#JustWatched

Baby Driver has a cool concept, stellar cast and great soundtrack. It's clearly trying to riff the road-movie genre in an urban setting by making it a road-movie that can't actually hit the road. But ironically enough that's kind of the problem with the film, it never manages to shift gear and become anything but what you see on the surface.

The film is all style and no substance, much like the women in the film. It's becoming clear that Edgar Wright has the inability to write women. Lily James' Debora pries into Ansel Elgort's Baby's backstory, creating a wounded, lonely but talented and misunderstood guy that we've seen a million times before. But we get no such insight into Debora herself apart from the fact she wants to runaway to nowhere which conveniently makes her the ideal girl for Baby who himself wants to do nothing but drive off away from his forced life of crime. Darling, played by Eiza González, is barely more than Buddy's (Jon Hamm) drive to steal, and later, seek vengeance. The women are present just to accekerate the story of the men. And it seems pretty clear that Baby is really only attracted to Debora because she reminds him of his Mother, which is more than a little creepy.

The film sells itself on its cool soundtrack and the fact the editing is heavily timed to the music. This sounds fun on paper and offers a slight laugh when a heist gets stalled and Baby has to start the song over. In practice however it becomes tiresome and results in a glorified music video. The editing is choppy, making it hard to tell what's going on. At one point we're watching a chase between two trucks and one of them ends up with the nose of the truck jammed under a moving lorry. I couldn't tell which truck was trapped because we're rarely offered a wide shot to take in what's going on. The well choreographed car chases are hidden in close-ups making it so hard to tell what's going on. Maybe this is an attempt to make us feel part of the action but if anything it isolates the audience.

It's also not clear if Wright wants us to suspend our disbelief and just go along for the ride or if we're meant to be invested in these characters and their experiences. It's clear we're meant to sympathise with Baby as he realises people are getting hurt during the heists (he's only realising this now?) and he doesn't want to be a part of this violence. But when he decides to fight back against the more loose-moraled criminals he straight-up murders them. In pretty horrific ways. We're also made to understand that although Baby is an excellent driver, he's also an awkward person, often walking into people, uneasy when he's out of his comfort-zone. Turns out the in third act that Baby is Batman. An expert at basic parkour, a marksmen, can run over the top of cars that are charging at him and has the ability to disappear mid-conversation when people look away for a second.

Edgar Wright needs to pick a lane because trying to drive in all of them results in an unsatisfying film. Also Edgar, if I can push the car analogy a little bit further, please let a woman at least share the driver's seat with you because female characters deserve better than this and you obviously have a learner's permit.

I don't post a lot online these days. My thoughts on films, the occasional tweet, more often a retweet, sometimes a photo on Instagram and I can't remember the last time I actually wrote a post on Facebook that wasn't for Cheesemint or The Reunion. I've been working on a website for months but something keeps holding me back from fully finishing it. I don't know when exactly I started using my voice less. Maybe it's through fear of judgment, maybe I got tired of adjusting my tone for the different circles of my life on here, maybe I'm sick of shouting into the void, feeling unable to compete with the shouting of others and I know there are people who can articulate what I want to say better then I ever could.

But tomorrow is an important day and if I don't contribute something more than just my vote I'll feel like I'm not doing enough.

The world is a mess. This country is a mess. Everyone is so angry all the time. I'm angry all the time. I wish I could say with sincerity that I know what the answer is but I don't. But I believe that if we stick with the Conservatives, stick with Theresa May, everything will get worse for the most vulnerable. Our doctors, our police and our teachers are telling us how dangerous this woman and her party is and we should be listening. These three institutions are the most important institutions in the entire country. One heals, one protects and one educates us. It's like the holy trinity of a community. The Conservatives and May are making an absolute mess of Brexit (something I still believe is a mistake) and we're isolating ourselves more and more from important allies and cozying up to a monster like Drumpf who fuels racism, Islamophobia and doesn't believe climate change is an actual thing. The recent terrorist attacks are abhorrent and everyone is right to feel worried and scared. I don't know how to stop these things but I would imagine giving more money to the Police and the bodies able to investigate and prevent these sorts of attacks would help. Scrapping human rights laws is not the answer and restricting freedoms of citizens is not the answer. What's to stop them from invading your privacy, removing your rights when it's convenient for them? If you think they'll stop at terror suspects then you're pretty naive. Governments never abuse their powers, right? May has consistently lied, flip-flopped and can't be trusted at all.

