Annabelle: Creation

I enjoyed this film more than I expected to. That’s mostly because my expectations were very, very low. A derivative of a derivative of a derivative, this is about the breaking point of how far James Wan projects can be stretched. When they completely abandon ‘things-based-on-things-the-Warrens-claimed’ angle for Conjuring spin-offs with The Nun, I think that might be a step too far. This one is just about grounded in their exploits still, though it goes wholly into invented-plot territory by showing where the creepy Annabelle doll was made. The real one, of course, was made in a factory with all the other Raggedy Anns, but movie Annabelle is an ugly, creepy pseudo-Victorian doll. Here, we find she was made by American dollmaker Samuel Mullins in the 40s. Because I guess someone still had to make creepy dolls that they didn’t even sell back during WWII.

I was so uninterested in the particulars of this movie that I didn’t even realise it was the second Annabelle movie. I thought it was the only one, but there was an Annabelle before Annabelle: Creation, itself a prequel to the Conjuring films where the story of the cursed doll was told in brief. I guess that film only covered the events that led the Warrens to investigating the doll, whereas this one covers how the doll was made.

Honestly, the doll barely figures into the story. It has nothing to do with the tragedy that kickstarts the action, acts as a vessel in an episode told only in flashback, and then is only briefly the place a nefarious being resides (that can in any case project itself out around the house in just about any form) before spending most of the film being just a bit of background decoration. The film wants to show a darker evil than an ugly doll, but in doing so makes the doll seem superfluous.

But there were some things I liked here. While it shared with the other Conjuring films a propensity to show too much of the monsters/spirits that come with the tedious jump scares, there were some scenes where tension was built quickly. The level of gore was ramped up a bit from the safe boundaries of the other films. Plus while we’ve had a whole lot of creepy kid and creepy doll movies in the past few years, other than IT – adapting an older property anyway – there have been strangely few films with kids on their own being terrified. Slicing them up is probably way off-limits for a film like this, but having the nasty hauntings happening to little orphan kids without parents to run to felt a little different from other properties.

There are some fairly decent performances, too. The Mexican nun caring for the kids and the father are very believable, but the two main kids are definitely the most interesting. I wonder if the two kids will go on to have interesting careers. The rest of the kids did their best with the roles they had, but they were paper-thin - little more than bully girl, token black girl with no discernable personality, smallest girl, etc.

The film trundles along with jump scares and some creepy setpieces, never really shows any interest in defining rules as to what this evil spirit can and can’t do, gets a bit lost with which girl the audience follows as the core of the narrative, and then comes to a satisfyingly bombastic climax.

Nothing new, nothing clever and nothing exceptional, it was nonetheless a solid, safe Hollywood film. I expected it to be dreadful, so being merely mediocre leaves me feeling quite positive about it.

A Dark Song

A slow-boiling, low-budget indie horror, A Dark Song was something a bit different from the other, glossier films we’ve been watching lately. The set-up reminded me of Lord of Tears, only with performers who can actually act and a genuine sense of danger, while the feeling of being trapped in a mansion with the supernatural in the UK reminded me of The Quiet Ones.

A grieving mother hires an abrasive occultist to work through the lengthy Abramelin Operation from The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abremelin the Mage. In the world of the movie, working through the ritual leads to a guardian angel not of the internal plane but in the real world, who will grant a powerful wish. Well, it’s not how grimoires are generally presented to work, but it works for a film. At first it’s dubious whether magic is real or whether an abusive man is just taking advantage of a vulnerable woman, but before long inexplicable things start to happen. It’s a bit odd that there’s still some question of whether the ritual is doing anything when it rains gold inside one magical circle.

Things escalate towards the end, and I felt that if they were going to go the route the film finally settled on, perhaps more glimpses of it earlier would have been better. The slow burn is a little too slow. But the human drama of two very different people, who don’t trust one another and are both pretty unstable, is pretty fascinating. I admire the film for showing not only the typical horror elements of the occult, but attempting the transcendental and elevated as well, and the final twist of what Sophia finally says when she’s face to face with what she wanted was quite beautiful.

