The Quite Nerdy Blog

Pre-review plead, please go see Booksmart this week. I reviewed it a couple of weeks ago (review here  https://thequitenerdyblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/review-booksmart.html ) and it is just the most wonderful film. Funny, fresh feeling and very, very honest, it's far and away the best thing I've seen so far this year and being a tiny indie film, it needs its supporters. So please, don't go Aladdin or The Secret Life of Pets 2 (Rocketman is a fine alternative, as you will read) this week, go see Booksmart. Now onto the review. Rocketman is a weird synthesis between musical and biopic about the life of one of the biggest rockstars of all time, Elton John. It's the story of the highest of highs that he accomplished (financially, culturally and pharmaceutically) until about the eighties (my knowledge of John's career isn't amazing but that seems to be about right), where he is reflecting on his life through a group rehab session. What this framing device allows ...

John Wick Chapter Three is (surprisingly) the third film in the surprise franchise that is John Wick. Picking up from the events at the end of the second film, our man John Wick has an hour before a $14 million bounty is set on him and every hitman and assassin in the world comes after him. Clearly, this is a tantalising enough pitch, one that has had me salivating since that cliffhanger in 2017, but the film doesn't just leave it there. Once again, we get more insights into Wick's world, the people he has met along the way and the countries that also house underground assassin rings. It is all very silly and honestly, that probably makes the plot the worst thing going here. Don't get me wrong, the silliness feels fairly knowing, this is a step up from Detective Pikachu last week. It's just that the silliness is never fully cashed in on, refusing to either have some slightly more sensible plot points or to go properly mental with itself. Not a complete loss, it just...

Detective Pikachu is this year's most unbelievable blockbuster. It's based on the video game Detective Pikachu, which of itself was a spin-off from the video game series Pokemon (which was originally a card game). You've probably heard of it. Anyway, that takes us here, to this feature length movie. A kid (I think called Tim) has to go to Ryme City because his dad has gone missing. While looking through his dad's apartment, he meets a Pikachu wearing a little detective hat who can also talk to him. Together, they must go solve the mystery of Tim's dad and perhaps uncover some greater conspiracy about Pokemon or something. I'll level with you, the plot is easily the worst bit of this film. Don't get me wrong, I've spent the week revising hugely seminal noir films like Chinatown and Fargo and I was not expecting anything that level from a Detective Pikachu movie. But still, the twists and turns are ludicrously stupid. I wish I'd seen this film with...

Booksmart is the directorial debut of Olivia Wilde, an actress who I loved in Tron: Legacy, even if not many people did. The plot will probably sound fairly familiar, as it follows two girls about to graduate from high school. They've worked hard all year to get into the colleges they want (like, really hard, "fun is the enemy" kind of hard), only as they're about to graduate, they realise that everyone else who put in way less work and partied way more has also gotten into places like Yale and Stamford. As you might expect, this shakes them quite a bit and they decide to say "Fuck it" and spend the night before their graduation trying to go to the party all the cool kids are at, to prove that they're really fun as well as really smart. It's clearly a well trodden path and the film is essentially just the girls going from event to event (where the transport also serves as events in their own right) but everything is so perfectly done that it feel...

Look, everyone reading this who is worried about spoilers has probably already seen it but if you are still averse to anything remotely close to plot information, get out. I'm not going to spoil anything here, there's just a chance that you could interpret spoilers from my vagueness. Avengers Endgame is already basically the biggest film ever made. I'm writing this on Saturday and already, the record books are being rewritten [edit on Monday: yup, records have been destroyed]. The chances are, you've probably already seen it, maybe twice. If you haven't seen it, you probably won't and whichever camp you're in, this review is pretty much worthless. But I'm writing it anyway because we all know this review will get hella views because Endgame is hot shit right now. We pick up about three weeks after the end of Infinity War, where half of all life in the universe has melted into dust. Our heroes are all still struggling to get by, dealing with how each...

Right upfront, I've been having difficulties while writing this, in differentiating between Hellboy: the character and Hellboy: the movie so for the purpose of ease and light amusement, I'm going to refer to the character as Heck Chap because I don't care about this film at all anymore and I'm not sure anyone making it did either Hellboy (2019) is the third live action Heck Chap film we've gotten this century and at this rate, it should probably be the last. I confess I haven't seen Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the film that preceded this, although I have seen the original of that particular iteration and I enjoy it quite a bit from what I remember. Those two films were clearly for pussies though as this Hellboy is violent and gory as hell (I promise I'll try and avoid that pun from here on), as well as unafraid to use naughty words. That should suggest a kind of badass swagger but it immediately starts on the wrong foot with the worst Arthurian legend p...

Feels like it's been a little while since we've done a Top 7, hasn't it? Usually I enjoy a nice little deep dive on some obscure topic I've become obsessed on and often I just end up reviewing whatever it is that Disney just unloaded onto our cinema screens but being away from a cinema I can use my swanky membership at right now means I've decided to tear myself apart trying to create a definitive ranking list that I'll hate in about a week. This week, it's a topic I've been meaning to do for a while, the most visually beautiful films ever. I specify visually because films can be sonically and emotionally beautiful too but I really want to focus more on the side of cinematography and production and costume design than those. Obviously, no one will be totally happy with this list and it's less a definitive list than an attempt to capture the films whose visuals have stuck with me through the last 19 and a bit years of my life but figured I'd do my...