Wait... is that...?

Are we getting a new album????

...or is it just an ad for a magazine? (it could be both!)

Hang on... is that Teardrop I hear?

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Presents

This movie tipped a potential warning for me as it was under 90 minutes. But...

We are in a house, going around, looking at the rooms. A family moves in, and we follow them around, caring a lot about what happens with the sister Chloe. The brother brings in a douche-bag friend, and he is a real scumbag. We don't like him.

And that's what I'm going to say about the plot. Is this a second-person film? It definitely can be read that way. There's a mixture of oners, but then this is underdone with short cuts that don't quite work in that framework. The set up was enough to keep me watching, and we get definite hints about what is going on...

Lucy Lui is in this, but despite that name, she isn't the lead. Instead it is Callina Liang and Eddy Maday who lead the movie, and they are quite believable. There are very few effects (and the few are well done) but the key trick is how well the camera moves, barely getting past some of the actors, and you don't hear any footsteps. Good production there.

Frankly, this was a far better movie that I was expecting.

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Campagnion

I keep thinking that is Anna Taylor-Joy in the poster.

Josh is a shitty person, and this movie is entirely dedicated to showing that in every frame of this. Terrible person, terrible friend, terrible morals, just all out and out terrible.

Oh, and this is about companions and such.

I knew the trick of this movie from early trailers, but then it seemed to be a twist to not reveal? And yet, the "twist" is revealed in the first half of the movie, so it's not the big reveal? Indeed, there isn't much of a big reveal, it's just Josh being a shit, and we find out the degrees to which that is true.

The performances are fine. Sophie Thatcher is indeed the lead role in this movie, and Jack Quaid is the piece of shit. Others are also in this movie, including it's Harvey Guillén!

This movie doesn't have that much to say, so on one hand keeps it clean, on the other... it just doesn't have much to say.

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The Georg

He's just an assassin boy, she's just an assassin girl, can I be any more obvious?

There's a Gorge in the middle of nowhere, and it might contain some epic nastiness. Anyway, aside from that, we have an American man on one side, and a Russian woman on the other... can these two would be enemies find common ground, and come together in love? (Like, they aren't really enemies, just not supposed to contact each other.) And then a monster movie happens.

Half this movie is build up, then the bulk of the next part is them dealing with what is in the Gorge... and then like the last five minutes is wrap up? Seriously, they go from "we barely made it out of Act Two" before they are suddenly able to set off the last act and then the credits roll. How will they deal with it? Super easy, barely an inconvenience!

Miles Teller is our lead, and he's fine. Anna Taylor-Joy is the female lead, but she is definitely treated as the supporting artist here. Sigourney Weaver gets to cameo, so that's something. The monsters are... fine. Nothing particular spectacular about them, and the colour pallete is "mono", so they don't really have anything out standing about them.

If you want to see this, I'm not going to say "no", but there are better things to put on.

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Maona 2

I can see how this was abbreviated...

Moana is out looking for other islands/people, and after being struck by lightning, she gets the idea for the plot of the movie of going looking for a particular island. After grabbing a handful of other people who will not matter in this movie version, she heads out, bumps into someone who shortcircuits a lot of the adventure, finds Maui, and then goes to the island. There are many, many songs to fill in the space to make this over ninety minutes.

This definitely has the feel of "we could make this a television series" feeling, with lots of potential plot points expanding over an episode, with the focus on different characters. See, for example, how Prodigy did this. But here we just get maybe a song covering a lot of it, then on to the next one. Speedrunning as a movie!

Auli'i Cravalho and Dwayne Jackson are back, and perfectly fine. There are a scattering of other actors, and now I can easily recognise Rose Matafeo's voice, so huzzah for her!

This is fine, although would have been better as the full series. But at least there's the teaser for more movies... yay?

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Capitan Ameraci

aka The Falcon And The Angry Soldier.

There's a Celestial out in the ocean. Remember that? 'cos the movies haven't for a while, but now it's all anyone is talking about. It's vitally important for... reasons, and it forms the main backbone against which the events of this movie play out. Captain America is uncovering things while President Ross is involved, and then...

Actually, if you've seen the trailers or heard lots of old commentary, you know a lot about the 'who's that are involved, but they aren't nearly as prevalent as you might think. Anthony Mackie is great as Sam Wilson, and Harrison Ford is... often on screen. There are numerous other characters, and various cameos, and Giancarlo Esposito is wasted as Sidewinder.

All because the plot just isn't that exciting. The common thing people are saying about this movie is "it's fine" and...

It's fine.

[END]

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Trans1former1s Un

Before they met the eye, they were not more.

Orion Pax and D-16 are just dudes who want to help out and be more than they are. They do this by doing extremely stupid things that turn out to be helpful for them, until they find out the obvious secret of betrayal and their whole lives are built on lies. And then they are on track to becoming the battling bots we know and play with.

