Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

I think that is pretty much accepted by everyone that the 2016 version of Ghostbusters was terrible. The idea of having four female ghostbusters was squandered and the vocal minority that were able to act like they were right in voicing what they perceived was what was happening to their beloved franchise. Ultimately the jokes were so bad and the idea of putting comedy before the story meant that the film died a death and it seems like they have gone back to basics with this version directed by Jason Reitman son of Ivan Reitman.

The film Callie and her children (Trevor and Phoebe) who are forced to live in the house occupied by Callie’s father Egon who became estranged from his daughter and grandchildren. Callie feels a lot of resentment towards her dad but as the film progresses this softens and there is a lovely moment between Callie and a CGI Egon. Paul Rudd plays Mr Grooberson who is the 2021 Louis Tully even down to the running out of a Walmart and the creature crashing through the door to chase after him and he becoming possessed. 

The thing about this film is that its trying to create its new generation of beloved characters. Phoebe (McKenna Grace) is the new Egon and does very well in being a mirror image of Egon yet having enough qualities to feel new enough. Finn Wolfhard does get sidelined for most of the film as Trevor and only comes into the film in the second half. Logan Kim is the Stantz of the group. He’s a bit over excited with what he’s seeing and normally being a podcast obsessed would be irritating but Kim manages to make Podcast seem likeable and a good part of the group.Celeste O’Connor is the Winston of the group and aside from the romance stuff with Trevor. As she is saddled with that storyline like Wolfhard only gets the shine when the film gets into the second half. As a foursome they work really well even though they are all different people they still come together when needed like they did in 1984 and like they failed to do in 2016. 

Having Egon appear via computer trickery was a nice touch although it was slightly jarring that he didn't utter a word. It was a shame that Harold Ramis passed away in 2014 but it seemed like they wanted to have him in it but didn't know or could get the voice right. I also thought that the romance thread between Trevor and Lucky that didn't go anywhere was a bit of a waste of time. The central plot leaned a bit too much towards the first film which was disappointing because a mix of new and old is always good but it leant just a bit too much towards the old.

It was nice that Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson came back for a bit more than silly cameos. They werent in it all the time but at least the first film was remembered in a nice way and I was worried that they were going to swoop in and save the day after the younger characters had done all the heavy lifting but thankfully they didnt and had some good one liners but it did look like the years hadnt been kind to Aykroyd and Murray.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It would have had to try really hard to be worse than Ghostbusters 2016 but judging this film on its own merits then its a fun film. There are two post credit scenes. The first being with Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray nodding to the first scene that Peter had in the 1984 version which was fun but not really leading to anything and then the final scene is between Janine and Winston which shows how successful Winston has become and has kept the original building and now keeps Ecto-1 in it. Whether this leads to another film only time will tell but if the films continue in this vein then I wouldn't mind seeing more.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

I don't know the last time that I was looking forward to a film quite as much as I was looking forward to Last Night in Soho. I have been waiting to see this film since last October but the pandemic kept pushing it back and for a long time I was looking forward to this and No Time to Die to the most. The set up of the film is that Eloise (Thomasin Mackenzie) travels from her home that she shares with her Gran to attend a fashion school in London but after spending one night with her nightmare dorm mates she takes up lodgings with Ms Collins played by the late great Diana Rigg. She soon starts seeing events involving Sandie from the 1960’s who is trying to become a singer but soon becomes involved with Jack (Matt Smith) and we see Sandie being ‘killed’ and the film is Eloise trying to get justice for Sandie as she seemingly starts to lose her mind.

