I'm not a sports fan or even that fond of sports movies (The Wrestler and Real Steel are about as far as I go), so it was perhaps inevitable that I wouldn't enjoy Bull Durham very much. I found it very boring, and lazy in its assumption that the game is the most important thing in the world. Aside from that, it's fuelled by a sour, aggressive, homophobic male energy, none of the characters have believable connection and the only two female characters are groupies with no motivations or life beyond that.
Rating: Awful
Monday 23 December 2019
Friday 20 December 2019
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
I didn't come out infuriated like I did with TLJ, rather a weird mix of overwhelmed and bored. The film makes some of the big mistakes the other ST movies did - far too complicated story-wise (too many moving parts, too many characters); too much telling-not-showing; I don't really care about most of the characters in it; the same old destroy-the-planet-killer-climax.
Yet again, I found myself wishing they'd focused on Ben and Rey primarily, with a handful of other characters tied into them (so, Palpatine and Leia would be the big hitters in this movie, you could really get rid of all the others and not lose anything). The whole thing with Richard E Grant is utterly pointless, Poe's love interest and Finn's new ex-Stormtrooper friend are so crammed in it feels like they're backdoor piloting new tv shows.
There was a lot of stuff that would have been much cooler if it had time to breathe (and, for some of them, if they had been planned for/introduced in the previous two). Two examples:
- the 'light-jump-skip' sequence. This is a really cool idea but it came right in the middle of an incredibly rushed montage of a million different set-ups. Would have been great if this had some more time to have them jump into a quiet bit of space, for the TIE fighters to need a few seconds to calculate the trajectory and follow them, maybe even being a little more cautious about where they pop out so you get the beats of the Falcon arriving at a new location, reacting, then the TIEs arriving and making their way back to the Falcon etc. Done better, this could have been the climactic action scene - better that than another (surprisingly badly directed) space battle between the same old ships.
- Palpatine. His return is revealed in the opening crawl, we never get to hear his message, in that same bewildering opening montage Ren tracks him down, he's revealed, his previous plans are explained, his new plan is set-up. It's all so fast and there's no craft to it, no drama. Then he doesn't do much through the movie, then Rey gets to him and he does more explaining then his plan changes and he explains his NEW new new plan. If your character is having to describe things happening as they happen, you've fucked up.
Overall, I wish Kathleen Kennedy had a) planned some stuff through a bit more, and sunglasses) had the mantra "simplify, slow down, show don't tell" drilled into everyone's heads. I think in ten years time, out of the PT OT and ST, the ST is going to be the trilogy I least want to re-watch. It's kind of embarrassing that the PT avoided some of the big mistakes that the ST made over and over.
Rating: Bad
Yet again, I found myself wishing they'd focused on Ben and Rey primarily, with a handful of other characters tied into them (so, Palpatine and Leia would be the big hitters in this movie, you could really get rid of all the others and not lose anything). The whole thing with Richard E Grant is utterly pointless, Poe's love interest and Finn's new ex-Stormtrooper friend are so crammed in it feels like they're backdoor piloting new tv shows.
There was a lot of stuff that would have been much cooler if it had time to breathe (and, for some of them, if they had been planned for/introduced in the previous two). Two examples:
- the 'light-jump-skip' sequence. This is a really cool idea but it came right in the middle of an incredibly rushed montage of a million different set-ups. Would have been great if this had some more time to have them jump into a quiet bit of space, for the TIE fighters to need a few seconds to calculate the trajectory and follow them, maybe even being a little more cautious about where they pop out so you get the beats of the Falcon arriving at a new location, reacting, then the TIEs arriving and making their way back to the Falcon etc. Done better, this could have been the climactic action scene - better that than another (surprisingly badly directed) space battle between the same old ships.
- Palpatine. His return is revealed in the opening crawl, we never get to hear his message, in that same bewildering opening montage Ren tracks him down, he's revealed, his previous plans are explained, his new plan is set-up. It's all so fast and there's no craft to it, no drama. Then he doesn't do much through the movie, then Rey gets to him and he does more explaining then his plan changes and he explains his NEW new new plan. If your character is having to describe things happening as they happen, you've fucked up.
Overall, I wish Kathleen Kennedy had a) planned some stuff through a bit more, and sunglasses) had the mantra "simplify, slow down, show don't tell" drilled into everyone's heads. I think in ten years time, out of the PT OT and ST, the ST is going to be the trilogy I least want to re-watch. It's kind of embarrassing that the PT avoided some of the big mistakes that the ST made over and over.
Rating: Bad
Sunday 15 December 2019
Chuck and Buck (2000)
Some great performances and an effectively unnerving balance between comedy and stalky tension. Only issue is that it feels a bit aimless - after some initial escalation it really plateaus until the last fifteen minutes - but that does at least add to the lo-fi naturalism of the film.
Rating: Good
Rating: Good
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