Tag: black mirror

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch 👎

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I can’t quite articulate how much I love Black Mirror. I remember reading about the show years ago when it was only available in the UK and having to seek it out via less than legal means. Then,in 2014 being extremely happy when DirecTV aired the Christmas episode and being overjoyed when Netflix picked up the series and began producing new episodes later on. So when news leaked of a new Black Mirror movie a few weeks back I was excited since any new Black Mirror is better than no Black Mirror.

At least that’s what I thought that the time.

Friday morning I’ve got the day off and go to play this movie entitled Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on my AppleTV. Unexpectedly I get a message that the movie is not compatible with my device. Which is weird because a) I’ve never gotten that before with anything else on Netflix, b) my AppleTV is relatively new and up to date and c) it’s a movie, so why would it have to be compatible with anything? Then I tried it on my smart TV which has a Netflix app and… no dice there either. I get the same “sorry” message even though the message says that “newer” smart TVs are compatible.

That’s strike one and two.

Frustrated, I go to my computer to play Bandersnatch. That works and when the film starts it turns out that this movie is really a Choose Your Own Adventure style experience where you as the viewer have choices in how the story is going to play out. You choose what kind of cereal the main character is going to eat and what kind of music he’s going to listen to on the bus, etc. etc. etc.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Steeeeeee-rike three!

Here’s the thing, when I want to watch a movie, that’s what I want to do, watch a movie. Movies aren’t video games, I don’t want to participate in them. I want to see where the storyteller is going to take me, not choose the kind of cereal the characters are going to eat.

And because there are choices like this throughout Bandersnatch it means that one character will ask another a question, but because the interactive element gives the viewers ten seconds to make a choice means there’s lots of times the characters are just staring at each other waiting for you to make a choice in this weird, uncomfortable silence.

The sad thing was that when I finally got the movie to work on my computer I just let it play and didn’t actually make a decision as to what the character was going to do next and guess what, the story progressed just fine as the first option was automatically chosen. So apparently there’s a version of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch out there that would play just fine on my AppleTV and smart TV.

As I felt more and more frustrated over Bandersnatch I kept thinking back about the very first episode of Black Mirror I ever saw — I saw them a bit out of order so the first one for me was “Fifteen Million Merits.” I came away from that one feeling like I’d seen the very first thing to be as good as the original The Twilight Zone without being a copy of The Twilight Zone. With Bandersnatch I came away feeling frustrated and with the sense that this might just be the “Jump the Shark” moment for Black Mirror.

Ultimately I made it through a few of the on-screen choices in Bandersnatch before giving up and moving onto something less “interactive.”

Dear Netflix, please never, ever do this again. I have no desire to take part in any movies or TV series like this ever.

Sincerely, Bert

Netflix Black Mirror message
Netflix Black Mirror message

Direct Beam Comms #159

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

This time of year I always get into the Christmas spirit and put on some of my favorite holiday movies like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon as well as rewatch some very special Christmas episodes of my favorite TV shows.

Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire

The very first episode of The Simpsons was in fact a Christmas special that aired on December 17, 1989. If you want to see just how good The Simpsons was when it was an animated show about people rather than a cartoon about broadly drawn characters as which it has become you should check out this very first one.

Sherlock — “The Abominable Bride”

While most of the modern Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock episodes were set present day, the special 2015 Christmas episode “The Abominable Bride” was set in a more appropriate Sherlocky year of Christmastime, 1895.

Space: Above and Beyond — “The River of Stars”

Not too many hard-edged sci-fi shows have a Christmas episode, yet “The River of Stars” from Space: Above and Beyond was the exception.

Community — “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”

Right at the height of the greatness that was Community came the fully animated Christmas episode “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” that had lots of laughs along with lots of tears and would go onto cement this series into the annals of history.

Batman: The Animated Series — “Christmas with the Joker”

In this episode that originally aired in 1992 Batman, in fact, did not smell nor does (spoiler alert) the Joker get away.

