Month: January 2022

Film

What Nat added to her streaming queues this week, including The Lost Daughter, The Blue Angel and Being the Ricardos

11 January 2022 Natalia Romanova 3 Comments

Time for my new feature. Ooh! Do I need a drum roll? Probably not.

So, the idea with this is that every week, new films come onto the streaming services. I try to review them all, I really do, but that’s way too hard now – there’s just so many! But rather than leave them unmentioned here, I thought I’d at least register them for your attention. Even if I don’t actually review them, at least you know they’re there and if I do review them, maybe you’ll have watched them, too, and be able to share your thoughts with us?

I do have a silly big list of subscription to streaming services, including BFI Player, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Marquee TV (more for the ballet and the Broadway classics than any movies, admittedly), Klassiki (“The only place in the world where you can stream and explore films from Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia”) and Apple TV+, and there’s all the free services, too (All 4, iPlayer, Pluto TV, My 5), so I’m bound to miss some, so please point them out if I do!

Anyway, here’s this week’s list of things I added to my streaming queues, hoping to watch them at some point. Some have been on the services for a while, but I’ve only just noticed them, so that counts, right?

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Netflix

  • The Lost Daughter (2021): A woman’s beach vacation takes a dark turn when she begins to confront the troubles of her past. Maggie Gyllenhaal directs (Trailer)
  • She’s the Man (2006): Teenage Viola tries to convince the students at her twin brother’s school that she’s actually him in this twist on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Vinnie Jones co-stars as a football coach! (Trailer)
  • Good on Paper (2021): After years of putting her career first, a stand-up comic meets a guy who seems perfect: smart, nice, successful… and possibly too good to be true. Written by and starring Iliza Schlesinger, based on a true story! (Trailer)
  • The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017): A surgeon’s carefully curated life edges toward disaster when a trouble teenage boy with mysterious motives begins to impose himself on his family. Yorgos Lanthimos does Ancient Greek myth in the modern day (Trailer)

Amazon Prime

  • The Good Boy (Хороший Мальчик) (2016): The life of a schoolboy Kolya changes when he falls in love with his teacher and someone burns down an outbuilding. And the principal’s daughter thinks that he is an arsonist and falls in love with him… (Trailer)
  • The Tender Bar (2022): From director George Clooney and based on the best-selling memoir, The Tender Bar follows an aspiring writer (Tye Sheridan) pursuing his romantic and professional dreams. From a stool in his uncle’s (Ben Affleck) bard, he learns what it means to grow up from a colourful group of local characters. (Trailer)
  • The Protégé (2021): As a child, Anna watched her family brutalised and murdered in Saigon. When the man that saved her from the killers and trained her as a soldier of fortune is murdered, Anna is determined to have her revenge. She uncovers a 40-year old case her mentor had been looking into, and in so doing becomes the hunted as well as the hunter of a very powerful force that wanted the past left alone. With Maggie Q, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton. (Trailer)
  • Being the Ricardos (2021): During one production week of I Love Lucy – from Monday table read through Friday audience taping – Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) face a series of personal and professional crises that threaten their show, their careers and their marriage, in writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s behind-the-scenes drama. (Trailer)
The Love Witch (2016)

MUBI

  • Red Road (2008): This dramatic tale of city surveillance and a woman’s obsession with a man from her past was Andrea Arnold’s stunning debut after winning an Oscar for Best Short Film. (Trailer)
  • The Blue Angel (1930): Respected schoolteacher Rath learns of his pupils’ infatuation with postcards depicting a nightclub songstress. To investigate the source of indecency, Rath goes to the Blue Angel nightclub and is fatefully seduced by the smouldering Lola-Lola, triggering the downward spiral of his life and fortune. (Trailer)
  • The Love Witch (2016): At once a vibrant pastiche of 1960s horror and a contemporary corrective to the era’s – and the genre’s – sexual politics, The Love Witch is, at heart, a warm treatise on loneliness and love. Written, directed and scored by Anna Biller, this vivid ode to cult Technicolor treasures is simply magic. (Trailer)

Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Boba Fett and Cobra Kai

11 January 2022 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

I’ve not actually been watching much TV this week, I’m afraid. New shows have arrived but, honestly, I didn’t fancy them. Apart from maybe Pivoting (US: Fox), but that was only on last night, so I’ve not had time to watch it.

I did watch the latest episodes of The Book of Bobba Fett and Cobra Kai. The former (episode two) shows us there’s going to be a dual narrative in these episodes, with us seeing how Boba Fett got to be bad ass on Tatooine, learning to do his thing and respect the ways of the Tuskan raiders (yes, I’ve probably spelt half of those words wrongly. Sorry Star Wars fans), in the past while the present day narrative sees him trying to establish his new criminal empire and take over from Jabba the Hut as the new ‘daimyo’. It was fine. Quite fun to watch, but nothing too special, mainly because two stories seem to have only half the impact.

