Nick Bryan

movies

BEST OF 2014 – Podcasts, Films, Music

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Right, 2014 is one week and a few Christmas crackers away from ending, so it’s time for bloggers to work out their Favourite [THING] Of [YEAR] lists. I am no exception, especially as I’ve hardly reviewed anything for ages and kinda miss it.

So, exactly as I did last year, I’ve broken my enjoyment down into a series of headings. In this first effort, we’ll tackle the podcasts, movies and music. One of those segments will be much, much longer than the other two.

Podcasts

Last year’s favourite podcasts, The Bugle and House To Astonish, both experienced erratic schedules in 2014, due to John Oliver’s new TV show and a presenter having a baby respectively. I think this proves conclusively the destructive nature of my love. (Although The Bugle produced some excellent episodes in the last few weeks, since afore-mentioned TV show went off air.)

Still – this clears the way for some newcomers on the scene. Firstly, yes everyone, I too listened to Serial, and quite enjoyed it. Sagged a bit in the middle for me, but I thought they provided a more convincing non-ending than I ever expected them to. I’ve watched true-crime-based films and documentaries before and judged Serial as another of that genre, albeit in a new medium. Seemed to stand up well.

Best newcomer for me personally, though, was Rachel And Miles X-Plain The X-Men. If a charming, funny, affectionately-poking-fun look back at the X-Men’s labyrinthine comic book history appeals to you, this podcast nails the pitch. So good, I signed up for their Patreon campaign. Their weekly YouTube reviews of current X-Men books are worth watching too.

Over in the weird-comedy section, the very, very funny ManBuyCow podcast put out the latter half of their second series at the start of 2014, hopefully 2015 will see series 3. The theme tune alone is worth listening for.Lastly, and most topically, both Tea and Jeopardy (the silly-but-fun scifi/fantasy books discussion show with Emma Newman) and Daniel Ruiz Tizon (South London’s master of melancholy) put out daily Advent Calendar shows during December, and both have been great in their own ways, exploring festivity and helping us all build towards Christmas

.I also attended the recording of the Daniel Ruiz Tizon Is Available Bumper Christmas Annual last night, wrapping up a good year for him as he took his show from podcast to Resonance FM, but kept on chronicling the small victories and defeats that band together to make up our lives. You might be able to hear me laughing in the background throughout the annual and saying something about Doctor Who towards the end. Looking forward to seeing what Daniel does in 2015.

Movies

Okay, this is going to be short, especially if we restrain it to viewed films released during 2014. It’s basically just the two Marvel movies (Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and The Lego Movie, all of which were very good, broad adventures with a unique flavour.

If I had to put them in an order, I’d say Guardians just edges out Lego for the top spot, but if you’ve any interest in those films and haven’t yet seen them, definitely rectify that. They all entertain and emote with balanced skill.

I also caught up on some late-2013 movies recently: Frozen and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, both of which were enjoyable, engrossing adventures. Catching Fire perhaps suffers a little from middle-of-trilogy-setting-up-for-last one syndrome, but they did inherit that issue from the book.

Frozen, meanwhile, aside from that very catchy song, is almost painfully likable and does interesting things with standard Disney tropes. Could’ve maybe used a few more memorable songs aside from Let It Go, but the story still held me regardless.

Music

I’ve mostly tuned out of current music, but I bought a few current releases this year – new Elbow album The Taking Off And Landing Of Everything was definitely much better than their last one, including a few songs that made me feel properly sad/uplifted as only they can.

I also listened to the new Taylor Swift album 1989, mostly to see what the fuss was about, and found it a fun hour of pop. After a few stern Twitter recommendations, I went back and tried Red, her previous one, and yes, that’s the country-catchy stuff. It stayed on rotation much longer.

New Weezer album Everything Will Be Alright In The End turned out to be an addictive collection of fun-but-not-stupid indie-rock, and no-one was more surprised than the band’s own fanbase. If you used to like Weezer and drifted away, the new one strikes a good balance between memorable choruses and genuine emotion. I especially like the songs Cleopatra and Da Vinci, but other people have different favourites, and it’s probably a good sign that there are enough high quality songs on the record for these arguments to exist.

Also played Weird Al Yankovic’s Mandatory Fun for a while to great enjoyment, although like many parody albums, it got old eventually.

Lastly, as with the movies, I also discovered some 2013 music belatedly – primarily CHVRCHES album The Bones Of What You Believe and Nocturnes by Little Boots. Both smooth, driving, haunting music and great for writing to, I’ve found. There’s a song on The Bones Of What You Believe that very much is the theme song of the fantasy novel I’ve just finished, to me. And I hardly ever have those kind of thoughts.

Right – probably two more posts to follow in this series, Books & Comics and Top Ten TV, same as last year. I’ll attempt to get both out before 2014 dies, although one of them may slip and I can only apologise if so. Gotta see the last episodes of Doctor Who, Agents of SHIELD and Homeland before I can do TV, for starters.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past – “Open Mouth. Insert Wolverine.”

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This week, I went to see X-Men: Days of Future Past, a movie attempting to properly fire the X-Engine back up for their cut of that sweet Avengers money. There are millions of characters in the X-Cupboard, after all, and they were among the first entrants in the current run of super-movies.

So, hell, do a comeback, why not. But, oddly, this isn’t a reboot or straight continuation of the excellent X-Men: First Class prequel. Instead, they’re bringing back cast and director from the first two films and mashing everything together into an epic time travel story.

Wow. That’s so comic book. I’m totally on-board. But will it be a good movie?

