Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
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.
The Gift is a film that would do better without a trailer. A glance at said trailer would believe you to think you were about to witness a very simple home invasion horror. A man and his wife return to his hometown and are haunted by an old school friend. However, the film itself is much more intelligent than that.
There are a lot of parallels between the Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises. Both started quite small-scale, based around a specific idea, and as they’ve gone on they have got bigger and sillier and seemed to settle into what they want to be. They’ve also at this point, both peaked with their fifth film.
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.
The Legend of Barney Thomson is born from the city it is set in. It’s humour, people and language are so Glaswegian that you wonder how it will go down to any audience not based in Scotland. Robert Carlyle’s debut film as a director is as Scottish as he is and sees both him and Emma Thompson steal the show.
It’s become a commonly held view that Pixar have been in a bit of a slump. Brave and Monsters University were hardly bad films, but they missed that bit of magic that has always made Pixar so special. While Cars 2 sadly goes down as one of their first genuine flops. However, with the release of Inside Out Pixar are proving that rumours of their demise were greatly exaggerated.
In Marvel’s quest to conquer the universe, Ant Man has been their troubled production. With the news that Edgar Wright was dropping out three weeks before the start of filming, geekdom was thrown into turmoil as they already begun to lambast the Wrightless film. Sadly we will never see Wright’s version of one of Marvel’s more unusual superheroes, even though he and Joe Cornish still receive writing credits, and instead are left with Peyton Reed‘s effort.
Some films revel in action and set pieces. Massive blockbusters often want you to remember what happens in the film. They want you to stare agog as characters leap from building to building. Dodging death by the skin of their teeth. Then there are films that just create a world and a setting that you want to be a part of. They make you fall in love with their landscapes and the characters that inhabit them. Song of the Sea manages to do that and so much more.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the only thing worse than a needless Hollywood reboot is a needless Hollywood reboot done for contractual reasons. With the Terminator film rights set to revert to James Cameron in 2019, it’s time to milk that cash cow and Paramount and Skydance Productions have brought us Terminator Genisys, a film almost as messy as it’s spelling.
Sometimes you want to get deep and dark. Then other times, you want to watch a small yellow creature shout banana in a funny voice. I don’t know what it says about me that I tend to be much more into the second option.
Ramblings About Wrestling 