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FrancisHHooks
Reviews
Monkey Man (2024)
Skip minutes 65 to 85 and you'll be fine!
Overall, pretty decent effort.
But it does get a bit bogged down 65 minutes in.
Seriously, you could skip 20 minutes and miss only this; the protagonist kicking/punching a punchbag and the almost unbelievably irritating bongo player guy.
Yes, the film has a delightful bongo player character who accompanies our protagonist as he does the above. Bloody hell, after ten minutes of him I wanted the break his bongos over his bonce. Annoying.
Re-join the film 95 or 100 minutes in and enjoy the top hole finale; finally it de4livers what it promises; John Wick in India.
So...decent enough action flick.
Mandy (2019)
Pure genius from Diane Morgan!
Ever wonder why sitcoms are all between 20 and 30 minutes long? Actually, no, you probably haven't wondered that! We know the reason is the genre has long been shaped by the needs of commercial television.
Well the gifted actress and writer Diane Morgan, who produces comedy for the UK station the BBC that doesn't broadcast ads, came up with a genius idea; make a brilliant fast moving comedy that clocks in at a lean 15 minutes that's crammed with fantastic jokes and a fast moving plot; cut out all the fat, get straight to the funny stuff.
And she sure achieves that goal with the hilarious adventures of Mandy Carter. She's got great support too from Michelle Greenridge as her trusty pal Lola and Tom Basden (creator of the utterly wonderful Plebs, check it out) as her long suffering careers guidance counsellor.
I mean, I could rattle on about how great Mandy is for ages but I'd only be delaying you from watching it. It's the best *new UK comedy in years! Watch it!
*Actually it's on its third series! More to enjoy!!
Wicked Little Letters (2023)
1920's England??!
1920's? Nah. This film is very much of 2024. Here's a film for "Modern Audiences", more DEI box ticking than you can shake a stick at.
Half the cast is non-white despite this being decades before the Windrush Generation changed the racial make-up of the country so pretty much every scene looks ridiculous and inaccurate.
Black police officers? An Asian WPC? In 1920's England?! Really?
Even better a black High Court Judge - in England in the 1920's!! Completely ridiculous. This sort of tokenism just takes any viewer out of the story.
And, but of course, every single white male character is negative; either cruel or cruel and stupid.
Brilliant, well done.
Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (1971)
A challenging, unique film.
What a beautiful film this is.
I saw it many years ago and it holds up on a re-watch. What makes this different from other documentarians making a film on this subject is that Werner does not pity and patronize these people. Instead he is fascinated by them, he reveres and admires them and the unique perspective they have on life.
Their experience of consciousness itself is completely different from ours and in this wonderful humane film the great man shows the utmost respect for his subjects.
My only complaint is that Herzog doesn't narrate the film himself.
Only the great Werner Herzog could've made this film.
The River Wild (1994)
Absolutely bloody awful.
I checked out the recent reboot recently and was very pleasantly surprised so thought I'd go back and re-watch this after 28 years.
I really wish I hadn't. That reboot is an entirely different film. This is a turgid, dreary, stupid slog.
The characters are irritating as hell and the plot plods. Meryl Streep is absolutely terrible in this - she does that irritating smug titter of hers every chance she gets. Which is dispiritingly often.
Also we get the double whammy of Irritating Kid and Irritating Pet, a revolting, drooling labrador, one of those anthropomorphized ones that growls at The Bad Guys, runs off when it is appropriate to do so and, despite being a dumb animal seems to follow all the plot developments to perfection. In fact, it was probably keeping better track of what was going on than I was as I was lapsing into a coma after the first 90 minutes (which felt like 90 hours.).
There are desperately stupid plot-holes too. At one point the husband escapes leaving the wife and the kid in the hands of the kidnappers. All the kidnappers have to do here is shout "Come back or we'll kill your wife and kid!". Simple, Any kidnapper worth his salt would do this. But, no. The dumb movie kidnappers pointlessly go after him!
On the plus side Reilly and Bacon are okay but both have been so much better in better films than this. Also, yes, there is a bit of excitement in the last 10 minutes but by then it's too late.
I ranked this a 1. I'd have given it a 2 if the dog had got shot in the face.
I'd have given it 3 if the labrador got shot in the face too.
Heh heh...
I Came By (2022)
"He was old".
Perfectly watchable Netflix time waster.
But.
There's a really odd bit of spectacularly lazy writing at one point.
Following the disappearance of a character's son (the son is 23), when questioned by the police about the whereabouts of his father, the mother (played by Kelly MacDonald, who is in her 40's), responds "oh he died years ago, he was old."
So he just died of natural causes then did he? More details please!
Because all I've got to work with here, with the information given, is the deeply unpleasant mental image of a teenage MacDonald doing the business with a man in his 70's or 80's! Perhaps this odd couple deserved a film of their own, surely this unlikely March to December romance was deserving a bit more scrutiny?!
Or maybe the writer was having a bit of a lazy day. "Got to figure out what happened the lad's dad. Hmm. Oh, I dunno. I'll just say he was old. That'll do."
Brilliant.
"He was old".
Dashcam (2021)
Annie Hardy is hilarious!
Dashcam
This is the new film from Rob Savage who gave us the well revived minimalist lock-down hit Host 2 years ago. Found footage - you know how they go. 23 years since Blair Witch and I feel as if I've seen about 23,000 of 'em.
This time less or no Covid restrictions and a much bigger budget (it's a Blumhouse production, no less). I wish i liked it more but in fact its a bit of a mess and by the film's middle it just seem to be the same scene repeated over and over (protagonists find car while being attacked, crash car, run, find another car, crash car, run etc etc).
But it does have 1 thing that makes it a cut above and that is its star, Annie Hardy, previously unknown to me but apparently a member of a band called Giant Drag. She has a knack for obscene improvised raps - in fact that's what her character does, she drives around doing an online live rap show which is hilarious. In fact, by quite some way the best thing about the film is the hilarious improvised rap she does over the closing credits in which she manages to insult every member of the cast and crew in rhyme. That is a joy. You could almost skip the film and just watch that. Bit of originality - I'd never seen that before - unlike the rest of the film which, as stated above, I've seen about 23,000 times before.
Annette (2021)
Hh. Problem: Adam Driver isn't funny
I really wanted to like this as I recently enjoyed Edgar Wright's doco about Sparks (who wrote this). But it's a musical, it really is, the whole way through - so I found it a bit exasperating. Also it commits one of cinema's cardinal sins (in my book); it has a character who is a stand-up comic who everyone endlessly says is brilliant and brilliantly funny all the time yet the director, writers and actor have failed to make the character funny even once for one second - and it's a 140 minutes long so there's plenty of seconds to go round.
Directed by Leo Carax - so none more arthouse.