WARNING: Full spoilers throughout. And the ending is impressively weird, so if you’ve somehow avoided ruining it for this long, I’d keep going until you see it.

X-Men: Second Class?

Despite the returning of the Halle Berry/Patrick Stewart timeline dominating most of the promotion, this is far more a sequel to X-Men: First Class than older X-Movies in plot terms. However, thanks to the higher budget and return of Bryan Singer as director, the movie feels more like the old early-2000s efforts. It’s a strange mish-mash, and I occasionally missed the less actiony character focus of First Class, but the driving plot keeps things moving, and I was never bored. Manages a more serious tone than the Marvelvengers movies without seeming dour.

As you may gather, there are a lot of characters in this movie. So many, to be honest, a lot of them don’t get much to do. It’s particularly frustrating seeing Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart up there again, but without space to shine. Anna Paquin apparently had her entire subplot cut – I suspect the director’s cut DVD of this film will be a good one. But really the old cast are just there to jack up the stakes for the First Class section of the plot.

Still, we get Peter Dinklage as a villain – puts a lot into a small role – along with some impressive Sentinel effects. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy have intense moments, as does Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique. Future-X-Men (the new characters, rather than the returning cast) get cool fight-power-demo opportunities too, even if they stop short of developing personalities. As everyone says, the Quicksilver bit is great.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Wolverine

And Wolverine, yes, he is there. Central to the film for cash-based reasons, yet so inessential that Magneto literally wraps him in metal and tosses him into a river with twenty minutes to go, where he stays for the whole final showdown. I can’t bring myself to get internet-furious about this, as Hugh Jackman is very charismatic and watchable in the role still, but nor can I pretend it doesn’t feel a bit perfunctory.

Still, manipulating events in service of the franchise is hardly new in these movies, and at least it doesn’t derail the story itself much.

Indeed, shoving Wolverine centre-stage just because he’s popular is precisely the sort of thing the comics have been doing for years, and you don’t see me ditching them. Between the multi-character-cramming, the plot that demands a decent understanding of past movies and the straight-faced delivery of ridiculous codenames, this is one of the most comic-booky superhero films I’ve seen in a while. It manages to feel like a single movie rather than a TV episode, but still does a lot of shifting bits around the X-Men game board. Ambitious considering we’re talking about a series which began over a decade ago.

(And again, I’m not complaining. Love me a good superhero comic.)

One More Days of Future Past?

The most superhero-comic thing in this film is the ending, though – and this is where I do real spoilers, so last chance to turn away.

Although it’s not the whole point of the movie (which is good), a major effect of this time-screwing is to somehow erase the events of X-Men: The Last Stand from history, restoring the school and several dead characters to life.

Now, that movie was awful and pointlessly destructive, I have no problem with this, but it’s always a risk making this your big ending as it skates close to being self-indulgent. Fortunately there’s enough meat to the story for this to just draw a laugh.

Also, it makes the meta-narrative of the movie great fun: director Bryan Singer reaching back in time to stop the X-Men movie he didn’t direct from happening. Bryan Singer is Wolverine. Excellent.

Avatar – Belated Review

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Finally saw Avatar a week ago. However, my brief attempts to interest ‘proper’ blogs in a review didn’t go well, as the movie is now over two months old. So I ended up writing this piece for Dorkadore, focusing on its massive financial success (albeit with a few review-esque snippits).
However, I review things out of love, not just as a “job”. So I wrote a straight review of Avatar and am posting it here for the entertainment of anyone who may care.

(Notes: Yes, some points are repeated across the two pieces. And yes, a few small spoilers are contained within.

NICK REVIEWS AVATAR AFTER EVERYONE ELSE

The James Cameron-masterminded sci-fi epic, Avatar, has been out for a couple of months now. The build-up happened, filmgoers got excited, then readied themselves for an anticlimax, and finally felt slightly disappointed when reviews came out and were positive but not spectacular.

Despite all of that, it has ended up becoming the most successful film of all time. Nearly everyone has ended up seeing it in some form, even if only because their friends were going. Which is what happened to me yesterday.

I hadn’t bothered with it until now, because… well, I don’t like hard sci-fi, I can’t stand elves and I disliked most of Titanic intensely. But, you know, it’s the most successful film of all time. I don’t like to feel left out.

Fortunately, Avatar is to hard sci-fi what Emmanuelle is to hard porn. All the same parts are there, but they never get used in sufficient detail to qualify. The ‘avatar’ technology itself, easily the most interesting concept in the film, is skimmed over a tad, in favour of the more conventional culture clash-morality tale-love story involving the (concealed) white man among the noble savages.

Which is frustrating for those of us of the dork persuasion, but I am not convinced we’re the target audience here. Cameron may have included a swathe of sci-fi trappings to differentiate his film from Pocahontas, but this is definitely a film for the movie-going masses. If he’d spent the entire time delving into the intricacies of body-swapping, the record-busting box office figures would probably not have happened.

Not to mention, the story isn’t entirely the point either. Or rather, it is, but only to provide a setting for some lovely visuals. And they are gorgeous, make no mistake. Cameron’s vision of the multi-coloured alien world of Pandora is amazingly realised here, and once again manages to draw in the viewer, even as they moan about plot predictability.

So, yes, even though the plot is mostly predictable, the dialogue sometimes groan-worthy and, yes, ‘unobtanium’ is a horrific name for a rare and valuable element, you can see why it has done well. It may not be anything ground-breaking, but it’s a simple, lush modern-day fable. It was nearly three hours long, yet I was rarely bored. And if nothing else, I’d rather watch this again than Titanic any day.