MSU

235 Happy Christmas -- Happy Mumblecore Christmas, everybody. Anna Kendrick is Jenny, who turns up at her brother's for Christmas where he lives with his successful writer partner and adorable baby son. And that's kinda it. It's fun watching Anna Kendrick play such a f**k-up, and did I mention the adorable baby, and even though it's pretty funny in places and quite clever in others, 82 minutes is a lot of unfinished improv sentences for my tastes. 6/10 236 Now You See Me -- Part Ocean’s Eleven, part National Treasure, but with magic! It’s flashy hockum with a pretty impressive cast and an excitable score, but it makes no sense whatsoever and the biggest failure comes from its attempt at the illusion that the world gives the remotest f**k about magic. Plus Jesse Eisenberg’s hair knocks off another half star. 4/10 237 Now You See Me 2 -- I actually like this one a bit better than the first because Jessie Eisenberg’s hair is far more sensible. The same nonsense, the same assumption that people think magic is cool, and in losing Shannon from Home & Away from the cast, we gain Janis from Mean Girls. Also, we get Harry Potter who doesn’t do any magic for some reason. Not a bad time, all in all. 5/10 238 Enter the Dragon -- There's so much of this that's objectively poor. The plot makes little sense -- what drug baron *doesn't* invite loads of martial artists to their island? -- the acting isn't great, the dubbing makes everything feel false, and even the fight scenes don't really impress that much thanks to some weird editing choices. And all the squawking by Bruce, and others, amuses and baffles more than anything else. The score, though, is magnificent, and I still love the movie despite its faults and enjoy it every time I watch it. The Warner Bros logo at the start will always remind me of being 10 and at my Uncle Sammy's at New Year and seeing it for the first time on pirated Betamax. 8/10 239 Terrifier -- Torture porn is sooooo 2005, isn't it? It's impressive how a movie as short and notorious as this can be so boring. There's no plot, very little characterization, and once you get beyond being impressed with the practical effects and how oddly amusing Art the Clown can be, there's nothing much left. As an experiment and proof of concept for Damien Leone, it's probably successful, but as a sit down and watch movie, there's just not enough around the gore and the blood, not even much in the way of scares, for it to be enjoyable. 3/10 240 Fist of Fury -- I have fairly fond memories of this one and I can't remember if it's because I saw a different dub or I saw it subtitled, but this version is so badly dubbed it's practically unwatchable during the spells where Bruce Lee isn't squawking and punching lots of Japanese people. The story and its politics are more interesting than Enter the Dragon so it's even more of a shame that the dialogue has to be spoken in such a ludicrous manner. 4/10 241 Game of Death -- I mean, I guess it's impressive that they were able to cobble together a Bruce Lee movie with just 12 minutes of actual Bruce Lee footage after his death, including his actual funeral, but it's also creepy as f**k, desperately cynical, and an obvious cash grab. The original film's concept of ascending a pagoda with increasing levels of difficulty sounds far more interesting than this revenge tale where the only interest comes from how the makers choose to disguise the Bruce Lee stand-ins -- never in the history of cinema has there been so much fighting in sunglasses. The final act, though, with the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar fight, and the real Bruce Lee, is iconic. 4/10 242 Never Let Me Go -- It breaks my heart but I love this movie so much. I don't know that Carey Mulligan or Keira Knightley have been much better than they are here in Alex Garland's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's incredible novel. The science fiction background allows the story to accentuate the themes of helpless destiny and explore the attributes of what it means to be human. The children of Hailsham are alive with thoughts and feelings and desires as much as anyone but they aren't allowed to have a future where those things can be reality, and the childish ways they invent rumors to cope with this certainty do their best to affect your soul. As much as it breaks me, I adore this movie. 10/10 243 Paper Towns -- A fairly inoffensive coming-of-age drama about a boy's obsession with the girl next door, who after they share a night of high adventure goes missing, and the boy follows clues to track her down. Nat Wolff and Cara Delevinge are charismatic enough as Quentin and Margo, though they don't share much in the way of chemistry. The movie pivots about halfway through into a road-trip and despite a couple of decent gags involving gas station t-shirts, my interest kinda wanes at that point. That said, the story, based on John Green's YA novel that I quite enjoyed, saves a secret til the end that keeps the everything fresh and not too creepy, and Quentin learns some important lessons. And if nothing else, the movie and the book got me interested in tracking down some real-life paper towns, so I guess that's something. 5/10 244 Dream Scenario -- I'm trying to think of the last time I wasn't disappointed with a Nic Cage movie. It certainly wasn't this year. That said, I was with this one for longer than I was for the cowboy or vampire cos-play Nic Cage movies. Cage plays Paul Williams, a quiet, dull, tenured professor who inexplicably discovers that he has played a supporting role in the dreams of countless people. Somewhat miffed at his passive role in strangers' subconscious, he decides to embrace his five minutes of fame, do the breakfast show rounds and think about getting around to writing that book he's always been threatening to do, something his peers have already done. And up to this point, I was enjoying it quite a bit in a weird, understated, A24 drama kind of way. Nic Cage really is great in this role and has the minute details down to the ground. Paul is the kind of guy who shakes his head no, while his mouth says yes. He stutters around his words. He says things that only he finds funny. And yet, his wife -- who notably doesn't have dreams of him -- and his kids love him, and he has this undercurrent of disappointment and lack of fulfillment in his life. It seems easy to write the first act and a half of a movie like this just from the concept alone, but it's altogether harder to bring it home, and it's here that I felt the movie shat the bed. The concept, or the way writer and director Kristoffer Borgli handles the concept, just isn't enough. It takes a turn that has a drastic effect on Paul's character, and made the smile on my face feel more like a grimace. More and more, more even than Renfield, it feels like a wasted opportunity. 5/10

Yeah, I noticed that too. Some podcasts have third party ads inserted in them by their network or provider that will be removed, while lots of others just have the hosts reading Manscaped copy in the middle of their show that Amazon Prime can't take out. It still sounded dodgy as f**k, though.

