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...

Don’t worry, no spoilers! Wynonna Earp: Vengeance is a follow up movie to the TV show. It’s not a replacement for the Season 5 we were supposed to have but never got, rather it’s a sequel, stand-alone, five years later, kind of thing. I will admit, I had my doubts going into this. Wynonna Earp felt like our shit-show, but it also felt like it might be lightning in a bottle, and once it had escaped, you could never recapture it. Just putting the band back together again might not be enough. There were odd moments when I still felt that was true. Which in a 95 minute film is probably a reflection that, at some level, there were odd scenes that I thought needed a bit of work. Given I could say the same of almost any film, that’s not a bad thing to say about this one. There are many I’m far more critical of too. This one just registered a bit differently with me, because I had different expectations, and worries, compared to most films. But the things I expect from Wynonna Earp were ...

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...

I’m going to start with a criticism that won’t matter to anyone who isn’t British, but if Eloise (Ellie) grew up anywhere near Redruth, or Jocasta near Manchester, then I’m a virgin fresher. (Wikipedia tells me they’re from New Zealand and Glasgow respectively and clearly they need to do more accent work. Although there’s one scene where I almost fell out of my chair because, having just given up on it, Ellie suddenly sounded at least authentically West Country, if not Cornish.) Having bitched about that, I don’t know if the girl playing Cilla Black was lip-syncing or singing live, but she looked and sounded good. Equally, I don’t remember Jack's (Matt Smith) accent slipping. Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) doesn’t say where she’s from, and to me her accent reads like faux-cockney on top of something (I can’t quite place what), but that’s not unreasonable for the time and someone trying to fit in, in London, sound cool, and while her accent meanders a little but stays in that territory wh...

I am reviewing all three episodes of the Dr Who specials in one piece, because they are presented that way. However, they’re quite distinct stories, beyond 14 and Donna running through them. Part one has aliens running around on Earth with a switch on who the bad guy alien is. It’s based on a classic story from Dr Who Magazine, which I’m both old enough and nerdy enough to remember reading. Despite knowing the outline of the story, I enjoyed the episode. At least part of that pleasure was Rose, Donna's daughter, who was trans, played by a trans actor, and stirred up the man babies. Good solid story and a great piece of presenting trans people as part of everyday life. Much better than many of the other ways we’re meant to think about them. (There’s a little niggle about the gender language at one point, but overall it’s good.) The second story is a bottle episode on the edge of space that leans heavily into body horror. Doppelgängers of The Doctor and Donna who can’t quite control ...

The Fall of the House of Usher is a Mike Flanagan horror, in the tradition of Hill House , Bly House and so on. As you might guess from the title it’s inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. If you’re the right sort of nerd you can have fun spotting the references to Poe works, some are huge and smack you in the face, some are smaller or come from his life rather than his writing. I’ve seen reviews that absolutely hate this, or say they make the story incoherent. Personally I found them delightful and well judged. I'm pretty sure I missed some of them but the big, obvious references are held for the right moments - there’s an episode called The Pit and the Pendulum , and the pendulum does its job in a satisfying way. But the smaller moments, the ones that would be spoilers, if I missed them they’re not presented in neon lights and jerking the story out of shape, but if you do catch them, they add an extra little layer of pleasure in the way that all the best easter eggs do. If...

In season one it wasn’t obvious that we had a classic sit com, but season two makes it much more obvious. That might be a deliberate change. Season one had three women at college under pressure to deliver a final year project and they came up with an app to help women have better sex, did a load of research and got something that worked. The comedy came from the situation of these women doing research into sexual behaviour at university - a bit like Sex Education they didn’t make fun of anyone for how they expressed desire but if you imagine setting up a safe space for people to have sex and then asking questions about it, there’s lots of room for comedy around that, which they use. In season two, they’ve moved on a bit, the Sexify App is ready to be launched, then all their bills come due and their power gets cut off… an apparent angel rescues them, but demands double the user base - so the drive for Sexiguy, a male version of the app begins. (The angel is not all she appears to be...

