Spider-Man: Homecoming

I’m pretty happy that Spider-Man has been rebooted as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was nice to see him appear in Civil War and it’s nice to have him much younger than before, with the dynamic of him being an experienced, reckless kid mentored by Iron Man. Of course, this is done in the slightly awkward American Saved By The Bell land where 20-year-olds play 15-year-olds but look at best like 18-year-olds and you have to just pretend they’re kids, but Tom Holland putting on a high-pitched American accent just about pulls it off and makes for the most naïve and likeable of the recent Spider-Man actors.

After the events of Civil War, Spider-Man hopes he’s going to be included in more Avengers shenanigans. However, the call never comes. Spider-Man tries to make a contribution fighting minor crimes, and eventually gets caught up in a bigger plot. He does his best, messes up several times, disappoints his school friends, but keeps on trying and eventually pulls through.

What makes the film a success is that it doesn’t focus too much on plot and instead allows its characters to develop. The background characters are likeable, especially the kids Peter hangs out with. There are some great moments, mostly when various people discover one another’s secrets, and there’s a great surrogate-father and surrogate-son relationship between Iron Man and Spider-Man that’s new to these characters. There’s goofy humour throughout, and the threat is relatively low-key, making this a fun, light, easy-to-watch entry into the MCU. 

Plane film extra - Assassin's Creed

Video game adaptations are rarely classic pieces of cinema, but with the historical settings and nice simple set-up of Templars vs. Assassins, I thought this had a chance to be successful.

It looks nice. It’s nicely acted. It’s good to see Jeremy Irons in a movie again. And it’s nice to have important scenes in the Al-Hambra. But ultimately there’s no reason to care about Cal, far too much time is spent in the uninteresting present day story rather than the past, and the fact that the whole story is a big macguffin plot and the final way to beat the forces of evil is just to catch the baddie by surprise and beat everyone up feels like nothing was gained, learned or developed during the course of the movie. All the heroes needed was a chance to beat up the enemies.

Normally in these kinds of movies, the disaster that the good guys want to avert is at least partially unleashed. It’s generic, but it at least gives a sense of the stakes. That’s sorely lacking here, making for a deeply unsatisfying ending. 

Plane films - Life, Gifted, La La Land and Beauty and the Beast

#1: Life

This was a mistake. I thought there were no movies worth watching but I was only looking at the magazine – there were actually a few I wanted to see much more than this. In fact, there were plenty of better choices in the magazine, but I wanted some light cheesy sci-fi to start the journey.

I guess it was indeed light, cheesy sci-fi, but it was also really not enjoyable. Essentially, it aimed for realism with a disaster on the international space station, but the conceit was the old cliché of hostile life from Mars.

With a soil sample comes a microorganism. The scientists revive it, and of course it soon gets out of their control. A poor imitation of Alien ensues, with a dreadful bait-and-switch ending.

Some big-name actors do their best with extremely basic material, though Ryan Reynolds phones it in, but the CG blob isn’t interesting enough and ultimately the film offers absolutely nothing new.

#2: In This Corner of the World

See animation blog review

#3: Gifted

Still not one of the must-see movies on offer from today, Gifted was nonetheless well worth a watch. Chris Pratt’s speciality is being an everyman who is nonetheless very attractive to those around him and really seems to care about his loved ones, and that makes him the perfect star for this movie.

It’s not wholly original material, but it’s done well. Pratt’s character Frank is raising his niece, who happens to be a maths prodigy. However, it’s a gift she inherited from her mother, whose life was extremely unstable as a result of her mathematics achievements. Frank is trying to give her a normal life, mostly keeping her in a trailer park with an incredibly cute one-eyed cat, but when he enrols her in school for the first time, things quickly slip out of his control.

Delicately acted with a very believable performance from young Mckenna Grace, balancing intelligence, brattiness and normal childish hopes and fears, it did the family drama, courtroom scenes and even romance well.

#4: Kubo and the Two Strings

See animation blog review

#5: La La Land

I guess I just didn’t get La La Land. Beloved of many on my social media and a critical darling highly lauded at the Oscars, I expected good things. I get that it’s been a while since there has been a high-impact original musical, but there’s been plenty of big-screen adaptations of musicals lately. This pushes some nostalgia buttons and has some good tunes, but much like Greece I just didn’t like the characters and didn’t think the moral messages were good here.

So the centre of La La Land is the celebration of failing artists doing their best and following their dreams. That’s fine, but in the end the main characters aren’t really struggling artists. He is a jazz pianist who happens to have an old contract who just hands him a major-label contract and $52k+ a year salary, and she lives in a la-la land where someone can put on a one-man play for a single night, attract an audience of about 5, yet still get a call that one of those audience members loves her and wants to put her into a major feature film in a starring role. Meanwhile, it has no consequence that he can’t pay the rent and bills, or that she apparently gets supported by her rich boyfriend only to cheat on him and move on. I’d rather hear a story about some actual struggling artists.

Then there’s the fact that those two main characters are just obnoxious and hard to like. Both are extremely self-centred and ultimately their relationship could easily have worked with or without professional success, but they just don’t bother. Unlike Whiplash, which was loads of fun, I found this follow-up pretty poor.

#6: Beauty and the Beast

Maybe the most successful of the recent Disney live-action remakes, I enjoyed watching Beauty and the Beast for the artistry, the effects and Emma Watson looking very pretty as usual, but I did end up wondering why this needed to be made. Sure, it will bring in money, again targeting nostalgia and piggybacking on the animated classic to make for easy feel-good watching, but it was pretty redundant creatively, and other than some more realistic designs and some modern quips from Josh Gad’s Lefou, whose homosexual feelings (which may or may not make him ‘gay’) are far less of an issue than it was suggested by headlines around this film’s release.

The adaptation really does nothing wrong and it is fun to enjoy it when familiar with the original, which I suppose is everything it needed to do in order to make money, but the redundancy of it all ultimately feels…pretty hollow.