I really love this film. Firstly, the performances are really good. Anya Taylor Joy and Thomasin McKenzie are really good and are complete contrasts of each other. Joy’s Sandie is a confident and ambitious person whilst McKenzie’s Eloise is shy and always seems like she is fighting to stay in control of what she is seeing. Matt Smith is really good as Jack. He starts off as a charming guy who can make things happen but very quickly shows his true colours and basically becomes a pimp. Terence Stamp I think has a slightly underwritten role but manages to make his character seem just as unlikeable as Jack. For a long time I honestly thought that Stamp and Smith were playing the same character. I think this might be because of how the trailers made it seem but in reality Stamp’s character was the cop that we saw in one particular flashback. Michael Ajao is very good as John who becomes Eloise’s love interest and always seems to want to help her and even when she freaks out when they are about to make out he is still trying to help her. I thought that it was a lovely performance from him. Perhaps the single best performance comes from Diana Rigg who at first seems like she is just the cranky landlady but in the final act the films reveals that she is in fact Sandie and the blood that we saw wasn't from Sandie but in fact from Jack which I genuinely didn't see any of that coming and to be honest I wouldn't have tried to work it out cause I was just enjoying what I was seeing and all the great visuals that cinematographer Jeong Jeong-hun who worked on stuff like Oldboy and the first IT film. He makes this film work and if it weren't for the great visuals then the film would have failed miserably. Diana Rigg goes out in style with a performance that might have only mae sense in the final 20 minutes but it was bloody good. The last shot of her is in a burning room and she is sitting on the end of the bed and it just a great visual and its obvious why she doesn't feature too much in the promotional material because it would have ruined the twist.

The things that dont quite work are the gang of classmates that seem to exist purely to snigger at Eloise for being slightly different to them. The night when there is the party in the dorm and she decides to move out is exactly what I would have done. The characters don't really contribute to anything although Jocasta was by far the worst. Also at the end the film decides that she can just resume her career with no apparent repercussions for nearly stabbing Jocasta with some scissors but these are minor things because everything else is amazing in this film. Some might think that the film is style over substance then I think they are missing a lot from this film. It’s not the best Edgar Wright film because its not better than Hot Fuzz but its a damn good second best and shows that Edgar Wright is more than just flashy cut scenes and transitions.

Fantasy Island (2020)

Fantasy Island or Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island as the BBFC Certificate has it sees a group of irritating people arrive on an island where their fantasy comes true and after a while things go wrong. The rules are stated at the beginning which is that people are only allowed one fantasy and it must be seen to the end. 

The problem isn’t that all the characters are extremely irritating even though they are. It took me five minutes to come to that conclusion and that I wanted them all to meet a grizzly death. The fact that three of them didn’t was a source of annoyance for me. The problem isnt that despite setting out the rules, the film decides to change the rules. Even though they were told that once a fantasy starts it can’t be stopped, Gwen gets to change her fantasy when it turns out to be too good. Another convenient change comes right at the end when Brax is told that the fantasy he went through was his brother’s and that he gets his fantasy which is to bring his brother back. 

The main problem is that its very dull. I was waiting for something to happen and for people to get killed off but the film doesn’t do that and instead takes a very long time to set up the main twist of the film that everyone bar Melanie who brings everyone to the island to exact revenge because they were involved in her boyfriends death. That would have been a much reveal had it happened 30-40 minutes earlier. At 1 hour and 49 minutes long, its way too long and suffers from a lot of padding. Even with multiple characters the film doesn’t seem to know how make it all work. All the performances are fairly wooden even when Melanie’s true identity is revealed I didn’t care because the film had long past point of me caring. Roarke spent 95% of the film playing the villain and refusing to disobey the island and then he gets one speech from Gwen and five seconds later he decides to change his mind. That’s the quickest character change I can recall. 

Fantasy Island is one of the worst movies I have seen for a while and the worst I have seen at the cinema for many years. Even Cats was more entertaining and the flaws with the film kept my attention. Fantasy Island is just a mess from start to finish and even Michael Rooker cant save this turkey.

Brahms: The Boy II (2020)

Brahms: The Boy II is the most recent example of a film that shouldn’t really exist. The first one was a decent horror film that was trying to cash in on the popularity of the Annabelle films but managed to make something that was good enough on it own merits. What it wasn’t was asking for a sequel however money will dictate whether something will have a sequel or not. The set up of the film is that after a home invasion where Liza gets attacked and the son Jude becomes mute, they move to the country into the guest house next door to the house used in the first film. Jude finds the boy and as the film then becomes a battle to separate Brahms from Jude.

