Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

The elevator pitch for First Kill must have been quite a doozy. I imagine it went something like “Buffy x lesbian Romeo and Juliet x iZombie”. The Romeo and Juliet part is easy; our leads are a vampire and a hunter from wealthy families so we have two powerful families, divided. Admittedly not in fair Verona, but it’s pretty easy to see those lines of similar power and structure as we have between the Montagues and Capulets. They each have a scion, Calliope and Juliet, and these two have a complex home life, where they’re expected to uphold the family traditions, which includes hunting and killing the other while being the precious baby of the family. They also happen to meet and fall in love… Of course this doubles down on R&J, but the hunter and vampire as star-crossed lovers obviously brings in Buffy vibes. The iZombie vibes come from the sarcastic internal dialogue we're treated to. It’s not as sarcastic as Liv's inner voice but it is appropriate for the the charact...

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...

Yesterday England, technically the British Parliament but they did both happen to be English constituencies, had two by-elections. Both were caused by Tory MPs resigning in the face of a scandal. One, the MP for Wakefield, was convicted of historical sex abuses while the other, the MP for Tiverton and Honiton, resigned after it emerged he’d been watching porn on his phone in the chamber of the House of Commons. Honestly, it takes watching porn at work to a whole new level if you’re doing it at the place where people make the laws about whether it’s just to sack people for doing that… The Wakefield By-election, for all it was caused by a thankfully rare type of scandal, went pretty much as expected. The Tories won it in 2019, in something of a surprise, Labour won it back this time. The Tory spin machine is saying “nothing to see here, move along.” Broadly, that’s fair - this was a pretty marginal seat that you’d expect the government to lose in the middle of a parliament, plus it’s a...

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...

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...