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spiderdreamer-blog · 5 months

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2023 at the Movies: A Year in Review

2023 has been an odd year for American cinema in particular, between overall tepid box office outside of a few big hits and the combination of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes affecting release dates as well as promotional tactics. (Just so we're clear, this is a Union Solidarity Blog) But it was a fascinating year artistically nonetheless, especially on the blockbuster end. What this list aims to achieve is sort of a capsule review of the theatrical releases I saw (not counting streaming-only films even if I ended up seeing theatrical releases ON streaming) and how I felt about them in capsule review form. And even then, there's still stuff I need to catch up on like Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Oppenheimer, Elemental, or Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Anyhoo, on with my list, in chronological release order:

John Wick: Chapter 4: Much like its titular hero, there are perhaps some signs that this franchise could benefit from taking a bit of a rest. Some of the worldbuilding is going from knowingly absurd to just plain absurd, and a couple early action beats, while fun (NUNCHUCKS), are a little familiar in terms of director Chad Stahelski's neon-as-fuck aesthetics. Ultimately, it's not too much to derail things, as Keanu Reeves proves a capable grounding lead like always, and the Parisian third act is giddy, comically overblown violence in the grand John Wick tradition that reaches an unexpected poignancy. The supporting cast might also be one of the best in the series; while Asia Kate Dillion's unflappable Adjudicator is missed from the last installment, we do receive Bill Skarsgard doing an OUTRAAGEOUS French accent as a smarmy villain you really want to see dead by the end of this, Donnie Yen as a clever, funny spin on the blind swordsman trope, Rina Sawayama is both badass and touching, Shamier Anderson stands out by dialing down, and my beloved Clancy Brown has some of the best implicit "are you fucking kidding me" reactions I've seen in a while.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie: I was honestly dreading this for a while. Illumination Entertainment is a perfectly cromulent animation studio who makes films that, with a couple exceptions, represent pretty much everything I dislike about American family filmmaking: loud, hyperactive, deficient of nutritional value, and did I mention loud? But the trailers started impressing me in terms of how well they adapted the candy-colored toybox Nintendo aesthetic to a wider theatrical scope. And if nothing else, casting Jack Black as Bowser would probably be pretty awesome (spoiler alert: he was). Thankfully, it manages to be an immensely entertaining, zippy adventure film that minimizes potential annoyances at nearly every turn. This is primarily thanks to a ready-to-play, enthusiastic voice cast (outside of Black, I particularly like Pratt and Day's brotherly dynamic and Anya Taylor-Joy doing a Disney Princess-esque comedy action spin on Peach), a smartly simple story structure, and leaving a lot of potential open for the future like Seth Rogen's lovable ready-for-spinoff-movies Donkey Kong. It may not rock the boat, but it was better than it had any business being, and that counts for a lot in my book.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The Marvel Cinematic Universe and I are admittedly on a bit of a break. Not because they're doing anything WRONG per se, just that a lot of their shows and movies haven't enticed me as much in the past year. I did get out to see this, though, which is both the best all around MCU film since Endgame and very possibly the best film of its own trilogy. James Gunn pulls out all the stops emotionally for his Marvel swan song (godspeed to you over at the still-in-progress trashfire that is Warner Bros. Discovery, good sir), crafting a beautiful, resonant journey for all the characters. The ensemble cast fires on all cylinders, for one. While Bradley Cooper is the obvious vocal standout as Rocket takes center stage, it's assuredly the role of Chris Pratt's career (other non-Mario/Marvel directors, take note! You can in fact have this guy be funny, credibly tough, AND sympathetic instead of missing out on the other two), Zoe Saldana navigates a difficult emotional dance, Pom Klementieff finds real heart in Mantis, Dave Bautista is still one of our most interesting wrestlers-turned-actors in the choices he makes, Karen Gillan has slowly become of the MCU's MVPs as Nebula, Will Poulter is endearingly dunderheaded as a comedic take on Adam Warlock, and Chukwudi Iwuji proves a truly vile villain who exemplifies the maxim of "if you really want an audience to just HATE a motherfucker, have him torture cute animals". And of course Gunn's musical tastes remain impeccable, such as a Beastie Boys needle drop that prompts a truly bitchin' fight scene (oddly the second time this specific song happened this year in a Pratt-led vehicle). It's funny, it made me ugly cry at SEVERAL points, and I got to see a psychic cosmonaut dog beat people's asses with her mind. What more could I want?

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse: Into the Spider-Verse was a revolution and a revelation for what the American animated film industry could accomplish artistically and technically. How could a sequel possibly live up to it? Across does, against all odds, proving to be the Empire Strikes Back to the original's Star Wars in terms of going darker/more complex on the emotions and to greater visual heights (albeit with the caveat that maybe next time, we can manage the production better and not crunch people so much). Co-directors Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers, and Joaquim Dos Santos (who I've stanned as one of our best animation action directors from Justice League Unlimited through Voltron Legendary Defender) craft a propulsive narrative that asks big questions about who and what Spider-Man is. And while those will have to wait to be fully answered in the third installment, what it sets up is no less compelling or thrilling. Shout-outs in particular go to Hailee Steinfeld, who has to anchor this film with Gwen as much as Shameik Moore's still-iconic Miles; Daniel Pemberton for an outstanding score; Oscar Isaac for giving rich complexity to Miguel O'Hara, who could have felt like a boorish bully in lesser hands; and Jason Schwartzman for not just proving he transitions REALLY well into voicework between this and projects like Klaus, but being by turns pathetically funny and terrifying in ways I've never heard him be as the Spot. Can't wait to see where that goes next time in particular.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: "Pleasant surprise" comes to mind. While I never hated Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as much as most, it was definitely a little underwhelming as a possibly final Indy adventure. (Not helping is that Steven Spielberg immediately turned around and made an infinitely better indy movie in the form of The Adventures of Tintin) So I was curious to see how going to the well for seemingly the real final adventure would work this time around. Thankfully, director James Mangold proves he has a good eye for creative action, even if nothing here quite reaches the heights of the original trilogy, and Harrison Ford does some of his best acting in ages as a weary, burnt-out Indy; one always got the sense that THIS was much closer to his heart than Han Solo. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a terrific foil to him, joyously amoral (or so she says), while Mads Mikkelsen finds a new spin on coldly cruel cinematic Nazis; he has a tense reintroduction scene that had me squirming in my seat. Add in a slam-bang ending and a touching epilogue, and I'm pretty happy with where things end up for our favorite archaeologist. A solid B+, which we could use more of nowadays.

Also they Poochie-d Shia LaBeouf, which is hilarious to me on several levels.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One: The Mission: Impossible franchise has undergone a curious metamorphosis from where it started as one of many oldies TV adaptations in 1996 to a purposefully old-school action franchise. Director Christopher McQuarrie has become a pro at these over the last three installments, and Dead Reckoning (now no longer a part one, as the back-in-production followup will be retitled) has lots to offer both large and small for action fans even outside of the continued spectacle of Tom Cruise Possibly Wants To Die On Camera. Obviously the big stunt sequences remain a draw, like a terrific car chase through Rome or the climactic journey onboard the Orient Express because trains are ALWAYS bitchin' locations in movies. But just as good are pleasures like a tense cat-and-mouse game in an airport where nobody's quite sure whose side Hayley Atwell's thief Grace is on, Henry Czerny coming back to the franchise after 27 years and looking as shiftily patriotic as ever, Pom Klementieff on this list for the second time looking really hot as she whoops ass, and Cary Elwes getting an unexpectedly choice exposition monologue. Plus the whole deal with the A.I. villain ended up being, uh, fairly relevant.

Barbie: A brilliant human comedy from an unexpected source. This could have gone wrong in so many different ways, I can easily imagine a version that's WAY more lugubrious and, crucially, much less funny. But director/co-writer Greta Gerwig has quickly become one of our best talents between this and the wildly-different-but-has-more-in-common-than-you'd-think Little Women (I also still need to see to heard-it's-excellent Lady Bird). With an infinitely clever script (I love in particular that the "real world" is just as ridiculous in its own way as Barbieland) and Sarah Greenwood's impeccable production design, Gerwig and her cast craft a feminist fable that remains light and funny even at its most strident and angry. Margot Robbie has never been better, hilarious and gut-punching by equal measure, America Ferrera ends up as the unexpected heart of the piece, and Ryan Gosling is absolutely hysterical as Ken while still making him intensely sympathetic. He and Robbie deserve Oscar noms in particular. No, I'm not kidding. Might expand this one to a full review at some point tbh.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: I missed this in theaters and regret it immensely, given that this is a hilarious, cheerfully irreverent take on characters who've really managed a surprising amount of relevance in the modern age. Actually having teen actors voice the Turtles makes them feel so authentic, and they're matched well by an equally game cast like Ayo Edebiri's thoroughly modern April O'Neill, Jackie Chan as a more bumbling-but-heartfelt version of Splinter than usual, and Paul Rudd going full surfer bro as Mondo Gecko. And of course the scribbled-notebook underground comics vibe of the animation is a neat bit of full circle aesthetics if you know these guys' origins.

Wish: All of you are wrong and being dumb about this movie. It's not that I can't grok some of the criticisms as being legitimate, to be fair; for example, the songs, while very good on their own IMO, don't always hit the iconic level of a Frozen or Encanto. But the vitriol with which they've been expressed, and this odd narrative that Disney is in the toilet artistically and needs to nebulously "fix" things, is something I can't at all agree with. It's gorgeously rendered, for one; yes, I would potentially like to see a return to full 2D animated films for the studio at some point too. But if they're gonna experiment even marginally with CGI, I applaud co-directors Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn making it look this painterly as a starting point. And as with a lot of modern Disney, there's real richness and inner life to these characters. Ariana DeBose is a winning heroine as Asha, who feels distinct from other "princesses" by essentially being working class and unionizing the kingdom. And Chris Pine as Magnifico is a Disney Villain for the ages, blending real complexity in his relationships with scenery-chewing madness. (Also am I the only one who got major "studio executive/CEO" vibes off him?) If this is "mid" or "bland" Disney, I really question what some of y'all are seeing that I seemingly can't.

