The Force Awakens: The Beginning Of The End?

A new trilogy is born.

So recently I went through and watched every single Star Wars film again, and found that by and large the sequels are the worst era. Shocker.

My issue with this film is not that it is bad, but rather that it was a missed opportunity.

Whilst I could make the same point that everyone has made about how the film is far too reliant on nostalgia, I will instead say that the issue with it is that it has three protagonists when it should have two. For my money I think the film should focus on Rey, Daisy Ridley, and Poe, Oscar Issac, and just cut out the entirety of Finn, John Boyega’s, storyline. This is mainly because it does not pay off in any meaningful way in the following films and just ends up feeling like a needless side story. Think about it Rey has the Jedi side down and Poe has the Smuggler/Rebellion side down what does Finn actually bring to the table.

It sets up a lot of interesting threads with Snoke and Captain Phasma but sadly doesn’t really do much with either of them, this was clearly done to get people to speculate in-between films but then just did not pay off. I would have liked more about how the First Order came to be and less of an emo Kylo Ren, Adam Driver, honestly these scenes are hard to watch, seeing Kylo get mad and smash up the place isn’t scary, it isn’t cool it just looks like a teenager being an emo and it is irritating.

I found the characterisation of Rey here to actually be okay, this was before she became godlike overnight, and I found the character easy to root for. However, one thing I have to say that made these films stand out from both of the other trilogies in a bad way is the horrible Marvel humour that is really quite distracting.

Overall, it was a good start but arguably tried to do too much.

3/5

Pros.

It sets up some interesting things

It does manage to deliver some good nostalgia beats

Snoke

Cons.

It does not really set up or give an identity to the First Order

The Marvel humour and the cringe emo scenes

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The Empire Strikes Back: Star Wars In Its Prime

Summary

The Empire is at its zenith and even though Boba Fett does not do much of anything he is easily the coolest person on screen.

So I rewatched the original trilogy for the first time in years and I have to say I have a renewed appreciation for them, perhaps it is the lore deep dives that I have been doing that have brought that about or perhaps it is the sorry comparison to Disney Star Wars.

Anyway, I think that this is easily the best of the original trilogy as it feels the most like a war film. For me personally I am more interested in the war side of things rather than the broader fantasy and mysticism, so I enjoyed the big large scale battle this film brought to bear. I particularly enjoyed the opening sequence on Hoth, I feel like using practical sets rather than copious amounts of CGI really help to give it a visceral edge.

The growing dread of Bespin as you know even if you haven’t seen it before that something is not right is masterfully implemented and executed and I feel the payoff is satisfying. I would have liked it to be have been played a little more earnestly by Harisson Ford, he’s a bit too jokey for my liking in this scene, however, the emotional roar from Chewbacca really is effective.

Overall, a million miles better than anything we are getting from contemporary Star Wars and all the more proof that there should be an animated show focusing on the adventures of Han, Luke and Leia in between the adventures of the original trilogy or immediately after.

4.5/5

Pros.

The stakes

The visceral war feeling

Boba Fett just being cool

The tension on Bespin

The pacing

Cons.

Han is a bit to cavalier about being frozen

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Thunderbolts: The Future Of The MCU

Summary

The New Avengers are formed.

So going into this film I expected it to be bad, I had heard things about the film I did not like beforehand and I thought it would be on the same level as Brave New World.

However, after watching it I found it to be quite a delightful film with a similar feel to the Guardians films. Would I say something so dumb as to say the MCU is back? No because one good film does not fix the countless other problems the franchises is currently facing.

A lot of the reviews mention mental health and how deep this film is, well for me this is mixed. One the one hand the way the film treats Bob/Sentries, Lewis Pullman, mental health with him having a split personality as a superhero was well done, as was the depiction of domestic abuse we see when we see his childhood it was much better done than in Moon Knight for example. However, on the other hand, the film is not all that deep in its commentary on mental health, as Yelena’s, Florence Pugh, journey of needing to atone for what she has done was never fully explored beyond just being a loneliness issue. Moreover, there is a sequence near the end of the film wherein the whole team goes into the Void, the evil form of Sentry’s mind, and we don’t explore the trauma of the other team members. I think it would have been worth the time to have looked into Walker’s, Wyatt Russell, trauma of losing his wife and kids a bit more as it would have helped round the character, but alas it was a missed opportunity.

Outside of mental health talk I think the film does a lot to balance the heroic and the goofy, with each character having both. Red Guardian, David Harbour, is often the comedic relief but the film also gives him a number of great fatherly speeches wherein you can see how much he cares about Yelena and he risks his life constantly to help her. Walker too has a number of heroic moments such as shielding the team from bullets during the Limo escape scene. This is important as the MCU wants you to hate Walker after the events of Falcon and the Winter Soldier but this film does a lot to show him as a hero and to show he is not a villain. If the film was being reductive and simply wanted to show a lot of the male characters as sad pathetic losers for you to laugh at, as some have said, then they would not give them moments like this.

