The Quite Nerdy Blog

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...

This is honestly going to be the hardest review I have written so far. I'm not joking. I know it sounds like a joke but genuinely, there's a lot to unpack here and it's challenging all the critical faculties I've gained up to this point. So, we start with plot and may be coming undone already. A spaceship comes down to Earth with some symbiotes from a meteor that an evil "definitely not Elon Musk" entrepreneur wants to combine with humans for reasons. One of these symbiotes makes its way onto Eddie Brock, failed journalist, and inhabits his body with him. Hijinks happen, predictable plot twists jump up and nonsense b-plots arise. For example, another symbiote escaped the spaceship and latched onto a policewoman, an elderly Venezuelan lady and a little girl on its way to San Francisco. There's also the subplot about how Eddie's ex-girlfriend hates him but will almost certainly end up tonguing him by the end of the film. I guess what's most impre...

You know, I've seen a lot of bad Mark Whalberg films in my time and every time I feel like giving up on him, I find a film that restores my faith in him. He's still running on a lot of goodwill from when I watched Boogie Nights a year ago (an incredible film even not by Whalberg standards) and so here we are, watching Mile 22, his newest, impressively miserable endeavour. The plot at least should be simple enough, with a team of secret soldiers having to escort a double agent 22 miles (get it?) in order to receive some super secret information he has. It's an enticingly simple setup but it's constantly confused with twists, character deaths and needless tie ins to the cold open that most of the audience will have forgotten almost instantly. Sadly, the plot is probably the best bit of this miserable nightmare. Almost all the cast are an absolute waste here too so let's drudge through this shit heap. Lauren Cohan is one of the two token action women and she was ...