Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

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 ...

Australia v SA This week started with Australia hosting South Africa in Adelaide, a city that rarely sees rugby, let alone test rugby. RA couldn’t find anyone to promote the game and go to Adelaide, while several current and recent players (who are free agents of course) went to Melbourne to promote an NBA game that was being played there. And then people wonder why their TV deal is worth about 1/3 of the NZRU’s TV deal… Although you might expect this to be a walkover for the Boks, their recent record in Australia is dismal, they haven’t won there for nearly a decade. This match was no change to recent form, despite the bookies and the experts predictions. In fact, until late in the game the Wallabies held the Boks to only three points, their try in the couple of minutes made the scoreline look close and that is not really a good indicator of how one-sided the game was. It is an indicator that the Wallabies subs were a long way off the pace, which we saw in their last match too, an...

I didn’t write a review after week one because I was frustrated by one match and didn’t get a chance to properly watch the other. It made for a very terse review. But time heals some frustration and the contrasts between weeks 1 and 2 makes for an interesting story. So here we go. Rather than week 1, week 2, I’m doing the two matchups over both weekends. South Africa v New Zealand In week one, SA kicked and tackled the life out of NZ, strangling their attack, running riot at the breakdown and winning every aerial battle (except one, which saw a horrific mid-air collision and a red card). There were a few moments where SA pulled a fingertip tackle or similar out of the bag and stifled a possible fight back but there were far, far more occasions when the ref found a reason to whistle, usually the wrong way (IMO) and stifle any momentum the ABs were starting to build. At one point the penalty count was 5-0 and of those one penalty just shouldn’t have been given (he should have caused us...

Two shows in a row that were deemed unfilmable. Both have spent years, decades even, in various development hells and both have turned out to be very satisfying series. That said, where I described Foundation as sometimes hard to penetrate and requiring of attentive watching, The Sandman was a visual feast and every episode was a storytelling treat so I simply never wanted to take my eyes off the screen. It the difference between not daring to look away (although I was always sufficiently engaged this wasn’t an issue) and not wanting to look away. The differences run deeper than that. Foundation was based on a book while The Sandman is based on mature comics (later graphic novels and then book-length collections). That makes Foundation feel like a 10-hour movie, with a consistent, on-going story, split into sections. There’s absolutely noting wrong with that and while it’s not the only way we see these 10-episode streaming series if you look back at Stranger Things , First Kill ...

Foundation is based to some extent on at least part of a series of books by Issac Asimov. I have read them but several decades ago (maybe more than 40 years for the original trilogy, even the fourth book. That makes my memory between fuzzy and minimal, but there are enough parts that I do remember despite that gap that it clearly captures at least parts of the original but I can’t honestly comment on how faithful it is. The fact it’s taken this long to make a TV series from it says something about how “unfilmable” a series it is. The first four episodes span about as long as it’s been since I’ve read the books, although a lot of this is done in a single jump. That jump is, eventually, made clear but as I remember the book it’s very explicit. As they’ve chosen to shoot it, it’s really not. That’s a choice that feels unnecessary to be honest, and changes the way the flow feels. There are later time shifts, but they’re shot rather differently and flow much more sensibly. There is, as we...