The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp. Michael Powell. 1943.

So the question being posited here is, I guess: How do you make a lighthearted farce while simultaneously making a propaganda piece about the army? The solution is pretty ingenious: Make the framing story be about a contemporary army exercise, and have the main section of the movie be about the generals’ antics in previous wars.

I want to like this. It plays into all myths about Britishness: Everybody acts as if they are Jungian archetypes. It tries so hard to be amiable and silly, poking fun at everything it depicts. But it doesn’t work for me. Everything moves so slowly. The repartee is ponderous instead of zipping.

I understand what it’s made to do, and it’s quite likely that this is just the thing to keep the British spirits up in 1943, which also explains the length of the thing: A proper night out.

Hmmm… Oh! The gummint didn’t like the movie, because there are some sympathetic German characters in it. And:

The film provoked an extremist pamphlet, The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp, by “right-wing sociologists E. W. and M. M. Robson”, members of the obscure Sidneyan Society, which proclaimed it “A highly elaborate, flashy, flabby and costly film, the most disgraceful production that has ever emanated from a British film studio.”

Wow. Well, that makes me like it more. Hm… and the last half, which is barely funny at all, is really good. And when we get back to the framing story, that’s suddenly brilliant.

Unbreakable. M. Night Shyamalan. 2000.

Well, this is odd:

I don’t think a single line there is correct? That’s kinda special. (Well, OK, the “per year” thing might be true, and if you divide that by the number of days, you probably get to the “every day” number.)

But why?

Well, OK, this is Shyamalan, so it’s probably all part of the inevitable twist.

I Willis still the dead guy from the previous movie? OOPS SPOILERS Or is his son dead this time?

Again with the Shyamalan, this is a movie I’ve managed to avoid watching, but it’s a movie that’s so part of popular culture that I know that Willis is playing a super-hero before starting to watch it. So as with The Sixth Sense, I’m sitting here wondering whether people are supposed to not understand that he’s a super-hero already? What with the title “Unbreakable” and the surviving the train crash etc, and that’s going to be the twist at the end or something else?

It’s not an idea way to watch a movie.

It does pick up when Samuel L. Jackson shows up.

I wonder who they got to make the super-hero artwork. It sucks.

Oh, there’s the twist.

Kin. Jonathan & Josh Baker. 2018.

So what’s this then? I basically buy anything that’s sci-fi, so I’m guessing that this is… that?

This is apparently based on a short movie, and I thought that this had to be a low budget movie. But imdb says that it had a $30M budged (at bombed, hard, at the box office). So perhaps there’s some fun stuff coming, because the start is rather dreary.

I think I kind of see what the directors are going for: Mixing gritty drama (ex-cons, loan sharks, etc) with family drama with sci-fi and hoping that something interesting will come out of it. That doesn’t happen. The actors are flailing, getting all their chops from watching reruns of The Sopranos. Everything has been colour-graded into grey and beige. The script has a humour bypass.

I laughed out loud at the “character development” scene in the middle of the movie. Instead of the protagonist going “you’re not my father; you were never there for me when I grew up” (which is the standard phrase to develop character in these movies), instead he said “me and dad… we were never there for each other”. (The father’s dead at this point OOPS SPOILERS you see, so they had to phrase it that way.)

That almost made me like this study in tedium, but no.

WHAT DID THEY USE THE $30M ON! I’m guessing 29.9M went to James Franco hamming his way through his impression of Fort Apache, The Bronx. I guess it’s nice that somebody had fun.