Also I liked the 100th anniversary references, sue me. The last one in particular gets points for quiet charm rather than grandstanding.

The Boy and the Heron: Hayao Miyazaki, anime's favorite grumpy old man, comes back out of retirement for like the fifth time. Seriously, remember when Princess Mononoke was supposed to be his last film 25+ years ago? I'll believe his "last film" is truly his last when he's in the cold, cold ground. Regardless of the continuing saga of Old Man Won't Retire Because He Seemingly Can't Be Alone With His Own Thoughts, this is a brilliant, haunting spectacle of animation that might be a new favorite for me. Some have called it confusing, whereas I go for "dreamlike", possibly his most to date. Nearly every frame is suffused with longing and melancholy (though this also has some of Miyazaki's best comedy in a while), and, oddly like Wish, this feels like a true career reflection, if a bit more fraught and questioning what legacy truly means. Joe Hisaishi contributes possibly his moodiest, most dissonant score, with little of the bombast or whimsical charm that typifies his music, but it works unfathomably well. Credit also to the dub, with Robert Pattinson as funny and menacing as you've heard, but Luca Pandoval is also excellent as our stoic lead Mahito, Florence Pugh manages to be both a total badass and a funny old woman (it makes sense in context, I promise), Christian Bale puts forth a fascinating two-step with his boisterous father, Gemma Chan and Karen Fukuhara nail some complex emotional turns, Willem Dafoe nearly steals the whole thing in under two minutes, Dave Bautista makes a real meal out of a part not much bigger than that, and Mark Hamill finds resonance as a tired old man.

#movies #analysis #criticism #disney animated canon #wish 2023 #tmnt mutant mayhem #john wick #atsv #mission impossible #the boy and the heron #barbie #the super mario bros movie #indiana jones #guardians of the galaxy volume 3

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nono-bunny · 6 months

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Heya! Just wondering, since Netflix Geeked Week will probably show a trailer for the live-action Avatar on Thursday, I want to ask a few things:

Are you excited for it?

What do you think they'll keep, cut, and expand in this live-action of ATLA - Book One: Water (Season 1)?

Since Bryke are not on the project now, do you have a good feeling that this live-action could be a lot better than what they come up with at Avatar Studios?

(By the way, were these "Braving the Elements" episodes recent from your last posts? And were Bryke really acting like complete stooges in them? :O )

Hi, thank you for the lovely ask!

I've been completely ignoring the huge Geeked Week banner so I have no idea what's up with that or that it's possible we're getting a trailer soon, so that's cool information to have lol

1. I honestly can't say I'm excited for the live action. The last Netflix live action for a beloved childhood franchise of mine was such a dumpster fire because they focused on being edgy and dark and abandoned the source material for the worse, so like? Past experience has made me extremely cautious in regards to live action adaptions coming from them. In general I am not a fan of this trend- the Disney ones are shit, and I only really find myself watching and enjoying the (sometimes shitty, but like, in a fun way) J-drama adaptions of old shoujo manga as I don't really fuck with any other genre nowadays. Anime has a long history with shitty adaptions for action shows, and as action is inherent to ATLA after all, even if it's not technically an anime, I know that's gonna be a hurdle they'll have to clear- just having good effects and fight scenes. It's not MY personal focus as I do find charm in shitty effects (I do like J-dramas after all!) but honestly that is probably what's gonna make or break the initial hype for the show imo. Rn I'm honestly just... So neutral about it to the point where it surprises me (I'm. Very much not a neutral person usually lol) and I think it's just a matter of like.... Being burned AND pleasantly surprised by ATLA stuff before so I'm kinda hedging my bets until I know which way it's gonna go for me. Honestly I can very realistically see me LOVING it, but the other option is that it's bad and that's kinda what I'm preparing for rn ig? I can't imagine I'll be too upset if it's just... Bad or unsatisfactory given that I already spend way too much energy on the shit the OG did wrong lol, if the LA follows suit with those I think I'll just kinda... Ignore it lol. Idk, A LOT of mixed feelings

2. I... Really can't even begin to imagine what they choose to do with the reduced time frame, but I know I for sure have my own thoughts on what I WISH they would! Mainly I want NO Kataang, if there's Kataang I'm not gonna even bother with it tbh unless it's completely one sided (which it was in the original, yet we still know how THAT turned out)... I obviously want endgame Zutara, but I'm not hard pressed on it tbh- it would be funny as fuck for it to happen after Bryke left over creative differences though! I REALLY want the Blue Spirit to stay, I really DON'T want The Great Divide (no way it's staying in though so we're probably safe on that front), and overall I kinda just? Want Aang to be more sympathetic- him being irresponsible in the original show only makes sense until a certain point, and I want an Aang that shows an ability to grow from early on. Aang's an awful, awful Avatar, and I truly want him NOT to be one here- honestly, a good way to get around some of his early issues would be to borrow a bit from Korra and twist his love for slacking off into an enthusiasm for all four cultures (rather than just their rideable animals), which I feel like he was CLOSE to having... But as usual with him it was all tell and no show- I wanna see him having friends in all four nations, I wanna see him being multi cultural even before he gets freezed, I wanna see him embrace all four bendings and cultures rather than fixating on air, I wanna see him fail and take responsibility... But I also still want to see him being a kid, because that's crucial, and while the original show never allowed him to grow up, I also don't want him to be immediately seen as and treated as wise and powerful- I want him to struggle with what it means being an Avatar who knows about it at such a young age, I want to see him meaningfully interact with his past incarnations, I want him to ACTUALLY find a balance! I think I maybe just... Want a whole new main character still named Aang tbh, because I DON'T like who he is in the original show, but I do like who he could've been! I REALLY don't want the show to be intentionally edgy- if it goes into any dark topics, they should be ones already raised in the original. I want some more light shed on how the North Pole and Pakku's sexism never went away, I want the show to acknowledge that the monks didn't go down without putting up a hell of a fight, I want to know what the fuck Zhao was doing to get promoted like that despite his constant failures on screen, I want to really dive deep into Aang and Bumi's relationship and maybe how Aang failed him on a personal level (he's literally the only one who would've missed Aang, not the Avatar for all this time) and how he mourned him for years, I want Aang to contend with and realize that he's in a war and how he's FOR SURE killed people and will have to again even before Koizilla (he kills so many people in The Northern Air Temple!!)... I could honestly kinda do with an abridged version of some of the Gaang's travels, like, a lot of them are neat but only matter tangentially or from a world/character building perspective and can be dropped/merged/replaced pretty safely tbh. For example, Haru doesn't really need to exist tbh, what Imprisoned does for Katara can and maybe even SHOULD change gears to focus more on her rather than this random guy who only ever shows up once more to get laughed at because he has a lame mustache. The Fortuneteller should be dropped or altered severely because its message doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Yue should be a bigger presence and be more of an established character. Jet should maybe get his role expanded. Suki should be more of a presence throughout. There are a lot of ways to make the first season better tbh, and also it NEEDS to change to fit with the new timeframe so? Yeah I hope they do a good job at separating the wheat from the chaff because god knows the original show did not know how to do that.

3. I'm honestly pretty confident in saying that Avatar Studios will never ever make anything good, or at the very least, anything that I'll like, but as to what the lack of Bryke means for the LA? Honestly, it's all up to the people working on it- Bryke being bullheaded and bad writers isn't exclusive to them, and if the staff is made up of writers that lean too heavily on the source material or drift too far from it that could honestly sink the whole show. Of course I'm happy they're not on board given their awful track record, but like... I know nothing about any of the people working on it in their stead, so a lack of Bryke doesn't necessarily equate to good writing (it certainly does leave out THEIR bad writing though!!)

Braving the Elements is soon gonna start reviewing the third season of ATLA, and it started in 2021 so everything there is very recent! And yeah, every time Bryke are on they prove themselves to be assholes all over again, they keep topping themselves somehow istg!

I feel that this isn't my most eloquent post but tbh I'm quite sick rn so this is the best I can do atm, hopefully I managed to answer properly anyway?

#avatar the last airbender #atla #anti aang #anti kataang #anti bryke #atla critical #atla live action

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istherewifiinhell · 28 days

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okayyyy also. tagged by @joelletwo for 5 topics i could talk about for an hour with no prep.

now. two things. 1. i have infernal podcast dude energy and could say a lot about nothing. weird trait to have if u dont like talking to people? hard to say. 2. GESTURES AT BLOG. im ALREADY. talking at length abt my beloved shit. so im just ruling out turtles, alien robots, trek, etcetcetc all the shit thats been a main blog topic for the last past. 4 years?

I'm gonna say.... western voice actors? not that i could really. Give a lecture so much as. I'm way more familiar with them that than I am live action actors. And I'm kinda just CONSTANTLY like. Oh you know so and so from every cartoon youve ever fucking seen? And FEEL a real. gap. with people when they dont have a same reference point. probably like how ppl feel with me when i dont know their acting guys jhadbgjfga. Like u can name 5 VAs from ur childhood cartoons/animated movies right? And personal interest like, hey btw u know like the entire cast of tng was in disneys gargoyles? U know keith david can SING? And diego luna? Hey you know about Canadian actors who are in all the dubs and video games and yeah cheap shit? You know Scott McNeil right? You know Ian James Corlett? You know. THE IAN. of being Ian. Hello. is this thing still on?

I really like and care about the topics of education, children's rights and pedagogy? Not academically so much as, personal interest. What seeing very clearly that there was a lot of arbitrary rules that involved things like. The Government. and Systems. as a child does to a motherfucker I guess? I'm always INTERESTED in a discussion about it, is how i mean I guess. Like focuses of multiple intelligence and "applied knowledge" (and short comings there of). I mean long and short of it. Kids are full human beings and until u can grapple with that their feelings and opinions um. Actually matter. I hate you? jdhbgjhdb. And Naturally the world being good for kids has the prerequisite of it not sucking ass for adults too....

