Film Shapes

I'll admit to a sense of trepidation going into Bohemian Rhapsody . Queen have been my favourite band since the mid-80s, I guess, and I really didn't want the film makers to fuck this up. So, after a couple of hours of spine shivers and leg jiggles, I can confirm that any impending fuck-up was averted. Much of the thanks for this has to go to the casting director, Susie Figgis. The actors playing the four band members were as close to the actual lads as no mind (Freddie was a tad taller than Rami Malek but that's a small quibble). I actually forgot I wasn't watching Mercury, May, Taylor and Deacon, especially in the concert scenes. Special mention must go to Joseph Mazzello for getting John Deacon's unfussy feet movement down pat. The voice amalgamation was a nice trick too - Malek has said in interviews that it's probably about 90% Freddie that we hear on screen. There's a messy history to Bohemian Rhapsody . It's been knocking around for a decade...

Back to the Windsor Cinema in Nedlands and not much has changed since catching  The King's Speech  in 2010 or 2011. I reckon Merv and I were among the youngest punters there, and we're not exactly gambolling lambs anymore. But this demographic was pretty apt for  King of Thieves , the latest film to explore old spivs getting older and trying to stay relevant. This iteration is based on the true story of the Hatton Garden safe deposit robbery in London in 2015. It stars Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone and Paul Whitehouse ('I was very, very drunk') as the geriatric villains who come together at Caine's wife's funeral. A positively pubescent Charlie Cox instigates the gig.  The heist premise of  King of Thieves  has been done before, even factoring in the 'grey pound' aspect. It's not the most original film but it's worth the ticket price just to hear Caine and gang effing and jeffing all over the place. It's...

After initially being a bit ambivalent about seeing  First Man , I decided to give it a chance, mainly due to the goodwill held over from Damien Chazelle's first directorial effort, the excellent  Whiplash . Apparently, Chazelle had been sitting on this Neil Armstrong story since before La La Land and got started after Josh Singer ( Spotlight ) handed over a script. And a pretty prosaic script it is. Thankfully avoiding the trap that many other biopics have fallen into, this shies away from the cradle to grave narrative and focuses on about 8 years of Armstrong's life, from 1961 to 1969. Trim the fat, this is the meat. The main theme of First Man is obsessive drive and this is a watering hole Chazelle likes to return to, as there are obvious similarities to his previous two films. Armstrong's determination to get to the moon is, to an extent, explained by a tragedy that I won't go into here. Accurate or not, it adds a filmic poignancy that works depending on y...