Lets start with the positives. The performances are good. Katie Holmes does well as Liza. I haven’t actually seen her in a film since Batman Begins 15 years ago. I know she’s been in films since then but just not in one I have seen. I thought that once the story moved to the guest house, she got a bit better and stronger. Christopher Convery is also good as Jude. He to convey quite a lot of emotion without speaking and he manages it well. It’s difficult for child actors to be taken seriously but I have noticed recently that they are casting some good young actors like Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit and Jackson Robert Scott in The Prodigy. I thought the best performance came from Ralph Ineson who is one of those actors who appears in everything. He plays Joseph who at first seems like he is just there to deliver exposition but its revealed that he is a sort of minder for Brahms. Its also well directed. I thought the some of the shots were quite nice and they made the house seem a nice if slightly creepy place to live. It does rely on some jump scares but there were a couple of red herrings where you think there is going to be a jump scare but there isn’t so I liked that.

The main problem that I have with this film is that it completely ruins all the good things from the first one. In the first film the doll is just a creepy doll and the truth of the boy being in the walls of the house was a nice twist. In this film they decide that the doll has a soul and chooses people that are damaged. When the dad smashes the head of Brahms, there is this weird alien looking thing which doesn’t make any sense to me.  Another thing was when it was revealed about Joseph’s true identity, I didn’t really care I just thought it was a fairly clichéd plot twist. Then there is the cousins that pop up for about five minutes that don’t really add anything to the story. Jude has a nephew who keeps calling him mental and when he get skewed by the broken crocket stick, I thought that he deserved it because he was being horrible. Also at the end there is a moment where Jude has the mask on and its clear they are going to make a third one which is even less necessary than this film. One final issue is that Liza finds a code on Brahms is foot and enters into a website and it doesn’t work. Most people would try and reverse the code but for narrative reasons, she doesn’t do this until the final act of the film. I don’t spot these things but even I wondered why she didn’t try it the other way. Had she done that then the film would have been over 40 minutes early. 

On its own merits, Brahms is fine. It looks nice and has good performances but if you question why it exists and compare it to the first Boy film then it completely falls apart. If it’s on Netflix or on TV then watch it but don’t seek it out because you aren’t really missing anything.

Greed (2019)

Greed is comedy which tells the fictional story of a billionaire who is trying to throw a ridiculous party to show how wealthy he is. The story is told partly in flashback building up how Richard McCreadle (Coogan) goes from public schoolboy to King of the High Street. The film was suppose to be a comedy but NOBODY laughed and the week before I saw Parasite and people laughed multiple times and there were more people in this screening.

There is a thread where one of the children is in a reality TV programme. The fact it’s in the film shows that it’s current because reality shows are popular but I don’t think it will age well. The only good part about this particular thread is that former Doctor Who companion Pearl Mackie appears in this which got my attention.

I thought that Steve Coogan was quite good as Sir Richard McCreadle who is playing a charicature of a certain billionaire and there is quite a lot of Coogan’s other characters in the movie but I just didn’t connect to the character. When McCreadle got killed by a lion, I found it amusing but not much beyond that. I was distracted by Coogan’s teeth. I thought that David Mitchell was quite good in this. He plays the person who is writing the book on McCreadle and he seems like the most normal person in the entire film. He is tasked with making someone loathsome seem like a nice guy. 

I haven’t seen any films featuring Isla Fisher. She appears in films that I don’t really have any interest in seeing but I have to say that I thought she was quite good as the wife/ex-wife of McCreadle. She seems to like him but they aren’t in love and she gets to make a few digs about Richard. She does provide the right kind of humour. The film features a lot of people from the British comedy world so its an interesting query about how well this film will do out of the UK. 

