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The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas (1973)
"This could only happen to a Pisces"
This strange piece of 70s ephemera from a long-lost 70s Christmas is really fascinating. It's a beautifully designed little animation crammed with strange rococo props and fussy backgrounds but it's a shame that narratively it's a tale of two fairly illogical halves that don't seem to match up. You've got this whole... almost proto-Pixar "world of bears" which is fascinatingly high concept and full of bear airports and honey factories and the like. It's all very weird but as it spills over into our reality it loses momentum and becomes a rather atypical Christmas heartstring-tugger that seems at odds with what came before. A big fan of the beautifully dated pink-eyed delivery of the Smothers brother.
Bad Sisters (2022)
Catch the JP-idgeon
This characterful remake of a Flemish series sees a likeable gang of Irish sisters set about to do a murder. For ages. It didn't help that I ended up watching this over a seriously long period of time but it felt like seventy years. A lot of the surrounding plots that pad this up to 10 long episodes feel extraneous at best and downright deceptive at worst. Crack this down to six or less episodes and with a cast this good you'd easily have one of the finest Irish dramas ever made. A real shame but with some unforgettable moments. What a great mini.... wait, there's going to be even more?? Why? We didn't even need this much!
Captain Marvel (2019)
Deus ex cattina
Slogging merrily through a massive MCU backlog, I finally hit Captain Marvel and it's a real drag. A cautiously built and extremely muddled sort of a project that feels weighted down, messy and confused. The structure feels off - and Danvers Terminator-esque excursion to 90's Earth tells me starting it there would have been smarter. It never settles into what Danvers character actually is and the spotlight gets swiftly stolen by a convincingly de-aged Samuel L and even Clark Gregg. Even the baddy. Even a cat. It's irritating as Larsen has chops for days and deserved far better than this strangely 2D whisp of flimsy top-gunny air-force foolishness.
Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Game Over Man, Game Over
It didn't know what to expect retroactively clambering into affectionate arcade film Wreck-it Ralph. I knew it had been a bit of a cultural phenomenon a decade or so ago but suspected it would be rammed with Disney animation schmaltz. For me though, it ends up being their strongest non-Pixar effort. There are a lot of smart angles crammed into this dusty games cabinet and you can feel the decades that went into hammering out the characters and the plot. Ralph is an unconventional sort of a thing, and I genuinely was taken by surprise by it. It's only tainted for me at all really by seeing it through the shadow of the misjudged sequel, but more on that later.
Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
Monkey With a Thousand Faces
I was really surprised by Kubo - and not necessarily in a good way - Laika's breathtakingly beautiful bit of clay confection essentially amounts to a flimsily allegorical bit of culturally awkward fluff. Aside from the bafflingly intricate construction of a few set pieces within I have a terrible feeling it's not going to lodge in my mind with as much tenacity as previous Laika projects. As the credits rolled I was stunned that this much-hyped film that really had all the makings of my exact cup of tea ended up being the little more than "What if Joseph Campbell, but a weaboo?". A serious shame.
Miriam Margolyes: Australia Unmasked (2022)
Miriam's Fair Go
The utterly brilliant Margolyes sets out across just pre-pandemic Australia to discover what the "fair go" means there and bumps into the great, the good and the real. It's a testament to the structure of the series that it always feels a bit impulsive. Yes, clearly they would have got permissions and done scouting beforehand but Miriam seems to just wander around meeting real people. Her humanity is peerless, her self-awareness unmatched, and watching her just going around taking things in is beautiful. Much like the "planned/unplanned" vibe, where the trip ends is both accidental and somehow completely perfect. She gave it a fair go.
Jaws (1975)
"Let the bodies pile high"
Jaws is the quintessential summer blockbuster and one of those "you know what, fair play this is actually really good" sort of classic films that still functions really well. The core being a really tight narrative focus, some smartly layered symbolism, a host of fantastic characters and some genuinely shocking sequences. It's sad that the now fairly talked-about mayor plot isn't really resolved and it does feel like a film split firmly in two but it bristles with fantastic moments and is an absolute blast to watch. Gradually becoming that rare thing of a historical noteworthy work that also still really communicates something.
Sherwood (2022)
*Suspicious David Morrissey Noises*
British drama tends to either be either too cartoonish or too grimdark and a precious few manage to straddle that line. I think Sherwood just about manages it with the help of some seriously strong character performances and a few chunky narrative twists. As is usually the case, Adeel Akhtar is about thirty times better than everyone else and his arc is sincerely heart-breaking. The strike-breaking undercover cops stuff which is the wider plot is a bit less convincing and a quick glance at the local view tells you that they missed the mark in terms of authenticity. Still, I found myself drawn in every episode, and ultimately that means something.
It's Bruno! (2019)
Fido of the Conchords
Solvan Naim's breezy little series about a man and his dog is like a breath of fresh air. Propelled by fine tunes, low stakes and portions of perfect pups I was totally taken by it. There's a lovely lowkey vibe running through It's Bruno that feels super underrated. I mean, there is also no denying that it's fairly cheap looking and features a few unjustifiable lurches towards "a bigger plot" toward the end. The core concept, the wide cast of silly characters and call-backs are really solid and there feels like bags more sincerity in this than some other, much more expensive, comedies on the platform and indeed off it.