I would argue that Pugh is probably the least served member of the cast as whilst she is the focal point of the film, she is not really centre focus, with that being Bob, Bucky, Sebastian Stan, and the broader ensemble. Whilst I liked the father daughter scenes with Pugh’s character I thought how the film depicted her depression just felt like a cliché and had little depth to it. The scenes in which they talk about her first test are similarly repetitive rather than really pushing anything forward. I wouldn’t say any of this was due to Pugh’s performance rather the material she has been given.

This film shames Brave New World in that it takes its empathy ending and actually does it well. So for those of you who don’t know at the ending of Brave New World Falcon, Anthony Mackie, talks down Red Hulk, Harrison Ford, and defeats him through empathy and by appealing to the side of him that loves his daughter. This was terrible and makes little sense in the film, whereas here it makes sense why they need to go into the Void to get Bob back, they cannot beat Sentry in a fight, they try and get beaten, the only way they can win is to go into Bob’s mind and help him with his trauma, narratively it makes sense and works.

My main criticism of the film would be Val, Julia Louis Dreyfus, who is playing a cartoonish villain. She is being impeached and yet she thinks sending all her mercenaries to fight each other and then destroying bases linked to her doesn’t make her look evil, then you have how she treats her assistant and uses people. For a film about nuance she is not given anyway. Also the Trump or perhaps Tulsi Gabbard comparisons are incredibly on the nose and irritating.

Overall, a good Marvel film that feels like something you would have got pre-Endgame. Whilst not perfect it is a welcome step in the right direction.

4/5

Pros.

The tone

How it deals with Bob and his personalities

The team and the team dynamics

How it sets up things for later in the MCU

Cons.

Walker and Yelena could have done with more depth

Val is a horrible character and really should be written off at the earliest opportunity

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A Simple Favour Two: Blake Lively Runs Damage Control

Summary

The internet’s favourite bogeywoman Blake Lively, Amber Heard has run off into obscurity and Rachel Zegler is a bit played out, makes her film comeback in what might be the most chillingly telling performance of her career.

For those unaware, in the first film, we were introduced to Emily, Lively, a character who fakes her own death and then tries to blame it on someone else, Kendrick, and who has a child admitted to killing her father along with her sister. Therein lies my half joke half speculative theory, how far does life imitate art? Could it not be that Lively was drawn to the character for her own cold and bitter ways, both seek to incriminate someone else for something they did not do in order to punish them.

Moving off Lively for a moment the question with this film becomes why? Why wait well over 5 years to make this sequel and who was demanding for it to continue. Was it the director who has not had much success in recent years, Lively in an attempt to rehabilitate her image that was soured long before her most recent scandal who’s to say.

I think this film knows it doesn’t really have a purpose and so just repeats a lot of the plot beats from the first film just with a few characters swapped around for good measure.

Overall, this was doomed to cost Amazon money.

0.5/5

Pros.

It is hilariously telling

Cons.

It is unnecessary

It is boring

It is a rehash

Lively

It has pacing issues

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Death Of A Unicorn: Hollywood Sticking It To Themselves?

Summary

A rich father, Paul Rudd, and his daughter, Jenna Ortega, kill a unicorn.

So before watching this film I had heard how it was an eat the rich narrative about the evil ways of the haves and how the have nots can get wrapped up in it. This made me groan as we have seen this before, but then I watched the film and groaned louder.

It is an incredibly on the nose message of these cartoonishly evil rich people who want to defile the corpse of a unicorn in order to cure cancer. Of course they want to sell this cure rather than give it away for free, which makes them then even more evil. Can you get the message yet? One has to ask are they evil or is the system that creates them evil, is the fact that America is one of the few countries in the world without free medical care not the real evil here, but no such nuance is thrown in the bin. The rich are bad and responsible for all the world’s ills. This feels like it was written by a naïve student who really doesn’t get how the world works despite daddy’s credit card funding self-indulgent narcissism in the form of instagramable charity work in deprived countries.

What for me makes this film worse is that it is Hollywood telling us the rich are bad, in the place where the director will be making over a million for the film, the actors will comfortably be making over a million for the film and where even the slightest hint of self-awareness is viewed with disgust.

Anyway once the evil rich people are dead, the Unicorns resurrected Rudd’s character the good working class father who can afford to send their child away to school, ah Hollywood really understanding the working class, and who also dresses in designer clothes. Have you got my point yet?

Overall, the sort of film that slowly and insidiously kills Hollywood.

2/5

Pros.

Unicorns are original villains

Some good kills

Cons.

The eat the rich message

The hypocrisy

The ending

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The Woman In The Yard: The Black Woman In Black

Summary

Like the Babadook but with black folks.

So for me if this was a short film and ran to about the forty minute mark I would be giving this a near perfect score. The first act where you meet a supernatural woman in black who is incredibly menacing towards a family in the middle of nowhere, and wherein the threat level is slowly ramped up over time is very good. The second act begins to fall apart as we get more of an idea of who the woman in the yard is, and then the third act which is both nonsensical and reveals the film to be a Babadook clone entirely ruins the whole film.

