Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

French TV and film, I guess like visual media from any country, has its own unique style. They tell stories in different ways, use visual metaphors differently and often have different outcomes to their stories too. If you think of big hit films like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element and Leon can you imagine any of them being made by an American director? It’s not just the French that do this of course, British TV is distinctly different to American TV, even when one nation remakes the other’s shows. Think of the two versions of The Office but even shows where there’s hardly any format change can have vastly different fortunes: College Bowl is an American quiz show you’ve possibly never heard of, it has run for six seasons across its initial run and two relaunches. University Challenge , the British version, is currently in its 54th season, although it has had a brief hiatus and a channel swap. Why all this preamble? Furies is similar to a number of shows and films I’ve seen bef...

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...

To start, some caveats. First, the amount I know about making a TV show could comfortably be written on a postcard, possibly a stamp. If I paraphrased that advice to writers and “made what I know” it might turn into a TV show shaped thing, but what works for me is not necessarily mainstream enough to be a success. Second, I’m a self-confessed rugby tragic. I’ll routinely watch five, and sometimes up to eight games of rugby over a weekend. There are people who watch more, absolutely, but this show could be terrible and I’m still going to keep watching rugby. Bearing those things in mind, I have to wonder who the target audience for this show is. It’s hard for me to judge the show as a casual fan or someone who doesn’t know anything about rugby but I struggle to see how what we see here translates into enough of an understanding of the game to let you watch the forthcoming Men’s Six Nations (that starts on Friday as I post this) and appreciate the game. As a tragic, while I appreciate so...

While I try not to be too prescriptive in what it takes to enjoy a film - how you engage and enjoy something might be very different to me after all - I would suggest you need to be a fan of 300 and/or Sucker Punch and be willing to watch for the spectacle rather than anything else to enjoy Rebel Moon . Having said that, I’m going to split my review into what’s bad that made me say this, then what’s good. So what’s bad? There’s almost no plot, rather there are a string of tropes that come so thick and fast they’re better described as a tapestry, strung together by a gossamer thin plot where they can’t find a trope to squeeze in. If you want to play 'spot the trope' as a drinking game, I’d suggest sips of beer; if you drink anything stronger, you’ll get very drunk, very quickly. Some of the tropes escape being racist af because the guy that honours his debts and is really good with animals is clearly not a First Nations American, because he’s from a planet in space… (the actor...

Lupin is back and getting up to his old tricks. It’s been a year since the end of part two within the show, two years on Netflix, possibly more in France, courtesy of Covid. Assane has spent most of that time in hiding and comes up with a plan to get his wife and son away from the ridiculous pressure they’re under as he remains one of France’s most wanted criminals. In terms of format, we have very much the same structure as in the previous parts: a daring caper and then a Leverage style explanation of the more unlikely components. It felt to me for most of the season that we were missing the social commentary that Lupin had sprinkled throughout the previous parts, but it does rear up with a vengeance in a few episodes. The episodes feel oddly structured, both for Netflix and anglophone TV. Stories spill from one episode into the next, then finish part way through it. Not every time, but often enough it feels jarring and sets an expectation of odd pacing. You get what ought to be ac...

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...

The problems with Obsession are at least twofold. One is not really the fault of the show. While it lives up to its title, and I believe that at least one of them is dangerously obsessed from very early on (I’m less convinced the other is obsessed, but definitely damaged), it’s not being reviewed that way which is a real problem. The “erotic thriller with BDSM” is absent under a very twisted, obsessive quasi-power exchange with two very broken characters at its core. What I came to watch, based on the reviews I read, is not the show I was given. That’s a problem with the reviewers not understanding what they’re seeing, or not writing what they’re seeing and, as I said, not the show’s fault. But it’s jarring. However, within those two very broken characters and their interactions lies the second problem, and that is the fault of the writing and directing. Unless you’re here to watch this as porn (in which case you’ll get bored quickly, it’s just not porn) these characters are just so...

If I thought season one of Shadow and Bone was ambitious, shoving two books into one, season two mixes in parts of three and plays with the plot from the original material too. We can all think of shows that have tried that and struggled, if not fallen flat on their faces. Equally, there are shows that have made a success of that - adapting a story requires changes for the medium, yes, but in the case of TV for the episode and season length too. Fortunately Shadow and Bone fits into the second group. There are some changes that we'll have to see how they play out but, by and large, they within this season. The characters remain recognisably the characters we had in the books (sometimes that’s not great, Bardugo was learning her craft when she wrote Shadow and Bone the series, particularly the first book, and it shows if you look at the books she wrote later and the characters in them) but, at the same time, in some ways it is good - we’ve got a lot going on here, fairly simpl...

