shallowness

On streaming: How To Lose A Popularity Contest is a really good high-concept high school romcom with a loose literary connection ( Read more... )

In the cinema: I went to see You, Me and Tuscany, and it about lived up/down to expectations. (Look, it’s tough, here I am with the time and space to go to the cinema and it’s still mainly horror and kids’ films that are on.) ( Read more... )

I don’t think my takeout from the The Devil Wears Prada 2 trailer was meant to be, ‘Yes, but have you checked Miranda Priestly out for early-onset dementia?’ But it was. But I did take advantage of the fact that The Devil Wears Prada was being streamed by Four to rewatch it. ( Read more... ) So, yes, I plan to go see the sequel, even though I think this habit of releasing sequels 15 years and more later is beyond ridiculous.

Ficlets: one DCU, one original fiction and one Hart of Dixie. Anything over 100 words will also be posted at AO3 and, where suitable, ff.net.

Trip the Dark Fantastic, DCU, Catwoman/Batman, 97 words. Written for the prompt ‘Any, any, It's you and me forever dancing in the dark’ at the Three Sentence Ficathon 2026.

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Reunion, Original fic, OFC/OMC, 136 words, (second person POV), teen? Written for the prompt 'Any, any, meet me in the afterglow’ at the Three Sentence Ficathon 2026.

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Like mother, like son, Hart of Dixie, Zoe/Wade ER, 74 words, (future fic, kidfic). Written for the prompt ‘Any, Any, Bandaging a wound’ at the Three Sentence Ficathon 2026.

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(It's just a coincidence that I'm posting the last one today.)

Fanvid and fanfiction recs in the following fandoms: Everything, Everywhere All At Once, Farscape, Harry Potter, Marvel Cinematic Universe and Twisters.

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The first recs post of the year, feels like it's late, mainly because I've read a few multi-chaptered fics that were enjoyable enough if not worth reccing. Fic recs in the following fandoms: The Ballad of Wallis Island, Brooklyn Nine-Nine/Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover, Fairy Tales (Little Red Riding Hood), Veronica Mars, Vicky Bliss and The West Wing.

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FOTR = The Fellowship of the Ring
EE = the extended edition

Excuse me while I emote at you. I found out via Honest Trailers that they were releasing the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies in the cinema because it’s 25 years (25 years!) since the first film was released. So, of course I checked if this might be happening near me, and it was, though being middle aged now, the thought of seeing all however-many hours of it without a break made me quail (at home you have the natural break of changing discs), but the chance to see it on the big screen was so very tempting. I managed to get a ticket – the auditorium was full, a range of ages and a substantial minority were female.

ANYWAY, it was worth it, ( tl;dr )

I'll be posting twice tonight as I was offline for the last couple of days and I want to get these out/up while it's still 2025 here.

In September, I meant to go see the new (‘final’) Downton Abbey, but didn’t. October was also a total washout, and I wasn’t really following film news closely enough to say for sure what I’d have gone to see – The Roofman, perhaps. Not one of the billion horror movies that was out. I thought about going to see a film by the end of November, but circumstances didn’t allow.

So, December came, and then I had a cold. I will mention Relay, which I saw on streaming, but I think may have been briefly out in the cinemas. Recommended if you want to watch an ingenious thriller with a touch of competence (or just-paranoid-enough) porn and crunchy characterisation. It stars Riz Ahmed and Lily James (both playing Americans, which tickled my brain.)

But the first film I saw at the cinema after a three-month hiatus was The Running Man, and eh, it wasn't really for me. ( A spoilery bit about why. )

I finally went to see Wicked: For Good (on Boxing Day). I’d been prepared for it being weaker than the first film (as the second act of the stage musical is, supposedly. I hadn’t seen it.) And it is, but I was invested and wanted to see where it ended up. ( Spoilers )

During Twixmas, I finally got to see Zootropolis 2 (and I wasn’t the only one, it was a full – small – cinema, even though it’s been out for a while.) It was better than I dared hope, frankly. ( Read more... )

Watched live: ( Read more... )

Watched on catch up: ( Read more... )

Results show (also watched on catch up): ( Read more... )

Fanfiction and fanvid recs for these fandoms: The African Queen (book); Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Lord of the Rings RPF; Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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Two out of the three films I saw did that all too rare thing: being a film that foregrounds female experience from a female perspective (admittedly, that phrase came more to mind for the second film than the first.) Should also note that two female scriptwriters were involved in adapting film no. 3, which has an equal number of female and male main characters, at least.

Materialists is well worth seeing, but it’s no Past Lives is its problem. Nailing down what it is is also tricky, because calling it a romantic comedy doesn’t quite cut it. Although it shares something with Nora Ephron’s work and is in dialogue with some of Jane Austen’s concerns, it feels like something separate to the New York-set romcoms I’ve watched for decades. I found some of the talk about dating and matchmaking darkly funny, but it has dramatic elements and romantic fantasy elements. For my tastes, it was sometimes too didactic - who talks like that, even allowing for a financier using the language of business deals, and a stage actor being influenced by the plays he’s performed? It has dialogue that would have worked in a stage play, but then it’s as beautifully shot as Past Lives was – follow Johnson’s Lucy’s outfits.

I think this is the first thing I’ve seen Johnson in, and she was good as the materialist Lucy, working out what she wants; Pedro Pascal is having quite the summer being in this, F4 and Eddington, although maybe those films are all just released so closely in the UK, playing ‘unicorn’ Harry; while Chris Evans is a joy on screen (though I snorted at his John claiming to be 37. Wrong side of 40, sir.)

Sorry, Baby has been given a 15 certificate in the UK and the BBFC’s reasoning for that should be a good guide as to whether it’s triggering, which it might be. It’s a drama, but also mordantly and absurdly funny, about a young woman, Agnes, to whom a bad thing (her words, mine would be more trenchant) happened. Her most important relationship is with her best friend, who makes different choices to hers and moves away. It feels authentic. It’s non-chronological and the choices about what to show or not and when, and how to use dialogue from another time over silent scenes is judicious. Eva Victor wrote, directed and played the lead, and I hope gets a chance at a second feature, because there were so many smart details in this. Naomi Ackie is good as supportive BFF Liddy.

Naomi Ackie also appears in The Thursday Murder Club, which I saw at my local arthouse cinema, as it’s doing/had a brief limited run in cinemas, which may just be in the UK, before dropping on Netflix. The upside of watching it in a cinema was the communal chuckling, because it is amusing until it remembers it’s about murder. The audience skewed older, and some of them clearly hadn’t been in the cinema for a while, complaining about all the adverts, trailers, reminders not to talk and BBFC thing (which may be why a film like this has a limited cinema run.) It’s professionally made and features lots of big names, some things have been dropped or tweaked for the running time, and maybe some of the characters flattened, but that’s what you have to expect with adaptations, and overall it was entertaining.