14 Years Of NUTS4R2

Lockdown Memories

14th Anniversary Blog Post

When this post goes live, it will be exactly 14 years since I started this blog, initially because I was feeling a lack of connection with certain other elements of my life (who or what will remain nameless here but... some things never change). It’s also, however, two days short of being the 4th anniversary of what was, for many people of my generation, a very unusual, seemingly quite unbelievable and surreal event in our lives... the first UK Government lockdown in response to the deadly Coronavirus outbreak which was whittling down various countries populations.

Now I’m not here to argue that Coronavirus wasn’t a terrible thing. So many people died and the worldwide response to the disaster was fairly tragic and badly thought out... destroying or changing people’s lives forever. I know some people take the view that the UK government were having to deal with something they were unprepared for (and that’s a different can of worms to begin with, lots of warnings by scientists for decades and an underwhelmingly slow and ill conceived response to the situation did not help) but, I personally can’t let the government off the hook so easily. For almost the entirety of the first year of lockdown (and I say this as someone who has never before taken an interest in politics), I just assumed the people in power were a sad combination of naivety and stupidity and couldn’t work out what they were doing there. Then, slowly, it dawned that these were all corrupt idiots who were not interested in helping people at all and were just in it to make money. They are criminals, for sure, there’s no getting around that.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I wanted to say a few words about the actual positive aspects of lockdown... because I think they are important and I think our government has not learned anything from the situation or, most likely, just want to ignore the benefits to the majority of people. What a surprise eh?

Now don’t get me wrong. I know a certain amount of the population, presumably those suffering from severe extroverted personalities, found lockdown hard. I know some friends had some problems with their youngsters which intrigued me because, when I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to not have to go to school and certainly not have to socialise with other people. But some people didn’t reap the same benefits of the lockdown lifestyle that others did and I think it’s worth remembering those unexpected perks because I reckon 80% of the UK population could still be better off from them if the UK government wasn’t so greedy and corrupt (and it’s certainly not just the UK government, for sure).

Okay, so for me, lockdown had so many benefits... and for my blog too, it has to be said.

I have elderly parents and that meant that, working from home, I could keep and eye on them and come running if either of them got into trouble. Something I can’t do again now with a two buses or more (depending on traffic) journey home. It goes without saying that I was saving thousands of pounds by not travelling to work, of course. Not to mention clawing back two to three hours a day for myself when I would normally be travelling. And I was getting through roughly a week’s work in a day by not being at the office... so could respond quicker to any emergencies that came up in a quick and efficient manner. Which was handy for people.

And there were the health benefits too. A colleague of mine said that she’d never been fitter than during the lockdown and I have to agree. The extra time saved meant I had time to go out for a 20 minute walk every night, straight after work. I was borderline diabetic when I went into lockdown... within a year I was completely out of it again. Now I’m back in the office my diabetes and other health issues are worse than they’ve ever been. And I get barely a half an hour a night which I can positively call ‘my own time’ on a week day.

But lastly and perhaps more relevantly in regards to this blog, being in lockdown meant I had time to watch movies after work and then write about them. Because there was more money saved, I ordered expensive box sets from Severin in America and the Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection box set (start here with that one) really captured my imagination and reignited my love of film. As a result, I still have well over 200 written reviews backlogged and waiting to be tweaked and published. I got through a lot of movies in that travel time and I felt inspired and uplifted to be exploring cinema again... more than I’d felt in a while.

So those, I think, for the record... were my main takeaways from lockdown. And my conclusion is... everyone who is capable of working from home should be... never mind the stupid government edicts and the businesses who want us all to suffer in an office again. If these entities were truly about looking after the people and treating them right, then many of us would be allowed to work from home and, to boot, the climate crisis may not be hanging around our necks so much either. Remember going out in lockdown for a walk and being confronted with no cars on the roads... just fresher air. The less cars on the road (because people are capable of working from home) means less pollution and other benefits. It’s a win/win but, unfortunately, the members of parliament just want to make the economy work for them, so they can continue lining their own pockets with the benefits of other people’s misery. Or, at least, that’s the way it seems to me.

Anyway, those are my memories and take aways from lockdown and, as always, that just leaves me to say ‘thank you for reading’ my anniversary post. Especially to those who have been with me all 14 years to date.

Coronavirus Update

NUT4R2 VS Coronavirus

Hi all. 

I was recalled to the office setting for one day a week and, in spite of being Covid free for the last two and a half years, I caught Covid from the one day I went in. So I apologise for the lack of bloggage this week but, hopefully, normal service will return either later this week or sometime next week. So please revisit me soon for some fresh updates. Lot's of interesting stuff coming, including an unusual themed week.