I know none of the parties are perfect, none of the candidates are perfect. But I want to hope for better than what we've got now.

So tomorrow, I'll be voting Labour because I believe it'll make the country better and help those less fortunate. I want to save the NHS, help our schools and and police get the money they need. I think Labour are more capable of negotiating a better Brexit deal than the Tories who are too busy trying to win over the UKIP supporters. Zero hour contracts are used to exploit hardworking people and they need to go. I think a £10 living wage should be a basic requirement for any job. I think free school meals and childcare are a good thing. Getting rid of tuition fees and brining back the EMA and grants will give more young people a better start as they begin the path to their careers.

I could go on but I think the most important thing people can do tomorrow when they go to the polls is to think beyond their own interests a little. See it from the point of view of someone less fortunate. If we all showed a little more empathy then everyone would be better off and someone would be looking out for you as well.

It barely took five minutes for me to fall in love with this film. Perhaps I'm overly sentimental, overly sensitive but I found it to be enthralling. Watching a fearless little girl be inspired to be a hero by the women around her was just utterly brilliant and the hero she grows up to be engages so many of the timeless issues women face. But Wonder Women isn't just a hero for women, she's a hero for humanity. A lot of her words about cowardice ring true with contemporary events. Diana calling the British Generals out for letting innocents die in the name of war seems like a barely veiled statement about the West's actions in Syria and other recent wars. But the film never becomes sanctimonious. It balances the morality against action and humour with great ease making the whole piece a pleasure to watch. It's also set apart from it's comrades because it works as its own piece. You don't need to worry about watching any previous films and it doesn't get hooked up on setting up a sequel.

Wonder Woman isn't immune from blockbuster problems. The editing during the action is a little choppy, sometimes missing shots that would help the action make sense. The final fight might be two Gods fighting each other but it doesn't excuse it for being a bit messy visually and narratively speaking. I was dubious about Hans Zimmer's theme which seems to come out of nowhere in the trailers but in the context of the film it worked great. Everyone is so well cast and like Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man, Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman. Others might criticise the film for being too on the nose at times, with its use of slow-mo for dramatic-effect and grand speeches but you know what? It's allowed too. The first major female superhero film from this generation is allowed to drive the point home, to let us soak up the image of a woman walking into No Man's Land to save innocent lives and punching a tank in the process. I find myself genuinely looking forward to Justice League if it means I get to see more Wonder Woman.

It's been a long, hard road but Patty Jenkins has struck a huge blow for female superheroes and female blockbuster directors. This film deserves to do extremely well and perhaps other characters will finally start to get the screen-time they deserve and studios will stop unfairly questioning whether a female director can deliver the goods because Jenkins has delivered with Wonder Woman.

Alien: Covenant is so far up its arse that it's about to burst out of its own chest. It has none of the tension and horror of Alien, none of the action of the excellently constructed Aliens. It barely manages to rise above the train-wreck that was Prometheus. At least this time the character's motivations make a semblance of sense.

I feel like everyone involved with this needs a nice pat on the back, a congratulations but then to be asked "What else can you do?"

Free Fire feels like the result of a clear vision, expert planning and a lot of patience. It's quite reminiscent of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and a lot like a stage play. To keep track of where all the various characters are, who can see who, who's been shot, how much blood they've lost etc is pretty incredible. The writing was on form and had the entire cinema in stitches, something I love about group viewing. It really becomes a shared experience when you can hear others having the same level of involvement as you.

