Because Everybody Else Has One

Posting this late again but hopefully, you already say this over on Channel 24 . Not that you need another review telling you how much fun the latest Spider-Man movie is but hey ho... What it’s about Picking up from the events of Avengers: Endgame, Peter Parker has to come to terms with a world irrevocably changed. After helping to save the world from Thanos and his minions, all Peter wants is to get away from superheroing for a bit by going on a school-sponsored, educational European trip with his friends and to declare his feelings to MJ at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately for Peter, Nick Fury and a mysterious new superhero from another Earth have other plans for our Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man...  What we thought Warning: It’s impossible to talk about Spider-Man: Far From Home without spoiling the end of Avengers: Endgame. If you still somehow haven’t seen the biggest movie on the planet and don’t want to know what happens in it, do not read any f...

I totally forgot to post this last week. Ah well, I'm sure no one really cares that much about the new Men in Black flick, right? Either way, it's been up on Channel 24 since last Friday so hopefully, you saw my review of it there. What it’s about After finding her way into the Men in Black, new recruit Agent M teams up with the roguish Agent H on the seemingly simple assignment of showing an alien VIP a good time before he leaves Earth the next day. When things go horribly wrong, M believes that a mole in the MIB organization betrayed them but can she prove it before a new enemy threatens Earth’s human and alien populations alike. And, worse, can that mole be her new partner, H? What we thought Between the fact that both Men in Black sequels were, at the very least, disappointments after the fresh, funny and inventive original film took the world by storm and helped solidify Will Smith as one of the era’s definitive leading men, and that news of this new sequel/ r...

I'm probably the last person in the world to review this but I can't help but throw in my own two cents on a superhero movie. Especially not one I enjoyed as much as this. Unsurprisingly, this review ran a little long and more than a little late but, as I'm about to post my *shudder* Hellboy (2019) review, spending some time on a film like Shazam feels all the more appropriate... The Plot : Billy Batson is a troubled teenager who has spent his childhood being shunted from one foster home to the next ever since he was separated from his mother at a carnival when he was a toddler. After stopping his latest "foster brother" from being beaten up by a group of school bullies, Billy finds himself before the wizard, Shazam, who bestows on Billy superhuman powers in an effort to stop Thadeus Sivana, a ruthlessly ambitious Evil Scientist who dedicated his life to finding the Wizard and stealing his powers but instead, in his failure, let loose the embodiment of the ...

This is probably the "biggie" of the week. It's a weird one, though. Some reviewers absolutely love it. Some hate it. Me, I'm somewhere in the middle. This review is also up on Channel 24 What it’s about Alexander Elliot is a normal twelve-year-old boy but when he stumbles across a sword in a stone while fleeing a couple of bullies, he finds himself caught in an adventure where the fate of the Earth itself hangs in balance. The sword in the stone is, in fact, the Sword in the Stone – Excalibur – and the threat is no less than the evil half-sister of Arthur himself, Morgana. Excalibur may have deemed Alex worthy but can he, a now-young Merlin and a ragtag group of child-knights come together to battle this ancient threat or will infighting destroy them before they even get the chance? What we thought The legend of King Arthur and Camelot is the sort of tale that isn’t just timeless in the way it has resonated down the centuries but is pliable enough that it...

Considering just how many misogynist garbage-people have come out in protest of this film and its brilliant star, I'm tempted just to give Captain Marvel 10 stars, call it one of the must-see films of the year and leave it at that. But, let's be honest, unlike my reviews on Channel 24, which apparently get pretty good numbers, I don't think I'm going to make too much of a difference on the international box office by appealing just to you, my dear three readers, to be sure to catch this in cinemas. Most importantly, though, it has made a hilariously large sum at the Box Office, both "domestic" and international so that takes care of that. Here instead then, is my slightly more muted review of what just happens to be yet another damn good addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's not the best MCU film but it's far away from the worst. And, again, if it pisses off so many women-hating troglodytes, it must be doing something right!     Just a...