All the best and thanks for reading. Back soon.

NUTS4R2

Host

Zoom With A View

Host
UK 2020 Directed by Rob Savage
ShudderHouse

Warning: This review hosts spoilers.

You know I may be getting a little jaded because this film is far from original in it’s ideas and intentions but then again, there’s not much new left in the world and I have to admire the writers Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage and Jed Shepherd... and the director (again, Savage) for conceiving, shooting and releasing a film in a totally socially distanced manner during the first six months of the Coronavirus lockdown. Also for taking an old fashioned dash of horror film movie making which, obviously, we’ve all seen before... and telling it through new technology which has become one of the communication tools of the lockdown, the Zoom meeting. And, yeah, it’s a movie about some people ‘holding a seance’ over Zoom. An obvious idea but, if done right, it can still be quite effective. Spoiler... it’s done quite well.

And, yes, we’ve seen a few movies set on computer laptops now, for sure. I think the best one I’ve seen before this was actually not a horror film but a murder mystery movie called Searching (reviewed here) and the strength of that particular film was, the twist ending would have been so obvious if it were not for the fact that telling it through the technology like they did meant they could distract you to the point where the 'reveal' genuinely takes you by surprise. Now, Host (one of a gazillion movies already called Host, The Host, Hosts or The Hosts... why they do this I’ll never know), doesn’t have that kind of surprise element involved in it but, that’s okay, it’s a horror movie and they’re not especially going for surprises here anyway, I think.

What we do have... and I think this will annoy some viewers (especially those as old as me), is a bunch of old clichés reshot through the lens of a new format... and that’s perfectly fine for a horror film. That kind of story really depends, not on the originality of the piece but whether the timing of the jump scares, in this case, are well enough done. Now, I know it’s a well put together movie because, for once, even though I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen in the final moments... and I was right... the final shot still made me jump out of my skin. Which is a very welcome result as far as I’m concerned.

Okay, so lets look at some of the moments that detractors might think of as weaknesses...

 Well, the whole film is set and shot in a zoom meeting utilising special effects, presumably added with craftily downgraded CGI afterwards. Now I’m not familiar with Zoom myself but I’ve heard that when you talk in it, your screen blows up for everyone to fill the whole frame? Well that, of course, gives the film makers an ideal opportunity of one of the mainstays of a certain type of modern horror movie, preventing you seeing what’s going on in the other places the call is taking place while one person is dominating the screen. It even means that, while I’m sure the film must be edited to death and different takes mixed together on the main zoom screen, you can easily cover your tracks by cutting away from things when you don’t like the end of a person’s performance.

Those performances here, by the way, of the seven main actresses and the lone male... Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb, Radina Drandova. Caroline Ward, Alan Emrys, Jinny Lofthouse and the amazing Seylan Baxter... are all absolutely brilliant. They’re the kind of performances you tend to get when the director is relying on no musical scoring and a POV style of shooting but, clearly, you need good actors for that kind of thing and that’s exactly what he gets here. I loved the fact, also, that the actors were all using their own first names for their characters.

Anyway, back to the clichés... well there are some obvious things the writers just want you to notice right from the start, which they deliberately call attention to. You have the character who obviously lives very near to one of the others, who talks to the other through a window, establishing that, at some point in the film, one of those two characters is obviously going to go to the other person’s apartment to see just what is going on. There’s also another character who has a Zoom background movie of herself walking to the fridge to get a drink and... you just know that’s going to be used later as a blocking device to stop you seeing what’s really going on and then jump scaring you. Yep... check. You have the one character who leaves the call way early so you immediately assume that, when they come back later, they’re there as both an unbelieving witness to the devastation wrought by the evil spirit... who quite clearly and literally acts just the way the spiritualist who has opened up the channel to the spirit world said it might act if disrespected... and also to be quickly convinced otherwise when the demonic entity in question pays a quick visit on that channel too.

And it’s things like this and the fact that almost every character has a door open in the background so you can see into another part of their apartment, adding a lot of depth to the rooms they are Zooming from... so things can happen at the periphery of the call if you happen to be watching the right part of the screen, that might all seem a bit obvious to the average horror afficionado. And, alright, they are but... still, I have to admire what the director, working under the restrictions of shooting remotely on an actual zoom call, was going for. Especially when, you know, some of those tired old clichés of jump scares really work.

