It's a thousand years to Christmas, Mr. Holloway.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

(1983)

There's a good film in here somewhere, clearest in the library scenes between Jonathan Pryce and Jason Robards. And, coming from Disney's commendable - if patchy in quality and financially iffy - dark period, there's a strong element of thematically murky and even adult material running through it.

Unfortunately it's scuppered by Disney-enforced reshoots (clearest in the spider attack sequence where the kids are a good year or so older). It's mystifying how studios still go down this route of delaying the release of a film they aren't happy with while they pump in several £m of new scenes only for it to still go belly-up when it does come out. It’s also saddled with some of the most Disney-kids you could imagine in the leads.

The film has a lovely, moody, look, though, and James Horner test drives is his Aliens-attack theme 3 years early. In an alternate universe, Gilliam was thrown this after Time Bandits and so found it unnecessary to make Dr. Parnassus.

***

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I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

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(SPOILERS) I was going to say I’d really like to see what Vince Gilligan has up his sleeve besidesBreaking Bad spinoffs. But then I saw that he had a short-lived series on CBS a few years back (Battle Creek). I guess things Breaking Bad-related ensure an easy greenlight, particularly from Netflix, for whom the original show was bread and butter in its take up as a streaming platform. There’s something slightly dispiriting about El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, though. Not that Gilligan felt the need to return to Jesse Pinkman – although the legitimacy of that motive is debatable – but the desire to re-enter and re-inhabit the period of the show itself, as if he’s unable to move on from a near-universally feted achievement and has to continually exhume it and pick it apart.

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He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

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(1982)
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What you do is very baller. You're very anarchist.

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Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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