Meanwhile, it was more of the same in Cobra Kai as we’re only up to about episode six or seven. Lovely Wife isn’t enjoying this season at all, after loving the previous seasons, so has told me I can watch the rest of it by myself ‘if I want’. But I don’t really want, so I might hold off until she’s ready. I see her point: there’s a lot more nastiness and bullying in this season compared to the previous seasons, which makes it a bit less fun to watch. But we’ll see.

That’s it, though. So here’s what I could have watched if I’d wanted to and why I didn’t bother.

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Film reviews

The TMINE multiplex: Eternals (2021), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)

10 January 2022 Natalia Romanova 6 Comments

In which Nat talks briefly about the movies she’s been watching this week for no particular reason and that probably don’t warrant proper reviews, but hey? Wouldn’t it be nice if we all chatted about them anyway?

Happy New Year, everyone! It’s so good to be back! Sorry I was so rubbish last year, but hopefully I can get my schedule back into shape this year – it’s not the only thing on a diet, thanks to Christmas – and treat you to some movie reviews. Yay!

They Give Awards For Movies Scarlett Johansson GIFfrom They Give Awards For Movies GIFs

I even have a new idea for a feature that I’m going to unveil tomorrow. I hope you all like it!

Anyway, I digress. How have you all been? Job okay? Did you get the Christmas Covid like me and all my family? Ugh. I’m so sorry. At least it was Omicron, hey? Hope you’re feeling better?

Let’s talk about some movies to cheer ourselves up then and take our minds off our coughs. This is going to be a slightly brief rundown of all the movies I’ve watched in the cinema in the past month. I’ve watched many more movies than that but let’s save something for next week, hey?

So coming up, we have:

  • Screen 1: Eternals (2021)
  • Screen 2: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
  • Screen 3: The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)

Storming, hey?

Scarlett Johansson Black Widow GIFfrom Scarlett Johansson GIFs
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Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including Squid Game, Cobra Kai, Hawkeye, The Mezzotint and The Book of Boba Fett

4 January 2022 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week

Hello, everyone, and welcome to 2022 – 2021 again but done right, we can all hope. How was your Christmas break? Hope you managed to get one and didn’t get the dreaded lurgy (or one of the other minor lurgies that were doing the rounds).

You’ll be glad to hear – since you’re here – that TMINE actually had the chance to watch some new TV shows over Christmas. Some of them were even good.

There was only one regular still on the TMINE viewing list: Hawkeye (Disney+). The final episode of that was fun, but somewhat lightweight. Its highlight was a tear-jerking confrontation between (spoiler alert) Yelena Belova (Black Widow’s grieving sister) and Hawkeye. However, the script didn’t exactly let both barrels blast on that, and it didn’t feel like we were getting Jeremy Renner, the Oscar-nominated actor, so much as Jeremy Renner, the bit-part player from an episode of Angel, so the emotion largely came from (spoiler alert) Florence Pugh and all the good work that other entries in the MCU had already done.

What also should have been a highlight of the episode – the return of (spoiler alert) Vincent D’Onofrio reprising his Netflix Defenders role of Wilson Fisk – largely got ruined through poor characterisation, right down to that atrocious shirt. I’m wondering if he’s a parallel universe version, rather than the one we’ve seen elsewhere. But maybe it’s down to a problem that’s intrinsic to both comic book crossovers and the MCU that stems from one of their supposed strengths: the ability to have different tones and genres in different shows and movies. If you stick something from a grittier genre into something more comedic and family oriented, something’s got to change, and more often than not, it’s the grittier thing. That can work, but here, it largely undid more or less all the good work that Daredevil et al in terms of characterisation and plausibility – despite some excellent acting from the star in question.

Overall, though, while not ultimately as good on average as WandaVision, it had almost as many highs, was more consistent and more fun, and was still a lovely Christmas treat for us all to unwrap. Plus it did give us this brilliant double-act.

After the jump, though, let’s talk about those new shows. Squid Game (Netflix) technically isn’t a new show, since it’s been around for a while – to the extent that we actually tried it a few weeks ago but gave up. However, we felt we should give it a second chance, given how popular it is, and we made it all the way through to the end.

Properly new were BBC Four’s latest Ghost Story for Christmas, The Mezzotint, and Disney+’s latest entry in the Star Wars firmament, The Book of Boba Fett. And although we’ve only got halfway through it, let’s talk a bit about season four of Cobra Kai (Netflix) as well. See you in a mo!

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Squid Game, Cobra Kai, Hawkeye, The Mezzotint and The Book of Boba Fett”