Black Mirror — “White Christmas”

It really isn’t the holidays without watching one of the most depressing episodes of Black Mirror ever in one entitled “White Christmas.” Divided into three chapters, each starring Jon Hamm and each more downbeat than the last, “White Christmas” begins with murder and ends with a man trapped in hellish loop of December 25th where the song “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” is on a constant, never-ending loop.

Happy holidays!

True Detective season 3 commercial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZP6t1FmVO8

Star Trek: Discovery season 2 commercial

Movies

Glass trailer

Godzilla: King of the Monsters trailer

What To Watch This Week

Bumblebee
Bumblebee

Tuesday

Last fall’s thriller Bad Times and the El Royale is available on digital download today.

Wednesday

Mary Poppins Returns for a sequel more than 50 years after the original in theaters. Let’s put it this way, when the previous Mary Poppins movie was released The Beatles had only just arrived in the US.

Friday

The one movie I thought would never get made since the character was the butt of many a joke for years, DC’s Aquaman, hits theaters today.

The sixth film in the 11 year old Transformers franchise, this one taking place in the 1980s, Bumblebee is released to movie screens today.

The Netflix original movie Bird Box, about people who kill themselves after seeing some paranormal thing and the survivors having to wander the world blindfolded otherwise they’ll suffer the same fate, is available today.

The second season of the HULU series Marvel’s Runaways is available today.

Cool Sites

Lost Media Wikia — We explore and hunt for lost media and we use teams, and our fellow community members to contribute.

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie Posters of the Week

  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters poster
    Godzilla: King of the Monsters poster
  • Captain Marvel poster
    Captain Marvel poster

2018/2019 TV preview

CategoriesFeature, TVPosted on

It’s going to be a long fall. Usually, when the weather starts changing and the nights start getting longer I look forward to staying in and checking out the new series on TV. But this fall isn’t looking too good. Sure, there’s a few things to watch, but not enough for my taste and only a handful of series on network TV. The template the networks have taken for the 2018–2019 season is to debut a lot of lame-looking sitcoms and tired cop/hospital/lawyer procedural dramas that all seem to have been done before.

The good news is it isn’t all bad, there are quite a few new series on cable and streaming services to look forward to. The bad news is that most of these series don’t start airing until much later in the year and even then quite a few not until 2019. Oh well, there’s always horror movies marathons come Halloween to fill the gap.

New series

The Passage

On FOX the vampire thriller The Passage starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar is set to put a lot of stakes into the hearts of the undead ghouls in the one network show I want to check out in January. While the novel the series is based on took place mostly in a future overrun with the blood-suckers, this new TV show looks to moved things back a bit to the pre-apocalypse when these vampires were just being created in the lab.

Manifest on NBC about a plane that takes off one day but lands five years later with everyone on board not realizing the time-jump departs September 24. I think I’d be more looking forward to this show if it didn’t look like a clone of many other series before it, especially Lost.

Matt Weiner’s follow-up series to his uber-successful Mad Man entitled The Romanoffs is set to debut on Amazon Prime October 12. I’m not totally sure how this one’s going to go, but reportedly this anthology series will focus on characters who think they’re related to the Russian royal family the Romanoffs.

After the animated Star Wars: Rebels series on Disney ended earlier this year comes the new series Star Wars Resistance also on Disney October 13. This one is set to take place around the time of the current film series but before the events of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Nightflyers

SYFY is once again trying their hand at traditional sci-fi series with Nightflyers, based on the George R.R. Martin book of the same name. Not at all looking to cash in on Martin’s name and the fact that he wrote Game of Thrones and therefore SYFY can promote Nightflyers as such, here, it’s the near-future and as the ship of the same name explores the solar system it uncovers something that threatens everyone abroad the ship. Nightflyers does sound a bit derivative of things like Event Horizon (1997), except that the novel the series is based on was written way back in 1980.

The Netflix series Another Life has an astronaut (Katie Sackhoff) leading a mission to find the origins of an alien artifact, but this artifact might be deadly and the mission one-way. Maybe the cast of Another Life and Nightflyers can team-up since their two shows sure sound a lot alike.

