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Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
2020 | Adventure, Fantasy
Gal Gadot: stunning (2 more)
Movie with real heart
Excellent cinematography
WW dot Well Worth Waiting for Gadot
The long delayed release of the Wonder Woman sequel has finally happened, and it is well worth waiting for.

Gal Gadot is fabulous as the Amazonian beauty (and then some) with Chris Pine reprising his role from the first thing. (Of all the WTF moments of 2020 trailers, this was top of the list.... just HOW? A McGuffin is involved, but no spoilers here!).

In brief, Patty Jenkins delivers a popcorn blockbuster than has legs (over and above Gadot's perfect specimens!): the Goblet-of-Fire-Potteresque pre-title sequence is thrilling and engaging. And the story builds cleverly through the first half of the movie. Above all, there is a heap of HEART involved here.... this is not your run of the mill supervillain showdown flick. In fact, it's a movie with TWO villain (normally a doom-laden premise for this reviewer... "Spider Man 3".... shudder), but here it really works well.

Sure, there is a requirement for a suspension of belief, but - hey - it's a DC movie. On a slight downside, the second half of the movie - for me -unfortunately doesn't quite live up to the promise of first half, blending "Bruce Almighty" with "Superman 2" and rather over-egging the pudding.

But in a morass of B-pics, this sequel is one that is gorgeous to look at (Matthew Jensen's cinematography is superb), gorgeous to listen to (an epic score by Hans Zimmer) and is genuinely engaging. There's also a nice vein of humour running through it... when Kristen Wiig is in a park, a rough sleeper on a bench is reading "Waiting for Godot".... or is it "Waiting for Gadot"??
 It's such a brief scene, I wasn't sure!

Although I DEPLORE the Warner Brother's decision to release their material in parallel to streaming, here is a movie that is WELL WORTH you getting out to the cinema to see... assuming that you can find a UK cinema open (I saw this in the excellent Showcase De Luxe in Southampton).

Oh, and if you are someone who dives for the exit at the first title... resist... there is an excellent mid-title sequence featuring a wonderful cameo for us older folks!

(Please check out the full graphical review on bob-the-movie-man, which will be going live shortly. Thanks).
  
The Conjuring (2013)
The Conjuring (2013)
2013 | Horror
Have the exact same opinion from when I first saw it, it's fun and has its share of scary moments but holy hell is it also exhausting and conventional. Very handsomely made with a lot of visual personality (it's impossible for Wan to make a bad film simply because of how damn good they look) but otherwise short on nuance and running about fifteen minutes too lengthy. I mean this was practically made for normies to love but otherwise in terms of its acclaim even at the time, I don't really get it? I can't stress enough how much this did for modern horror as we know it and I of course applaud it for that, but I think most people were just shocked that a high-grossing studio horror movie could be shot and acted well back then imo. Putting aside the fact that they're real-life bullshit artists, the Warrens depicted here are just about as bland as can be - for me this whole affair just doesn't have the verve or the flavor of Wan's 𝘐𝘯𝘮đ˜Șđ˜„đ˜Șđ˜°đ˜¶đ˜Ž. His playfulness and the entire cast's conviction help ultimately sell this for me even in spite of its austerity; the moments when this feels like a rustic haunted house joyride make it work but the rest it of mostly *strains* man come on this shit is so beyond familiar territory even by this point. Fine, but could have been better.
  
Rescuing Norah (Corrupted #1)
Rescuing Norah (Corrupted #1)
J. W. Ashley | 2020 | Contemporary, Romance
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
116 of 200
Kindle
Rescuing Norah ( Corrupted book 1)
By J.W. Ashley

Sometimes the people we think we know, turn out to be someone else entirely.For Norah, running into a handsome young benefactor had never been in the cards. After being raised in shelters, she never expected to meet her own prince charming. So when Clayton Matthews turned his attention on her, she never looked back.But as the years pass, Norah's seemingly perfect life begins to unravel, revealing a much more sinister side to the man she's promised to marry.After losing his job on a technicality, Harley is determined to redeem himself in the eyes of the Seattle PD.Taking down one of Seattle's biggest crime bosses would be a damn good way to start, but as a Mercenary working for an off-the-books firm he's got his work cut out for him.On the night he's set to present his evidence, everything changes, and he finds himself on the run with none other than his target's beautiful fiancee.And as the game of cat and mouse turns deadly, Harley finds himself torn between duty and the intense attraction he feels for a woman he should hate.Rescuing Norah is the first in a series of intertwined suspense novels where the threat gets bigger, the sparks burn hotter, and the only thing standing in the way of victory is the bulls-eye painted on their backs.



