I know I said that I’d have exciting things to say given that I actually had some time off this week. What I did instead was sleep. A lot. I been catching around ten, eleven hours a night. I was the gym every day, I wrote a little and watched some fun films and some homework films and played more video games than I’ve had the chance to in a while. I cut real loose.
People online be getting all sniffy. ‘I wanna watch A Quiet Place in cinemas,’ they say, ‘but teens and phones and I can’t trust them to be quiet when the film’s on. So I won’t.’ Ah, suck it up, stop being so precious and go see the goddamn movie. It’s pretty good. For what it’s worth I caught an evening screening, opening weekend, fairly full with a younger audience and everyone in our theatre were locked in from the start. Once the film make it clear what it’s doing you’ve not really any choice, it’s get in or get out.
Ghost Stories as a movie finds itself in a sticky predicament. The play, also written and directed by Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman is presented as an investigation, partly this paranormal investigator looking over the most mysterious cases of his life, but also an investigation into horror tropes. It’s particularly concerning older horror flicks I guess, those from the sixties and seventies, the B movies and the things that calcified into tropes over that period say about us as a people.
Can someone tell me how to do twitter?
Young queer lives can be so fuckin messy. You often only realise it later. You remember that loose mix of outcast kids that were about at school? The goths, nerds, emos and just general weirdos who generally just hung out with each other because they didn’t make up a large enough group in thei own circles. Yeah, that was me. You’d be surprised, or not, by how many of us has came out after leaving. As if our fragile presence was both supporting and constricting.
You know what? The robots in this film are BIG. I don’t quite know what it is, they certainly aren’t better realised or animated than megastructures in other films. I weren’t even watching it in 3D, lol who even does that anymore, but however it is that you generate that elusive concept of bigness, Steven S. DeKnight pumps that through every frame. Like, the ‘exterior’ scenes are often pretty wonky, the lighting is off, the characters awkwardly composited onto the backgrounds. But way off in the back there there’s a big metal fella out of focus and despite the artifice there’s a little part of my brain still going, ‘Wow, so big tho.’
There’s a scene about midway through when Ben Mendelsohn’s, sell out, stuffed shirt, businessman bad guy is laying out his evil plan. After they take control of The Oasis, the virtual reality game that has become the bedrock of society in the ruined and desolate world of the 2040s, they’ll jam it full of advertising. In a cute little note, they throw up graphics reminiscent of crappy, free-to-play mobile games. ‘We estimate’, he says, ‘that we can fill roughly eighty percent of the visual field with ads before the player will have a seizure.
