The Quite Nerdy Blog

Well folks, this is going to be one of those reviews where I figure out how the hell I feel about a film by writing about it. My viewing of The Lighthouse  is one that's still relatively fresh with me but by having it stew in my brain for a while, I'm hoping I can work out how the hell I feel about it. The plot is a simple one, at least on the surface. Two men are dropped off on a remote island as lighthouse keepers, there to tend the lighthouse that provides the light that prevents the ruin of ships. Being an island with only two men on it, it's a desolate place. One could almost be forgiven for, I don't know, going a little mad sometimes? What I find interesting about the plot is how sparse it is, while also being almost entirely up for debate. There is very little in the way of traditional plot, yet what there is is fascinatingly vague. Sometimes the "it's all your interpretation" plot annoys me (see The Cloverfield Paradox or Wounds ) but when done...

As a lot of you probably know, I'm on a year abroad at the moment, off studying in the crazy world that is Florida. It's very exciting and everything, all these new experiences, but there's a side of it that has acted as a really profound entry point into another side of myself that has seemingly always been there; it can be really, really fucking isolating. Of course, I'm only about two months into it and at this point in my first year of Uni back in Exeter, I was feeling similarly alone, but there is a difference, in that I'm so far away from all I know and completely separated from alcohol, something that allows me to ignore these feelings for a little while. With all that time that sobriety has given me, I've had plenty of time for thinking and self-reflection and while I worry that this post is just going to come across as a narcissistic excuse for free therapy, it isn't that. This is an honest attempt to try and explore what it is I'm feeling ...

So, this is a bit odd, isn't it? We're all of a sudden back talking about Breaking Bad , a show whose finale in 2013 was so neatly and perfectly constructed that there was surely no way we would ever get a follow-up. And now, six years later, here is such a follow-up, coming to us as El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie . Before we start digging into this too deeply, I want to say two things. First, if you haven't seen the show, I don't even know what you're doing here. I'm going to try and steer clear of any plot elements but Breaking Bad is a show that deserves to be seen by everyone, as cold as possible, so go away and watch all of it right now. Secondly though, this is a film I did not want to happen and as I write this piece, weigh up the film in my head, that will be sitting over me the whole time. I felt that even with the ambiguity we got from Jesse's ending, it was about as perfect an ending as you can get, so what is the point in telling more story? ...

Well, here we are folks, this is where modern life has gotten us. It's 2019 and the most controversial, upsetting, fear-inducing movie of the year is a movie about the bad guy of that rich dude who dresses in leather and punches homeless people, directed by the man who brought us every single God awful Hangover movie. We can get more into all the "society" stuff later if you stick around that long but first, let's try and actually talk about the film, because that's what I'm good at, not broad cultural commentary. The story is of a man named Arthur Fleck, who... Seems off. He has a disorder where he can't stop laughing but it seems like there's more than that, something broken far deeper inside. In the day, he is a long suffering clown-for-hire but in the nights, he's an aspiring comedian, incapable of getting a single laugh. In this position, he becomes more and more downtrodden, being crushed under the grinding wheels of late capitalism in an...

Ad Astra  is Apocalypse Now in space, with sad Brad Pitt. It's one of those cases where I have essentially done the entire review in a sentence and I now have to spend three paragraphs pretending that I haven't immediately negated the entire review. To get a little more into the plot, Brad Pitt plays an astronaut called Roy McBride, whose dad has disappeared off into the vast nothingness of space. After suffering a high (like, really   high) altitude fall, he is informed that his dad has gone missing and that no emergency signals are being reached. Obviously, being the best astronaut and having very intimate connections to this lost pilot, Roy is the perfect man for the job! This film being set up and pitched how it is, most people already have a real solid view of how this films shakes out, although I won't spell it out too much if you haven't twigged. It really is Space- pocalypse Now  though, with Roy travelling deeper and deeper into the darkness, with the twist...