Rambles about the wonderful world of wrestling.
Everyone knows that traditional fairy tales have always been a bit scarier than their modern incarnations. The years have seen the attitude adapted that children need to be protected from the grotesque, that they don’t like things that scare them and that anything that might do so should be avoided. Now obviously if you are going to sit a child down in front of Saw, you should probably get your head checked, but the truth is that most kids like being scared, if it is done in the right way.
Lucy is bonkers. It doesn’t really qualify as a review, but it is the truth. When insanity was being handed out, it was at the front of the queue and yet there are people out there who have genuinely used it’s scientific inaccuracies as a platform for bashing it. Which quite frankly, I thinks even more insane.
A Practical Guide to a Spectacular Suicide is yet another film that managed to gain its funding through the use of the crowd, raising it’s £3000 through the use of Sponsume. Directed by Graham Hughes and co written by him, Keith Grantham and Graeme McGeagh. All 3 of whom only have one previous film to their name, 2010s The Big Slick which was made for only £200 and won a BAFTA New Talent Award for writing. APGSS is a dark comedy and has been shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival, it’s another one that is unlikely to make its way to a wider cinema release, but should at some point be available in one form or another.
Continue reading “A Practical Guide to a Spectacular Suicide”
Coherence is currently playing at the Edinburgh Film Festival and is a small independent sci-fi thriller. It was directed, in his first feature film, by James Ward Byrkit, who is best known for his role as a writer on Rango. Shot inside his own home, he decided against the use of a traditional script, instead just mapping out the major plot points. This allowed the actors to improvise and brings a realist feel to the dialogue.
The X-Men franchise has had it’s ups and downs. From Bryan Singer’s first two films, which started the franchise off with a bang, to the awful clusterfuck that was The Last Stand. It seemed to be finally starting to find it’s way again by going into the past and providing origin stories in X-Men: First Class. The follow up Days of Future Past now attempts to combine the two timelines, taking the classic cast of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and co and combining them with the new guns in James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender.
If you have recently quit smoking I would stay far away from The Two Faces of January. Set in the 1960’s, director Hossein Amini obviously decided that alongside the fashion choices of his central characters, the best way to depict the time period was to make sure that every character spent at least 3 quarters of the movie with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. Based off of a novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (who’s novels have previously provided the base for films like The Talented Mr Ripley) this is a film that oozes style and class, plus a hell of a lot of smoke.
Football at the highest level is a bloated, corrupt and quite frankly horrible sport. Overpaid pre-Madonna’s prance around earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a week in teams assembled by Russian billionaires with little thought towards the fans. Yet we all still love it. We all come back week after week to buy the overpriced pies and worship at the altar of teams that quite often do not give a shit. Why? Well because of stories like that told in Next Goal Wins. Continue reading “Next Goal Wins”
The idea of humans falling in love with machines is not a new one in cinema, it’s a common trope of the sci-fi genre, but if anything the last few years have led to it hitting closer and closer to home. Advances in technology like the Iphone suggest a future where, while our computers may not get to think for themselves, they may well be able to trick you into believing they can.
Ben Stiller is a hard actor to like. When you look back over his filmography there is an awful lot of crap. Even his supposed good films, aren’t really that good. However, his latest effort seems to be outside his normal remit. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is an adaptation of a short story that was originally made into a film in 1947. In it’s current incarnation it has been around for a long time with it having been in line to be directed by everyone from Spielberg to Ron Howard. While Jim Carrey and Sacha Baron Cohen are just two of the actors who have been in line to play the central character. It has finally come to fruition however, with Stiller fulfilling both roles.
Ramblings About Wrestling 
