Much ado about nothing

It's been a bit of a dry patch in terms of movies the last couple of weeks; the Oscars have been and gone and as is customary I ignored them like the industry insider circle jerk that they inevitably are. Everyone got upset that a Netflix Original won Best Picture or Director or whatever because they released it on just enough cinema screens to count but not enough for non-subscribers to see it in droves. Spike Lee got upset because Green Book won and it's apparently more about the White guy learning to be a half decent human being than it is about the awesome black musician he's driving around the racist hot spots of early 20th Century America who was apparently not inspiring enough to actually make the movie about. Or so goeth the rumours anyway. I don't engage in that sort of office politics bullshittery so I just skipped it entirely as per usual. 

Seems like studios slow their release schedules down around the Oscars though, as if people can't handle watching movies at the same times as watching the self-congratulatory nonsense of the awards show. Let's face it though, we're really all just sat twiddling our thumbs waiting for Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame to come out and by all accounts it's not long now. The typical knuckle-dragging Meninist movement has already come out of the woodwork to denounce Captain Marvel as an awful movie, without of course even seeing it; if your manhood is threatened by the mere possibility that a female Super Hero (Super Heroine? Or does that sound to much like a really heavy duty opiate?) then I would suggest you might want to have a long think about your life choices up to this point. Then maybe crawl back up your own arses and let the rest of us get on with things. I mean, to be fair, it might not be a great movie. The trailer looks pretty good, but the law of averages states that at some point soon the MCU has to suffer another Thor: The Dark World. Rest assured though, if Captain Marvel fails to lands with audiences, I highly doubt it will be because it has a woman in the leading role.

Speaking of failing to land, we've been treated to the second, red band trailer for the new Hellboy outing that everybody wanted, but we wanted with Ron Perlman and Guillermo Del Toro. The first trailer, honestly, was a big ol' swing and a miss. Hellboy looks OK in the wide shots, but we get closer and realise he's a Thirty-Yard-Looker and the make up effects are much more ropey than you'd like. Every time Hellboy opens his mouth, he sounds like he's taken way too many shots to the head over the years (rumours of a deleted scene where he shoots himself in the chest so they can study the encephalitic damage to his brain are unsubstantiated) and if he's going to slur his way through the whole movie like that, it's going to be a real trudge to get through. What little humour they threw in doesn't really land and the God-awful "Mony Mony" cover that they've chosen to accompany the heavily censored violence is ill-advised at best. I don't watch Eastenders, but apparently the machine gun-toting granny is Mo and that is hilarious, I'm reliably informed. The new trailer does fair a little better. They've ditched Mony Mony for a blandly heavy version of Smoke on the Water which is a little more atmospheric but still reeks of uninspired. There is more action, great big demons traipsing about and Hellboy riding a dragon which is ok. Mila Jovovich continues to display her acting diversity by playing Mila Jovovich in a Slightly Different Dress but it's not another Resident Evil movie so let's just be thankful for small mercies. David Harbour does look the part, but he still doesn't look quite right and despite myself I couldn't help liking his comeback to the Blood Queen even though he does mumble a swear which is a little out of character. It's better, but there's a lingering feeling that no matter how good this movie is on it's own merits, it will never be Ron and Guillermo and that final movie in the trilogy that we were all after. I'm intrigued enough to go and watch it, but I can't say I'm particularly hopeful.

I'm still working my way though my "to-watch" list, which consists mainly of stuff I didn't get to see at the cinema when it came out. Upgrade is in there, a neat-looking techno-body horror from Leigh Wannell (who actually hasn't done some bad movies you know). He wrote Saw of course and will forever be know as the whiny guy in the bath but also managed to be the whiny guy sans-bath tub in Insidious so thankfully he's behind the camera not in front of it, presumably whining about surgical implants. Hotel Artemis is there too, a sort of assassin-based thriller with a decent under-current of dark humour. I still need to watch Equaliser 2, because the first one was a blast and I have no reason to expect anything other than that from the sequel. There's a couple of things at the cinema at the minute too: I haven't managed to see Alita: Battle Angel yet, the Lego Movie sequel is out so I guess I ought to pull my finger out and watch some movies. Beats trying to wade through the Flat Earth documentary on Netflix that I sincerely tried to watch and lasted all of about eight minutes before I was literally yelling at the screen. Aside from one guy claiming the Earth was clearly not spherical because he could see Seattle (I shit you not) it was the next guy up whose Brain Coach had convinced him that reciting all the US States in alphabetical order whilst bouncing golf balls on hammers in each hand would make him smarter. The moment he said "You know the dinosaurs were made up right?" with genuine sincerity, I almost launched the remote at the screen. Sadly, in my rage, I missed the ultimate vindication when the final moments of the documentary show a misguided experiment ostensibly designed to demonstrate how flat the Earth is, succinctly and pretty much irrefutably proving it is in fact curved. To quote: "That is interesting". Yeah it is, you pleb.