Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Everything Everywhere, All at Once Avatar: The Way of Water Top Gun: Maverick The Northman Love and Leashes The Batman The Woman King Thor: Love And Thunder Don’t Worry Darling Jurassic World: Dominion D.E.B.S. The Half of It Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness Elvis Licorice Pizza Don’t Look Up I only saw 16 films this year, that includes two that are old films that I caught up on. I have a few lurking on my Netflix list to watch as well that I will get around to eventually. That’s not the lowest number of films I’ve seen since I started this list, but it is way down. There are a mix of reasons for that, changes in my domestic life, fewer films I want to see (there are some really long gaps between good films being released at the cinema this year) and, like a sizeable chunk of people, I’m not so good at sitting down at home to watch a movie. I’m much more likely to watch an episode or two of whatever the latest show I’m hooked on might be. Two episodes might be the same ...

Let’s start this review with the three big elephants in the room. Avatar was fairly criticised for its white saviour dialogue. While I’m not the best one to judge all the ins and outs of that trope (I’m a lousy saviour but I’m certain white), it certainly feels like they tried to both correct that and address it to some extent. People are boycotting ATWOW for the sins of the past, which is up to them, but it doesn’t seem like this film deserves to bd boycotted on its own merits. The wait for “the technology to be good enough.” There is a lot of water and a lot of CGI and water in CGI has been janky for a long time but that has improved recently - more computing power and tied to that better CGI around animating water have come along in the last five years or so. Here we have the Reef Na'vi and their marine animals that they interact with in the way the Forest Na'vi of the original interacted with the “dragons” and land animals of the forest. Of course that means both underwa...

There’s quite a lot to say about this film before we get into the film itself. It’s set in a real, historical African kingdom, Dahomey, at a time when it really was throwing off the shackles of being a tribute state of another African empire, the Oyo, and becoming a major power in its own right. A lot of the story follows a group of women warriors, the Agojie, who were real. However, the titular Woman King, Nanisca, is fiction. Although at this time the Dahomey were a tribute state, they went on to be a fierce raiding empire, capturing and selling others into slavery. At this point their struggle seems pretty heroic but, overall, their empire seems to be not one of the good guys. Does that mean we shouldn’t tell this story? I don’t think so. I learnt something about this empire and their wider history which is a good thing. But I’m not sure my voice matters in this, my ancestors weren’t enslaved by the Dahomey of a later period after all. I don’t know how important it is, but in additi...

I suppose I should say that I know this film has been in the celebrity gossip that masquerades as news for all the wrong reasons. I know Wilde has been accused of running a terrible lot, Florence Pugh refused to do publicity for the film and the likes. But I try my best to avoid this sort of nonsense, I know of it because it’s been discussed in reviews of the film and the like. So I’m really reviewing the film on the basis of what I saw in the cinema and not the celebrity drama. This film owes, despite what Olivia Wilde may try to make you believe, a huge debt to The Stepford Wives. That’s not to say it’s a remake, it’s clearly an update and the way the robot wives from the original have been updated is even more disturbing to be honest. Where to start with this film, the excellent, the dubious or the bad? Let’s start with the bad. Whoever cast Chris Pine really screwed up. Don’t get me wrong, of that crop of acting Chrises who burst onto the movie scene at about the same time (He...

Thor: Love and Thunder is more a Taiko Waititi film than it is a Marvel film. It happens to have characters from the MCU in it, sure, but it’s an action comedy from the head of Taiko Waititi. Really this review could stop here: if you like his films, there’s an excellent chance you’ll like this one too. If you’re an MCU purist, I suspect the answer is, don’t bother. The film starts a little slowly. We end up with a team of Thor (and Korg), Valkyrie and The Mighty Thor (who is Jane Foster, wielding Mjolnir for plot reasons that I’ve been told come from the comics but are spoilers if you don’t know them already) and we have to put the pieces in place. We see them in enough detail to understand their stories, what’s going on in their lives, to set up the rest of the story before they come together for the rest of the film. I didn’t time it, but it felt like it ran a bit long, especially Thor’s section - and, somewhat surprisingly to me, that wasn’t because I wanted to punch Chris Pratt ...

