The Drama: A Film That Shouldn’t Have Been Made

Summary, a couples wedding plans are thrown into disaary after a horrific secret from the bride’s past comes out.

So we are going to spoil this as it is important to talk about the twist and how it ruins the film massively, if you don’t want it spoiled then stop here and come back.

So when asked what the worst thing that Zendaya’s character had even done was, she replies she once planned a school shooting. Why did anyone think this was a good idea, this isn’t a drama film it’s being portrayed as a quirky rom-com, this was such a tasteless decision.

When the trailers came out we thought it was just going to be more modern Hollywood slop, as noted by the fact that almost all character are in an interracial relationship, however the reality is all together darker.

What’s more it feels like it was done to be shocking rather than for a good reason, and with the fact it seems like school shootings are happening more and more in the real world this seems incredibly in poor taste.

The film almost makes light of it at times.

Zendaya when asked directly about the tastelessness of the twist tried to play it off as comedy, it’s not comedy to make light of dead kids it’s just a bad look.

If Zendaya was a better actress maybe they could have done something to make the performance more rounded rather than just feeling like Zendaya playing herself as she always does.

If this is a foray into dark humour then it is one that goes too far.

Overall, a horrible film that never should have been made.

0/5

Pros.

None

Cons.

The twist

It makes light of real tragedies

It uses the subject matter for shock value

It’s depressing

It’s vapid

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Super Mario Galaxy Movie: Nostalgia Missing A Soul

Summary, the Mario Brothers are threatened by the arrival of Bowser Jr who has set out to find his father after the events of the first film.

So on the press tour for this film Charlie Day was asked who his Luigi from recent American History was and said the murder who shot the CEO in an act of left wing defiance. This was pretty breaking at the time of writing this review, and sadly it does impact enjoyment of the film, as Luigi was a highlight before this incredibly poorly thought through statement.

The film itself is good and perfectly serviceable, and more of the same if you or your kids liked the first film you will like this, however, where this film is let down from the first is that it doesn’t have the same emotional core. The first film had Mario’s feelings of insecurity, Bowser’s love of Peach and even the depressed Luma to give the film stakes this one really doesn’t have that. You have the father son stuff with Bowser and his son, and the sisterhood storyline between Peach and Rosalita, but neither of these hit the same depth of feeling as the stuff from the first film. It was nice to see Mario and Peach as a couple get teased out more, this is an important part of the games that the first film did not spend enough time with. One assumed that that Mario asking Peach out would be one of the post credits scenes of the film but it wasn’t.

The adventure is interesting you see a lot of the galaxy and a lot of new things, this is mainly a chance to set up new films or to promote different IPs, obviously a film cannot spend the same amount of time with a universe as a game, but it does feel like in each of these cases it is just window dressing it is like look its Star Fox, or oh look its Daisy rather than having the world’s feel lived in or the characters seem like they matter. For example if they had replaced Star Fox with a different Nintendo character would it really have mattered at all, not really. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Nowhere is this truer than with Yoshi, not only do they have Yoshi be out and about in the over world without anyone thinking it was weird, but also all the character’s function is to follow Mario around and act like one of the minions characters. The fact is if you were to play one of the Yoshi games you would see the character has a lot more personality than he was given in the film.

The music was a lot better this time around, it was more classic game music rather than horribly forced in pop music, and the end credits that showed scenes from the film in puppet form was a lot of fun so it gets bonus points for those things.

Overall, it is serviceable and fun to a degree but there is a hollowness to it.

3/5

Pros.

Mario and Peach

The Music and Puppet Show

The scope of the film

Cons.

It has a lot of new characters but they don’t need to be there and it just feels like a shop window

The emotional core of the film is not enough

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Cinema Issues: James Gunn The Man Who Should Have Stayed Cancelled

In this edition of Cinema Issues we are talking about James Gunn, why he’s a truly awful studio head and why God willing he’ll be fired soon.

Where to start, perhaps with the fact that he was too afraid to use the phrase truth, justice and the American way on the Superman poster but will use truth, justice, whatever, on the Supergirl poster.

Or perhaps we should think about how edgy he is, and how he needed to have Superman cancelled in his film, just like James was, or have him called a bitch by his cousin or have a photo of him pissed on by his dog. Just to remind you that no one cares about Superman least of all James Gunn. As why respect one of DC’s oldest and most beloved heroes?

Why not have Kal-El suggest Superman take a harem, why not force in the Justice Gang as it has then invokes his initials. It’s bad decision after bad decision.

