Well, this is very modern… by that I mean that everything’s colour-graded to match all the greenscreen they’re flying in, and that also means that most of the scenes are pretty dark, since that makes matching elements up easier.

I.e., make even the real sets and costumes look bad enough that they don’t look out of place with the bad CGI.

This seems to make references to stuff I don’t really know? I mean, it might all be in-film fiction, but Gawain sounds familiar… Er… I mean, I’ve read Prince Valiant. Knights of the Round Table and stuff? I dunno. Is it something they make poor American children learn in school?

I’m already incredibly bored.

Oops:

The Green Knight honors and deconstructs its source material in equal measure, producing an absorbing adventure that casts a fantastical spell.

That sounds awful! Why did I buy this?

These fifteen minutes have probably been the most boring I’ve ever endured watching a movie ever. I’ve literally died of boredom. It’s like somebody has taken Game of Thrones and boridified it.

Even more!

OK, so Gawain is a dick, and also a total moron? I guess that’s something.

No! It took forever!

Nice CGI.

Nice colour grading.

Everything seems to take forever.

Oh god. It’s 129 minutes long. I’m not sure I can take being this bored that long.

Oh yeah, the doofus needs a CGI animal companion.

They haven’t quite figured out whether to model its movements on a dog or a ferret?

O my ghod. There’s still 45 minutes left!?

Man, that’s a bad CGI fox.

It’s even worse when it talks!

SUCH IRONIC

I’m guessing that the director wants to make fun of the entire idea of “heroic quests”, or perhaps express “I hate doing homework” or something. But surely you can do that and still make something less tedious than this.

The very end was kinda clever, but that doesn’t excuse the previous 126 minutes, so:

The Green Knight. David Lowery. 2021. ⚀

This rom-com has gotten quite a bit of attention the last few days… and I can totally see why. It’s a snappy, well-written rom-com, and that’s so rare these days.

No lines (so far) that are actually hilarious so far, but they keep coming so fast that that’s OK.

OK, now it’s even funnier.

It’s so… breezy and well made.

Boo hiss!!!

Things get a bit more serious, and I’m not sure that works as well as the zippy frothy scenes at the start?

I mean, it’s not bad, but…

The performances are so much fun.

Oh, I didn’t think about this before this scene — is Uma Thurman old enough to be his mother? *pauses movie* OK, he’s born in 1991 (but is playing a 23-year-old, I guess?), and Thurman is born in 1970… Yeah, I guess it’s possible. She’s really young to be a president, though, but I guess she’s playing somebody older…

It’s a bit of Fry!

Anyway, the film is a bit uneven? The start is fantastic, and then it’s a bit bumpy, and then the ending is amazing! I laughed, I cried, etc etc.

So I’m going with:

Red, White and Royal Blue. Matthew López. 2023. ⚅

It’s Cowboy Curtis!

And Bill! Or Ted! I forget!

Nice desert.

It’s Bergerac! I mean Lovejoy!

Nice fridging! I bet that’s gonna make Lovejoy all vengeful and stuff.

Reviewers are always saying how realistic the fight scenes are, and they totally aren’t. But they’re fun to watch — a lot more fun than, say, Marvel fight scenes are. They’re very theatrical and dance like.

And extremely silly. Did I mention silly?

But then again, the entire premise is too, so it all adds up.

As with the previous movies, this looks really good. Nice saturated colours and dramatic scenery.

They ramp up the stupid even more in this movie — which I don’t mind. I do mind that they take a half hour time out to do some character building (i.e., talk about fambly (it’s all about fambly, after all)). It’s really tedious.

But even that looks good.

Have they used more CGI in this than in previous movies? Some things, like the Arc de triomphe looks really… fake. The cars don’t really move like cars do.

In general, it looks more like a traditional action movie (and by traditional, I mean “from 2015”), where they don’t bother to go on sets but just greenscreens everything, even stuff that would be easier to just shoot on location. To take a shot at random, the above one — it looks a bit unreal. And there’s been way more of those “uhm…?” sets in this one than the earlier movies.

Well, it’s better than the third movie, but there’s a lot of dead air in the middle of this one. The plot is the silliest of all the John Wick movies, and that says a lot, but that’s fine.

John Wick Chapter 4. Chad Stahelski. 2023. ⚃