We've already had Hollywood trying its luck with Ghost in the Shell so how does it fare with another iconic manga property? Like Ghost in the Shell, adapting Alita: Battle Angel has been, if nothing else, more interesting than one might expect... This review is also on Channel 24 What It’s About Hundreds of years in the future, much of the world lays in ruins as a nuclear World War between Earth’s sky-cities have decimated humanity. One of the planet’s last remaining sky-cities, Tiphares, hovers above a place known simply as Scrapyard City, so named because it is literally a dumping ground for the trash and waste coming from the affluent city above it. When biomechanical expert, Dr. Ido, finds a cyborg head amongst the heaps of garbage routinely discarded from Tiphares, he attaches the head to a mechanical body that he made for his deceased daughter. The transplant is a success but the cyborg has no idea who she is or where she’s from so Ido adopts her as his own and na...

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...

A whole bunch of reviews this week... if only the films themselves were better. Starting things off with what is easily the stinker of the week... This review is also up on Channel 24 What it’s about Miles is a young, working-class motorbike racer struggling to make his way in a field dominated by those who can afford the most state of the art racing equipment and don’t have to rely, as he does, on shoestring repairs and salvaged second-hand parts. His fortunes take a sudden change when he comes across A.X.L. a robot-dog that was created by the military as a lethal weapon but with which he soon forms a bond. What we thought Based on his own 2015 short, Miles, Oliver Daly’s feature film début as both writer and director feels like a first film and, unfortunately, in all the wrong ways. What we have here is a fairly basic, borderline banal, take on a “boy and his dog” story (yup, the second in two weeks) but with some Short Circuit and Robocop thrown in for, frankly, no good measur...

Okay, I have to be honest, for some reason actual production info was hard to be found for this film so I'm a bit worried about some of the facts I present - I heard from the PR person handling the film that the original cut was 3-hours but I'll be damned if I can find anything to back that up online. Also, I got the location wrong in the original review (which you can read over on  Channel 24 ), so I fixed that at least for this review. None of this actually changes my thoughts on the film at all but, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I'm not 1000% sure I got all the background details right. Anyhoo...  What it’s about The year is, roughly, 20,000 BCE and when the teenage son of the chief of a tribe of pre-historic humans is presumed dead after a hunt goes horribly wrong, he sets off for home with the help of an injured dog that he tends for after injuring. The only catch? This is well before dogs were domesticated and had more in common with feral wolves...

For once Pixar's recent sequel trend doesn't just feel like a cash-grab to sell more toys. Here's hoping Toy Story 4 can continue the trend... The superhero film landscape is now rather different to what it was when the first Incredibles came out - unbelievably, some fourteen years ago. We had a couple of good Spider-man and X-Men films back in 2004 but Batman Begins was still a year away and the juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn't even a pipedream. More than just a fabulous entry into Pixar's ever-expanding canon, the Incredibles was a major step forward for superheroes on the big screen. Not that there weren't great superhero films before it - there had been plenty of damn fine superhero films since Christopher Reeve first brought Superman to vivid, cinematic life way back in 1978 - but more even than Spider-Man 2, which came out earlier that same year, the Incredibles captured comic book superheroics in a way that no film before it h...

Hey, we're getting this a full two weeks before the US! Too bad it's such a dud... As always, I will try my best to avoid spoilers, especially as the trailer actually didn't give very much away, but there is a section in this review that deals lightly with what happens from the beginning of the second act on that you may want to skip until you've seen the film. It is clearly indicated, though, and, fairly vague but proceed with some caution for that paragraph.  Plot: Two years after the Jurassic World theme park was destroyed by dinosaurs, the island on which it resides, Isla Nublar, faces total annihilation as its volcano roars to deadly life. In a last-ditch effort to save the dinosaurs, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) once again joins forces with former dinosaur-trainer and current ex-boyfriend, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), to return to the Island at the behest of the co-creator of the original Jurassic Park and John Hammond's former partner, Benjamin Loc...

