The Quite Nerdy Blog

Welcome back to my second post covering the 2020 London Film Festival! It's honestly been a completely exhausting festival and while my sleep schedule and academic courses are glad it's over, I do already find myself missing that beautiful chaos. It'll be the same kind of thing this time, with me reviewing three more films I loved from the eclectic selection on offer. No particular order, they're roughly organised by the order I saw them, but I recommend them all strongly. I've also been doing some coverage for Exepose, Exeter University's student paper. So far, they've published my reviews on  Relic and Undine , with two more on the way for One Man and His Shoes and Possessor . If you want smaller, more immediate thoughts on these films, you can find them on my Letterboxd , where I've also ranked all the films I saw at this years festival. With those things said, onto the films! Never Gonna Snow Again Cards on the table here, Never Gonna Snow Again wa...

Hey everyone, hope you're all still having a good apocalypse! It's been busy for me over the last few weeks because, in a virtual form, the London Film Festival is here. I'm gutted that I can't get that specialness of a weekend away in London watching films this year but the big plus side to going digital is that it is now more accessible than ever. As part of that, BFI offered what they've called "Film Academy accreditation" for young people, allowing them to get access to press and industry screenings of pretty much every film at the festival. With no worrying about rushing across London to the next cinema or thinking about gaps where I could grab some lunch, I've been able to watch a huge swathe of films so far (though I admit that still being a university student has slowed me down somewhat on the watching). I've seen a bunch of excellent films and there's more I'm planning on covering in two weeks time but for today, I want to talk abo...

As part of his frenetic media tour when promoting Parasite , there was a particularly dry answer Bong Joon-Ho gave to a question. The audience member was talking about a flooding scene in the film and asking if it was perhaps created as a response to some of the massive floods the US had seen over the last few years. His answer? "We have floods in Korea too". Aside from it being a wonderfully witty story about a man the entire world now loves, it's also a really telling example of how a brilliant film can feel like it was made specifically for the moment you're watching it in, even when that couldn't possibly have been the intention. That is the current mood around La Haine , a film that is 25 years old this year and unfortunately, it feels just as relevant today as it did when I first saw it in 2016 and I can only imagine it feels even more urgent than it did in 1995. For the uninitiated (and I strongly recommend initiating yourself with this wonderful film), La ...

Um, hey! This isn't going to be your regularly scheduled post, because (as David Bowie's appearance is supposed to hint at) The Quite Nerdy Blog is changing. For six years now, I have been doing pretty much the exact same thing. Every week, without fail, I have produced a piece of writing. It means I have an incredibly dense portfolio but it has also led to weeks of panic, last minute writing and feverish edits as I've attempted to put out a new post. I also feel like it means I am more worried about putting out a lot of content instead of really interesting content and as such, I am finally changing up my schedule. We are still sticking to a Tuesday release at 10:00am GMT, but I will only be releasing a post every other week. If there is something out that I want to talk about or review in some form then yes, I may break from the schedule for something. As we stand though, a new blog post will be released every other Tuesday. I figure I should explain my logic a little bit...

Charlie Kaufman is back! For those unfamiliar, he is the brilliant yet intensely strange writer responsible for Being John Malkovich  and Adaptation , as well as the director (and writer, again) of Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa . Importantly, he is also the writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , my favourite film. His films are cerebral and strange but have a large cult following among a certain breed of film fan, among which I certainly count myself. He returns with I'm Thinking of Ending Things , produced and distributed by Netflix, a film which is likely to perplex even the die hard Kaufman fan. The premise is simple; a young woman is joining her boyfriend on a trip to meet his parents for the first time. They're leaving the city and heading toward a farm, heading there in the snow. The problem is, the young woman is thinking of ending things. Despite what I was saying earlier, about how Charlie Kaufman's films are cerebral and strange, they're usuall...

Tenet is a film with few expectations on it, it only has to be the film to bring audiences back into cinemas after six months of closure, so no biggie. It is also... It is a lot and what we're going to have here is one of those reviews that is in part going to be me attempting to break down what I saw for my own benefit. I'm also going to steer clear of spoilers, because I know the film isn't yet playing in America and plenty of people don't yet feel comfortable going to the cinema, a decision I completely respect. Anyway, the plot of Tenet is ambiguous, both in how the film has been marketed and even by the end of the film. What I feel confident saying is that our protagonist is a secret agent who, after a mission gone wrong, is recruited by an agency even more mysterious than the one he previously worked for. With the help of allies whose motives are ambiguous, he must prevent annihilation, the form of which is also initially unclear. My vague words and unclear descri...

Being someone who writes about films online, I have naturally made much of my name (the little that has been made) by talking about very bad films and breaking them down while trying not to have a breakdown myself. I personally much more enjoy celebrating films I adore but it has to be said, there is a pleasure I get in tearing down films that deserve to be hated. As such, we are finishing this month of madness with the very worst films I saw all decade. Unlike all the other lists, I did not seek out films to put on this list, they were ones I was simply unlucky enough to suffer through for my own reasons. Smosh: The Movie , Slender Man and Keith Lemon: The Film are probably awful, but I was lucky enough to not see them. Speaking of, many of these films I saw to review for the blog so, just like the Best Films list, I'll be linking to any full length reviews I've written of the films over the last six years. With all the caveats out of the way, let's dive face first into th...