The iconic comic book mini-series then film Watchmen will become an HBO TV series of the same name sometime next year. There’s not a whole lot that is known about this one, other than apparently it doesn’t totally follow the story of the comics but instead takes place in the same comic universe.

And as for new shows this season, that’s about it. I’m sure I’ll checkout some of those lame-looking sitcoms hoping to be surprised with something interesting, but I’m not holding my breath.

Returning series

Fortunately, there are a few returning shows this year to look forward to.

The Good Place

Returning network shows that will premiere this year include The Good Place, the sitcom about a group of people lead by Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) stuck between heaven and hell returns to NBC on Thursday, September 27 and The Orville on FOX that is Seth MacFarlane’s love-letter to the classic series Star Trek squeaks into 2018 with its second season debut on Sunday, December 30.

Two Netflix superhero series return this year too. First up is the second season of Iron Fist which drops September 7. Then, sometime later in the year, comes a third season of Daredevil who appear last season on The Defenders. I honestly don’t really remember what happened in the second season of Daredevil since it aired more than a year and a half ago at this point. Weren’t there lots of ninjas?

Doctor Who

Doctor Who returns for its 11th season of the modern incarnation of the character October on BBC America here in the US. The big news with Doctor Who is that after 55 years and more than a dozen versions of the character, this time the lead will be played by a woman, Jodie Whittaker. Personally, I still like Peter Davison’s version of the character the best, no matter how many Matt Smith fans out there I have to go all “Sharks and Jets” with.

The Sundance series Deutschland 86 will return for its second season October 25. The first season was about an East German spy played by Jonas Nay infiltrating West Germany in order to steal military secrets and had tinges of The Americans to it. The third season looks to pick up three years from there and just a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The British sci-fi series Black Mirror will serve up more creepy goodness sometime this winter on Netflix. Even after four seasons I still really dig this show and I think it’s partially because even though there’s already been those four seasons, Black Mirror is an anthology series so each episode is a story unto itself. And to date there’s been just 20 episodes of it produced in total, which is less than how many episodes of a modern network series are produced in just one year, so the show is still fresh.

Star Trek: Discovery
Star Trek: Discovery

A second season of Star Trek: Discovery returns to CBS All Access this January. The first season of Discovery got good enough reviews from Trek fans, if those were the only people seemingly watching it, and the second season looks to bring in the big guns to the show, namely the USS Enterprise along with its Captain Kir… errr… I mean Captain Pike (Anson Mount).

The Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things will return for its third season summer of 2019. Last time we left the plucky kids of Hawkins, Indiana seemingly having beaten the evil forces that had emerged from the “upside down,” but if other sci-fi shows have taught me anything it’s that every victory against evil is just temporary. Until the final episode of the series, that is.

My favorite superhero series The Punisher also returns to Netflix sometime next year. The first season ended with Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) having totally accepted the mantel of the skull wearing vigilante by blasting all the baddies to smithereens with the second season looking to pick up from there.

The Terror

A surprise to me this spring was just how much I dug the first season of the AMC series The Terror about an ill-fated expedition to the Arctic the 19th century. The second season will reportedly have a new story and focus on Japanese Americans during the second world war since the first season ended with pretty much the entire cast dead. That’s not a spoiler since the first season was based on a real-life expedition that ended in tragedy and I’m not sure you can consider a historical fact a “spoiler.”

A third season of the critical darling then critically derided True Detective will debut on HBO sometime next year four years after the second. The third season looks to “one-up” the first since that told a story over two time periods by telling a story over three.

Shows that I think will premiere sometime in 2019

Mindhunter

My favorite series of the 2017–2018 season , Mindhunter is set to begin its second season on Netflix next year. This show about the creation of a serial killer hunting unit within the FBI in the 1970s was one of the most well-written and acted shows on TV in recent memory. Plus the series is co-produced and had a few episodes directed by David Fincher which is always a good thing.

The sci-fi drama The Expanse will leave its home of three seasons on SYFY and move over to the Amazon Prime service next year. The third season ended on a high note, so I’m extremely excited to see where the show will go from here.

