Be Excellent To Each Other

Watched The Marvels, it was a silly Marvel film, but we loved it. A nice cast and the story kinda worked. The hate is not not justified for the film.

Quite...watched it over the weekend and enjoyed it immensely.

Same. Watched it. Enjoyed it. Didn't feel the need to be a misogynistic arse on the internet. Weird.

Ticket booked for Dune on March 1st. This will be my first trip to the cinema in over five years...at this price it'll be another five years before I go again.

I don't think it will catch on.

Yeah, we've still got half an hour to go (dessert needs preparing) but The Marvels is brilliant. Stupid internet basement trolls are stupid.

Even the CGI is better than anything else Disney has done in the last year, except maybe Loki season 2.

Wicked Little Letters was very sweary fun.

Continuing the nostalgia-tinged run of watching older family friendly films, on Saturday night we all got together to watch A Knights Tale. No, 2001 doesn't feel that long ago to us, but apparently it was. I remember taking Lady T on a date to the cinema to see this. All of the streaming services wanted to charge money for it so I had to hunt around for the DVD.
I never fail to enjoy this film, it's just such a fun romp and a nice, neat, story - charming and well acted, it looks like they had fun making it. The kids enjoyed it a lot, and so did I.


After the kids went to bed it was time for more grown up film and this time it was Lady Ts choice, and she picked 'Players' on netflix. It's a modern rom-com type deal but I didn't find any laughs in the roughly 45 minutes I lasted before falling asleep. Imagine the concept of Barney Stinsons playbook, but stretched out for a whole movie and not done for laughs. Now also make it a big-team effort of implausibly coordinated characters that are snappy talkers and quick thinkers, almost like a gang in a heist-movie. It was shit, and although I didn't hate it, there was zero enjoyment to be had. When I woke up, Lady T said the film was simply 'alright'.

I haven't fallen asleep in front of a crap movie in ages. Must rectify that.

I'd actually like to stay awake instead, but it's hard to do that with some of this tripe that's put in front of me when I'm pretty bloody knackered already.

Just back from seeing Dune. Excellent stuff, I don't think there has been anything like it for a very long time.

If you are going try to see it on the biggest screen you can.

Obviously set up to have a sequel if this one does well enough but leaves the most important question unanswered. "Where do the Bene Gesserit get their magnificent hats?"

It really bloody well was.

The Beekeeper: bouncing straight in at a 10/10 for one amazing coat. Would be 8/10 otherwise, as Statham does what Statham does. However he isn't in a vest so 9/10 overall.

Watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off last night. One of those films I'd heard a lot about but never actually seen.

Very enjoyable. Had I watched it as a teenager I probably would have obsessed about it as Bueller's antics certainly taps into adolescent anti-authority fantasies (which I think was the appeal of the Marx Brothers to my 14 year old mind).

Also, it's very much an unintentional period piece now. The music, the hair, and the tech all scream 1980s!

Ferris Bueller is a knob. But he has what the kids call "rizz", so he gets away with it.

100% he'd be a Senator in real life.

Coke-addled twat in sales or promotion or something like that.

Yesterday I did something I haven't done since 1977, which was to go to the cinema on my own. Last time it was to see 'A New Hope' and I went alone because Mrs. W is not a sci-fi fan and I couldn't think of anyone else to go with.

Same applied to Dune Pt2 which I went to see at noon yesterday. It was indeed excellent stuff and VERY LOUD. I came out feeling like I did when I was a kid and went to see some kind of action adventure film, exhilarated and full of energy. Of course, like LOTR, Dune wasn't 100% true to the book, but then how could it be at only 2 hours and 40 minutes. But neither was David Lynch's go at it in 1984, but that one didn't leave the end dangling with no expectation of a sequel. AND that was the whole thing covered in 2hr 17m.

To be fair, it's technically 5 hours long.

If.l you can't tell a story, and don't have Jason Statham in vest punching a shark in the face, in under two hours, it isn't a film it's indulgence.

Yes, yes...all very interesting. But what about the hats?

Does Dune 2 have like a recap of Dune 1 at the start of it or anything like that?

No, but part 1 is on Disney+ if you have access to that.

Or I can tell you about it if you like, but it would probably take longer than reading the book or watching the movie.