I wouldn’t sit through this again. A lot of the uncomfortable atmosphere is created by unpleasant impositions occultist Solomon forces on Sophia. Drinking blood, stripping down, being deprived of sleep. It makes for an interesting dynamic between them, like Lara Croft being harangued by Frankie Boyle with a London accent, but takes a little too long. This is definitely not one for the horror fans who just want ghoulies jumping out with loud violin screeches to tell you when to squeal and giggle. This is a horror fan’s horror movie, rather like The Witch or Hereditary, and while I admire how it dares to be something unusual and am pleased to have watched it, it’s definitely not for everyone.

While I’m not an occultism freak, I’ve done a lot of research into Golden Dawn and grimoires and of course encountered Abremelin while reading into Crowley. Even if the film’s take on the guardian angel is very exaggerated, it’s clear there’s a lot of knowledge and enthusiasm for occultism here. I guess that Solomon’s name and the title are a reference to the Song of Solomon – but to be honest, ‘A Dark Song’ isn’t a very good title at all. Something about a ritual would have been better. Great care and attention goes into drawing magical circles and patterns, and the design department seem to be having fun.

There was very little one could call scary, and there isn’t even that much tension, so I can’t say this film got me any closer to finding a horror film that is actually frightening – becoming a bit of a holy grail for me at this point. But it had way more substance than the average by-the-numbers exorcism flick with a CG monster popping out, so I’d rank it as one of the better horror films of recent years. But the quest for something that’s actually scary goes on…

Insidious: The Last Key

Decided to finish the Insidious saga with The Last Key, released earlier this year. And like most horror sequels everything’s stretched very very thin. James Wan is obviously barely involved at this point, and Leigh Whannell seems to be in too deep with this project to know what the audience wants to see and what’s actually entertaining.

But it’s not as though I expected Insidious 4 to be an earth-shatteringly good movie. The previous films have degenerated from creepy but mostly effective to little more than a series of jump scares roped together. Elise was a strong character but already spread thin in the last film. This generic foray into her past with unthreatening bad guy, unconvincing stakes and made-up rules leading to made-up last-moment saves was even less satisfying than ghostly headbutts. Nobody seems to care in this movie and nothing is clever or original other than a couple of very brief visual moments that were kind of neat, like a walking figure becoming hanging clothes, or revelations that some ghosts are not actually ghosts at all.

But a couple of kind-of clever moments in a very uninspired full movie is pretty inadequate, and that’s what this film was. Ticks the box of simple, vaguely thrilling horror movie, but does nothing at all to advance what happened in the previous films.

Insidious: Chapter 3

Possibly watching this after a few artsy horror flicks wasn’t the most charitable thing to do. It was never going to be anything but a piece of fluff, and judging by box office numbers for the likes of The Witch and Hereditary, this is the sort of thing mass audiences want. Not very scary, but with a few little jump scares with ridiculous string section blasts to tell you what you’re meant to think, and then you can laugh and cuddle up to your partner a little more and feel good. This sort of by-the-numbers horror is to horror what The Big Bang Theory is to comedy. Nothing wrong with it, it’s enjoyable to watch and it does what it’s meant to do, but plays it totally safe, follows a formula and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

From Poltergeist to The Conjuring, and quite possibly back to The Exorcist, it’s pretty obvious with these sorts of supernatural films that the interesting people to follow tend to be the exorcists themselves. The often very quirky individuals who show up after all the normal family’s problems have reached a climax point and teach them how to fight back. And that’s true for Insidious, too – I cared a lot more about the funny older lady with the power to look into ‘The Further’ than about the dad of the family who was ostensibly the central figure of the first two films. So this prequel shows her in action again. Not revealing much about her past – it looks like that was saved for the recently-released Insidious 4 – but showing a case from her past and, a little unconvincingly, how she got her team together.

This film is noticeably more ropey than the last two. The family that gets haunted are very wooden, there’s quite a bit of awkward cutting to make it look like a 70-year-old woman is getting violently thrown around. As usual, the things the ghosts do are arbitrary and based more on building up audience tension than actually making any sort of internally consistent sense. Many of the supposedly creepy moments are more comical, as are the times Elise steels her spiritual power to become a badass and fight back. Meanwhile, there’s nothing whatsoever funny about the supposed comic relief guys.

