The Movie Addict

Jaws is the original blockbuster and in its 50th Anniversary year I took the opportunity to see it on the big screen and for some reason it was in 3D. It’s probably been 15 years since I saw a film in 3D and there were a couple of times I took the glasses off (that I had to wear over my normal glasses) and the picture was a bit blurred and it did look a lot nicer with the 3D glasses on.  The thing about this film that I always know but forget until I see it is that it is effectively two films in one. The first half is on land and is dealing with the threat of a shark eating the tourists  in a town where tourism is vital and then the second half is about three blokes  trying to kill the shark. Both halves are very good. The Mayor has always been portrayed as someone who will do whatever it takes to keep the beaches open even when people are being killed because and this time I sort of understand why he does what he does even if I don’t agree with his methods.  The ...

 So this was a mystery screening that I was 99.9% sure was The Toxic Avenger because somebody decided to list the mystery screening above the option for this film which had the same certificate and the same duration. This version is a remake of the 1984 cult classic which I confess I haven't seen (yet). The set up of the film is that Peter Dinklage plays Winston who lives with his step son and works at a dodgy place run by Kevin Bacon and after attempting to steal cash he is thrown into the toxic water and then exacts revenge and that's pretty much it.  The plot is pretty straight forward, Kevin Bacon is the comedic baddie with Elijah Wood as his brother. Wood seems to be channeling Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s nice to see Kevin Bacon is something that isn't a phone advert. Last time I saw him was in MaXXXine and he seemed to be hamming it up and he has turned that up to 11 in this. When he turns he seems to be chewing the scenery and having fun with i...

The Life of Chuck is one of those films that I took a gamble on. The trailers that I had seen didnt really show very much but it did show that it had a stella cast including Tom Hiddelston, Karen Gillan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Hamil and Matthew Lillard. This film is a genre bending, narrative bending film which strangely starts off with act three. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan are a former married couple and Ejiofor is a teacher and Gillan is a nurse. The internet stops working and at first people seem to be more concerned with whether it will come back or not and at one point someone is worried if porn is going to be back. As things get progressively worse and adverts appear for someone called Chuck who is celebrating 39 years even though he barely looks older than 39 and the planets start going out. No one seems to know who he is but that never really gets solved because the film isn't really about filling in the blanks. I was worried when Ejiofor started talking about someth...

I got a chance to see Eddington a few days before its general cinematic release and the trailer seemed intriguing and it has some big names and I thought it was worth a try as I was disappointed with Beau is Afraid and Hereditary and Midsommar were slightly odd films. The film is set in May 2020 when the world was preoccupied with the coronavirus and the Sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) is trying to stop people wearing masks but the Mayor (Pedro Pascal) is the opposite and the film then seems to try and make it the Sheriff vs the Mayor before becoming about the chaos caused by Black Lives Matter. This is the third Pedro Pascal film that I have seen in the space of a few weeks and whilst he doesn't feature as much as he did in The Fantastic Four: First Steps or Materialists but he is quite good in this and is the opposite of Joaquin Phoenix’s Sheriff in every way imaginable and that is one of the key things about the film. I do think as much as I think that Joaquin Phoenix is a very good a...

Not sure if the world was crying out for a sequel to Nobody. I remember liking the first one when it came out as I like Bob Odenkirk and it was fun seeing him do the John Wick thing as Odenkirk. The set up is that Hutch and his family go on a vacation that Hutch went on when he was a kid. Turns out that the town is hiding illegal operations run by Lendina (Sharon Stone) who controls Sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks). Just because Hank stares into the distance remembering a happy childhood memory this annoys the Sheriff and Hutch gets on the wrong side of the law very quickly. The film takes a while to get started as it spends a long time setting things up which is odd for a sequel but there we go. They decide to take David (Christopher Lloyd) because…..well he’s Christopher Lloyd and he was fun to see in the first film. The whole idea about a nice peaceful town having a criminal dark side isn’t really fleshed out but I suppose the screenplay is written by Derek Kolstad who wrote the John Wick...