Yep, Academy Ratio was the standard in the 50s.

Exactly! I expect a 4:3 to give it an old movie feel or a sense of claustrophobia, but here it did neither and the side edges just reminded me I was paying full price to see 2/3 of a screen. It is very English and there's class stuff going on that I'm not sure translates all that well. Everyone who saw it with me seemed to love it, though, so there may be word-of-mouth hope for it yet.

232 Scott Pilgrim vs the World -- After watching the new Netflix anime series, which I loved, I had to come back to this one more time and it's still an absolute joy for me, definitely one of my favorite movies of all time, and despite not really featuring anything I can cling on to as reminiscent of my life, it still manages to speak to me on a personal level, and I feel so connected to Scott, which is as confusing as it is comforting. Hello again, friend of a friend. 10/10 233 Saltburn -- Emerald Fennell's follow-up to Promising Young Woman took me in directions I didn't see coming and has made sure that I will never look at a certain Sophie Ellis-Bextor song in the same light ever again. Mousy Oliver Quick is a bit of an outsider having trouble settling in at Oxford University until he falls into the orbit of fellow student and super-wealthy Felix Catton. After the two become close and Oliver explains the difficult relationship he has with his parents back on Merseyside, he is invited to summer at the Catton country residence, the palatial Saltburn estate where he slowly integrates with the family and its hangers-on. For probably half of the movie's two-and-a-bit hours runtime, I was led to believe that this was a year-late entry into 2022's spread of movies about rich people being p***ks in a place (Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, The Menu). However, Fennell has a few tricks up her sleeve to ensure that until the final act, you're never quite sure what you're watching. Barry Keoghan, along with Paul Mescal, is becoming one of those actors who I've come to realize I have no idea how they actually speak. He flits from accent to accent flawlessly and here, he's Scouse, and he brings so much mystery to the role of Oliver in a really confident performance. His eyes search deep into your soul, and it's easy to understand how his seductive character manages to bridge the wealth and entitlement gaps between him and his hosts. Contrasting this, we have Jacob Elordi as Felix, about a million times more engaging here than he was in Priscilla, Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant as his parents, and Archie Madekwe as cousin Farleigh who puts Gran Turismo firmly in his rearview mirror. The acting talent here is absolutely as decadent and plush as the surroundings. Fennell's script and direction are crisp and precise and it's wonderfully subtle how the power dynamic and expectations shift through the movie, and how the punctuation points manage to revolt and entice in equal measure. If I have a couple of complaints, one would be the aspect ratio which feels inexplicably tight at around 4:3, and secondly, there is a moment when Felix gives Oliver a birthday present that felt purely there, against the characters' better judgment, just so the rest of the movie could happen. That said, though, it's a delicious and often hilarious way to spend a couple of hours, I'd be surprised if it doesn't make it to my top 10 movies of the year. It's just a shame that it doesn't seem to be finding its audience in the US judging by the 90% empty screening I attended. 9/10 234 Arrival -- Arrival is one of those rare movies that I saw twice in the cinema, but this is the first time I've seen it since 2016, after which Amy Adams went on to somehow not win Best Actress at the Oscars. I still love this movie, maybe even more since I read Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life, which is definitely worth checking out. I love sci-fi like this, where the story is as much about destiny and free will and parenthood as it is about aliens and it's as much seen through the lens of linguistics as anything else. It's a beautiful, slow-paced movie that builds through jumps in timelines that all come together at a singular point and the emotional toll it took on me was not insignificant. The minor problems I had with the movie seven years ago still ring true. Jeremy Renner's character is a passenger that plays no discernible role until right at the end where he delivers one of the clunkiest, stinkiest lines of dialogue I've ever heard that is surely only there to double-check that the audience is following what's going on. And it's a real shame because Denis Villeneuve's direction is so focused all the way through that I'm surprised he let that line go. Tremendous stuff. 9/10

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off dropped last week. Scott Pilgrim vs The World is one of my favourite movies for a whole host of reasons so I was eager to see this animated version with all the actors from the movie coming back to voice their characters. The first episode is very reminiscent of the movie and if this is what the series was going to be, I'd've been quite happy with that. But it takes a sudden turn, becomes something quite different while remaining true to the original. I absolutely loved it.

230 Halloween: Resurrection -- Halloween begat Halloween II. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers begat Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. Even Halloween 2018 begat Halloween Kills. Seems that every high point in this franchise always delivers something much poorer straight after. I don't think it's ever been so stark as it is here. H20 to Resurrection is a staggering fall from grace. In H20, Michael is famously decapitated and Resurrection spends the opening few scenes dreaming up the most ridiculous pish to explain all that away so another 90 minutes can be added to the total. It then kills off Laurie Strode, apparently at Jamie Lee Curtis's insistence, in the most dreadful manner. From there, things happen, Michael kills people, Busta Rhymes turns up a few times, and then it's done and we never have to speak of it again. 1/10 231 The Holdovers -- Paul Giamatti is what the dictionary and no doubt every review is going to call a curmudgeonly teacher at a fancy New England prep school in 1970. There he tries and fails to get his students interested in his classical history classes while dismissively burning them with clever and witty putdowns they don't understand. Over the Christmas break, he's left looking after Angus, a troubled 17-year-old student who has been abandoned by his mother and stepdad. Along with the school cook, Mary, who has recently lost her son in Vietnam, this motley crew kinda learns to get on with each other over the next two weeks in the empty school. The movie really doesn't offer much in the way of surprises, particularly as teacher and student discover they have much in common, but it's the performances that really set this apart. Giamatti in particular does a fantastic job as a functioning alcoholic at a time when no one really knew what a functioning alcoholic was, who manages to bury his true self. Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary is also excellent although disappointingly her character is demoted to the sidelines just as it was getting interesting. It's the sort of heartfelt movie that becomes a traditional rewatch at Christmas, and for those of a certain age from a certain part of the US, I'm sure it'll keep those member berries satisfied into New Year. 7/10