But frankly I don’t watch Insidious 3 expecting anything different from this. So in what it sets out to do, it succeeds. I doubt I’ll remember the details of the story next year, though, never mind in 5.  

A Quiet Place

Another more experimental horror film today, the almost dialogue-free A Quiet Place, which was quite the hit a few months ago. I have to say, my initial stance was a little disapproving – this film is seven parts The Last of Us, three parts The Village, with just a dash of Cloverfield for monster design. A bearded but grizzled father whose name I can’t remember but I always thought of as Joel, has a first-act tragedy to get us invested and introduce the dangers of this world, then has to survive attacks from clicking, sound-sensitive monsters in a post-apocalyptic United States. It’s not unfamiliar territory.

This shows how the long-delayed The Last of Us movie could actually work extremely well and find a very receptive audience. It makes me a little sad that people who watch it when it eventually comes out might be pulled from their immersion by remembering how they’ve seen the Clickers somewhere before.

Beyond that similarity, this is a good chance for strong performances. The kids act well but the adults – the director John Krasinski, and his real-life wife Emily Blunt – get a real chance to shine. They can portray fear, pain, terror, resolve, bravery and even despairing resignation so well without words. For a short movie with a tiny cast, it does everything it needs to with brevity and grace.

Maybe the scares could have been better, and maybe seeing less of the monsters would have helped. The way they find to combat the creatures and the idea that nobody ever tried something like that before seems very far-fetched, but it worked in the little microcosm of the film.

Not bad, but not fantastic either, it at least tried something different. At least, different from other films. Not very different from video games.  

Hereditary

After recommendations from friends, decided to watch this recent horror flick. Backed by artsy distributors A24, it put me in mind of their previous experimental horror movie The Witch, which excited critics but didn’t resonate well with audiences. I remember The Witch fondly, daring to be different with the period setting and slow pace, but its problem was lack of scares. Hereditary is also slow-paced and experimental, and also hasn’t done overly well with audiences, probably mostly because general film audiences prefer to turn off their brains and enjoy formulaic scares when it comes to horror.

As long as it’s done well, I don’t care if a horror film is a rehash of old ideas or dares to be different. Hereditary definitely doesn’t play it safe, starting with a pretty ordinary set-up where a family is seemingly haunted after a death in the family, but soon hammering on the psychological trauma harder than just about any other film I can think of. There’s some degree of ambiguity whether anything is actually supernatural here or just a combination of human machination and delusions, which I quite like, and the film is unafraid of showing some of the starkest and most unpleasant imagery you can imagine.  

Toni Colette also gets real opportunity to shine here. I really loved her performance in The Sixth Sense where she kept everything restrained, but here where things can go to the extremes she gets to show what she can really do. It’s a tour de force that should be lauded regardless of whether it’s in a genre piece.  

Definitely not to everyone’s taste, and perhaps a little too slow and short on real tension for me to be drawn back to it again, and a little marred by some poor choices (like the little girl making a little popping noise with her tongue in an effort to have a creepy recurring sound), it was nonetheless one of the braver and more interesting horror films lately, in a world of Insidiouses and Conjurings that may entertain but don’t really attempt to get under the skin.

Return Plane Films: Big Eyes, Blade Runner 2049, The Commuter, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Founder and A Wrinkle in Time

Plane Films 1: Big Eyes

After finishing off 'The Disaster Artist', which only got more hilarious, I decided to watch a slightly older movie, Tim Burton's 'Big Eyes'. I don't actually remember ever seeing the work of Margaret Keane before the publicity for the movie began. Maybe very vaguely. 

This movie was one I absolutely wanted to see when it came out, but never got around to. So it was a pleasure to see. Not only is this a portrait of a peculiar outsider artist who gained popularity despite being completely outside the mainstream ideas of good taste (and has a very cartoon-like aesthetic I find quite appealing), but a fascinating story of agency stolen by a conman. 

