Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Generally, even if I don’t review them here as religiously as I should, I like a lot of Apple TV's tv shows ( Slow Horses, Silo and Severance in particular, but others too) but I’ve been less impressed by their film output. The Gorge changes that for me. Let me be clear, this is not a great piece of art. It’s unlikely to change your life on a deep, emotional level. I’ve seen a review that says “there are so many plot holes in The Gorge that…” and this might be true, but it’s missing the point. This is monster-slaying fun, very much in the mould of The Mummy , the one with Rachel Weisz in it. Both of them have plot, but that’s not really important, there’s just enough that as things bounce along the switches and changes have something to hang on, if you care. I paid enough attention to notice them, but I’d have been happy enough if they weren’t there. I need to say, before going on, this film is very dark. Maybe not Daredevil dark, but approaching it. Often it feels appropria...

I’ll be honest, normally I wouldn’t have watched Unfrosted . It had vaguely crossed my attention when it first dropped but failed to really register. But when the Discord mob said “shall we have a watch along, this is the movie?” I said yes; I’m not a complete misanthrope. Until we talked about what the film was about, I didn’t realise that I had heard of it, it made that much of an impression! The film is based around a largely true story of the battle between Kellog's and Post to bring Pop-Tarts to the marketplace. What we see is nothing like the true history, instead it’s a lightning fast comedy that very much throws everything at the wall hoping that enough jokes land for you to carry you over the ones that don’t. All of us laughed enough that we have no regrets about watching it. We tended to laugh at the same things so we could have had a better, more focused, film that would have kept us laughing more. That said, for all we’re discord friends and while most of us have never...

Hot Skull is, obviously, a Turkish TV dystopian drama. Couldn’t you tell from the title? One of the things I love about Netflix is that they bring shows from other cultures to us. Squid Game, Dark, Lupin, Cracow Monsters, Biohackers, Sexify, Dark Desires, the Rain, Queen of the South, 3% and more are all shows I’ve seen and largely enjoyed from around the world courtesy of Netflix. Even when they haven’t necessarily been great TV (I’m not going to name names here), it’s usually great to see how other cultures create their stories. In particular, four of those, along with Hot Skull are dystopian series (I might have a type, and Netflix might make good predictions of that) but once you strip away the “this is our disaster, this is how we’re coping” there is still a chunk of “and this is how (in the case of Hot Skull ) Turks view a dystopia that is different to Germans, Poles, Danes, Koreans and, of course, Brits (and in cases not listed Americans). To me those differences are fascina...

Two shows in a row that were deemed unfilmable. Both have spent years, decades even, in various development hells and both have turned out to be very satisfying series. That said, where I described Foundation as sometimes hard to penetrate and requiring of attentive watching, The Sandman was a visual feast and every episode was a storytelling treat so I simply never wanted to take my eyes off the screen. It the difference between not daring to look away (although I was always sufficiently engaged this wasn’t an issue) and not wanting to look away. The differences run deeper than that. Foundation was based on a book while The Sandman is based on mature comics (later graphic novels and then book-length collections). That makes Foundation feel like a 10-hour movie, with a consistent, on-going story, split into sections. There’s absolutely noting wrong with that and while it’s not the only way we see these 10-episode streaming series if you look back at Stranger Things , First Kill ...

The short review of Elvis is really easy. It’s a Baz Luhrmann film, for better or worse. It’s a biopic about Elvis. It’s kind of Jukebox Musical using Elvis music. If at least two of those things don’t grab you, you probably won’t like this film that much. I like the Luhrmann films I’ve seen ( Romeo+Juliet, Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom ) and although I’m not really a fan of Elvis, I know his music and his death is the first celebrity death I really remember making the news so I was at least willing to engage on those parts. The next thing that really matters is how well the lead makes you believe they present as the character they’re portraying. That’s particularly important here because, for reasons I guess I understand, the film is intercut with actual footage of Elvis' performances. Fortunately Austin Butler does a really good Elvis, the look, the moves, the accent and the singing. There are a number of songs reworked for telling the story here, and they sound like Elv...

The Northman is a Norse saga brought to the big screen. If you don’t really know what that means, I would brace yourself, it’s a rather different sort of storytelling than your typical Hollywood movie, even though it’s pretty heavily focussed on a leading man. While there are action scenes, you should possibly go in thinking Shakespearean tragedy more than than Die Hard (although the language is much more modern than most Shakespeare you see on screen) and you should mix that with a big dose of interacting with the Gods, vision questing and the like, and what I’m loosely going to call swords and sandals combat scenes. This is historically wrong (and while I quibble about the size of their shields, they get the history of the combat pretty decent) but it sets the right sort of mental image. This makes it quite trippy in quite a few places, and maybe thinking Rambo crossed with Hamlet on acid gets you closer to the right place - there’s a strong revenge thread running though this s...

I’m not really old enough to remember the 60’s, my earliest memory that can be dated is to mid-July 1969, when I was four. This adaptation of the book looks and feels like it’s set in the 60’s but I wonder how much it feels like films and TV from the period, or set there more than it would resemble reality if we could travel back in time? Whatever the answer, it certainly feels right and so do the casting choices. The part of Harry Palmer was not written for Michael Caine, but he was pretty much perfect for the role. It would have been better if he was a northerner, from Burnley in fact, but the world at large think of him as a cockney now. Maybe being more true to the book would have helped, because we’re treated to another cockney Harry and there are times I’m irresistibly reminded of Caine's acting. But when I wasn’t, I completely enjoyed this new portrayal as well. I certainly enjoyed his (rather unexpected) posh love interest. As in both the film, and more particularly the b...