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The Flash (2023)
I loaded up this film with a presentiment that it would be silly. I can’t remember how it was reviewed at the time, but I had a feeling that it wasn’t good. Is it any good? Well, yes and no. The actual plot gets very silly very quickly; that’s something that almost always happens when you do time-jumping stories. The philosophical and physical problems created can’t easily be done away with. What saves the movie is that it very much plays for laughs, and I confess I did laugh in places. The final twist to the film is also well done (in fact there are two twists). In short, I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from watching this film... just don’t expect a masterpiece.
The King
This is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, which I didn’t immediately recognise. It’s very well done. The cast are excellent (featuring a young Timothee Chalamet as Henry), and the plot, as you might expect, is tightly knit and believable. I only had a couple of niggles. One was that the locations seemed too clean, clothes rather unimaginative. Maybe that’s just me being picky. And a couple of jump cuts were a bit abrupt... but that really is just me being picky. It’s a very good film. Well worth a watch.
Copycat
This is a tale of a serial killer copy-catting what other serial killers have done. An expert in serial killers gives a speech early on to students, and near the end of the film everyone suddenly realises that the new spate of killings exactly follows the order in which she listed earlier killers in her speech. It’s not awful. It’s not great. It’s very derivative and it’s not too difficult to guess how it’s all going to play out. I’d give it 5 out of 10.
Coherence
This is a very weird film which gradually gets even weirder. A group of partygoers find themselves trapped in a sort of inter-dimensional vortex in which other groups of identical partygoers are also stuck. The groups seem not to like each other. A book about the inter-dimensional stuff is conveniently to hand and... well, the groups start to get muddled up, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident. It didn’t quite convince, but I watched it to the end. I’m not sure I can really recommend it, though.
Demon City
Ivy was out, which gave me the chance to watch a ‘silly film’. Well, they don’t come much sillier than Demon City, a Japanese film in which a top assassin emerges from a 12-year coma and promptly starts killing anyone remotely connected with putting him in it (and murdering his wife) in the first place. He’s shot, knifed, bludgeoned... you name it... but he keeps on coming and kills, oh, at least 100 extras en route. It’s very silly. I don’t really recommend it.
Sinners
This film was advertised as being a tremendous cross between western and vampire tropes and as I write this there’s talk of it being up for Oscar nominations. Well, I’ve always enjoyed westerns, and I don’t mind a good vampire movie (think Interview with a vampire, or What we do in the shadows), provided it isn’t just a lot of gore for gore’s sake. So Sinners piqued my interest and I watched it while Ivy was away in China.
It’s a good film, although whether it’s Oscar material is another thing altogether. The western theme in the film isn’t quite what I expected. I thought it would be cowboys with revolvers, quick draws and lots of horses out, out on the range. But it wasn’t like that… it was set, I imagine, just after the glory days of the Wild West and just before the gory days of gangsters and machine guns. It was somewhere in between. I guess it worked okay. The vampire theme was well done; no unnecessary gore, and the film kept rigidly within what you might call the vampire guidelines - the main ones being you couldn’t enter a dwelling unless you were invited, and you burst into flames if subjected to sunlight.
The characters were well drawn, and there’s one scene where the main vampire sort of lifts off the ground that will remain with me. Not much of a spoiler, that. We all know what vampires get up to.
So, a good film. I recommend it if you like the two aforementioned tropes and aren’t too bothered watching people attacked by bloodthirsty vampires.
Frankenstein
While Ivy was away I took the opportunity to watch Guillermo del Toro’s version of Frankenstein. I watched it while Ivy was out in case there was too much blood and gore in the film for her, but in fact there’s very little. Mind you, she might still have not liked it.
I did. There were a couple of places where I think you have to willingly suspend your disbelief… even further, that is, than you have to when the plot’s all about a ‘man’ created and resuscitated out of bits of dead people. I won’t tell you what they are. One of them occurs within minutes of the start, which is amazing. I don’t see how anyone could watch the first five minutes or so of this film and not want to watch the rest of it. As all the advertising says, the film concentrates on how the creature feels, how it reacts to people, how it tries to humanise itself. del Toro does this very well, although you have to hoist your disbelief a second time during the process. My lips are sealed.
It’s a good film with a different slant on a story we all know. Well worth watching.
Shogun series 1
I read James Clavell’s Shogun many years ago, probably in the nineties, and it’s been one of my top ten - or possibly one of my top twenty now I’ve read a lot more books - ever since. It’s a wonderful story. Also at some point in the distant past I saw the TV version starring Richard Chamberlain, and that was also very good, not least because of his brilliant performance. I don’t remember that series very well now, but I’m guessing the special effects would look pretty tame by today’s standards.
And now we have the latest series showing on Disney+. I’m behind the times, having just binged to the end of Series 1, but I shall soon be binging Series 2. It’s very well done. Much of the story came back to me as I watched it and one of my favourite scenes, when Buntaro shoots arrows from inside a residence to hit a gate post outside, made my day. ‘Choose which post, Anjin-san,’ he says, and Blackthorne does, and Buntaro (of course) nails it.
All the cast perfectly fit their characters, especially Toranaga, Blackthorne and Mariko. One of my favourites is Yabushige, a real almost Cockney Japanese character. Of course not everyone makes it to the end of the series… but no spoilers here. I have only two minor gripes. One, there was an error in one episode (which doesn’t affect the story at all, but still). That would be a spoiler if I described it here, so I’ll post it on my brand new Plot holes and errors page. The other is that much of the story is shot at night or at least when there’s little light, and I thought it was a bit too dark to see properly, at times. Maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, if you get the chance, I strongly recommend this version of Shogun. No doubt I shall be reporting on Series 2 in due course.
The life of Chuck
I watched this film on Netflix while Ivy was sitting with her back to the television. Naturally I assumed, it being a Stephen King adaptation, that it would be too bloody/scary for her. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a great film. divided into three ‘chapters’ which go backwards in time instead of forward like normal well-behaved chapters. The first one is best. I saw what was happening about half way through, so the story lost some of its mystery… but none of its charm.
It’s a very watchable film and, trust me, there’s nothing in it that your grandmother couldn’t watch. Recommended.
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