The way the film portrays the situation unfolding is very convincing and dramatically compelling. At first it's a misunderstanding, and then expedience. Then there's a critical moment where there's a clear chance for the truth to come out, or at the very least for him to make the very reasonable assertion that the couple have been painting together - but takes a choice that only leads to lie upon lie and ever more darkness. 

There's so often this kind of partnerships in the art world - the actual artist, who is introverted and finds it difficult to live alone, and the extroverted salesperson who can't convince anyone with their art but shamelessly promote and commercialise the art. This is even more a perfect storm, with the salesman actually taking the success for himself. 

Burton does a great job of the storytelling here, peeling the layers off and letting Walter crumble in his dishonesty. It's done deftly, like when Walter misidentifies acrylic for oil, which prefigures a later revelation. And it's a great examination of an abusive relationship as well. Even with a very ambiguous accent, Christoph Waltz is perhaps the finest actor I can think of that can pull off a conman - so charming, so intelligent and so quickly able to flip to controlling, manipulating and devious. It's completely believable, and Amy Adams puts in a wonderfully believable portrait of the artist taken advantage of. 

Some scenes don't work so well, like a confrontation with a critic that gets massively overwrought at a point of the movie where it should be focused inwards towards the relationship as Margaret is getting emboldened and the promise of the payoff of the focus on how stifling and traumatic 1950s patriarchy could be.

Perhaps the saddest element of the story is that it's very probable that without her husband-manager-abuser-captor, Keane's weird big-eyed paintings likely never would have become famous. 

While perhaps there's a temptation to yell and scream at Keane to escape her torment and come clean sooner, it makes perfect sense given her background and the expectations of the time. 

2: Blade Runner 2049

After being put off by the sheer length of the film during other flights - as I think many audiences were - I decided that it would be good to watch it this time, split between two flights. 

And I'm glad I did. While it's flawed, especially when it comes to length, it was well worth seeing. 

I wasn't keen on the sequel happening at all, to be honest. There didn't seem to me to be a need for a follow-up. The film stood well on its own. There was also no Philip K Dick source material to work from, even if the original had departed from 'Do Androids...' in a big way. And Harrison Ford reappearing in follow-ups to his other big action roles hasn't exactly gone so well. 

Indeed, probably the most expendable part of this bloated film, the part that could have been cut but for the draw of a star name, was Deckard's part. He got a somewhat cool but unnecessary fist-fight, introduced a confused and rushed final-act moral question, flops about as a damsel in distress and then while he was able to give the film a somewhat satisfying conclusion, everything from the point of his introduction - well past the half-way point - seemed inferior, with coincidental plotting, unspectacular locations and odd pacing. I strongly suspect the film was written without Deckard appearing, and hastily redrafted when Harrison Ford agreed to take part. 

Beyond his part, though, there was a rich and interesting film. The Blade Runner future has gotten yet more gritty, with a lot of wastelands and toxic areas. Ryan Gosling's replicant, Joe, is good at hunting down the older, more human replicants. But when he sees there may be something beyond what he's always known, he begins to change. The parallel of his love story with his AI companion helps this grow, and I do like the debate over whether this film is simply mysogynist and objectifies for the male gaze, is simply projecting and thus criticising a highly commercialised future where women are further commodified, or actually sending a strong feminist message with certain key female characters and the central quest for the power to give birth - though I suppose to be right-on in today's world of identity politics, we shouldn't say that giving birth is just a female trait any more. 

What the film does well is evoking the style of the original film. That doesn't just mean instrumentation recalling Vangelis and fun cameos from original cast members - including a remarkable CG-enhanced lookalike scene. It's more about the way pace is controlled to build and release tension, give a sense of wonder and refer back to noir detective filmmaking. That's what works here, when they get it right - and is most glaringly lacking when it isn't quite right. 

But for its faults, this is a film of great ideas, great performances (especially in very minor roles) and great visuals. I loved the way Vegas ended up, and I loved how I thought I'd figured out the twist very early only for that twist to be perfectly undone and undercut. There are many good things to say about this film, but I don't think I'd ever sit through it again - and I'm still not sure it really added much to the original. 

