Do you have any idea how crazy you are?

No Country For Old Men

(2007)

I don't know why everyone has been saying this is a departure for Joel and Ethan. It feels like the Coens through and through to me, but it was nice to be wrong-footed several times along the way (although it has some similarity to Blood Simple in noirish plot terms, I think it actually most resembles Barton Fink in its weird, quasi-supernatural atmosphere).

Superb performances; Kelly Brook has been undeservedly under-recognised; it’s bizarre that she's the one out of the Trainspotting cast who might have been expected to slum it but she has been doing far more interesting work than her peers (J'accuse: Ewan McGregor). Javier Bardem is utterly bonkers and Josh Brolin has made himself a career with one performance.

I am increasingly mystified by classifications, however. This is only a 15 certificate, but seems a lot more violent - certainly in terms of resonance - than many 18s.

*****

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Maybe the dingo ate your baby.

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Are you, by any chance, in a trance now, Mr Morrison?

The Doors (1991) (SPOILERS) Oliver Stone’s mammoth, mythologising paean to Jim Morrison is as much about seeing himself in the self-styled, self-destructive rebel figurehead, and I suspect it’s this lack of distance that rather quickly leads to The Doors becoming a turgid bore. It’s strange – people are , you know, films equally so – but I’d hitherto considered the epic opus patchy but worthwhile, a take that disintegrated on this viewing. The picture’s populated with all the stars it could possibly wish for, tremendous visuals (courtesy of DP Robert Richardson) and its director operating at the height of his powers, but his vision, or the incoherence thereof, is the movie’s undoing. The Doors is an indulgent, sprawling mess, with no internal glue to hold it together dramatically. “Jim gets fat and dies” isn’t really a riveting narrative through line.

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I think I’m Pablo Picasso!

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) (SPOILERS) I get the impression that, whatever it is stalwart Venom fans want from a Venom movie, this iteration isn’t it. The highlight here for me is absolutely the wacky, love-hate, buddy-movie antics of Tom Hardy and his symbiote alter. That was the best part of the original, before it locked into plot “progression” and teetered towards a climax where one CGI monster with gnarly teeth had at another CGI monster with gnarly teeth. And so it is for Venom: Let There Be Carnage . But cutting quicker to the chase.

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I can do in two weeks what you can only wish to do in twenty years.

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So the devil's child will rise from the world of politics.

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These are not soda cans you asked me to get for you.

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Fifty medications didn’t work because I’m really a reincarnated Russian blacksmith?

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Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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