Naked (1993)
"Thanks for the mammaries"
Very rarely do films clamber into your mind and lodge there but this one has successfully done that. In the sense that I watched it a few months ago but it keeps queasily lurching back into my mind. Underpinned by the dark aimless wanderings of nasty narcissitic Johnny, here played with onanistic intensity by David Thewlis. The film is a grotty voyage through early nineties London and feels unendingly cruel. You get Leigh's cartoonish caricatures but drenched in a kind of sweaty 3am glaze of lost wrongs. The worst thing is you definitely know a Johnny, or you worry people think that you are a Johnny. That's why it's still in there. It all got a bit real.
Blue Collar (1978)
Harvey Keitel's Psychosomatic Crab Trio
Some films you find, some films find you. This is definitely the latter - and on the strength of seeing the hefty rock soundtrack alone in a discount vinyl bin I decided to watch it. The music is good but it's the bitter viewpoints and dark twists, as well as a totemic central trio in Prior Keitel and Kotto, that really made this a fascinating watch. It doesn't pull many punches and there's some deep brutality in here amidst the occasional comedy sequences. Prior's core performance is genuinely spellbinding and honestly as a directorial debut for Schrader it's pretty solid if a little tonally uneven. Sometimes it's really worth following up on a strange whim in a record bin.
Neverwhere (1996)
"It's very cold, my friend. And very dark. And very cold."
Neil Gaiman's insanely ambitious 90's TV series is a wild ride into a strangely progressive dark pocket of forgotten Brit TV. Filmed on strange cameras and ending up with this odd unvarnished presentation that looks much better in retrospect than it did at the time, bristling with oddments and weirdnesses and absolutely great British character actors. Trevor Peacock? A super young Paterson Joseph and Tamsin Greig? Peter Capaldi as the ominous Angel Islington?? A thousand times yes. It's extraordinarily gawky but strangely endearing, like a lot of Gaiman's work, but is also very recognisably his which is quite an impressive feat in a lot of ways.
Red Dwarf (1988)
Boys from the Dwarf
Red Dwarf was a show that I was so obsessed with as a child that my teacher wrote to my parents to ask that I be "made to watch" something else. Funny jokes, hard sci fi concepts, solid characters, cool ships, relatable naffness, great guest actors. From the battleship grey days at the Beeb through to the Funchal promised land of Dave. From youthful Alien-inspired eighties exuberance, that weird awkward mid-life crisis period of which we rarely speak to a mostly tasteful old age. The boys from the Dwarf are fabulous, flawed and ever-smeggin-green. To that teacher of a byegone era I say: "swivel on it, punk!"
Life in the Snow (2016)
"You'd be a fool to mess with this impenetrable wall of musk ox"
The great Gordon Buchanan gads about in various cold climes prodding polar bears and the like. It has a compilation quality but Buchanan is always a charismatic draw and footage of him gamely scrabbling about on snowy hillsides is worth the price of admission alone really. Not a lot of it has stuck into my brain, certainly not enough to fill the required characters count here. I was going to write about the etymology of snow but that is dense and not particularly interesting, so I instead thought I'd puncture the idea that that Eskaluet languages have more words for snow than English but actually that turns out to also be quite a dense topic. Better to just make like Gordon and gad about in it.
Echo (2023)
"Keep kicking him, keep kicking him, keep kicking him!"
Why hire good writers, decent TV writers, if you're just going to bludgeon their experience down into this narrow and flawed little box. It's such a shame that this is yet another uneven and poorly structured Disney+ Marvel endeavour as you've got some serious talent here, behind and in front of the cameras. Nice to see a bundle of Rez Doggers and they can get that cash but they just serve to remind you that there are far greater TV shows of this era you could be watching. There's some decent fight sequences too, but throughout there's this nagging desire that if you're pushing the envelope in terms of representation, tone and violence then you should also push it in terms of collaboration and trust.
Chernobyl (2019)
"I prefer my opinion to yours"
This hypnotically unpleasant miniseries from the before times actually speaks volumes to all that was to come. Not just in the decades since the incident depicted in the show, but in these few short years too. The real gem of the series isn't it's dogged brutal realism or it's beautifully bruised cinematography but the remarkable cast of European character actors which infest all of it. Harris feels like the "big takeaway" here but really it's folk like Con O'Neill, a pre-fame Keoghan, the great ruddy Alex Ferns, Michael Socha, Peter Guinness and the much-missed Paul Ritter that make it sing. Yes it's full of hard lessons and bloody truths but the characters and the actors that fill them make this as good as it is.
American Masters: Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool (2019)
Tasty... musically tasty
A strong and admirably unflinching examination of one of the most iconic American musicians of the 20th C. The contributors are tastefully chosen and, although initially a bit strange, the decision to use Carl Lumbly to make Davis's own raspy words and blunt musings the "throughline" is a really smart one. It'd be nice to see more artist documentaries build themselves around the actual thoughts of the person. Beyond this, the documentary sadly struggles to walk the line between art and artist, and we get a couple of clunky omissions that feel a little onerous. To skip over his influential electric period almost entirely is a serious shame.
