The Quite Nerdy Blog

With fair warning, this could be less of a review than a glimpse into the descent into madness I suffered a few days ago but hey, let's see what happens by the end. Before I start, let me explain to you why I even watched this film. I'm in the middle of a last minute dash to watch a bunch of stuff for my best of the year list (coming next Tuesday) and I've also dedicated the last couple of days watching Christmas films because hey, even I love Christmas. This film, Christmas Wedding Planner, fit the bill of both, was on Netflix and I'd also heard it was bad in a really fun way so I though "what the hell" and put it on. Ninety minutes later, I emerged a different man. What I had just seen was kind of incredibly bad and it was hard to comprehend everything. In fact, five minutes in, I realised I needed to write a blog post on it and starting making notes to try and hold. I've also realised that just explaining why I even approached this film has taken u...

This week, we've had two big superhero film releases and man... They're both pretty unforgettable, although in completely different ways. I have some pessimistic views on which will perform better and feel pretty strongly that it's going to be the one that makes the most money won't deserve it but the cart is coming before the horse, let's review these movies. Aquaman is the newest DC film which already puts it on shaky ground considering what a weak track record franchise that has and it's also a story about the silliest well known superhero, Fish Boy/Aquaman. His story is one which is basically reverse Black Panther with a splash of Shape of Water, in which his mum (Fish Queen Nicole Kidman) ends up falling in love with and shagging a lighthouse keeper and producing Jason Momoa, heir to the fish throne. He is to head back to Atlantis to try and stop his evil brother from waging war on the humans and to do so, he kinda travels around the world and does som...

I appreciate that a lot of my posts can be cynical and miserable but seriously, try not to get angry at me for this one and bear with me a bit because if you ignore me (and this absolutely isn't hyperbole) cinema may change for the worse. Disney have been on a trend recently (that I'm certain even the least cinephilic of you will have noticed) of remaking beloved animated films in live action form and for them, it's worked out brilliantly. Mostly, they've been well reviewed but they've been absolutely huge box office draws with Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast all making around $1 billion each. Which I hate. I adore cinema and it doesn't always give me delight to be angry about them but this trend really worries me and it is only getting worse with four remakes coming out next year alone. Remakes alone aren't always bad (you're reading a blog by a guy who prefers the Suspiria remake to the original for God's sake) but...

Robin Hood (2018) is a telling of the Robin Hood story in 2018 and as literally everyone predicted, it is bad. Am I done yet? No? Fine, I'll talk more. We all know the story of Robin Hood because it's a pretty big part of British mythology and, ya know, it's had roughly 2 million films made about it in the last fifty years. The important thing though is that none of that matters because, as the film tells us, we should "forget everything you think you know about this story", the irony being that I am forgetting everything about this film. Robin of Loxley is a Lord in Nottingham who enjoys repeatedly kissing Marian on the lips while cameras spin around him. His life of luxury and playground pecking is brought to a close however when he is enlisted in the Third Crusade and has to go to what I swear isn't a war zone in Iraq. When he comes back, everyone thinks he's dead and so he has to go rob from the nasty Sheriff or something. Marian has a new beau, Fr...

What is it with the amount of trash I've watched this year? I know a couple of weeks ago I was talking about how disappointing a year it's been but man, this is a whole new low. See, I used to be a huge House of Cards fan. I got into it when season 2 came out and as someone who doesn't have the most sophisticated taste for politics, I was wowed by how enthralled I was constantly. Slowly, the series got less and less good and then very suddenly, the Kevin Spacey accusations came out. Headlines start to fly about how the House of Cards is tumbling down, jokes are made about how even fake Hilary can't get her shot at the presidency but among the rubble, the cast and crew of the show united and pledged that, for the fans, they'd finish up one last season. And maybe they shouldn't have. As a warning, there will be spoilers from here on out but that shouldn't matter for such a poorly written final season. I'll address the elephant in the room right away;...

Fantastic Beasts and the Crimes of Grindlewald is a very long title but essentially, it is the next film in the prequel series that has been squeezed out of the Harry Potter franchise. I think I reviewed the first one here on the blog but as a recap, I thought it was solid, if largely uninteresting, but the best moments were those that focused on the titular Fantastic Beasts. With the sequel though, we move further away from that stuff and into Grindlewald, a character we know is evil because he's played by Johnny Depp, my famous nemesis. Anyway, he's trying to raise an evil army and do evil stuff so our cast of characters, both old and new, have to try and save the day. What you've probably picked up is that this film relies heavily on the first film but this is also a film that is clearly just here to set up the next three films (yeah, seriously) and in pretty much all the film, you feel that. It's also a film where stuff just kind of seems to be happening, which ...

