Thursday Movie Picks: Super Long Titles

Dec 12, 2019

It’s Thursday again! It’s actually Thursday whilst I’m writing this too, because unlike last week where I was super organised with blog posts, this week is not going to plan. There was so way I could miss Wandering Through The Shelves’ weekly game this week though, the topic is too much fun. See, some weeks I’m scratching my head and trying to think of something clever, but this week’s theme is Super Long Titles, and so I’ve scoured my Letterboxd diary to see what I’ve watched that fits.

It’s annoying trying to actually talk about a movie when the title is so darn long, but I think I prefer it to super short, one-word titles. Mainly because I inevitably end up confusing movies for other ones because their names are too similar. I’ve watched Coherence (2013) and Compliance (2012) and I can’t tell which is which to save my life!

Before I give myself a headache and eventually look them both up, here are my 3 picks this week:

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

It’s a good job most people know what movie you’re on about if you simply say Birdman because I can never remember its full title! Regardless, I haven’t put together my lists for the best movies of the decade yet but Birdman would most likely be my #1 choice for 2014!

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (2014)

2 movies from 2014? What was going on, writers? Anyway – this movie wouldn’t make any of my Top 10 lists mainly because it was pretty ‘meh’ and forgettable. That said, I will never forget about it’s title because I use it as a joke waaaay too often. Just pick any movie character who had a rough time in their story and add it to the title, boom! Guaranteed to make me laugh.

Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996)

I saved the biggest till last, wink, wink. Fun fact, Don’t Be a Menace is probably my husband’s favourite movie of all time. When he was a lovable dork back in college he would quote it all the time, and somehow I managed to only watch it for myself 4 months ago. I mean yeah, it’s got some hilarious jokes in there but I mostly had to watch it whilst my husband watched me, waiting for me to laugh!

Thursday Movie Picks: Adaptations

Dec 5, 2019

I refuse to believe it’s Thursday already, mainly because it isn’t – I’m just organised for a change and have all my posts this week written in advance! Anyway, another Thursday means another of Wandering Through the Shelves’Thursday Movie Picks. This week’s theme is Adaptations. Basically, movies that have been adapted from other works. There are so many to pick from I’ve decided to go with a theme within the theme.

It’s been a very festive week so far and so all of my picks this week are Christmas movies adapted from books! And yes, my #3 choice is a Christmas movie, don’t you try and tell me otherwise.

It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

My local cinema had a showing of this a few years back that me and the family went to go and see. I’d never watched it before and although I really enjoyed it, it’s a tough movie to put into my annual movie rotation for December. It’s based on a short story called The Greatest Gift, by Philip Van Doren Stern. Apparently the Director Frank Capra read the story and bought the film rights straight away. The names of all the characters were changed for the movie.

The Polar Express (2004)

It feels to me like The Polar Express is only a few years old, and yet I’ve watched it so many years in a row it almost feels like it’s always been around. Almost 20 years before the movie’s release, The Polar Express was a children’s book written by Chris Van Allsburg. By 1989, the year I was born, it had sold a million copies!

Die Hard (1988)

Is there ever going to be a year where we aren’t arguing about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie? Probably not, but if you’ve watched the movie so many times you can’t bear it any longer, perhaps you might want to read the book it was based on, Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. Just to confuse you as well, Nothing Lasts Forever is a sequel to The Detective, which also got an adaptation in 1966 starring Frank Sinatra!

Thursday Movie Picks: Scientists

Nov 7, 2019

There are so many Thursday Movie Picks themes that I end up skipping because I can’t think of enough movies I’ve even seen to fit – let alone 3 great choices that I can recommend. That is, until Thursday rolls around, I read everyone else’s posts and realise that I’ve watched more than I thought…and then kick myself for not picking them myself!

I almost did the same with this week’s theme of Scientists. Then I made myself sit down and think, and lo and behold, I have a list as long as my arm! I’ve whittled that down to 3 choices with a slight mini-theme. These 3 movies are ones that I really enjoyed, but something stopped them from being amazing.

