Watching - February 2023

Roxanne (1987)

The outfits and the music absolutely scream "80s" but the story is pretty timeless. I think this might have been the first Steve Martin film I saw. He's great in it but the obvious age difference between him and Daryl Hannah always bothered me. It doesn't stop it being a sweet film though.

Life on Mars (Series 1) (2006)

I first came across Life on Mars accidentally, via a free DVD in a newspaper or something. I didn't watch it on TV as it wasn't (and still isn't) really my usual sort of thing and anyway, with three very young kids I didn't have the time. But then I needed something to watch during the night while I was trying to get Z to sleep (at least, I assume it was him - I remember a very young baby!) so I tried it and was hooked. To start with, I think it was the re-creation of 70s Britain, an era I lived through but only sort of remember (I would have been about the same age as Sam Tyler, 4 or 5) that I found so evocative, and the juxtaposition of that with modern day sensibilities. But the action scenes are fun, and each episode is a kind of whodunnit which is fun too.

Life on Mars (Series 2) (2007)

More of the same - but when the original series was this good, why mess with it? Some of the characters become a little one-dimensional - Gene Hunt is always pissed off (magnificently so, but still), Ray Carling is always a sexist thug - and you start wondering whether any of the minor characters actually do anything at all other than sit around smoking, but overall it's still a great world to be in. Slowly developing through this series though is the idea, left more ambiguous in the first series, that Sam is in some sort of limbo world, from which he can only escape by betraying the people he's become friends with. Eventually this comes to a satisfying (albeit slightly unsettling, when you really think about it) conclusion. 

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

I'm struck again how Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc is so much more like Poirot than Kenneth Branagh's actual Poirot. The film is a bit silly and over-the-top but hugely entertaining.

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Unlike Pretty in Pink, this wasn't a disappointment when watching it again after all these years decades. It's an unusual film to be so well known, it seems to me: it feels like a play, with a lot of character study and little plot. But it's perfectly judged to appeal to teenagers.

Down With Love (2003)

Here's an odd film that wants to be an update of 50s/60s romcoms like Pillow Talk (from which it swipes most of its plot structure) while at the same time being a pastiche (or more generously, a tribute) of that style. As a result, it ends up being a bit too pleased with its own cleverness to convince and too contrived to fully entertain. The casting is a bit off too: Renée Zellweger spends too much time posing and Ewan McGregor isn't sleazy enough. Not really worth the time, if I'm honest.

Judy (2019)

I didn't mean to watch two Renée Zellweger films in a row but this doesn't really deserve comparison with the previous one. Without being a complete biopic of Judy Garland's life but by just zooming in on a couple of months late in her life, with occasional flashbacks to her early life as a child star, it manages to convey a sense of how exploited her life was, and how her only remaining solace is performing; not because that's what she loves but because it's all she's been left with. Zellweger is a revelation - almost unrecognisable as Garland and brilliantly capturing her mannerisms. The end is borderline mawkish but it worked for me. Very good.

Wednesday (2022)

We watched this series over the course of several weeks as a family. It's emo AF but entertaining and enough to keep me interested. Overall, it's not really my thing, but nice to share with the kids. What it did highlight was the very different ways we watch. K & Z are constantly chatting, taking the mickey out of things, looking at their phones, and yet still manage to follow what's going on. They'd have happily watched all eight episodes in one or two sittings. I, on the other hand, could only manage one episode at a time and I found that hard to take in because those flippin' kids would not stop talking! I'm feeling old.