The Quite Nerdy Blog

Here we are gang, New Years Eve! This feels big and dramatic, or it would, were it not for the fact that due to time zones and social media algorithims, you probably won't read this until New Years Day and I'm writing a couple of days in advance. Regardless, time to reminisce at the end of the year, which makes this a good time to explain my process of best of the year stuff. Today, we're going to be talking about all the odds and sods, things that fit into categories that I wasn't going to do a full list on. In a month (just after all the Oscar stuff is over and done with) I'll break down my favourite films and TV of 2019 and then in August, we'll dedicate the whole month to the best of the decade, be it books, films or video games. For today though, we're just going to talk about some of my favourite things I wanted an excuse to talk about. Some of these are short films, some of these are video games, a couple are even YouTube videos, all are really worth ...

Well, here we are. Star Wars  is allegedly over now, although we all know that's a lie. Disney have been pretty open actually and just referred to this as the end of the Skywalker Saga but still, that means this is the conclusion of 42 years of work. As such, this is a film with lots of things in it, aiming to tie up many, many loose threads. Rest assured, I won't spoil anything in this part of the review but I'll do my best to break this heap of things down. As ever, it is the story of good fighting against evil, Rey working out who she wants to be and other characters supporting her on her journey. Already, I am fighting for the details. As I write this, I saw the film earlier in the day and after wandering aimlessly around San Francisco (I know, #humblebrag), it has almost entirely faded from my memory. It is simply a series of events. A happens, then B happens, then C happens. Any decent writer will tell you that structure should be much more like "A happens, t...

I will start with a claim. This claim will, I am sure, shock many of you to your core, but that's why I'm warning you first. What it is is: sometimes, people accuse me of having pretentious taste in films. I know, right? What an absolute shocker! What with it being a quiet week though (with apologies to The Rock, I'm not rushing out to see his new Jumanji reboot sequel), I figured I might dedicate some time to that claim. Do I have pretentious taste in film? Does that matter? And finally, should pretentiousness have a place in cinema and cinema criticism? There it is, there's your road map, we call that a thesis statement in the biz. Now we can start. Let's begin with a complete defence of pretentiousness because films that are really wanky can be pretty excellent too. Much as the favourite film conversation often stumbles when people ask "I'm sorry, I've never heard of Mulholland Drive , what is that?", it's still a film I'm proud to...

Another sterling week in the books for cinema, this time coming from Netflix, a company many blame for the death of cinema. See, up yours establishment! With all the flipping off done to the establishment, I guess we should apologise slightly uncomfortably by moving onto The Irishman , the new film from industry establishment Martin Scorsese, after which we'll get to Noah Baumbach's sob fest Marriage Story . In the vein of many of the Scorsese films we love so dearly, The Irishman  is a crime drama about the mob. Actually, scratch the word "drama", this is a flat out epic, not just for the already infamous three and a half hour runtime this bad boy carries. No, it's also an epic in the sense that this tells the story of a lifetime, specifically the lifetime of Frank Sheeran (no relation to Ed) as he worked his way through the Italian mob. He starts out doing bits of driving, then "painting houses", before the big guys start to really notice him, eve...

All of a sudden, 2019 has started pulling through and delivering some absolutely knockout movies. So great are they that I have simply had no choice other than to bust out a double review spectacular for the first time in a long time. We'll get to Knives Out  a little bit later but now, it seems like it's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood . A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood  (upsettingly spelt the American way but we'll get over that) has been framed as a story about beloved children's presenter Mr Rogers. He isn't as much of a big deal in the UK but for those who want to learn more, there was an absolutely delightful documentary that came out last year called Won't You Be My Neighbor? which as well as being a good way of learning about Mr Rogers is an absolute sob fest because of how wholesome it is. Genuinely, if you're ever going through a tough time and have already seen Paddington 2  five times this week, it's a hell of a pick-me-up. It d...

I have a horrible feeling I'm going to piss people off with this blog post, but at least let me explain myself first. For years and years, I have been talking about how we're living in a golden age of TV, a glorious age where there's loads of TV and basically all of it is great. Just in this decade, we've had the debuts of shows like Bojack Horseman , Fargo  and Black Mirror , era defining works whose ongoing seasons I remain enraptured by. All of this, in my eyes (and as it always seems to), culminates in Twin Peaks: The Return  in 2017. Gone was the non-stop binge marathon that most TV has turned into, instead we got a glacially paced 18 weeks, in which frustration gave way to sheer cinematic joy which in turn became another cliffhanger for the ages, one which we will likely never get an answer for. I've spoken at length about that show many , many times but in the way it revolutionised long form story telling, criticised our hunger for satisfying content and w...

Loads of exciting films are coming out at the moment ( Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Marriage Story ) and I have not had a chance to see a single one of them because I am both busy and lazy. What I did get a chance to do though was see Miami Connection  in a proper cinema with my flatmates and there is little I would rather write about right now than that, so here we are. Let's start with some background though, what the hell is this film and why was I so excited to pay cash to see it? Miami Connection  is, in the great tradition of "so bad it's good" cinema, the brainchild of one man, Y. K. Kim, the star, producer, co-writer and uncredited director. He's originally from Korea but moved to Orlando and became a teacher of taekwondo, eventually spinning that off into a series of instructional videos, books and seminars. Eventually, somewhere in there, Kim saw his opportunity to make a film that would spread his message of taekwondo, love and world peace through ...

Terminator: Dark Fate  is the sixth Terminator film, whether you can believe it or not. It's been 35 years since the first one, 28 years since the last one anyone cared about but fortunately, those are the only ones that matter. I know this because I've only seen the first two films and Dark Fate  discards all the mess of  Rise of the Machines, Salvation and Genisys  (they seriously spell it that way, I'm sorry) and reset the franchise. You know, in the way that the last two did. Anyway, Skynet apparently don't exist anymore but some thing called Legion does and it's essentially the same thing, because it keeps sending back Terminators to kill someone who will be important in the future. In this case, that person is a girl named Dani and the resistance have sent back Grace to protect her, a cybernetically enhanced human instead of your bog standard Terminator. At some point, Sarah Connor and Arnie show up, because there has to be some hook to the film. If you ha...

Parasite  won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival back in May, which roughly translates to "It won the best award at what is maybe the most important/pretentious film festival in the world". Essentially, huge news for film nerds like me, variably big news if you don't waste your life following film news and media but the point I'm making is that it has been riding a wave of unstoppable hype since then, more so than usual for a film from beloved Korean director Bong Joon-Ho ( Snowpiercer, The Host and Okja, among many other gems). I've become a huge fan of the dude over the last year or so and his films range from post-apocalyptic train takeovers to true crime recreations and gonzo B-movie monster flicks, meaning that there is something for absolutely everyone in his remarkably consistent filmography. I don't want to show my cards too early but let's just say that Parasite  is more of the same, in that it's nothing like anything that has ...