It turns into a PowerPoint presentation at the end which felt like I was being lectured at. I understand why they put the stats in and they are shocking but I think that it wasn’t done in the right way and that’s my overall issue with this film. It felt it could have been handle a bit better. I was surprised that the people playing the refugees on the beach were actual refugees but by the end of the film I just found myself being slightly numbed by it. It’s not terrible but it lacks the killer punch that this film should have had.

Parasite (2019)

I went in to the screening of Parasite wanting to dislike it because I thought that 1917 should have won the best Picture Oscar and also because it felt like people were hyping it way too much and I thought that all it was going to do was disappoint. What I felt 2 hours and 12 minutes later was pretty much the exact opposite. I don’t think I have seen a film that bonkers for a very long time. I knew that I loved this film but it took me a while to figure out why.

The set-up of the film is that a family that are fairly poor and they integrate themselves into a wealthy family and each family member has a role. The film has a lot of comedic moments in the first two thirds of the movie. In the screening that I was in, there was several moments where people were laughing and its not hard to see why and I was chuckling with them. All the actors playing them are perfect. They are treated as quite smart and they have to come up with a plausible plan to get rid of people who they are working for them. 

The final 15-20 minutes is bonkers because it just comes out of nowhere. People are getting stabbed and skewed and bashed over the head with rocks and the reality of what becomes of the father is quite sad and it shows how much they have fallen is quite remarkable. It ended in a perfect way and as the credits played, I sat there for a few moments to try and take in what I saw. This is a film that didn’t drag at any point from the very beginning to the very end. The humour is well placed and when it turns, its does so in such as way that you don’t really notice it until its happened and by then the film is moving along towards the end.

If I had to nit-pick then I would say that there were a couple of moments when I was worried that the characters were going to be too unlikable but Bong Joon Ho managed to pull it back. I hear there is a black and white version and I hope to see that film because I think that this will only enhance my enjoyment. Parasite thoroughly deserved its Oscar. I love 1917 but I think that I love this film more. A film that is as close to perfection as its possible to get.

Underwater (2020)

Underwater is a film that is an unwanted movie. It was made by 20th Century Fox and when Disney brought Fox, this film got pushed back (it was filmed in 2017).  This film invokes several films such as Alien, Cloverfield, Event Horizon and Poseidon. The set-up of the film is that Kristen Stewart plays Norah where she and a band of fellow researchers have to get from A to B whilst trying to avoid some buggy parasites. 

I don’t quite know what to do with Stewart. On the one hand I don’t believe her as a leading lady. It’s a shame really because she really throws herself into the movie and she gets thrown about a lot (sometimes quite literally). Vincent Cassel is quite good as Captain. It’s clear that he’s been told not to outshine Stewart but he gets by far the best death. T.J Miller is the comic relief and to be honest he was a distracting influence and I wasn’t bothered by his death. 

There are some issues for me in this film. Firstly the camerawork is terrible. There were times where the camera was shaking so much that it became quite difficult to follow what was going on and who was in peril. Then there is the fact that the characters all have character traits and that is who they are such as Kristen Stewart who is suppose to be Ripley from Alien, Cassel is the European, Miller is the comedian, Jessia Henwick as Emily is the scared one who has to overcome her fears. Mamoudou Athie as Rodrigo’s character trait is that he’s the first to die. I called it when he first appeared and I was proved right. The thing about a film like Alien is that even though they all have their own lives, you believe that they a crew whereas because this film gets going from the very beginning, there is no time for much character development which is a shame really. 

The film’s monster is quite good and they do a good job in hiding it for quite a while. Due to the fact its set on the bottom of the ocean, there is very little light so its not easy to see what the crew are trying to avoid. There are things that I like about this film so its not as terrible as you might think. I don’t think that it’s the best film in the world and its way better than The Meg because its got better acting and better effects. It’s also only 95 minutes long which is quite a good running time and didn’t last longer than it needed to.