Electrick Children (2011)

What a weird but enjoyable little film. Rented purely 'cause I wanted to see what Rory Culkin had grown into (another good actor, but Kieran's probably still the most promising). A mormon girl listens to a cassette tape, hears music for the first time and suddenly becomes pregnant. Her parents don't believe her immaculate conception story so they throw her brother out believing he raped her. They run away to Las Vegas, him wanting her to confess on the tape to who really raped her so he can go home and clear his name, she wants to find the voice on the tape, believing him to be her baby's father and the man she must marry.
A good culture shock film with everything you wanted to happen, the brother gets drunk and high and makes out with girls and swears and has a great time, the sister falls in love with a loser skaterboy and they escape the weird religious oppression of the commune. Hooray!

Robin Hood Prince of Thieves (1991)

I used to love this film, well, bits of it. And those bits I found I do still love! But my god, what a boring overly long film it is! Still better than Russell Crowe but nowhere near as good as the Disney version.
Christ! All these Americans! Ending with a wink to the camera?! Jesus! Self-righteous American tosh! And then, every twenty minutes or so you get this really quite different, darkly comic British pantomime, Alan Rickman arrives and you wake up and you find you're enjoying the film all of a sudden! He's camp but he's scary, he's funny but fucking weird! That bit when he talks to that kid "I had a very troubled childhood, I'll tell you about it sometime..." then he stops an seems to remember he's in the middle of being a professional sheriff, he's not, he's a fucking nutbar! And he plays it so well. You can bet your bottom dollar that it's because of his performance in this dreadful film that got him every other job he's ever had.
Sometimes I think it's a shame he got that Harry Potter job. Yes I'm in the minority that think he's completely miscast, but I really do think that comedy is where his talent really lies, that in Robin Hood and Galaxy Quest he is simply brilliant, and perhaps if he hadn't done Harry Potter he might have had better roles and made some better films! Who knows.
Tim Roth would have been a great Snape. He turned it down apparently. Imagine! Imagine if Tim Roth was Snape! Lily, James, Lupin and Sirius would have been better cast as well, they would have cast them around Roth! Cast them the right age! Had them all in their forties rather than their sixties! Ridiculous.

Shirley Valentine (1989)

The next time someone good does Shirley Valentine on stage I'd really like to see it. I enjoy the film and I think even though it looks SO eighties, the script and the performances are good enough to keep it timeless, at least it hasn't suddenly become dated. But I would love to see it as it was originally, a monologue. Pauline Collins as Shirley is by far, head and shoulders above everyone else, the best thing in it, and so she should be she won enough awards for doing the monologue on Broadway and the West End before they turned it into a film. It must have been fun for her getting to actually go on the fab holiday she'd spent three years talking about on a stage set like a crappy kitchen with chips and egg on the cooker.

Up (2009)

I thought I'd write a little bit about Up here because when watching it with my mum in the middle of the night I said as Russell and Mr Fredrickson went into that storm "What if they actually died at this point and the rest is them just in limbo trying to find heaven?" which freaked my mum out and she said "It's Paradise Lost!"
I think she meant Paradise Regained, Paradise Lost is just Adam and Eve. Paradise Regained, as far as my understanding is, is Jesus wandering in the wilderness and being tempted by the devil. That's Up, init?
But what I reckon what mum actually meant was it's the Divine Comedy. Hey, all these things were written in rhyme way back when! But when mum was drawing comparisons she was drawing them to the Divine Comedy not Paradise Lost or Regained! Plus they're all about the same sort of stuff; heaven and hell!
Dante is guided by Beatrice, his ideal woman, the one he met as a kid, through Heaven. Then he falls and so Virgil, his poet guide, rescues him and guides him through hell and then into a sort of limbo, there's a load of lost souls there and he has to think about what's important and let go of some stuff. Once he lets go he is able to understand god and he is happy.
Now that is Up. And if you were wondering Virgil is Russell and the lost souls are all those dogs who have human voices.

