The Quite Nerdy Blog

I've been having a rough summer in terms of the cinema. Sure, I've watched some great films at home such as Before Sunrise but in terms of films actually at the cinema, it's been a massive flat line for me. Thank God then, for Tom Cruise and his gang, roaring onto the big screen with Mission Impossible: Fallout, one of the best action films I have seen in years. We'll get to the actual action side in a second but as is custom, I'll break down the plot first. In Fallout, for the first time in the franchise, we carry on from the last film Rogue Nation with many of the big characters being those who've returned from that film. Ethan Hunt is, as ever, pulled into a conspiracy involving three potential nuclear bombs, arms dealers and the CIA looming ever closer over the IMF. In a lot of ways it's your typical Mission Impossible plot with plenty of double crossing, plans that the audience aren't in on and pulling off masks but 22 years after the first film

Welcome to my review of Skyscraper, a film I really saw and got really drunk during. The problem is that we're a couple of days later and I am currently completely sober (whether my flatmates believe me or not) so any enthusiasm I had is going to have completely faded. Still, I'll do my best to capture the magical process that I experienced as I watched this laughable film. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plays an everyman who happens to look superhuman because he's The Rock, a man who is missing a leg and is doing security work on the tallest building in the world. Terrorists turn up which means our everyman hero has to make absurdly improbable jumps, punch people and, most importantly, tell them that "Daddy's gotta go to work". If that plot sounds familiar, it's because it's essentially a clumsy cocktail of Die Hard and every Dwayne Johnson action film. There are many problems that spring from that that I'll get to later but the most rele

Sicario 2: Soldado (or Sicario 2 or Day of the Soldado or just Soldado or whatever it is in your region) is the sequel to the wonderfully tense Sicario, a film about the Mexican drug cartels and how the US Government tried to control them. It was great, a proper miserable time at the cinema and another film that proved how incredible Denis Villeneuve is. However, with the sequel, he, star Emily Blunt, cinematographer Robert Deakins and composer Johan Johannsen are gone, leaving behind Josh Brolin and Benecio del Toro to make up for their absences. Before getting too into that though, the plot follows our two heroes (if you can call them that) as they... Okay, so I saw this film three days ago (as of when I'm writing this) and I don't entirely remember the plot. There were conspiracy thriller beats, the kidnapping of an important mans daughter and one plot twist that I remember predicting in the first five minutes. All in all, it was perfectly functional but considering I re

Yeah, it's a deliberately antagonistic title and I'll get properly to the argument soon but I'll open with my defence of films that are longer because the one thing I'm not saying here is that films over an hour and a half are inherently bad. Obviously I love tonnes of films that are everything from ten minutes longer than that to another hour and a half longer. Hell, my favourite film of all time is Fight Club, a movie that's closer to two and a half hours. Really, the general point I want to make with this article is that films should be the lengths their stories need them to be, no longer. Take Mulholland Drive, a film that comes in at just under two and a half hours. The reason that film gets to be that long is because about an hour and a half of it is the TV pilot David Lynch originally made but he had to add the right nightmarish elements to both make it a true cinematic experience and to round off the plot that makes sense in a self contained way. Apocaly

The UK is currently gripped by one of the hottest summers in our history and it is July so now seems like a pretty great time to rundown the films that best encapsulate this magical season that is entirely unlike any other in the seemingly infinite possibilites it offers us. I've tried to judge largely by how well the films represent summer, not how much I like films that just happen to be set in summer so films like Before Sunrise and Dirty Dancing sadly didn't make the cut. With that said, let's get into the list! 7. The Seven Year Itch Chances are, even if you haven't heard of this film, you recognise the image on the poster, which is the iconic scene from the film in which Marilyn Monroe's dress flies up as the subway train passes underneath. In fairness, it's a moment that has earned the status of iconic but it's a moment that is more a reflection of the actual plot and themes than one that is in any way integral. That aforementioned plot is of