And that’s the case here. If you think the writers and director are just raiding old ghost story and possession ideas then, okay fine, they are. But that’s what pretty much all horror writers and directors do. Some do it really well, though and get away with it. I’ve also seen a number of them over the last ten years which, for one reason or another, nowhere nearly nailed it as well as this lot did so... yeah... I don’t really care. When it works it works. So... original, no. Scary... not really but those jump moments really do get you and I’m assuming that this means I was feeling a certain amount of tension already in some of the sequences. Entertaining... heck, yes. This is another nice little horror movie from somebody who obviously knows their business. I liked this one quite a lot. If you can find the right movie called Host (there’s even more than one movie called this released this year, for goodness sake) and you are a fan of horror movies... and perhaps more so if you are not and are not especially familiar with the tropes of the genre... then this one is really worth checking out sometime. Also, it’s very short at 57 minutes so, you know, easily time to fit it into your day. Give it a go.

Coronavirus At The Movies

 
The Movies Have Got It Covid

Warning: This article gives away the endings to Wonder Woman, Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Over the last six months of pseudo lockdown, I’ve been writing and editing a monthly Pandemic newsletter which I send to a small circle of friends to help keep them occupied and smiling through these trying times. Normally I don’t repeat content from here that I’ve included there and vice versa but, I thought the following article which I wrote for inclusion in the final issue (volume 2 starts up when we hit the second wave of Covid), number 6, last week might interest some of my blog readers too so, here’s the article I wrote speculating how cinema content might be shaped in the Covid and post-Covid world. I hope you like it.

It’s been suggested to me recently that, once movie production gets going again properly, it’s doubtful that the future of film will be reflective of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. The argument is that people will not want to see depictions of social distancing on screen and, instead, will want to see a world untouched by the disease that has been, err, plaguing us these last six months or more. Audiences go to the cinema for escape, after all.

I'd have to say that... I think it’s probably quite dependent on how long this ‘new normal’ will be with us but I don’t think that people who are working on any form of art... be it film, fiction or music (to name but three), will be necessarily falling over themselves to provide people with a Covid-free environment in their work. Also, the fact that it seems people can get reinfected just a few months after having the symptoms, possibly prompting four times a year vaccines* if, indeed, an effective one can be found, is also going to be a factor in this. I think we could be stuck in this for a while and I fully expect our films to represent this. Even those set in alternate fantasy versions of our current reality such as the DC and Marvel universes, for example.

One of the things you need to remember is that a lot of fictional creators tend to base their stories in a world of historical accuracy. Unless they’re set in the past or in some remote fantasy land such as Middle Earth or Cimmeria, they’re going to want to base their story in the real world as much as possible. Why? Well simply because conforming to a facsimile of the real world helps make the fantasy they are weaving... be it superheroes, spy stories or even romantic comedies... more believable. If the audience can buy into the physical, psychological and sociological environment in which certain characters are interacting with each other, then it makes the story they are telling more credible.

Historically there are plenty of things which buy into the time period of when they are set and in which great pains are taken to explain certain historical inaccuracies conjured up by the subject of their stories.

Take the comics of DC published during the Second World War, for example. The DC characters were so powerful that kids would wonder why they didn’t just go over to Germany and stop the war. A good point... Superman would have finished the war in one afternoon.  So the writers came up with (or is that fell back on?) the artefact which Hitler himself listed among his occult obsessions. In the DC comics, Hitler absolutely had possession of the Spear Of Destiny (the spear that allegedly pierced the body of Christ on the cross), an artefact which has been used over and over again in genre fiction and movies since... well, for a long time. Because of the strange properties of the Spear Of Destiny, the readers were told, the superheroes couldn’t go near Hitler because the Spear would negate their super powers. And so, the comics could go on publishing superhero tales without the question of quickly ending the war ever coming up. A useful side step.

And we’ve seen things using historical context time and time again at the cinema. Take the recent Wonder Woman movie, for example. This was set in the First World War and, because it was Diana’s mission to end that war by destroying her war god brother, the film-makers brilliantly made sure that the day that she does this also coincided with the day the armistice was signed. So in the real world about her, the war was over but... we flies on the wall know how it really ended... right? Wink. A nice solution to what could have been a huge fantasy versus reality problem. One which allowed the fantasy world of the character to play out in a relatively accurate historical backdrop without the two elements ever fighting one another. Nice work.

Of course, some writers and directors don’t care about historical accuracy... or so it seems at first. Look at the two Quentin Tarantino movies Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, for example...