Part of any film or tv show set in the real world is about verisimilitude. If you set the show in London and mention real places, then you need to make sure you connect them sensibly. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has Robin and co walk from the White Cliffs to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall in a day. If that doesn’t make you shudder or laugh, try looking up their relative positions on you maps app. You pulls a few of these about London, he walks home from work, it’s about a six hour journey. He stays in a nice flat in S. Kensington that he’s renting. I can’t find anywhere to rent there for less than £12k per month, and he’s meant to be doing that on a lecturer's salary? Really? Likewise, as a visiting lecturer in a British university he’s unlikely to be a professor, our lecturing positions are different, professors are heads of departments and similar. Students mostly call staff by their first name at university level. Hilary was my head of faculty, I know she was professor so...

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...

The very short review of this film is “gorgeous but WTF was that?” I have read, although a long time ago, a translation of the book (which was the first complete release of the story) and, like a lot of fairy stories, the original is a LOT darker than the Disney movie for example (although some of the weird bits of the Disney film come from the book more or less intact), and some of that darkness comes through clearly. The scene where Pinocchio first comes to life felt pretty familiar for example and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a 19th century Italian story, the heavy Catholicism in this adaptation felt familiar too. However, I’m pretty sure Collodi didn’t predict the first and second world wars, the rise of Mussolini and the like, but Il Duce is a character we see as del Toro's obsession with fascism coming through. This takes the story into almost pure del Toro, I say almost pure because there are easter eggs from the original thrown in. Why is the boy Pinocchio befriends calle...

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...

Wednesday is, of course, an adaptation of The Charles Addams cartoons and their other adaptations, particularly the two films with Christina Ricci et al (you can find little and not so little easter eggs scattered throughout the episodes). This is also identifiably a Tim Burton series (you can find easter eggs for his previous work too) but this is more an adaptation like Sweeney Todd than Alice in Wonderland - I think the source is macabre enough he sprinkles his touches throughout rather than twisting it too far. However, it would be fair to say that this show owes as much to the success of Harry Potter, and it’s far less TERF-associated spin-offs, as it does to the original material. In the vast majority of the earlier material we have the family together, by and large. This series sends Wednesday away to boarding school, which is distinctly not Hogwarts in many ways but, equally, could have come from the mind of Tim Burton but probably wouldn’t have been funded like this in a...

Warrior Nun doesn’t pick up where season one finished, but it’s relatively close, there’s a two month gap rather than the two years we’ve had to wait. This is just long enough for the plans of various factions to have started to develop. Adriel is using his powers to create new followers, human possessed by wraiths he is calling over of course. The nuns are on the run, hampered by the fact that Father Vincent is thoroughly on Adriel's side. Beatrice and Ava are trying to lie low in a bar in the Italian Alps, but Bea is super-organised and Ava is… well Ava so it doesn’t go too well. There’s a new, anti-Adriel group called The Samaritans, and Ava gets mixed up with one of them in the bar. Because this is television, this is obviously significant, but the ways it’s significant turn out to be complex and interesting. Lilith’s story keeps developing, as does Jillian Salvius' story and the new pope’s. Some of these story developments are in moderately predictable ways, some are fr...

This show deserves multiple trigger warnings for bullying, bullying of a sexual nature, sexual blackmail and extreme body horror. I expected the last one of those, it’s a zombie TV series, the others I will discuss relatively shortly but I need to say they almost made me stop watching and they’re not super-strong triggers for me, so if they are for you, I’d seriously steer clear. Relatively hot on the heels of Squid Game Korea and Netflix gives us All Of Us Are Dead a zombie drama set, in part, in a high school but spreading into the wider city as well. We have fast, smart zombies, always a lethal combination and the transformation is combined with spectacular body horror level contortions after someone is infected. The transformations en masse tick all the horror tropes, and impact, you’d want. But because the transformation takes a while from infection to turning into zombie it has moments of massive pathos as characters we’ve grown to like slowly change before our eyes. The hig...