227 The Persian Version -- There was plenty in this I enjoyed, and some I enjoyed a great deal, but at its heart it's a story about a mother and daughter who don't understand each other but then do, and we've all seen that plenty of times, haven't we? Added to this, there's an immigrant story and that's something I think I'll always find interesting, particularly when that's between countries such as here with Iran and the US. Layla Mohammadi plays Leila, the only girl in a large family of boys, and the movie somewhat deals with her trials as a gay woman in New York while trying to negotiate a difficult relationship with her mother who seems to think that every action Leila takes is with the express purpose to hurt her, such as falling pregnant to a one-night stand. When Leila's dad has to undergo a heart transplant, she's sent out of the way under the supposed guise of looking after her grandmother, but there she discovers some family secrets that pull apart her understanding of her own life and relationships before putting it all back together again in a better order. Writing that out, though, suggests a linear narrative and scenes that kind of gel together but the actual movie is far more distracted than that. We flit from subject to subject, even jumping perspective now and again, and we don't always return to get any closure. The sections that deal with her own childhood, traveling back and forth between the US and Iran with Cyndi Lauper tapes smuggled in her underwear are probably the sweetest. The sections with Leila and English father-to-be Max interacting with her family are probably the funniest. Where the movie fails, though, is in its reluctance to close any of the circles it begins to draw. Leila's ex-wife is barely drawn, her own career as a filmmaker and writer seems to only exist to excuse her writing poignant lines in Final Draft, and it all does a disservice to the stories it *really* wants to tell. That said, it closes strongly in what should've been a pretty obvious manner but still surprised a tear from my eye, and it would be a stonehearted individual who came away not wanting to call their mum. 6/10 228 It's a Wonderful Knife -- Proof, if ever that it was needed, that despite Totally Killer being a great slasher version of Back to the Future, Happy Death Day being a great slasher version of Groundhog Day, and Freaky being a great slasher version of Freaky Friday, not every movie can be turned into a great slasher version of [INSERT MOVIE HERE]. The problems with this really stem from the hoops the story has to jump through to make the It's a Wonderful Life aspects work, and even then, the main thrust just doesn't add up. We should know who George Bailey is in this, we should know who Clarence is. We don't. And I don't think anyone involved in the movie knows either. Title first, movie second. Not helped by a script lacking in charisma and soul, Jane Widdop is a bit of a Dollar General version of the leads in the movies mentioned above. She plays high-schooler Winnie, who stops a serial killer in her seemingly idyllic town of Angel Falls, and in doing so saves her brother's life. One year later and she hasn't moved on and resents the rest of the town and her family who have. She mutters a wish during the northern lights that she had never existed and bo and lehold, that's exactly what happens and in her new reality, her brother died, her parents now hate each other, and the town is a very different place. With the help of the school outcast, Bernie, she has to fight against time to get back to her previous life. To be honest, I didn't expect it to be very good, but as it came from the pen of Michael Kennedy -- who did such a great job with Freaky -- I expected fun. The editing is just dreadful and cuts out the kills as if it's a PG-13 movie which leads to some question marks over continuity and flow, and the movie's most creative kill moments come in the first ten minutes which leads to issues of a lack of suspense and build. By the end, it feels like no one is quite sure what they're doing anymore, there's a bizarre shift in tone and direction, and the whimpering end just confirms the dryness of the ideas well. Joel McHale phones his performance in from a neighboring state, William B Davis is shamefully underused and dispatched early doors, and Justin Long is the only person who genuinely seems to be enjoying himself. It's just a shame that this isn't a slasher version of When Harry Met Sally as it would've made my choice of "I'll have what he's having" closing line make much more sense. 2/10 229 The Killer -- This really could have gone either way and I imagine there being quite polarizing reviews that are going to be based on how compelling people find Michael Fassbender, how forgiving they are of David Fincher, and how they deal with subject matter that for very long stretches is boring. In my review of Tar, I wondered not for the first time if it is ever okay to be purposefully dull, and I think the first chapter of The Killer, set in Paris ahead of an assassin taking out his mark, really tests that hypothesis and I have to say, for me, it worked rather well. The movie centers around Fassbender's assassin character and the ramifications of a botched job but rather than cut out all the preparation work, or the stakeouts, or the contemplation, or the hours where nothing happens, Fincher decides to focus on that and it becomes a meditative day-in-the-life where The Killer narrates his mantra to us, or runs through series of seemingly loosely related statistics. Fassbender's depiction of this character is somehow more detached than the android he played in Prometheus, and I can get how this deliberate one-note performance won't work for everyone, but as someone who enjoyed the first 126 pages of American Psycho, I liked it quite a bit. Fincher relies on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to score this character study but it's less noticeable here as instead we're bombarded with Smiths hits from across the years, making me wonder if this is what a Smiths jukebox musical would look like. An eight out of ten for me, but really anything between three to nine would be difficult to argue against. 8/10

Saw Stevie Nicks at the Little Caesar’s Arena in Detroit last night. At 75, her voice is amazing even if her patter still needs work. This was my first time at the LCA and as a building and, I’m sure, a hockey venue it’s pretty impressive. Less so as a live music venue.