Blonde is a deeply uncomfortable, even unpleasant, film built around a mesmerising performance that a little bit of me hopes wins Ana de Armas best actress at the Oscars, although I’ll be happy if she loses to Michelle Yeoh. Although Marilyn died three years before I was born, as I was growing up, certainly when I was a child, she was still the epitome of a sex symbol. Even into my teens that was the case, although by the end of them other women were starting to displace her. So, although I never really studied her life, most of the events loosely depicted here are part of my cultural baggage. I certainly didn’t understand it all the first time I heard some of the stories, but by the time I was 14 or so and I was hearing them for the fifth time I was old enough to understand what they meant, maybe not in the context of the the America of 30 years earlier, but at least to understand what an abortion was, what the drugs stories meant, what being a Playboy centrefold implied and so on. ...

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...

Following on from the adaptation of Normal People we have the same director bringing us an adaptation of Conversations With Friends . In terms of Sally Rooney’s career this is backwards but this is how the TV has brought it to us, and how I’ve accessed them too. Much like Normal People we have young Irish people, final year students I think, but with jobs as well (it’s really not super clear - this may be an age thing, when I was a student it was rare to have to take a job, and no one I can remember did that, these might just be kiddies who were working to make ends meet) in Conversations with Friends rather than at school, at the start of the story, learning about the world and their place in it. But they’re also negotiating the world of work and sex/intimate relationships in the adult world. Students might be adults but blowing off lectures is different to blowing off work and your pool of possible partners and friends are basically your age. Once you’re in work, age gaps are sud...

I was an unashamed fan of the first three seasons of Stranger Things . Season four part one carries many of the same elements that made seasons one to three so delightful but where someone, presumably at Netflix, forced them to edit their scripts down to around an hour, this season that hasn’t happened. The episodes are about 20 minutes longer, but not necessarily 20 minutes better. The good scenes are absolutely great, as before, but there’s padding between them that just wasn’t there in previous seasons and it makes too many of the episodes drag for me. Add some problems I had with how they write Robin that I’ll address later and a huge issue with the finale and I struggled with this season for the first time. If you have come across any media about Stranger Things season four, it has probably mentioned the use of Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. A lot of the time I’m ambivalent about the music they use in film and TV. I notice when it’s jarringly wrong but very rarely do I thi...

I don’t think most of this season it’s as funny as the first two seasons but that might be me. And that’s not to say it’s not funny. I laughed, out loud despite being alone, at every episode usually several times. I took to watching from a recording because I frequently laughed so hard I couldn’t hear what was going on and I wanted to be able to pause/rewind easily. It’s not like it’s unfunny all of a sudden, I think it just slides off to a different place that doesn’t work for me. As usual the music is really on point and it was great to relive some of those tunes. They play with the format of the show too: we have a flashback episode, a road trip episode and more. I don’t mind that but maybe that contributed a bit to my feeling of it not quite hitting the mark. Setting up the mechanics of the different episodes chewed into the time available for the cast to do their thing. Then came the finale. An hour long special, set a year later building up to the referendum on the peace agreem...

Cracow Monsters is, as you might guess from the title, a Polish show that’s on Netflix. Wikipedia bills it as horror but it’s much more in a dark modern mythology area than a traditional horror. It’s definitely about the conflict between good and evil but on a cosmic, rather than a human or human-adjacent monster scale. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some horror-style moments but they’re not the main thrust of the story, the focus. This show comes with a spate of trigger warnings for sexual scenes, suicide, drug misuse and some others. Broadly speaking all of those are accurate but, honestly, it’s pretty mild stuff. One of the warnings is for sexual violence and I’m left wondering what it was for to be honest. It should be far too easy to dismiss this series. It’s relatively simple to watch and, without even really analysing, spot a bucket load of tropes. We literally have a club for misfit kids with superpowers run by a professor for example. Sound familiar? A character that wea...

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...

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...

Season three of A Discovery of Witches is the season that diverges most dramatically from the source material, sometimes in tiny ways and sometimes in much bigger ways. Some of that, I’m fairly sure, is due to the the restrictions due to filming during Covid but mostly I don’t mind the changes, they’re either non-substantive or, when they’re hefty, they don’t alter the impact of the show as far as I’m concerned, although YMMV. Sadly, the same can’t be said of the closing scenes, which I understand why but they still landed with a whimper instead of a bang. It was nice seeing the villains get their comeuppance, which was suitably wrapped up before the end, although I can’t help feeling all of them, even the ones that had been interesting rather than just moustache twirling pantomime bad guys, were rather reduced to that as Diana evolved from an academic who was basically denying she was a witch to a spell weaver and time walker to a full on Mary-Sue. (It should be noted that she does...