Suspiria (2018) is a remake of a cult Italian horror film from the seventies about a dance academy in Berlin. I'm sure plenty of people read that and were already turned off from the film (and this review) by that description and honestly, I don't think they're wrong to. This film is undeniably an arthouse horror film and so no matter how much you love Call Me By Your Name (the previous film from Luca Guadagnino), this is a film you may seriously need to consider seeing. More on that later though. Back to the plot, where we follow a dancer named Susie who has just arrived from America and seems to have some kind of aura around her that captivates the other dancers and the dance teachers. Where the plot goes is fascinating and unexpected, even for people who have seen the original film. Hell, one of the big plot twists from the original is revealed very early in the film but I won't ruin that in case you don't know it. All of these things are laid out slowly but ...

Going into 2018, I said it didn't look like as great a year for films as 2016 and 17 and while I've seen plenty of delights (The Night Comes For Us, Suspiria, Bad Times at the El Royale), I've sadly been proved right. Essentially, where this post has come from is that as the year starts to wind down (I know it's November but I like to stay on top of my lists) I was looking at a list I made at the start of the year of the films I was most excited about. Of the 12 films that have come out from that list (and including the top two films on the list), four have been bad. That doesn't sound like a lot but it's a third of the films that have come out from that list and maybe says something about the year in film we've had. Obviously, every year there are bad films, genuinely awful films and most years, I see a bunch of them but it's felt like the bad films have stung really hard this year. I'll talk about the films I didn't really expect to be good...

That's right boys and girls, Halloween time is here and what's spookier than me putting in twice the work for yet another bullshit post barely anyone will read? Nothing, apart from maybe a masked killer with a knife and being alone in space. Fortunately two films came out recently that deal exactly with those things so let's review the hell out of them! Halloween (2018) is a misleading title right out of the gate because it's actually the 11th Halloween film and is positing itself directly as a sequel to the 1978 film, also called Halloween. That all sounds quite confusing so let me boil it down a bit. Forty years ago, Michael Myers was first let free (both on screens and in the narrative) and was put away after a murder spree in which Laurie Strode escaped free. This event changed her life and she spent the next forty years both scared Michael would escape and preparing herself to kill him if he ever did. In the mean time, she had a daughter who in turn had a daug...

After four and a half years, I've made it to 250 posts on this blog which, when you think about the amount of writing that consists of, blows my mind a little bit. Anyway, I wanted to do two reviews next week that I couldn't push back any more than I already have so as my big 250th special, we've got a little post I've been incubating for a while because seriously, The Room and Vertigo get more and more similar every time I see them. Anyway, if you've stuck with me for a month, a year or even since I started this hot mess of a blog, thank you. This one is for you. Vertigo. The Room. Whenever you have conversations about the greatest film of all time or the worst film of all time, respectively these are the two that will always come up. In many ways, they're as complete opposite ends of the spectrum as you can get. With that said however, I've been developing a theory over the last year or so and I was going to give it a massive build up but it's in ...

The London Film Festival just wrapped up and I went to it (kind of, for one weekend) so hey, I'm gonna talk about the stuff I saw. For the two films I saw, it'll be a full review like you'd usually expect but I also saw two episodes of a TV show so I won't give that a full review, just a quick rundown of what I saw. It's going to be organised in the order I saw them all, not how much I liked them and also bear in mind that the festival atmosphere makes everything a bit more exciting so I could be more positive on what I saw than you would be. With all the housekeeping done, let's review some films that aren't out yet! Happy New Year, Colin Burstead Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (formerly called Colin You Anus) is the new film from Brit auteur Ben Wheatley, director of films like Sightseers, High Rise and most recently, Free Fire. This film goes away from the genre fare of those to instead capture a family New Years Eve party and the misery, tension ...

This is going to be one of those posts that requires a bit of explanation but here we go. Almost two months ago now, I attended a screening of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a really wonderful film that I didn't get around to reviewing but it may make it to my end of the year list. Anyway, the film really touched me and director Desiree Akhavan was there afterwards for a Q and A. She was an absolute delight and I will be supporting all her upcoming projects (including her current Channel 4 series The Bisexual) but because of how I felt, I wanted to ask her how she was able to create a story where I shared few things with the main character but was still able to find myself in her. I may have phrased it poorly but Akhavan gave me an answer I have been unable to stop thinking about since; desire. Quite simply, we relate to characters in films because they all have a desire for something and that's a basic human drive we all share. With that in mind, I want to put that to t...