Stuff i’ve {watched, listened to, read, played} recently

Well, obviously it’s brilliant, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Christopher Nolan knows how to deliver a good old-fashioned cinematic spectacle. The Troy flashbacks are going to get all the praise, but μὰ τὴν Εὐτέρπην, the audio mixing for the Cyclops! The Imax screen genuinely turned into a cave. I heard sounds previously unknown to human hearing.

I like how everyone these days seems to agree that Hell just looks… a bit like Iceland.

That Circe scene is absolutely going to give a new generation of confused teens transformation fetishes.

I liked how they integrated the Bronze Age Collapse as a running theme — though i’m not sure i love the trend of seemingly every film these days being about a bygone age being over and how we now live in a forsaken world, or whatever.

Yep… still great.

At one point Ellie Rowsell pulled out a megaphone out of nowhere and started singing through it. The encore was all covers and the crowd went absolutely feral for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I completely fucked my voice for the night singing along to that and “Don’t Delete the Kisses“. Absolute cinema.

Good stuff! I’ve heard some people were put off by the characters talking all modern-like, but i thought it was fun. Helped you put yourself in their shoes.

The Republican National Convention scenes are just Conclave for straight people.

Mostly enjoyed this — Sam Rockwell is the glue that holds it all together — even if it’s a bit disjointed and doesn’t have as much to say about technology as it thinks it does.

Oh, dear. Oh, dear.

I wanted to like this film, and in parts i sort of did. (The scene where Michael Sheen is telepathically interrogating our female protagonist to try and narrow down where she is? Actually really good!) But any authorial stamp Spielberg may have imbued it with is overwhelmed by the mediocre shitshow that is everything else.

This film has two modes: Explaining everything and explaining nothing. I hate them both. The characters (to the extent that they can be called such) are underwritten, and largely just talk in grandiose platitudes about how everything’s about to change and the government can’t keep covering up the existence of… uh… mm… supreme extradimensional lifeforms? (This alien movie is too afraid of seeming silly to actually say the word “alien”, but not too afraid to have a bunch of little green men running about.)

The pacing is a nightmare, too. Disclosure Day judders along in sudden starts and sudden stops as our male lead tries and largely succeeds in evading a corporate paramilitary by being the worst hide-and-seek player in recorded history. No wonder the aliens have to teach people empathy — in this universe Homo sapiens doesn’t even have peripheral vision!

All in all it’s just quite poor, and shows very little interest in the titular “disclosure”, which is relegated to a TV-news clip show that takes up the film’s last ten minutes. A surefire shoo-in for the Pebbledash Dildo at this year’s Horny Awards.

I’m annoyed that this is as good as it is, frankly. It’s a film adaptation of a Youtube series based on a 4chan creepypasta. And yet, here we are. A moopie about Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve scrambling around an endless yellow Ikea showroom contains some of the tensest, most heart-pounding horror moments of the year. (And a great score from director Kane Parsons, too!)