Fackham Hall: Jimmy Carr Becomes A Saud

Saudi Arabia’s favourite son Jimmy Carr brings back the spoof film and decides to spoof the most timely of genre’s the period film.

This film serves one purpose as far as I am concerned it shows why the parody film died and why it should not be brought back. It’s humour is juvenile and repetitive, it even has a misunderstanding of someone’s last name being what, which is the most played out joke possibly ever. The film didn’t make me laugh once. I laughed more as I saw Jimmy Carr had removed the Saudi gig from his tour schedule.

This film could be a British nasty that tarnishes our reputation, I say as a native, not as someone who lives there anymore, much like the Catherine Tate Granny movie from a few years ago. However, it ropes in some actual talent, God knows how, and manages to tarnish all of their reputation as well. You have Katherine Waterston, and Damien Lewis who both have prominent roles here, and yet will likely regret it until their dying day.

There is something also incredibly dated about fixating your mockery on a genre that is basically none existent anymore.

1/5

Pros.

It is short

Cons

It is not funny

It is irritating

It is dated

It has weak performances

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Futurama Season 10 Overview: Dead Behind The Eyes

Summary

Season Three of the Hulu/Disney run may be the worst.

As you know I am a huge Futurama fan, I enjoyed the Fox era, I enjoyed most of the Comedy Central era, I enjoyed the films, however, the Disney/Hulu era for me has been the most contentious. As you know when I reviewed the first season of this era I didn’t like it, outside of one or two episodes, then the second season came out and I was warmer towards it without it being anywhere near the old stuff, I ended my review of last season on a positive note thinking that it was only up from there. Then they made this season……. Which may be the worst in the shows history.

I think the main thing ruining Futurama in the current moment is the modern dayisms and the lectures, older episodes took political problems or concepts and made them into something fun or treated them as an aspect in a wider adventure, like classic Star Trek. Here it just becomes the writers talking at you.

I will go through this season quickly to make my point. The first episode opens with one of the famous Bender being insecure or threatened episodes, these are always good, and this one is serviceable, its about his height rather than one of his long standing insecurities. There is a better Bender episode later in the season. You will see he is one of the two bright spots of the season. The second episode may well be the worst of the series as a whole. It is a climate change episode wherein they repeatedly say if only this information, that the earth was heading for a climate emergency, was available in 2025, and then go it is over and over again. They also condemn the people of our modern age for not doing more to stop it despite having the information. Despite trying to put this in an adventure it just turns into a lecture its awful. Then you have a horrible Fry and Leela episode where episode now being engaged, she just decides randomly she doesn’t like him as the episode needs a conflict and then sets up a narrative that she is going to get into a relationship with someone else, again. How many times across the show have they done this, it is not trolling the audience it is just disrespecting the world and the characters at this point, they are a couple you went there stick with it, stop breaking them up for episode drama, It is cheap and lazy. The double whammy of these two episodes back to back almost made me stop watching all together. Then you have a very generic and forgettable adventure with talking numbers, it isn’t good but at least it isn’t as horrible as the two previous episodes. The fifth episode of the season starts out as an episode about the parents being upset that kids today are on their phones, you can feel the age of the writers, but actually ends up turning into a delightful tale about Kiff and his son bonding. Kiff, Amy and Bender are the bright spots of the season. The Sixth Episode is about the rapture and has a very solid premise but the payoff is weak and feels like some of Rian Johnson brand audience expectations subversions. The seventh episode is a commentary on Pizzagate, multiple years after it happened and you could interpret it to be an attack on MAGA, it is boring, cringe and played out. Then you have a Zoidberg episode, which despite messing with cannon and still not bringing back his girlfriend, is sweet and does land in the feels. Then there is the second adventure of Bender where he becomes a truffle farmer which is entertaining, it is Bender being Bender. Finally you have an incredibly dull finale that has an overly convoluted premise.

So out of ten episodes you have two strong episodes in Sacred Screenless and Crab Splatter, Two entertaining episodes with Bender in the Trouble With Truffles and Destroy Tall Monsters, then a few mixed bag or generic episodes with The Numberland Gap, Wicked Human and The White Hole, then three outrightly bad episodes with Murderoni, The World Is Hot Enough and Fifty Shades of Green. As such there are only four entertaining or good episodes in a season of ten episodes, that means you are more than likely to find a bad or generic one, that is a shocking inditement on the show.

The worst thing about this season is how it has moved away from being from science fiction adventures to the writers lecturing the audience about what they saw in the news, or some political event that has already faded from memory. This is what happens when the magic is lost from the writing and you are just writing to fill an episode count.

I would say that if the next season is not better I hope this series ends as I don’t want to see it further tarnished.

Overall, a truly bad season.

2/5

Pros.

The four good episodes

Bender, Amy and Kiff’s character work

Cons.

