Film Reviews by Fussypot

My husband was so bored by this he wanted to leave halfway through. I also found it tedious as Eve was so unresponsive to anything. Instead of jumping at a job offer she said nothing, it would have been her big chance. Other characters you just saw their bodies not faces and I get why, but it was so irritating! There was so much fuss about a red dress but she never even tried it on, and agreed to swap it for a car? What did that mean? Something must be lost in translation there. Why was the lift voice not bilingual? It should have been. At the end she just walked out to where? Home? A new job? I thought she was going to jump off the roof! We never get to see her son nor does it explain if she was once married or anything about her really. The stripping bit was just an excuse to see a naked woman, it was gratuitous, I cannot see her doing that, nor if a woman bled, would they rush to change sheets and not their own clothes first! I expected the film to develop a lot more than this, each day blurred into another as you could not tell if it was night, where Eve was, if it was a new day, or anything really. i made the effort to watch, I thought such workers should be represented, but I did anticipate a better ending.

When I was a teenager, David Warner was a real heart throb. We loved him in Shakespeare plays so we all wanted to see this film. So after his sad recent demise I really wanted to see it again. It also stars a young Vanessa Redgrave who unfairly had an award for this film while David Warner didn't. It is a typically British anarchic film, with odd happenings, mainly due to the excessive imagination of Warner's character, Morgan, who has been brought up as a communist. His wife loved him but couldn't cope with his eccentricities any longer and had chosen a really arrogant drip of a man to replace him. Morgan sets out to make the man's life a misery, quite rightly. The film is interlaced with clips from other films like Tarzan and King Kong to express Morgan's powerful imagination. Although he ends up in an asylum, he has the last laugh as his ex-wife is carrying his child.

This film is an absolute delight, lovely London accents with the great Irene Handle, Bernard Bresslaw and Arthur Mullard. It is famed for its silliness and poignancy as Morgan does everything he can to get his beloved wife back.

Best of all this film has no swearing, especially the disgustng F*** word which is so nauseatingly prevalent in today's films, no coloured people where they would not naturally be at the time, i.e. not obviously put there to make up a political quota like nowadays, and no excessive sex scenes. Film heaven, and I wish films now would go back to the high standards of this one. Oddly my husband hated it, so maybe it is a girl thing, but it remains one of the best and most enjoyable films I have ever seen.

An unusual story. Seemed to be about an orphan who had a difficult start in life along with his sister who is mysteriously not mentioned again for a long while. Cyrus goes to work with a sculptor in the country. There is a mystery to unravel about the family he describes as each is not what they seem. He befriends an old man of the family who seems to be treated very badly by the family, but then his kindness appears to be false also. There is a big shock - hard to appreciate at first as he spends a lot of time having nightmares so it is not clear if what you see is real or not for a while. We were stunned. Certainly not the run-of-the-mill romance or anything tale. Reasonably acted and quite an experience, perhaps a bit confusing and hard to see until the end why he is so twisted. Perhaps a satisfying end. Too much English language in it perhaps, but otherwise an experience filmwise.

I watched this as I like Gemma Arterton as an actress, but although she was OK in it, the subject matter was terrible. I get that you need to see the mundane housewifey stuff at the beginning to emphasise how bored and miserable she was, but it never got better! The husband was too randy, never considering her feelings, she ended up shouting and swearing at her toddlers which is unforgiveable. This is why smacking is so important - a quick slap and the children calm down and behave. Using terrible foul language will frighten them and they will remember the words and accept them as OK which they are not.

She is half-hearted about what she wants - discusses doing a very expensive art class, but it is unclear if she actually goes to it ever, this might have added interest but it is all too vague. She snaps and clears off to Paris - this might have improved matters but after actually getting to an interesting gallery where she finds the original tapestry of the five senses she has become interested in, she picks up a Frenchman and leaves the art behind, so after a few interesting scenes, she sleeps with him, finds out, surprise surprise that he is married, and wanders off dazed where she then wakes up in a woman's house who took her in.

