Gremlins 2 is the hardest iâve laughed at a film in some time â a movie written and directed by cocaine.
I think i broke something when the smart gremlin started talking in a New Zealand accent.
Gremlins 2 is the hardest iâve laughed at a film in some time â a movie written and directed by cocaine.
I think i broke something when the smart gremlin started talking in a New Zealand accent.
The internet was lit ablaze last year with the rediscovery of Martin Scorceseâs obscure masterpiece Goncharov, and itâs easy to see why. Accessible yet complex, of its time and yet progressive, it was ripe for a critical reĂŤvaluation.
What people donât often hear about is its sequel â one that Marvelâs biggest fanboy didnât even know existed. The rights having fallen into the lap of the bloated corpse of Cannon Entertainment, they dumped it straight to video in 1989, leaving it to be forgotten.⌠until now!!!
Goncharov 2: The Quest for Gonch (sold in the USSR as The Quest For God) is the biggest piece of shit since the fat one i laid in the McDonaldâs deep fryer last weekend.1 The Gonch himself is no longer played by Robert DeNiro â clearly too good for this shit â but an up and coming Danny DeVito, wearing an unconvincing latex mask which sits somewhere in between Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky and that one I Think You Could Leave skit.
Personally, I think this was one of Devitoâs better roles. Casting Devito to replace Deniro was an odd choice, but thatâs what happens when the Farrelly Brothers direct a mafia film.
Yes, this was the Farrelly Brotherâs first picture. They tried taking a more serious film for their first work, but it falls flat on its face in many places. I found the scene where the Gonch huffs thirteen cans of glue to be quite amusing for all the wrong reasons. Devito put his heartâ
I neither know nor care who you are but please stop defending The Quest for Gonchâ˘. The Goncharov Cinematic Universe does not need this sort of slander, and neither does this blog!
Listen, there is TONS of potential for the Goncharov Cinematic Universe to expand from this film. Itâs not the best film, sure itâs⌠wellâŚ
âŚ..
âŚwell, it is definetly2 a film.
Well if youâre going to get technical, itâs not a film! Itâs a video! Iâd say it was shot on a potato, but thatâs an insult to potatoes â when you compare it to the beautiful composition of Gonch 1â˘âs ending clock shot, this was shot on a yam.
Ok, sure, the picture quality wasnât the best, but Iâd blame that on the filmâs rushed development. It was first approved by Scorceses in the late 1980s as a fallback in case he was killed by a conservative lynch mob during the production of The Last Temptation of Christ as a fallback.
You have no understanding of the complex lore behind /The Quest for Go(nch|d)/
, you
absolute fucking nitwit. You fool. You Fucking Nimrod.
The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, and Concharov II was released in 1989â
Martin Scorcese had no involvement in this. This was that fucker Matteo Bunchofnumbersâ idea. You know how i know that? Because if Martin Scorsese knew about the existence of Goncharov 2: The Quest for Gonch, heâd have not only killed himself, but figured out how to kill himself twice.
Youâre half-right; he had no involvement in the film, but he did approve its creation solely to profit off of any VHS sales. I know this because a friendâs cousinâs nephewâs sister-in-lawâs bossâ sonâs great uncle knew a guy who worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and did an interview with Scorsese not long before the filmâs release.
I guess killing yourself twice just results in you coming back to life. Look â regardless of Marty McFly or whatever his name isâ affiliation with it, can we focus on the end product? I mean, that scene where Kremlinova trips over her high heels in that blue dress, and then when it cuts to the next shot, itâs orange! Orange! Donât you try and fucking pretend itâs some deep symbolism that predicted the rise of every movie poster in the 2000s, itâs just the director having a fucking washing sponge6 for a brain!
Actually, I thought it was one of the more insightful scenes of the film. The dress colors symbolize
the slow and gradual fall of Russian society from great pride in an idealistic world to the growing
realization that said utopian dreams will never fruition, and the subsequent moral collapse
127.192.34.2
7 therein.
