Antebellum (2020) - Movie Review

Bear with me on this one, because I’m feeling a bit apprehensive about writing a review for this particular movie. As I have been making a regular habit of mentioning around here, I am a suburban white dude from Sydney, Australia, and while I don’t shy away from discussing rather grisly topics over the course of these reviews… gotta admit, being able to do justice to the American original sin that is slavery has always felt like one of my blind spots. I mean, I’m as far away from knowing the first-hand black experience as it’s possible to get, and I have certain fears that my takes about a given film to do with the topic might end up trivialising this aspect of that experience. And that's something I really want to be careful about when discussing Antebellum, which mishandles the topic worse than any other film I've covered on here.

Ben-Hur (2016) - Movie Review

Ben-Hur, the 1959 cinematic epic, is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. It is also three-and-a-half hours long, so between my disliking of overlong cinema and general attention span issues in general, I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet and I’m not even sure if I will. Yeah, I may do my background research where I can, but even I have limits. Not to say that I haven’t seen bits of it over time, just never in its entirety. As such, I’ll be going into this as most young filmgoers of today would and take this as its own work. So, now that it doesn’t exactly have a pre-existing impression of the story to live up to, how is it?

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies (2016) - Movie Review

For as much as I try and deconstruct the films that I watch, with varying degrees of success, I am quickly discovering something about myself when it comes to films: I love dumb zombie movies. Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, Cooties, Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead; sure, these are all meant to be comedies, but even then these are incredibly silly films and more than a little wrong-headed in their own ways. And yet, as I look back on them, I still love them a hell of a lot more than I probably should, given the pseudo-intellectual air that can be felt around these parts. Hell, I’m still laughing at a bit from Cooties where a character just says “Word”. So, knowing my own weakness for the more goofy iterations of the living dead, I look at today’s film with a general idea of what I’m getting myself into. I mean, look at the bloody title; my love for all things surreal and ultimately silly can’t help but be triggered by something that gloriously inane. But, I have to maintain some level of professionalism around… here… yeah, I can’t even pretend that that’s what I do in the first place. Let’s just say that my opinion on this film may already be skewed before we even get into it proper. Anyway, time to sink our teeth into this thing.

The Longest Ride (2015) - Movie Review

On the list of red-flag genre listings, at least as I see them, romantic dramas are a few rungs above romantic comedies. The reason for this is the irony factor: Romantic comedies are already trying to make the audience laugh, so any hopes of getting laughs out of how bad it is are slim at best; romantic dramas, on the other hand, are perfectly viable in that regard. I bring this up because, since this film is adapted from a Nicholas Sparks book much like The Best Of Me was, I suspect that the only way I can possibly enjoy this movie is for less than genuine reasons. The best I can realistically hope for is that this doesn’t aggravate me as much as that film did, which shouldn’t be too hard but I’ve been proven wrong before.