone -- Forty years on, just about, and it's still a hoot and a half and everyone is SO IMPOSSIBLY YOUNG! I always suspected that more recent movies like The Lost City and Jungle Cruise owed Romancing the Stone a debt of gratitude, and that has been more than confirmed. Douglas and Turner work well together and Robert Zemeckis's direction, while never really diverting from the tried and tested formula of 80s romantic comedies, is vibrant and full of fun. A more than decent way to spend 100 minutes on a dreary afternoon. 7/10 105 Casino Royale -- What a difference four years makes, so much so that this feels like a new franchise. No transition from one Bond to another has been such a reinvention. Daniel Craig's 007 plays by his own rules and it's an incredibly welcome move. There are obvious throwbacks, of course. The cast of characters remains largely the same, the globe is sufficiently trotted, and the baddies typically have some visible deformity, but it all feels like it's in the new century for the first time. I can't imagine any effort from Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton featuring an extended base running sequence on a Madagascan construction site, although the thought of Roger Moore doing it is pretty amusing. Mads Mikkelsen is a fine villain, Martin Campbell's direction is an improvement on his work on GoldenEye, and Paul Haggis's script is sharp and thankfully not dripping in innuendo. This Bond is blunt, flawed, somewhat inexperienced, and brilliant. And the theme tune kicks serious arse too. 9/10 106 Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret -- Been a quiet couple of weeks at the movies if you're not interested in Marvel, so this was Mrs MSU's pick and I guess all the nostalgia and memberberries that this serves up worked better for her than it did for me. It's a coming-of-age drama-comedy that wasn't all that funny and didn't have much in the way of tension, but it was charming, cute, and surprisingly frank in places as Margaret attempts to negotiate a new school, new friends, and the threat of puberty. There's an interesting subplot of her maternal grandparents being Christian and disapproving of their daughter's marriage to a Jew but it didn't really pay off at any point. Rachel McAdams is acting within her means throughout, Abby Ryder Forston as Margaret and Elle Graham as her friend Nancy are great, but it's Kathy Bates as Margaret's granny that steals the show. 6/10

Ivo deliberately throwing the Live task was probably my highlight of the series so far.

David Mitchell has said he'd never do it, but I still think he'd be great. Ade Edmonson, Lenny Henry, Lucy Porter might be fun. Sean Locke would've been good in his pre-dead days.

095 The Evil Dead -- I don't know what's more amazing; that Sam Raimi could make this for around $300k, or he was able to raise the investment in the first place, but what he does with that money is still remarkable and it's astonishing how some cheap practical effects and a vocal octaver could create such a chilling atmosphere. The acting is a bit overblown but it's also much better than we could have any reason to expect. The infamous tree scene hasn't aged well, but it was never applauded in the first place, and the movie would be better without it, and there's never much of an explanation as to why there are spooky goings on even before the incantations are made, and it's lost some of it's punch in 40 years but overall, there's still a huge amount to admire in a brutal 85-minute assault on the senses. 8/10 096 Evil Dead II -- It's a different style of horror here with far more emphasis on the comedy than before, which renders the gore -- of which there is a ton -- in a far more palatable frame. There are some incredible sequences here -- the headless torso cutting itself down the middle with the chainsaw by accident, the eyeball flying across the room, the possessed hand etc -- and while they're kinda gross, it's like the movie is nudging you in the ribs at the same time. Bruce Campbell is camping it up big time here but there are still really clever uses of camera angles that maintain a genuinely unhinged and hallucinatory feel. And once again, it's all done and dusted in under 90 minutes without feeling rushed. If anything, it's still quite exhausting. 9/10 097 Ghosted -- Chris Evans is a farmer who sells plants at an artisan market -- because of course he is -- when he meets Ana De Armas and after one date he is convinced that she's his perfect partner only for her to secretly be a special agent -- because of course she is -- and he inadvertently gets caught up in her world of espionage and adventure which allows the pair of them to discuss various aspects of their relationship while they drive through high-speed chases and shoot bad people. It's a terribly cliched premise that's made all the worse thanks to a truly diabolical script that I've seen some reviewers guess was written by ChatGPT. If that was the case, I think we can all sleep soundly that our robot overlords perhaps won't be enslaving the planet any time soon. Evans and De Armas, to their credit, manage to be entire charisma vacuums as they bump through one pointless encounter to the next, and director Dexter Fletcher has done so much better with Rocketman and (kinda) Sunshine on Leith. 2/10 098 Army of Darkness -- The least Evil Deady of the Evil Dead movies is still camp as f**k and plays out like a more twisted version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or a comparably twisted Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's good fun, and very funny in places, but I think the reason it's taken me this long to finally watch it all the way through in one viewing is that it almost feels like a spoof of itself. Ash is a real arsehole at the start and through the movie he -- shudder -- discovers things about himself and starts fighting for the people he saw as peasants at the start. Or something. I'm not sure I want that from an Evil Dead movie. In keeping with the others, it's a short affair so it doesn't eat up a lot of your time, and it's not bad at all. It's just not what I expected. 6/10 099 Evil Dead -- I loved an awful lot about this the first time I saw it, from the poster, to the soundtrack, the corny dialogue, the story, the premise, the color palette, the effects, the handy availability of a nail gun and chainsaw. And after watching all the Evil Dead movies this week, I just love it even more. Just a great combination of gore, guts, jumps, scares, and dread. Poor Mia the junkie is coming off heroin at her mother's old cabin in the woods and for a while her demonic possession is mistaken for cold turkey. It's such a great conceit that makes the realization for the others that something else is afoot all the more effective. Before we even get there, before the title card comes up, there's a little prologue that in itself is pretty fucked up. And on this viewing, there are even a couple of minor chuckles in there. There are horror movies that work better on a psychological level, that push my buttons, that tap into my own fears, but for what it is, Evil Dead for me is among the best in class. 9/10 100 Chevalier -- Proof, if ever it was needed, that Paris turns everyone into an arsehole. I went into this not knowing very much at all about the life and times of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and I came out of it none the wiser. The story of the son of a slave and her wealthy master, uprooted and planted in Paris as a protege musician, who rubbed shoulders with royalty and nobility would be an interesting tale, but Stephen Williams' movie really robs the biography of any nuance and for the longest time presents as something of a forbidden romance as Chevalier (Kelvin Harrison Jr) has an affair with his leading lady, Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving). The problem really stems from the fact that Chevalier isn't really presented as a likable character and his challenges are mostly overcome with ease, and his later interest in the revolution seem purely motivated because he didn't get the head job with Paris Opera. It's such a shallow look at what I'm sure was an interesting life, I cringe to call it a biopic. The music, however, is great although I was under no illusion at any point that any of the actors are responsible for any of it. 3/10

He says it wrong twice, realizes he's said it wrong, then says it right, then says it wrong again under the qualifier of that's how Russians say it, to suggest that when he said it wrong the first two times, he was actually saying it right.