They couldâve used a better dress for the scene, though.
73 West Boulevard, Ocala, Florida
8
So then Goncharov gets aids. You know â given how tenderly G1 / Gonch Wick Chapter 1 handled its gay love scenes, thereâs a real opportunity there! But since this is being directed by Thomas Ouiseau (no relation? I think?), he âcatches aids from a government cactusâ, starts coughing up blood, and immediately says âi have the aidsâ and dies. Yes! Iâm writing over you! Fuck you!
My least favorite part of the film would be the scene where Goncharov punches an Albanian consort woman. It was not necessary to the plot at all, and just felt like a dated excuse to throw in a bar fight scene. Oh my god, are you seriously writing over me? Wha- how is this even possible?
Fine, you know what, here.
Youâve heard of Marsyas and Applo before, right?
Youâre in Comic Sans now.
hhhNOOOOO
You know what, hang on, this is my blog. I donât have to put up with this crap. I can just tell you to leave. Or whatever.
That feels rude, actually, now i think of it.
I was never invited, so telling me to leave simply doesnât work in the first place. Algorian logic. Pretty deep stuff interdimensional. Donât think a normie like you would understand.
Look, can we just agree on a rating out of 10 and then go? The people need to know if G2ÂŽ is worth the purchase!
âŚ
0.85/10.
I think youâre being too nice with that 0.85. I mean, what is this? IGN?
Thrembo/10. Too many overly long sex scenes.
Thatâs not even a real number. Not since the incident.
Anyway â i give Goncharov 2: The Quest for God (God never shows up, incidentally, unless you count the Kandinsky painting in the beach scene) an (eiĎ+1)/10.
I revise my earlier rating. Rational numbers are better for ratings.
I give the film a -bÂąâ(b²-4ac) 2a/10. Has the potential for greatly expanding the Goncharov universe, but its attempts at being both a psychological thriller and a slapstick humor film wrapped into a mafia film are simply too confusing for most viewers.
Thankfully, the first Goncharov11 film on VHS was also the last. And itâs stayed that way ever since. (We donât talk about the Blockbuster trilogy.12) Good night.
Title of movie: Vanilla Sky
Year of release: 2001
Starring: Tom Cruise
Director: âCameron Croweâ (possibly Tom Cruise in a latex mask)
Plot: Rich prick gets in a car accident, has some nasty dreams, and then Mr Exposition shows up in the great glass elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the last 10 minutes to explain everything
Directorâs taste in music: Same as mine; you can tell because this film has like fifteen pointless needle dropsa
Does it contain a Tom Cruise Triathlon�b No, although he does do a Tom Cruise Run⢠at least once
Does it at least have good ideas? It has the germs of things that might be called ideas, but none that havenât been done better before
Overall review:
When i was eleven, my dad told me to come downstairs. (I was on holiday at the time, you see, on my semiannual Divorce Custody TripÂŽ back to the fatherland, where i could gorge myself on as many sweets and spit out as many cuss words as i wanted.) He had something to show me on his home cinema setup.
Normally it would be some documentary about watchmaking or nuclear waste storage or any number of things that took his fleeting fancy. Neither of us were much for fiction, and my young self especially wasnât much of a cinephile. I donât think my taste in movies had updated much since i watched Finding Nemo on a loop at age three.
Two and a half hours later, there i was, on his lily-white fake-leather sofa, my jaw agape, needing a lie down to take it all in. That was the day i met my first favourite film: Interstellar.
Christopher Nolan has a reputation for mind-bending bombast, but his directing is actually quite plain when you get down to it. His palette of colours would be more at home in a hardware store than an art department.a He has little time for the fancy camera trickery so beloved by his fellow mass-market auteurs like Spielberg and Zemeckis. He shoots his pictures as they are, not as a painter might like them to be.
