Tag: film

A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods was a must see for me.  Not because I’ve read the book, which shamefully I haven’t, but because I once set out to spend three weeks on the Appalachian Trail.  Unbearably heavy rucksack strapped to my back, me and three friends started in the exact same place Robert Redford and Nick Nolte do in this film.  Except we were sweating a hell of a lot more thanks to Georgia’s unbearable humidity.  The fact that I only made it twenty-four hours before hitchhiking off the trail and that it was one of the worst twenty-four hours of my life is neither here nor there.

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Halloween Binge: A Nightmare on Elm Street

Wes Craven’s influence on the horror genre can not be underestimated.  As the great Kim Newman put it, ‘Wes Craven reinvented horror at least four times, most directors don’t even manage it once.’  Arguably, his most telling influence on the genre was the creation of Freddy Krueger and A Nightmare on Elm Street.  A film I was inspired to return to following Craven’s recent passing.  However, that didn’t seem enough and I decided to keep going.  In the last few weeks, I’ve watched every single Nightmare on Elm Street film, including crossovers and remakes.  Why?  Krueger only knows.

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The Visit

Horror and comedy are often dismissed as easy genres.  Every year a plethora of films populated by jump scares and jokes about dicks are packaged up and inflicted on the public.  They’re also inevitably crap.  The truth is to make a horror film or a comic film is just as hard as making a sweeping war epic.  To combine the two, is arguably even harder.

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Bill

The story of Bill needs no introduction.  I mean everyone has heard the tale of Shakespeare, who is still going by Bill at this point, being kicked out of his lute band (Mortal Coil) and moving to London where he and his first play get embroiled in a Catholic plot to kill Queen Elizabeth.  It’s basically history 101.

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Legend

Creating worlds around bad people is a tricky business.  When done well, you get shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad.  Filled with unpleasant people, who do bad things and also their families and the crap that they have to deal with in that world.  Importantly though, we are never offered excuses for what they do, but instead just given a glimpse into what motivates them.  When it’s done badly, you get self-aggrandising crap that tries to hide the fact these characters are bastards.  Legend sits somewhere in between.

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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Teens with cancer is in danger of becoming it’s own genre.  Following the success of the emotionally draining Fault in Our Stars, we now get the quirky indie version.  Sundance awards and all.  It’s a description that is sure to raise the heckles of some, as they expect to hate Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and yet this story about a self loathing teenager called Greg and his friendship with a girl suffering from leukemia manages to never collapse into mawkish sentimentality.

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45 Years

Cinema is often unfair to the elderly.  There are few films that give an accurate representation of what it actually means to be old, at least not a growing old doesn’t involve them either going senile or just being a bit racist.  However, with the discovery in recent years that as a group they will attend the cinema on mass, this has begun to change.  The success of films like The King’s Speech seemed to activate the Grey Pound and we are now getting films that are more understanding of elderly life.

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Trainwreck

Being funny is hard.  Being funny for two hours, is very hard.  That’s the challenge laid at the feet of Trainwreck from the start and, like most Judd Apatow films, it is probably around half an hour too long.  However, it does manage to be funny.  A lot of which is due to a star making performance from Amy Schumer, who is also the first person to write a film that Apatow directed who is not called Judd Apatow.

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Southpaw

Boxing films are notoriously hard to pull off.  They can go from the sublime to the ridiculous very easily, as director’s try to capture the frantic nature of the sport.  The truth is that the best boxing films don’t focus on the sport itself, but the people involved in it.  Which is exactly what Southpaw tries to do.

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