If there is any kind of point to this movie, please let me know.
I couldn’t be arsed by the end, mainly because the film itself wasn’t bothering to do anything other than bore me.
I was bored.
28 Years Later (2025).
Nuremberg (2025). This was so bad I wished to put the cast and crew on trial.
A history lesson in every utterance of dialogue, you can’t go a minute without the filmmakers reverting to the Third Reich elementary textbook, because, as audience members, we’re of course incapable of reading.
So much about this trite, lightweight, run-of-the-mill drudgery infuriated me, but just to illustrate, here’s an example of its level: The nauseating alleged psychiatrist in this train wreck of a motion picture performs a card trick to pick up a lassie on a train. I found this rather amusing and thought the writers were taking the piss. But then he does another magic trick. And then another.
I think I’ve seen this in a dozen motion pictures, and they were all shite. But this one is curiously honking given the gravity of the events depicted.
The hammy ‘acting’, especially by the untalented, non-talented, talentless Rami Malek (Remi Maplin) pratfalling around like a tormented hipster, is a wee bit of an insult considering the subject matter. A snoozy exposition that takes an epoch to get going, the narrative has no choice but to truncate the Göring cross examination, reducing it to a five-minute ‘gotcha moment’.
A stupid movie made by folk who should know better, it’s an utter slog.
And the thoroughly wooden Colin Hanks is in it, the Pinocchio-like thesp quite possibly an even more glib actor than his father.
I’ve seen worse films, but if Tom Hanks is near celluloid, even if he doesn’t feature, you’re going to be in huge trouble.
Avoid this pish like the plague and all that.
Monkey Man (2024).
What a title for a movie and this is what caught my flagging attention when sieving through the shambolic content we have for streaming. The crap littering the landscape is rather outrageous and this needs to stop.
I was dubious Monkey Man (2024) would be any good – but then one, that is I, never approaches a movie with an open mind and I refuse to watch a film if the poster insults me.
A rags-to-relative-riches yarn, our resourceful hero surmounts the shackles of social stratification (accidental alliteration) by using his primary skill: the fact that he’s lethal, a Jason Bourne type … donning a monkey mask. The action is hair-raising stuff; seldom has brutal hand-to-hand scrappage looked so soothing, if you’re into that kind of thing. The movie has a heart, though. Our lad loses the mask – the beatings he takes imbued with elements of latent masochism – and becomes all he can be.
Recommended.
The Conjuring 2 (2016).
Why was this not rubbish? Why is it a decent movie with genuine scares? A script and crew working in tandem, I guess, and I’m not ashamed to announce that I did indeed shit my pants on several occasions.
Well done.
Patriot Games (1992).
Sean Bean is the villain. And he dies. This isn’t even a spoiler as it’s a given, for we are in the ’90s and this Mr. Bean was the go-to bad boy when a thriller needed a bit of Sheffield rough.
He’s actually okay in this, despite his wandering accent.
But Harrison Ford looks bored as hell. Everyone else looks bored. The Irish Peace Process looks bored.
I was also bored.
Boring movie.
Blank Check (1994).
I watched this abomination of a movie because someone (British) said “blank cheque” on the bus, but that’s by the by.
The viewing was a major mistake, for this was definitely one of the worst nostalgia trips I’ve subjected myself to.
Horrible little film.
Miguel Ferrer.
Profound statement:
I have just been informed that the actor Miguel Ferrer was not only George Clooney’s cousin but the son of the impeccably svelte José Ferrer, whom many of you will know as the Turkish Bey from Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
Every day is a school day and all that.
And Miguel was a top presence, a villainous aura fit for any drama, though he was also in a lot of dirge.
The Player (1992).
The master of the slow zoom and the overlapping conversation, frequently several happening at once, Robert Altman’s very amusing, freewheeling thriller is half satire, a director taking the absolute piss and slandering his own environment.
It’s peerless entertainment and one of his most enduring works.
Doubt (2008).
Hoffman keeps this banal, stagy movie together in another supremely layered performance. Streep, however, is rubbish, and this can be added to the voluminous inventory of rubbish that is her CV. She’s not as bad here, though, as she was as Lady Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011), which is a grating, painful experience to watch.
Casting blunders aside, I would summarise Doubt (2008) as a dull portrait of a repressive, gleefully authoritarian institution that everyone is aware of, inhabited by elders who operate as pedantic snores with no hinterland. It gets better after the dire exposition but barely.
A waste of time.
Bye for now.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983).
Just brilliant, absolutely magical scenes, and that score is quite special:
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 