Change Your Image
bookaholic
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
First Date (2022)
Moving, and unexpectedly funny
The scenario might not sound funny -- a recently widowed woman hopes her daughter will stay on at the farm after the funeral, not go back to the city and leave her alone -- but this short film manages to be touching, relatable on an emotional level, slightly shocking (though people can behave strangely when they're grieving), and at times hilarious.
Aisling O'Sullivan gives an understated but powerful performance as grieving widow Tina. Daithi O'Donnell is a wonderfully hapless hopeful suitor to Tina's daughter Jackie.
Áine Ryan's screenplay is so well written, and I look forward to seeing more of director Clara Planelles' work.
School Spirits (2023)
clever mystery, engaging characters
Light spoilers only
I watched this over two evenings, becoming more & more invested in finding out not just what happened to Maddie, but why every living person who the story focused on seemed to be guilty of something, and some of the dead ones seemed suspicious too.
Mystery/suspense shows can make any character seem suspicious, with the right music, lighting, actions that we don't know the motives for. School Spirits did this so well, making it hard to tell what the characters were really up to -- were they grieving, feeling guilty about something non-murderous, actually guilty of harming Maddie...?
The characters are multifaceted; we learn more about them, and they learn more about each other, with each episode. Some are still a puzzle to me -- is Xavier's dad (the sheriff) a bad guy, as in corrupt? What is up with Mr South, the janitor?
I like the unusual world-building that the writers have done about what the ghosts/spirits can & can't do, how they interact with the physical world -- that becomes clearer as the episodes progress too.
It's a really entertaining series that explores friendships, grief, children being carers for their parents, adults being good mentors (or not)...
Great writing, great performances, good production all round. I'm looking forward to the second season.
The Midwich Cuckoos (2022)
A story worth retelling
Worth watching. Really good contemporary adaptation of John Wyndham's novel.
(I've read the book, seen an earlier adaptation)
Seems that this story, of ordinary people raising alien babies, really appeals to viewers & readers over the decades. Not as many retellings as Frankenstein, but scary children are a great trope, and people believing that they love the inhuman children raises the stakes.
Things I like about this 2022 series:
Terrific performances from the adults and the child actors.
The story structure across the episodes. Some viewers felt it was too slow, but the pace worked for me. Enough time to get invested in all the characters, to see the adults change under the influence of the children, then try to break free. And even to hope that some of the children might turn out to be redeemable.
These children are much scarier to me than the kids with platinum hair. They look quite normal, which makes their powers, their ruthlessness, so much more frightening.
Setting the story in a commuter town works to create a varied group of people who can believably be cut off from friends & family.
Things that didn't work:
lot holes, including -- didn't any of the friends or family outside Midwich notice that the babies grew up incredibly fast? Did they all have to sign non-disclosure agreements? How did Westcott manage to get away with it all?
Marvel Studios: Assembled: The Making of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021)
Great exploration of themes & characters & techniques
Fascinating to see how Falcon & Winter Soldier was created. The story draws on both the comics and the evolution of the characters as shown in the MCU, refined by the writer with input from actors and producers.
The fight scenes that exciting in their final form are even more impressive when you see all the components: stunt choreography, actors, high tech cameras, CG effects, different shooting locations...
And this production had more than the usual challenges to scheduling and shooting, losing a major location when earthquakes tragically hit Puerto Rico, and pausing production for eight months because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Friends from College: Mission Impossible (2017)
Great comedy of embarrassment
The best comedy of embarrassment that I've seen has been British -- Fawlty Towers, The Office (UK).
Friends From College is the closest I've seen from North America -- not as cringe-inducing, but excellent, uncomfortable humour, mixed with relatable real emotion, like Ethan & Lisa's feelings about IVF
Thorne: Sleepyhead (2010)
Melodramatic mess
Several very good performances, which almost redeem the bad writing.
As others have said, the police characters are often simply not credible in the way they behave, and the medical professionals are pretty bad too.
I don't expect complete accuracy or realism in crime fiction, and I know that lead characters often do more in an investigation than someone in their role actually would, but why on earth would a forensic pathologist be observing an interrogation of a suspect?
