Rate the last film with your terrible opinions

Is it true that this film feels like it was written by AI?

Bit of trivia since I’m deep down the well on that era of stuff at the moment - Julian Barrett was the original first choice to play Brian in Spaced but when he wasn’t able to due to Mighty Boosh commitments Mark Heap was cast and the character rewritten slightly to pivot more toward the nervous paranoid energy he had rather than the more pretentious character Barrett would’ve played (based on his performance in Asylum an earlier less good comedy show with Simon and Jessica).

I can’t imagine the show working as well if Brian was confident the whole time Howard Moon-style.

Migration (2024) ***
Took the kids to see this today. Was expecting, frankly, something between mediocre and outright poor, so I was pleasantly surprised that it's actually pretty decent. Kumail Nanjiani plays a hypochondriac dad-duck who takes his family on an inept migration; hilarity ensues. Sure, it skews young and there's nothing really you've not seen a dozen times. But it's pretty engaging, with some really nice performances, and - this really surprised me - it's a very good-looking film, with some moments of real splendour, especially as we follow the ducks up into the sky. I promise you could do much, much worse.
(Cinema)

I’m also quite fascinated by how it must have looked that Simon Pegg, David Walliams and Dominik Diamond were all on the same drama course at Bristol Uni together. Diamond getting Gamesmaster so early makes him feel way older and like his tv career was basically over before the anyone else in that generation of comedians came close to making it.

I think if you watched those Channel 4/BBC 2 comedies in the late 90s, it's really interesting to follow the subsequent careers of this bunch of comedians. But I'd never really thought about the intertwined lives and careers; it's almost like the 90s equivalent of the "Comic Strip" bunch meeting up at university.

I think that late 90s/early 00s bunch are interesting because as intertwined as they are they’re from a slightly wider genepool than the Oxford and Cambridge pipeline to success (or to a lesser extent the current Durham one -Ed Gamble, Nish Kumar and others) where you do the revue or footlights then get signed by Avalon and immediately put on their many tv panel shows.

Its more like pockets of relatedness so you have those three I mentioned above, the Boosh met on the circuit, Adam, Joe and Louis Theroux were at private school together, the Spaced group featured a mix of uni types and not, the League of Gentlemen weren’t Oxbridge either. I think its reflected in the way all their shows have such distinct stamps of identity on them.

The main Oxbridge leg here would be that Matt Holness and Richard Ayoade had Darkplace and were at Cambridge performing together with Mitchell & Webb and Olivia Colman and that group who really broke through in the mid-00s.

Now that panel shows have replaced “scripted comedy” (although most have joke writers who’ve fed lines to the performers) it really has become more a stratified hierarchy of stand ups and its mostly dictated by who manages them and coincidentally its getting harder for working class or regional acts to progress. Especially when those management companies also own the production companies who make the panel shows, which is why there are only about 15 comedians who rotate between them all.

I need to give Abigail another chance. I clearly wasn't in the mood for that kind of film when I first tried watching it and just gave up at the reveal halfway through.

Yeah. If you put 'write me a script for a two hour movie set in the future where a CIA analyst chases a rogue AI to another planet. And rides in the mech from Titanfall 2. The nice one people like' into ChatGPT it would spit out something not a million miles away from this. 

At the very least whoever/whatever wrote it doesn't really understand how humans tell stories. It has a load of moments that are the equivalent to that telltale seventh finger on an AI generated picture. At the very least if I had written it, I would be telling people it was actually AI, for sure.

He’s got a very under appreciated weird C4 show called Flowers with Olivia Colman that waivers been being very funny and very intense. I’d recommend that too.

Abigail - 8/10

If you can see it without knowing 'the twist' then great, however even if you know it, it doesn't take away from the film. Well acted with the young girl outstanding. Definitely worth watching.

It's pretty hard not to predict it if you've seen the genre of the film or read the blurb. Or watched the trailer... Hell, even opening the IMDb page and looking at the first photo gives it away.

I wouldn't really call it a twist. Just the story progressing in a way that was already heavily signposted.
Keyser Soze it ain't...

While You Were Sleeping

Scrolling idly through one of the streaming services the other day, I decided I wanted to watch something unchallenging. I've been doing serial killer movies and procedurals with my son, as well as 70s classics and, well, sometimes you want a break. I really don't watch Romcoms as a rule: not because I'm not a sentimental prick - I am - but because they are pretty much the tropiest, most formulaic genre out there and I've hated most I've watched. 

I'd seen this at the cinema with a girlfriend in the 90s and remember thinking it was okay. Rewatching it, it's actually surprisingly funny, and its predictability is leavened by a few important things, as you might expect for a movie that uses a comatose single-testicled narcissist as its main MacGuffin.

First is that the supporting cast is solid without exception, with particularly funny turns by Peter Boyle and Jack Warden - their rambling banter around the dinner table is genuinely very funny ("You need good beef; Argentina has great beef: beef and Nazis"). Related to this, the script has a sharpness and fizz to it that makes the saccharine shit much more palatable ("What should I do?" "Pull the plug" "You're sick" "I'm sick? You're cheating on a vegetable").

Above all there's great chemistry between the unlikely pairing Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman. Sandra Bullock really could do nothing wrong at this point, could she? She's superb here for sure, and pulls off the impressive trick of convincing us she is a single unfulfilled loner. 

7/10.