Another sci-fi drama, this time Westworld, is set to debut its third season on HBO. Now, I won’t even pretend to say that I understood what all happened in the second season finale of Westworld, I don’t think it was quite on the level of the final episode of Lost or anything, but I suppose time will tell.

Previous Previews

Direct Beam Comms #114

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Black Mirror fourth season ***/****

I recently finished up the fourth season of the excellent Netflix Black Mirror series and thought it was the strongest one yet. There were a few episodes that didn’t quite work, but overall I thought from beginning to end Black Mirror is still one of the creepiest/scariest/prescient things on TV right now.

Hang the DJ

“Metalhead”: “Metalhead” isn’t the typical episode of Black Mirror. Shot in black and white, this one is a straight-up action piece that’s kind’a sort’a a British version of The Terminator, and doesn’t let up until the end. I like that series creator Charlie Brooker feels comfortable enough with the universe that is Black Mirror in that there’s no one standard episode of the show and he can stretch out with a slightly different story than usual like with “Metalhead.”

“Hang the DJ”: Honesty, half the fun for me is trying to figure out where each episode of Black Mirror is headed and I couldn’t figure out where “Hang the DJ” was going at all. Even right up to the very end of the episode I had no idea what was about to happen and that’s part of the reason I liked this episode so much so much. Four seasons in and Black Mirror can still surprise.

“Black Museum”: The “Black Museum” episode is closest to the “Black Christmas” episode of a few years ago where a few different interrelated stories are all told under the umbrella of an overall encompassing story. Here, it’s a weary traveler touring the titular Black Museum that contains all sorts of forbidden knowledge and what happens when the disgraced museum proprietor reveals one too many secrets.

USS Callister

“USS Callister”: The episode that was announced first before the series had premiered and got the most hype this season was “USS Callister.” What everyone, myself included, thought was going to be a riff on the original Star Trek series turned into something that was darker and deeper in meaning that anything I could have imagined beforehand.

“Crocodile”: Crocodile is an interesting take on what extremes people are willing to go in order to keep their lives and lifestyle intact. And, since this is all taking place in the universe of Black Mirror, there’s an interesting price to be paid for those actions.

“Arkangel”: The one episode this season of Black Mirror that I didn’t think quite worked was “Arkangel.” This episode about a mother who implants a device in her young daughter’s head so she can see out of her eyes with something akin to an iPad goes pretty much as expected as the girl gets older and doesn’t quite care for the fact that her mom can literally keep track of her wherever she goes 24/7.

Westworld second season TV spot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUmfriZoMw0

Movies

Venom trailer

Avengers: Infinity War TV spot

Mission Impossible: Fallout trailer

Solo: A Star Wars Story trailer

Deadpool 2 trailer

Night of the Living Dead

One of, if not the most, influential horror movies in history gets a Blu-ray release this week. While there’s been many different editions of Night of the Living Dead released to date, everything from VHS to DVD both in original black and white and colorized, this brand new 2018 edition marks the first time since the movie was originally released that viewers can see the film in all it’s gory at home.

From The Criterion Collection:

New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director George A. Romero, coscreenwriter John A. Russo, sound engineer Gary R. Streiner, and producer Russell W. Streiner

New restoration of the monaural soundtrack, supervised by Romero and Gary Streiner and presented uncompressed on the Blu-ray

Night of Anubis, a never-before-presented work-print edit of the film

Never-before-seen 16 mm dailies reel

The Movie Chain: #6: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2012)

Last week: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.

One of my favorite TV mini-series of all-time is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley from 1979. So I was kind’a predestined to like the 2011 film of the same name that starred Gary Oldman from last week’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in the Smiley role.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy takes place in the 1970s within the “Circus,” or the code-name for British intelligence, where a Soviet mole has be discovered in their top echelon. Those in charge might know the mole’s there, but no one’s quite sure exactly who it is that’s feeding the Soviets all the British secrets they can handle. Enter Smiley who was booted out of the agency some time before and can be brought into investigate since he’s the one person everyone’s sure isn’t the traitor.