The lectures

It is dated

It ruins the Fry and Leia engagement.

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The Stupids: Mocking The Mentally Disabled

Summary

A film that shows slop is not a modern concept.

So this film is called the Stupid’s so you expect a level of stupidity, but not the aggressive level that this film presents you with. Maybe something more akin to Naked Gun or Mr Magoo, but no here the writing is as dumb as the characters are. Landis has tried to defend this in later years by saying it was aimed at kids, that might be so but why assume those kids are dumb?

There are scenes wherein it almost feels like this film is mocking the disabled, in many ways how these characters are could be considered medically slow or stupid, especially with how they interact with the world as such the film wanting you to laugh at them feels mean-spirited like when Adam Sandler does his learning disabled impression. Maybe cruel comedy worked better back in the nighties.

Where a film like Elf, also aimed at kids, works where this doesn’t is that whilst you could argue the film presents Ferrell’s character, as learning disabled quite clearly, the film wants you to root for and laugh with Buddy rather than at him. Whereas herein the film wants you to laugh at the central family.

Overall, this is probably best left to the dustbin of history.

0.5/5

Pros.

It is mercifully short

Cons.

It is irritating

It is mean spirited

It wastes a good cast

It assumes kids are dumb

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The Karate Kid: THE Sports Movie

Summary

The Karate Kid is born.

Honestly this film should have been a one off, as you can tell from my other reviews of the franchise the rest of the Daniel run are not good and get steadily worse.

This film works well as not only does it have all the standard beats of a sports movie, but it also has a lot of emotional depth for Mr Miyagi and makes him a rounded character, they could have relied on racist stereotypes and cliches but they didn’t for the most part.

I thought the bullying storyline was very played out even for the time period it came out, but I did like the evolution of the fight your bully and stand up for yourself storyline turning it into this grand sporting event. Doing this allowed the film to feel a little like the later Rocky films but on a smaller scale as its aimed at kids.

Daniel works as a blank slate that you can project yourself onto as a kid, rather than how he gets in the later films.

Overall, a solid teen sports movie with its heart in the right place.

3/5

Pros.

It is a good sports film

It has a good soundtrack

It is fun

Cons.

Some elements are generic

Its predictable

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Moonies Married To The Cult: A Documentary That Teaches You Nothing

Summary

A documentary about the secretive Moonies organization.

This felt like a very surface level documentary, in terms of the fact it covered a lot of things in not much depth. Not only did it assume at the start of the documentary that you already had a working knowledge of who the Moonies are, but it then presented a scatter shot approach to its topic, jumping back and forth between a lot of different points not spending much time with any of them.

It also doesn’t spend much time with more high profile things related to the Moonies such as the death of the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and brushes over a number of these sort of things. It makes one question whether they may have had more material they were forced to drop, or maybe they originally planned it to be a series but then it got turned into a film. It is hard to say but one thing is for sure, it does not give you much of an in-depth look or understanding into the group.

It also has what I like to call Netflix witness/expert syndrome, wherein a documentary has a lot of talking heads who are just regular people, who had experiences with the Moonies, but doesn’t balance that out by including experts to contextualise things. When a documentary leans more heavily on ‘I was there’ testimony rather than having expert opinions it immediately loses credibility and is also far less engaging.

This feels like it was made for the short attention span having youths who want a mass market somewhat true crime documentary.

Overall, weak and fairly boring.

2/5

Pros.

I’ve seen worse, at least it had decent production values

It has some really interesting threads that it just doesn’t explore.

Cons.

It wastes one or two great witnesses

It is far too surface level

It jumps between too many things

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Wake Up Dead Man Knives Out Three: The End Of A Deal

Summary

Rian Johnson gives up.

The first Knives Out film was good, the second was bad, but the third is meh. Whilst it is better than the second film which was out and out trash, it is an effort in passive watching and little more. By that I mean the film feels very low energy and as though it was done just to make another one rather than out of a genuinely good idea, or need.

Josh Brolin commands the film admirably, but everyone else is just turning out for the pay check, even Craig’s fateful inspector feels like a flanderised version of himself from the previous films. Craig’s Blanc feels at times almost cartoonishly impotent or incompetent, and behaves at times in a way that is entirely alien to how we have seen him up until that point. Bad character writing.

The commentary of the film is on religion and how it divides us, but I suppose if done in a more effeminate way, is still good I guess, would arguably be the message of the film. Personally, I am not very religious, but I can imagine how if you were you might find elements of this film highly objectionable.

Overall, this feels like it was done to satisfy the Netflix demand for new content and not out of need, or due to some great new idea.

2.5/5

Pros.

It is watchable

Brolin

It has a few laughs

Cons.

There are too many underdeveloped characters

The preaching

It feels purposeless

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Love Meghan At Christmas: A Fake Christmas At A Fake House

Summary

Meghan Markle is back to save Christmas.