It works to his detriment as often as in his favour. The Dark Knight trilogyâs dedication to surgically removing every ounce of colour and whimsy from its inherently campy source sucks it dry of life and fun. (Whenever Heath Ledger isnât on screen, all the other characters should be asking, âwhereâs the Joker?â) But in the intervening years, it seems that Mr Nolan figured out how to use his un-style to his advantage.
On Earth, he shoots everything like, well, a Christopher Nolan film â a look that perfectly suits such a drab, dying world of omnipresent dust storms and weltering crops. When the plot shoots past the stratosphere and into the stars, he anchors his fantastic alien worlds and black holes of tantalising beauty against that same pedestrian style; devoid of his peersâ tricks and flourishes, you get the sense that if his gargantuan star-eaters and tome-tiled tesseracts were real, this is exactly what they would look like.
Much has been made of Interstellarâs Achillesâ heel: lurve. I'd like to offer a lukewarm defence. Many take Anne Hathawayâs speech about love as a force âtranscending dimensions of time and spaceâ as exposition, seeing her character, Amelia Brand, as a simple mouthpiece for the Messrs Nolanâs hamfisted platitudes. I would call this a severely mistaken interpretation.
Dr Brandâs lines come at the lowest point in her life. She has spent years â decades, from Earthâs view â floating alone in space; now, the crew have to decide how to use their one remaining shot to save all mankind. She isnât making any profound statements or logical arguments. She is desperately trying to explain to the two men beside her why she thinks, right or wrong, that they should take the risk and visit her former loverâs last known location rather than the closer world the other two prefer. Itâs clunky and melodramatic, but thatâs the point: sheâs grasping at straws, willing to do anything to see her love again. Her speech gives balance against her comradesâ assumption that cold, hard logic is all that matters, throwing gut feeling and emotion out the airlock.
When Cooper falls into that black hole and finds himself wall to wall with a myriad versions of his daughter, it isnât some literal fundamental force of âloveâ that brings him there. It is his acceptance of Dr Brandâs romanticism over Mannâs enlightenment. Cold calculations have brought him nought but ruin, forcing him to watch his daughter grow up in front of his eyes and nearly killing both him and the whole human race; so, he lays down his mask, dives into what science tells him is certain doom, and lets the man who wept at those 20 years of messages take control.
Iâm not sure that it all comes together in the end. Matthew McConaughey is a fine performer, but the role of Cooper deserves someone who can give it the gravitas (heh) and sensitivity his trauma deserves â not just screaming âMurph!!!â over and over. Mr Nolanâs script is utilitarian as ever; misunderstood as it may be, Dr Brandâs tangent fits into the rest of the film about as well as a cat fits into a baseball glove.
That slack-jawed night on the sofa would begin a new tradition. Every time i shuttle back and forth between England and Holland, i queue up Hans Zimmerâs score on my earbuds, and try to time it juuuuust right, such that the second the jet takes off, âMountainsâ comes to its peak or âNo Time for Cautionââs organs begin to blare. Thereâs a lot of flicks i like better these days â Interstellar would probably barely scrape the top ten â but thereâll always be a warm place in my heart for my first love.
Welcome, one and all, to the 2798th annual Horny Awards! Every year since humans figured out how to count them, the Satyrsâ Forest has presented hand-made, custom trophies to the best works of the year that was. Itâs an astoundingly long-lasting tradition, and definitely not something i made up just now.
2022 was one of the years ever. Things, iâm told, occurred. People were born; people were taxed; people died. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released several albums. It will go down in the history books as âthe year between 2021 and 2023â. On with our show.
Our first category marks all the wonderful movies that were made in this past year â which is quite a lot, so my apologies to all those films who i either didnât mention or didnât have time to see!
