Films on Rum and Popcorn

Chain Reaction

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Morgan Freeman has been in a lot of films. Many good, many bad. It feels almost silly to use a Morgan Freeman film tag link to take us to a forgotten mid 90s action movie but when you see he’s co-starring with Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz… what more could you ask for?

I think it’s fair to say this is not any of them’s greatest cinematic piece but neither is it their worst. This is a competent, pacy thriller with some twists and turns. Weisz is a nery scientist (of course), Keanu is a baffled looking techy (of course) and Morgan Freeman is a wise and knowing gentleman (of course). Some kind of infinite energy source has been discovered. Cue goons, explosions, set-ups and chase sequences.

It’s decent. The worst you can really say about it is it hails from a action movie era when female characters were universally pathetic. Weisz is massively underused here and basically swings between looking scared or relieved for most of the film.

The Lego Movie

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Is this a good film? Surely not really. It’s definitely fun. And I think it’s probably better than it really has any right to be. Cash in crossovers from toys and games are pretty much universally awful. But this isn’t. Somehow, they managed to keep it just silly enough that it feels joyful and yet not so silly that it feels like a waste of your time. It’s a perfect plane movie.

And it has a cast of thousands of big name actors, which makes it a surprisingly useful film tag pick.

The Disaster Artist

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0100

A very good film tag entry! Though Alison Brie maybe didn’t have the biggest role in this one, she was certainly a central character and just look at the options for film tag out from here!

I don’t know how much sense this will make to anyone who hasn’t seen The Room. I imagine it’d still be an entertaining story but you’d definitely be missing something. The completely bonkers film project, mysteriously funded, full of terrible dialogue and worse sex scenes… it’s hard to describe it in a way that remotely does it justice. This film gets a lot of its laughs for free just by lifting scenes wholesale from The Room (the credits sequence side-by-side reshoots are incredible). Both Francos do great jobs as the leads, but its the reactions from cast and crew that really make this film - how weird must the real life experience have been?

Promising Young Woman

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100

A better one that we’ve had in a while in film tag. I’d read the description and feared it was going to be a hard and very heavy watch. The pre-credits scene does nothing to change that - leering creeps in a club argue over who’s going to take advantage of a drunk single woman. Thankfully, this the tone shifts a bit and moves towards a revenge-thriller, all the while hammering home the message that these men’s behaviour is very much not OK.

It’s a decent film, but after that first tonal shift, it never really went anywhere very unexpected. We’d pretty much predicted the plot after the first 20 minutes or so. Sure, there were some unpredictable details but nothing that you couldn’t sort of guess would happen. We spent much of the 2hr runtime wondering if it would throw us off but it never did. As such, I reckon it could probably have been trimmed down a bit - there’s probably a great 80 minute film in there somewhere.

The Great Gatsby

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Oh dear.

This has all the elements it should need - excellent source material, great cast, art-deco period detail - but has been so thoroughly Baz Luhrmanned that it feels like a bit of a slog. It’s far too long. Baz’s “desire to blend the music of the Jazz Age, associated with the 1922 setting of the story, with a modern spin” is pretty clumsy. Worst of all, though, is the lavish quantities of astonishingly bad CGI. It’ everywhere. Every external shot of the city or Gatsby’s castle. The car journeys. The water. It’s mind blowing that someone looked at the crummy computer rendering and thought “yeah, that’s good enough”. If you can’t do it on a computer, do it on a set!

Gangs of New York

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s another very long one. And I can’t say I enjoyed it an awful lot.

The story is suitably epic in nature, spanning the demise and rise of the Dead Rabbits gang of Irish immigrant New Yorkers in the 1860s. We have poor troubled Leonardo di Caprio butting heads with Daniel Day Lewis’ ’the butcher’ - an unrelentingly nasty, greasy, sneering gang leader. The period look and the grimy feel are done incredibly well, and it’s getting bits of the geography of New York filtered through the lens of mid-19th century rioters.

