The warning of spoilers is accurate
She Said sounds like a dodgy AOR chart song by a 'rock' band like Train or Collective Soul, but is actually the story of how Harvey Weinstein's perversions finally were revealed, leading to him spending what is likely to be the rest of his life in prison. It stars Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan as the Woodward and Bernstein of the New York Times uncovering sexual abuse in quantities that would have had Jimmy Savile nodding in approval. Weinstein wasn't just a monster, he was a rich and powerful one.
The thing is, I think I struggled to fully enjoy the film because the events depicted happened so recently and given films like All The President's Men, Zodiac and The Post have all been classics and this isn't. It's not a bad film, Mulligan and Kazan are great, as are Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher and Ashley Judd, playing herself, but the scariest thing about Weinstein seems to be the amount of power he wielded and the complicit people allowing him to buy his way out of a frightening number of lawsuits, of who and which we still know little about. It still doesn't make it a particularly good film. Historically it will be a key moment, in 50 years time were they to still have films and they made a biopic remake about this I'm sure there'd be more car chases, drugs, nudity and murders, but this is just two hardworking reporters chipping away at the veneer.
This is a proper spoiler; they get the bastard in the end and he's still facing new charges almost every month. I don't watch a film produced or connected to the Weinsteins without wondering who the victim was in this one and I expect so much more will come out over the next few years that they could probably make a follow up. Ick.
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Would you watch something called Rehab Addict Lake House Rescue? Is this something genuinely new or some hybrid of three other genres?
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John Wick is a special film because it proves irrevocably that Keanu Reeves can't really act. Therefore every film Keanu Reeves has ever appeared in is special for that reason. John Wick is great fun - if you can excuse the dog slaying - and it does something I've not seen in this kind of film before - the resignation by most of the cast that they're going to die unless they get lucky. The scene when the head of the Russian mafia discovered John was after his son: 'Oh shit.'
How it has spawned two sequels with a third on the way is a little difficult to get my head around, but it's a full-on fun 100 minutes with only Willem Dafoe's choices not really being properly explained. But hey, what film nowadays makes perfect sense and has multiple killing sprees?
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Nothing appears to still be happening in The Last of Us as Joel and Ellie trundle across a surprisingly empty US highway system unmolested by either zomboids or crazy survivors. In fact, up to a point, post-apocalyptic USA looks considerably more appealing than it does at the moment.
Episode four was still on the soporific side of exciting; the fungal-infested zomboids we're obviously having the week off, while the nutters were out in reasonable supply as we're introduced to the vigilantes of Kansas led by Melanie Lynskey who is keeping a very unnerving secret in her cellar.
I still feel that the people reviewing this for the Guardian or raving about it on film sites are people who grew up playing the game. There's a degree of knowledge about their descriptions of what is going on that suggests they've either seen all episodes or they know what these new characters are up to from playing the game. It means I try to avoid the articles and blogs about this series because I find it just clouds an already dark and murky lack of [gamer] knowledge; reading the aforementioned newspaper's summation of ep.04 suggested to me that Andy Welch (the author) knew a lot more about what he was watching than I did.
There's a level of Last of Us Snobbery floating about. Like a sort of nerd pissing contest between the 'we know the game, we know what happens' folk, the 'ooh look something to fill the Walking Dead void' brigade and people just dropping in to see what they might find. I've seen far more 'Oh you're not a gamer' styled comments/insults than I thought - proving I don't understand how important the game market is, obvs - and even Welch's weekly column in the Guardian was referring to characters and groups of people in a way that the casual viewer did not/would not learn from the episode itself. Apparently there are clues or enough material out there in Internetland to fill in any gaps you might have with the series so far, but, I dunno, I kind of expect the TV show I'm watching to cater for everyone not just fans of the game and me not have to go in search of things that aren't in the show to make me understand the show better...
Anyhow, Joel and Ellie avoid running into the 'revolutionaries' with the pulsating cellar floor but get held up by what looks like two kids* with guns and Adam Ant vibes. I'm hoping the thing under the pulsating cellar floor is some kind of mutated monster that heralds the beginning of something a little bit different from a big budget version of The Rick Grimes Show; it's probably not going to be that...
*You see, I thought it was two kids, but it turns out it's an adult and a kid and it's the people Melanie Lynskey was looking for. When I expressed on a forum somewhere that I was struggling to keep up with the story, it was a little like I admitted to something heinous and should be exterminated. I'm just about at the point where I really can't be arsed with it; unlike its die-hard aficionados I'm finding it slow, uninteresting and not even in the same league as early The Walking Dead seasons and apparently that makes me something of a moron.
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Everyone Else Burns is, as I hoped, getting better, but I realised watching episodes three and four that the least funny thing in it is Simon Bird. He plays varying different versions of the same character in whatever sitcom he's starring in whether it's The Inbetweeners or Friday Night Dinner and he carries that same vibe in this.
I was bang on the money about Fiona the wife, who I think is quite brilliant as she slowly begins to understand what makes her neighbour tick - her neighbour being a divorced woman with a wicked desire to educate Fiona. Meanwhile daughter Rachel is slowly turning into a normal 17-year-old and younger son Aaron is developing a number of ... quirks ... that are being treated a little like they'd be treated if this was a comedy made 40 years ago.
I'm of the belief that this doesn't specifically need some cultish church as a background reason for the family's dysfunctional behaviour; I've met some families not too dissimilar to this over the last 60 years and most of them would probably have been excommunicated from whatever denomination they aimed for.