Annihilation (2018)

A mysterious, creepy movie with a stellar female cast and Oscar Isaac? I mean, this movie couldn’t be awful if it tried. Annihilation made a lot of ‘Best of 2018’ lists, and rightly so, to be honest. The scene with that bear creature mimicking the scream was downright terrifying and a moment I’ll never forget, but the movie lost me at the end. I love a weird ending but this one was just too much.

Downsizing (2017)

I’m still so gutted about how much potential Downsizing wasted. A future world where humans can be shrunk in order to save the planet, and all the fiscal and political issues that arise as a result? This could have been a smashing TV series, but it doesn’t work at all as a movie. Too much plot got packed in with not enough time, and a lot of threads just lead nowhere. I love the idea of it all though, and I hope the story gets picked up and done better sometime.

A Cure for Wellness (2016)

I feel like in the run-up to this movie’s release, there was so much hype, and then…the movie came out, and no one made a fuss. I didn’t even see it in the cinema, but I’m glad I still watched it. It’s long, but it’s got the creep and mystery factor that keep you going. I shamefully can’t even remember the ending, but I know it was one that you either loved or hated.

Thursday Movie Picks: Teen Horror

Oct 10, 2019

Spooky season has well and truly arrived! The nights are getting darker, the air is getting colder, and you can’t go to a supermarket without being confronted by pumpkins or sweets! It’s the perfect time of year to hibernate indoors with a hot drink and a scary movie. This week’s Thursday Movie Picks theme is Teen Horror, and since finally welcoming horror movies into my life I’ve seen quite a few!

Here are my three favourites:

It Follows (2014)

Also known as the supernatural STD movie, It Follows is one of the few movies that genuinely scared the crap out of me both whilst I was watching it and for days afterward. Basically, it starts with one girl after a sexual encounter. ‘It’ follows her, only ‘It’ can take any form it wishes and moves at a slow pace until it finds you and kills you. You’re the only person who can see ‘It’, also. The only way to stop ‘It’ is to have sex with someone else and pass it on to them.

Happy Death Day (2017)

I’m so fed up with Groundhog Day-style movies that I avoided Happy Death Day until this year. It’s so good though! You can probably guess the plot, a teen girl is murdered one night and then wakes up at the start of the same day, only to die over and over again. It’s a bit jumpy, but it’s also quite funny and the sequel is surprisingly even better than the original!

Midsommar (2019)

It only feels like yesterday that Midsommar was released but I’m starting to learn that with Ari Aster’s movies, you aren’t likely to forget about them anytime soon. After suffering a family tragedy, Dani travels to Sweden with her awful boyfriend and his friends to visit a fabled mid-summer festival. It’s a quiet movie for a horror, and a lot of the worse moments happen off-screen, but it’s a glorious movie.

Thursday Movie Picks: Break-Ups

Sep 19, 2019

There’s something about the changing seasons, days getting shorter and the weather getting colder that makes curling up on the sofa with a hot drink and a sappy movie so appealing to me. So I guess it’s great timing that this week’s Wandering Through the Shelves Thursday Movie Picks theme is break-ups!

When I started scouring my Letterboxd account for possible choices, I very nearly created a theme within a theme of Ryan Gosling break-up movies, but changed my mind at the last minute! It was a good reminder that there are still far too many of his movies I haven’t seen yet, though…

But without further ado, here are my 3 picks for the week:

The Break-Up (2006)

I know this seems like the laziest choice ever, but I actually really love this movie! Back in the day when I didn’t watch many movies at all, The Break-Up was the first rom-com I watched with an ending that surprised me, it totally bummed me out and I’ve never forgotten about it! Plus, it has my favourite funny argument between a couple ever. “I don’t want you to do the dishes, I want you to WANT to do the dishes!” “Why would I WANT to do the dishes?!”

Begin Again (2013)

Excuse me John Carney, it’s been 3 years since your last movie, we’re due another! You can always count on a John Carney movie to be beautiful and have the best soundtrack ever. I loved Begin Again so much. Keira Knightly plays a talented musician who finds herself single after her long-time boyfriend makes it big in the music industry and leaves her behind. It’s just stunning in all aspects!