There can only be one winner, but iâll start off with a lightning round of honourable mentions. Baz Luhrmannâs Elvis was like being locked inside a room with an insane person for two and a half hours, and i loved every ridiculous, extravagant, kinetic minute of it. Tom Georgeâs See How They Run and Rian Johnsonâs Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery were brilliant and funny throwback mysteries which really needed more time and appreciation in the cinema. And i dearly hope David Letichâs Bullet Train becomes the new Fast and Furious â 2Bullet2Train! Bullet Train 3: This Time itâs a Plane! Bullet ISS! The possibilities are endless.
An especially honourable mention goes to Luca Guadagninoâs Bones and All, a tender horror romance which almost made it to the main list before i realised that i hadnât actually all that much to say on it. Itâs a metaphor for something, i tell ya hwatâŚ
It could have done with less of the hot-dog fingers, but anyone who would leave our first âofficialâ runner-up off of their year-end list is a heartless bastard. On paper, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a recipe for everything everywhere to go totally wrong: a riff on The Matrix with a tenth of the budget, directors whose last work was a movie where Daniel Radcliffe farts a lot, and a sense of humour firmly dated to Reddit circa 2012. Yet it pulls it off.
This is a movie where people beat each other up with dildos, where a hallway of people literally explodes into colour and light, and where the equivalent of the Death Star is an everything bagel. It is also one of the only movies to have made me bawl like a baby in the cinema. Everything Everywhere is an anti-cynical, anti-nihilistic manifesto for our time. Yes, nothing matters! and yes, you might not write the next great American novel or paint a masterpiece! but the world has so much joy and beauty, so many minuscule details that you pass by every day, so for goodnessâ sake, even if youâre just doing laundry and taxes, take your time to enjoy the little things in life.
I need to go hug my mum.
Blockbusters arenât what they used to be, are they? Ever since Endgame, Marvel have been running on autopilot, releasing a steady stream of snarky CGI sludge made more out of obligation than passion. They donât even work as escapism anymore â the fantastical isnât fantastic when every billion-dollar release is set in a world of superheroes and sci-fi.
Like Everything Everywhere, our other runner-up is a prime example of a movie that just shouldnât work. Itâs a sequel to a 40-year-old film so mediocre i turned it off halfway through, made as a cynical cash-grab recruitment ad for the navy, with a topic and plot designed to appeal exclusively to Your Dad.1 Yet, through sheer dumb luck, Paramount hit the jackpot on Top Gun: Maverick.
Obviously, Tom Cruise is an absolute charisma magnet and the best part of every movie heâs ever been in. But that seductive Scientologist smile only goes so far (just look at The Mummy), and thatâs where our director comes in. Joseph Kosinski doesnât have a particularly long track record; it would be easy to mistake him for a typical director-for-hire. His dialogue scenes donât stand out from the pack, and heâs not particularly creative with the camera, but that doesnât matter. What he excels at is spectacle.
2010âs Tron: Legacy is a profoundly middling film in terms of its plot and characters, but it gained a cult following thanks to the delicious combination of Daft Punkâs killer score with Mr Kosinskiâs brilliant visuals and action. He took that computerised world of bits and bytes and gave it stakes, weight, and a sense of scale, where a Marvel hack would have told the VFX guy to just press render and go with whatever comes out.
So you take a director whose most known work is a spectacular CG effects-fest and a lead actor famous for his insistence on doing all of his own stunts, and what do you get? The best blockbuster film of the decade, thatâs what. The original Top Gunâs plane scenes drag and drag with no real purpose; in Maverick, every flight has something at stake, with non-stop action â but the film still knows when to pull back and take a breather to give its characters heart. My icy, cynical heart knew that i was being manipulated every step of the way, knew that every pull of the strings was planned out in advance, knew that this film was made for money and nothing else⌠but iâll be damned if i didnât start crying at that Val Kilmer cameo.
Go and see Top Gun: Maverick on the biggest screen you can, whether thatâs a 1080p computer monitor or an Imax cinema. You wonât regret it.