But? Well its long. Very long. And those impressively nasty, grimy characters? They just keep on being so. And on. And on. Whereas last week’s film tag, Cloud Atlas packed story after story into its nearly-three-hours, here Scorsese really only has one story to tell. I like a good bit of bloody violence and gratuitous cruelty, but was pretty tired of this by the time the end rolled around.

Cloud Atlas

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is an ambitious one. I feel like I’d have hated it in the cinema but did actually quite enjoy it at home.

In David Mitchell’s novel, which I remember really enjoying, the parallel stories are told in a pyramid-fashion: you start with the oldest, moving forwards in time and then it all cascades backwards again, until you finish up with the end of the oldest story. Someone decided (probably correctly) that this would feel a bit weird in film - too much like an anthology of separate stories - and instead has jumbled the stories all together. We cut from colonial-era shipping to future revolutions in New Seoul and back again. It’s a little disorientating but if you sit back and let it was over you its quite fun. The recurring cast, popping up again and again with face-altering prosthetics is great fun.

This was the Wachowskis’ next major project after the Matrix sequels and writing the screenplay for V for Vendetta, so I can sort of imagine how this felt a bit flat. It’s epic in scale but never really quite goes anywhere. I suspect this is something that a book handles much better - the sense that the journey was more important than the destination - but at the end of 3 hours of film you’re sort of left wondering what the point of it all was.

So yeah, ambitious, quite good fun, lots of silly costumes. Not bad.

Mickey Blue Eyes

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure this one was worth digging out to watch. It’s a light-hearted rom-com-with-mafia-boss-parents. I can just about imagine enjoying it on a listless afternoon at the cinema with a massive tub of popcorn. Or a post-pub video rental, which you mostly tak through…

Huge Grunt is a well-to-do auctioneer. His partner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, is a schoolteacher. But her dad? James Caan is a mob boss. And whilst the family (or, rather, The Family) welcome Hugh with open arms, they’re pretty soon getting him mixed up in all sorts of mob capers.

It’s a bit thin. Coming hot on the heels of The Godfather it was always going to be. But even so… eeesh.

The Godfather

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a classic. I’d never seen it. I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

First things, it’s a pretty enjoyable story that rattles along at a fair pace. It’s a long film but it doesn’t really feel like it, which is impressive. The first half (two-thirds?) is great. Marlon Brando’s weary Godfather, and then the tensions between cool-headed Tommy and angry Sonny are all gripping. Al Pacino’s return to assume the family throne lost me a bit though - the last chunk was still decent but never really grabbed me in the same way.

House of Gucci

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This was more enjoyable than it felt like it ought to be. The accents were grating, the characters mostly rich and unlikeable but … it had a certain charm. The first half, where we follow Adam Driver and Lady Gaga’s ascent into the Gucci business is much better than the messy second half which races through time increasingly quickly. Not that it should have been any longer.

American Fiction

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a clever one. It never loses sight of the point its making but never feels too heavy or didactic. A clever balance. The supporting cast are all great.

Poor Things

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Lanthimos strikes again! This is a ridiculously wild ride, full of a cast having an absolute ball. Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo are clearly having a great time, gurning and staggering around the dreamlike alternate world. I don’t think I’ve seen anything for a long time where I had so little clue what might happen next.

The Boy and the Heron

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Whisper it - has Ghibli made a film that is just too Ghibli? It’s beautiful, of course, and full of weird and wonderful creatures, of course, but the plot starts out as gently bonkers before descending into fully unhinged chaos. The second half is far too much like someone trying to tell you their dreams.

Zone of Interest

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Oof. Heavy stuff. There’s a lot to like about this film - the whole “it could be any of us” angle is very cleverly done, and the natural acting to the static cameras gives it a really unusual feel. There’s a little part of me that feels like I’d got the message from about 30mins in and that the rest didn’t really achieve a lot, but I’m quibbling here: it’s strong, powerful, memorable. Worth a watch.

#manhole