UHhhh guh. User design/civil engineering? You'll hear it from me until the day I die, crushed under the tires of a ford f1 giga truck with the LED 20million watt bulbs. PROTECTED BIKE LANES. for the love of god. I just know a lot of designers I guess and like engineering, conceptually. But like, u know that famous bridge everyone crashes into. If theres 80million warning signs and people are still crashing... maybe theres. other factors. Or you know ofc like, traffic planning, vehicle accidents, structural disasters. A lot of them are not just. Things happening. Tragedies. There's politics there. Usually a lot of Money stuff. and structural racism. The real reason your fridge is full is that there's a bunch of half empty condiment jars hiding all your forgotten left overs. And widening the roads isnt gonna do shit for traffic.

Jackass entry: Themes and motifs of anyyytthing ive watched with another person or saw, and like they also know it. I realllly like, visual theming and narrative shorthands. Anything that breaks like, maybe people in this setting dont have the same customs, but their gonna do something so you the audience can recognize it. Non literal/accurate use of colour and lighting, for mood and clarity. Breaking the physical shape and scale of things so they can appear and be readable on screen. COSTUMING COSTUMING COSTUMING. A well styled character can do soooo much for your understanding of a work, especially with large casts, and a poorly styled one can take me right out. Well. anyway. yes i love animation u all knew that.

uhhhhh Thatgamecompany/giantsquids studio. im giving myself a free space. lol technically I DO. blog about this. the music. at least. BUT beloved. games. Me and everyone else I guess. Hey speaking of u know its laura bailey and troy baker as the voices in the pathless? And you know how a lot of the games have themes of coming into being/growing/rebirth. And LOTS of environmentalism. And implied cultural world building, and wordless stories. and beautiful metaphor rich otherworldly visuals. and gameplay styles that really connect with the emotional story their going for. and ofc, the music. oh the leit motifs. well. there u go. sword of the sea when?

tagginggg. uh did anyone get @deadgrantaires or @army-of-bee-assassins yet? anyone elseeee who wants to regale me with things they knowww about. id love to know.

#some shit #KINDA. gave up. cause i hampered myself with the restriction not my fandoms. jadgbdhf BUT YALL ALREADY KNOWWWWW i could take u thru #my fav mirage issues or like. my favourite implications of tf stuff.#like. all the things i like to watch and like. this is a story about familys. or rebellion. or why people care about each other.#why its important to keep living. and everything iver ever blogged about. lmao #i also skipped on things like. cool machinery i like or how products are WORSE now days. even tho. djjhdbfj. if i have to talk to a #less known person i would consider those like. safety topics. dgjhdf #if u wanted to be really vague i could to a tangential daisy chain all themed around the colour blue. ofc.

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ciaossu-imagines · 1 month

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For the Disney day of the event, I definitely spread the beloved topic around to all my fandoms! For Servamp, I decided to write about what the Servamp’s favourite Disney treats from specifically the Disney World park would be and I hope you’ll all enjoy the weirdly specific, but hopefully interesting, headcanons!

The Servamp’s favourite Disney Parks treats:

Kuro can’t pass up the popcorn carts and really loves Mickey pretzels. However, his absolute favourite treat exists in Disney Springs. He’s a huge cola fan so it’s no surprise that he definitely considers the ‘Tastes Around the World’ international tray from the Coca-Cola Store Rooftop Beverage Bar a must during every Disney trip.

Hugh is actually a really huge fan of pineapple flavours so he can’t help loving Dole Whip. While just the Dole Whip is fine, his favourite treat are the Dole Whip floats, especially when they have the specialty orange flavoured ones since orange soda is his favourite among the soda types and to have it topped with delicious Dole Whip? Heavenly.

Jeje’s favourite Disney treat is only available seasonally, around the autumn and Halloween season. He’s a bit of a basic bitch in how much he enjoys pumpkin anything and especially pumpkin spice anything. Rosie’s All-American Café in Hollywood Studios does a pumpkin bread tiramisu around that time that Jeje absolutely thinks is one of the most delicious things on earth.

Freya has grown to really love the taste of apples, and while there’s a lot of delicious foods available at the parks, her favourite treat is a drink. She really love LeFou’s Brew, especially in the souvenir glasses. She definitely has multiples of those cups. For those unaware, LeFou’s Brew is just a frozen apple slushie with marshmallow flavoring and a passion fruit-mango foam.

Lawless likes a lot of the Disney treats. Most of them are served in some over-the-top presentation and that really appeals to him. In terms of taste though, he’s a big fan of the Cheeseburger Pods served at Satu’li Canteen in the Animal Kingdom.

Ildio can really get behind those massive turkey legs served at all the Disney parks. It’s a little disturbing just how many of them he can eat in a row. His siblings have clocked it and it’s sixteen. Sixteen of them in a row and he said he was still hungry, but they’d all run out of money.

Lily is a huge fan of Les Halles Boulangerie & Patisserie in EPCOT. It’s a must on any trip to Disney. He always gets coffee as a drink and likes to try out the different bakery treats. His favourite from them though is their macarons, especially their Macaron Lime Raspberry.

Tsubaki likes to try all of the different treats and foods you can only get at Disney World. He finds a lot of them tasty, yeah, but he’s never been able to settle on a favourite. However, Disney World recently released a treat that he tried, and it became his favourite right away. The new Everest Cupcake from Animal Kingdom just fully won his heart over.

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angelthedrummer · 4 months

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ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ــ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩـ

Blog Information

🖤Blog Status: Active

🖤 Blog Type: Self Shipping

🖤 Blog Birthday: January 23rd, 2024

Blogger Information

🖤 Hi!! You can call me Angel. I am 22 years old, Christian, as well as bisexual and autistic. This here is my selfship blog! My F/O is Pickles The Drummer from the show Metalocalypse ♡⸜(˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝ I have been selfshipping ever since I was a kid, but I had no idea until now that there is a community surrounding it! Really excited to be able to be a part of this community <3

🖤Likes: Retro and Y2K aesthetics, any cute and pink aesthetics, history, true crime, learning about animals and nature, skincare and fashion, art, synthwave, dnb, pasta, salty food (french fries my beloved uwu <3)

🖤Fandoms: Metalocalypse, Skyrim, Fallout, Disney/Pixar, PS1/PS2 style horror games (like Puppet Combo), Nancy Drew, Studio Ghibli, Toontown Rewritten, Animal Jam, The Eltingville Club, X-Men

Self Shipping Information

🖤 Romantic F/O: Pickles The Drummer (:: my hot mess🥁❤️)

🖤Platonic F/Os: Toki Wartooth (:: sweet little bumblebee 🐝🍯), Skwisgaar Skwigelf (:: ice king ❄️☁️), William Murderface (:: needs a hug 🧸🥲), Nathan Explosion (:: himbo emo 🥀🐺)

🖤Familial F/Os: Charles Foster Offdensen (:: you are my dad...your my dad! 🤗☕)

DNI (Do Not Interact)

🖤 If you are a misogynist, LGBT+phobic, ableist, racist, and/or just a bigot of any kind, a proshipper, etc, you are not allowed on here!!

🖤 If you ship yourself with Pickles The Drummer. I love him so so much and I don't feel comfortable interacting if you also ship yourself with him. However I am fully comfortable with sharing platonic and familial F/Os, so if you want to interact you are more then welcome to! ^_^

That is all of my basic information about myself and my blog! Hope we can all become friends, so feel free to send an ask, send a message in my DMs, or interact with my posts. Thank you for reading and I am so happy to be a part of the selfshipping community <3

#self shipping #selfship #self shipping community #f/o #fictional other #f/o community #self ship #self shipper #self ship community #self ship intro #selfshipping

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disneytva · 1 year

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Disney Branded Television Orders Phineas And Ferb Revival With Season Five and Season Sixth For Hybrid Release On Disney Channel And Disney+

During Disney Branded Television‘s Winter Television Critics Association press conference, the studio announced its plans to deepen its relationship with veteran Disney Television Animation creator Dan Povenmire including a revival for Phineas And Ferb with a Season 5 and Season 6 order for a hybrid release on Disney Channel and Disney+.

40 new episodes of the iconic animated series will be produced, which will be split up into two seasons of 20 episodes

The announcement was made by Ayo Davis, president of Disney Branded Television

“Dan is renowned for his ability to create universally beloved stories and characters with both heart and humor,” said Davis. “We couldn’t be happier to continue our collaboration with him and bring back the iconic ‘Phineas and Ferb’ in a big way.”

“It has been the greatest pleasure of my career to see how an entire generation of kids and parents have embraced the characters and the humor of ‘Phineas and Ferb,'” Povenmire said. “I’m eagerly looking forward to diving back into the show for them and for a whole new generation.”

#Phineas And Ferb #Phineas & Ferb #Dan Povenmire #Jeff Swampy Marsh #Disney Channel #Disney+#Disney Plus #Disney+ Originals #Disney Plus Originals #Disney+ Original Series #Disney Plus Original Series #Disney+ Original Animated Series #Disney Plus Original Animated Series

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allthingsencanto · 2 years

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It’s finally time to talk about Isabela, and how I feel towards her as a character. Please keep in mind that these are all my opinions, (don’t get scared I don’t hate her lol) and whatever opinion you have is valid! I’d love to hear your thoughts on her as a whole as well, so feel free to say in the comments! Without further adue, let’s talk about her!