The woman in the yard,Okwui Okpokwasili, is a compelling monster, and her power set does make for some good scares. However, the filmmakers break the cardinal rule by telling rather than showing and when we learn that she is just a manifestation of the lead’s depression and that a lot of the broader more supernatural things that happen may well be in her head, you just go eh and lose interest. The Babadook which this film clearly wants to be did a similar thing, however, it left the ending ambiguous enough to the effect that you didn’t know if the Babadook was real or not this film spells it out for you.

Overall, a strong first act positions it above average, but then everything else stops it from getting into the good rating tier.

3.5/5

Pros.

The early scares

How they set up the woman in the yard

The lack of jump scares

The setting use

Cons.

When they reveal what the woman is

The ending

The pacing in the end of the second act and start of the third.

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Deadly Intent: The Shadows Of A Father’s Love

Summary

A mother, Rebecca Reaney, and child, Gus Barry, face the threat of an abusive husband and father, Peter Lloyd, from beyond the grave.

So anyone familiar with maternal horror will find that this is quite by the numbers. All of your standard hallmarks are there, overwrought mum, withdrawn kid, and some kind of supernatural threat. However, where this film gets some extra points for me is by having the spirit that is harming them being the father who tried to kill his son in life.

The exploration of domestic abuse and how the trauma can stick around long after the person has died made this film interesting to me and separated it out from being yet another Babadook clone. I also found interesting how this film approached grief showing how the mother is in no way effected by it and is instead overwrought by her fears of losing closeness with her son. This marks a distinct difference from how single mother grief is often depicted in these sorts of films and offered some much need divergence.

Overall, it pretty much is what it says on the tin, or in the summary, what you see is what you get. The reason I am interested in it is because it is different and provides a counter weight to other films in the maternal horror subgenre.

3/5

Pros.

It offers a different perspective on grief

The intimate ghostly connection and comments on domestic abuse

British charm

Cons.

The pacing

It looks very low budget

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The Monkey: Tatiana Maslany Is The Fun Mum You Never Knew You Needed

Summary

Oz Perkins follow up to Long Legs focuses on an evil monkey, who ‘holds the key’ to life and death and he’s ‘gonna get me’ and all of us as he is seemingly a harbinger of the end of the world.

So for me this was a step back from Long Legs and in many ways a tonally strange film, it seemingly didn’t know whether it wants to be a horror film or a comedy film and tries to mix and match different elements that don’t come together well. I would argue that this is probably also a weaker film than The Black Coats Daughter so it is not even second in the Perkins ranking.

The monkey itself was interesting, I liked the mythology around it and would have preferred if they had played into its connection to the Apocalypse, rather than waste time with an needless father-son story that really just felt like it was there to make the film long enough to be feature length.

Overall, it was okay but not some of Perkins better work.

2.5/5

Pros.

The mythology

Maslany

The kills

Cons.

The humour

The pacing

The father and son side plot

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Heart Eyes: Death The Ultimate Cock Block

Summary

A serial killer is killing couples, can you survive?

I enjoyed this film quite a bit, if reminded me in a number of ways of the Scream films and also the Scary Movies, that is not to say that it was a comedy film it was still a slasher but there were comedic elements within that. In many ways it wanted to hit on both fronts in the way something like Thanksgiving also wanted to do, but where that film couldn’t really land its comedy this one does.

I think a hell of a lot of what makes this film work is Olivia Holt, she is such a charming and likeable lead that you cannot help but root for her, you also really believe the love story as well, it feels very warm but also modern and not cliché. When I saw Christopher Landon’s name in the credits I knew why I liked it so much as Ally has a lot of similarities to Tree from Happy Death Day on of my all time favourite slasher films.

Overall, a surprisingly fun slasher film.

3.5/5

Pros.

Holt

The humour

The romance

The kills

Cons.

The reveal is obvious

Pacing issues

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September 5th: Required Viewing For Anyone With A Pro Palestine Flag In The Bio

Summary

A film recounting the experiences of a live TV crew during the Munich Olympics hostage crisis.

So this film hits hard in relation to events currently going on in the world and the feeling by some people towards Jewish but more specifically Israeli people. Released in a contemporary setting this film serves as a reminder for what happens when you allow antisemitism to march unchecked through the streets, a lesson a lot of European governments need to here now more than ever.

However, as far as historical thrillers go there isn’t much to set this film apart from a number of other similar films. That is the issue with doing something based on a true story though you cannot really innovate in any meaningful way. Whilst I found the film engaging I wouldn’t say it was edge of your seat viewing in the way something like Argo was.

The cast were all serviceable but not particularly memorable.

3/5

Pros.

It is timely

It shows genuine heartbreak and strife

It is very engaging

Cons.

It feels too familiar

None of the performances are stand out

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