Because Everybody Else Has One

With just an hour to spare, let's finish off New Year's day 2019 with a look back at the best and worst in cinema in 2018. As has now become traditional, my top 3 films of the year were included as part of a larger list of Channel 24's critics' favourite films of the year. I'll just repost my own picks here but do head over to the full list on Channel 24 to check out some other top picks. I quibble with some of the films included and haven't seen a few of them but there's loads of good to great stuff on there too - some of which you'll see later on here, too. Please note, my picks are based on films released in cinemas in South Africa this year. These aren't in any particular order but the top 5 do rank higher than all the rest. 1) Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri Aside for a few fallow periods between seasons, it was a fairly strong year at the cinema. Even so, nothing released over the past twelve months beats Three Bi...

Big, dumb and fun might not sound like a ringing endorsement but for an installment in the DCEU (aside for the genuinely fantastic Wonder Woman), it's pretty much an A+ rating. I'm still surprised we got an Aquaman film before a Flash or Green Lantern (oh, right...) movie but it's not like much of anything in the DCEU makes much sense anyway (WW aside, once again). Regardless, DC still has some ways to go before catching up with Marvel but this is definitely another step in the right direction.  This review is also up on Channel 24 . What it’s about Based on the DC Comics character of the same name, Aquaman, real name: Arthur Curry, was born to an Atlantean queen-in-waiting and a land-dwelling fisherman, whose elicit relationship leaves Arthur as a renowned superhero but one without a people of his own. When word gets to Arthur that the current king of Atlantis and his own half-brother, Orm, is planning to launch a concentrated attack on the countries of Earth, the...

I'm still in shock. This review is up on Channel 24 as well. What it’s about With the war between Decepticons and Autobots tilting very much in the favour of the former, Optimus Prime sends one of his scrappiest fighters, B-127, to Earth to find refuge for their group of righteous rebels but things don’t quite go as planned when B-127 gets severely damaged and is forced to transform indefinitely into a VW Beetle for self-preservation. The years is 1987 and when B-127 is discovered some months later by an alienated teenage girl named Charlie in a junkyard in her small, coastal hometown, the two form an unlikely friendship. It’s not long, however, before both the US Army and a pair of Decepticon scouts start closing in on Charlie and B-127 – or as Charlie has renamed him, Bumblebee. What we thought I’m writing this review just half an hour after the credits rolled on the preview screening of Bumblebee that I attended and I’m at something of a loss for words. D...

Boy, do I have a lot to say about this one. And for good reason.  Please note, though, that the opening section is some background to the character of Miles Morales and my current and initial reactions to him in his comic book form. The review of the film proper only begins with the second heading but if you're looking for more information about this new Spider-Man, I have hopefully filled in some of the blanks. This isn't available on Channel 24 but it is *spoiler*  included in my top 3 films of the year that will be available there soon. I'll post the link when it's up but, yes, this is that good...   Ultimate Comics Spider-Man: A Look Back When Brian Michael Bendis killed off the Ultimate Universe version of Peter Parker in 2011 to make way for a new, half-black, half-Hispanic Ultimate Spider-Man with artist Sara Pichelli, he received no small amount of often fairly ugly criticism. A lot of the pushback came from those who decried the change as a c...

If the box office so far is any indication, "mortal" is just about right. Whether it deserves to be neglected in quite the way it has been is, perhaps, a different question altogether but you do have to wonder what the idea was of releasing something like this against a half dozen films that are all but guaranteed to bulldoze over it. Did studios really have that much faith in the Peter Jackson name? This review is also on Channel 24 .  What it’s about In a distant future, Earth has been ravaged by man and nature as anything that massive shifts in the tectonic plates hadn’t done to destabilize the old world order, man-made warfare certainly did. The world now consists of small pockets of Easterners who are able to maintain some of the past in hermetically sealed cities where peace and prosperity are matched by glorious natural landscapes and roaming, mobile cities that pillage the land of any resources left, both natural and man-made. When a young woman with a trauma...