Yeah, that detail didn't escape me.

221 Halloween III: Season of the Witch -- This is a tough one to judge, even tougher than the Friday the 13th movies where they forgot to put Jason in. But it looks like I've ranked this better than Halloween II which I found a really mean-spirited affair made for the wrong reasons. Here, they try to anthologize the franchise which is a brave decision and may have worked if they'd had the strength to follow it up. Because they didn't, this will always feel like an odd outlier that doesn't really belong. It's a peculiar movie, not exactly awful, but pretty stupid and fairly dull until the end. Bonus points for trying something different, for the practical effects, and for that stupid wee tune that has been in my head for almost four decades. 5/10 222 Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers -- The studio seemed to realize that the best Halloween movie is the one that makes the most profit, so bring Michael back into the picture, put his name in the subtitle so no one is in any doubt, throw a few million dollars at it, and wait for the box office to light up. Considering the amount of damage Michael Myers took to his eyes in the first two Halloween films, I always thought it would've been more interesting if he was portrayed as blind here, bumping into potential victims and avoiding being run over in the street, but somehow lasting about an hour and a half before coming to a sticky end down an abandoned mine. I'll always think positively of this entry most because Danielle Harris is excellent as young Jamie Lloyd, in this timeline the niece of the Boogeyman. Her performance and the genuinely shocking twist in the tail make this worthwhile, and having a completely off-the-charts Dr Loomis, now with facial burns so we don't think Halloween II has been ignored completely, doesn't do it any harm either. 7/10 223 Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers -- At this point, I’m not convinced Loomis is or ever was a doctor. Danielle Harris, once more, does a far better job than anyone could’ve expected but this is just a bad movie. Taking the franchise down an overtly supernatural path seems to have been a decision made on a whim. This was not a great decision in 95 minutes of bad decisions. Like the comedy music whenever the bumbling cops appeared. Like Max the Dog barking for what felt like an eon. Like Jamie being mute and telepathic. Like Loomis being unreasonably angry at everything. Like no one in Haddonfield taking a vacation out of town in October. It couldn’t feel more like a Friday the 13th sequel if it tried. 3/10 224 Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers -- It would be amiss not to recognize that the Producer's Cut makes more sense than the original theatrical cut, but it would be considerably more amiss to suggest that this in any real way makes the movie notably better. Freezing Danielle Harris out of the film because she wanted decent pay is a further black mark against it, the Thorn cult idea was always a horrendous direction to take, and really the only positive thing I can be bothered to say is at least it didn't kill Paul Rudd's career, because it probably should have done. 2/10 225 Halloween H20: 20 Years Later -- I have a soft-spot for this sequel for a couple of reasons. It was the first Halloween movie I saw in the cinema -- the Leicester Square Odeon in That London where I was astounded that a movie ticket could cost £20 in 1998 -- and it was also such a drastic improvement from the pish that came before it. It's a post-Scream Halloween that's more authentic thanks to Kevin Williamson's involvement, evidenced in far superior production values, particularly after the opening sequence. This one cost more than the Jamie Lloyd trilogy combined and was the most expensive overall. The supernatural aspects are sensibly binned and the whole thing is just much better fun, with a genuinely tense finale, and seems to treat the legacy with reverence. Helped along with Williamson's input, Friday the 13th Part II director Steve Miner does a decent job moving the camera around a near-empty prep school, which proves to be a splendid location with lots of corners and shadows and a particularly cramped dumb waiter to play with. And despite all the new young faces on show, it's Jamie Lee Curtis's return to the franchise and the focus on Laurie that really makes this a Halloween to enjoy, so much so that we can ignore the Californian setting and the logistics of Michael traveling cross-country, especially when we get a bit of Janet Leigh and hat-tip to Psycho into the bargain, and LL Cool J's erotic fiction recitals to give us a smile when folks aren't being butchered. 7/10 226 Priscilla -- I expected more from the movie than this, either more about Elvis or, heaven forbid, more about Priscilla, but everything that's served up is more or less surface-level only. Boiled down, this is a movie about grooming and a movie about exploitation and a movie about human trafficking, so why then is it so unfathomably boring? We learn so little about Priscilla and Elvis is painted in incidental brushstrokes during episodes of his life where he is either going off to Hollywood, coming back from Hollywood, berating Priscilla's dress sense, berating Priscilla's opinions on music, drugging her, assaulting her, briefly attempting to rape her, until eventually he lets her leave him. Meanwhile, Priscilla is painted for 95% of the movie as non-existent unless she's around him. This seems like a dreadful waste. I found Cailee Spaeny's lead performance flat, unengaging, and oddly exhausted. Jacob Elordi as Elvis is a little better but very two-note with nothing in between and for me, he's a poor substitute for Austin Butler who at least held my attention. Sophia Coppola's direction is insipid and uninspiring with nothing much happening in the perifary to distract from the lack of anything happening in the focus. I get that if anything this is supposed to show the superficial nature of Elvis's fame -- he's shown complaining about the poor scripts or poor songs that land on his desk but never shown actually doing anything about either -- but the movie ends up caught in its own trap of resorting to a really dull, episodic way to tell its unnuanced story. I've read an awful lot of praise for this since I saw it, a bit of Oscar buzz brewing too, so maybe it's just me, but I've never wanted to scream, "WHY IS THIS SO FUCKING BORING?" as much in a cinema for a very long time. 3/10

How it came back to me. (x + 3)(x + 5) means multiplying x + 3 by x + 5 and the way we do that is by multiplying the components together and adding them all up. So (x + 3)(x + 5) can be written as (x * x) + (3 * x) + (5 * x) + (3 * 5), further expressed as x2 + 3x + 5x + 15, and then finally summed to x2 + 8x + 15. All of this is to describe or work out y. So if y = x2 + 8x + 15, when x = 2 then y = 22 + 16 + 15, which equals 35. So the point (2, 35) is on the curve drawn by y = x2 + 8x + 15. And if you take this information back to the original (x +3)(x + 5), if x is 2, then the answer to this becomes 5 * 7 which, as if by magic, is 35.