All this is supposed to help her find herself - but the encounters are so few and so brief she seems not to have discovered anything. It must have cost quite a bit to ship her husband to France for just one scene where he stands there and she hugs him.

The blurb says ''Through a series of risky and incendiary encounters, she discovers the woman she really is and the life she really wants'' - but if she does the viewers do not - we end with the same scene as at the beginning with no answers - has she left home? Is she in an office or a new house of her own? Is she tearful when watching children far off as she has left her own? What? As for a series of encounters - just meets two people and not much else happens. Most bored housewives would not have as much money as she has to drive off in their own car and hop off to Paris either - so rich and yet when she gets to Paris she wears exactly the same night attire she has worn all through the story - yuk! This was a really, really, dull story that could have been so much better. A waste of a few hours, only the brief scenes in the Louvre were worth it and the equally brief strolls around Paris streets otherwise, just do not watch.

This story had potential, about a poor writer getting all the credit for his wife's work, and putting his son down for being clever like her.

Beyond belief that she would put up with this, apparently on the advice of just one woman saying she would not succeed in writing as a woman it being a man's domain. In her student years there would be a long history of successful women writers, even if there were a number of them who used men's pseudonyms to get there. Was she really so desperate to hold on to her lecturer when he was unfaithful to his wife, sulked if she criticised his work and was constantly unfaithful? I doubt many women would put up with this for long. The end is totally disappointing, meaning she never gets the recognition she deserves I suppose.

I expected better. Apparently it is taken from a novel. Glad I never read it or I would have hurled the book across the room in disgust.

The storyline jumps back and forth in time and tries to take in as many countries/continents as possible just to say they are not only American, but the story is just daft. There is one smaller childlike person with the most terrible ginger wig ever, who asks why she was made that way and there is never any answer. The reasons for the almost immortal Eternals changes every 5 minutes as they find they have been regularly lied to and brainwashed and their memories taken away. The Celestial beings they work for, supposedly supreme, are essential bullying liars, world killers, murderers and parasites, so who would want to support them? Their premise is that the planets are purely there as eggs so they can produce more of themselves as apparently without them there is no light in the universe. I think the Eternals could do a better job as they are very inventive. The Celestials feed off human energy until they can hatch and then the world, with all its precious flora and fauna - which is never mentioned as apparently only humans matter to the Eternals as well, is destroyed.

The Celestials are the worst made creatures ever, they look like 6 eyed bits of plasticine a child has stuck together with rubble and glue. Considering the powerful special effects which are mostly pretty good, the Celestials are appalling.

The Eternals have lived for 1000s of years and are basically aloof, yet one has been made homosexual, obviously to make sure there is one representative in there.

This film is rated 12, yet it shows men kissing and a naked couple having sex. Sorry, but even if that couple are married neither scene is suitable for 12 year olds!

It should have been rated 15 as there is such a lot of violence as well.

When you discover that the all-powerful also made the Eternals enemies that they are supposed to be protecting humans from, just to keep them busy, the whole thing feels sick, especially when the enemy find out about being duped and also call the Eternals murderers. How these Celestials could make sophisticated spacecraft with their lumpy fingers is beyond me! Each Eternal seems to keep changing sides, are lying to each other and are generally a total mishmash of legends. One has the worst Irish accent ever that keeps mutating into an American one, they swing from controlling humans to protecting them, giving them advanced machinery they are not ready for and snatching it back, and worse.

At the end the montage tries to wrap in many artifacts and mysterious objects from around the world to try and justify with them with this stupid Marvel legend.

I don't mind fantasy for fun but this was dire.

There is obviously a sequel planned but I do not think I will bother to watch it.

Not as funny as the trailer would have you believe, and far too much swearing using current four-letter words not those that would be used in that era. Gets really boring, swearing once was more gentle and full of variety, now it is the same awful word over and over ad nauseam.

There were so many room in so many places it got confusing.

I am not sure it deserved all its BAFTAs. It was mildly entertaining and somewhat British at least, but a bit over-hyped.