So I definitely like Isabela. For starters, her character concept (just like all the other character concepts) is amazing. Isabela has the power to form flowers, and she is UTTERLY GORGEOUS. Like seriously, she’s beautiful, I LOVE her character design and dress, it’s all chefs kiss. While we don’t know the full story of when she got her gift, you can certainly tell that the title of beautiful flowers and her gorgeous form had a play in her role to be the perfect golden child. She is the oldest of her two sisters Luisa and Mirabel, and Abuela absolutely loves her. Alma sees her as a perfect, beautiful woman, and the whole town admires her and looks up to her. What I love about this is that while Isa doesn’t have to put much effort in to help the town like the other Madrigals do, her flowers represent how SHE needs to be, elegant, beautiful, perfect. Even though some may say it’s a lucky title, I can only imagine how overwhelming it must be to have EVERYONE love you, depend on you, and be obsessed with you. It reminds me of really famous celebrities, all that attention and praise can sometimes be too much, and as the movie shows, turns out it is. With her gift and good looks, Isabela is expected to be graceful, elegant, and most importantly, perfect. Alma admires her, but the expectations are surreal with Isabela, for not only does she always have to be perfect since that’s what’s expected of her, but she even was arranged to marry the handsomest man in town, and bring the next generation of Madrigals…..so yeah…it’s a lot, and it certainly doesn’t help that Isabela is also clearly falling into Alma’s footsteps, which btw, is another fact I love about her character. Isabela looks up to Alma, and always wants to please her, so she’ll be perfect no matter what, wether she doesn’t like it, or thinks there’s another alternative.

Of course though, since the movie is told through Mirabel’s eyes, the film approaches Isabela as nothing but a prissy stuck up mean princess. She has everything a girl could ever want, people fawn over her, everyone wants to BE her and looks up to her, she’s pretty, and she’s going to marry a handsome man. What more could she want? Because of this, Isabela and her younger sister Mirabel don’t have the best relationship. Mirabel sees her older sister as a perfect prissy girl who has no problems in the world, and Isabela sees Mirabel as someone who just doesn’t get it, someone who’s constantly in the way of her perfect facade. Since this post is about Isa herself, I’m only going to mainly be talking about her side of the relationship, but if you want to hear more about Mirabel’s side, I suggest you check out my other post! So…It’s no surprise to say that Isabela wasn’t the best sister. She was blatantly mean to Mirabel, and even though sometimes you could see where she was coming from, other times she would be unnecessarily mean, like when she rolled her eyes when Mirabel was warning everyone about the cracks, when she frowned when Mirabel walked Antonio up the steps, or when she gave Mirabel “advice”, about not trying so hard so she’s not in the way. It of course makes the audience really not like her, which I’m sure was the intention, since again, the film is told through Mirabel’s eyes. Now when it comes to why Isabela was so mean, there’s a lot you can say, since this film allows it’s audience to think for themselves, which is a good thing. You could say she was jealous because Mirabel has no gift, no expectations at all, you could say she was so angry whenever Mirabel kept thinking she had no issues when she really did, or more importantly, you could say that Isa saw Mirabel as someone who always got in her way and just didn’t understand her. That’s what the film leans towards, with Isabela saying that all Mirabel does is mess things up for her. I’m going to be honest, I don’t find that hard to believe. As said before, Mirabel and Isabela are practically polar opposites. One is the perfect golden child who’s graceful, and the other is the scapegoat, who’s imperfect and all over the place. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mirabel in the past messed up other events regarding Isa, wether it was intentional or not. However, I will say that I wish the film DID give us more examples of that, other than the dinner scene. I wish we saw more scenes of Mirabel and Isabela going back and fourth at each other, because even though I’m smart enough to know the relationship wasn’t one sided, usually whenever the two interacted in the film, it felt like it was mainly Isabela who started things, making her look like she was more in the wrong rather than the both of them, because as said before, Isabela would be mean for unnecessary measures, and sometimes Mirabel wouldn’t even be doing anything drastic that would warrant Isa’s reaction. Of course though, this film is about perspective, so before I really get into how I feel about how Isa acted towards Mirabel, let’s look at Isabela’s point of view.

Isabela is the character that you THINK has everything figured out, the character that’s perfect in every way. But of course, it just so turns out that being the perfect golden child everyone admires is NOT so easy and fun. The film eventually lets you know that Isabela does NOT like this perfect life she has, and doesn’t even want to marry the man who she was expected to. She was practically forced upon this role of being perfect, and even though she wanted more than that, she went ahead with this role anyway for years, not just because of Alma and her toxic expectations, but simply because she loves her family, and wants to do what’s best. Isa is definitely one of the many characters that had it really rough, and I feel for her, and sympathize with her. It doesn’t help of course that her younger sister thinks she has it SO good, I especially do love the part where Mirabel calls her selfish, and Isa’s response is that she’s been stuck being perfect her whole life. It’s something she would totally say, because she HAS been stuck with this role, she practically gave up her own life for the family, so it made sense why Mirabel pissed her off there. As said before, It’s such a good lesson to teach kids that even if someone may LOOK like they’re at the top of their game and happy, at the end of the day they’re HUMAN like you and me, and every human has their hardships, their pain, their demons. She also needed to learn to let her emotions out whenever she wanted, do what she was feeling in the moment since she had to keep in all in, which is another spectacular lesson. Her obvious lesson and biggest one however, was that…..NO ONE is perfect, and that’s why this role was so tough for Isabela. No human is perfect, we’re all flawed, and we’re all going to make mistakes no matter what. That’s what makes it all the more satisfying when Isabela has her wake up call, and realizes that she can do so much more than what she presented herself with. I absolutely LOVE the idea that she never knew she could grow things like carnivorous plants and cactuses, since she’s been stuck making pretty flowers all her life, stuck in her perfect facade.

Thanks to Mirabel, Isa was able to open up, and let herself go. She now knows that she doesn’t need to perfect, she can embrace herself, embrace who she is and embrace her feelings whenever they rise without being afraid of what it could do. She was holding SO much back, she wasn’t able to talk to anyone and had to put a mask on for years (like her sister, a parallel I love), but now she’s free, and I love the lessons in this film of embracing who you are, EXPLORING who you are and not being afraid if others don’t like it. Her breakthrough is very powerful and important, and even though I don’t condone her actions towards Mirabel, that doesn’t mean I’m not happy for her, or think she’s a bad character. I will say that I think the film could have been better when it came to her and her sisters confrontation, I talked about this before but I mainly wish Isabela owned up to her mistakes as well, because while Mirabel needed to learn her lesson of recognizing her sisters struggles, the same didn’t correspond with Isa. It felt more like the writers were approaching only Mirabel to learn something about her sister, when in actuality they BOTH needed to, cause again, the relationship isn’t one sided. I’ve seen a lot of people wish Isabela apologized to her sister, but for me I just wish she had acknowledged the mistreatment and learned HER lesson as well, that she needed to recognize her sisters struggles and not beat her down for it. Instead, we kinda just got Mirabel learning a lesson and opening her eyes towards her sister, instead of them BOTH putting the effort in to reconcile. I feel like the writers sympathized with Isabela, and were just really happy to show how much she had secretly been holding in, and celebrate her breakthrough, which isn’t a BAD thing, but again, had Isa learned her side of the relationship towards her sister, it would have been better than it already was. Jared Bush himself confirmed that the main reason behind Isa and Mirabel’s fallout was that they just didn’t know what the other was going through and we’re too focused on their own problems, so yeah, the relationship is definitely NOT one sided. Despite me saying what I said, I certainly think EVERYONE needs to keep in mind that this broken dynamic was the fault of BOTH Isabela AND Mirabel. Acknowledging Isabela’s flaws as well as her sisters flaws are things that should coexist, rather than people saying one of them was in the wrong and the other was a victim. But as I said, even though I think the writing should have had Isabela admit her faults or understand where HER sister was coming from as well, that doesn’t mean I hate her, or think she’s a horrible person, far from it. Isa shouldn’t have treated Mirabel the way she did, she is and kinda always will be hard to watch in the film for me even with an open perspective, but she was under so much pressure, going through so many things, and was under the influence of Alma, someone who was toxic herself. While that doesn’t excuse her actions, the main thing about Encanto is not really FORGIVING people, but UNDERSTANDING where they’re coming from, and how they can fix what’s broken and improve as people, as human beings, and THAT’S what’s most important, not mainly how a person acted, but how they work to be better, how they change.

I know I talked a LOT, but that’s what I wanted to get out for Isa. I love her character concept, I love her arc, I love her song, and I love how a character like her was represented in two amazing lessons, one of exploring who you are and embracing yourself, as well as that everyone…..EVERYONE has their own hardships, even the people you think are horrible, mean, or overall not in a bad spot as you are. Even if I have my personal gripes with her and think the writing near the end of her and her sisters reconcile could have been better, it’s clear that Isa isn’t a bad person, she just slipped down the wrong path due to the family matriarch, and influencing Abuela. I definitely want to see more of her, I want to see how she’s improved, how her and Mirabel are on better terms, how she uses her powers now, and more importantly, I DEFINITELY want to explore more of perspective, wether it be during the events of the movie, the past, or after, because she’s a very interesting character. I will definitely talk about Isa more in the future, but with that said, feel free to disagree with me, and if you want, let me know YOUR thoughts on Isabela! Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you soon! 🌵🌸🌺💕

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grigori77 · 4 months

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2023 in Movies, My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 3)

