Review: A Star is Born

Good modern adaptation of this classic story.  We know Gaga can sing, but it also turns out she can act too - and actually rather well.  While the romance is lightly told, I was always convinced of the relationship between her and Cooper's character.  They have great chemistry.

Jackson's path of self destruction is as hard to watch as Ally's rise to fame is invigorating.  And that's perhaps the one problem with this movie - it finishes on a down note.

The musical numbers are well staged and I liked some of the cynicism behind what it takes to make someone a star.

Verdict: A classic story worth revisiting. 

Review: A Bear Named Winnie

Amazon seems to be making it harder to find prime movies on the Fire stick nowadays and the missus wanted a thriller she hadn't seen (it seems like she's pretty much watched everything on Prime), but wasn't scary.

Somehow, we stumbled upon A Bear Named Winnie. And just to be clear, this is not a thriller.  Instead, it's a fairly gentle retelling of a "true" story about how Winnie the Pooh came to get his name. Apparently, it turns out he was named about a real bear in London Zoo - and the story of how Winnie came to be in London Zoo is the focus of the film.

It's an interesting story with a few minor points of drama and the two bears used in filming are extremely cute. I spent much of the film wondering just how they'd got them to be so tame and well trained as well as envying Fassbender for spending a movie working with a bear.

One word on the Amazon Prime copy, it's pretty blurry looking.

Verdict: Touching tale with cute bear action. 

Review: They Shall Not Grow Old

I have mixed feelings about Peter Jackson's attempt to make the testimony and footage from the first World War more accessible to modern audiences through colourisation, CGI, sound effects and even 3D.  The "restoration" is only partly successful to my eyes. For example, the blurry slow motion segments rather than adding pathos and drama only serve to make the production sag and the colourisation  - particularly the uniform washes of skin colour - can never be mistaken for reality.

More concerning is the juxtaposition of still photos of corpses with close ups of people who resemble them in group photographs - and the use of unrestored clips of black and white silent footage with a clattering projector soundtrack belies the fact that silent film can look very good indeed when sensitively restored and played at the right frame rate.

But it's not without merit, the colorisation highlights details like poppies growing on a grass verge or camouflage patterns on tanks which I would have certainly missed otherwise.  The foley effects add real atmosphere to the first hand accounts of survivors.  The story itself remains a powerful one, and the close is really strong.

Verdict: A worthy experiment

Review: 2001

I'm sure I must have seen this before, but it's recent release on 4K UHD disc makes it worth a revisit. Sadly, our projector isn't quite capable of 4K - but I'm pleased to report that except for one particularly scene where there's some quite noisy grain in an early scene 2001 looks as fresh and modern as ever.

It was the missus' first viewing and given her usual lack of patience for movies that are lengthy and with ambiguous interpretations I wondered what she'd make of it.  I also saved the story of my father walking out of a 1968 cinema showing on account of it being too boring until afterwards - and gave her the option of pausing the film for a catch up on what was going on.  We only had to stop a few times - and I relied on dim memories of my reading of the book for explanations.

Initial signs were not good as we were faced with a black screen and strains from the soundtrack - the Overture apparently. This was quickly skipped as there was no chance of the missus sitting through that.

Overall, it's held up remarkably well. It's slow and even ponderous - but the imagery remains breathtakingly remarkable in places.  It captures the sheer weirdness and vastness of space in a way that's astonishing given its age.  Truly visionary.

Verdict: Bring your own interpretation to this bona-fide science fiction classic. 

Review: Sherlock Holmes The Scarlet Claw

Atmospheric reworking of the Hound of the Baskervilles starring Rathbone and Bruce. This was our Halloween viewing  as neither of us fancied a straight out horror. This is a hugely nostalgic film for me as it evokes BBC showings of the series back in 1980s and watching them on our small black and white TV.  Viewing it on our projector recently was obviously rather different!

What I found extraordinary was that I'd quite forgotten the majority of the plot and only one or two scenes gave me vague feelings of deja vu. I think I'm long overdue a rewatch of the rest of the series.

This adventure is probably one of the better ones as it's an original tale which while being set in the modern days of 1940s, Holmes and Watson aren't being compelled to help with the war effort. Further, no one has gone overboard with the makeup, given Rathbone a distracting hair style and the script isn't too abusive to Watson. The remote Canadian village location also adds a certain timeless quality which while you couldn't mistake it for nowadays, it could easily be more period accurate for Holmes.

Verdict: Top tier Rathbone & Bruce. 

Review: The Rainmaker

The stakes in this feel lower than some of the other Grisham adaptations. But that's resulted in a more nuanced (although still occasionally implausible) film.

Damon's earnest newbie lawyer is perfectly balanced by DeVito's rather more cynical hack.  Voight makes for a good adversary.

Unusually, for these movies it finds time to weave in at least one secondary narrative.

Having watched a run of these long courtroom dramas now, I'm struck by Grisham's confidence in ordinary people doing the right thing.

Verdict: One of the more intelligent adaptations. 

Review: A Time to Kill

Another Grisham courtroom drama and it doesn't shy away from controversial topics as it deals with racism and revenge killing.  Likely, also a step up in terms of cost compared to some of the others.

As a story it's an absorbing if overwrought one as one brutal act risks escalating into a feud combined with race war.  The act which kicks it all off also made it a difficult watch for me and I'm not sure I would have chosen it had I known.

The cast are good good in this, with McConaughey showing early ability to portray complex roles and be the core of a movie.

It's odd seeing Jackson with hair and Spacey in a movie at all now.

Verdict: Good, but probably a bit overlong.