Our two runners-up were films that i would recommend to anyone, anywhere, of any age, and at any time. They have something for everyone. First place, on the other handâŚ
If you believe the lame-stream media, our winning film was the result of arthouse horror hero Robert Eggers being given a blank check by Universal to make a big period action movie. This is false. It was created by scientists in a lab in Durham to appeal to me and me specifically. (You can tell because i was the only person who actually went out and watched it.)
Based on the Norse legend behind Shakespeareâs Hamlet, The Northman is an epic following Large Scandinavian Man as the viking Amleth, son of a deposed king, on his journey to avenge his father with the power of Odin and testosterone2 on his side.
When i call Amleth a viking, i do not mean that all-too-common sanitised Hollywood depiction of a 20th-century Christian in pagan clothing. No; his society and its ways are portrayed as they were, warts and all, regardless of what the audience might feel about it. The vikings of this film keep slaves, burn down houses, consult witches (memorably played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe, and BjĂśrk, in decreasing order of screentime), mock Jesus, and pray to Gods as a fact of life. (The film never particularly demeans them for the latter three, which i found a welcome reprieve from paganismâs usual relegation to the villains of horror schlock.) The only concession to modern mores is the absence of polygamy, because splashing people with period blood and cutting off heads is okay but good heavens a second wife?????
Mr Eggers and his crew schlepped all the way to Iceland for filming and made good bloody use of it. Whether its long shots are focused on natureâs rolling fields and bursting volcanoes or humanityâs flame-lit funerals and grimy oarsmen, the result is consistently one of the most beautiful things of the year.
Itâs not for everyone. Itâs long, and those just there for the action will find themselves asking when theyâre going to get to the fireworks factory. Itâs gory. Itâs grim. But itâs definitely for me.
Hey, did you like the Matrix sequels? Do you want to watch a three-hour-long film where every character is played by the same six actors? No? Well, too bad, because the best film i watched in 2022 that wasnât released that year was the Wachowski sistersâ3 Cloud Atlas.4
There was a point, about 60% of the way through this three-hour-long movie, where i started to wonder if it was all worth it. Iâd seen Tom Hanks attempting a Cockney accent, Hugo Weaving in unconvincing Asian prosthetics, and a lot of people saying âtru-truâ a lot of times. Surely it was impossible to tie this all together into a satisfying conclusion.
I started having flashbacks to The Matrix Resurrections, an endlessly creative film plagued by its own self-obsessions and Lana Wachowskiâs inability to not put the first thing that came into her head into the script. Was this going to be the same? Are the sisters trapped in an endless cycle of almost-but-not-quite?
And then there was a point, about 90% of the way through, where i started crying. Theyâd squared the circle, tied all six stories up into a neat bow; an epic told on the scale of centuries, where actors cross boundaries of time, nationality, race, and gender; a film that would be their magnum opus were it not for the long shadow of The Matrix. I donât know how they did it, but they did â and thus nudged their record of hits against misses slightly to the positive side.
2022 was a good year for bad movies. Moonfall was the peak of so-bad-itâs-good Emmerichian excess. Morbius morbed all across the internet. And the usual Marvel schlock was even shlockier than usual. But nobody thought those films would be any good anyway â itâs hard to be disappointed when you donât have any expectations in the first place.
So, by God, was i disappointed in Nope. From Jordan Peele, criticsâ favourite rising star, this sci-fi Hollywood horror brims with so many creative ideas and metaphors that they all boil over and donât go anywhere. I can only imagine that a quarter of the script got sucked up into a UFO and they decided to just keep shooting. There are so many great ideas in this film, and itâs a darned shame they wound up such an anticlimax.
I donât actually watch much television; iâve always found it hard to get invested for the âlong haulâ. Ben Stillerâs Severance, made for Appleâs floundering streaming service, is a slow burner, the sort of thing i despise â but its slowness is methodical, carefully drip-feeding you bits of information whilst never wasting its time on fluff and filler.
Itâs strange. Itâs puzzling. Itâs brilliant. And the final episode is some of the best TV iâve ever seen. If i could, iâd sever myself â just to watch it all over again.