10. NIMONA – we almost didn’t get 2023’s most socially important animated feature. When Disney acquired Twentieth Century Fox and everything went tits up for its various affiliates, animation house Blue Sky Studios bit the dust just as this long-awaited adaptation of influential She-Ra & the Princesses of Power showrunner ND Stevenson’s beloved fantastical graphic novel from Spies In Disguise directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quaine was nearing completion, and it looked like it might never see the light of day … at least until Annapurna Pictures and Netflix swooped in to the rescue, snapping it up, funding its completion and getting it out on streaming to the delight of all of us who’d thought it was essentially LOST. The end result is just about THE VERY BEST movie I’ve ever seen about the struggles of being non-binary and not conforming to any set gender norms in modern society, viewed through the fantasy prism of a shapeshifting “teenager” who effortlessly steals their own film. Chloe Grace Moretz is perfectly cast as the voice of the titular misfit anarchist troublemaker supernatural being, who finds an opportunity for some fresh chaos by joining forces with Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), a newly-knighted commoner who becomes public enemy number one after being viciously framed for the murder of the queen of a futuristic medieval society (really!) built around chivalry and the righteous smiting of monsters. Ballister’s determined to prove his innocence, while Nimona just wants to create havoc, while they’re both being hunted by his former fellow knights, led by his ex-boyfriend Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang of The Try Guys), a direct descendent of the Kingdom’s legendary original monster slaying heroine Gloreth. It’s a gloriously original piece of work, the animation presented in a truly GORGEOUS brightly coloured 2-dimensional 3D graphic style that at once riffs on the ingenious visual inventiveness of the Spider-Verse movies while also creating something COMPLETELY NEW but simultaneously lovably reminiscent of the classic Blue Sky cartoony look, while the frequently chaotic action is just as infectiously anarchic as the lead character herself. It’s also fiendishly brilliant in its subversive message and twisty logic, making the viewer question what being a monster REALLY means, and if what we SEE someone as REALLY IS their true identity. Needless to say, Moretz runs away with the whole film, while the character of Nimona herself is a truly ENCHANTING and thoroughly inspiring creation who’s destined to become an iconic hero for non-binary and trans kids around the world, but Ahmed and Yang are clearly having a great time here too, as is Frances Conroy as the Director of the Kingdom’s knights, having a blast bringing icy menace to her deliciously duplicitous villainous turn. It’s an incredibly FUN movie, shot through with a rich and rewardingly infectious sense of humour, taking classic fantasy tropes and turning them on their head in new and wonderfully inventive ways, but it knows JUST when to get serious too, and there are some powerful moments when it grabs hold of your heart and DESTROYS YOU emotionally, especially in the incredibly evocative climax. Ultimately this ISN’T an overly faithful adaptation of Stevenson’s original graphic novel – he was in a darker place when he wrote and drew it, going through his own complicated struggle with his gender identity before finally making his personal transition in 2022 – but it certainly is rewardingly true to the book’s spirit and deep-down message of inclusion, positivity and being true to your core identity, which makes it one of the most important animated films to be made in a very long time. I’m so happy it’s received the TRULY MASSIVE amount of attention and LOVE it’s garnered since its release, and I thank Netflix and everybody else who made the effort to get this movie out after all when Disney seemed so reluctant to take a chance on it. This deserves to be seen, it NEEDS to be seen, and I urge you to check it out.

9. RENFIELD – my horror movie of 2023 sits very comfortably in the genre’s sub-category that I’ve always loved best, a jet black comedy of particularly rare quality and gleeful abandon that made it one of the most entertaining viewing experiences I had this past year. Yeah, like the best horror comedies it has enough genuine darkness that it CAN be genuinely scary when it wants to be, but given the sheer (literal) batshit craziness of its premise this is a BONKERS FILM, and so it wisely embraces its sheer lampoonery to full effect without reservation. Not that it’s overly surprising – director Chris McKay cut his teeth helming The Lego Batman Movie before branching out into live action with Amazon’s criminally underrated time travelling alien invasion blockbuster The Tomorrow War, both of which were excellent vehicles for him to master the gloriously anarchic style that he finally unleashes fully formed for this brilliant alternative sequel to the classic Universal Dracula movie with Bela Lugosi. That being said, the big box office draw here was always going to be Nicolas Cage, who pays loving tribute to Lugosi as the infamous Count, kicking into his typical “manic” setting to chew the scenery with ruthless abandon and, as a result, frequently steal the show right out from under Nicholas Hoult as his titular ghoul manservant, the long-suffering Robert Montague Renfield, who just wants the opportunity to finally find a real, simple life for himself and thinks he can pull it off in modern day New Orleans, only for his Master to himself become inspired by Renfield’s newfound ambition and set his sights on world domination with the help of the Lobos, a brutal local crime family. Thankfully Hoult DOES manage to hold his own in his scenes with Cage, as always proving ADEPTLY talented enough to deliver another winningly endearing performance while playing perhaps the single most pathetic specimen of his career to date … meanwhile the thoroughly adorable Awkwafina once again proves she’s well on the way to becoming the PREMIER kooky goofball female comedic lead in Hollywood as Rebecca Quincy, the one truly honest cop in one of the most corrupt police forces in all of America, who winds up falling for Renfield’s hangdog charm and puppy-dog eyes as he inadvertently becomes the key to her quest to bring down the Lobos after they murdered her legendary detective father. Shohreh Aghdashloo brings a much needed touch of class to proceedings as Bellafrancesca Lobo, the family’s seductively sly matriarch, while Space Force and Sonic the Hedgehog’s Ben Schwarz is a frequent non-PC laugh riot all on his own as her entitled constant disappointment of a son Teddy, and Ghosts’ Brandon Scott Jones is lovably flaky as the leader of Renfield’s endearingly pathetic support group for people trapped in toxic co-dependent relationships. This genuinely is a DEEPLY FUNNY FILM, perfectly geared up for a maximum hit count with the one-liners, in-jokes and situations, but then there’s no surprise here since writer Ryan Ridley (adapting a pitch from The Walking Dead’s original creator Robert Kirkman) is a seasoned veteran of TV comedy, particularly well known as an alumnus of the similarly edgy and madcap Rick & Morty, and this carries a lot of the same twisted, anarchic charm as that rightly beloved series, just in a much more big budget live action form. It’s also SPECTACULARLY bloodthirsty when it wants to be, the welcome reliance on what are clearly LARGELY physical effects meaning that this movie is another gore-hound’s wet dream, even if the film does mostly play the horror elements for laughs throughout, and it’s an impressively inventive and chaotic beast in THAT regard too, delivering some of the most gloriously OTT splatter-fuelled action sequences I’ve seen in a good while whenever Renfield eats a bug and gets an ultraviolent power boost. Altogether this is definitely some of the most fun I had at the cinema this past year, and I’ll admit I wouldn’t mind a bit more of this if they DID fancy trying the sequel road after all …

8. LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND – Mr Robot was one of THE all-time great TV revelations of the 2010s, creator/showrunner Sam Esmail becoming a genuinely challenging counter-culture voice responsible for hard-hitting, thought-provoking material which really shook up the status quo. Shocking, then, that his only real notable foray onto the BIG screen was with the offbeat but ultimately overlooked romantic comedy fantasy Comet, but that balance has FINALLY been redressed almost a decade later with this powerhouse leftfield tour-de-force dystopian apocalyptic thriller from Netflix. Adapting the already hard-hitting, critically acclaimed novel by Rumaan Alam, Esmail wastes no time in weaving a spell of subtly inexplicable unease as we follow a family of well-to-do New Yorkers who take the opportunity to get out of the city for a break on the coast after renting someone else’s house for a long weekend, only for the owners to suddenly return in the night with tales of a blackout and more bafflingly worrying events unfolding in the outside world, hoping they can stay too until they know more. Feelings of distrust and paranoia immediately settle in and refuse to leave even as the two families warily get to know one another, but then things are getting WEIRD – the internet and TV are DOWN, drones are dropping indecipherable foreign propaganda from the skies and there are sudden bursts of head-splitting noise coming from SOMEWHERE … all too slowly it becomes clear that something truly terrible is happening, and that there’s more than just rumoured cyber-attacks at work here. This really is CHILD’S PLAY for Esmail, who’s clearly having a wild old time crafting a twisting, unnervingly unsettling suspense thriller which sticks the knife in and keeps on twisting as things get more worryingly desperate, all while casting a deeply critical eye on the state of modern society, capitalism, pop culture and pervading racial and social divides. Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke are both typically EXCELLENT as Amanda and Clay Sandford, the white liberal upper class couple who find their deep-seated preconceptions forming their perceptions as they’re forced to deal with the as always truly MAGNIFICENT Mahershala Ali’s cultured stockbroker G.H. Scott and his brash, opinionated daughter Ruth (Industry and Bodies Bodies Bodies’ Myha’la), while there’s a brief but unsurprisingly POTENT turn from Kevin Bacon as Danny, the exact kind of paranoid, doomsday prepping redneck who’s probably gonna survive this coming apocalypse JUST FINE. There’s SO MUCH to unpack and explore in this film, it’s definitely one of those film’s that rewards repeat viewing with neat little twists, fascinatingly subtle hints and clues which lead to insidiously profound payoffs and more sneaky little easter eggs than you could EVER spot on a single viewing, leading to a truly HORRIFYING existential climax which will lead to many a sleepless night given the way this world seems to be heading. Speculative science fiction or worryingly potent prophecy? Only time will tell, I guess …

7. SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE – the animated feature that completely CHANGED THE GAME at the end of the last DECADE getting a sequel was pretty much a no-brainer, but it didn’t make the wait any easier, and after COVID put a dent in so many of the big releases coming forward this was definitely one of the most painful delays for me. Finally getting to see it was, therefore, ONE HELL of a cathartic release of tension, so much that even later discovering that not everything was exactly GOOD in the production studios at the time (namely the animators being crunched LIKE CRAZY by the ever-shifting nature of the vision they were being asked to realise, leading to a toxic working environment for many, which is NEVER cool) still didn’t dent my truly AWED appreciation for the finished film. Seriously, this is THE BEST animated feature we saw this past year, and ALREADY a strong candidate for best animated feature of THIS DECADE (although that’s likely to change if the incoming sequel turns out to be as good, if not BETTER, which it probability WILL). Honestly, I could end the review right here just with that recommendation, it’s GENUINELY THAT GOOD, people. But I still got a job to do here, so … once again, Miles Morales (Dope’s Shameik Moore), the new Spider-Man in his world, is at the centre of a whirlwind of narrative chaos as a new arch-nemesis he never knew he had emerges to hold him to account for what he did when he destroyed the Kingpin’s interdimensionally destructive supercollider in the first film – the Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a former scientist at Alchemax who got turned into a walking mass of unstable wormholes when he got hit with the full brunt of all that quantum energy. As he embarks on his quest to take his misguided revenge on Miles, his interdimensional spree of carnage leads our Spider-Man to become connected with a Multiverse-spanning cadre of Spider-People, led by the spectacularly stern Spider-Man of Earth 2099, Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), who police the various Earths in order to combat and remove “anomalies” that arise to threaten them … and

the Spot is a BIG ONE of those. Oh, and Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), the Spider-Woman Miles most definitely fell for in the first film, has started working with them too after her own father, police Captain George Stacy (Shea Wigham), who’s had it in for their Spider-Woman after she was mistakenly framed for the death of their Earth’s Peter Parker, discovered her secret identity and made her run from her own dimension as a result …yeah, it sounds pretty complicated, but this whole twisted labyrinth is, nonetheless, unveiled in the exact same super-slick, viewer-friendly way the first film pulled off its own exposition, which just makes more room for all the FUN as we get to follow our old favourites and a whole host of fascinating NEW incarnations of our favourite arachnid-themed superhero on their various insane adventures. This is JUST AS SPECTACULAR in terms of action, character work, pure invention and sheer, unrivalled SPECTACLE as its predecessor, in many places upping the wow factor SIGNIFICANTLY (particularly during a particularly colourful visit to the distinctly Indian-flavoured alternative version of New York called Mumbattan, which is the stomping ground of one of the film’s most memorable new Spider-folk, the irrepressibly chipper Pavitr Prabhakar, voiced by Deadpool’s thoroughly brilliant Karan Soni). Indeed, the most fun we have throughout this movie is definitely getting to hang out not only with our old friends but all these newcomers too, with Pavitr being joined by the fascinating likes of the very coolest Spider-Woman after Gwen, Jess Drew (Awkward Black Girl’s Issa Rae), digital avatar Margo Kess/Spider-Byte (The Hunger Games’ Amandla Stenberg), overly-angsty living Todd McFarlane comic panel Ben Reily/Scarlet Spider (the incomparable Andy Samberg) and even Mayday Parker, the impossibly adorable new baby daughter of Jake Johnson’s welcome returning fan-favourite OG Peter Parker (and, of course, Miles’ original mentor from the first movie), who’s ALREADY got her spider-powers, while Miguel is a FANTASTIC character, brooding like a champ and sometimes proving to be as much of an EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE villain in the story as the Spot, especially once his beef

with Miles is revealed … but at the end of the day, ALL of these new arrivals thoroughly PALE in comparison to one of this film’s BEST secret weapons, Hobie Brown/Spider Punk (Daniel Kaluuya getting to use his normal accent for once), a misfit non-conformist anarchist JOY with one hell of a problem with authority (Miguel’s IN PARTICULAR) who effortlessly steals our hearts just as much as EVERY SINGLE SCENE he’s in. That being said, it really is SO GREAT having our old crew back – Miles and Gwen are SO SWEET, their chemistry is just OFF THE BLOODY CHARTS without them even trying, and I adore every single scene of them together, never mind their own individual storylines (it’s PARTICULARLY great getting to see Gwen herself get a SIGNIFICANTLY enlarged narrative presence this time round, becoming JUST as important in this story as Miles himself), while any time we get to spend with Johnson’s Peter is pure gold, and we get to spend even more time with Miles’ wonderful, loving, hard-working parents Jeff and Rio Morales (Brian Tyree Henry and Lauren Velez), which is ALWAYS a plus. Needless to say, this is a whole LOAD of fun, shot through with the same classic winning humour, wild invention, visionary experimentation, thematic resonance and pure geeky in-joke easter egg-packing FAN SERVICE that made the first film such a winner, but it also comes through BIG TIME with more of those wicked FEELS, this time ramping things up FAR MORE with the serious emotional HEFT as we’re presented with some truly DEVASTATING character arcs whose after effects are gonna be felt for A VERY LONG TIME after. The fact that this is just the first half of a two-part SAGA, with Beyond the Spider-Verse currently in the works, means that we can look forward to PLENTY MORE, although here’s hoping that this time they give their animators a little more BREATHING ROOM to get it done right WITHOUT having to break their backs in the process, yeah? Then again, with the writers’ AND actors’ strike barely over, the likelihood of THAT is pretty strong …

6. OPPENHEIMER – really, is there ANY SURPRISE over this placing so high? You know what a MASSIVE Christopher Nolan fan I am, and him making a proper EPIC historical biopic examining the career and achievements of the father of nuclear power was GUARANTEED to not only grab my attention but also thoroughly please the serious high-brow cinema appreciator buried inside me over all that action junkie, superhero fanboy and sci-fi-nut stuff … but yeah, this was ALWAYS gonna be a fucking amazing film, wasn’t it? Nolan’s most regular acting collaborator (outside of Michael Caine, anyway), Cillian Murphy, stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who spearheaded the Manhattan Project which led to the creation of the very first viable nuclear weapons which were then used by the American military to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and end the Second World War. On the surface he seems like a driven, visionary man with a real fascination for the science he’s pioneering, but also a cool pragmatism which makes him the ideal man to usher in this astounding technological achievement, but as the film unfolds in Nolan’s typical non-linear narrative fashion we discover a far more complex man than we first supposed, Murphy unveiling Oppenheimer’s deep-seeded fears about the frighteningly real dangers his Project could give birth to. After all, he may have been the father of the Modern World, but this particular creation also gave rise to a century of technological horrors and a whole new, long lasting Cold War. Anyway, this is UNDENIABLY the greatest performance of Murphy’s career, if he doesn’t at least get an Oscar nod for this there’s no justice in the world, while, in typical Nolan fashion, the rest of the rich ensemble cast is a genuine embarrassment of riches, from Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s long-suffering wife Kitty and Florence Pugh as his ill-fated Communist mistress Jean Tatlock to Matt Damon as his nominal “boss”, Gen. Leslie Groves, Kenneth Brannagh as his mentor and idol Niels Bohr, the mighty Tom Conti as the even MORE awesome Albert Einstein and even Robert Downey Jr. in a particularly KEY role as Oppenheimer’s one-time colleague and later rival, Atomic Energy commissioner Lewis Strauss, who dominates the parallel narrative throughline presented over the course of the film as his own efforts to discredit and destroy the great man ultimately end up coming back to bite his own political ambitions. To a man, they’re all as MAGNIFICENT as the rest of the film, which is a fascinating journey into the dark heart of one of the greatest but also most historically and socially destructive scientific achievements in the history of the world, the man who ushered it in, and the hell he then went through afterwards when he then tried to make sure we didn’t make it SO MUCH WORSE once we had the power to destroy ourselves. It’s a film that raises extremely tough questions, and what answers we ARE able to come to are every bit as terrifying as any of the consequences that are either seen or merely suggested here. Nolan is, as always, A MASTER in the director’s chair as much as in the screenwriter’s corner, bringing his usual visionary flair and artistic brilliance to craft yet more of his trademark IMAX-rocking BEAUTY and opulence, while his sneaky, snaky narrative shenanigans once again frame things in ingenious, challenging and sometimes emotionally DEVASTATING ways before we’re brought to the bittersweet denouement. Tenet composer Ludwig Goransson’s expansive, evocative score is, ultimately, just the icing on the cake, making an already amazing film even more noteworthy. If this ain’t the toast of the Awards Season they really didn’t pay attention …

5. THE CREATOR – if ever there could be a film that would decry the state of the modern blockbuster blueprint, it’s this one. Seriously, that fact that something THIS fresh and original could flop in a market so saturated with cookie-cutter franchises and exhausted expanded-universe IPs just says it all, doesn’t it? Writer-director Gareth Edwards (along with screenwriter Chris Weitz, who previously worked with him on Rogue One) has had a look at our encroaching terror at the pervading rise of AI, taken a step back and looked at what COULD potentially happen if we actually end up OVERREACTING and blaming it for something which is actually entirely our fault … cue a troubling delve into a dystopian future where, after the accidental nuking of Los Angeles due to defence-Ai programming human error, the West has uniformly turned again artificial intelligence and set about waging an uncompromising war against it and the sentient androids it’s spawned. These survivors have fled to the more sympathetic nations of New Asia, but the oppressive machinations of the Western coalition and their obsessive hunt for the AI’s creator, Nimata, have given birth to a terrifying weapon, the deadly orbital weapons platform NOMAD. John David Washington is Joshua Taylor, a US Army sergeant who lost an arm and a leg in the LA blast, and then what innocence he had left in a subsequent ill-fated infiltration mission in New Asia, who’s drawn back into the fight by his former commanders when evidence emerges that his supposedly dead wife, Maya (an enjoyably complex turn from Gemma Chan), the daughter of Nimata he met and fell in love with on that mission, is still alive and in possession of a devastating weapon which they need to get hold of before it can be used to destroy the West. Going in with a special forces team, Joshua discovers that this so-called weapon is actually Alphie, an android child (newcomer Madeleine Yuna) with the power to control electronic devices, and he finds that the truth is nothing like what was led to believe … Edwards and Weitz have created a spellbinding science-fiction MASTERPIECE here, a breathlessly thrilling and expansively EPIC science fiction war saga which takes some challenging and thought-provoking ideas and heavy themes and takes a very interesting direction in their interpretation while posing profound questions about the nature of humanity, morality and love, all while delivering a truly intoxicating masterclass in peerless world-building, brought to astonishing living, breathing reality through some of the most seamlessly engineered visual effects I have EVER seen in a feature film (then again, Edwards DID start out as a visual effects artist, so he knows the game INSIDE AND OUT). Washington is an unusually complex, multi-layered hero as Joshua, fallible and driven by selfish desires but ultimately finding something much bigger than himself to believe in, while Yuna is a revelation, a sweet and inspiring little light in the darkness, while mighty support from the likes of Alison Janney, Ken Watanabe, Marc Manchaca (Ozark, The Outsider, No One Gets Out Alive) and Ralph Ineson rounds things out nicely. Powerful, inventive, affecting and endlessly thought-provoking, this deserves to be remembered not only as one of the most rewardingly original and genuinely brilliant movies of 2023, but of the entire decade, and I think it’s a genuine crime it wasn’t a massive hit like it deserved to be. Audiences really did SLEEP on this one …

4. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING, PART ONE – really, there should be NO SURPRISE that this topped off my list for the summer. I may have grown up with James Bond, and I LOVE the Jason Bourne movies too, but the Tom Cruise-starring cinematic adaptation of the classic TV spy show has been MY ABSOLUTELY FAVOURITE espionage-based film franchise since JJ Abrams established the tried-and-tested formula for the series with 2006’s seminal classic third entry. That being said, the franchise didn’t find its strongest voice until Cruise brought Jack Reacher writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, The Way of the Gun) on board for the dynamite fifth instalment, Rogue Nation, which was so fucking brilliant and well received by both critics AND audiences that Paramount saw fit to retain his services on the EVEN BETTER follow-up, Fallout, which came DAMN CLOSE to equalling the heights of Sam Mendes’ Bond masterpiece Skyfall … so of course it was a NO-BRAINER for him to return once again for this two-part intended send-off for Cruise’s seemingly immortal superspy, Ethan Hunt, as he not only faces his deadliest foes to date, but also a very dark ghost from his own past. As with its predecessor, this is another spy flick where knowing as little as possible going in works best for your enjoyment, suffice to say that this time Ethan and his loyal friends, master hacker Luther Stickel (the legendary Ving Rhames), tech wizard Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and former MI6 spook Ilsa Faust (Dune’s Rebecca Ferguson), really have their work cut out for them when they’re forced to go rogue yet again in order to track down and deactivate a supermassive AI program known as the Entity which has become fully self-aware, broken free of its constraints and is now wreaking havoc throughout the internet and beyond.

Unfortunately this seemingly unstoppable digital force has enlisted the aid of a particularly dangerous “avatar” to represent its concerns in the real world, a mysterious terrorist known as Gabriel (Ozark’s Esai Morales) who seems to be following a dark agenda of his own. The ensuing race against time takes in a grand tour of impressively picturesque locales, a collection of winningly well-written characters and a series of knuckle-whitening, visually arresting action sequences that have long since proven to be McQuarrie’s bread-and-butter just as much as his ingeniously twisty labyrinthine plots and sparky, sharp-witted quickfire dialogue, again showing that he really is THE VERY BEST filmmaker that Paramount could EVER have found for this franchise. Needless to say, Cruise is as spectacular as ever in what really has become the very best role he’s EVER HAD, by this point basically just INHABITING Ethan’s easy charm, admirably solid, unswerving moral principles and truly INCREDIBLE physical prowess, delivering equally well in the truly insane stunt-work which WE KNOW FULL WELL IS ALL HIM as he does in the acting stakes; meanwhile Rhames, Pegg and Ferguson once again shine bright in their now comfortably well-established roles while still managing to bring fresh depths and interesting new arcs to their well-worn characters, we get a lot more of The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby’s intriguing notorious second-generation arms dealer Alanna Mitsopoulis/the White Widow, and it’s an IMMENSE pleasure to finally welcome back the first film’s prickly yet verbose antagonist Eugene Kitteridge (Henry Czerny), Ethan and Luther’s former boss in the IMF, in a far much expansive role this time round. Meanwhile the franchise newcomers all impress as well, Morales easily proving to be the series’ VERY BEST VILLAIN to date as he menaces, seduces and murders his way through the story, brutally tearing our heroes’ lives apart as he pursues his mysterious master’s nefarious ends, while we get a brand new series heroine in the form of Grace (the MCU’s own Peggy Carter, Hayley Atwell), a sly and duplicitous professional thief who essentially stumbles into the thick of the action before becoming Ethan’s EXTREMELY unwilling accomplice; meanwhile there’s strong support from Shea Wigham and Greg Tarzan Davis (who previously worked with Cruise on Top Gun: Maverick) as Briggs and Degas, a pair of US Intelligence agents sent to chase down the rogue IMF crew, and Cary Elwes as Denlinger, a particularly duplicitous US Director of National Intelligence. And then there’s Paris … ah Paris, my sweet, psychotic demon child. Guardians of the Galaxy’s Pom Klementieff actually gets to be FRENCH again as Gabriel’s unpredictably lethal pet killer, and she’s an absolute JOY throughout, so delightfully unhinged that she makes every second of her screentime an undeniable pleasure, and as a result she’s BY FAR my favourite character in this. Altogether, this is about as perfect as spy cinema gets, McQuarrie and his cast and crew working tirelessly to deliver not only the very best film in the series to date, but also the best film I saw all summer, very nearly my action cinema highlight of the whole year, and one of the VERY BEST spy movies I have EVER SEEN. Given the shake-up from the Strikes it’s not clear if we’re REALLY gonna get to see Dead Reckoning Part Two in May 2025 like it’s been slated since getting pushed back from its summer ’24 release,but whenever it DOES finally arrive, I KNOW it’ll be worth the wait … it just has to be bloody INCREDIBLE to be better than THIS ONE …

3. JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4 – and so, it has come to this … honestly, who’d have thunk it, back in 2014 when the first movie came out and (rightly) became a surprise sleeper hit that went a long way to revitalising Keanu Reeves’ career for a SECOND TIME as he found THE GREATEST ROLE HE’S EVER HAD, that almost a decade later it would’ve blown up into something THIS BIG?!!! I mean sure, back then it definitely was The Little Movie That Could, but still … well, after two increasingly BIG sequels which each maintained a surprisingly impressive level of quality throughout, the fourth and final John Wick chapter is finally here, and GODS is it good. I mean it’s FUCKING BRILLIANT. It just might be THE BEST ONE YET. Certainly it’s proving to be the most well received, landing BY FAR the best rating on Rotten Tomatoes and it genuinely seems like almost nobody has ANYTHING bad to say about this movie, even the CRITICS largely seem to LIKE this one. And it deserves every lick of love it’s been getting, this is definitely both the pinnacle of the series AND a perfect swansong for the greatest assassin in cinema history. I don’t wanna give too much away about the plot, even those who HAVE seen what’s come before shouldn’t be spoiled, even if these movies have never exactly been SHAKESPEARE in their construction they do still frequently leave you guessing in the best ways as to how they’ll turn out, and this one is definitely no exception. I’ll just say that, after all the killing John’s done to get to this point, his one-man-war with the international criminal network’s High Table has finally reached its zenith as Winston (the great Ian McShane), the Manager of the newly-demolished Manhattan Continental Hotel, gives him the means to finally find a way to get out and find peace while he’s still alive – namely by challenging the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), a high-ranking Table member who’s taken it upon himself to rid the criminal underworld of the “cancer” that John and his constant disrespect have wrought, to single combat in a ritualistic duel in order to take his place at The Table should he win. The

subsequent battle that ensues as John sets about facilitating this duel and the fallout that follows as he fights his way to that final, fateful meeting fuels the film in HIGH STYLE, so that even though this movie’s almost THREE HOURS LONG it never feels overlong or outstays its welcome. Once again the cast are all ON FIRE, Reeves once again proving that he is just about THE BEST LOOKING and most interesting action star working in Hollywood today when he’s mowing down endless bad guys with a stoic expression and the odd deadpan response, the role once again VERY MUCH playing to his strengths, while McShane and Laurence Fishburne (returning once again as the dethroned Bowery King) are both on fine form throughout, and it’s both a pleasure and privilege but also a genuine heartbreaking SHAME to watch the late Lance Reddick deliver one of his very last performances as Charon, the noble and quietly charismatic Concierge of the Manhattan Continental (at least he also shot one more turn as the character for the upcoming Ana de Armas-starring spinoff feature Ballerina, so it’s not QUITE the end); meanwhile the newcomers all serve admirably as well, with Skarsgard particularly impressing as one of the franchise’s best villains to date, slimy, entitled and exquisitely arrogant, the kind of Big Bad you just LOVE to hate, Wynnona Earp’s Shamier Anderson is a delightful revelation as Mr Nobody, a precocious up-and-coming hitman talent who certainly has a whole lot of potential for a possible future spinoff franchise of his own within this larger universe, Donnie Yen excels as usual as Cain, a former friend of John’s that the Marquis brings out of forced retirement in order to take the unkillable Baba Yaga out (clearly the filmmakers saw his blind badass take in Rogue One and they were like yeah, let’s have a whole lot more of THAT), Hiroyuki Sanada once more delivers effortless class and cool gravitas as Koji, the honourable and principled Manager of the Osaka Continental, and Scott Adkins is viciously impressive but also thoroughly surprising in an almost unrecognisable prosthetic getup as Killa Harkan, the brutish Head of the High Table in Berlin. In the end, though, we’re once again here primarily to MARVEL at all the action exploits on display while wallowing in some of the richest and most well-crafted world-building there’s EVER BEEN on the big screen – this is a thoroughly fascinating universe, realised with

exquisite precision with so many cool little winks and nods and in-jokes to make the geeks among us grin and chuckle with sheer joy over the immense bounty on display, while veteran stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski once again wrangles some of the VERY BEST cinematic action EVER COMMITTED TO FILM in a series of astonishing and punishing set-pieces bravely executed with nary a visual effect in sight. There are almost TOO MANY cool action beats in this movie to count, although the final BIG sequence, in which John fights his way up the spectacular but infamously punishing Stairs of Montmartre in Paris against an endless onslaught of thugs all determined to not let him reach the top, which includes one of the BIGGEST belly laughs I have EVER HAD at the cinema in my life, as much just over the joke’s sheer, ingenious AUDACITY, has to be the film’s undeniable highlight (closely followed by a genuinely INSANE run/gun/drive chase/shootout/fight sequence through the sheer chaos of the traffic around the Arc de Triomphe – every single one of these sequences is thrilling, they’re adrenaline fuelled and each crafted with such precision but also brilliantly varied inventiveness that it NEVER leads to vicarious battle fatigue. Best of all, though, as with the previous film’s there’s a surprising amount of soul and heart and heft to the film too, which ultimately leads to a climax which is both immensely satisfying but also pretty devastating in its emotional power. Altogether then, this was EASILY my action movie of the year, a fitting climax to an franchise which has come to SET THE BENCHMARK for this entire genre, and, honestly, just a damn fine movie in its own right.

2. NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU – the scariest movie I saw in 2023 is a very strange beast indeed, a genuinely original and very leftfield piece of work despite tackling one of the most classic movie plot tropes out there – the alien invasion of a small American town. What makes this such a noteworthy piece of work is that this film plays almost ENTIRELY without dialogue … SERIOUSLY, throughout the entire film’s run there’s only a SINGLE line of actual spoken dialogue delivered by its lead, the rest of the film relies entirely on sound effects and Joseph Trapanese’s atmospheric score alongside visual storytelling cues to gets its narrative across. It’s an incredibly brave prospect and one which I’ll admit I wasn’t even EXPECTING when I first sat down to watch Hulu’s most blindingly successful offering of the past year, it kind of snuck up on me realising that nobody was actually SAYING anything, but I still knew EXACTLY what was happening. This is because there’s ONE HELL of a writer-director at the helm of this project – I’ve been a big fan of Brian Duffield for a while now, having really loved his screenplay work in The Babysitter, Underwater and Love & Monsters, so when he dropped his actual FEATURE DIRECTING DEBUT in the middle of the Pandemic with 2020’s ingenious jet black teen comedy horror Spontaneous I was already onboard and in the aftermath simply COULD NOT WAIT to see what he’d do once he got his hands on a budget decent enough to actually deliver the kind of films he’d already been WRITING. But even so, this one STILL left me shocked by just HOW FUCKING AMAZING it actually is, seriously, this is almost certainly THE MOST IMPRESSIVE movie I’ve seen in the past year, and DEFINITELY its most important from a filmmaking standpoint. The story itself revolves almost EXCLUSIVELY around a slightly odd young woman named Brynn (Booksmart and Dopesick’s Kaitlyn Dever) living a seemingly idyllic but ultimately lonely life in her isolated home on the outskirts of a small town which seems to have universally shunned her for some initially unknown past crime … which means that she knows full well that there will, indeed, be NO ONE coming to her rescue when, one night, an alien walks into her home and starts tearing the place up using devastating telekinetic powers. She

manages to escape after accidentally killing the creature, but this simply makes things worse as, when morning comes, she discovers that the whole town is in the middle of a subtle but TERRIFYING alien invasion and that they seem to have marked her as a particular threat. From this beautifully simple starting point, Duffield has crafted a simply PERFECT scary movie, exquisitely paced and relentlessly driven as we hit the ground running the moment night falls after that initial time taken to establish Brynn’s place in the story, and he never lets off the brakes again until we reach the end. This is a genuinely TERRIFYING piece of sci-fi horror, with the varied creatures in particular presented in impressively near flawless standards of CGI which really should be used as a major benchmark moving forward with the artform, while the frequent and substantial knuckle-whitening set-pieces are executed with a precision that verges on the simply RUTHLESS throughout. It all plays out with a surprising denouement which feels cathartically PERFECT for everything that came before once you think about it a little, and the whole endeavour is aided ENORMOUSLY by the MASSIVE contribution of the film’s star herself – this is essentially a one woman show, and Dever easily proves the equal of the task, delivering an immensely potent performance that makes the striking lack of dialogue an ultimate significant VIRTUE since she’s able to convey SO MUCH with just a look, no matter the scene, so you find yourself latching onto her in the first ten minutes, meaning that when it goes from bad to worse to truly NIGHTMARISH you’re thoroughly invested in her desperate fight for survival. This really is a star-making role, and I don’t doubt she’s due for a MAJOR raise in her profile moving forward … altogether this is a genuine MASTERPIECE, easily one of the undeniable HIGHLIGHTS of the past cinematic year and a great sign of things to come, one would hope, should the rest of Hollywood take notice. Only time will tell … in the meantime take my advice, check it out and experience something TRULY SPECIAL …

1. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES – so what, then, could POSSIBLY have beaten such astounding fare to the top spot this time round? If you’d asked me that at the year’s start I DEFINITELY wouldn’t have thought it could be THIS … I mean SURE, I love D&D as much as the next geek, but even so this felt like SUCH a shameless cinematic cash-grab from Wizards of the Coast and Disney (producing through Paramount) that I felt there was NO WAY it could REALLY be an actual GOOD FILM. At best I was expecting to be mildly entertained by a serviceable guilty pleasure, something that’s good for a Saturday night-in with a pizza and a six pack, not a genuine MASTERPIECE of cinematic adaptation. And yet, it turns out that’s EXACTLY what we got – this film has ONE HUNDRED PERCENT clearly been made with the utmost love and respect for the source material because the only possible interpretation for the way they wrote this was by taking Player’s and Dungeon Master’s handbooks, a Monster Manual, some character sheets and a few dice bags and just turning the mini-campaign that ensued into a two-hour screenplay. It’s clear that they are heavily steeped in respect and knowledge of the game itself, or were at least CONSTANTLY advised by experts who are, because this movie is AT EVERY STEP a pretty much PERFECT representation of the Forgotten Realms setting, the bestiary and even the game mechanics themselves IN ACTION, and it EVEN colours the way that the plot is laid out, how the characters interact and how some of the action sequences go. (Seriously – a perfectly executed knockout on a knife-wielding hostage taker with a hurled potato? That’s the Barbarian’s player landing a Natural 20 Critical Hit on their Attack Roll. It love it.) Sure, the results are likely to INFURIATE some people who think a little too highly about how FORMALLY WRITTEN their cinema should be, but for most folk this actually makes for a refreshingly honest and pretty unique piece of cinematic storytelling that actually works DAMN NEAR PERFECTLY from start to finish. It also helps that the writer-director duo in

charge here are a pair of stalwart comedy movie veterans, namely Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daly of Horrible Bosses, Vacation and Spider-Man: Homecoming fame, whose extremely enjoyable previous directorial collab Game Night actually likely provided a useful throughline for them to get into tackling this one. The main cast of dysfunctional heroes we follow through the story are even put together like a typical motley band of player characters – Chris Pine once again proves that he’s at his best when he’s doing broad comedy, thoroughly delightful as self-centred, opportunistic roguish Bard Edgin Darvis who, along with his platonic partner, tough-but-fair and sweetly naïve Barbarian warrior Holga Kilgore (played to absolute PERFECTION by Michelle Rodriguez in what’s UNDOUBTEDLY the best role she’s ever had, and definitely my FAVOURITE character here), enlists the help of bumbling, neuroses-riddled half-elf Sorcerer Simon Aumar (Pokémon Detective Pikachu’s Justice Smith, twitchy, unsure of himself and UTTERLY adorable) and shape-shifting Tiefling Druid Doric (It’s Sophia Lillis, forthright, dependable and immediately done with all of Edgin’s shit) to help them knock over the accumulated fortune of their one-time colleague, Rogue-turned-nobleman Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant once again expertly bringing home the scheming sleaze persona he’s perfected in more recent years now he’s finally said goodbye to his earlier days as an upper class heartthrob) and foil the dastardly machinations of the monstrous undead Red Wizard Sofina (a genuinely chilling and unsettling turn from Shadow & Bone’s Daisy Head); meanwhile there’s a top-notch supporting cast of “DM-controlled NPCs” that help the story flow and breathe as effortlessly as the main stars, from Bridgerton’s Rege-Jean Page as deliciously dry Paladin Xenk Yendar, the obviously-overpowered PC from another campaign that the DM brings in to help the party out when things go COMPLETELY WRONG for them, and Chloe Coleman (Gunpowder Milkshake) as Edgin’s estranged young daughter Kira, to Bradley Cooper in a truly INSPIRED and genuinely hilarious cameo as Holga’s decidedly diminutive ex-husband Marlamin. Every single one of these is a well-rounded, living-and-breathing vital person in their own right, and the writers have crafted them and their misadventures with proper precision throughout, while the world has been realised with genuine skill and clear loving attention to detail, as well as a welcome reliance on real sets and locations and good old fashioned physical make-up and animatronics over pure digital effects wherever possible. There are some pretty spectacular action sequences on offer here (the Underdark sequence with a decidedly overweight dragon is a particular highlight, although my personal favourite has to be the scene in which Doric has to pull off an unexpected escape by Wildshaping between different animal forms, all unfolding in a spectacular unbroken “single” take), but in the end this film is, first and foremost, a COMEDY, and while there’s plenty of heart and pathos on offer, as well as more than a little genuine DARKNESS here and there, ultimately almost everything is VERY MUCH played for laughs, and the end result is definitely the funniest film I encountered this past year. It’s also just about the most effortlessly ENDEARING film I’ve come across in a very long time, and I have to admit I am SO GLAD that it managed to defy my low expectations SO MUCH, I feel VERY HAPPILY HUMBLED that I was proved SO WRONG this time round. I’m genuinely hopeful that we get LOADS MORE of this going forward, I’d love a whole campaign’s worth of movies to grow out of this humble one-shot. Best get those D20s rolling again, guys!

#2023 in movies #nimona #renfield #leave the world behind #spider man across the spider verse #oppenheimer #the creator #mission impossible dead reckoning part one #john wick chapter 4 #no one will save you #dungeons and dragons honour among thieves

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