| MovieSteve

Eternals

2022-11-022022-01-29 by Steve

Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, Eternals is a Marvel superhero movie that’s sketchy, thin, never fully fleshed out. Not bad, exactly, just hard to get a bead on. Is stuff missing or was it never meant to be there? Perhaps its problems lie in the origins of the source material, an iteration of an iteration etc etc. The first of the superhero gangs was 1960’s Justice League (itself a revival of the 1940s Justice Society of America), a greatest-hits compilation of DC Comics’ big hitters – Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash and more. In 1963 Marvel responded to the success of the Justice League with its own version, … Read more

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

2023-10-292014-02-12 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 13 February The 500,000-year-old rock containing a spark plug On this day in 1961, the Coso artefact was found by three people out hunting for geodes. It appeared to be a spark plug inside a rock. A geode is a hollow stone, rock or boulder formed either by bubbles forming in volcanic rock, or by the action of water dissolving away a space in a sedimentary formation, which then fills with different minerals – quartz crystals being particularly common. Either way there was little chance that a Champion spark plug from the 1920s, as used extensively in Ford Model T and … Read more

Girl, Interrupted

2023-10-312013-04-07 by Steve

Girl, Interrupted tells the real-life story of Susanna Kaysen, who wrote the original memoir about her enforced stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s. She was banged up after a pills overdose for what was termed a “borderline personality disorder” but the suspicion remains that she was being incarcerated at least partly because she was young, rebellious and pissing off her parents. Director James Mangold’s film version turns the whole experience slightly into One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest redone as a 1960s Mean Girls drama. Instead of shock therapy there’s the withdrawal of TV privileges, straitjackets have largely been replaced by attentive, pleasant carers. And as for debilitating doses of recreational … Read more