Cadfael (1994)
The case of the revolving Berringers
One of an endless mountain of glorious things my partner introduced me to - I've since got weirdly into the breathtakingly complex medieval world of Cadfael and this series serves as a decent taste of general vibe of the world and cast - but sadly robbed of the novel's dense interconnectivity and continuity. You don't even get the same actor portraying Hugh Berringer from one series to the next. Shot on a sprawling set built in Hungary in the 90s and pinned down by a magnificent performance from a commanding (but not particularly Welsh) Jacobi. Beyond a few dated editing choices it also feels oddly timeless, helped by the ethereal soundtrack composed by Colin Towns. A strong contender for best medieval monk-based whodunnit of the mid 1990s.
Predator (1987)
Baby, you got a stew going
By strange coincidence this slid into my eyes just days before the great Weathers bicep-handshaked his way into the deep beyond. I saw fabled foundational Pred many decades ago but was struck on a more modern viewing by how gloriously straightforward it is to start and how compelling it's brawntacular ensemble is despite the unquavering silliness of the action premise. By the time we get down to Arnie v the beast though, a stealthy bagginess creeps into the structure of the film and the momentum trips up considerably. Quite rightly the strongest part of this very muscular work remains the work of the Winston workshop.
Living with Yourself (2019)
A Surfeit of Rudds
Timothy Greenberg takes what might be a satisfying philosophical low fantasy film premise in the 1990s and stretches it out into a meandering mini-series that never feels like it can settle on a tone. I'd say I was here for raw power of seeing two concurrent Rudds, but the singularly magnetic Aisling Bea is draw enough. Here, despite occasionally taking centre-stage, she still feels relatively underused as Rudd's perennially exhausted partner. The series runs out of steam in a pretty major way by the end and although I wasn't necessarily expecting a hard sideplot, something outside of the double Ruddle bubble feels like it needed to be going on.
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001)
Stan's Life Shut
Despite some deeply cringey talking heads (and an awkward "Eyes Wide Shut" heavy vibe) this sprawling documentary made just after Kubrick's death is surprisingly thorough and fairly solid. It's bundled in with a box set of his work and has a lot of folk involved who at least knew him and worked with him and aren't entirely blowing smoke but as a project made in the wake of his death it definitely leans less on the critical and more on the praise and the personal. Folk left in his wake. There's some remarkable young Stan footage in there and a few fascinating musings on his peerless indefatigability which sounded like a bit of a double-edged sword at the best of times.
Pokemon konsheruju (2023)
That's when good Psyduck become good friends...
This achingly sweet little self-contained series sees the earnestly anxious Haru reaching a bit of an existential impass and trying to find herself whilst working at a resort for knackered Pokémon (presumably tired from all the imprisonment and blood sports). It's transfixingly serene and extraordinarily beautiful but so, so brief. It's more like looking at a beautifully made diorama than actually watching a series. I kept finding myself longing for episodes of the old 90s series to be re-done in this beguilingly detailed stop-motion style. Except for the Poké-rap. Nobody needs to see that in more detail.
Tron (1982)
SkeleTron
I didn't know what I was expecting from Tron but I didn't necessarily anticipate that the gender roles would be more dated than the effects and the plot would basically just sort of... happen. It's a great deal of fascinating and ground-breaking effects draped over almost nothing really, which feels a serious shame. David Warner's beautifully malevolent Sark and the atmospherically breezy arcade set are the core memories I took from this and the rest just... cruised over me like some manner of light cycle.
I'm now to add some more characters to this review which I feel doesn't need anything else so I'll just list two roles of David Warner's that I particularly like. The first is Time Bandits the second is in The League of Gentleman's Apocalypse. Thank you for attending my Warner lecture.
Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster (2024)
"Quite a big boy and that's just the skull"
Old Attenborough continues to lumber onward like a living fossil (which isn't an insult given how much he loves a fossil) and in the festive period of 2023-2024 we got this documentary about the logistics surrounding the retrieval of a colossal pliosaur skull sticking halfway out of a Dorset cliff-face. The real stars here aren't the twinkly-eyed Attenborough full of boyish joy for the act of discovery but the bizarrely bantering fossilmen Etches & Moore whose job it is to scale down the cliff and get at the skull. The subsequent scans and explorations of the find are genuinely fascinating and there's a nice driving focus throughout that I wasn't expecting. Bonetacular. Bonetastic.
The Kemps: All Gold (2023)
Take your seaside wonge...
Saw in 2024 with another slab of playful Kemp madness from Rhys Thomas and it was utterly wonderful. This wonky bit of mockmentarianism has everything thrown at it with knowing cameos up the wazoo and occupies the kind of warmly foolish spot on the beeb that folk like Vic & Bob and Harry & Paul used to. That it's the Kemp brothers doing that manner of caper now is still authentically very strange and the more you know, the more you get out of this barrage of silly larking. Eccleston, as in Dodger, is the real force here and even gets a bit of revenge on his Let Him Have It co-star Paul Reynolds. It's... gloriously niche.