3: The Commuter

After Blade Runner, I wanted to watch something a bit lighter. This thriller on a train seemed to fit the bill. I'd seen the trailer and it looked bland but entertaining. And that's what it was. 

Falling into typecast territory, Liam Neeson as an ex-cop gets a phone call instructing him to find someone on his train or people close to him might meet a bad end. And it builds from there as you might expect. The standoff at the end of the film gets a little more cerebral and some decent crime writing comes through, but the premise just isn't unique enough for this to make much of a big stir. 

Nonetheless, this was a well-made, well-acted Hollywood movie that provides good entertainment and has fewer plot holes than usual despite the extremely convoluted plan the baddies have come up with. Worth a watch even if I'm not sure how much of it I'll remember in 5 years. 

4. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

One of several successful films about hotels from recent years, this one had a truly stellar cast. Just seeing Judi Dench and Maggie Smith together is a pretty special thing, even if their interactions are minimal and it looks pretty conspicuously like the two of them were never actually on set together, but with performances by Bill Nighy, Tom Hiddleston, Dev Patel and Penelope Wilton - that's star power. So many of England's senior actors.

These aren't their most challenging roles of all time, but they certainly get moments to shine. At first I thought that the Indian characters were written in a bit of a daft, overtly soap opera way, but the just have fronts they're expected to show and as the film progresses we see the deeper levels. 

Of course there are feel-good moments and there are some very funny parts too. One interesting part is that there are two xenophobic older ladies, and it's interesting how different the way they come over is. One is so overtly hateful that somehow it's sweet and silly, and she eventually gets won over by the local people. The other has a pleasant facade but makes lots of disparaging comments and never actually learns to adapt even if she has a redemption moment where she accepts the problems with her marriage. 

I can't say this made me want to chase the joie de vivre of India. But it was certainly fun to watch!

5: The Founder

This is an interesting take on the business origin stories that have been popular for a while now. Not the story of the McDonald's Brothers, though they of course feature prominently, but of Ray Kroc, who took a great idea and franchised it across the country. 

Michael Keaton, who I still picture in his Birdman role, does a great job transitioning from struggling salesman to egotistical entrepreneur.

There's some common ground here with Big Eyes, especially when Kroc starts taking the credit as founder, though things of course get much less out of hand. 

There's something about 50s America that also makes me feel nostalgic, even if obviously I wasn't there. It's like they universal Western culture touch point for nostalgia. And it's a lot of fun to watch anything set in the period. Except maybe Grease.

A Wrinkle in Time

I wanted to sleep through the last leg of my flight but was too uncomfortable after walking up once, so decided to watch something light. This seemed to fit the bill.

I don't know anything about A Wrinkle in Time outside the movie. I think it was a novel first, and I vaguely remember one of those stupid debates about whether Diversity is our Strength or whether casting a white or unspecified book character as another race is white genocide. For my part, I have no problem with the casting of this film, and if there's a racial question here it's about why so many characters lack agency.

When a brilliant scientist disappears, leaving his family behind, his daughter Meg gets kid movie issues. She's sad and argumentative and gets bullied at school. 

Luckily for her, her six-year-old brother has done all the legwork, to the extent that this would probably have been more interesting as his story. Except that he doesn't have a growth arc and is just the precocious but adorable little boy archetype (not one of Jung's but common enough). He has contacted intradimensional beings broadly based on question words to help on a quest to find their papa. 

They are joined by Calvin, a boy from Meg's class who is gorgeous in a Disney musical sort of way and incredibly bland in a Disney musical sort of way. His entire personality development is covered in a 2-second vision of his father shouting at him.

Then there are the Misses. A young white woman who's supposed to be mischievous but is mostly obnoxious, a South Asian lady who gets no personality so has to communicate entirely in quotes, and giant Oprah Winfrey in full fabulous drag queen regalia - and you can't go wrong with giant Oprah.

There's very little tension to be found in the kids' quest, mostly hallucinogenic and lacking any goals, direction or direct opposition until the last half hour or so. So it's difficult to care about a story like that.

