Films: The Ups and Downs

When you are battered over and over again about a killer disease, you want some escapism: And that's what '21 Bridges' gives you. The premise is simple: Two guys break into a drug storage facility, where they are there to steal 3kg worth of coke (to those not au fait with that sort of thing, that's a lot of blow). It turns out to be a lot more than that. Three cops show up to the reported break-in. A shoot-em-up happens, and then after more policemen are shot - bringing the total to 8 -, Andre Davis ('Black Panther''s Chadwick Boseman) and Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller) team up to find the killers before they escape Manhattan. Hence the name '21 Bridges' - the NYPD close up Manhattan. " We got twenty-one bridges in and out of Manhattan. Shut them down. Three rivers. Close them. Four tunnels. Block them. Stop every train and loop the subways. Then we flood the island with blue," says Boseman. We are immediately on the edge of our s...

The last time I watched King Of New York was on skiing holiday in Austria. Maybe about 10 years ago, if not more. I watched the ultraviolence and drug-taking entralled. And not able to understand a damned thing: I watched in German. This time, in an effort to get away from all things virus-related, I decided to watch Christopher Walken as drug lord Frank White, who is released from jail to find out that all his cocaine business has been taken by other people. His mission is to wipe out the competition and give the proceeds to a poor hospital. We don't know if this is entirely magnanimous, or he's doing it for himself ("I want to be Mayor of New York.....he thinks I'm joking". Anyway, he's trying to raise $16 million for a hospital that's been cut because of budget cuts. His crew is the much-dancing Jimmy (Larry Fishburne) as well as Test Tube (Steve Buscemi in not a tiny (HINT: HE TESTS COCAINE)) as well as his motley crew of degenerates. ...

When it came out, the new Star Wars movie: "The Rise of Skywalker", was roundly criticised. The fanboys hated it because it brownnosed too much to the audience. Some of the critics didn't like it because it felt too much like Return of The Jedi. The group who did like it was Disney, who made $1 billion and counting from it, as the punter ignored the frustrations of the cellar-dwellers and the self-styled Hollywood pen elite and got their butts on seats. Some of them multiple times. Today was my second watch, after the first one burnt joy and a headache into my skull after I watched it in IMAX (which was cool). If it's a second watch, some people like to think that this was the time to think critically . So I tried to. I tried to analyse the battle sequences, whether it was indeed an updated version of Return of The Jedi, and whether it was paying too much homage to the fans instead of following the darker trajectory that the last two films had promised. ...