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Reviews
The Last Kingdom (2015)
Ancestors Rock
Love this show. No idea if it's historically accurate, it goes back a bit further than the usual tales of England. But it is abstolutely cracking.
It's better written and acted than most of the dross that's offered up. It doesn't have the budget of a Game of Thrones, but the action is good, and since it doesn't have dragons (a good thing) it doesn't need expensive special effects.
It could do with a bit more nudity, cos I like that kind of thing. Otherwise, totally recommended.
The Magicians (2015)
Badly adapted, acted, with a hint of misogyny
This was unwatchable, I got through about 5 episodes of seasons one and two, after that I started skipping ahead on the BluRay, cutting out the scenes with either Quentin or Alice, then I couldn't stand watching Eliot and Margot. By the end I only had a wafer thin interest in Julia, which didn't turn out so well.
I read the books, which is how I ended up watching the series. My complaint isn't with the various plot changes, nor particularly with the writing, which is intermittently clichéd and corny, but bearable. The real problem is with the acting.
The portrayal of Quentin was simply excruciating, in the books he has a neurotic charm, on screen he was depressing and annoying, and not in a fun way, every scene he was in was a chore to watch. Meanwhile, Alice was the stereotypical shy nerd, who's portrayal fairly closely matched what I might have achieved in the role, and I can't act.
Eliot and Margot were just intensely unlikable. Which leaves Julia, who's character was given enough credibility to elicit some interest in her fate.
That said, I don't understand the thinking when a production is apparently coy about nudity and the beauty of sex, and yet has a graphic depiction of violent sexual assault. It seems wrong and weird.
OXV: The Manual (2013)
Enjoyable and original, deserves to be seen
This is one of the most original films I've seen. It clearly wasn't made with a huge amount of money, but the cinematography and production values are perfectly fine.
The acting and editing are also convincing, but the real star is the script and the story it carries.
The film is somewhat reminiscent of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, at least in its realist treatment of science fiction.
At its heart its about determinism vs free will and how that metaphysical conundrum accounts for love. Which sounds like it could be an ordeal to watch, but it isn't, instead it's interesting and enjoyable, and I think it deserves to be seen.
The Shallows (2016)
Canute in a bikini
I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, a shark becomes vengeful towards a human, no problem, an exhausted woman can ride a turbo charged chain to extreme depth, fine, mobile phone coverage on an isolated beach in Mexico, sure, they have great infrastructure.
What I absolutely cannot accept is that high tide does not follow low tide by a little over six hours. It's the same the world over and is invariable. A hot girl in a bikini can persuade me of almost anything, but not that she can change the speed the moon revolves around the earth.
To add to this marine quibble, the story tells us there's 25 minutes to high tide, but the rock she's sitting on is still two feet above the water. Now if she'd been marooned on a rock in the Bristol Channel, where there's a huge tidal range, it's just possible the rock could have been covered 25 minutes later. Of course it's pretty cold, so no bikini, and there aren't any killer sharks, so no tension.
The rest of the film is extremely silly. She should have eaten the bird.
Bølgen (2015)
Left me crestfallen
The film starts well. Nothing that hasn't been done before, but pretty well done for all that.
It then slips into the worst of disaster movie clichés (also applies to horror films) as the characters start behaving in increasingly idiotic ways.
A full two minutes after the sirens have gone off and the fire alarm is set off in the hotel, all of the guests are still holed up in their rooms. One of them sticks their head out of their room to ask, "Is this a drill?" Seriously? What sort of cretin would think a hotel has a fire alarm drill at 2 in the morning with all the town's sirens going off.
Then there's the clueless geologists. Only the protagonist seems to have a passing knowledge of what all the data means, despite red lights going off everywhere. Each time the readings suggest there might be something wrong the chief geologist dismisses it as probably an error with the sensors. I mean what's the point of having the equipment if you're not going to believe what it's telling you.
Even when the whole mountain collapses, the fantastically idiotic woman in the early warning centre doesn't think to raise the alarm. When she's finally told to sound the sirens, she stares at the red button for long seconds, get on with it you stupid cow.
Back in the town, the hotel's guests are now milling about in the lobby, the bus driver for some unfathomable reason doesn't want to drive them up the hill. Anyway, they all die, which is fine because they were too silly.
The hero's wife then needlessly kills a man who was needlessly freaking out at an extremely unhelpful time.
When the hero finally turns up to save his wife and son, the teenage doofus decides to stop swimming while underwater because he's short of breath, rather than kicking harder for the surface. So the hero gives him the kiss of life underwater and the son continues, while the hero now decides to give up, despite only having 10 feet further to go.
Simply abysmal, but I quite enjoyed the film.
Meru (2015)
Simply Astonishing
This is one of the finest films about extreme sport I have ever seen. It takes you into the mind of a climber, and what you find is spirituality and madness in equal measure.
It is a pleasure to spend time in the company of the three main climbers, who each overcome the most testing adversity to achieve something which to my eyes looks humanly impossible.
The film is also beautifully shot, a number of times I found myself wondering how it could be possible to get a particular angle? Or who would leave the relative comfort of the bivouac in the middle of a storm to get an exterior shot of all the gear hanging off a wall at 20,000ft.
Simply astonishing.
Ex Machina (2014)
Intelligent and entertaining
I think this was the best film I saw in 2015. It's well written, acted and directed, most of all it's good entertainment.
It's an examination of gender, hubris, ownership and what it is to be human. This is all achieved in a suspenseful thriller with a good salting of sexual tension.
The acting is uniformly excellent, Alicia Vikander is exquisite, the perfect human I would construct if I was god of my own world. Oscar Isaac is equally compelling as the arrogant heartless creator, while Domnhal Gleeson plays the innocent who is ensnared and duped by all the other characters.
Alex Garland has a strong track record writing screen plays, here he not only writes but also directs, and with the skill of a highly regarded veteran.
I look forward to his next film, in the meantime Ex Machina is worth a repeat viewing.
The Revenant (2015)
Silly and painfully dull
Okay, okay, it's not really a one out of ten, more like a three, but the overall score is way too high and needs compensating.
As many other reviewers have noted the acting and cinematography are uniformly excellent.
Otherwise, it's both boring and ludicrous. The first twenty minutes are pretty good, but after the bear attack it becomes both silly and tedious. Indeed it's sillier than the film where Liam Neeson gets chased around the wilderness by a pack of wolves, and at least that was quite exciting.
The biggest problem by far was that the DiCaprio character continued to live. In sub zero temperatures if any human, but especially one that's been severely weakened, is plunged into freezing water and then is unable to get dry he will die of hypothermia. What he won't be able to do is go back into the freezing water in order to build a horseshoe of rocks under the water so he can trap fish. This was just one instance of many.
A horse's chest cavity is simply not big enough to accommodate a fully grown man, Leo fires his barrel loading pistol twice in quick succession which is impossible.
Then there were all the continuity problems. Leo gets washed downstream but appears to arrive at a location which is at a higher altitude. Sometimes there's lots of snow on the trees, then in the next shot barely any snow at all. It's just a mess.
But the worst thing was how long it took to achieve relatively little. Just lots of suffering for DiCaprio and boredom for me.