Anyhow, by the time you get to episode five it's set itself up for any interesting final episode as at least half of the family look like they might be rebelling against the conformity laid down on them; or maybe not...
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With two weeks to go before the new MCU film hits the cinemas, it means it will be at least June before I see Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, I'm hoping that Secret Invasion is going to land sooner than later otherwise I won't have anything new to complain about for ages...
Actually, I can always go back in time and have another go at Black Panther: Wank Ada Forever and that might be down to the fact that I've read a fair few reviews about the film now - I was avoiding them - and I'm glad I wasn't the only person who thought it was loose knit jumper of a mess. What is more satisfying are the number of people who have watched it over the last couple of weeks who feel that they might have been wrong to have been so positive about it when it was released.
It's actually a bit of a weird one in you could say it's allegorical to Marvel at the moment. It kicks of with a nostalgic look back to when things were simpler, introduces us to far more than we want or need and then makes a hash of sorting it out - sounds pretty much what the MCU films have been doing since Endgame.
I've also been trying hard to remember what it was about and why the narrative went the way it did, such as how did Lupita Nyong'o - a semi-retired former Wakandan spy - unearth the secret of Atlantis, locate it, work out a way to infiltrate it and then rescue two people, when the CIA were just getting confused. Namor and his submariners had swanned around for nearly 500 years with no one having heard or seen them and no intelligence agency on Earth is aware of him or his minions, but Nakia's performing jailbreaks. Or why Namor is now very much a sociopath and what makes Marvel/Disney think we're going to root for him, especially given how different he is from the classic version.
Essentially, because there wasn't much of a story, this film has been used to further the introduction of plots for next year's Thunderbolts and Captain America movies, while dropping the M word in for good measure. This wasn't a film that you could really watch and enjoy without a knowledge of at least the first film and maybe a couple of others; it's not a standalone like the first Black Panther and that's probably the MCU's biggest single problem now - 90% of its output is now familiar to us, very little is new and what has been new - Eternals or Shang-Chi - hasn't exactly set the world on fire and even 2024's aforementioned Thunderbolts is a collection of existing heroes/anti-heroes. Nothing stands alone as an individual film - everything is linked. There's nothing released where you can say - you don't need to understand Marvel to enjoy this film.
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We went back to Tarantino again and watched The Hateful Eight. Like other Tarantino films we've watched, it was almost a week long and at the end of it I wondered why the hell I'd even bothered. Does he get a paid by the actual film minute? The reason I ask is because his films don't need to be a week long, probably two hours would be ample.
This is another violent western with a lot of racism and slapstick comedy. I think I've seen Samuel L Jackson in more dodgy films now than half decent ones. This wasn't a bad film but it wasn't anything to write home about either; or even write a half decent review. I could still have lived a full and interesting life without having seen it.
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It's been 24 years since we last watched Ben Stiller's Mystery Men - a superhero film pitched somewhere between Batman and Watchmen with added comedy. I recall finding it a bit of fun in 1999, but in 2023 we turned it off after 30 minutes. It was a wee bit too camp; a little too silly and a lot pantomime. While we remembered nothing about the story we remembered the characters and when we were reminded of them - Hank Azaria, William H Macy and Janeane Garofalo amongst them - it didn't help, in fact it helped us decide.
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So we moved onto Chappie, another film that left me a bit confused because I didn't think I was enjoying it at all and then I realised I was. It has a curious Mad Max vibe in the acting and a very Robocop feel in other places and yet as it went on I found myself enjoying it far more than I probably should have.
I think it was because it wasn't what I thought it would be and ended up going places I really didn't expect. I remember a comic story by Tony Isabella and George Perez in Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #2 called War Toy and it was about robots trained to be soldiers and how one of the robots had helped defeat an alien invasion before being kicked out of the army. When the aliens returned he was the only one left to stop them but before he could be brought back into the army he kills himself leaving the planet to be overrun by aliens. Grim stuff.
Chappie isn't like that at all, but the robot does remind me of War Toy - it was like someone had read the comic and thought they could do it differently. The film had turns from Sigourney Weaver, Huge Ackman, Dev Patel and Sharlto Copley and jerked around at times from slightly silly to deeply emotional; the acting was all over the place and yet by the end I was thinking I should have watched it 8 years ago. Maybe I did. If there's one thing I'm starting to realise it's that I might not be paying enough attention to the films I watch.
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The Menu is a strange little film. I wanted it to be about food, but food was just a cover; a ruse; what is what really about was dissatisfaction. Ralph Fiennes plays a world renowned chef who offers taste experiences at his island restaurant at ridiculously high prices and the supporting cast are some of his favourite people - to hate and loathe.
The film is a bit stagey; like it would work equally well as a play. It overplays the entitlement factor a little too much, but maybe that's the whole point. There is an element of the preposterous about the menu in The Menu and while it is an amusing film that reminded me a little of Peter Greenaway, I couldn't shake the feeling it was being a little too clever by half. It will disappoint people who have enjoyed restaurant films in the past.
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Next time: I think the wife is getting fed up with watching films all the time and is hankering for something with brevity. I also noticed Channel 5 has started showing 1923, so I expect it won't be long before she mentions this; however, if Channel 5 is showing it, I don't have to be involved. Oh and Clarkson's Farm season two, there's that as well.
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