The Amazing Maurice (2023) - Movie Review

With how badly director Toby Genkel’s previous animated ventures have turned out, being responsible for the gargantuan irritants of the Nestrians in the Two By Two films, the prospect of him helming an adaptation of Terry bloody Pratchett is… concerning, to say the least. Doubly so because this will be the first theatrical adaptation of Pratchett’s Discworld canon, being relegated to TV miniseries up to this point. However, knowing that the writing and storytelling was ultimately the biggest problem with Two By Two, and this is built on a foundation not reliant on toy sales to justify its existence, maybe this will work out for a change.

Anomalisa (2016) - Movie Review

While I have talked at length before about the nebulous concept of 'Oscar bait', and how this time of year just before the Oscars is usually the big dumping ground for its ilk around here, I fear I may have misrepresented it just a touch. I have usually attributed that term to what most people consider to be prestige pictures: Period pieces usually dealing with the important social issue of the day; bonus points if it’s set during World War II and/or involves Nazis.

Well, only recently by my own admission, I have realised that there is another type of Oscar bait out there: The over-conceptualised, over-cooked 'thought experiments' that are meant to be challenging but, more times than not, usually end up getting slapped with the 'pretentious' label whether it’s warranted or not. It’s the kind of space that arthouse hacks like Malick occupy. Yeah, I more than acknowledge that I may be in the minority on this, but I will not submit when it comes to how much the Academy unconditionally loves that guy and work that feels even remotely like his. Not to say that the hyper-intellectual type of Oscar bait is inherently bad; after all, Academy favourite Charlie Kaufman well and truly fills that gap and he is easily one of the most fascinating, if not always coherent, cinematic minds still working today. Yeah, time to actually put on that film snob hat for once; would be a shame if I didn’t wear it even once.

Macbeth (2015) - Movie Review

Shakespeare is far and away the most adapted writer in human history, which makes the prospect of reviewing one of the thousand films based on his work a little daunting. Not only that, as much as some scholars would eagerly wish to argue, the man’s work is full of notoriously intricate language that can prove rather difficult to read. As someone who has a serious habit of comparing films to each other, even when it isn’t called for, how am I to know whether or not the supposedly 'fresh' ideas presented in one adaptation haven’t already been made cornerstones of the work previously? Is there nearly enough time in the world for me to spool through every work just to be sure? Is it even worth me doing so in the first place? This is where I come face-to-face with the reason I started this blog in the first place: To learn. I have never made any pretence about my own knowledge involving the medium: Everything I claim to know about film, I have learnt in passing and I am by no means a definitive voice on anything except my own personal tastes and opinions.

So, with that unnaturally heavy introduction to another one of my typically idiosyncratic and scatterbrained analyses out of the way, time to get into today’s film.