In an attempt to try and expand the sort of films I see, I decided to watch Materialists which is my second Pedro Pascal film in as many weeks. This is by far the worst of the two. The film sees Dakota Johnson play someone who pairs people up at a posh dating agency but whilst attending a wedding she bumps into Pedro Pascal and they start dating. Also at the wedding she meets her ex in the form of Chris Evans and the film becomes a love triangle.  I can't understand what people find so appealing about romance films because everyone and I mean everyone is insufferable and I didn't really care what happened to Dakota Johnson’s character. The only character that I cared about was Sophie. Her story saw he get assaulted by a guy that Dakota Johnson’s character set up with because he ticked the right box. That stuff felt like it had some emotion to it and credit to Zoe Winters for making the character seem like a real person instead of the soulless characters that occupied the rest o...

I’m normally not a big fan of body horror. I think that when it's done well it can be a bit too squishy and so it's something I tend to stay away from, however there was something about Together that made me curious. It was because it was given a 15 certificate and yet Weapons was given an 18 (which it didn’t deserve) so I decided to take the risk and see if I could cope with it. The set up of the film sees Dave Franco and Alison Brie play a couple called Tim and Millie who for ‘reasons’ move to the countryside and in no time at all they go hiking and fall into a cave, whilst staying the night they decide to drink some water and that is when things go wrong. The whole process of Tim and Millie trying to figure out what is going on was quite interesting and it helps that Franco and Brie are married in real life as this means that you buy that they are a couple that are having issues and normally the differences would annoy me but Brie and Franco work well to make me care about w...

Weapons is one of the most intriguing films of the year. I was a fan of Zach Cregger’s last film ‘Barbarian’. The set up is that all but one child in a class disappeared at 2:17am, the film is a Rashomon structured film where we see a certain time period from several different perspectives that seem unrelated but then there is a little moment that connects it to the overall story. Julia Garner is the teacher who is suspected by pretty much the entire city that she knows something and we see her story, then we see the principal (Benedict Wong) and his story, Josh Brolin plays Archer who is the father one of of the missing kids who believes that Justine has something to do with it, then we see James (Austin Abrams) who is a junkie who breaks into the house that has the kids then Alden Ehrenreich plays the cop who has a thing with Justine and finally we have Alex’s story and his is the most interesting. Alex is the only one in the class and that was a mystery that was more interesting tha...

The Naked Gun is a much loved comedy which is a recognisable IP so it was inevitable that we were going to get a remake. I liked the first one and probably saw the other two many many years ago but I never had an emotional connection to them. The idea of Liam Neeson playing a comedy role works for me. He was funny in Ted 2 although he was only in it briefly but he has done other comedy shows and films. When the first trailer came out I enjoyed it because of the OJ Simpson joke but when the second trailer came out I was less confident because it seems like the jokes were trying too hard compared to the ease that the original ones were pulled off. Sadly that proved to be the case. The film starts off with a bank robber and someone stealing a literal plot device. Neeson plays Drebin Jr and Drebin is trying to find what happened to a guy who died in a car accident. Paul Walter Hauser plays Hocken Jr and CCH Pounder is their boss trying to keep them under control. Danny Huston plays Richard...

Elio is a film that seemed like it could be a lot of fun based off the trailer which is a mistake as a trailer has more often than not made a film to look better than it is. The trailer didn’t suggest that Elio had lost his parents (deceased parents is such a typical Disney move) and he now lives with his aunt who works on an air force base. He gets interested in space and then wants to be abducted by aliens and gets his wish and ends up in the communiverse with a variety of different aliens. This includes a warmongering Lord Grigon. Elio is mistakenly thought of as the leader of Earth and soon finds himself trying to broker a peace with Grigon. In the middle of all this He makes friends with Glordon who is the son of Lord Grigon. Elio plans to use Glordon as a bargaining chip and when he comes to pick up fortis then things go wrong and that is when the plot really kicks in. The animation is your typical Pixar sort and it’s nice and can work in any type of story. It’s weird to think th...