Itâs The 1975.
Well, no point in dragging that out. They may not be the best band in the world, but they are my favourite band in the world; their eclectic pop-rock sensibilities are what got me into music, and iâll always appreciate them for that.
This isnât just a sentimental pick. Being Funny in a Foreign Language sees the band trim away the fat and bloat of their previous works and hold back on the eclectic experimentation of the Music for Cars era, settling on a distilled, refined version of the sound that defined their first record. There are no bloated instrumentals, no experimental noodlings; just, as their international tour proudly suggests, The 1975 At Their Very Best.
No album came close to blowing them out of the water â because iâm a soppish fanboy â but to whet your appetite, here are some more of my favourite songs of 2022. (In no particular order.)
It was with some trepidation that i typed the word âPaganâ into RateYourMusicâs charts function, knowing the reputation that explicitly religious music has. The words âChristian rockâ have always been accented with a sneer, and the most well-known Pagan musician of the modern age is an unrepentant church-burning neo-nazi.
Right at the top, after iâd filtered out all of the metal (apologies, metalheads; it just isnât my bag), sat XTCâs Apple Venus Volume One. You wonât find it on streaming â frontman Andy Partridge has few kind words for the likes of Spotify â but i made do with a pirate Youtube playlist until i tracked down a physical copy at the shops.
Apple Venus is the groupâs penultimate album, and even knowing nothing about them, I could tell. It drips with aching sincerity, the kind that dips into corny pastiche, in that particular way that only happens when a band who have spent their whole career dripping with snark and cynicism realise that theyâre getting too old for this shit.
And thatâs all i wrote.
Some other favourite old songs i discovered this year:
Iâve been getting into post-rock recently, and there are a few albums which seem to be near and dear to fansâ hearts. Sigur RĂłsâ ĂgĂŚtis byrjun, a surprisingly accessible masterclass. Godspeed You Blank Emperorâs Lift Your Skinny Fists, the best soundtrack for a movie that never existed. Talk Talkâs Spirit of Eden, a bit too jazzy for my tastes. A few more that iâve yet to listen to.
Then thereâs The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.
Explosions in the Skyâs third album is widely beloved. It tops lists with the big guns. It often shows up on genre âstarter packâ lists. There is a teensy, tiny problem with this: itâs shite.
Well, alright, i thought, two tracks in. Maybe it picks up by the end? Everyone is raving about that closing track, âYour Hand in Mineâ â and then that was shite too!
This is music for a car commercial. It is the Imagine Dragons of post-rock. Itâs the sort of music a TV network might play as inspirational backing for their Paralympic coverage. It is sappy, insipid, and uninspired dross of the purest and vilest sort, and it boggles the mind to think how it ever got the reputation it now has. See me after class.
Just one game found its home amongst my digital shelves this years, and i have yet to find the opportunity to complete it. Lucas Popeâs Return of the Obra Dinn wins by acclimation â so far itâs stylish, intriguing, and fun to solve, but again, iâve not finished it! Weâll see if it sticks the landing.
Homestuck isnât very good. It has an undeniably appealing cast of characters and charmingly naĂŻve art â you donât get millions of fans without doing something right â that are sadly weighed down by its authorâs baffling decision, faced with all the sprawling multi-media possibilities of the web, to tell its story entirely in walls of unreadable monospaced text.
Wired Sound for Wired People isnât my thing. It has undeniably mastered a medium: its flickering pink pixels and eerie soundscapes build an unmistakable mix of intrigue and unease, beckoning you to follow it down the rabbit hole. But it lacks a message to go with it â thereâs no story to speak of, just a collage of strange and trippy scenes.
So what if someone were to combine the best bits of both, and undo their shortcomings? Idiosyncratic, eerie audiovisuals, with relatable dramatis personĂŚ, and a compelling story which uses the power of hypertext to its fullest?
