Above Average Joe Blogs

So here we are 10 years after the original Iron Man movie and my initial response from that film: "That was pretty average, it won't catch on." Well colour me very very wrong, at least on the second part of that sentence. We've had 17 other Marvel films of varying quality since then and now they all culminate in the 19th film - Infinity War, with a plot that has had its various threads slowly (and not always deftly) woven into the preceding 18 films. Full disclosure (although you may have already gathered from the above paragraph) I'm not a massive Marvel movies fan. I've enjoyed quite a few of them (The first two Captain America movies, the original Thor, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming) but I've also seen a fair few I just have not liked or have thought are blisteringly average (Iron Man 2, Guardian of the Galaxy, Civil War, Black Panther). Why I list these movies for you is to give you a basis for this subjective criticism as I imagine that f...

Much like the subject matter of the film, director Alex Garland's film Annihilation has come to us in various different forms around the world. In the US it was deemed that the average American could handle its topics from the comfort of a plush cinema seat, whereas us plebs in other countries were deemed too dense to delve into its depravities outside the comfort of our beds and sofas, binging the film on Netflix. By way of an introductory rant, whilst I applaud Netflix for picking up this gem of a film, it is a worrying trend that big studios were not willing to front up and back a brave, unique, twisted, and weird sci-fi film, and stick it on the big screen. Although the film is great irregardless of its confines on your laptop, tv, tablet, phone (select applicable Netflix providing gadget) I can't help but feel the impact of the film would have only been heightened seeing it on a big screen. But anyway, I digress...Annihilation is Alex Garland's second feature fil...

The Oscars, for me a normally highly stuffy affair full of self-congratulatory nominations for dry as poorly made porridge films about Hollywood, or the golden age of cinema, or an autobiographical film about some war hero, has suddenly had a bit of a shot in the arm this year. On a normal year, I would count myself very lucky to have watched one film nominated in the best picture category but here I am having seen the horror-comedy Get Out, realist-fantasy The Shape of Water, the war movie by way of Mad Max film, Dunkirk, and the bleak dark comedy drama, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (henceforth Three Billboards) [it's a shame what I think would've been my favourite movie of 2017, Blade Runner 2049 didn't get best picture nomination]. Get Out is probably the biggest surprise nomination out of the bunch as I thought it was a perfectly good film, great even, but in terms of really knocking it out of the park with directorial flare it isn't super. Howeve...

So the blog posts kinda got a bit quiet in the last 2 months. I think I'd only seen two movies in that time and they weren't particularly interesting, or easily bloggable movies. The first was Thor: Ragnarok, the second The Disaster Artist. For Thor, my thoughts amounted to "eh, its another Marvel movie, too long, too much humour, lacklustre villain." My review would have been, do you like Marvel movies? You'll like this. If not, this won't win you over. The Disaster Artist on the other hand, was a trickier film for me to blog about through its subject matter: a film about the making of the the best worst film ever made, The Room. I'm not a huge comedy movie fan but this film had me in stitches time and time again. Plus, I'm no Francophile (great pun, google it), but he gave a spot on performance of the alien-like Tommy Wiseau. If I had to give any critiques it is that it would not work for anyone who has not seen The Room but really, why haven...

Blade Runner: 2049 and Cinema Etiquette  Cinema Etiquette  Misophonia. The hatred of sound. I, and I imagine a fairly large number of readers will have this to some degree for certain sounds. Classic examples would be burping, lip smacking, snorting, gulping that sort of thing. Well now imagine you are in a cinema trying to watch Blade Runner: 2049 when the stranger next to you decides to do all of these tics every 15 minutes throughout the film. It was enough to drive me  out of the screening for a few minutes as any longer and the only noise people would hate would be me gently simmering in repressed British rage. If cinema etiquette was graded, the selfish bastard next to me would've been expelled post haste. Although having said that, I am somewhat of a cinema etiquette Nazi when it comes to this. And so, I've made a simple list of rules to ensure optimum film satisfaction. 1. No late entry. You know what time the film starts. You can get your ticket ...

I had a bit of a bumper week for films the past week, knocking off Darren Aronofsky's Mother! (! is part of the title for reasons unknown) and then Matthew Vaughn's sequel to Kingsman, subtitled The Golden Circle. Before diving into these reviews I'd like to talk a bit about the problems with trailers. Both the trailer for Mother! and The Golden Circle raise two different problems with modern trailers which are almost impossible to avoid if you are seeing movies in the cinema and therefore having to watch trailers before the actual film. Mother! and a Misleading Trailer First, Mother!'s (this is never going to be an easy film to properly punctuate) problem relates to the potential for miss-selling the movie in question. The trailers for Mother! suggested that the film was going to be a psychological horror movie that was going to go further than any other movie before in terms of shock value. That isn't me hyperbolising, one trailer for the films come replete w...

Cannily enough, the last time Stephen King's mammoth sized horror epic It got an adaptation it was 1990. Then It was adapted into a tv-movie starring the inimitable, sinister voiced, Tim Curry. Now 27 years later, just like the titular monster's feeding cycle, It is back, and ready to feast on the fears of children. And unfortunately, that's about the only peer group I suspect will find this, whilst wonderfully made bit of 80s retro kids on bikes adventuring throwback, scary. But before we dive deep into that tautologically turgid claim a few side notes. First, I'm not a mega Stephen King fan. That isn't saying I dislike him but I've only read a handful of his books, although considering how vast his body of work is maybe that isn't too bad. The first King book I read was Cell, which I read in high school. That was a twist on the zombie apocalypse genre, where all the mobile phones in the world suddenly let out a phone call which, if answered, turns th...