The Quite Nerdy Blog

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...