Yeah, it all came back to me eventually, although the graphing bit was keen to establish the bits where the line broke the x and y axis which meant substituting 0 in for x and y, so y = 15 and x = -3 and -5. It all seemed a bit much. It got worse where you had to do it the other way round and get equation back to the wee brackety jobbies.

It doesn't get better from that. My joy last week was: Simplify and then graph (x + 3)(x + 5).

I still haven't seen Exorcist II all the way through and the only reason I'm going to do anything about remedying that is to see if it's worse than Believer.

217 No One Will Save You -- Kaitlin Dever plays Brynn, a young woman who lives on her own on the outskirts of town and who finds herself on the outskirts of society thanks to a mysterious incident in her past. She spends her days mourning the deaths of her mother and her best friend and constructs a miniature version of her hometown in her front room. She is ignored by the other townsfolk and she avoids their apathy wherever possible until one night, her home is invaded by an extraterrestrial. So a home invasion horror flick then? Well, sort of. Brynn is a resourceful soul and she's determined. She accidentally kills her unwanted visitor and at this point, the scope of the movie broadens into something bigger and wider and what was already interesting becomes compelling. It took me at least five minutes to notice that no one had spoken and then that was all I could notice. And it's a lovely little detail that goes a long way to let us into Brynn's world and it says a lot that director and writer Brian Duffield is able to tell his story so convincingly and a high anxiety Kaitlin Dever is able to convey it with no dialogue or internal monologue. The themes on play are maybe a little obvious and it takes inspiration from some well-known sources, but it ends up being one of those streaming gems that I'd really wished I'd got a chance to see on the big screen. 8/10 218 The Exorcist III -- I hate to keep going on about how shit Exorcist: Believer is, but this really cements it. Here's an Exorcist sequel that has comedic elements, a frankly insane performance from George C Scott, and for long spells has more in common with a police procedural than an exorcism, and yet it's still far superior. I saw this on VHS when it came out in 1990 and just couldn't tune in to the tone. Watching it again, I can see where poor 17-year-old me became confused by it, and I'm not sure some of the effects or performances have aged all that well, but it's impossibly compelling for a whole variety of reasons and didn't need to desecrate the memory of Chris MacNeil to do so. Bonus point for THAT jumpscare, ooft tae f**k. 7/10 219 The Omen -- Along with Halloween, The Omen was the horror movie of my youth where the score was enough to terrify me. It’s still a pretty spooky watch as the son of the devil manages to become adopted by a diplomat and his wife but I couldn’t help think that so much of the movie depends on characters in the know being really bad at explaining stuff. I mean, there’s a time for biblical quotes and a time for just spitting it out, Patrick Troughton. Aspects of the script let it down but don't prevent it creating a really troubling mood. 6/10 220 Rocky -- I don’t think Sylvester Stallone has been better or has written better than here. Before Rocky became a sporting franchise, it was a carefully observed character study, a story about an underclass of characters too jaded to have faith that their opportunity would come. It’s still surprising how little the actual title fight takes up of the runtime and how quickly it’s wrapped up. Talia Shire, Burt Young, Burgess Meredith, and Carl Weathers all contribute perfectly to this lightning in a bottle. A worthy Best Picture. 9/10

Same. I actually quite enjoyed episode 3. The character of David is still puzzling to me a bit, but Freddy is growing on me. Is it weird that he's in Boston and hasn't been to Cheers yet?