Looking it up now I’m off the flight and able to go online, I see not only was it a bigger controversy than I thought (I can kind of understand objecting to the removal of Christian themes, but disliking it based on the casting seems dumb to me, there’s nothing about this that should even be remarkable, though I guess I might feel different were I a fan of the book) but it was a huge flop. It’s listed on Wikipedia as perhaps the biggest (even inflation-adjusted) flop of all time if the loss ends up at the upper end of the estimate. Yowch.

Plane films: Goodbye Christopher Robin; The Shape of Water; Tomb Raider; Justice League; Fantastic Beasts; The Disaster Artist

Plane Film 1: Goodbye Christopher Robin

I had this film wrong. Recently there was a trailer for another movie, featuring a grown up Christopher Robin having a somewhat hallucinogenic experience late in life where Pooh seems to visit him and speaks in the Disney voice. This film was completely different, an enjoyable, of course highly fictionalised account primarily about how AA Milne came to write the classic books. I had no idea there were the two different films being made. And I have to say, I still have considerable doubts about Christopher Robin, and likely would have enjoyed Goodbye Christopher Robin more if I hadn’t expected a talking Pooh to appear at any moment.

I very much enjoyed the evocation of the inter-war period, the way Sussex nature looks so idyllic and the very believable performances, convincingly evoking the idea of strong emotions simmering beneath a refined exterior. And the kid playing Billy Moon was also a great find, swinging between emotions and going overboard as kids so often do.  

The characterisation is a bit overly broad. Alan Milne in particular is not convincing, falling too hard into the shell-shocked former soldier character type with not enough of his own personality. There's an attempt at a character arc showing Christopher Robin's parents as neglectful and completely emotionally disconnected from the child they've just left with their nanny for his childhood. It's not very believable after reading Milne's poems, or even seeing all the cute pet names and stories about being very young touched on here. It feels much too much like the result of a scriptwriting 101 class about character arcs and development. 

It's all a redemption arc but because it takes place over several years, there just isn't enough redeeming and much too much bad parenting for the intended sympathy to ring true. Especially since rather than pushing fame upon him, it seems like the think Christopher Robin would resent the most would be getting sent to boarding school, where his life began to get crappy. Yet that point is never raised. Maybe that's my own personal biases based on my own experiences coming through, though. 

Plane film 2: The Shape of Water

Guillermo Del Toro's latest Oscar darling isn't nearly as magical or iconic as my favourite of his, Pan's Labyrinth, but it's still a very compelling and likeable fable. In a grimy vision of Cold War America, a mute cleaning lady named Eliza discovers they are keeping an aquatic humanoid creature in a lab. When Eliza bonds with the creature and learns it's to be vivisected, she does all he can to free it. 

Del Toro's films tend to skirt the line between arthouse and comic book in a way very few others manage - perhaps Burton at his best is the closest. Here there are a lot of cartoonish things, like the ragtag group that helps Eliza, and how one minute, the antagonist seems like a seriously heinous figure, with his views on race and gender roles, the next he's having to focus on his positive thinking after his car gets bashed up. 

Sometimes it feels like it's taking itself too seriously when it's repeating tropes from ET and Free Willy. Still, the balance just about works and the story is very satisfying. Unlike Pan's Labyrinth, it's not one I'd care to rewatch over and over, but absolutely I enjoyed it. 

Plane Film 3: Isle of Dogs

See Animation blog

Plane Film 4: Tomb Raider

After a reboot of the video game series, it made a lot of sense to also reboot the movie franchise. She may not be up there with Bond or Bourne but Lara Croft is definitely an icon recognised the world over and deserves a decent film.

This version is definitely less camp and cheesy than the Jolie films, but I don't think it's going to reignite the franchise like the game reboot did. And the problem is that they didn't take enough cues from that game, which this film essentially adapts. 

It's the same basic story - Lara heads to the Japanese island of Yamatai to follow her father's research and ends up clashing with shadowy organisation Trinity as well as the mysterious forces that were being researched in the first place. It even takes some of the best setpieces, like having to climb a rusty old WWII-era plane. 

