Recent Posts

• December 25, 2024

  Home Alone 2

  This is almost certainly the first movie I’ve watched from start to finish on broadcast TV in over fifteen years, easily. An interesting thing, economically, is that RTÉ didn’t show any ads during this Christmas Day screening of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I can only imagine the amount of money they could charge to sell ad space - on a day when everyone has no money left - is lower than the cost of people switching channels to somewhere else and staying there in a bloated haze for another twelve hours. I realised this while waiting endlessly for a bathroom break. Since it was Christmas, obviously this was the second Home Alone movie I’d watched in the space of two days. Doing it that way really highlighted what a really beat-for-beat remake it is, just more brutal. The opening is at least winkingly duplicating, power goes out to the alarm clock again and they wake up late. At least the family don’t forget Kevin at home this team, they all make it to the airport and then get separated. Kevin manages to get on the wrong flight without getting his head caved in because Homeland Security doesn’t exist yet. His family end up in Paris, once again having a dreadful holiday, and he ends up in New York. The Wet Bandits, now the Sticky Bandits, run into him and try to roll a revenge plot into their main plan to rob a toy store that inexplicably keeps all its cash in the register overnight. Simpler times. Kevin does the Angels with Dirty Faces trick again, except this time in a hotel room. He gets room service and runs up a bill, using his freedom to have basically wholesome fun by eating ice-cream and watching movies; essentially identical to what I, an adult, do when alone. Donald Trump - now infamously, formerly famously, appears for a few seconds. Despite being Lost in New York, and not actually Home Alone, he still manages to find a house to booby trap. Except this time, instead of relatively innocent traps like crunching up Christmas decorations or gently placing a generally harmless spider onto Marv’s chest, he’s up on the roof hurling fucking bricks into their skulls, crushing spines with bags of cement, and I think there was a nail gun? I’m writing this a month later. The Home Alone traps were funny - even the paint cans wouldn’t straight-up murder someone - but these were downright sadistic. Eventually, Kevin, being a child, gets caught this movie has Pigeon Lady instead of Shovel Guy, who comes in and saves him at the last minute, he learns not to judge by appearances and that maybe his family are good to have around after all. The only reason this movie even needs to exist is to give us around twenty minutes of Tim Curry being Tim Curry.

• December 14, 2024

  Evil Does Not Exist

  Ok something happened at the end of this movie, but frankly I don’t get it. It involves deer in some way.

• December 13, 2024

  Trouble Every Day

  Oh it’s a cannibalism sex disease. This was on my list of supposedly extreme horror movies that I’ve somehow missed over the years (the last one of these was Possession, which was incredible).

• December 08, 2024

  Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

  Breaking my miniature streak of watching movies from 1951, 1941 and 1931, but I guess that wasn’t going to last too long anyway, due to when films were invented. Both Frankenstein and Bride of were due to leave the Criterion Channel at the end of the month (and both are very manageable about 1hr 15 minutes long) so we rolled straight into this one.

• December 06, 2024

  Frankenstein (1931)

  Hard to separate this from the sheer cultural ubiquity of it. Ever seen someone on a screen shouting, it’s alive! It’s alive! Here it is. A village carrying flaming torches to go see off a monster? A hunchback assistant doing his master’s bidding? Yep, that’s from here too. The big, flat-headed, bolts-in-neck monster lumbering around? You got it.