The Quite Nerdy Blog

This year, my yearly tradition of reviewing film that are so bad it's scary continues as I review one of the bottom 50 films on IMDb in a year when Ben Affleck has now earnt widespread respect. Time for this film to undo all that very quickly. Calling Gigli a film is insulting to the medium but I guess technically that's what we're dealing with here. It's the "story" of... Well, I'm not really sure. I think Ben Affleck is a gangster who has to look after a mentally handicapped guy who won't shut up about Bay watch and he is paired with Jennifer Lopez to do this. Plot twist though, she is a lesbian so he has to seduce her straight in what IMDb calls a "Crime, Romance and Comedy" film. Spoiler alert, it's none of them. The plot doesn't really exist and I never had any idea what was going on. Christopher Walken and Al Pacino stumble on set at points, look confused and leave. Still, in a film where the two leads were dating in real l

The Girl on the Train is the film based on that book that person you knew probably read and thought it was quite good although could sometimes be a bit much but my, it was rather gripping. It's also the story of a woman who stares at a seemingly perfect couple from the window of her train but decides to get involved when something goes wrong. She's also a divorced alcoholic. The plot of this film has been compared to Gone Girl and I will come back to that later but it isn't as smart as Gone Girl. It is generic thriller territory and I worked out who dun it pretty quickly which ruined the tension. The narrative turns that films like this are so often dependent on are weak to non-existent so don't expect a totally riveting narrative. Overall, it's a decent story but nowhere close to as good as it should be. Acting is a mixed bag in the film but probably the highlight. The obvious highlight is Emily Blunt in the lead. She is good enough and portrays a broken wom

I was lucky enough last week to see a screening of one of the episodes in the new series of Black Mirror, followed by a fantastic Q and A with Charlie Brooker, Annabel Jones (producer of the show) and Joe Wright, director of Pan and the episode that was shown. Before I go on, I want to say that if you are interested at all in this show, you will be very happy with the new episodes and reading this post will probably tell you too much. If you are happy to not go in blind to the new episodes though, let me tell you about what I saw. I'll start with a discussion about the new trailer that came out last week. It was less than two minutes but therefore pretty much perfect. Due to the anthology nature of the show, it was somewhat scattered in that it had to show clips from episodes but was still amazingly well structured. The trailer followed the typical Black Mirror episode structure of things start out okay, the technology seems good and then everything goes very downhill, very qu

Hell or High Water is a film you probably haven't heard of. It's gathered a bit of word of mouth but mainstream buzz has been non-existent on it. I only went to see it on the glowing recommendation of one friend who said it was already one of his favourite films ever. Kind of expecting it not to live up to the hyperbole, I went, expectations slightly lowered and holy shit did this film blow me away. It's the story of two brothers who rob banks simply to try and get by and a sheriff and his deputy who hunt them down. The story is simple and if it sounds familiar, that's because it's basically a western. I'm not an expert on the genre but it goes along like a modern (yet not too modern) version of the Sergio Leone classics. And anyway, the story that's in place is only simple so as to be the perfect canvas for the rest of the film to expand on in incredibly impressive ways. The performances in this film are absolutely sublime, there's no point hiding