The Quite Nerdy Blog

Black Widow is the hotly awaited solo film of Black Widow, a character who has been dead for over two years now. I bring this up at the start because it helps foreground the weird place the MCU finds itself in currently. After the pandemic shuttered most cinemas and film sets for the majority of 2020, studios have been working with a mix of productions finished during COVID (more on them in a bit) and productions that have been sitting on a shelf gathering dust. Black Widow is the latter, originally supposed to be released in the spring of 2020, now here in the summer of 2021. It feels exactly like it's been on a shelf somewhere, and that colours so many of my thoughts towards it. This feels like the exact wrong time for a movie about Black Widow, a step back while the TV branch of the MCU is attempting (again, more on that later) to push this universe forward. Paramount among the reasons this feels like a film that was meant to come out years ago is that it's set in between Ca...

Last year, when we all went into lockdown, I did what most of us did: I reverted to a younger version of myself. Living in my childhood bedroom again, I became my thirteen year old self. All I did between daily walks and weekly video calls was play video games and watch Community . To this day, Community is still my favourite show, but I discovered it when I was thirteen and I hadn't rewatched the whole show in full since the season 6 finale. So yeah, I had very little to do with my days and I thought that a comfort watch of my favourite show was appropriate. Most of us did similar, avert thy judgement. The question you're probably asking is why this is relevant a year later. In fairness, a great question. In my rewatch, I failed to finish the show, leaving it hanging on the final three episodes. For an entire year, I have left those episodes untouched and as a sort of closure, I wanted to finally watch those episodes. In the UK, we're coming out of lockdown next week, endi...

This week marks the release of F9 , the ninth film in the Fast and Furious  franchise. This week also marks the week where I get back the final results to my English and Film Studies degree. Quite frankly, what better way is there to mark both momentous occasions than to celebrate the improbable miracle that is the Fast and Furious  franchise. It's come a long way, sometimes a quarter mile at a time, sometimes a nuclear submarine at a time, but it has remained a series of total fascination to me. So using my knowledge and smarts, I want to analyse why Fast and Furious  is so good, even to someone who has spent four years being told the good films look like the polar opposite of this. Pop open that bottle of Corona, chill with your family and join me as we go from the streets of L.A. to... well, that would be a spoiler, wouldn't it? As any piece about the Fast and Furious franchise is obliged to say early on, this was originally a grounded franchise. The Fast and The Furio...