In that same vein why not allow a guy who thinks the word Green in Green Lanterns is lame to make a Green Lanterns show in a true detective style. Or shoot a Clayface film without a Batman.

How about his new feminist side of showing how women can be just as messy as men, and how women aren’t perfect by having them be damaged drunk party girls who don’t grow. The same person who thinks telling little girls it’s okay to be a mess is a positive message.

Maybe we can get back to the fact that he likes to get into spats online, or the fact he revealed a whole slate of projects most of which haven’t been seen or heard from again. Remember the Authority?

All of this comes without all the creepy jokes he made about kids or SA and thing of that nature that got him canned from Marvel.

Honestly his tenure as studio head, opening with a cartoon no one watched, following it with a Superman film that was a financial disappointment and then following that with a Supergirl film with zero hype, suggests that he really was the wrong man for the job.

It’s time for WBD or Paramount to just fire him.

Lily’s Ritual: Seedy and Creepy

One of us was able to see this at a film festival in Spain last year, and after things stopped getting in the way they were able to write up a review.

Below is that review.

A young woman is inducted into what she thinks is a wiccan sisterhood but it turns out to be something more sinister.

This film was enough to make you uncomfortable, not in the ways the film wants you to be uncomfortable but because it felt like a creepy old man directing and recording a group of young women in various states of undress and wetness, in terms of their clothing.

Moreover after the twist happens, the demon is interesting and the blood effects work. However the end wherein it is dancing around is just a little too pretentious, it is as though this film thinks it’s art.

Overall the film couldn’t decide if it wanted to be soft core or an art film.

0.5/5

Pros.

It’s short

Cons.

It’s creepy

It’s pretentious

It’s poorly acted

It’s dull

The twist is fairly obvious

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Cinema Issues: Putting Star Trek Out To Pasture

What show has a large woman who eats her own comms badge, a black guy who has two dads that left him, and also a ship captain who seems unable to sit in a chair. That’s right it’s Starfleet Academy.

One’s mind may go back to the instantly memeable moment from the Simpsons wherein the kid goes stop it it’s already dead. The numbers have been bad for a lot of Kurtzman Trek over time but this one just couldn’t seem to connect with much of anyone as such it was cancelled before it’s second season even airs. This is due to the fact that the second season is already paid for and shot so it will be released likely all at once and then the show will be canned.

The reason why the show has been cancelled is because no one was watching it and the ratings were bad. It is that simple. However if you wanted to talk about why the ratings were bad then let’s go, they chased away the male audience calling them bad and toxic, and aimed primarily at women and the LGBTQ+ crowd, this is not enough to hold up a majority male brand who knew. Whilst other shows had the bare amount of testosterone needed to get men to watch it, Academy seemed to be against that from the beginning deciding to lean even harder into it’s small Blue Sky niche audience. Spitting on your fans also doesn’t help with this.

Before we hear the trite Star Trek has always been woke reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee comments, there is a difference between a show exploring political ideas of both the left and the right and having a nuanced debate and letting you make up your own mind, as the Original Series and The Next Generation did. As opposed to telling you what to think and saying if you don’t think this your a Nazi as modern trek loves to do.

The narratives online is already that this is because the family that runs Paramount are Trump supporters, if this was the case why wasn’t it cancelled earlier why now, and is based out of the fact that these people cannot understand that they are the minority and that no one watched. It’s sad.

Saturday Live UK: The American Take Over Of The UK

Our reviewer for this doesn’t live in the UK anymore and so had to use a VPN in order to watch it, and boy did they regret it.

One has to ask why to several key factors, firstly why did they feel that the UK needed Saturday Night Live a show that is dying in the States.

Why did they feel the need to open with an American hostess rather than you know a well known British comedian.

Why did they fill out the cast list with a group of nobodies from British comedy rather than even mid range panel show comedians that many people already know. One has to also assume there was something of a diversity quota when filling out the cast for this show as it is in no way reflective of the UK’s actual population.

To shift gears, who is this for? The kids don’t watch live TV and certainly don’t care about Saturday Night Live, and then older people will resent how this is such obvious cultural imperialism. Maybe this is for the sort of bored lonely middle age people who sit and watch Love Island every night or maybe it’s for the American ex-pats who moved to the UK to run away from Trump.

Upon watching the first episode it became clear this was a mess that should have been aborted long ago, it wasn’t funny, it didn’t have anything to say and it felt like the most corpo thing ever put on British TV.

This is the sort of show that makes you turn off midway through.

