Day 685

Aka Sunday 16^th December 2018

…more prep for next week’s interview…still no notification of what the presentation topic will be…

…I also watched:

‘Zero Dark Thirty’, an interesting film that does a good job of condensing a near decades worth of searching for Osama bin Laden into a little over 2 and a half hours. Jessica Chastain does a great job playing Maya, a CIA intelligence analyst who starts the film as a fresh-faced analyst and ends the film as a harded veteran, who, despite the bureaucracy of the CIA, finds bin Laden. In some ways the film is more about Maya determination and single-mindedness than bin Laden, with the majority of the film being closer to a spy procedural than an action film. Although the way that Kathryn Bigelow has filmed the last act of the film, as the SEAL team infiltrate and assassinate/kill bin Laden, puts many action films in the shade. A fine film about a disturbing subject and a definite 8/10.

Although two things did bother me a little about ‘Zero Dark Thirty’. The first is the torture, I had heard that this was a ‘pro-torture’ film, that it showed torture as being effective. But I wasn’t left with that opinion. Yes, the film shows the CIA getting some useful information from torture, but this is overwhelmed by the film showing how horrific the torture was, and the effect it had on the victims and the torturers. At one point, early in the film, we see that the CIA get more information from a suspect by bluffing the suspect, using the fact that the suspect has no awareness of the time or date, than they got from torture. The other thing was that Netflix omitted Ms Chastain from the starring box, yes, Edgar Ramirez and Joel Edgerton are damn fine actors, but it seems odd as Ms Chastain plays the central character!:

‘Mission Impossible: Fallout’, still as good as when I saw in the cinema, and like I said at the time, it’s “full of double-crosses, mis-direction, intrigue, life & death stakes and great, great stunts. At this stage the MI films are like fine engineered machines, hi-octane stunts at regular intervals (and they are marvellous stunts, I had to turn away from the screen during the HALO jump, as it was making me feel queasy!), Ethan and his team going rogue at some point, etc., but they don’t forget that we need to care about these characters and there’s plenty (at least plenty for a blockbuster action film) of character beats and development to make us care what happens and want the bomb to be diffused, the getaway to work, etc. so that the characters are saved. Ten out of ten.”

‘Need For Speed’, a not very good rip-off of ‘The Fast and the Furious’, but, despite having a pretty good cast (Aaron Paul, Dominic, Imogen Poots, Rami Malek and Michael Keaton), doesn’t have a tenth of the charm or silliness of ‘The Fast and the Furious’. Dull, dull, dull. 3/10.

‘Red Riding Hood’ a cool retelling of the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ story as a werewolf tale, starring Amanda Seyfried as Valerie (aka Red), whose village is besieged by a werewolf and are hoping that Gary Oldman’s Father Solomon will save them. The film is a little hokey and clichéd in places, but it’s also enjoyable, for which a large amount credit must go to Ms Seyfried, who, for me, carries the film when it lags a little and falls into clichés. 6/10.