I like the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie a lot, if I think it moves at probably a too fast pace to tell all its story. I think this comes after having read the novel movie was based on and having watched the six hour mini-series many times too. Scenes in the mini-series that take good chunks of hour-long episodes fly past in minutes, or seconds in the movie. However, this might not bother the casual viewer if they’re unfamiliar with the source material.

One thing I think other filmmakers can learn from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is that there can be a lot going on in a movie yet the material doesn’t have to be spoon fed to the audience. There’s quite a few characters and scenes in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the dialog is steeped in inside jargon and the pace of the film is fast yet since the underlying story is sound and it all works.

Next week: “You can practically see it from here.”

Rumor Control

Looking at upcoming TV series premieres it seems as if things are going to be pretty light the next few weeks which I couldn’t quite understand at first. On the one hand there’s supposed to be 500 series all premiering in 2018 which would mean that right around ten shows need to debut each week to hit this number. But I figured out why things are so light — I think everyone’s trying to keep out of the way of the Olympics since any series going up against that the next few weeks is sure to be caulked in the ratings.

Then again, if you’re like me and have no interest in the Olympics, having a few series premiere against it might be some genius counter-programming to gain a few more eyeballs to your show than might normally get since there’s not really anything much going on those two weeks of the Olympics.

I’m just sayin’.

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #108

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Black Mirror — “USS Callister” ***/****

When Black Mirror first premiered in 2011 I didn’t think I’d ever get to see it. Created by Charlie Brooker for Channel 4 in the UK, Black Mirror was a series everyone was talking about but no one could watch legally here in the US. It took some time but I was finally able to see that first season and was blown away — Black Mirror was as good as everyone said it was and it quickly became one of my favorite series.

A few years back Netflix picked up the show and suddenly what was very difficult to see became very easy with the outlet streaming old episodes along with brand new ones. And now comes a fourth season of Black Mirror beginning with a first episode titled “USS Callister.”

Here, a software architect by day Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons) moonlights at night as the captain of the USS Callister in a virtual reality simulation game. The USS Callister is a ship of the Space Fleet (think 1960s Star Trek) crewed by people who look a lot like Daly’s real-life co-workers. But since this is Black Mirror they don’t just look like Daly’s co-workers, they’re digital duplicates of them right down to their memories and personalities. The real people on the outside have no idea what’s going on, Daly created the duplicates in secret, meaning that for the clones on the USS Callister life is a hellish existence alternating between the boredom with having nothing to do while Daly’s at work and the nightmare of having him act as captain where he wants to play Space Fleet. And if they don’t play along he can do things to them like remove their eyes and mouth causing them to feel like they’re suffocating forever or turn them into grotesque alien creatures to populate the various planets around the digital galaxy.

And since these crew members aren’t real, it means they can never die either and will be stuck in this existence forever.

Enter new co-worker/USS Callister crewmen Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) who has a plan to get out. But if her plan fails it means an existence of eternal suffering for those crazy enough to cross Daly in the digital world.

Black Mirror is a great show at examining what life might be like in just a few years time if just a few things go wrong. Like what are the odds that someday technology will make it easy to make a perfect, digital clone of someone? And what are the odds that someone will use that technology for ill, like cloning people for their own private video game? Some of these ideas were also covered in the “Cookie” segment of the Black Mirror Christmas episode a few years back.

Regardless… Black Mirror is one of the best series on TV. I’m just glad that I don’t have to fight to watch it anymore!

Doctor Who ***/****

Each year the series Doctor Who airs a special Christmas episode. In years past those episodes have had a strong holiday theme — one year even featured the good Doctor teaming up with Santa Claus to fight evil. But this year was different. This year’s episode mostly skipped the Christmas theme and would mark the first official appearance of the latest incarnation of the Doctor, this time not to be played by a man as the character’s been the last 50+ years but by a woman.

“Twice Upon a Time” takes place at the South Pole in the 1960s, in the trenches during the first world war and in the future where people who are just about to die are whisked away to have their memories duplicated for historical purposes before being sent back to their own time to face their fate. The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) is on the verge of regeneration — or changing bodies. A way that producers of the series have used since the beginning to keep the show going by replacing the lead actor with a new face. But this Doctor doesn’t want to regenerate. He wants to die and finally rest after centuries of adventure.