I work in an educational establishment and I can’t even begin to tell you the horror stories of the genuine historical ignorance of a large number of the students making their way through colleges and universities across the country. It’s astonishing and I can tell you now that there are a lot of people of a certain age (and younger, now) who believe that Adolf Hitler met his death by being machine gunned down in an exploding cinema and... that’s how the Second World War ended, didn’t it? Because that’s what happens at the end of Inglourious Basterds so, it must be true, right? That was set in World War II. Now, I’m absolutely all for artists doing what they want in movies but, when something presents itself as historically accurate then I think they should just have a little warning put in at the beginning of the film saying that the outcomes of this film are in no way representative of real life. Because, you know, a lot of people think these things actually are.

Similarly, even though the ending Tarantino was going to go for was obvious even before I took my seat at the cinema to see Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, there are a fair few people of, again, a certain age, who think Sharon Tate went on to have a long, prosperous career as a Hollywood actress. I guess at least some of the people who go on to explore her post-Manson body of work will hit a wall of truth when it comes to the IMDB, at least.

The thing is, though, even these flights of fancy on the parts of Tarantino are taking a lot of time to paint that fantasy into a world which is backed up by the time in which they are set. Sure, the outcome is different but all the window dressing of 1940s Germany and 1960s Hollywood is brought into play to make his fantasies credible. So, really, he’s doing exactly the same as most filmmakers do these days... setting the story in a historically accurate environment.

Which brings me back to Covid in the movies (and other art forms). If this thing truly does last less than a year then I think the virus and the distancing will, at the very least, be used to have a scene or two with ‘light hearted social distancing’ scenes used to show, say, a development through time for a romantic relationship. “Oh, look guys, now they’re in the 2020s and they’ve got that kooky social distancing going on!”

At the worst... which I’m guessing is where we are at (the news hasn’t been very encouraging of late), I think we’ll be seeing the long term effects of social distancing and coronavirus in movies for a long time to come. Because, for one thing, it demonstrates what the audience are living themselves and thus adds credibility to the story line (whether you want to see it or not) and two... because if you’re forced to film scenes in a socially distant manner then, surely, it will be easier to do that if the scenes you are doing that with are having socially distant content?

So yeah, I’m sorry to say that, in terms of the virus and its more visible side effects, I think art will be imitating life just as much as it always does in the future and, since coronavirus is such an important part of our everyday lives currently, I don’t see us escaping that anytime soon.

*has been suggested at time of writing

10 Years Of NUTS4R2

The Decablog

10 Years Of NUTS4R2

Well, here I am at 10 years of reviews then.

Over the years, when I’ve contemplated this ‘blog anniversary’ I’ve often wanted to do something special for it like, I dunno, a competition or something. Instead, I’ve just had the worst 15 months of my life with various tragedies and... well, the next installment seems to be a grim landscape ravaged by the walking dead of the Cora Nora virus (my name for it, I won’t let other names gain a negative power over my thinking, thanks very much).

So, yeah, not much for me to celebrate for sure but at least ten years is something positive done with my time, I guess. Or, you know, you might take the tack that it’s ten years of not having a life... it’s pretty time consuming trying to do something like this while also holding down a full time job I can tell you... but either way I’m happy to have stuck it out for so long. Hopefully I’ll still be in a position where I can continue with it... the way the world's changed in the last few weeks (and is going to change) seems pretty worrying. There’s always a chance I’ll be roaming around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland trying to secure old film prints for trading with the mohawk-headed tribes that wander the decaying environment.

Or... you know... not.

Anyway, purely because I haven’t got a better idea right now and I’m trying to be both self isolating for another few days with a nasty cough while at the same time being the mad food shopper for the family, I thought maybe I’d celebrate this miniversary with some of the articles which keep me doing this from time to time. These are not necessarily my most entertaining blog entries but I think these ones I've picked out here are among my most informative or enlightening. That is to say... these are the ones that I hope I’ve either made some connections nobody else has spotted before or, at the very least, they bring a fair amount to the table. Or not... you decide. Just click the titles to take you to my review.

So first up we have three British spy movie reviews for The IPCRESS File, The Quiller Memorandum and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Next up I offer you my thoughts on three of the classic Universal Monster movies of the 1930s and 1950s... Dracula, Frankenstein and Creature From The Black Lagoon.

Here are some of my Dario Argento reviews for his Animal Trilogy gialli... The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, The Cat O’ Nine Tails and Four Flies On Grey Velvet.

Here are a couple of reviews of two very different movies, both of which have central figures who are a huge influence on my 'adult' personality... The Final Programme and Doc Savage.

And finally, my all time favourite movie, Blade Runner.

And that’s my tenth anniversary post I guess. Sorry it’s not a little more spectacular but hopefully I can make that up for you on my 20th anniversary... if I get that far.

Anyway, thanks very much for reading, that’s always appreciated.

Stay safe and survive.