I’m always on the look-out for good film blogs, so you can imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon harlequinade’s Cinematic Corner, a witty and entertaining website with an aesthetic that’s right up my alley. She’s on a temporary hiatus at the moment but I’m sure she’ll be back soon and I’ll be able to follow the blog in real time rather than just reading past posts. Her best work is in her series ‘Rambling Fridays’, wherein she… rambles on Fridays. I loved this idea so much that, being a filmbro with no morals, I decided to wholeheartedly steal this idea and its format. At least I had the decency to not steal the title, and set my series on Mondays rather than Fridays.
I’m just a bad person, really.
To be fair, I wouldn’t really call myself a filmbro, at least going by the definition in the Urban Dictionary. Sure, I do love Jurassic Park and The Dark Knight and I have been known to award more than one Quentin Tarantino film five stars, but I have never once said that Logan should have won Best Picture, and I’m not obsessed with the MCU.
Between remote learning and generally being unproductive, the only film I’ve watched this week was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King yesterday. It was absolutely a five-star banger.
My viewing of RotK concludes my three-week first-time watchthrough of the LOTR trilogy, and I have to say it deserves it’s place among the pantheon of great movie trilogies.
Well, Return of the King was the only feature film I watched this week. I did also have time for a classic 12-minute spoof from 1978: Hardware Wars. It was one of the first if not the first spoof of Star Wars and it’s genuinely funny, as well as clearly made with love for that original film. You can watch the short on YouTube here.
Speaking of YouTube, my current quest is to find Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 South Korean monster flick The Host on there. I have been told several times (not least by Karsten Runquist in his Movies to Watch While Self-Isolating video) that it is available for free on YouTube. I can attest to that, but the two uploads of it that I’ve found so far have both been distinctly lacking in English subtitles. One was in Korean with Hindi subtitles, and the other was Hindi-dubbed with Korean subtitles. I could just rent the film on the same website for $4.99, but I’m committed to the quest now.
To finish off the ‘I recommend YouTube videos to you’ portion of this post, The Oscar Expert posted his super-early predictions for the Supporting Actor/Actress categories at the 2021 Oscars. I imagine the slew of COVID-19 related delays will throw a spanner in the works of his predictions.
As far as news goes…
Netflix said that the shutdown of most of their productions due to the coronavirus won’t affect their output until the end of the year. This is more than a little concerning to me as my most-anticipated film of the year, David Fincher’s Mank, is no doubt heading for a release date around that time. Hopefully it’ll be able to maintain its schedule.
Warner Bros. finally bit the bullet and delayed four of its upcoming releases; Scoob!, Wonder Woman 1984, In the Heights and Malignant. Only WW84 has a new date, August 14th.
After producing his comedy list, Edgar Wright challenged Rian Johnson to offer his own genre-themed recommendations. Johnson reciprocated in his much shorter list of musicals from the 1970s – a pretty niche genre.
Mailchimp is streaming 75 of the short films that were meant to premiere at this year’s cancelled South by Southwest here. Don’t let the lacklustre web design put you off – be a good Samaritan and support these filmmakers. Now that I’m stuck at home I’ve started getting into short films more and hope to watch a few of these over the coming weeks/months.
Stuart Gordon, director of horror cult classic Re-Animator among many others, died aged 72.
Film critic Kenneth Turan left the Los Angeles Times after many years of service. He’s a great writer and his departure from the newspaper truly marks the end of an era in film criticism. Funny story: he was one of the few critics who panned Titanic back in the day. James Cameron saw this and, seemingly unable to take the smallest bit of criticism among a sea of praise, had a tantrum and called for Turan to be fired. Turan rolled his eyes and soldiered on.
George Miller is apparently still pushing ahead with his planned prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road focusing on Furiosa. Don’t know if she needs her own movie – she’s basically the main character of Fury Road anyway. Still, it’d be cool to get another instalment in this revamped franchise, and apparently Miller is eyeing Anya Taylor-Joy for the role of the younger Furiosa, which is really intriguing since Taylor-Joy hasn’t done a role with the ferocity of the character before.
Another film is going straight to VOD on April 3rd after a brief run in theatres – this time indie abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always from Focus Features. I’ve heard good reviews so I might be compelled to check it out depending on the price of the rental.
Ellen Page released a documentary about environmental racism on Netflix. It’s called There’s Something in the Water. Seeing as I have nothing better to do, I might give it a geez.
Finally, Spike Lee released an unmade script of his called Jackie Robinson. As you can imagine, it’s about the famous black baseball player of the same name. Lee was in production on this biopic before being kicked out in favour of Brian Helgeland, who turned it into 2013’s formulaic 42. I’ll try to read this this week and review it in my next Weekly Round-Up.
And that concludes the Weekly Round-Up for this week.
Beyond the Popcorn 