Enter the very first Doctor from 1963, here played by David Bradley but originally William Hartnell who passed away in 1975. This first Doctor doesn’t want to regenerate either and he and the modern Doctor along with an army captain (Mark Gatiss) pulled from the trenches of the first world war and flung into the future and the Doctor’s assistant Bill (Pearl Mackie) who may or may not be a duplicate of the original have to uncover what they’ve done to cause time to freeze in place all across the universe.

I thought that “Twice Upon a Time” was the best episode of Doctor Who in recent memory.

I’m a big fan of the classic Doctor Who series and love it whenever the modern show mentions the old, which they do from time to time. And to see the original Doctor here returning to form, and even with his slightly smaller TARDIS than the current Doctor’s, made for one satisfying episode.

Especially interesting was the introduction of the new Doctor played by Jodie Whittaker. It’s traditional for the new Doctor to be introduced at the very end of the episode where the character’s thrown into some sort of extreme peril, to be concluded in a few months time at the start of the next season of Doctor Who. And this introduction was no different with the new Doctor being literally ejected from the TARDIS in the closing moments of the show.

It will be interesting to see just where that next series goes from here. I have no doubt that Whittaker will make a good Doctor but Doctor Who producer since its reboot in 2005 Steven Moffat won’t be returning next season, Chris Chibnall will be taking over the reigns. This will mark the first time in 13 years that someone new will be setting the direction of the show.

So, love Doctor Who or hate it, it’ll be interesting to see just where Doctor Who ends up in 2018.

Movies

A few months back I posted all of the new movies I saw to date in 2017 and here’s the rest of what I saw this year:

  • Spider-Man: Homecoming: I thought this was a really fun movie that did a good job of reintroducing a new Spider-Man without going through all the rigmarole of doing another origin story.

  • Logan Lucky

    Logan Lucky: This “Ocean’s 7/11” was one of the hidden, overlooked gems of 2017.

  • Split: I was really surprised by this one. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has been on a cold-streak for literally 15 years at this point and for him to come out with a movie as interesting and powerful as Split was is amazing.
  • Thor: Ragnarok: I can’t remember the last time I had as much fun as I did at a superhero movie as I did with this one.
  • War for the Planet of the Apes: A fitting end for a superb trilogy of movies. I only wish all movie reboots could be as different as/paying as much homage to the original as War for the Planet of the Apes was.
  • Dunkirk: Easily the best movie of the year and probably the best Christopher Nolan movie since Memento, and that’s saying a lot.
  • A Trip to Spain: I really like the whole A Trip to… movies and A Trip to Spain was no exception.
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi: I’m not sure what all the negativity was about surrounding this movie, but I liked Star Wars: The Last Jedi a lot. I thought it was better than Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
  • Bright: This Netflix original has been getting a lot of flack for being one of the worst movies of the year. While I don’t think Bright was a great movie, it wasn’t a bad one either. It’s one of those films with a lot of great ideas, probably too many for a single film to hold.
  • Blade runner: 2049: Slow and ponderous at times, I’m glad I checked this one out. Though I’d be surprised if I ever watch it again.
  • IT: Essentially the TV series Stranger Things has been aping IT quite successfully for two seasons now. So for a movie version of this classic, beloved book to come along now and still be as stunning as it was is saying something.

For the record, I only saw 18 movies this year that were released in 2017, but for what I saw these were my favorite.

  1. Dunkirk

    Dunkirk

  2. Logan
  3. IT
  4. Thor: Ragnarok
  5. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Rumor Control

Things I’ve misheard over the years:

For many years I thought the movie about zombies in the Caribbean The Serpent and the Rainbow was instead titled Surfing in the Rainbow.

I also thought the title to the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was really Do Androids Dream an Electric Sleep?. And to this day I think my title’s better that the original.

When the song “Glycerine” by Bush was popular and got lots of radio play I used to think the lyric “Bad Moon White Again” was “Madmartigan Warrior” since surly everyone, including songwriter Gavin Rossdale was a big a fan of the movie Willow as I was.

Cool Movie Posters of the Week