209 Saw X -- I wish I could remember which Saw movies I've seen. I've definitely seen the first two, then I've seen at least another one at the movies and maybe one more after that. I enjoyed the first Saw quite a bit and nothing I've seen after that has come close. I've heard good things about this one so I was quite optimistic and out of the sequels I've seen, I think I'd agree that this is the best one. The first twenty minutes to half hour are really quite excellent as John Kramer is slowly conned into parting with his savings to receive some cancer-busting treatment on the down low in Mexico. When he uncovers the scam -- and let's ignore how long it takes him -- he tracks down those responsible and puts them through his notorious games. The initial traps are quite inventive -- while we're ignoring things, can we also ignore where he got the time or effort to construct them, and can we also ignore that the movie doesn't try to de-age Amanda -- but nothing really that got me squirming too much in my seat. The reverse bear-trap still has a visceral effect on me and while these traps sound horrible, there's just something lacking for me. As the movie progresses, so my interest wanes, and the traps become far less interesting, and the amount of variables that have to line up to allow them to happen tests the limits of acceptability. If you haven't seen any Saw movies at all, this might be a brutal and shocking experience, but for me my hand just kept on reaching for the popcorn. Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith are excellent and I'm not speaking from a position of authority but they may just get more screen time here than they do in any other movie in the franchise. I guess, my main issue is I didn't like any of the characters, despite the performances. The movie is full of bad guys so if one of them is forced to dig out his brains with an ice cream scoop, have at it, and the finale felt like they'd totally run out of ideas and the inclination to wait for some better ones to arrive. 6/10 210 Halloween (2018) -- I had a sickie last week so watched the new Halloween trilogy in one day to see if my original opinion of them held up. I thought the first one was decent and by and large, it is. It's still flawed and it's nowhere near as good as the original, but it has some decent ideas that give the illusion of freshness. I love the podcast element in the introduction, the three generations of the Strode women and their attitudes toward one another are great, and the whole thing is paced pretty well, which isn't nothing for a David Gordon Green movie. There's still plenty that doesn't work so well. Who allowed Michael Myers to work out for the forty years he was locked up? How did they ferry him between his cell and the chessboard yard at the mental facility? Why on earth did they decide to transfer him on the 40th anniversary of his rampage? Dr Sartain, the new Loomis, and his motives are bonkers and quite a letdown on reflection. Quite a lot of the dialogue is just awful, maybe topped by the peanut butter on the penis line. But the nods to the original aren't too over the top, Laurie's paranoia is excellent, and for spells, it's quite chilling, particularly the set-piece during the shortcut. Most of all, though, I believed that David Gordon Green and Danny McBride understood what they doing, and had respect for the original, neither of which can be said for Exorcist: Believer. Maybe having John Carpenter on the credits made a difference. 7/10 211 Halloween Kills -- Stupid dies tonight. Actually, not as bad as I remembered it. The mob justice part of it, on paper at least, is pretty interesting although it does lead to unwanted consequences. For a start, it means Jamie Lee Curtis isn’t in it nearly enough. And then it gives us a few hundred Simpsons townsfolk mistaking a five-foot-four fat bald man for Michael Myers. This whole “yes, I can see what you’re trying to do” theme continues with the Big John, Little John stuff, and the oddly confusing denouement with Karen, and the dispatch of the world’s least efficient mob. I still prefer the first one, but this is okay and that’s better than I was expecting. The reboot really should’ve died tonight. 5/10 212 Halloween Ends -- The pre-credit sequence is still an effective rug-pulling exercise but then we’re left with the rest of the movie. The end of Halloween Kills had a knife-wielding Laurie Strode march out of the hospital, promising that she was coming to get Michael for killing her daughter. Yeah, turns out she didn’t do that. Instead, it’s eventually four years later and the Laurie Strode who spent 1978-2018 in a state of constant preparation for the night HE would return, then watched that happen, saw her daughter and son-in-law be killed along with dozens of her fellow townsfolk, who then let Michael slip back into the shadows, has started putting her life back together, is writing a book, and is ready to celebrate Halloween 2022. EXCUSE ME? You can’t tell me this was planned this way, or that the close of this trilogy was designed to have so little of Michael vs Laurie. But that’s what we’ve got. A Halloween movie that barely qualifies as a Halloween movie and instead feels like one of those Friday the 13th sequels where they forgot to put in Jason. It does have some things going for it as it focuses on two characters destroyed by their pasts and who find themselves as outcasts on the fringes of society and it actually does a decent job of depicting their descent once they find each other, but in the end that's more like something to start a new trilogy, not complete one and so this still feels insipid, lackluster, and a waste of everyone’s time. 3/10 213 Quantum of Solace -- After all that, I remembered that I hadn't finished off my 007 watch. This is a bit of a crash from the heights of Casino Royale. There's lots in it I don't mind, such as the beats of the storyline are okay, and the setting in Bolivia worked well, I don't even mind it's about water, and the cast is superb. It's just that the story is told in the most confusing way possible and the attempts by Marc Foster to emulate Paul Greengrass's treatment of Bourne does not make it more accessible. Not as bad as some reviews had me believe but deserved better. 5/10 214 Totally Killer -- The quiet town of Verner suffered from a spate of teen murders in 1987 that remained unsolved. When teenager Jamie's mom is killed in a copycat slaying in 2022, she winds up back at the time of the original killings which she has to solve to save her mother. I was reminded a lot of Happy Death Day watching this, a feeling only cemented as lead girl Kiernan Shipka bears a passing resemblance to Jessica Roth, but where that put the slasher movie into Groundhog Day, this puts it into Back to the Future, and it's a remarkably joyous fit. Fish out-of-water comedies aren't exactly thin on the ground but Shipka's portrayal of Jamie trying to fit in with 1980s Mean Girls, one of whom is her horny mother, is brilliantly done. At times the mystery of the masked killer plays second fiddle to the high school comedy aspects and, as is mandatory, Jamie's relationship with her mother, but Nahnatchka Khan's film balances it all out quite well. The horror aspects are surprisingly brutal for a film like this. In one kill, the victim is stabbed a bunch of times and then rolled onto her side to be stabbed a bunch of times more, which I really didn't expect. But it's the little details, it's the cops talking about their top three worst types of people, the supposed life-saving qualities of a blow job, Jamie's desperate attempts to keep her mom and dad from getting too horny with each other, that really tickled me and will, I suspect, demand a second watch fairly soon. 8/10 215 Killers of the Flower Moon -- Some three-hour movies don't feel like three-hour movies, but I've yet to see a three-and-a-half-hour movie that didn't feel exactly that, in the same way I've never said, "Well, that was a quick Super Bowl." When oil is discovered on Osage Nation land in 1920s Oklahoma, it pumped lots of money into the direction of the Native Americans, albeit which has by law to be overseen by white folks. Thoroughly nasty piece of work, William Hale (de Niro), sees an opportunity for a long-game con by getting his dim nephew, Ernest Buckhart (Di Caprio), to marry into an Osage family, then pay hitmen to dispose of the family and gain control of their rights through inheritence. The acting talent is incredible and the performances of Leonardo Di Caprio and Jessie Plemons as the FBI agent sent to investigate the murders are stand-outs. Scorsese's direction is incredible, and in places, transcendent, but an already indulgent experience is made to feel that little bit more extreme in the closing few scenes. Robbie Robertson's score is also very good but would've been better if it didn't last for 210 minutes. I enjoyed it a lot in the same way as I would have if I'd binge-watched a four-part drama on Apple TV with outstanding production values over an afternoon. I can't really remember the last time Bobby De Niro was as good as this, and he really is great here. But it's more than a little frustrating that people *this* dumb, *this* opportunistic, *this* entitled could get away with so much for so long. I've seen some commentary around the focus of the piece perhaps being better suited to shine more on the Osage Nation, and particularly in Molly, and I have to agree. Lily Gladstone soaks up every scene she's in, and I'd like to have seen her more, and a bit better used as well. It feels like this is Apple's push for Oscar bling in a few month's time, and maybe it'll threaten some of the acting categories, but for my money there are better movies this year, although maybe not many that have such a compelling story that brings this shameful part of America's history to life, something of which Mr Scorsese has some experience. 8/10 216 Buffaloed -- Zoey Deutch, like a younger Anna Kendrick, is probably the best thing in this hit-and-miss comedy set in the world of debt collectors. Her character, Peg, has always been a bit of a grifter, and gets prison time for selling forged Buffalo Bills tickets. Upon release, she discovers she owes $50,000 in assorted fees, uses her gift of the gab to get the debt canceled, gets a gig with the debt collection agency, and then applies her talents to squeeze as much as she can from the poor people who end up on her call list. A scuzzy manager and a lawyer love interest compel her to see the error of her ways and set up her own, ethical, debt collection agency, which her previous employer does not take kindly to. Buffaloed does manage to be amusing in places, again, mostly down to Deutch and her mom, played by Judy Greer, but the jokes are way too far apart, and Peg's love interest with the lawyer who prosecuted her over the tickets thing just isn't believable. It kept me engaged and I was keen to see how it all turned out but the final reveal is probably the worst bit of the movie, like the writers' sympathy for these characters just couldn't hold out for the whole hour and a half. I kinda know how they feel. 5/10

