Be Excellent To Each Other

Uh, because it was Finding Santa, not Finding Christmas

Please do not inspect my credentials, it is cold out

Oh, with the guy from The Rookie? That's less exciting.


Turns out that was a lie. Don't do this.

Finding Christmas sounds like a cheesy re-run of The Holiday.






In.

A Christmas Miracle for Daisy - tired of the corporate rat race, a lady moves from LA to Montana and is an interior designer. There's a new house that needs designing, interiorly, and she's on the case! BUT IN A SHOCKING TURN OF EVENTS it's her ex fiance that has bought the house! Knitwear and an inexplicable Father Christmas character abound.
Love.it.

9/10.

Do Christmas movies ever do it the other way around? A young woman leaves her job at the cupcake shop in her home town, moves to NYC and meets an ambitious young corporate lawyer and realises this is what she wanted all along?

@maliA may enjoy these, which you print out, deal out at random each time you watch a Christmas movie and see who can win: https://myfreebingocards.com/bingo-card ... ds/stqgcwx

Brilliant. Thank you

I can't believe I didn't include "a relative is ill"

Oh, you made those? They’re ace. I was going to print a couple off for Russell and I over Christmas.

A Brush with Christmas- a lady who is a chef BUT ALSO A PAINTER lives in a small town (which has an outdoor boat museum, as opposed to those modern indoor boats) and man who draws things comes to stay with his friend. There's an arts festival )which is massively poorly run by my standards) and that's the hook. It's riddled with continuity errors so 8/10

Also, I don't believe it was filmed in winter.

Gran Turismo. I really disliked the look of this from the trailers. But for all the cynicism of the product placement, the gossamer-thin and obvious plot, the fact that the real-life story doesn't seem all that exciting, and Orlando Bloom delivering lines in ways that have to be heard to be believed... it's alright! Once you're into the racing, it's consistently good, David Harbour can hold the thing together on his own and does, and the lead (Archie Madekwe) is really likeable - and surprised me by showing just how improbable the real-life story was. I was on an exercise bike while watching and it diverted me completely, which is all I wanted.

I watched a film!

Leave the World Behind

If you’re a fan of Sam Esmail and his work on Mr Robot you’ll probably be all over this (like I was). If you ain’t or aren’t familiar, you might be a bit meh to this slow paced drama. You’ll probably be a little blah to the ending an’ all. Not me, I was furiously jacking myself off at how good it was. Fuck that kid and her obsession with Friends though.

The Bad Batch is baffling from a "what did they think they were achieving exactly?" perspective. Unless someone just wanted more topless Jason Momoa I guess.

Netflix describes The Electrifying World of Louis Wain as 'whimsical' but I've had to take multiple breaks from the deep upset it's caused me.

We watched the new Eddy Murphy Christmas film 'Candy Cane Lane' on a streaming channel (I think it was Amazon Prime).

It was solid but not terribly engaging film, but the last few scenes were kinda exciting. The kids enjoyed the couple of 'cutaway swear' gags as they are potty mouthed little hooligans.

It wasn't as wholesome or as engaging as some of the other recent Christmas movies, but it wasn't bad. 63%

I quite like Jillian Bell.

I've watched 1/3rd of Last Christmas and it's been great so far.

Might be my favourite (other than Die Hard).

Films that I watched over Xmas:

Amerikasti: Oscar nominated Armenian film about an Armenian living in American that returns to Armenian to be repatriated in 1948. He immediately discovers that communism isn’t great and gets locked up for wearing a tie. And being American. It sounds grim but it’s actually a comedy/farce about how he watches an Armenian family in a house from his jail window and gets involved in their life. Pretty good I thought.

Then I watched The Creator: high concept sci fi with incredible visuals. Seriously impressive looking throughout. It’s about a war between robots and humans. Humans don’t like robots and don’t think they’re alive so they hunt them down and kill them after robots are blamed for nuking LA. It aint Bladerunner, mind, but rather a tale that’s supposed to make you feel things for robots as they’re just living their life while in fear of humans blowing them. Despite this, it’s a seriously soulless affair (ho ho). I failed to get invested in the people or robots. I couldn’t give too shits and just wanted more action, but even that lacks that… something, that would elevate it to being essential viewing. Just something was missing through the whole film that felt quite difficult to pin down. It’s an entertaining watch but I’ll probably forget about this film pretty quickly. It’s a real shame cause it had real potential to be utterly fantastic.

Godzilla Minus One was great. A nice change from American cinema.

Yeah, watched that this afternoon with my daughter, we both loved it.

We’ve signed up for the unlimited pass at our local cinema, so I expect we’ll see quite a bit more over the next few months. £9.99 a month was too cheap to ignore.

We went to see Wonka on Christmas Eve. Really enjoyed it. Might go and watch Godzilla while I’m off… not sure if I’ve ever watched one on the big screen.