This was a bit of a surprise for as I didn’t expect it to be as good as it was! Full of action a little romance and a very solid storyline! It definitely had you rooting for the good guys and booing the baddies. Loved the little twist with Norah and Gerry very sweet!
  
40x40

James Wood recommended Falling Awake in Books (curated)

 
Falling Awake
Falling Awake
Alice Oswald | 2016 | Fiction & Poetry
(0 Ratings)
Book Favorite

" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."

Source
  
Magic Born (The Guardian #2)
Magic Born (The Guardian #2)
Rayanne Haines | 2018 | Paranormal, Romance
8
8.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
57 of 250
Kindle
Magic Born ( The Guardians book 2)
By Rayanne Haines

Once read a review will be written via Smashbomb and link posted in comments

Maria Del Voscova is a powerful witch with a past. When she’s asked to become a member of the elite Guardians she knows she can’t risk sharing the truth about her messed-up family. But we don’t always get what we want. Sometimes, we don’t always know what we want.

Though Mar absolutely knows she doesn’t want Neeren, King of the Parthen. She alone sees the darkness in him and it reminds her too much of the past. She knows better than to fall for his stoic, tortured soul façade.

She’s training to be a Guardian, a shadow; tasked with keeping the balance between good and evil in the world. It’s what she wants—to be better than her family was.

But the past has a way of catching up to Mar and the future has a morbid sense of humor. On her first mission, she’s kidnapped by the enemy she’s been running from her entire life. Thankfully the guardians look after their own. As it turns out, so does Neeren.

As Mar finds herself caught between the past and the future; between blood and bond; between the light and the dark, she realizes her only chance at surviving may be in trusting a man who is the most dangerous of them all.


This was so much better than the first book! I love Nareen and Maria’s story. Poor Maria I think everything the author could possibly think of was thrown at this witch and she still fought through Everything. Although I did like the 1st book this one just had more fight to it. I’m looking forward to reading about Quinn and her part to play in all this.
  
The Fly (1958)
The Fly (1958)
1958 | Classics, Horror
As the wife (Patricia Owens) of "murdered" scientist played by Al (David) Hedison, is maniacally hunting for a fly with a white head, both the police and his brother (Vincent Price) are trying to uncover the truth behind his death, which seems by all accounts to be the work of his wife.

But as she recounts the tale of how they both ended up embroiled in the hydraulic press, one under it and one at the controls, the plot thickens and a Sci Fi classic is born. Hedison's scientist has invented the teleporter and during one of his human tests on himself, a fly enters the chamber with him and the pair are fused: The fly's head and left arm are now a part of Hedison, whilst his head and arm are buzzing around as part of a common house fly.

The film makes an effort to offer some real science, though be it toned down and simplified by today's standards, but it is easy to feel that this is a naive movie at face value, if you forget that in 1958, teleportation was a fantastical concept, but mid 60's science fiction such as Star Trek would make this much more matter of fact and play around with science more freely.

But by the time of the remake in 1986, David Cronenberg was gifted with an audience who understood these ideas and offered a more comprehensive take on what might have happened, in this case, gene splicing and DNA replication, with the cells using the corrupted hybrid DNA code as a basic every time the cells replicate, a process which would eventually turn Jeff Goldblum's man in to a man/fly hybrid monster!

But here, whilst almost all of this is present, it is simplified for an audience unprepared and unarmed with the scientific knowledge with would be more common in the 1980's, thanks to films like this. Here, Hedison's man/fly is changing mentally into a fly the longer he has the mutation, leading him to commit assisted suicide in order to prevent his work from been replicated, fearing the consequences.

This is ground breaking stuff. A Sci-Fi classic which spends most of its running time building an intriguing, intelligent suspenseful thriller, with little time given over to the eponymous Fly itself, but it is omnipresent, chilling as is the reveal of the scientist's deformation in the final act, the change in personality and loving relationship with his tragic wife.

And that penultimate scene in which the white-headed fly is revealed to us with Hedison's head and arm as it/he is about to be devoured by a spider in his web, must be one of the most chilling scene's of the genre. Simple, effective and not for the special effects or gore, but for the concept, one which leaves you thinking and considering what you have just witnessed.

What would you do if you saw a fly with a human head? A human with a fly's head? Creepy...