Much like the Grinch here Meghan tries her best to seem affable to get guests to come around to her house and desperately appease her, but if they say something she doesn’t like she will steal their presents. You get this vibe when Prince Harry who you imagine has been kept forcibly locked under the stairs for the past season arrives in the final few minutes and thanks his wife ‘for having him’. I imagine his SS costume that he was going to get for Christmas will have gone missing now as Megrinch teaches him a lesson.

Jokes aside this is more of what Meghan does best hosting various Z list celebrities and having them speak wellness speak, as Meghan pretends that she is listening. All the while she is thinking about her campaign for President on the democratic nomination. The guests she has for the special are a mixture of cringe, quiet and pandering, they all make the same awkward small talk, some with more of a feeling of duress.

Meghan tries to pull out all the stops including wearing Christmas pyjamas and does manage to make it feel Christmassy, despite her being fake, not in her own house and with her kids off and out of sight.

The cringe never ends.

Overall, a funny experience if you watch it ironically and see how weird and out of touch Meghan is.

3/5

Pros.

It is funny not intentionally

It is short

The discomfort is real

Cons.

It is very fake feeling

It is more of the same

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Home Alone Three: Fighting Terrorists With Toys

Summary

We remove, Macaulay Culkin, we replace burglars with terrorists, and we have it so the child is only home alone whilst there mother nips to the office. Is it even still Home Alone?

For me personally I prefer the traps section in this film to either of the earlier efforts as it truly feels like this one went all out and gave us this idea taken to its fullest. Perhaps this is gimmicky but to me it worked.

The child is not as affable as Kevin and the family feel like an imitation but at least the traps are good. It was odd that the mother seemed almost modelled after Catherine O’Hara, but I suppose John Hughes did have a type.

I thought the parrot had a number of good moments and brought some levity to the film, though I must say that even it got to a point wherein I felt was becoming a bit of a crutch for the film ultimately.

Overall, there is still some charm to be had here particularly if you like the traps however, I would say that it is not as good as the other two films as films and feels like a made for streaming movie, though in its time it would more likely be a straight to video film.

2.5/5

Pros.

The traps

The parrot

A few funny moments

Cons.

The plot is worse

The terrorists stuff is ridiculous

It lacks the charm

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Five Nights At Freddy’s Two: Blumhouse Actually Managed To Make A Horror Film

Summary

Blumhouse actually managed to make a horror film.

I thought the first Five Nights At Freddy’s was bad, this one I find almost good, they really managed to turn it around.

They managed to fix the tone issues of the first film and have it be actually scary throughout no building forts to happy music. The horror is very by the numbers, there are one or two effective jump scares, but it is more of what you would expect. The marionette was a cool addition and had the right aesthetic.

The story itself I found interesting, I am glad we weren’t returning too much to the first location, however, there is a number of contrivances throughout the film which set up the ending. So at the end of the first film Mike and Vanessa were basically a couple, yet here they walk that back and have this whole weird arc of Mike being angry at her and saying he can’t trust her, now this happens so she can get possessed at the end of the film and become the baddie for the next one, but makes no sense. The fact the writers need to break the logical throughline of their relationship just so they could set up a cliff hanger ending speaks to how bad the writing team is here.

Overall, the film is a step up from the first film, but the writing is still a fundamental issue.

3/5

Pros

It is more horror focused

It is engaging

It has one good jump scare

Cons.

The ending

The writing

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Diary Of A Wimpy Kid The Last Straw: Forced Conflict From A Writer Out Of Ideas

Summary

Greg and his family are back and this time he has daddy issues for no particular reason.

So I thought I was done with the horrible animated Disney + Diary of a Wimpy Kid films and yet here I am.

This time after embarrassing his dad at church, Greg is going to get sent to a military school unless he gets his act together. Cue a series of schemes to try and appear like he’s doing good at school which all go wrong, who could have seen that coming. This whole conflict is weird for three key reasons, one this conflict between Greg and his dad hasn’t been there before, the fact they have the author of the books writing these films and he just forgot that little detail is shocking, secondly is the fact that it is pretty clear to see Greg is accident prone not bad which makes the dad look unfair, thirdly Rodrick is actually bad and he just lets him get away with it. As such you end the film thinking that the dad is an insecure man child, who wants to punish his son for his own failings, which probably isn’t how the film wanted him to come across.

In the images on Disney+ for the film you see them wearing Christmas hats and it is presented as a Christmas film however, there really isn’t a mention of the season anywhere so it doesn’t really come across as a Christmas film. So if that’s what you are looking for then stay away.

All of my points about Greg being a goody goody from my last review also still stand here, it is quite sickening.

Overall, less cringe than the last one but the story and the conflict feels forced.

2/5

Pros.

It is short

There is one or two good laughs here

Cons.

It is boring

Greg is devoid of personality

The conflict feels forced

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