And would a detective really get away with treating a suspect like that? Was he under caution? Okay, maybe you don't show the proper procedures because this is a thriller and you want to keep the pacing tight, but why wasn't anyone else in the room? Why would other police just stand in the observation room watching a colleague losing it like that?
The relationships between the characters weren't particularly convincing either.
When the mother said her son died under a train and all she had left to bury was mush, I had a fair idea where the story was going. Not sure why I kept watching.
Lucky me, I watched to the end, through all the flickery flashbacks, and got to see that nit with the tongue at the end. Wtf was that? Did he have a razor blade in his mouth through the shouty interrogation? Surely he can't have just bitten it off!
Marcella: Episode #1.3 (2016)
Content Advisory: Animal Abuse
Good episode, keeping lots of different threads of the story going.
There's a distressing image of an abused animal on screen. You'll probably know when it's coming and be able to look away.
Doctor Who: The Tsuranga Conundrum (2018)
A mixed bag
Every season of Doctor Who has at least one episode that most viewers think is weak - Sleep No More with the eye-snot monster, for example.
The Tsuranga Conundrum is nowhere near as silly as Sleep No More, but it seemed unfocused to me; too many plot strands, and characters who had the potential to be engaging, like the heroic pilot, but we didn't get to know them well enough to be moved by their stories.
I quite liked the villain of the piece, and the Doctor's ingenious solution to its nature. The Call the Midwife homage was sweet. I would've been happy to get to know the medics as characters in a SF novel. And the general, her consort, and her brother - I'm sure they had interesting backstories.
Some reviewers say they're giving up on watching the series, but a) I'm enjoying it overall, and b) I did that during Colin Baker's first few episodes back in the 1980s, and wish I'd kept watching, so it would take a lot to make me give up.
I love Whitaker as the Doctor; I like the companions; the ideas explored in each episode are interesting - I'm happy with this season so far.
Swinging Safari (2018)
Nope
I was a tween then a teen in the 1970s, and I love seeing homegrown Australian movies. None of that helped me enjoy this film.
The design is great, the cast is full of great actors, there are some good themes in there somewhere, but the end product is a big smelly decaying beached whale.
Ladies in Black (2018)
Excellent Coming of Age movie
This film can be enjoyed simply as a feel-good story with beautiful scenery. It also shows a time of change for Australia, as well as for the young heroine Lisa: Anglo- and Irish-Australians meeting Continental European culture; a working-class girl aspiring to go to university; women wanting fulfilling relationships with their husbands, rather than settling for "he's not a bad bloke".
A lovely adaptation of Madeleine St John's novel, The Women in Black, with a great ensemble cast.
Beautiful late 1950s costumes and production design recreating 1950s Sydney.
One reviewer criticised the film because "nothing happens", but for the four central characters - Lisa, Fay, Patty, and Magda - it is a summer of significant change.
Promoted to Glory (2003)
what actually happened???
contains major spoilers! my mum, sister and I watched this on the evening of Christmas Day, 2006 (maybe its first screening in Australia?). we weren't planning on watching anything, but I turned on the tele about ten minutes into it, and we just got caught up in the story. Ken Stott and Lesley Manville were brilliant, and all the actors were great. the characters were really interesting - the Salvation Army soldiers, the recovering alcoholics - all seemed like three-dimensional, complex people, even if they didn't have much time on screen. I loved Mike's hallucinations/imagined/spiritual experiences - and the writing and editing were great - the jumps in time disorienting the audience just enough to give a sense of Mike's confusion, without being annoying. the romantic triangle was fascinating - I felt for all the characters, even poor Nigel. but what the hell happened at the end? when Mike was raising the bottle of gin to his lips, and Annie was racing towards the building yelling "Nooooo!", I though 'she's going to get hit by a bus' (which would bookend neatly with him being hit at the beginning)- but then it went back to him having been hit, and made it seem like the Entire Story was imagined by him as he lay there dying. what!?!? that's worse that ending it with 'and then he woke up'. can anyone tell me what happened?