This is a lot better than I was expecting. It's not exactly deep, but it's a story well told, and even the obvious moments are still executed well. It's a decent origin story, and although the twist from D-16 is a little forced, you can see how it plays out. Although the actual eventual name of Autobot and Deception is a lot of a stretch.

Good vocal performances too. Chris Hemsworth is doing his "big speech" voice, and Scarlett Johansson is also in this. Brian Tyree Henry is a great D-16, and Keegan-Michael Key is suitably annoyingly as B-127. (If there is more to their names than just random numbers, I have no idea.)

I don't know Transformers deep lore, but this works fine for me.

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Nosfaeratau

This is the 2024 remake, and if it is a faithful remake... yeah, I just watched Dracula again.

Blah blach not Harker goes to not Dracula and sells him a place in England yadda yadda not Mina is entranced with not Dracula skibibi toilet not Van Helsing is on board to explain everything and cause some kind of ending.

No wonder copyright law was all over this back in the day. It's such a rip off you would think it was originally a Kylo/Ren fanfic! I will allow that the performances are good, Nicholas Hault is fine, Willem Defoe is having fun, Bill Skarsgaard is creepy, and Lily-Rose Depp is... on screen. Women don't fare well in Dracula stories, and she isn't exactly playing up a strong woman stereotype, and I just couldn't care when she was on screen.

All I can say now that this is at least a movie I've now seen.

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Glaadiiaatoor 2

The movie of the farther will be revisited upon the son.

Hanno is a young man with a wife, and she may as well be named "Dead soon, gonna bite it" as she lives up to that name almost immediately. He is captured, and taken to be a gladiator, and we get several fights as Hanno proves he is the Main Character of the movie. The man who killed the wife turns out to be Hanno's mother's new husband, so he is actually not a terrible person (and indeed, is played by Pedro Pascal, so of course we are on this side), but unfortunately Roman politics happen. Which also leads to the two lead mad emperors trying to lead (having character be mad mean you don't need to justify the plot - they are mad, they just do things!), but are outdone by one person who takes advantage of them never having guards around, and then we finally get to the final combat, in which everyone watches so they don't need to shoot a huge army fighting scene.

I was surprised by the collection of English actors here, Derek Jacobi, Tim McInnery, and Matt Lucas. But they, and everyone, is overwhelmed by Denzel Washington's acting all over the place. The effects are fine, and the battles look impressive enough.

All in all, I was somewhat entertained.

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Hoos of Leves

So I read the book. Or did I blue the book? I considered doing House in blue, but now can't be bothered.

As you may have heard, this is a book of layers.

Level 0: There is a movie, called the Navidson Record, about a guy documenting a strange door in his house that goes into an infinite depth of darkness and corridors. Which is definitely my shit. Indeed, I've done an RPG module based on that (although I didn't know it at the time)!

Level 1: A book about the movie, written by Zampanò. This is an indepth analysis of the movie, detailed notes, and a bajillion footnotes to academic papers. [One conceit of this book is that it is written around four years after the documentary, but there are just so many academic papers referenced that I am severly doubting that any media could generate so much discussion in such a short time frame.]

Level 2: Johnny Truant had the notes Zampanò wrote, and put it together into this book we are reading, and has added notes of his own. He is affected by the book of the documentary, adversely, and has to get it out to get it out of his head. Here the most interested aspect to me are the appendix of the mother's letters, which I will come back to a moment.

Level 3: This whole thing is a book written by the actual author of all, Mark Z. Damielewski.

This is certainly a piece of work, where Mark has put a lot of effort into it. Many of the chapters are formatted to give a sense of what the text is about, eg the labyrinth chapter is cramped and confusing (this is the chapter most people reference when pointing out what the book is doing), another chapter is spacing things out, only a few words per page, so you get the rushing sense of action as you speed through the pages. That's nice and all, but I'm not convinced it's really needed. Like if this was an actual film, you would get that naturally that translating it to text doesn't quite capture. Frankly, aside from the labyrinth chapter, this could easily be any normal book, or even an audiobook, but with that chapter...

And then there is the deep reading of the text. The meaning of the various layers, why is the word house in blue, what happened that no-one apart from Zampanò is aware of the documentary, that this book itself appears in the text as a book, but... the problem is this entire book is predicated on the concept of an unreliable narrator. Every level is suffused with "are they telling the truth, or just writing down anything," with Level 2 explicitly calling out some of the times he is doing that. So... I noticed a few weird typos and such, but I can't trust "is this a key to unravelling the whole thing?" or is it just "whoops, didn't mean that?" Let alone "I wrote this because it was just what occured to me at the time" (at Level 3). I'm definitely doing to watch some video essays that deconstruct this book, but I can't trust they understand it either.

So definitely a book I read. Or, at least, turned the pages while seeing words with my eyes.

[END]

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