Now this one is just a really pleasant surprise. Though, I don't know why it should be: it does star Rose Byrne, after all. This review is also on Channel 24 What it’s about Pete and Ellie are a happily married couple who decide that it’s finally time to take the plunge and have kids. Opting to adopt rather than give birth, the couple ends up fostering three siblings from a broken home: a headstrong teenager, a hyper-sensitive pre-teen and a lively but tantrum-prone pre-schooler. As kids and foster parents learn to come to terms with one another, the children’s birth mother returns to make an already complicated situation even more difficult. What we thought Instant Family’s flaws are pretty much exactly what you might expect them to be based on the premise. It’s a family drama that is predictable, somewhat clichéd and sentimental bordering on mawkish. At nearly two-hours long, it’s also much longer than such a film should be. What is perhaps less expected, though, is j...

Well, this one was a total bitch to review.  This review is also up on Channel 24 . What it’s about When an uncle he never met promises him a new start in Nova Scotia, Canada, Londoner Alec Bailey finds himself in a small town where seemingly everyone in the community believes him to be some sort of magical healer. He first believes this to be the result of a mistake in an ad he placed offering his service as a “healer of machines” but it soon becomes clear that there’s a whole lot more going than he first imagined. What we thought The Healer is a bit of a tricky one to review. For a start, there’s the matter of its marketing, which posits this as a “faith film” (“faith”, of course, meaning Christian, in the way “religion” means Christianity in your average bookstore) but even with religious belief being an important part of the film and even if Christian faith is taken as the default setting for most humans, its “message” is a bit of a jumble. I’m no Christian so mayb...

The first of what I hope will be a bunch of reviews for the rest of the year. Looking back, there were way too many notable films that I didn't talk about that I really would like to. That said, let's start things off with a brand new (to South Africa) release that is just begging to be discussed. For a band with a story as straightforward as Queen, it's sort of astonishing that it took this much time and this much effort to get a proper biopic of the band - though, most especially, the band's enigmatic lead singer - into cinemas. Freddie Mercury was an intriguing guy and extremely talented singer/ frontman but Queen was never exactly the Who in terms of complexity, explosive personalities and self-destructiveness. Queen came along at such a time that their story really is as simple as a solid band finally finding its voice by hiring the pivotal member that would define their sound and set them on the way to stardom, which would result in the usual sex, drugs, an...

A number of fairly big films came out this week and they're all worth checking out, to some degree or another. I actually hope to get to the others - as well as a bunch of other notable releases from the past year that I haven't reviewed as of yet - as I'm largely finished with professional writing for the rest of the year. Reviews for Channel 24, aside, of course. Anyway, speaking of which, onto this week's Channel 24 review: Creed II...   What it’s about With Rocky Balboa in his corner, Adonis Creed has lived up to his father’s good name as the heavyweight champion of the world, while his personal life is no less rosy as he proposes to his longtime girlfriend, Bianca. When the past comes crashing into his life with a challenge to his title by Viktor Drago, the son of the man who killed his father, Ivan Drago, Adonis comes face to face with a chance for revenge but one that may cost him everything he has. What we thought Seen widely as a return to form fo...

I know, I know, a decent Gerard Butler film. Who saw that coming? This review is also on Channel 24 What it’s about After a coup removes the controversial Russian president, Zakarin, from power, a submarine crew, captained by the newly promoted Captain Joe Glass, must infiltrate Russian waters to rescue President Zakarin and the team of Navy Seals tasked with getting Zakarin out of the clutches of his captors. All that lies between their success and failure is a full-on war between the USA and Russia and a nuclear World War III. What we thought Playing out like an old-fashioned Cold-War/ submarine thriller, Hunter Killer may pay lip-service to the current geopolitical climate (or, at least, since it was clearly made a few years ago, what the current geopolitical climate would look like under Hilary Clinton) but with just a tweak or two, it could easily have come out around the same time as Crimson Tide or even the Hunt For Red October. This is both its greatest strength and...