Watching - June 2025

Hot Pursuit (2015)

Slightly ho-hum buddy movie, showing its age with some clichés (particularly about women) that I hope wouldn't get the time of day now. But funny in places, and passed the time.

The Time Traveller's Wife (2009)

I read the book about two and a half years ago and enjoyed it very much, so I was keen to see what the adaptations are like. There's a more recent TV series but I'm unlikely to get Apple TV for a while, so when this came up on Prime I was interested. It's a two hour film so of course it misses on much of the content and subtlety of the book - it can't show the internal thoughts of the characters and there's a limit to what it can show. So instead of a moving meditation on the effects of long term illness on a relationship (in my opinion, anyway) you get a sort of thriller/romance. The film brings to life some scenes well - Henry's despair at suddenly being transported to random places was much clearer in pictures than on the page - but struggles in others, particularly the ones with Henry as an adult and Clare as a child, where it's harder to ignore the slightly problematic nature of the relationship. Still, a sweet film and a nice way to pass the time.

Maestro (2023)

While I'm usually not very good at working out the underling themes of films, I think I've got this one. This is ostensibly a biopic of Leonard Bernstein, but really it's about what an amazing talent Bradley Cooper is. It's fatally infatuated with its own cleverness of direction and emotional truths, when actually it's just a posh TV melodrama, stuffed with clichés (ooh look, Bernstein is smoking in every scene! What a original, subtle and clever directorial choice!), over-theatrics - cue the Oscar nomination scene! - and poor dialogue; in one case, Cooper (did we mention that he wrote the script as well as directing and starring - blimey, what an amazing talent, eh?) has Bernstein say he "misread the room" ... in the 70s? Come on. And don't get me started on the startlingly poor choice to put Cooper in Jewface. I get that biopics are difficult - you're trying to fit decades of a real and messy life into a convenient two hour story arc - but this failed badly, in my opinion, and I was already counting the minutes to the end after about twenty minutes in. Somehow I finished it, but I couldn't get involved. 

Somewhere In Time (1980)

I was reading around the subject of The Time Traveller's Wife and this was mentioned - a little-known, slightly hokey and very sentimental romance starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour film that features time travel. Mostly forgotten now (apart from by a small but very enthusiastic fan club), there's nothing particularly special about it and if it wasn't for the big names (Christopher Plummer also features) it would be a typical TV movie - and indeed it effectively was, as apparently it got a new lease of life on early cable. So, nothing special - but I still enjoyed it more than Maestro.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (season 3, 2015-2016)

My kids are finally shaming me into watching more of this, since I haven't made much progress since last year! Is it worth it? Well, I enjoyed it, but a whole series is something like the same duration as four films, and that's a lot of time to spend with the same characters. I'll give myself a bit of a break before the next season.

F1 The Movie (2025)

A summer blockbuster about Formula One, on the biggest screen in Southampton, and with sound that shakes your seat - what's not to like? I really enjoyed the whole experience (even the fly that caught in the projector didn't annoy me); the action scenes are spectacular, there's laughs and emotional bits and some sort of redemption. The plot? Well, it's tempting to describe it as essentially a re-run of Top Gun: Maverick: old hand is called out of retirement for one last hurrah, and shows those upstart young 'uns what a real driver can do, by disregarding the rules blah blah blah. Brad Pitt's good (not as good as Tom Cruise, though), but I was pleased to hear so many British voices - this is true to F1 life, of course, but it wouldn't have surprised me if Hollywood decided that all these weird foreign accents would be too difficult for Americans to understand. But overall, although the (mostly ex-) F1 fan in me had a great time, it's hard not consider the film as a whole as pretty insubstantial, and I suspect that anyone not interested in the sport would find it a bit of a yawn (a view articulately and, I'd say, accurately, argued in Nicholas Barber's review on the BBC)

Clueless (1995)

So, anyway - it's, like, the 30th anniversary of this iconic teen romcom. And it's being re-released (briefly) into cinemas this weekend, so what better time to watch it again? At home, though - I considered going out, but it's only being shown on the smallest screens, so it would have been a bit pointless. It's still peerless, even if you could point at some moments and call them dated.