The awful scenes with the poor cat were tasteless and nasty.

Seemed to be more an exercise in possible scenarios of the near future than anything else. We understood less of this than in the non-anime version. Just could not follow it much at all, and there seemed to be no purpose in the story other than making artificial intelligence that wanted to reproduce and all being controlled by greedy corporations. Quite boring really, stuck with it but would have done better just to shut it off early.

One of the rare occasions I was not interested in the making - of extras.

Went quite well, although I still do not know what SWADES means - an acronymn perhaps? The NASA stuff was laughable, real gobbldedgook science speak and obviously not real. Some actors like the American in charge at the initial conference were dreadful performers. I am sure a lot of the village cast - it seemed very populous for such a small place, were locals, and they did well, especially the children. Some good pointers were brought out, the unfair caste system, young men expecting their wives to give up their careers, children married off young and no point seen to be educating girls and so on. These are important of course, but some bits were not thought out, when Mohan returns to India there is no indication as to whether he got work with NASA there nor if he actually married, but the sentiments were good. I imagine if the locals made their own electricity the government would have something to say about that, and this was made before the advent of mobile phones and solar panels it would appear, yet for all the failings of electricity people seemed to be able to run laptops and have lights switched on. The oddest thing was the English subtitles - they do tend to be Americanised sadly, but strangely they were also in archaic English, whether this was due to some songs being traditional religious ones or not I don't know, but if so they were not correct, for example using 'dearth' instead of 'doth'. It was strange to see the text full of thees and thous.

Entertaining and thought provoking nevertheless.

Loved this. Great story and still in keeping with the older series. The gang were great and it was lovely to see the original Holly back again. Good to see a follow up of the felis sapiens cats, though I didn't like the hair styles. One of them looked more like a tamarind monkey and the others were too scruffy and un-catlike, with no tails. The gags like scratch posts and cat flap were good though, as was the giant floppy disk and the lovely Speccy loading sounds. Here and there I did get the feeling that their acting was not quite up to scratch, but as one of them was ill during shooting that might have been the reason as they had to re-do some scenes. Perhaps too many American accents thrown in as well. Worth seeing the deleted scenes included too, as they had even more cat gags in them. I look forward to the next one, which they fully intend to make. Haven't laughed so much in ages. Really cheered us up.

I got this to watch, of course, because I love Joaquin's acting, and watching a dedicated Vegan in action helps too. He acted as well as ever, and it must have been pretty difficult as most of the film is taken up with him alone. The sexual aural and proxy porn was embarrassing, vile, and illogical. A personality developed on a supercomputer would surely have better things to interest it than that! The film was disturbing in that so many people were choosing to have relationships with the computer - and it was essentially only one they all shared, no surprise there - instead of working hard to develop normal human relationships and take note of their surroundings. Even when Joaquin's character meets his nearly-ex-wife, he cannot communicate with her enough to express his real feelings yet can with a piece of electronic machinery! Daft. The end was very predictable and showed that humans had learned nothing from the pointless experience of having a 'relationship' with a non-physical entity. This film was so dull and silly that my husband and I took a break halfway through, did more interesting things like sit in the garden watching the breeze in the trees and the birds feeding and then went back to it after a couple of hours. Definitely not a good film.

I have to say that the setting for this film was in the darkest, most dismal and ugly home imaginable. Long dark corridors, equally dark rooms, most with dark doors with an almost invisible chinese-style pattern on. These doors hid kitchen cupboards and room entrances, which were so narrow they were barely wide enough for a person to walk through, where the doors themselves were almost invisible. The rest was in wide open glassed areas that seemed to stretch in columns against an unidentified hillside with no signs of human habitation. Despite this, the film is not really horror, but science-fiction.

There was no explanation as to what had happened to the girl's arm nor to her mother, and no explanation about whether her dog was speaking telepathically or carrying the gadget which contained her mother which spoke to her. What time was it set in and where did the cube come from?

