Month: December 2017

Movie Review: STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI – Hard to like and badly written, this movie is more like episodes 1-3, than 4-7.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews6 Comments

When we saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi on December 28 of this year, that day was notable for three reasons – my brother’s birthday, my wedding anniversary, and 40 years to the day I went to see the first movie in the franchise.  40 years – that’s almost half a century.  Amazing.  This was back in the day when the UK would get a movie literally months after it’s initial US release.  Over the Christmas period, and a little after, it was almost a competition to see how many times you could see it more than your friends.  I don’t recall if I beat anyone, but I went to see that movie 13 times in maybe a three week period, staying in the cinema to watch it two or three times in a row.  That won’t be happening with the latest in the franchise.

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Movie Review: BRIGHT – Netflix’s first “big” original movie is fully loaded … with missed potential

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I’m not a fan of Will Smith, and yeah, it’s partly because of his role as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but mostly because he starred in two cinematic travesties that, inexplicably, have a fan base: I, Robot, and I Am Legend.  In both cases, these movies were adaptations of capital L Legendary works of genre fiction and were spectacularly awful in their execution.  I was never a huge fan of Asimov’s ponderous prose, but Richard Matheson’s seminal vampire novel remains a great favourite of mine.  Fresh Prince and the Zombie Vampires was the worst of the three adaptations – maybe someone will eventually do it right.

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Movie Review: PITCH PERFECT 3 – Almost plotless and peopled with 2D characters, this movie is a waste of their time, and yours.

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Hey, I’m no movie snob.  I love some independent movies, and I favour character-driven stories over soulless plot-driven crap, but I’m not THAT guy at the party who only talks about that Chechnian 30 minute short about life on a pig farm as if it was the greatest piece of cinema in history.  Despite my feeling that both Captain Fantastic and A Ghost Story are going to chart really high on my 2017 Best Of list, I remain a huge fan of populist movies.  Pitch Perfect 3 is not one of them.

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Movie Review: 1922 – Based on a Stephen King novella, this movie has good production values, but is smothered by terrible pacing

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As someone who used to be a huge Stephen King fan, and is currently going through a kind of King renaissance thanks to Audible, I’m finding both why I liked King so much in my teens, and why I didn’t as I grew older: in terms of premise and plot I like King just fine, but when it comes to characters and exposition, his prose gets drowned, submerged as if wearing concrete shoes.  1922, a Netflix-released adaptation of the story in King’s Full Dark, No Stars collection feels pretty similar, but this time it’s the pace at which the story unfolds.

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Movie Review: THE SHAPE OF WATER – Del Toro’s romantic fantasy does nothing to blow the dust off a tired, old story.

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The name Guillermo Del Toro on a movie fills me with dread.  Unfortunately, not in the way I’d like it to.  Everything about the guy I love – his devotion to horror and sci fi, his adoration of HP Lovecraft matches my own, and he has a collection of props I would kill for.  His traveling exhibit At Home With Monsters was pretty amazing – I took some pics when I went to see it earlier this year, and posted them here.   So yeah, I love Del Toro – unfortunately I think most of his movies stink.

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