Oliver Battershall

Money Talks (1997) 3.5/5
Really fun, tight well-written action. I don’t know how much of Chris Tucker’s stuff was improv but the way he acts I wouldn’t be surprised if it was >90%. He readies himself to become the king of interracial buddy-cop crime capers in this Rush Hour predecessor, it’s pretty underrated! Sheen is a great straight man too, but it’s inevitably Tucker who completely steals the show.

Upstream Color (2013) 2.5/5
I got it, or at least I think I did. It just didn’t work for me. I know it was a stylistic choice but the constant vague wooden dialogue was so unengaging and the wider message seemed surprisingly bare for the guy who made Primer. There’s no reward for picking up the pieces because they hardly fit together, opaque filmmaking for the sake of it.

Legends of the Fall (1994) 3/5
Teeters DANGEROUSLY close to being schmaltzy frontier-slop with its sweeping orchestral score, long runtime and bizarre subplots. It’s a film that desperately needs saving by some good acting performances, which fortunately is what is provided.

Up in the Air (2009) 4/5
Felt pleasantly surprised by the depth of this one given the number of opportunities it had to veer into cheesiness. It did truly cave under this urge for one scene at the end but that’s okay, it’s certainly a step up in that regard from Juno, which I didn’t get along with as well as most. Like Juno, there’s a great acoustic soundtrack and some very human touches. Clooney is effortlessly charming as per. Not bad for a movie I only found out about through those short-form video clipfarming accounts.

Wonka (2023) 4/5
Paul King is class because he’s like Wes Anderson for your kid that isn’t quite old enough for Wes Anderson yet. From the symmetrical blocking and pastel colour palette to the general sense of whimsy. I’m sure everyone’s already made this observation but it came to me halfway through so just humour me. I’ll always back Chalamet to the hilt, through that whole faux-outrage over his opera comments I was on the front line. He’s pretty good here, but it’s the ensemble cast and (more importantly) King’s persistent ability to command them that makes this. Sits somewhere in between the Paddington movies in quality.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) 3.5/5
Excited to continue making my way through this franchise. Don’t care what anyone says about it, it’s cool shit for the fellas and I am but a lowly fella. I’m definitely more susceptible to this stuff having been a child who loved Hot Wheels, Top Gear, Speed Racer and that scene in Cars where the naughty cars (young Oliver’s words) showed up to mess with Mack the truck. No one has ever showed such command over the word ‘cuh’ as the leading duo in this. You have the iconic “Forget about it, cuh” line but I’d wager “EJECT-O SEAT-O CUH” is Top 10 lines put to screen. You can determine some quite distinct eras in cinematic history through the nature of their car movies. In decades to come I think people will look back on this franchise with the same appreciation that people have for films like Easy Rider and American Graffiti in that regard.

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) 3/5
Fairly standard monster movie stuff in retrospect, but with plenty of truly exemplary underwater camerawork and some surprisingly creepy violence from the first rubber suited monster to hit Hollywood. Watched in 3D in a packed crowd chuckling at all the gimmicky shots and cheesy moments, as the gods of cinema intended. They use a shot of a harpoon being fired towards the camera about ten times and I flinched for every damn one. The whole time I was waiting for some big moment where the monster would be humanised or one of the characters would be like “my god…the real monster was MAN” etc etc but (to my delight) there really was no message other than “These men won’t stop one-upping eachother because of how fit Julie Adams is, also woah lol look at that monster isn’t he fucked up”. An evening well spent.

The Odyssey (2026) 4.5/5
A bit of a departure from other recent Nolan classics like Oppenheimer and Interstellar that thrived through drilling to the emotional core of some really monumental characters. You’re not going to have much subtext in the way we expect when you’re adapting THE story. The birth of the hero’s journey trope, the beginning and end of storytelling as we know it. As a result this is very much a film that skirts a lot of character work but thrives in its grandiose Moments™. Battles, some valiant, some punishingly one-sided, all punctuated by harrowing screams, unfamiliar enemies and flickering flames. There’s a 1 vs 100 fight scene in this that hyped me up even more than the corridor scene in Oldboy. The ensemble cast weren’t all hits (Much of Tom Holland’s talents as an actor seem to have been sapped dry by the Marvel industrial complex) and the non-linear structure that Nolan usually employs SO well didn’t really work for me here, but it still feels like momentous and mandatory cinema viewing.