I saw BLACK PANTHER yesterday and thought it was great – easily the most intense Marvel movie and thoroughly enjoyable. It's superbly acted by the main cast and feels very different to anything else from the MCU so far (with the possible exception of Captain America: Civil War), probably because the subject matter is so dark and to do with survival and global politics, more akin to a DC film like one of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy to something like Ant-Man. It's a marvellous piece of filmmaking (and something even more interesting if you were to analyse it for its race and gender politics) and a film I hope to see again the cinema before buying and watching at home.
On Wednesday, I went to see THE SHAPE OF WATER with absolutely no expectations other than having loved just about everything that Guillermo del Toro has previously directed. It's a mesmerising film, beautifully designed and with a career best performance from Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones showing why he is one of the most underappreciated and unknown actors around – there are few people who can do what he does with his body – and the entire ensemble cast, from Michael Shannon to Octavia Spencer and Richard Jenkins are brilliant. It's such a visually rich film with so many details in every frame that it will stand up to repeated viewings because there is much to take in. The soundtrack is similarly engrossing due to the clever mix of diegetic and non-diegetic music.
The only downside was the projector wasn't properly calibrated and was showing the film in the wrong aspect ratio, meaning a subtitled scene with Russian dialogue had no subtitles because they were off the bottom of the screen. (Someone went out and told a member of staff and the problem was rectified shortly afterwards.) Despite that, I absolutely adored it and I'm going back to watch it today.
Last night, I watched the three NAKED GUN films. It's been many years since I saw any of them, possibly when I saw the third in the cinema way back in 1994 and it was surprising how many jokes I understood as an adult which I didn't as a child and how I still find the ridiculous puns and slapstick humour to be funny.
|