I'm back!

 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 used to get. It's probably also a good idea to constantly be uploading new reviews to my RT page once I have finally gotten around to uploading, what, 14 years-worth of old reviews?!

These reviews, incidentally, will (hopefully) be much shorter than my News 24 reviews, and they will always take second place to my paid work. I hope to add a new review fairly regularly, but they won't always be as timely as I might want them to be - as you'll see by the first batch of reviews I'll be releasing over the next few days.

And, no, it doesn't take a genius to work out just which films I'll be tackling first. Let's just say that it's been an exciting month or two in the cinemas... 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Godzilla Minus One

Image
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 ...
Read more

You People

Image
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...
Read more

The First Omen

Image
 I haven't posted anything on this blog in a while, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk about what is this year's biggest cinematic surprise so far: a "legacy" horror prequel/ sequel/reboot that is actually really good! After approximately seven hundred thousand Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel, prequels, and reboots and especially after last year's crushingly terrible The Exorcist: Believer, you would be excused for believing that the carcass of '70s horror classics had been well and truly picked clean.  Not that there haven't been decent follow-ups to the big horror hitters of the 1970s. The Exorcist had The Exorcist III, a genuinely pretty great horror film in its own right, even with all its flaws. Alien had Aliens. Halloween had at least a couple of sequels/ remakes that are well regarded. But overall, abominations like The Exorcist II - and The Exorcist: Believer - are more the norm than the exception. Which brings us to The First Omen. ...
Read more