Wonka was so much fun. Exactly what this dreary year needed. It looked a treat, I had to put my eyeballs back in their sockelettes.

I don't see how an hour of blood, boobs and people saying "fuck" is going to fix Rebel Moon.

It needs a directors cut! By the director, who made it, with full control over the movie, who released it... Isn't the film he released the directors cut already? If it needed more, put it in before you release it

It was extremely mediocre. I had zero feelings about it either way, it was just, meh.

Godzilla Minus One was great, think it’s already my fave Godzilla film.

Extra points for Shinden as the hero plane from me.

I *thought* it was a real plane, but had to wait till I got home to confirm. Minus points for referring to it as a jet.

In other new, The Family Plan on Apple TV was good, disposable fun action.

Yeah it had me at the Zero to be honest.

I’m not saying that The Marvels is bad but, fuck me, it’s terrible.

Bree Olsen’s face when Rambo says “why don’t you fly into the sun?” is fucking hilarious. Her face is all like “Bitch, why don’t you shut your mouth”.

The fight sequences are awful too. And tonally it’s all over the place. They almost have a musical number half way through on a planet “where everyone sings” and they do nothing with it. I was thinking, fuck, if you’re going to just go nuts, go nuts. But nah, they dance a bit and have a CG fight against space ships.

Captain Rambo is just dreadful as well. Awful dialogue throughout, lacks any charisma and can’t fight to save her life.

Ms Marvel is surprisingly alright, mind. She’s the only one holding this together.

Aye up, Rambo has turned into a space ghost.

Huh, Rambo is stuck on the other side of a worm hole. In space. That we’ve already established MFs can just fast travel to and from anyway? I don’t know, just give her an hour or so to fly back I guess…

That final fight with the Creed boss was a bag of shit. Gotta be the worst Marvel baddie yet. Ineffectual, wasn’t scary, barely a threat. What was the point?

I’m not sure what the bit with the cats was about either. It just turned into an elongated comedy sequence for little to no reason but to pad the runtime. The Marvels weren’t even in it. Thankfully. Some might say.

OMG HER FROM HAWKEYE! I don’t care.

<small voice>
I really enjoyed Marvels…



I liked Wonka a lot too.

This is the MCU in a nutshell nowadays.

missed that edition

Poor Things was weird as fuck

'Indian Top Gun' https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/j ... propaganda

"one ludicrous sequence after another" 2*, The Guardian.

"Yes", 5*, Cottage 14.

(I haven't seen it.)

It’s on at my local cinema. Might pass

The Lost City is enormously good fun with a brilliant cast

The Beekeeper. Even for a Statham film, this is witless and humourless. It wants to be John Wick very badly. It just about gets away with making Statham do a bit of a US accent and laughs at it when one character 'detects' a bit of British in there. But why pick an English actor with a similar accent problem to play the president? Weird. Action redeems it slightly.

The Holdovers with Paul Giamatti is not the type of film I’d normally watch, but was very well written and acted. A great way to spend a couple of hours.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14849194/

Last night I noticed that "Suitable Flesh" had been released on Shudder.

It's a (very loose) reworking of Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" starring Heather Graham and Barbara Crampton as a couple of psychiatrists, one of which gets involved with a patient who seems to have multiple personalities (or does he?).

To be honest I found it a bit of a let down, it was marketed as a spiritual successor to the Gordon 80's 'Lovecraft' films but it didn't have half of the looney stuff that those films had. You do get a looksee at Heather Graham's boobs if that is relevant to your interests and it must be noted that Barbara Crampton is now 65 years old but seems to have stopped aging in her early 40s. So in summary, probably I would only recommend it if you have an interest in 'inspired by HP Lovecraft' films, it's silly but not silly (in a gory /sexy way) enough.

The Matrix Resurrections is a generally very good film. Why didn't they just make that instead of those 2 other stupid ones?

There's something very very wrong with the audio mix (on Amazon prime) though, bits that should be noisy/bassy went very quiet. Even after accepting the shitty £2.99/mo ad-free (and also audio quality it turns out) surcharge.

Watched this at the weekend and really enjoyed it - good lighthearted fun. The purple sequinned catsuit was an inspired choice.


We also watched Cool Runnings with the kids. I'd forgotten how good a film this is. Also, there's something about the simplicity of older films (not too many sub plots or twists and turns, not relying on fancy CGI and effects) that I really dig.

And, on TV, we watched Jurrassic World the Lost Kingdom. In what I consider to be a true mark of a movies impact, as well as my own lack of care sometimes, it took me at least 10 minutes to work out if I'd seen it before or not (turns out, I had). It's a perfectly fine film and quite enjoyable, but as with a number of the other big franchise films it's hard sometimes to remember the different instalments and they all kind of blend into one indistinct lump in my memory; I'm thinking of the Mission Impossible films in particular here.