I'm a kid of the 70s so Fender Mediums for me, and whatever works its way into my pocket from Guitar Center.

207 The Exorcist -- This, I think, is my third viewing of The Exorcist, unashamedly triggered by the recent requel that's doing the rounds. First time I saw it was on a well-worn dodgy VHS back when it was still banned in the UK, or at least unavailable for home viewing, and it wasn't the crispest of experiences. I remember being baffled by quite a lot of it, especially the Iraqi intro. It freaked me out a little, and I was maybe 20 at the time, so it didn't leave me with a feeling that I'd seen a masterpiece of cinema or anything like it. It was fine, but little more than that. Second time was at the UCI in Edinburgh for its 25th anniversary. On the big screen, it was a far better visual experience but unfortunately, there was a group of girls in the audience who found the movie hilarious and guffawed all the way through. Again, not ideal conditions, and again I appreciated some of it but left somewhat underwhelmed. Tonight I feel like I watched it for the first time and for the first time, it blew me away. It's such a harrowing, disturbing, and thoughtful movie, a carefully structured movie, and it delivers so much with breathtaking performances. I genuinely got chills during Karras's silent dream sequence, watching his mother at the subway entrance as the demon's face flashes up and Mrs Karras begins her descent. Chilling. I've got goosebumps just thinking about it as I type. And despite all the possession stuff, surely the angiography scene is the most unsettling of all. I'm so glad I watched it again. I've never really described myself as a fan of this movie but it's never really been given a chance to impress me. I'm impressed now. An absolute masterpiece that absolutely is not about a possessed little girl. 10/10 208 The Storms of Jeremy Thomas -- So little on at the cinema this week if you're not interested in Taylor Swift. For the second week running, I ignored Paw Patrol and went to see something else and for the second week running, I regret this decision. When documentarian and narrator Mark Cousins asks Jeremy Thomas if David Bowie was a star, and then indulges in a word association game for what felt like ten minutes, you know, if you weren’t already fully aware, that this is a documentary where the maker is putting in way too much of himself. You would think that after being involved in 60 odd movies as a producer and director that Thomas would have an abundance of cool stories to tell during a needlessly long 5 day 1,000 mile drive to Cannes, but if he does, Cousins doesn’t let him tell them, or ask the right questions to provoke them. Instead, we have vague, abstract conversations about sex and politics and death interspersed with Cousins quoting lines from Thomas’s movies and asking if he thinks the sentiments are true. I have no clearer idea of Jeremy Thomas now than I did before I sat down in my seat, and the meager contributions from Tilda Swinton and Debra Winger did little to illuminate matters. Thomas is important because everyone says so, and he thinks Marlon Brando was a star, and he associates nightmares with terror. I guess that’s something to be going on with. 2/10

I saw that the first two episodes are available and remembering that the first season of Frasier took a while to find its feet, I gave ep 2 a go and it's much better. It was far from hilarious, but there might be something in this after all. ETA -- the bar at the end of ep 2 has a nice little tip of the hat to John Mahoney.

