2025

dir: Guillermo del Toro

2025

I was excited, I guess, when I heard about Guillermo del Toro making his version of the Frankenstein story. Now I feel a bit foolish because, ultimately, it’s just another version of a very familiar story.

And furthermore I’ve realised I don’t really need new versions of these stories. I don’t need another Dracula, don’t need more Frankensteins, don’t need more invisible people or werewolves, because I’ve seen them all, and they’re all just variations on very narrow themes.

It almost seems surprising that del Toro hadn’t already made a dozen Frankensteins up till now, because he’s made whatever else he wanted before, with all the gothic flourishes and insane costuming choices he could possibly fit into a flick even when there wasn’t enough story to justify it all (I’m looking at you, Crimson Peak, you wasted three good actors in that flick, but great costumes, eh?)

This is his dream version, his ultimate iteration, with the best cast he could get and presumably the biggest budget Netflix could give him. Maybe that means more people will see it than otherwise would have seen it on the big screen. Either way, he seems awfully pleased with himself, and people seem to be fans of it.

I thought it was okay. Okay is good enough sometimes. You go in expecting revelation or wonderment, but all you’re doing is comparing this version with the other versions you’ve seen, with the original story, with the other offshoots. You argue with yourself as to whether it’s in tune with the original, but if it hewed too closely to the original, then what’s the point. And where it varies, you wonder, “does that mean anything, to justify the change?”

dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

2025

I never thought I’d live long enough to see Paul Thomas Anderson make another great movie. I keep being told that he’s made lots of great movies since Boogie Nights, but mostly I’ve found his films since then to be extremely frustrating.

With the advantage of time I think there have been occasions where I haven’t been that fair, or been generous enough to accept that no flicks, whether PT Anderson’s or not, have to perfectly conform with my expectations in order to actually be good or not. It’s just that it had become for me a major stumbling block with his movies, whereby there would inevitably be an aspect of it, or, in the case of There Will Be Blood or The Master, a final section so bonkers that it made me question whatever merits I thought I’d experienced up to that point.

I’ve long known above movies having terrible endings because sometimes directors just don’t know how to end their stories, but rarely do I experience endings that make me hate the whole fucking movie.

That rare honour is Anderson’s, in that I’ve felt duped multiple times by his filmography, even more times than by M. Night Shyamalan.

Well, as usual, an unasked for preamble saying the opposite of what I want to say about a movie: this is a strong movie, with an ending that doesn’t sink the whole endeavour or render it embarrassing, one that I enjoyed / was thrilled by almost from beginning to end. It’s got some great characters, it’s got some insanely great performances; it depicts the recognisable slide into authoritarianism that we see playing out in the States under the guise of border enforcement, and yet it’s not at all about the current ICE goon squads rounding up anyone vaguely ethnic looking, whether citizens or not, or about the MAGA fuckheads explicitly. It’s about the excitement, the thrill of revolution and rebellion in the 60s-70s which gave way to disillusionment and destruction when it all turned to shit.

And it’s about a secretive cabal of white supremacists trying to recruit a new member to their Christmas Adventurers Club.

dir: Kathryn Bigelow

2025

Fuck this film, honestly.

Sure, it’s well made, the performances are all fine, the tension is over the top, but come on.

I don’t think anyone other than the dumbest of Americans thinks nuclear war is winnable, that there’s a scenario whereby one can win a war by using nuclear weapons (now). I think most people get that having them means countries without them can’t attack you or talk too much shit about you. With the countries that have them, well, you fight through proxies, but never directly, because you don’t want to nuke each other.

We all pretty much get that if one was launched at the States, or at China, or Russia, from anywhere, we’re pretty much all fucked. It’s all over. Done. This film goes to some trouble to explain why.

In the 80s at least, though it was policy probably decades before (since Eisenhower), the president at the time, who the rest of us naively thought would be the worst president those fuckheads would come up with after Nixon, explained to the American people that Reagan’s policy with respect to what would happen if the Soviets ever launched or detonated a missile over the US would mean there would be Mutually Assured Destruction. If the States couldn’t rule the world, there was no way they were going to let the Russkies have all the cake and eat it too. If we go, we all go, was the message.

dir: Joachim Rønning

2025

I mean, three strikes, you’re out, surely?

The original Tron is not some beloved 80s sci fi flick; you couldn’t even say it’s a cult classic. It’s on the level of the mostly forgotten Disney stuff from ages ago like The Shaggy D.A. about a human cursed to be a dog, or, even worse, a dog cursed to be a human, or Hervey the Love Bug. It’s stuff that exists but no-one really cares about it. It’s not some rich resource to keep mining, to warrant continuing to return to the well.

Tron was and still is a pretty silly film about a guy who gets sucked into a computer and discovers a funky world where people fling these disks at each other and ride on light cycles. Lots of strong colours, and the ‘real’ world being replicated in the electronic world with easily vanquished bad guys and lots of blue neon everywhere.

Blue means ‘good’, red means ‘evil’.

Jeff Bridges played a guy who gets sucked into the computer world. He’s not even the main character. Tron is. It’s in the name, Tron’s the hero, played by the great Bruce Boxleitner. Now that’s a name you don’t hear often enough.

Anyway, it was a pretty cheesy kids movie. I was a kid. I liked cheese. I watched a copy of Tron taped off of the telly squillions of times, and then I presumably got bored of it. It holds no special place in my nerdy heart.

And then for some baffling reason they made a sequel called Tron Legacy in 2010, which is a terrible, terrible movie with great visuals, a banging soundtrack and nothing but terrible narrative and acting choices.

It didn’t do that well. More people got the soundtrack (by which I mean illegally downloaded) because it was great, and by Daft Punk, and not because they liked the movie.

The script, the dialogue? It was terrible, like, genuinely terrible. There’s an actual line of dialogue where Jeff Bridges says “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!”