Enter Corru.observer. Linked to me by someone whose homepage iâd complimented â with no other comment than that it was a friendâs âpersonal siteâ â Corru puts you in the seat of an archĂŚologist(?) some decades(?) in the future(?), trying to piece together the memories of an alie⌠iâll let you find out the rest. Thereâs only an âepisodeâ and a half out right now, and i canât wait to see where it goes.
2022 was not short of epically un-short videos. Internet Historian put together a fully animated retelling of the story of Floyd Collins, a 1920s farmer who found himself stuck upside down in a treacherously narrow cave. It clocks in at an hour and ten minutes. Kevin from Defunctlandâs weirdly emotional investigation into the Disney Channel theme runs an hour and a half. Stuart Brownâs Xcom retrospective? 1:40.
But in the age of Tiktok and Vine, it pays to be succinct. Our winner by no means reaches the six-second nirvana of those two platforms, but at 25 minutes, it would fit comfortably into a half-hour broadcast slot on telly â not bad on a site increasingly dominated by 7-hour videos about people watching sitcoms for children.
That winner is Michael Stevensâs video on the origin of selfies. In it brief runtime, it answers every question i never knew i had about the selfie, while spinning in a number of fascinating tangents and eyebrow-raising questions (in the typical Vsauce house style). It even got me to renovate the gallery just to add that photo by Anastasia. Cheese!
I perused many places during my walks out and about this year, but none so consistently provided me with so many new sights as the Ouseburn, a small but mighty stream which winds its way in the east of Newcastle from suburbs to leafy woods to industry to hipster vegan cafĂŠs. Every time i thought iâd seen it all, the Ouseburn revealed a new cranny, some quirky establishment or warp in the cityâs fabric, something different to explore.
Affleckâs Palace is the beating heart of Mancunian counterculture; a labyrinthine maze of shops which across their three floors sell everything from rose ice cream to bath bombs to incense to Hatsune Mikuâthemed fizzy drinks⌠and i canât tell you any more than that, because i havenât finished my post about it yet!
Really, though â Affleckâs has it all and more, and iâll be sure to stop by next time i go down south.
Day in, day out, we are flooded with the latest news of disasters and terrors from around the globe. It gets the views, it gets the hits, and it gets the clicks; itâs no wonder journos love to accentuate the negative.
The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award is an antidote to doom and gloom, honouring the best thing that happened in 2022. It was a late entry, but it could hardly be anything other thanâŚ
âŚThe National Ignition Facility, the U.S. government lab who reported that, for the first time, theyâd gotten more energy out than they put in via fusion power. There are hiccups, of course; the facilityâs magnets guzzled dozens of times more power than the reactor itself. But every stepping stone has its imperfections, and this is the first great step to a truly prosperous future â where energy is too cheap to meter, where power is so abundant that there will be hardly a grain of economic sense in the idea of tapping any more of GĂŚaâs precious little black gold.
Happy belated new year, everyone. And as always â may it be better than the last!
The blue people from Avatar are hot, and iâm tired of pretending theyâre not.
Editorâs Note: Xanthe has not yet seen either Avatar film.
POV: Robert Zemeckis just died and you are a cynical Universal exec with dollar signs in your eyes.
Back to the Future | |
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![]() Theatrical release poster
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Directed by | Joseph Kosinski |
Screenplay by | |
Based on | |
Starring1 | |
Music by | |
Production
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Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release dates
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Running time
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152 minutes[1] |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $200 million[2] |
Box office | $985 million[3][4] |
Sequels
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I was bored the other day, so i thought iâd go see a film. The problem, my dear readers, is that i have this terribly unlucky habit: 70% of the time, when i go see a film at the cinema, itâs not very good â and i can confirm that Donât Worry Darling is, indeed, not very good.
If youâve heard anything about Donât Worry Darling, itâll be about the juicy, juicy behind-the-scenes drama, involving saucy affairs between director Olivia Wilde and the filmâs leading male star, an exasperated Chris Pine, and Shia LaBeouf. But weâre not going to be talking about any of that â instead, weâll be talking about the topic everyone is desperately avoiding: the movie itself. Oh dear.