I should have seen Doctor Strange at the cinema. If I'd seen it at the cinema there's a good chance I might have enjoyed it. It's clearly a visual feast. Impressive special effects, full of colour that would be immersive on a big screen. But I watched it on blu-ray and while I could generally admire the aesthetic of the film I found the rest of it to be really hollow.

Despite the thinly veiled attempt at offering the comic book movie canon something different, it's the same as what we've seen before and it's so dull because of it. In films with similar plots with been fortunate to have interesting, watchable characters to enhance the overall viewing pleasure but Stephen Strange is completely insufferable. He's an arrogant, entitled arsehole of a man who goes from being the best brain surgeon to being the best sorcerer while seemingly learning nothing about humility along the way, though we're supposed to buy that he's a changed man. The supporting cast are even less developed which is a shame because the sheer talent that was on offer is extraordinary.

Big dumb fun. Really enjoyed it. Full of Pacific Rim vibes. On paper it's got all the makings of a terrible film but, for me, it just works. If you know me well, you'll remember that I hated the first outing in this "Mosterverse.”. I thought Godzilla was poorly written, clunky and took itself way too seriously for a film about a giant lizard. Kong however, doesn't make that mistake. It knows it's ridiculous and it leans into it but still manages to pull off some tension and drama. It's funny, decently enough performed and I liked the artistic license the director has taken with the fast cuts, extreme close ups and bright colours. It doesn't always work, an example of this being Tom Hiddleston wearing a gas-mask in a fog of green gas and slicing colourful creatures with a samurai sword in the style of an commercial advertising 4K HD TVs. The soundtrack is good but it verges on Suicide Squad territory, setting up virtually every scene in the first act. Yes, we get it. This is set in the seventies.

There's some substance to the whole thing which I didn't expect. It plays on the Vietnam War a little too heavily sometimes but it makes for some interesting subtext for the characters. Kong looked great and the creatures were really well designed. The giant spider was terrifying and had be squirming in my seat as one of the marines was slowly being dragged up to its mouth.

I might have gone a little overboard with the GIFs but I love this show so much.

There are many people that bemoan the state of Hollywood at the moment. These critics aren't completely wrong. 2016 was a prime example of this. A year full of tired sequels, remakes and interesting concepts reduced to outdated tropes (Passengers, you can take an awkward bow for that one). But sometimes you need to focus less on the bad and more on the good, because it is there. We're just not paying attention. Arrival is a good example of something fresh. Yes, we've seen countless films centred around humanity encountering an alien race for the first time but this felt like something new. While a potential hostile move simmers in the background, the story puts its focuses on communication in an attempt to stop the pot from boiling over. A clear satirical take on the world, that perhaps if we actually talked to each other we'd be able to get along. It develops with a nice, slow pace. Everything feels very methodical. The wide cinematography and rhythmic, haunting score adds to this. Having said that, I wanted more about the development of the communication between the humans and aliens. It felt like we took the first important steps and then skipped ahead slightly for the plot's sake. But otherwise we're given time to process things and we're never out-right patronised which would be easy to do in a film like this.

Like another film I watched recently, Source Code, this one sits with you afterwards. You process it. You push the map down and iron out the creases, taking it all in. It would benefit from a second viewing, that's for sure. Amy Adams carried so much weight in this film. She's been handed some duff roles recently (American Hustle, Man Of Steel/Batman V Superman) but she really is great when given good material.

You could be forgiven for writing off this film. Not only is it a comic book movie, which are (and I can admit this despite me being an avid consumer) general by-the-numbers, popcorn fodder, but it's also an X-Men movie. The X-Men movies have varied in quality from the good to average and to plain awful. This is ludicrous since there's such great source material that's based on real world events such as the civil rights movement and persistent themes of how we view people different to ourselves. The worst of these films have been the ones dedicated to Wolverine, the bad boy hero of the X-Men. While 2013's The Wolverine had some decent ideas, it all got lost in ridiculous action sequences and pointless characters. If that wasn't bad enough, it's predecessor X-Men Origins: Wolverine is garbage on a bonfire made of excrement. You also might have seen the first trailers for Logan and, as a friend pointed out to me, thought it was a geriaction X-Men movie made for your Dad and so, based on all the available data, decided to give Logan a miss.