Overall, just awful.

0.5/5

Pros

Tina Fey

Cons.

It’s not funny

It’s irritating

It’s corporate

It’s too long

It’s incredibly safe

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They Will Kill You: Landlords are Satanists

So in this outlets commentary on the killing fields for our latest cinema issues article we thought that this film would be totally eclipsed by Ready or Not 2. However, upon watching this film easily is the better.

Both films have the annoying sister gimmick, however, this one has far less time with them needing to coddle each other and talk about their feelings.

Asia is much cooler and more badass than Grace who rather than turn into a hardened survivor they just tread as a “mess”. The action in particular is great in this film and is well choreographed for the most part.

The Satanist stuff towards the end gets a little convoluted herein, but for the most part it works well as flavouring. It is again very similar to Ready or Not but it manages to be different in that the Devil figure behind the forces in this film takes a more active role. It must be stated the gimmick of immortality makes the stakes feel a hell of a lot lower.

Overall, a good film if a little flawed at times in terms of premise.

1/5

Pros.

Zazie Beetz is great

The action is good

The ending is amusing

Cons.

The pacing

The sister stuff as well as the immorality are plot issues

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Ready Or Not 2: No One Is Looking For This

Summary, Samara Weaving is back to play hide and seek.

This film was incredibly disappointing and not needed. Firstly the film did away with a lot of the humour of the first film, and for the most part was a more serious affair, mistake number 1. There was some humour but it was far more few and far between.

Secondly, the relationship between Weaving’s character and her sister played by Kathryn Newton was irritating. In the middle of being hunted they would stop and have a spat about who left who in the orphanage, it made no sense they would do that. Also the drama between the sisters and the need for them to work through it has been done to death. You’ve seen it in a number of films and done much better than this.

Thirdly there were whole shots wherein you just knew they were doing it so teen girls on Tiktok would go “yaaaas slay queen aesthetics”, these shots didn’t actually do anything to advance the plot but were done to appeal to the former Tumblr these days the blue sky crowd.

Overall, whilst this film slightly expands on the world of the film and you could argue that as a positive in nearly every other way it’s a regressive sequel that harms the first for having been made.

1/5

Pros.

It expands out the world

Cons.

The ending is bad

The humour is toned back

The sister stuff is boring and repetitive

The stuff for aesthetics

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Cinema Issues: The Killing Fields

In this edition of Cinema Issue we are talking about release strategy and how Hollywood cannot seem to get out of its own way. Back a few decades ago films would come out on the same weekend and compete, this became less and less done and studio executives became more and more skittish.

Now you have things like films with very similar premises such as Ready or Not and They Will Kill You coming out a week apart. This is not a return to direct facing off, in that they are coming out on the same weekend, which at least has free market merit, this is release date stupidly. By spacing out the films by a week the latter will suffer at the box office as people are not going to want to see a film very similar to Ready or Not a week later. Ultimately it should have either come out alongside it at the same time, if they have confidence in it, or moved to a different release date.

This is but one example of this trend you can see studios doing things like this all the time sometimes cannibalising their own films. For example next spring/summer Disney are going to release the live action remake of Lilo and Stitch 2 at the end of May and then the third Incredibles film in the middle of June. This gives their own Lilo and Stitch about 2 weeks before it will have its marketshare eaten into by Incredibles 3 and is just stupid. If rival studios want to challenge each other that’s business but if studios are committing acts of self harm to their own release slates that stupidity.

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Mother’s Pride: A Weaker Fisherman’s Friends

Summary, the people behind Fisherman’s Friends attempt to make a new film about the death of the British pub.

Whilst a lot of what this film has to say is spot on, about the deaths of independent British pubs and how only the chains are remaining. The issue with the film is that it lacks the heart of Fisherman’s Friends and feels more emotionally manipulative than earnest.

The dad being arrested came out of nowhere and went nowhere, all the stuff about suicide felt very needless and even the dad having a heart attack felt like something to try and shock the audience. A better script could have made these things feel earnest or made them appear more than cheap gimmicks to shock the audience but it just wasn’t that script.

There is also a really horribly cringe “modern audience” scene wherein a character asks how another identifies and then says she is pansexual. It feels like it is there by some sort of mandate rather than anything else.

Overall, whilst we like to cheer on British cinema this just wasn’t it.

2/5

Pros.

It’s watchable

It has a few cheer worthy moments

Cons.

It feels emotionally manipulative

It is badly paced

The awkward modern audience stuff

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