The Quite Nerdy Blog

Wonder Woman 1984 is not, as the title implies, the 1,984th film in the Wonder Woman  franchise. Instead, it's the sequel to that film a few years ago everyone loved called Wonder Woman , except instead of being set during World War 1, this film is set in (get this) 1984. Diana, being the seemingly ageless being she is, has continued living since that war, doing her best to help humanity and currently working at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. However, this peace is disrupted when a mysterious magical mcguffin turns up, which has the power to grant the wish of whoever touches it. As you would expect, there are exactly no terrible consequences to it, but heroes and villains alike are using it to make their wildest dreams come true. It's hardly earth shaking stuff, but importantly, it doesn't have to be. This is a disposable blockbuster and in a year when disposable blockbusters have been so absent, I needed something as well plotted as this. Its plot is predictable, bu...

  Mank is David Fincher's first film since 2014, when he released his trash pulp masterpiece Gone Girl . He has been busy since with TV projects but as a feature director, it's a welcome return, though not into territory that feels familiar for the director. He's got a hell of a filmography, mainly covering serial killers but also veering into sci-fi, home invasion and whatever the hell The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was. The most important touchstone though is The Social Network , as that was Fincher's last attempt at a biopic and also widely regarded as a drop dead masterpiece by many, including yours truly. And so, into that waiting void, Fincher drops Mank , his return to biopics, though this time about a much less prominent figure: Herman Mankiewicz. I admit I didn't quite feel the emotional punch I was hoping to. Because you are likely unaware, Herman Mankiewicz was one of the screenwriters behind Citizen Kane , a film often regarded as one of the greates...

The new generation of consoles is here and currently, there are not many games for them. However, if you have the Xbox Series X or S, you have the benefit of Xbox Game Pass. Over the past few years, this has become the big selling point of having an Xbox and while I have complex feelings on the disappearance of game ownership, it's still a pretty incredible value prospect. Much like Netflix, you pay a monthly subscription fee and get unlimited access to a huge suite of games, for as long as you continue to pay your membership fees. Strangely, it also comes with a "Surprise Me" button which allows you to get randomly recommended a game. Seeing as there appears to be absolutely nothing else happening at the moment, I'm playing six random video games for your enjoyment! Let me quickly set out the rules. I picked six games using the "Surprise Me" button and played them all for at least 15 minutes. I don't have an Xbox Series X, I have a humble little Xbox On...

Star Wars was a mistake. I don't just mean this in a hyperbolic "the human race was a mistake" kind of thing (though partly I do), I also mean that the original Star Wars was genuinely an accident. It is very common knowledge by this point that there was a lot of chaos on the set, in which a still novice director named George Lucas tried to make his sci-fi riff on old Kurosawa films with a Flash Gordon vibe. On getting to the edit room, editor Marcia Lucas found something of a mess. There were strange shifts between scenes, it was unclear what the tone was meant to be and everything felt incredibly amateur. Even today, you can go back and look at some of the original footage and it looks pretty terrible. That original trilogy salvaged something mediocre and turned it into a phenomenon. But then something incredible happened. In post-production, this hot mess of a product came together. Marcia Lucas gave scenes a flow that previously didn't exist and added the now icon...

Welcome back to my second post covering the 2020 London Film Festival! It's honestly been a completely exhausting festival and while my sleep schedule and academic courses are glad it's over, I do already find myself missing that beautiful chaos. It'll be the same kind of thing this time, with me reviewing three more films I loved from the eclectic selection on offer. No particular order, they're roughly organised by the order I saw them, but I recommend them all strongly. I've also been doing some coverage for Exepose, Exeter University's student paper. So far, they've published my reviews on  Relic and Undine , with two more on the way for One Man and His Shoes and Possessor . If you want smaller, more immediate thoughts on these films, you can find them on my Letterboxd , where I've also ranked all the films I saw at this years festival. With those things said, onto the films! Never Gonna Snow Again Cards on the table here, Never Gonna Snow Again wa...

Hey everyone, hope you're all still having a good apocalypse! It's been busy for me over the last few weeks because, in a virtual form, the London Film Festival is here. I'm gutted that I can't get that specialness of a weekend away in London watching films this year but the big plus side to going digital is that it is now more accessible than ever. As part of that, BFI offered what they've called "Film Academy accreditation" for young people, allowing them to get access to press and industry screenings of pretty much every film at the festival. With no worrying about rushing across London to the next cinema or thinking about gaps where I could grab some lunch, I've been able to watch a huge swathe of films so far (though I admit that still being a university student has slowed me down somewhat on the watching). I've seen a bunch of excellent films and there's more I'm planning on covering in two weeks time but for today, I want to talk abo...

As part of his frenetic media tour when promoting Parasite , there was a particularly dry answer Bong Joon-Ho gave to a question. The audience member was talking about a flooding scene in the film and asking if it was perhaps created as a response to some of the massive floods the US had seen over the last few years. His answer? "We have floods in Korea too". Aside from it being a wonderfully witty story about a man the entire world now loves, it's also a really telling example of how a brilliant film can feel like it was made specifically for the moment you're watching it in, even when that couldn't possibly have been the intention. That is the current mood around La Haine , a film that is 25 years old this year and unfortunately, it feels just as relevant today as it did when I first saw it in 2016 and I can only imagine it feels even more urgent than it did in 1995. For the uninitiated (and I strongly recommend initiating yourself with this wonderful film), La ...