Film Shapes

A lucky day off on Thursday, so off to see the much anticipated new film from Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood . Quite a few things to chew over here so I'll start at the middle. Not really, just thought I'd go for a little QT humour....hello? Hello? Hmmm. There's a lot to like about this film and a fair bit not to as well. Let's start with the positives. Tarantino really knows how to get the best out of his actors. Leonardo DiCaprio is great in the role of a fading TV gunslinger who can see the sunset of his career approaching. His attempts to handle this twilight are precious and DiCaprio aces it all. There's an especially mint section where he's playing head villain in an episode of Lancer , directed by Sam Wanamaker (which seems to have actually happened ). DiCaprio's character, Rick Dalton, has been on the turps the night before and he's having some trouble remembering his lines. His over-acting in these scenes and subsequent meltdown i...

Well, it's been almost a month since I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home and I have to admit, I've been dragging my heels on this one. It's not because it's terrible, though it wouldn't be far off the bottom of the Marvel pool. I think it's a deflation factor. Coming so soon after the Endgame colossus, this just didn't grab anything for me. It might also have a bit to do with my antipathy towards the character of Spider-Man. He simply shits me. Tom Holland is a charismatic, winningly gormless presence but sadly, he's not enough to win me over. That said, Spidey in the other Marvel films has been fun and reasonably interesting but in these stand-alones, I'm not having it. There's a case to be made that the best part of this film is the post-credit sting. Not the mid-credit sting, though the return of J.K. Simmons is a good move by the Marvelii. The final sting asks some questions and sets up some tasty possibilities for Marvel's fourth...

Asif Kapadia's newest doco follows Diego Maradona's time at Napoli, with the occasional glimpses of his life before and after. It focusses on this period (1984 - 1991) as this was Diego at his best and, arguably, worst. I've seen a couple of docos and lots of highlights of Maradona as a player but this is the first film I've seen that balances the two sides - Diego AND Maradona. This dichotomy is best summed up by his old fitness coach, Fernando Signorini - "With Diego, I would go to the end of the world, but with Maradona, I wouldn't take a step." Kapadia treats his subject pretty even-handedly, neither fawning nor condemning, letting the visuals and interviews inform the audience's judgement. On the topic on interviews, Diego Maradona , like Senna , relies purely on old footage to tell the story. There are no new 'interviews' aside from audio of Diego and others played under old game vision or news reports. I reckon this technique is w...