Because Everybody Else Has One

Keeping with the format I adopted last time, my review of the Birth of a Nation comes from Channel 24 and, exclusive to this blog, are another two films that released on Friday that deserve at least a mention.  (Sorry this is a bit extremely late... holiday laziness...) What it's about The (mostly) true story of Nat Turner, the slave/ preacher who used his influence to incite a bloody uprising against slave owners in the American South. What we thought Despite intentionally “stealing back” its name from the groundbreaking but morally despicable 1915 D.W. Griffiths film, the Birth of a Nation mostly exists in the long shadow of 12 Years a Slave, the multiple-award-winning modern masterpiece that set a new bar for films about slavery. Sadly for it and its now infamous writer/ director/ star, Nate Parker, it doesn't come anywhere close to matching that film's emotional power, its complex intelligence or its quietly brilliant filmmaking. This isn't ...

Is this the film Star Wars fans have been waiting for? Possibly not but that doesn't mean they won't enjoy it anyway... This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about Set shortly before the events of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Rogue One tells the story of how a group of scrappy rebels came into possession of the plans for the Death Star. What we thought Rogue One is a Star Wars movie the like of which we've never seen before on screen but is sure to ring a bell or two with those dire hard fans (like yours truly) who spent the 1990s reading Star Wars media tie-ins like the “Tales of” anthologies or the X-Wing series of novels and comics and, of course, played the X-Wing and Tie Fighter series of PC games. Those novels, comics and games were set firmly in the Star Wars universe but focused on either new or supporting players in the Star Wars saga and often featured a tone quite different from the original trilogy (these were pre-prequels...

Are we done with this series yet? This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about The third film in the Robert Langdon series, Landon wakes up in a hospital in France with no memories of what he's doing there or how he got there. It's not long, however, before he and the doctor treating him find themselves on the run for their lives from the followers of an eccentric billionaire who believes that the only way he can save the world from overpopulation is by wiping out most of humanity. What we thought Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's the Da Vinci Code was rightly criticized for being a laboriously boring and badly lit conspiracy thriller but, by the sheer force of the madness of the conspiracy at the centre of the film, I couldn't help but have a bit of a soft spot for it. I have real trouble believing damn near any conspiracy I've ever heard but I tend to find they make for good fiction; the more far out the better, of course...