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...

Having said in my review of First Kill the elevator pitch must have been easy, I find myself really struggling to imagine exactly what the elevator pitch for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once was. This movie is part of the current multiverse craze, it’s a musing about maternal love and a daughter’s duty (in two generations), it’s a wuxia action movie, it’s several romance movies and it’s a comedy. And somehow, although the film feels busy, it also works well. Some of that is the stars. Western audiences will be most familiar with Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis, but there are a lot of people that we might not be as familiar with who have quite long careers and are more than capable of carrying their parts. This being a film that spans the multiverse those parts are quite varied as we see the same people from different universes. This isn’t a comedy in the classic style. You don’t have the jokes and laughs coming along predictably, but there are enough that I think you have to...

Let’s address the elephant in the room. I try to ignore my distaste for the artist and just accept the art. But when Chris’s Pratt rides onto screen living his best cowboy dream (which is the first scene he’s in) I wanted to punch him. In the action scenes I could happily watch him; he - more strictly his stunt double I guess - and the stunt coordinator worked well. But take him away from that and his smug face and my knowledge of his politics and the smaller but I know about his personal life (I try hard to avoid gossip masquerading as news but I’m not 100% successful) caused the urge to violence to rise again. Anyway, on to the film. We have an evil organisation called BioSyn. In case it’s not obvious, say it out loud, read that y as an i. There’s a megalomaniac, old, white man. Even if I hadn’t just watched EXU Calamity I’d have said hubris was his fatal flaw. We have two different stories that are meant to converge. One brings us the core characters from the Jurassic World tril...

D.B.B.S. is a hard film for me to review. I was in the right mood to watch it, I really enjoyed most of it but there was a huge level of cheesiness that I was always aware of but willing to accept today. On another day though, the cheese and the annoying parts would probably have me turning it off in frustration if not throwing things at the screen. Let’s start with the bad. Although this was apparently directed by a woman, and in some scenes I could believe that, it felt like she lost the battle with someone and the bulk of the cast were dressed like a man's wet dream. Perhaps it’s just me, but the schoolgirl look doesn’t do anything for me, and lots of women in schoolgirl costumes felt like a fetish party gone wrong. Given the story claims they’re students at a university training in the background to be spies, it doesn’t even fit the plot… The plot itself is serviceable. I can’t really go further than that. I think it’s meant to be a pastiche of films, and thus series, like C...

The Half of It is a modern, queer, retelling of the play Cyrano de Bergerac . It’s 90% gently delightful and 10% annoying. Shy, smart hard-work Ellie Chu (how many racial stereotypes can you throw at the poor girl) has a crush on smart, popular, pretty girl, Aster. Ellie writes homework for a big chunk of the tiny senior class in Hicksville, I mean Squahamish, for cash. So when, equally stereotype-laden, inarticulate jock Paul approaches her to write a love letter it’s not entirely unreasonable. She actually challenges him about who writes love letters these days, and he says it sounds romantic. Eventually Ellie agrees and writes the letter. Of course it’s to Aster. What follows is a mostly charming gentle romance. Paul pushes for a faster pace but Ellie, mostly successfully, keeps things slow. Aster has no idea what’s really going on is, in some ways, the subject of a pair of voyeurs as Ellie and Paul spy on her to try and find out about her to include things in their letters. Of c...

It would be fair to say I have mixed feelings about this film. I’m not really a fast jets fan but I really enjoyed pretty much every scene when they were doing stuff in the jets. They were well constructed and exciting even for someone like me who doesn’t instantly go “ooh, fast jets.” There are a chunk of other scenes that worked well through the length of the film as long as you stay engaged. The short scene with Val Kilmer, who looks and sounds rough because he’s really suffering from throat cancer was nice. It made me wonder why both Meg Ryan and Kelly McGuinness weren’t even invited back though. That was annoying. The structure of the story is pretty much told in the trailer. Maverick is recalled to the Top Gun school. He trains some young pilots, then leads them on a dangerous mission. I don’t have any issues with this, it’s perfectly functional and gives you more time with the jets. Another place where my feelings were mixed, this film sort of fits into three acts but each of...

