Because Everybody Else Has One

Godzilla Minus One has been out for weeks in South Africa and even longer elsewhere, but I only just saw it yesterday and I simply had to share a few quick thoughts on it. For context, I've seen a few of the American Godzilla movies, but I've always felt like I should enjoy Godzilla, and Kaiju (giant monster) movies in general, more than I actually do. I have no real connection with these movies and may well have skipped right past Godzilla Minus One as I wasn't asked to review it by my editor at News 24 were it not for the exceptionally good reviews and enthusiastic word-of-mouth. And let me tell you, the glowing reception to the film could not be more deserved: I was blown away by this truly brilliant film. I may not be a major fan of the approximately seven million Godzilla films that have come out since 1954, but even I know that a large part of what made the original Japanese version of the film such a hit was that it was about a giant lizard monster rampaging through ...

However tempted I am to give The Marvels 10/10 just to piss off the women-hating troglodytes who have, for months, been piling hate on the film for committing the unforgiveable sin of being led by not one, not two, but three female superheroes, that would rather be stretching the point. What I would say, though, is that they're wrong, wrong, wrong: not just morally, but because for all its faults, The Marvels, which is directed by Nia DaCosta and written by DaCosta, along with Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik, is really rather good.  And perhaps more importantly, considering that the real world is such a horrifying shit show right now - especially for those of us who have the audacity to be both Jewish and Zionist - it's just such a relief to sit back for 100-odd minutes with something that is this joyful, this funny, and this centred on three women - well two women and a teenage girl - of different races, religions and backgrounds, literally tied together to a single fate, ...

I'm somewhat swamped with paid work right now, but I needed to jot down some of my thoughts about Martin Scorsese's latest juggernaut of a film. And by "jot", I mean I'm mostly just going to expand slightly on the comment that I already made on Mark Kermode's review of the film on YouTube. In very short, I think there's a brilliant two-hour, even two-and-a-half, long movie buried in here, but I found the punishing runtime to be very much to the film's detriment. Especially the middle section, which focuses almost entirely on a succession of murders, which just dragged and dragged. It also had a major problem in that Lily Gladstone's character, Molly, was the only really sympathetic or, to be honest, well-drawn character out of the main cast. Frankly it was only in the final hour that I became at all invested in DiCaprio's Eugene, which is a major problem considering he's clearly the film's main protagonist and POV character. And while D...

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a phenomenon that has been quietly blowing me away since the late 1980s when I discovered the original cartoon at the impressionable young age of seven (or thereabouts) and became a massive fan almost at first glance. Like those famous Marvel and DC superheroes before them, the Turtles have managed to transcend their humble comic book origins to become an entertainment juggernaut that have caught the imagination of now generations of kids and even some adults along the way. All the more so because unlike the massive success of, say, those early Superman or Captain America comics, the Turtles started life as a truly independent, self-published, black-and-white comic book that were written and drawn mostly as a parody of Frank Miller's gritty, neo-noir takes on Daredevil and Batman. And here we are, most of four decades later, with the seventh (?) big screen outing for our heroes in a half shell (following countless TV series, comics, video games and a...

So, You People on Netflix. I have thoughts.  And none of them positive.  (Reprinted in part from my Twitter multi-post). First off, on a simple, artistic level how the hell did they get this many excellent comedic actors in a movie this unspeakably bad? David Duchovny, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Rhea Pearlman, Matt Walsh, Nelson Franklin, and Eddie frickin' Murphy, but not a single laugh between any of them. But not only is it horrifically unfunny, its racial politics are also genuinely grotesque. Now, to be clear, I tend to roll my eyes when films and TV shows are criticized for being "woke" because normally such criticisms come from basement dwellers whinging about women or minorities having the audacity to, you know, be represented on screen, but this film is pretty powerful proof that there is a serious argument to be made against "woke" identity politics from a liberal, (centre-)lefty perspective.  You People is clearly, by today's standards, entirely "p...

The other half of the Barbeheimer phenomenon, Oppenheimer, hasn't been quite as controversial as Barbie, but it has still drawn some controversy. Not controversy about the morality of atomic warfare, of course, but about Florence Pugh's nude scenes. Because that's the world we're living in, I guess. But I begin with a digression. Much like Barbie, there's probably not a ton to be said about Oppenheimer at this point, except to say that it's every bit as good as people are saying. Still, I'm going to take a run at it. What stands out most about Oppenheimer is how much it's both very much a Christopher Nolan film and quite a radical departure for him. Yes, loads of the old Nolan tropes are present and accounted for: multiple timelines, an epic scope, trouble writing female characters, practical effects shot on IMAX cameras, a booming and intentionally over-stuffed soundtrack, and of course, Cillian Murphy, finally taking centre stage.  On the other hand, i...

At this point, is there anything more to be said about either part of Barbenheimer? Probably not, but that hasn't stopped people from continuing to weigh in on both films.  Just yesterday, Bill Maher was trending on I'm-not-calling-it-X-Twitter (yet again) for saying how much he disliked the film for being both preachy and presenting a militant feminist view of the world that doesn't actually exist anymore. Whatever. Bill is just being Bill, as usual. He manages to be both right and completely misses the point at the same time.  Barbie does indeed show a greatly exaggerated view of the world that represents a male-female power dynamic that is at least 10, if not 30 years old. It's also true that Gerwig is not afraid to hit us over the head with its anti-patriarchy messaging.  But what Bill misses - and what dumbasses like Ben Shapiro, who went on to have an embarrassing 45-minute hissy fit about a freakin' Barbie movie, certainly miss - is that a) it's a satire,...

  So, yeah, it's been a while...  I abandoned this blog some four years ago for the simple reason that it just wasn't getting very many hits and it wasn't really worth the time and effort to maintain it.  A couple of significant changes happened recently career-wise, though, that I decided to bring this old blog back from the dead. First, with a new emphasis at News 24 on in-depth reviews and features rather than reviewing every single thing that comes out, there are a number of big movies (and TV shows) that I've seen of late that I haven't covered, and I've been itching to write about them. Just as importantly, I finally have the chance to improve the readership of this blog, as I was recently accredited as an official critic on Rotten Tomatoes (as in, my reviews will now count towards the "Tomatometer score"), so hopefully, by having these reviews side by side with my "official" reviews, they might draw more than the dozen or so readers I ...

Oh, I believe in Yesterday... No, really, you have to be pretty cold-hearted not to go along with this movie, even though it was clearly just made for me. My review has been up over on Channel 24 for, like, a week. So hope you saw it there. What it’s about Jack Malick is a struggling singer/ songwriter whose only fan is his best friend and manager, Ellie. When an unexplained worldwide power-outage has him riding his bicycle into a bus, Jack wakes up with a stunning realization: no one but him remembers the music of the Beatles. Now, passing the entire Beatles songbook (or the parts that he can remember, anyway) off as his own, Jack quickly becomes the biggest pop star on the planet. He seems to have gotten all he ever thought he wanted but is fame and fortune built on the uncredited work of others really how he wanted to get there? And, with the whole world at his feet, what place does that leave for Ellie, the woman who stuck by him through his ups and many, many downs? W...