But don't be so hasty. Logan is a great film. Despite being  connected to a franchise that constantly rewrites its own history in a way that leaves even the most hardcore fan confused, Logan is actually fairly self-contained. It's set in the future, giving itself enough distance from the spectacle of its past. It nods toward previous X-Men events through dialogue and a few characters but almost writes its legacy off as fiction in a clever and meta way. The in-film, real life exploits of the X-Men have been adapted into comic-books making their heroic deeds fanciful and far from the truth of reality. Reality is something that is very present in Logan, both the film and the character. The film shows real consequences for these character's actions. The R-rating brings a brutality to these characters that has been lacking before. They were muzzled. Both in a violent sense and in a more gritty realism way. Hearing Xavier swear makes him much more relatable. It's a small detail but it works. Showing the the characters in a non-PG environment means they have a chance to feel real. It also means that having a lead character that uses big metal claws to fight people isn't sanitised for the sake of younger viewers.

But what really sets this film apart from the others is the time it takes with its characters. There's a small cast and it's very intimate. As I was watching it I couldn't help but think of a video essay I'd seen called "Batman v Superman: The Fundamental Flaw" which is a terrible title but it's essentially about moments versus scenes. To paraphrase the video, it essentially says that comic book films, especially Batman V Superman, rely heavily on "cool moments" like Batman stopping Superman's punch. Or Superman kicking the Batmobile. Or Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman standing together on screen. But they lack actual scenes. Times where the characters actually talk to each other, discuss what's going on. Scenes that develop the characters, that help the audience understand them and relate to them. To see these characters being people, to see them laugh, cry, argue and get how they see the world and others around them. Logan has lots of scenes like this. Of course it has its share of cool moments and great action sequences but it also took time to stop and reflect and let the characters do their thing. Two in particular stand out. Xavier and Laura in the hotel room in Las Vegas watching Shane. The second is the dinner scene with the Munson family. These scenes make the more dramatic moments and climaxes have value that lingers. I was a little concerned towards the end of the film that we were going to get a Hook or Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome vibe. A lot of children fighting adults can go that way very easily. (Though the trimming of the beard came very close) But it didn't. Overall it was handled well. The children weren't used as a way of obviously pandering to the audience. I was actually terrified for them. The children gave great performances, especially Dafne Keen who played Laura. Much like Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things, Keen has a screen presence that almost outshone Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart.

I forgot this came out. Probably not a good sign. Nothing of note to talk about. Probably not a good sign either. Just feels pretty irrelevant. Why do so many comic book films just feel like a trailer for the next one?

Wasting Olivia Munn? An absolute crime.

Source Code is one of those great science fiction films that sits with you afterwards and you keep rolling through the ideas it presents and you can't shake them. I find this even more so with time travel films. I love trying to work it all out. Like trying to flatten out a screwed up map on a windy day. The more you focus on one corner the more you lost control of another.

It's a tight film. It's fast but then it slows down to let moments sit. There was so much more to it than what I was expecting. There's a nice message in there somewhere, something about the value of life even if it can't live in our reality. Something about hopes and dreams being their own world if we give them enough credence. I might be talking out of my butt but I thought it was nice.

One question I can't shake is what happened to the guy that Jake Gyllenhaal inhabits on the train? Early on they explain why that the man was chosen because of similarities to Gyllenhaal's brain or something and they explain that everyone on the train is dead anyway so it doesn't matter. But then when Gyllenhaal saves everyone and they all get to live in the new reality he's created, the guy he's inhabiting doesn't get to live because Gyllenhaal has taken up residence. I know Gyllenhaal's real body is dead in his original reality but it seems pretty unfair on the guy he's now living as. But then he was dead anyway, right?