The film boils down to a thin Truman Show pastiche following a troubled couple in an idyllic American suburb, wherein a 1950s housewife, imaginatively named Alice Warren, questions what her controlling husband, the inexplicably British Jack Chambers, actually does at his mysterious government job. The wonderful Florence Pugh, hot off of 2019âs Midsommar, gives her all with the script sheâs given as Alice, and is easily one of the standout parts of the film. Jack, on the other hand⌠Jack is played by Harry Styles, a man who should not act. (Every pop star nowadays seems to think they can walk the tightrope between music and cinema as easily as Lady Gaga does, and it never quite seems to work out for them.)
So, letâs put ourselves in Ms Wildeâs shoes. You have one common plot structure, one brilliant lead actress, and one so-so lead actor. How do you make this movie⌠good?
Well, first you load up the secondary cast with talented people. KiKi Lane and Chris Pine both absolutely kill it in their respective roles â Margaret, a troubled neighbour to Alice, and Frank, Jackâs hammy villainous boss â but neither character feels fully fleshed out; Mr Pine in particular finds himself with not much to do despite ostensibly being the driving force behind the plot.
You can also pour piles upon piles of money into your filmâs technical aspects. The quaint suburb in which Jack and Alice live is designed to within an inch of its life, and every shot is clear, crisp, and packed with colour while not being too overbearing â like a James Bond film or, if youâre being unkind, a perfume commercial.
Alright. Youâve got your cast, youâve got your style, now you just need to⌠ah, god, what was it? You look down at the smudged writing on your hand â ah, yes, the script! You have to write a script, with, like, a plot and stuff.
You wake up from a terrible dream. You are no longer Olivia Wilde. You are once again the handsome reader of the blog of an even handsomer webmixter, who politely informs you that the filmâs one-block-wide Jenga tower of a storyline, while it seemed to be setting up for an interesting conclusion, falls apart completely in the third act. The filmâs writers pull out every clichĂŠ in the book â âit was all in VR!â âour protagonistâs best friend was in on it!â âif you die in the game you die in real life!â â in the space of about ten minutes, with barely any of it given room to breathe. (In fact, that third revelation comes after a pivotal death scene.) Just as the audience wonders what impact this will have on the plot going forward, the film just⌠ends, with a distinctly unsatisfying resolution to our heroâs story, and an air of âwell why did they even bother?â about the villainous plot.
All in all, i really canât recommend watching Donât Worry Darling â perhaps catch it on streaming when it comes out if it piques your interest, but donât spend your heard-earned Lizzies on going to the cinema to watch Harry Styles gaslight his wife for an hour and a half. (5/10)
See How They Run is a fun, Wes Andersonâlite romp of a mystery story that gets in and out and does what it needs without making too much of a fuss about itself. Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell drive around in a tiny blue â50s police car; what more could you possibly want? (7½/10)
The Woman King is a fine enough (alternate-)historical epic carried on the backs of some terrific performances by Thuso Mbedu and Viola Davis. (6/10)
I wasnât expecting to be so spellbound by a seventy-year-old drama film of a bunch of people talking in a room, but i absolutely could not take my eyes off of 12 Angry Men, which you should really just go watch right now. (9/10)
I think Morbius might legitimately be the worst film iâve ever seen on the big screen. The basic idea has potential, and for the first 15 minutes or so, i was cautiously optimistic â but then it all gets smothered by a mountain of pure gobshite and some of the worst dialogue ever put to screen.i
I recently had some downtime and, since âtis the season, watched Censor, a small British horror film about a film censor during the âvideo nastyâ panic who investigates a strangely familiar scene.
Itâs tense, stylish, and scary â all the more impressive coming from its first-time director, Prano Bailey-Bond â becoming more and more surreal the further it progresses. Give it a watch, why donât you?