I genuinely don’t know how to start this. I hate to use the excuse of “I’m too emotional to come up with something witty or clever to open this review” but… it’s the truth. The Father has really emotionally wrecked me, partially because of the content and partly cos it hit me on a personal level. Just warning you that if you have a family member with dementia that this film is going to hit you like a train and probably ruin the rest of your day… but god it’s so good.
Released: 25th December 2020 Seen: 22nd April 2021
The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi was printed in 1883 in Italy and quickly became a classic. The story of a little wooden puppet with a nose that grows every time he lies has not only been adapted multiple times but has inspired a multitude of other films. Possibly the most famous adaptation was done by Walt Disney in 1940, a film so popular that the song “When You Wish Upon A Star” would basically become the Disney anthem.
It has been said before that there is only a finite number of stories that people draw from, things like the monomyth or Boy Meets Girl are simple little stories that end up applying to thousands of movies and books. One story that keeps being reused and influencing others is A Boy and His Dog, the 1969 story that is the basis for a large amount of apocalyptic fiction. Even just knowing the basic storyline (a boy and his dog walking through a nuclear wasteland, the journey help the boy grow) you’ll see it in places like Mad Max, Fallout and the Oscar-Nominated Love and Monsters.
You know, it’s funny that we’re about a week away from the Academy Awards and yet I’m here bragging about the fact that I also have won an award, one I might not have known about were it not for fellow award winner Film-Authority bragging about theirs. A very real case of they showed me theirs so now I’m showing mine, for I too am on the Screench list of best movie critics.
I even get to put this image on my blog, which I will do here and also somewhere else on this page when I figure out how to do that because WordPress editing is hard (it’s partially why I haven’t changed the header, that and I have no design skills and can’t make a good header)
And another review I wrote for Soda and Telepaths of a TV series, this time of a series that… oh boy, oh boy this one was bad. This one was very bad and I do not reccomend watching it, but I do reccomend reading my review of it cos I wrote smart words.
Released: 11th April Seen: 22nd November (Lift Off Film Festival)
So, I’m not anything close to a sports guy. I don’t get them, I don’t understand them and I have just never enjoyed them. I don’t watch or play them, they do nothing for me. You ask me about Pooh, I’ll start talking about a little yellow bear who is all stuffed with fluff but if you ask a basketball fan about Pooh, they’ll start talking about a man named Derrick Rose who was a rising basketball star that signed on to the Chicago Bulls in 2008 where he was destined for greatness, being the youngest person to win the MVP award and a whole bunch of other sports titles that I do not understand… and then he tore his ACL (Anterior cruciate ligament) and all hell broke loose. Pooh: The Derrick Rose Story charts all of it, from Derrick’s days in Chicago learning to play through to today and it is a shocking tale, to say the least.
Released: 6th June Seen:22nd May (Advance Screening)
Do you know what’s the hardest part of these reviews to write? This opening paragraph that is always placed above a cut so when you look on the main page you get this little paragraph that provides a little bit of context, either context for the series the movie is part of or maybe a personal story so you can understand where I’m coming from when I talk about a certain film. The idea behind this format is that if you were to scroll through and read the opening paragraph, it might catch your eye and make you read it. It provides a jumping off point, like an introduction to an essay and they’re insanely hard to write because it requires me to find a way to hint at my feelings about the film without going into detail. It’s a taste-test that I offer you to get you to read on and when a movie is great they can be a lot of fun to write and when a movie is awful, they’re even more fun to write. But what about when a film is so middle of the road and so pointless that not only do I not have anything interesting to say about its inception, but its lack of purpose makes me spend a two-hour train ride pondering “Just how the hell am I going to talk about this?”. Well, Red Joan is here to test just how much I can get out of one of the most boring films I’ve seen in a while… which is weird to say about a film with Russian spies stealing nuclear secrets but that’s what we have.
When the history of the fight for women’s rights is written, a solid chunk of that book will inevitably revolve around Ruth Bader Ginsburg, current Justice of the Supreme Court and (hopefully) owner of the philosopher’s stone that will grant her immortality so that she may survive for another millennium. She is, unquestionably, one of the key figures in the women’s rights movement and it seemed inevitable that her rise from law student to Supreme Court Justice would be turned into a biopic at some point, and it got one in the form of On The Basis of Sex.
In 1984, Akira Toriyama created the first Dragon Ball comic and started a multimedia franchise that has survived for three decades. Multiple TV series, specials, video games and manga comics have been made. It even got turned into a live-action film that we won’t talk about in any great detail because I can’t bring myself to acknowledge the existence of that film any more than I need to. This series is older than I am… and I am sad to say, I barely watched it. Sure, I watched a few episodes of the Dragon Ball Z series when it aired because it was usually on while I was eating breakfast before going to school and it was a bright colourful distraction but I was never really a huge fan of the show. My only memory of Dragon Ball Z is the theme tune that literally everyone in my generation had hammered violently into our heads because it was obscenely catchy. In fact, I’m not even that big an anime fan. My limit with anime was watching Deathnote about 5 years after the TV series ended, and of High School Of The Dead, which is the stupidest zombie-related thing that I’ve ever seen in my entire life and I’m very much including (Insert topical political reference here). I am, in no way, the target audience for this film SO, this film presents an interesting question that I hope I’m able to address… can a person who doesn’t know anything about the series, or indeed this entire genre, still get something of value out of this film adaptation?
Oh, a major piece of info, I watched the dubbed version of this film. I do not know if a subbed version is showing near me so I cannot tell if that changes anything about it.
One of the most enduring stories of all time is the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It’s the kind of story that has been retold more times than I dare to count and in every form you can imagine. It’s a glorious story about a group of men brought together out of loyalty and friendship who fight to defend their country and the iconic imagery from it is a key element of our culture. The adaptations of this story can focus on anyone in it, from Merlin to Arthur or even one of the knights, it’s a great classic tale and we have another adaptation of it and, to the surprise of almost no one, the story still finds a way to resonate with the audience and capture our imagination.
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