On Chesil Beach (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Newlyweds Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle) are spending their first night together as husband and wife at a hotel on Chesil Beach. As they prepare to consummate their marriage, they reminisce on how they met, how they fell in love and, ultimately, why that moment has them both feeling extremely nervous.

Everest (2015) - Movie Review

Way back when, long before YouTube put Andy Warhol’s words to their most logical extreme, great feats of physical endurance were usually carried out with some reward of societal achievement backing it: Swimming unfathomably long stretches of water, navigating ungodly deserts and scaling unimaginably high mountains; history has put a lot of weight behind the people who did these things first. Now, humanity seems to have stopped caring as much about discovering new frontiers to conquer (on Earth, at least) and now want to share the experience as much as possible. It could be argued that this idea of hosting events where these previously-superhuman feats are available to the everyman cheapen the challenge of the event itself, but there is a feeling of bringing the world closer together through collective experience that gives it some urgency. This is why the idea of scaling Mt. Everest, barring my own aversion to physical exercise, is weirdly appealing despite the very clear danger involved. Something tells me that the idea is going to be substantially less appealing after sitting through today’s subject.

A Royal Night Out (2015) - Movie Review

I have a serious problem with the term 'first world problems' for a number of reasons, one of the main ones being that people mostly use it to negate whenever someone who is better off than they are has something go wrong. Nowadays, it comes package-delivered with all the "at least you aren’t starving in a third-world country" clichéd phrases, which then begins a slippery slope that means that literally no-one can ever say that they are going through hard times. Homeless and living on the street? At least you have a street to live on unlike most kids in Ethiopia; that kind of thing. The reason why this annoys me like it does is that I get that those in the higher ranks of society go through issues as well; not the same issues as the rest of us, but they have to deal with problems same as the rest of us. Sure, someone complaining about a scratch on his Mercedes kind of has what’s coming to him, but more income brings on a different variety of things that need to be handled and not everyone is cut out for it despite where they are. For the record, this isn’t me looking down from a castle wall and telling people to get over it; I’m just a middle-class guy who’s seen enough Disney Princess movies to get the general idea of why living in regal luxury can get a bit too much for some people.

The Theory Of Everything (2015) - Movie Review

In my now-yearly tradition of spooling through the Oscar nominees as if I gave a pea or squib about what the Academy actually thinks, this one's inclusion let loose one of the frankly uglier stereotypes surrounding the Oscars from my mind. Essentially, the story goes that the Academy is far more favourable towards films that focus on illnesses that weaken the body or the mind; anything involving a wheelchair or mental abnormalities are shoe-ins. Whether this is accurate or not, the simple fact is that these stories do connect with people; we have a capacity for sympathy, despite what the world of bro-douche-comedies may want us to think, and these films do register more with us than others. Add to that how the subject is one of mankind's most unique scientific voices and then it hits harder. Is this just simple Oscar bait?