The Quite Nerdy Blog

I have a confession. About a month ago, I bought a Nintendo Switch. It was an impulse thing if I'm honest. I'd seen someone selling one on eBay and it turned out to be a scam but by that point, I was so committed to the idea of buying a Switch that I just followed through on it and bought one from Game, where I got free next day delivery and had no time to really think about what I'd done. So it turns up and a month on, I'm officially in love with my Switch and back in love with gaming which I appreciate sounds slightly pathetic but let me explain a little more. After all, that's kinda the whole purpose of this blog. One of the things that is a draw to basically any Nintendo console (as is certainly the case with the Switch) is the exclusives, which no one really seems to do like Nintendo. Interestingly, I actually don't own plenty of the flagship exclusives for the Switch, among them The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. In a wa...

Edit: this post has been edited to reflect the depressing reality that we live in post-Oscars 2019, where any correct predictions are highlighted in green and any incorrrect predictions are highlighted in red . There's also a little tally at the bottom of how many I got right. We finally made it. The worst awards season since I've been interested in films is finally starting to come to a close but before it does, there's one last wave of pointless predictions to be made. Now that all the nominees are in, I'm going to try and predict all the winners for the 2019 Oscars ceremony. Last year I actually managed to correctly predict all but one so fingers crossed for similar luck this year. As with all other years too, this is a blog that exists to get my trash opinion out there so I will also be saying which nominee I think most deserves to win. So come on friends, one last push and then we can get into dumb blockbuster season, just a little closer to the release of Hobbs...

Nominated for 3 Oscars, including Best Original Score and Best Adapted Screenplay If Beale Street Could Talk is both the follow up to director Barry Jenkins' critically acclaimed indie darling Moonlight and also one of the most cruelly snubbed films of the 2019 awards season. For those who are unaware, this film was not nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and quite frankly, that is an absolute disgrace, hence my stance on saying fuck it and just reviewing this film anyway, because it deserves all the love and praise we can heap on it. It's an adaptation of the book of the same name by James Baldwin (which I haven't read but am now eager to), about a young couple, Tish and Fonny. Fonny is in prison for circumstances that aren't explained to us until later in the film but feel sadly predictable and while in there, Tish discovers she is pregnant with their child. The narrative weaves its way between their exquisite past, a tale of them falling deeper and deeper i...

Nominated for 3 Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is not one of the bigger Oscar movies but look, the big Best Picture films I've either not seen in months and am not interested enough in revisiting them or it's Green Book and I just haven't got around to it yet so I'm reviewing a film that's at least been in some of the conversations that I saw a few days ago. It's the real life story of Lee Israel, a writer who has most notably written biographies and essentially just made a career out of transforming her writing style into that of anyone else. Unfortunately for her, that career just isn't paying as much anymore and so she ends up faking letters from famous figures who are dead and selling those letters on to collectors. It's always hard to work out how to judge the quality of a story that is "real" but I suppose with CYEFM, it tells the story it has fairly well. You likely won...

Nominated for 10 Oscars (joint highest this year), including Best Cinematography, Best Director and Best Picture. Roma is the newest film from beloved Mexican Auteur Alfonso Cuaron, director of awards friendly films like Gravity, personal pieces like Y Tu Mama Tambien and technically complex works like Children of Men which I haven't seen yet but I'll watch it soon, I SWEAR. Anyway, Roma is a combination of all those aspects and very neatly so. It's the story of a woman called Cleo who is something of a housemaid for a middle class family in Mexico City. She cooks for them, cleans up after them and maybe she's even really cared about by them. It's not really about that though, it's about her and her inner turmoil over the period of about a year. As with many movies like this, it's largely fairly plotless. Stuff happens, there is a narrative thrust to the film that I'm still not sure I want to reveal two months on, but that's not what matters. It...