Wait, didn't we just have a Star Wars movie? This is going to take some getting used to. No spoilers for anything here beyond the first act, incidentally, but I do get into that first act slightly more than some may prefer. From where I'm standing that whole section may have its own twists and turns but it's still mostly just setup for the meat of the film. Still, proceed with some caution but, for fairness sake, I have provided a slight spoiler warning for the paragraph(s) you may want to skip if you prefer to go in knowing as little as possible. Just six months since the Last Jedi moved the Star Wars franchise in a fairly new and unexpected direction (much to the consternation of many fans - myself very much not included), here we are with a Star Wars movie that, once again, is all about looking back. It's a somewhat odd decision, not only because the prequels were generally not met with the utmost enthusiasm by fans but because it's the complete opposite t...

The culmination of ten years of Marvel films deserves a longer review than usual, don't you think? Please note: I have done my best to avoid anything even vaguely resembling a spoiler, but if you really want to know NOTHING going in, feel free to read this only after seeing the film. This should give away even less than the trailer, though... This review is also currently up on Channel 24 . What it's about A culmination of the past ten years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thanos, the Mad Titan, puts the final plans in motion to collect the final four Infinity Stones: six gems of incredible power formed from the Big Bang that, when uses together, allow those who wield them the power to instantly rewrite the Universe however they wish. All that stands between Thanos and his insane wish to rid the universe of half of its living beings are the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy – but do even the Galaxy's Mightiest Mortals have what it takes to stand up to...

A surprising stinker, this. This review is also up on Channel 24 What it's about When a group of cavemen have their valley home overtaken by the greedy Bronze Age governor of a nearby city, young caveman Dug discovers a way to save their home: a bet with the same governor where a team of cavemen would go head to head with the city's star football team. If they win, they get their home back, if they lose, the entire village will have to work in the bronze mines while living in the deadly badlands. What could go wrong? What we thought However much I admire his craft, I've never really been a fan of the claymation work of Nick Park. Heck, even in terms of the wider work of the company with which he is most closely connected, Aardman, I'm the sort of lunatic who thinks their best movie is their sole excursion into CGI, Flushed Away. It's hard to deny the quality of something like Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, of course, or the a...

Just a quick one, this time. OK, maybe not... I had the pleasure to see Ready Player One again with visiting friends from Cape Town in IMAX 3D this past weekend and the difference between my first and second reactions to the film is really quite profound. Certainly profound enough that this may just be the first re-review in all my years doing this blog. A few of my issues do remain with the film but it's a much better and much more enjoyable experience than I first gave it credit for. It's true, for example, that the (admittedly super impressive) video-game-inspired CGI is something of an alienating factor and it does at time feel like watching someone else play a video game but I do think that Spielberg actually does give even these sequences some weight by having them transposed against the dangers of what's going on in the real world of the film. This is especially well done later on in the film but it's true in all but the introductory sequences - which ar...

Just a slight disclaimer. I'm very tough on the 3D of this film but a fellow film reviewer pointed out that the 3D was out of focus. I didn't notice because I normally find 3D films pretty unbearable but it's entirely possible that the film's 3D prints, in general, aren't quite as bad as I originally thought they were. I still think 2D would be the way to go, preferably IMAX 2D, but -  Nah, forget it. Just see it in 2D. This whole 3D thing has more than worn out its welcome. This review is also up now on Channel 24   What it's about The year is 2045 and as the real world gets progressively worse, most of the world's population spends time in a vast virtual world known as the Oasis. With the death of the Oasis' creator, James Halliday, however, his virtual world becomes more than just a means of escape as he leaves control of the Oasis, along with his personal half-a-trillion dollar fortune, to the first person to solve a series of challenges...

This is going to be a slightly different review as I'm actually going to get a bit into both the massive pre-hype that the film received and, perhaps more crucially, the audience I saw the film with - both of which did (adversely) affect my appreciation of the film. Fortunately, though I still have my issues with it, a bit of time has given me a far better perspective on the film and what it was trying to do. SPOILER WARNING:  Please note that though I will do my best to avoid spoiling any actual plot details, I will be going into the themes of the film quite a bit and because these themes are often tied into the characters and plot of the film, you may well be able to infer just a bit more than you want to know about the film. As such, if you want to know as little as possible about the movie going in, it might be best to read the actual review section of this feature-length essay/ ramble after you have seen it. The Preamble To get this out of the way first, Black Pan...