Big Beacon, Alan Partridge's new book following I, Partridge and Nomad is out now. Saving my pennies for the audiobook. Or just waiting for someone to throw it on YouTube. "Not only has Alan Partridge created an entirely new storytelling structure, it's very funny indeed." Jon Ronson 'Partridge... has become the man our time deserves. Aha!' The Times In Big Beacon, Norwich's favourite son and best broadcaster, Alan Partridge, triumphs against the odds. TWICE. Using an innovative 'dual narrative' structure you sometimes see in films, Big Beacon tells the story of how Partridge heroically rebuilt his TV career, rising like a phoenix from the desolate wasteland of local radio to climb to the summit of Mount Primetime and regain the nationwide prominence his talent merits. But then something quite unexpected and moving, because Big Beacon also tells the story of a selfless man, driven to restore an old lighthouse to its former glory, motivated by nothing more than respect for a quietly heroic old building that many take for granted, which some people think is a metaphor for Alan himself even though it's not really for them to say.* Leaving his old life behind and relocating to a small coastal village in Kent, Alan battles through adversity, wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious community, and ultimately shows himself to be a quite wonderful man. * The two strands will run in tandem, their narrative arcs mirroring each other to make the parallels between the two stories abundantly clear to the less able reader.

Well, I gave it a fair crack but the new Frasier is as dreadful as I'd feared. The jokes are awkward, the story a mess, and the new characters poor and obvious stand-ins for old ones as if the new writers, who I assume maybe watched at least a few of the old series, were given a checklist to work through.

I watched it in a couple of days. Coogan's performance is incredible, the scenes of abuse strike a balance of being upsetting without lingering too much on them and the inclusion of his hangers-on, like Ray Teret and Peter Jaconelli, seemed to make it more chilling. Despite that, I think The Long Shadow did a better job of telling a well-known story from a different angle.

203 The Creator -- Gareth Edwards' first movie after Rogue One is visually incredible, all the more so with a supposed budget of $80m, but has a storyline that seems to borrow a bit too much from Avatar and the aforementioned Star Wars prequel thing. Some decades in the future and man's pursuit of advancing AI has ended in the only way it can possibly end: the annihilation of Los Angeles in a nuclear explosion. Following this, the US understandably takes against AI and seeks to rid the world of it, but a country called New Asia remains as last bastion of the technology where human, robot warriors, and sort of halfway-house simulants live in harmony or something. A mission is launched to track down and kill Nirmata, an AI messiah who is rumored to have built a weapon capable of taking down The Death Star, or NOMAD as it's called here; an enormous airborne laser station that's capable of destroying anything in its path. Maybe it is called The Death Star. I forget. John David Washington plays Joshua, a former special forces agent who lost his pregnant wife, discovers that the weapon is a 9-year-old girl. Madeleine Yuna Voyles is amazing as the kid, but the storyline is overblown in terms of the runtime, the depth of the world it creates, and the political and ethnic issues it drags up. I feel like it's trying to say something about the treatment of refugees in the real world, trying to remind us that we're all the same underneath it all, we're all trying to give our kids a future, but it goes about that side of its business in a heavy-handed, exposition-laden, and dismissive way, so the emotional beats designed to coax a tear from my robotic eye feel cheap. 5/10 204 The Bourne Legacy -- I don't really care for Jeremy Renner -- to me, he's always just the boring Avenger that's, I dunno, a good aim or something. So I had issues substituting him in for Matt Damon while keeping the Bourne name in the title. Surprisingly, the first section of this with Oscar Isaac and Renner in the Alaskan wilderness is actually pretty decent stuff, but it becomes a bit dull after that when I suspect it's supposed to get exciting. All the stuff about chems and reds and greens just sounded stupid and I never really felt engaged with the story. I still like the way it messes with its own timeline but this is a low point in the series by a clear margin. 5/10 205 The Exorcist: I'm a Belieber -- This is a brilliant example of a movie, cynically and lazily made, that doesn’t earn anything it’s trying to do. I imagine David Gordon Green and Danny McBride sat down and watched The Exorcist, or read its plot summary on Wikipedia, and hot on the heels of making disappointing Halloween movies, decided to go one better by making an awful Exorcist sequel. The first one opened in Iraq? Let’s open this one in Haiti! The first one has one little girl? Let’s have two! Reprise the utterance of *that* line and throw in a head-spin? Why the hell not! And while we're at it, let's ignore the ambiguity around why Regan got possessed in the first place and this time we'll make it crystal clear. I'm not a huge fan of The Exorcist -- it's fine -- but even I can see some of the elements that Green and McBride have ripped off here without the first clue of why they were important or how they served the story, and it leaves me sad that they somehow convinced Ellen Burstyn to be involved. I didn't expect this to be a definitive take on the Exorcist mythos, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad and dull and empty, and only Pazuzu himself can have the faintest idea of what horror awaits in the proposed sequels. If the makers have any conscience, those sequels will never see the light of day, and the master copy of this will be thrown down a very steep flight of stairs. Without all the baggage of being an Exorcist sequel, this is probably a 3/10 movie but because of what it's trying to emulate, it's a 1/10 every day of the week. 206 On Fire -- A "true" story of a family who are forced to evacuate their home when they're caught up in a Californian brush fire is timely enough and fair play to the folks who made this, they've succeeded in making a movie and getting it a release and that's pretty impressive, and they've done that without looking like they've spent a fortune in doing so. But by any other measure, this is a dreadful experience, poorly acted, woefully scripted, stupid and funny in an unintentional way, and actually has a character screaming, "f**k you, fire!" at the fire. It has a feel of an 80s made-for-TV movie that's based on an outline of an idea that no one could be bothered fleshing out into anything more substantial. The mother in the family is 8-months pregnant, the father-in-law misses his deceased wife, and the son runs cross-country and you can honestly fill in most of the movie's plot points from that information alone. It does, however, feature the dad vampire from Twilight who I have now seen in four movies that have a combined score of 6/40, which is impressively low. 2/10