The Quite Nerdy Blog

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 ...