Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Movie reviews you didn't need

From my Netflix viewing:

*  tried to watch 1922, based on a Stephen King short story.  It got mostly good reviews, it seems, but I couldn't stick with it.   My biggest issue was with the lead actor:  his Southern drawl was actually hard to understand at many points, and his acting generally seemed to be just "too much".   I didn't like the narration, either.    As I have explained before, I am, generally speaking, a Stephen King sceptic - it is pretty rare that I find any project sourced in his stories to be anything more than just passable.   (The one exception - Kubrick's version of The Shining - King hated.)   This movie did nothing to swing my judgement about his oeuvre.

Johnny English Strikes Again:  the first two Rowan Atkinson vehicles were much better than I had expected.  The third outing, form 2018, shows that they have run out of ideas, and Atkinson's acting seemed more desperate and Mr Bean than in the previous ones.   (I am not so keen on the Mr Bean character, incidentally.)  Not offensively bad;  just a case of a franchise out of steam.

Veronica:  a Spanish 2017 supernatural thriller, this story of a teenage girl who seemingly has invited a haunting into her apartment by virtue of use of a ouija board with friends is actually pretty good, despite that set up sounding like it owes too much to The Exorcist or various other films whereby teenagers invite supernatural trouble into their lives that way.   It's well directed, and well acted by its mainly young cast.   (The movie made me realise -I think that Spanish movies often do very well with their child actors.   Now that I think about it, it also confirmed another thing about Spanish language films - they have probably the least reluctance of any culture to showing full frontal - adult - male nudity.)   The only slight downside is that it was said to be "based on a true story" which was well known in Spain (because of police involvement), but checking later revealed that the movie had exceptionally few actual similarities to the real story.   Oh well.   


1 comment:

Not Trampis said...

Watch the Capture. Outstanding miniseries that was on the ABC from pommyland.