Even if you get some gist of time-travel it takes a long time of wading through the slow chapters of the film (each labelled), before you have any guesses as to what is going on. There is also some extreme violence which is over-the-top even though the reason for it is explained - the Trojan horse idea, get an injured girl to be taken into the house to enable a crime to take place, but the 'fake' set-up violence is totally over-done.

Another irritation is that a very large amount of the film is acted out long-distance. You feel you are in a theatre in the rearmost seats trying to work out what is going on on-stage, as it is so far away it is difficult to make out which characters you are watching. I see no point in this as it is less 'arty' and more frustrating than anything.

Next the acting. I don't like subtitles in films as they detract from the film itself (unless it is a foreign-language film or American, where I need the subtitles because their diction is so bad), but in this one they spoke so quietly, in mostly English accents, though one might have been Australian, that it was really hard to make out what they said, each of us going 'what?' at many points in the film. But in a really rare situation, there were no subtitles available! In this film you most certainly need subtitles. The actual acting varied up and down througout from very poor or totally over-the-top histrionic.

Many of the actions were bizarre and a day later we are still trying to work out why they were there. For example on bringing an injured girl into the house why was she immediately submerged in a water bath that seemed to be at the end of a corridor? Why was a bath of water even there when you might fall into it at any point?

There was no clear ending, just an intimation of what had probably occurred and was going to occur and you were left wondering, right through the credits as it focussed on the cube, we were expecting something to happen after the credits rolled as so often does in films now

(and this is a 2017 film) but it didn't, the cube stayed the cube and that was it.

So in all I would say that unless you really want to punish yourself for some masochistic reason I would say give this odd film a miss.

I was really looking forward to see Strike again with his interesting relationship with Robin. The detective part of it was OK, but it was totally disappointing that she went back to her possessive drip of a boyfriend. You were kept on tenterhooks until the end and I was so put out by the dreadful ending the programme was quite ruined.

Drona is a mythological story written in the Indian style of gods and the tasks they give humans. It is nice in that it is not yet another re-hash of the traditional stories, Indian TV I find gets awfully bogged down in these, rarely adding new stories which is a shame. So this one is an interesting tale, if a bit weak here and there. The Drona line - all the firstborn males are called that, but there is no indication they ever have more than the one child, are tasked with protecting the nectar of the gods. Why they cannot look after it themselves and why they cannot make the human caretaker immortal so he can always look after it beats me, but that's the story. The film starts with the usual sob story of the motherless little boy ill-treated by the saas, but there is a twist to that as he is there for his protection. However when discovered by the wicked demon all his neighbouring protectors who come to his aid seem to be very easily killed, and only one continues with him, his 'shadow', Sonia.

The fight scenes and effects are good here, but the plot gets lost by previously having a hugely long song and dance scene which in my opinion comes too early in the film. It also inexplicably has him dancing with a little found dog as a companion which is sweet, but then the dog is forgotten and one wonders what became of it, did he just abandon it? The film seems to be set in Prague, yet the accent some people speak is Cockney London - what the? A little continuity or correct scene setting would have been better here.

The rest of the tale transports you more to the medieval past with the palace, shrines to the dead and mythical city, he seems out of place with his modern western gear - where are these lands where it looks like 500 years ago?

Despite these issues the story rolls along well enough, the effects are very good, I especially liked the clever but creepy faces of his ancestors in the sand presumably giving him advice, and the comic book sections of back story.

It was great that both Sonia and Drona did most of their own fighting and stunts and it was good to see an actress doing a bit more than just looking pretty. Other characters apart from the demon tended to be a bit sidelined, the queen stood bemused in the path of evil magic flying towards her where normal people would have jumped out of the way, especially if they knew how wicked their enemy was which she did. The demon killed his clone yet this was puzzling too as he turned out to have hundreds of them already so why kill that one without any good reason, not letting it develop?

That apart, the music was pleasant and the puzzles and challenges quite impressive, with the later implied threat indicating perhaps a sequel or perhaps them not being as successful as they thought. So yes I enjoyed it, but it did lack something.