I need to say a couple of things before I dive into the review proper. I’m far from a Marvel A/V Universe completist. I haven’t seen anything on Disney+, although I have an idea of broad plot outlines, and I haven’t seen all the movies either. From what I understand, and what I know of WandaVision that might make a huge difference to how you react to this film. I’ve also become increasingly disappointed with core MCU films (that formula is super restrictive in terms of the story structure, changing the character and retelling the same story doesn’t make it more interesting to me) and more and more a fan of those that hard core MCU fans dislike. Not necessarily uncritically, I thought Eternals needed to be a miniseries not a film for example, but overall I enjoyed it, where most MCU fans hated it. But I’m going to review based on my viewing experience. YMMV. I’m going to start by saying contradictory things. This film, at 126 minutes, felt too long, certainly longer than The Northma...

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...

This is Korean rom com that takes, as the rather unlikely basis for its romance, BDSM. A young career woman has never found romance. When the hot new man with the remarkably similar name transfers into her department she’s as interested as all the other women, but figures she has no chance. That similarity in names gives us the delayed meet-cute - a package for him is given to her by a lazy guy in the post room, she doesn’t check properly and opens it to find… a heavily studded collar. He tries to pass it off as a dog collar, and might have got away with it, but the box spills and a flyer for the BDSM place comes out. After some miscommunication, she realises she’s interested, he admits he would very much like to submit to her and they sign a temporary D/s contract. Although she’s a n00b, she’s diligent in her research. His level of experience is unclear - he’s clearly got more of a clue but while he’s shown at times to be what I’d consider to be a pretty heavy pain slut, deeply ...

I need to start this review with a potential trigger warning . It’s not long and it might not hit everyone but there are two scenes where Batman is observing someone. One made me feel a little uncomfortable but was tolerable. One went over the edge into voyuerism for me. I know everyone involved is consenting in the film, which is quite different to the real situation, but it still made me feel really uncomfortable. On to the review itself. Every clip you’ve seen where it’s really dark and moody is generally right. There is an opening quote “they look for me in the shadows but I am shadow.” The cinematographer seems to have taken that to heart, hardly any scenes are shot during daylight and when they are it’s heavily overcast. Given Batman and Catwoman dress in black, there’s a lot black-clad characters in the dark. However, eyes are wonderful things and I could follow the action comfortably enough. For any Batman movie, or TV show, you really have two things you have to pull off. H...

I suppose I should start this review with a potential trigger warning . I know of five people who have seen this film and who I’ve heard talk about it. From that group, one feels that the central relationship veers into stalker territory. However, the three of us that saw it together knew that in advance and disagreed. More on that later. Still, if that’s a really sensitive trigger for you, you’ve been warned. The central story is set in 1970’s LA and a wealthy, self-confident 15-nearly-16 year old boy meets a ten year old woman and asks her out on a not-date, honest. The film then follows their story over a shortish but not properly defined period of time. It might have been a year or two, although two of us thought it was meant to be just one summer. According to Wikipedia, all the real events we see that can be dated occur in 1973, but in odd parts and in a different order. So I think within a year is fair enough. If you’re old, like me, the soundtrack is awesome. I was eight when...

Parts of this film were really well observed. One that springs very easily to mind: Kate aiming for a spliff after the opening phone call; someone knows a chunk of astronomy PhD students. At the same time there are so many lazy tropes about women scientists it’s painful, from the incredibly unflattering haircut to fact she’s the one that has hysterics and gets called up on it. Really, this paragraph is a reflection of the film as a whole: there are good ideas and terrible parts shoved together into an uncomfortable mess. There are funny jokes in here. Some are smart, some are stupid and, for me, too many are a swing and a miss. There is some good social commentary about how the various parts of the system interact with science news. It was meant to be about climate change but with the tight limit and the change in circumstances it works far better as a satire about Covid. Part of the problem, for all us but particularly with expecting politicians to handle it well, with climate chang...