But almost everything the film changes in an attempt to improve the action to fit Hollywood ideas of a good screenplay definitely has a negative impact. The game begins right in the thick of the action with Lara having to survive on the island and the backstory getting filled in later. The film shows 40 minutes of dull preamble that's going to date horribly - Lara losing a kickboxing match; Lara is a delivery driver; Lara takes part in some stupid hipster bike chase; Lara goes to a pawn shop; Lara gets her bag stolen in Hong Kong and the chase takes her exactly where she needs to be. 

This Lara is also much less a positive feminist symbol, surprising for Hollywood. Lara in the game starts out vulnerable and feeble but very quickly becomes a capable survivalist constantly staking out on her own. Here she's much too often spured to action only by a male, or motivated by what a male is doing. The more agency the adaptation gives male characters who didn't feature much in the original, the less Lara gets.

And you know what? In a Tomb Raider movie, there should be a whole lot more raiding of tombs. 

Plane Film 5: Justice League

I'd been hoping for Black Panther, but unfortunately it wasn't the superhero flick available for my flight. Instead I got Justice League, which I can't say I had been desperate to see. But I was kind of curious to see how this team came together and how Wonder Woman was integrated. 

That said, I have basically no interest in the DC Cinematic Universe. Batman films have gone downhill in my eyes since Batfleck, and I'm not interested in watching the TV series that would inform me about this teenage version of Barry Allen. 

Justice League seemed to have a really forgettable villain and none of the exuberance of the Avengers films despite a similar gather-the-McGuffins plot. Unlike Infinity War, which had reactions absolutely everywhere I follow online, nobody really said anything about this film or the impact of Steppenwolf. I mostly had Boney M stuck in my head every time I heard his name. 

Everything here is so grim and pessimistic, too. Everyone keeps moaning about how the world has gone to hell. Even the quirky humour guy, apparently now Barry, has a pretty grim life. The humour also mostly misfired, with the best joke not only in the trailer but already done way better by the Powerpuff Girls decades ago. 

Ultimately, while the Avengers films have been incredibly fun recently, DC just can't make their movies fun enough. 

Plane Film 6: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Despite owning copies of the little charity book this film is based on (they were going to be worth a fortune as collector's items you know), I had litle to no interest in seeing it in the cinema. For me, Harry Potter definitely outstayed its welcome by the end, both the books and the movie series. Definitely more so the movie series. 

So when they announced they were further milking this series with a whole series based on this encyclopaedia-style booklet, I thought it was a terrible idea. 

Well, watching it on the plane wasn't a bad thing. Though I kept falling asleep. Basically, this was an extended episode of Dr. Who. The writing was extremely like Dr. Who - and much as I like seeing Eddie Redmayne, he was definitely  just doing his best Dr. Who. 

Newt Scamander comes to America and stretches credulity in the idea that wizards have managed to keep themselves secret at all by letting various magical creatures loose in a bank to steal people's money and probably ruin a few of their lives - not that they mention it.

He gets mixed up in a vague plot about what's basically a magical time bomb in human form. The ending is very questionable, with what's basically a police shooting ordered by the black female president, and only the big antagonist and Newt are suggesting it might be a bad thing. It also means the action just fizzles out. The way Newt manages to get everyone on his side despite still being a wanted criminal is also highly dubious.

It's only meant to be a bit of fluff. But I definitely feel like I could have got the same level of enjoyment from a mediocre episode of New Who.

Plane film 7: The Disaster Artist

The internet has made Tommy Wiseau a legend. The Room will probably endure now as one of the best terrible movies ever made. And Tommy Wiseau is the reason it's so entertaining to watch it. His terrible stilted delivery, his strong accent and of course his sheer blistering self-confidence. 

This film follows him and his roommate trying to make it in LA. Of course Tommy doesn't do so well, but his roommate starts to get some success and that causes friction. So they set out to make The Room and that's where it actually gets entertaining. 

A charming take on an outsider artist, it's amazing that this film could get made at all, and it's nice to show how some people walk their own path and may even get a film made about them just by doing that.