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...

The rejects in Slough House are back. The series continues to mix the two styles of British spy stories, Bond and le Carré, flashy and seedy. This time we have a classic trope of both genres: the long buried secret. This is nicely woven into the existing characters in a way that, in retrospect I should have seen coming but, as each twist was revealed, it felt at least surprising, sometimes shocking. It’s hard to really talk about without spoilers. It’s an adaptation of a spy novel where there’s a necessarily intricate plot to satisfy the spooks fans, but I will say that, as mentioned above, there’s some lovely character work here too. Part of that is because we have a larger cast. Even with some of the slow horses being functionally red coats, walking fatalities waiting to happen, albeit slightly more filled out than the classic Trek version - we know something about these characters rather than them being a non-speaking extra hired for the week - we have quite a number of characters ...

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...

Warning: This is not as spoiler-free as my reviews normally are. This is an adaptation of a book that is as old as me. You’ve had a LONG time to read it and get to grips with the story. I largely keep to the elements that we’ve seen in the trailers, but there are some changes made in the adaptation process that changed how the film worked at critical points for me, making it not work. Although I tried, I found I couldn’t write this review without coming back to them, so you have been warned. Dune Part Two starts with a huge challenge but a lot of goodwill, at least here. Just like in the book, the first chunk, the first film, is a huge amount of world building, the second chunk brings that to fruition. Fortunately it faces up to the challenge and largely overcomes it. There are a chunk of big plot arcs, pretty diverse plot arcs too, that have to be kept in air and then nicely resolved. We’re used to seeing that in streaming series, but we’ve fallen out of the habit of seeing it done...

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...

This is an interesting special for Dr. Who. It’s the Christmas special but it’s also the official introduction for both a new Doctor and a new companion. This particular “everything new” combination in a Christmas Special hasn’t been done before - the 2005 Christmas Special had an existing companion but a new Doctor, it’s fairly common to have The Doctor sans companion, and we’ve had an exiting version of The Doctor plus an incarnation of The Impossible Girl, but not a clean slate like this. I would say it attempted too much to fully succeed and, perhaps inevitably, it was the companion intro, that suffered a bit. She hovered somewhere between plot token and rounded character. As long as she doesn’t become another Impossible Girl, that’s not a disaster though. They had to land the Doctor properly, they had to make the story work and, as we saw with Clara, it’s possible to rescue even a season of the companion being a plot token more than a character, and we can hope the Ruby becomes mo...

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...

Barbie is a film where the 2001 -spoof trailer made me say “yes, I want to see that” and, as well as being the opening scene, pretty much sets the tone for the film. Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie is a brilliant piece of casting but, to my surprise, Ryan “stone face” Gosling is equally amazing as Stereotypical Ken. There has to be a level of irony in the fact that in this film he’s playing a plastic character, literally, whose face cannot move but he emotes more than I’ve seen in any other film I’ve seen him in. Helen Mirren is the narrator and that British sarcasm adds a whole extra layer to the film. But that’s just part of the whole script, which is amazing. It’s funny, moving and clever. There’s a wide range of humour, from pithy one-liners to longer form observational satirical sketches and pretty much everything in between. I’ll be honest, not all the humour lands as hilarious for me, I don’t have all the experiences (it’s hard to say which ones without major spoilers), ...

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...

Season two of Slow Horses doesn’t quite maintain the split between the two styles of British spy drama as evenly as season one, it’s heavier into the Slough House side of the balance than the Regent’s Park side. However, just as we had a plausible story of modern Britain in season one, we have a somewhat plausible story here. It’s centred around long-term KGB sleeper agents and we know the KGB did do this sort of thing, I’m not sure enough of them are still fit and active, and ideologically engaged, to do what we’ve got here, but it’s not impossible. That said, most of the people who are doing the heavy lifting, the deeply involved things reveal that they have motives that I felt worked. We’ve got a couple of new cast members (we lost Sid and Struan in season one, so we get replacements) who manage to have plenty to do, and one of whom shows why they were sent to Slough House early on. The other not so much, which raises alarm bells after season one of course. We have, as we had las...

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...

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...

In general British spy dramas, and have no doubt, Slow Horses is a thoroughly British spy drama, fall into two camps. You have the Bond Camp, everything is glitzy, high tech and high adrenaline, high paced. You have, whether in the book or film style of this, peaks and troughs of tension that are really well suited to the film but work well in a book too. The other is the Smiley Camp, quite slow paced, seedy and the most high-tech thing is usually the photocopier. Sifting through papers and bins is often the height of the action but the stress builds and builds inexorably. Interestingly, both of the authors behind the typonyms are former spies, but one was there during WWII and the other during the Cold War, so perhaps it reflects the way things changed from hot to cold espionage. I’m not aware of a spy novelist coming out of the social media iteration of spy craft, although I’m sure there will be one, if there isn’t one already. I wonder what they will look like? While you can argue...

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...