57. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part [7]

Enjoyable follow up. Honestly I love these movies just from looking at the sets and the way they animate. Soundtrack is also quite good.

58. Best Sellers [5]
Michael Caines turn as an alcoholic writer is what is toally carrying this. Otherwise its a 4 but I'm just amazed he put in such a good performance in such a nothing movie (feels like a 90s movie for some reason). Its not an oscar turn but he is great in this mediocre flick.


59. Bumblebee [7]
So much better than the Bay Formers movies, there's heart, plot and proper characters here (albeit its still a hollywood action flick) It doesnt quite grab the charm of the 80s movies it wants to emulate and it feels a touch overlong but this is how you do a transformers movie. Sadly the next film look so to be heading back to the more is more philopshy.

The Hobbit : Battle of the Five Armies (Extended Edition).

Overblown. Of course. But the pre-credits opening is a bravura showing from Jackson. I'm a bit of a Middle Earth fanboy so I quite liked these even though they just felt a bit cheaper than the first trilogy. Legolas' eyes look weird and even though Tauriel is unnecessary she is marvellous to look at.

Overblown as it was, the extended edition shows elves v dwarves which you don't see in the theatrical cut and there's a pile of other gags showing more orcs getting beheaded so there's plenty for fanboys to enjoy. These films are good if over indulgent.

Not sure why I decided to watch this again. But I enjoyed myself and then decided to watch....

The Appendices

When you see the love and craft that went into this lesser trilogy you see that these films aren't lesser things than the original trilogy for the want of trying. LotR was a masterclass in leaving stuff out, but it's clear The Hobbit's problem is they wanted to add all this stuff in and lost the run of themselves. But the craftmanship on show is stunning. Eye opening for those, like me, who bought the extended edition DVD sets with these extra discs and never bothered watching them.

The art of the ‘bonus feature’ seems to be in decline, doesn’t it? Most of what’s available (especially from the streaming services like Apple and Amazon) feel more like trailers with a couple of talking heads thrown in. There’s very little real behind the scenes insight.

Yeah I wish they would put the extras up with the digital releases too. Disney is actually doing a bit of stuff with an hour long doco released with each big Marvel movie and show on plus but they're still a bit puff-piece. Nothing really goes into the little details and stages of filmmaking like the appendices or the features for Frighteners and King Kong.

Robert Rodriguez is good for it too. Always tried to make it look like making a film was achievable.

Nolan likes to pretend his films are pieces of magic that you aren't allowed to know "the trick"

I've never been able to find the extras on Apple. Unless I've just never bought a movie that has it

Ah, that explains it. I only have an iPad as an apple device so I'll have a look there

Thanks pop. Didn't realise that, but tend to use the Movies app when watching movies on the Apple TV, the device, not the service, because Apple are stupid and named their TV service after their TV device.

Hypnotic

Rob Rodriguez and Ben Affleck in film that is beyond stupid and nothing more than a [3] however in my current brain dead mental state I could not stop watching and found it highly entertaining and shit and so it gets a solid [6]

Blackberry

One of the recent trends of corporate making of dramas but this has humour and is genuinely interesting and a real surprise. Glen Howerton is amazing. Loved it. [8]

Air
I enjoyed this. Matt Damon as the scrappy underdog personifying the whole of Nike’s basketball division. It nails the feeling of the place and time, and gives you a fallible hero to root for. Not bad for a movie about a sponsorship contract. Shame they reduced all but two or three characters to caricatures, but it does make the film feel focussed.

Enys Men
A few of you are going to love this, and a lot of you are going to think it's boring shit.  I'm actually not quite sure what I think quite yet - I'm definitely not in the latter camp, but not sure I'm quite in the "love it" gang yet either. (Once it's sat in my subconscious for a while it may find its way there)

It's written, directed and scored by Mark Jenkin who, whatever you think of the film, is clearly a very talented man.

The plot is pretty hard to describe because, well, for most of the film it consists of a woman in a red raincoat doing the same things over and over again for reasons that are only partially explained. There is very little dialogue, and even when people do speak, you're sometimes left with the impression that the words have come from somewhere else. In short?  It's about an observer on an island, and what they see there.

Your enjoyment of the film will partly boil down to how much pleasure you get from repeated images of the sea, the sky, of rocks, and lichen and seagulls. Sometimes - and increasingly - strange things will happen, but I think it's overselling it to describe this as a horror film. Certainly I didn't feel remotely scared watching it.  It kind of fits with the more formal description of folk horror - tales in which we're encouraged not to fear monsters, but perhaps our own incomprehension of the world around us, and the nagging feeling that it knows things we can never hope to grasp.  Though, again, for every person in whom it evokes that response, I suspect there will be another who feels there's nothing there to grasp at all, and dismisses the whole thing as tedious hokum. (A quick look on IMDB suggests the ratio is considerably more in favour of "tedious" unfortunately.)

Even those who hate it will, I suspect, have to acknowledge that it's frequently beautiful.  Those images of nature are fantastic, filmed on "proper" film for reasons that are both thematically relevant as well as visually pleasing. By the end you either will, or won't have a sense of what the hell it's about, which again will likely sway your opinion.  (I have a fairly solid idea, I think, and the more I think on it, the better the film becomes in retrospect.)

So, yeah, please don't watch it expecting a traditional horror movie. It's not that sort of thing at all. But if you fancy something strange, slightly hypnotic, and very much linked into the lore of the land it's worth a view.

24. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Still not entirely settled on this one, probably needs a rewatch but my feeling is that it's a good film but just not a good Guardians film. I really liked the premise of switching focus to another member of the team but man, that was some dark shit. The shift in tone did actually work well, particularly with the aesthetic of other elements (animal experiments, the 'flesh' base) though felt like it clashed with some of the more expected flashy set pieces. It was a good time but I was hoping for more of a fun time. Still, it packed an emotional punch again and is a solid end to this Guardians story. [6]

25. Mass
Talking of an emotional punch... Two sets of parents, one whose son was the perpertrator of a mass shooting in a school and the other whose son was killed in the attack, meet some years after the event in attempts to help them all move on. There's an opening sequence of setting up the room and the parents arriving but after that the bulk of the 2 hour running time is the four of them in the room talking. It's a combination of grief, anger, sorrow and guilt in its rawest forms as an initial attempt at structured dialogue inevitably falls into accusations and defensive posturing.
All four deliver superb performances and the last quarter or so of the film was equally devastating and redemptive, no holding back the tears. A powerful masterclass in tense, intimate filmmaking. [9]

26. From Up on Poppy Hill
On the other end of the scale from their fantastical movies, this is the other type of film Ghibli do so well and this reminded me that I've overlooked some of them. The story is set in the run up to the 1964 Tokyo olympics and centres on a group of mid-to-late teen schoolkids and their attempts to save an old clubhouse from destruction, whilst elements of family life and loss play out in the background. There really isn't much more to it but it's told so well that nothing more is needed. The characters are incredibly well realised and lighter moments are well balanced with more serious elements, all in a beautifully animated world. In the top tier of Ghibli, though that's a crowded field. [8]

Great film. We don't get to see enough of Vincent Cassel these days.

hylian_elf wrote:

One of the first Criterion DVDs I imported. Brilliant film.

It has put itself on my collecting radar, that's for sure.

Ah, I have a 3 month trial of that so I'll give it a go.

I've got a Cassavetes dvd boxset.  I wonder if some of those director collections are worth a few quid.