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 ...

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? ...