A Dangerous Method (2012)

Good to watch after watching In Treatment, my mum said she hadn't realised because she didn't know much about it but Paul is obviously a Jungian and Gina; Freudian. That was the only thing we got from it though! It was boring and now, three days later, I can't remember anything about it apart from Keira's comedy Russian accent and her using that jaw of hers to her advantage (pulling mad loony faces). Yep Keira is shite. I watched Seeking a Friend for the End of the World as well this week, it was fucking terrible. Not just the script but Keira especially. Playing a 'kooky English girl' no, she should stick to period pieces. But no, actually she's rubbish in them too. I've seen all her films, why? Because I like her.
Why do I like her? This is something I can't figure out! I think it's because I like HER, the real her, the her I see in interviews and being paper doing normal things and being a normal person. And I like the fact that even though people go on about her being too thin it's obvious she is just made that way! She isn't too thin, she's just funny looking! She's got silly little legs, little chunkers, I don't know if anyone;s ever noticed that, but she's not an anorexic little model, she's a funny little British girl who has a funny flat face! It's only beautiful from certain angles, other angles it's just weird! And I like that about her!
I'm waiting for her to make a good film, she does very well in those magazine adverts modelling for perfume- even the tv ad where she's on that motorbike is shite! But no, she was terrible in Pride and Prejudice, Bend it like Beckham, Atonement, Love Actually, Never Let me Go, even Pirates of the Caribbean, which I really enjoy, she's just a bit naff.

In Treatment (2008)

So I can't stress how much I liked In Treatment, though I also can't stress how much it was just because of the concept! Five half hour episodes a week; the patient he sees on Monday on Monday, the patient he sees on Tuesday on tuesday, etc and then on Friday he goes to his therapist and talks about what he really thinks of all his nut job patients! And the best part of it was you had to wait a week to see Sophie again, or Jake and Amy or whoever was your favourite, and how has what Paul's (Gabriel Byrne, our therapist) had to deal with over the week, how was that going to affect how he treats his patients. See even though you only see him non-professionally in the friday episodes it was still all about him, it took a week to get into it, but once you're in you are caught!
So Sophie was my favourite. Not just because she seemed to be the only patient he actually managed to help (Laura, no, that didn't work, Alex, that definitely didn't work, Jake and Amy, well, Jake seemed much better but I grew to like him more and more towards the end and hate Amy, and his own therapy, well what a disaster!) But I liked the relationship between them. One of the things Paul argued to his own therapist was that he loved all of his patients, if he didn't feel a connection then he couldn't really help them. Sophie was the one he really loved I think, and she loved him. She got what she needed out of therapy, a safe place and someone she could trust and a father figure who didn't let her down or take advantage of her. I came to the conclusion he should be a child psychiatrist, as he was gentle and patient with her when he wasn't with some of the others, after all it's ok for a child to act like a child but surely you can't help showing your anger and disgust if after ten sessions a grown man is still acting that way (I liked it when he went mad at Alex, did he punch him or did he just throw coffee in his face?).
Mia Wasikowska was bloody good. Makes me want to watch Jane Eyre again, she's now on my list of actors to always watch. I liked Melissa George as Laura as well, but only 'cause I fancied her.

This Is England '88 (2011)

I saw This is England (2006) when it came out at the cinema, it was really good and then I forgot about it, when This is England '86 came on the telly and was all about Woody and Lol's wedding and breakup and her murdering her rapist father, well, I thought it was excellent, the best thing I'd sen on tv for years and years. Why didn't I write about it on the blog? Maybe then I would have remembered how much I'd enjoyed it and I wouldn't have somehow managed to miss this one! '88 was on last Christmas and is a sort of nativity story, it wasn't as gripping as the last series but I really enjoyed it. It was just about how Lol and Woody were both so sad without each other. I like stuff like that, I like depressing romances.

Misfits Series Three (2011)

 

Series three saw the departure of favourite Nathan and the arrival of new favourite Rudy. No need to worry about your show when Joe Gilgun climbs aboard. Yes, seeing him there reminded me how good This is England is, more about that later.
It was a good series to end it on. I watched the first episode of the new series but I won't be watching the rest, it seemed to have lost all charm and it was violent and not funny. If Kelly had stayed it would have been ok, she was my other favourite, but she is gone. Ho hum.
Anyway, I enjoyed those three series of the Misfits they were in a league and genre of their own, Matt Smith's Doctor drunk and on heroin, Being Human but high, Buffy but bum-raped by Rudy's apathetic self-interested side.