Same Kind Of Different As Me (2020) - Movie Review

Okay, this film technically came out in 2017 (which was after it spent a good three years on the shelf from its 2014 finish date), but considering it only just became available here in Australia this year, and how royally muffed-up the cinematic release schedule has been across the board all year, I’m counting this as a 2020 movie. This is actually one that I’ve been keeping an eye out for when it would drop over here, and it’s something I hinted at when I reviewed Monster Trucks. Yep, this is another film with Don Burgess attached to it as DOP that seems like a major step-down for such a legendary figure. However, as I’ll get into, this is a much better fit for him than something like Monster Trucks.

Judy (2019) - Movie Review

Judy Garland. Hollywood royalty. Gay icon. Star of one of the greatest films ever made. Making a biopic about her could have easily rested on her Yellow Brick Road days and captured something resembling poignancy; knowing how much of modern cinema owes to that film, from the continuing evolution of movie musicals to the dream-logic narratives of David Lynch, it’d resonate on that alone. But instead, director Rupert Goold and writer Tom Edge have gone for a different take, looking at the final year of Judy’s life, when she was trying to scrape together enough money from performing in London’s Talk Of The Town to officially retire. And the vision they give is so utterly spellbinding, it’s difficult imagining this story looking or feeling any differently than this.

Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) - Movie Review

In 2001, Bridget Jones’s Diary (man, that apostrophe still irks me somewhat; I don’t care about grammatical accuracy, that just looks wrong) served as a major paradigm shift for how rom-coms were realized and set a standard for how they would look for the rest of the 2000’s and even today. With its firmly tongue-in-cheek sense of humour and old-school literary influences, it was the exception to the rule that itself became the rule, bringing a far more irresponsible and mutton-acting-as-lamb recklessness to the status quo. Then the sequel came along and, by sticking to auto-pilot on all counts, was thoroughly annoying and a major let-down. Now we have a long-awaited(?) follow-up to the story that may or may not retcon said sequel The Edge Of Reason out of existence, but as always the Sequel Rules still apply. Rule #6 goes that threequels made 10+ years after the fact have a high probability of being either the best or worst of their respective series (see: Toy Story 3, Terminator 3). So, with all that in mind, how does this go?