La La Land (2016)

I will never, ever, get over the sadness that the ending to La La Land caused me. It’s just not fair. I thought I was over it, and then on holiday we were stuck in some Los Angeles traffic and I found myself singing ‘Another Day of Sun’ and it brought the pain back to me. I do like that the embarrassment at the Oscars where La La Land was announced as Best Picture just to have it corrected a few minutes later was kind of a parallel to what the audience to this movie ends up going through, though. The irony isn’t lost on me!

Thursday Movie Picks: Non-English Language Movies

Sep 12, 2019

Shame on me, it’s been forever since I took part in Wandering Through the Shelves’ Thursday Movie Picks. I got into the swing of it, came across a week where I had nothing to contribute, and then fell off the wagon, hard. Typically now I’m back off holiday this week’s theme is a real struggle for me, but I do (just about) have 3 movies to bring to the table this week.

The theme, of course, is Non-English Language Movies. I’ve largely avoided these movies for the majority of my life because…well. I’m from England where we rarely learn any other language at a high level, and the thought of reading a movie was offputting. I’ve widened my horizons in recent years though, and I’ll happily watch any movie that other bloggers are raving about, no matter the language!

Here are my 3 favourites that I’ve seen so far…

Incendies (2010)

If you’ve seen any of Denis Villenueve’s other movies (Prisoners, Sicario, Enemy, to name a few) then you know you’re in for a wild, often brutal ride. There are no happy endings here. Incendies is the story of a set of twins traveling to the Middle East to discover their family history, and it was one of those endings that has haunted me ever since. 100% a must watch!

Memories of Murder (2003)

Speaking of no happy endings…Joon-ho Bong’s Memories of Murder was an exhausting (but worth it!) watch. It deals with three detectives desperately trying to solve the case of multiple murders. If you’ve watched Wind River (2017) and found it a good watch, then this should definitely be next on your list.

Roma (2018)

A weird choice, considering I wasn’t exactly singing it’s praises when I reviewed it last year, but despite Roma not being the most exciting movie I’ve ever seen, it’s stuck with me ever since. On the surface, it’s a quiet story of a housemaid and the life she leads, but there are some really powerful moments in there.

Thursday Movie Picks: Blockbuster Flops

Jul 18, 2019

Sometimes, after spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars on acting talent, special effects and marketing, a movie flops at the box office. More often than not, these movies are Blockbusters – those movies sometimes based on other movies, books or TV shows. Most of the time, the flop is justified. The movie was just downright terrible. But that isn’t always the case, and I guess this week Wandering Through the Shelves has set us bloggers the task of defending some of those failed movies.

I used this Wikipedia article to help me define what the biggest movie flops are, and these are 3 of those movies that I don’t think deserved to do so badly.

Ghostbusters (2016) Production Budget: $144m Worldwide Gross: £229m

I loved the all-female Ghostbusters remake. Not because I’m a woman and I want women to have bigger roles in the industry, but because it was a fun movie and it made me laugh. In fact, it was the first Ghostbusters movie I ever watched, I watched the original for the first time last year and wasn’t that impressed (don’t @ me). What annoys me so much is wondering how much of a factor internet trolls were to the failure of the remake. If anyone’s seen the movie and hated it that’s fine, everyone has their own opinion, but to hate on a movie before even seeing it is just childish!

Rise of the Guardians (2012) Production Budget: $145m Worldwide Gross: £306m

Honestly, I was shocked to find Rise of the Guardians in that Wikipedia list. I think it’s such a beautiful animated movie. It’s definitely geared more towards being a Christmas movie but it covers a lot of other holidays too. The voice cast is stellar (Chris Pine, Hugh Jackman, Jude Law to name a few) and the story is so sweet. If you’ve never seen it before please just do me this one favour and give it a try!

Green Lantern (2011) Production Budget: $220m Worldwide Gross: $219m

Yeah, yeah, you rolled your eyes so hard I heard them! I know Green Lantern isn’t a good movie. I watched it before I got into the genre and didn’t know better. Anyone who’s ever read a Green Lantern comic could write a better script, and the bad guy was butchered in the development phases. BUT. Are you telling me that Green Lantern deserves a flop sticker when movies like Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad are labeled as huge successes?

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