By the look of them they're all made by The Mad Hatter.

Part 2 is deffo 2 hrs 40mins, without the end credits. I made a point of checking the actual running time. IMDB says Pt 1 was 2h 35m, so very technically it's 5hr 15m in total.

It's not a story, it's a minuscule part of a saga, or perhaps a melange, that spans millennia.

Oh, I have Part 1 on my Plex server and I've watched it previously. But I don't remember much of it, other than that it was ever so slightly hard to follow -- but I was watching at home so I probably wasn't fully concentrating on it.

I'm that way with almost every drama I watch these days i.e. everything is ever so slightly hard to follow.

Kate had some surgery, they said she wouldn't be back while Easter, it isn't Easter so everyone should calm the fuck down.

Louder. The answer is louder.

Maybe she won't be back until Dune.

Watched Wicked Little Letters last night. It was very funny, and is exactly the kind of gentle black comedy movie that I adore. Top-tier performances by both Olivia Colman and Jesse Buckley, and Timothy Spall is also very menacing as a 'villain' of the movie, not a role I've seen him play very much before.

Thoroughly recommended.

I keep seeing trailers for that movie and it looks brilliant.

It was. So much fun.

Oh very good

I watched some films

While scrolling through Shudder I saw that 'Destroy all Neighbours' had been released. Intrigued as I knew it involved Alex Winters and was a Prog Rock horror I decided to watch it.

Throughout I could feel my IQ dropping, it is not a good film, it is a stupid, silly film. Having said that I enjoyed it quite a bit, everyone was having a good time and the effects are suitably low budget and ropey. Can't say I would recommend it but if you have 80 minutes free...

I was waiting for the penny to drop, somewhere.

Dune 2: loud, louder, visually amazing, shit dialogue. Really liked it

The Bee Keeper - Amazing

I went in with really low expectations (Sky Originals seem to be really low budget affairs on the whole), but I actually found myself enjoying this, turn your brain off, don't worry too much about motives, or how many British actors are doing really bad American accents (the FBI lady lamp-shaded Stath's at least!) and enjoy the silliness and action.

The next day we watched 57 seconds (Josh Hutchinson is in both films), Another Sky Original, a bit silly again, (the plot device is that there is a ring, that allows you to travel back in time 57 seconds. - so there are a few TikTok Groundhog Day Style shenanigans.

Again it was a little formulaic, but enjoyable

“Godzilla X Kong - meh” sums it up quite nicely.

Fun enough but entirely forgettable.

Stayed awake then?

Two large bags of Haribo helped. Legs were a bit twitchy, mind.

I watched Dune: Part 2 too. Man alive the audio in IMAX was so fucking groovy. Looked nice too. I’ve never been a Dune book fan, mind, and never played the Amiga game either. Still, I enjoyed the first film a lot and it won me over by the end. Bit slow to get moving, mind. And I wanted more of a “Helms Deep” battle at the end after waiting so fucking long.

Ghostbusters Frozen Empire was good, perhaps not quite as good as Afterlife but I still enjoyed it. It was a fun little film and seemed to move at a fairly brisk pace. The kids liked it too.

As you may have expected

One weekend evening the kids wanted to watch a movie but bedtime was approaching so we asked them to find something short to watch so they chose some old (ok, 90s) film called The Big Green

Entirely predictable, disadvantaged students in a poor town have no hope but a SUBSTITUTE TEACHER comes in an manages to find a SURPRISING way of getting through the them and through the MAGIC OF SOCCER (football) there's a happy ending. Even though I gave that snarky description, I found the film charming and fun, a really good family movie - although it is very much lightweight. The lady in it was very pretty, Steve Guttenburg looked like he was really phoning it it.

We watched that one in the depths of lockdown. It's a straight re-run of The Mighty Ducks, but no less enjoyable

I'm not sure if I've seen Mighty Ducks, but I did have the feeling I'd seen this story (more than once) before. But still as you say enjoyable and perfect family-film fodder. In fact, it was quite nice to watch a nice film, it was relatively gentle and charming.

The Meg 2 it's a brilliant b movie. Well worth the two hours.

It still blows my mind that the fellow who directed 'A Field in England' also directed 'The Meg 2'.

That is quite the career trajectory