Tag: Jeremy Irvine

Are you excited? They made a sequel to The Woman in Black!!

Why do I hear crickets? Must be my refusal to try to buy more bug spray. I personally have no idea what anyone else thought about The Woman In Black, and I am far too lazy right now to look something like that up, but I thought it was a dull. Harry Potter did nothing for me. Just was an period piece British film, with a shitty ending, and a shitty everything else also. I would have never guessed a sequel could have happened.

Because now we have The Woman In Black 2: Angel of Death. I have to assume Great Britain went bananas over the first film. I am pretty sure it was a remake or a book or something first, and they probably like anything set in their country.

From what I can tell this thing isn’t even really related to the first movie. Different actors/characters. Maybe a different ghost, but that would be Troll 2 levels of dumb. Honestly, if it has anything to do with the first film, I wouldn’t even remember.

Oh it’s a creepy looking doll that a kid likes. That’s normal in horror now, I guess.

This sequel takes place in World War II, which is either before or after the first film. Again, I remember jack shit about it. We have a very universal concept here. Britain is getting bombed occasionally, so a lot of kids have lost family. Orphans and double orphans. Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox) is a teacher of orphans, and their school is going to go leave the bustling city of London to live in the countryside instead. You know, where the Nazis should not be bombing. Her headmistress (Helen McCrory), Eve, and a bunch of kids head out to live in an abandoned building, to be safe.

But of course they won’t be safe. This is a horror movie sequel. And it is the country so we have inherently creepy looking people like Hermit Jacob (Ned Dennehy) running around. Thankfully there is a hunky man, a pilot, Harry (Jeremy Irvine), and another guy, the air raid warden (Adrian Rawlins). Gosh, could they be anymore safe?

Anyways. Haunted mansion type movie. Little kids going missing. Mute kid (Oaklee Pendergast) is of course involved, cause that bitch can’t talk.

But oh nelly can he scream. Suuu-eeeee! Suuuu-eeee!

Yawn yawn yawn. No surprise. A sequel to a movie I disliked I didn’t find great. But man, it was just so dang boring. And British. Not that British things can’t be scary. But this doesn’t at all feel like a concept worth even creating. They didn’t add anything new to the horror genre.

It just seems like a ham fisted concept, that vaguely is related to another film, to make money. It is literally Troll 2ing us. Right in front of our eyes. Oh, the ghost is a woman in black, who hates kids? Fits. Done.

Fuckkkk. It is just. It is full of boring characters, boring plot, boring scares, and nothing new. Throwing in a bad ass subtitle doesn’t make a bad ass film. It makes it generic.

Generic horror is maybe worse than generic comedy. Maybe. It’s just the level of mediocrity that we should all avoid in order to make it through the night, actually entertained. Boooo boring. Yay entertainment.

The main reason I wanted to see The Railway Man was because of the song they used in the trailer. You know the one. From The Thin Red Line.

“God Yu Tekkem Laef Blong Mi” . Seriously, put that song in a trailer, I am going to try and watch your movie. I will also be pissed if your movie isn’t epic enough to warrant the use of that song. Thankfully, Mr. Nobody used it in its movie, and it deserved it.

So, just saying, The Railway Man. A lot of pressure on you to not fuck this one up.

They get bonus points for making a World War II movie without Nazis, though.

Eric (Colin Firth). He’s got a secret. He’s been hiding. Under his skin. Wait, no, that is Mr. Roboto. Sorry.

Eric really likes trains. He always has, likes to ride them, knows what makes them tick, knows a lot of trivia. He also served for Great Britain in World War II. While on duty, his company had to surrender to the Japanese military and their unit was taken to work in camps. What did they have to work on? A railroad! The Burma Railway, to be historically accurate. How zany.

Speaking of coincidences, he also met his now wife (Nicole Kidman) thanks to the trains. Trains are really a big part of this guys life.

But he actually does have some pent up secrets. Some things happened to him while he was in that POW camp. Things done to him by Takeshi Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada), the official translator for the Japanese that he would rather keep buried. But it turns out that Takeshi is still alive, in Japan, and wasn’t taken as a war criminal like the rest of Japanese soldiers from that camp.

This is good, if Eric was the kind of guy to enact revenge. But he wouldn’t do that at his age, would he?

Also starring Stellan Skarsgard as one of his old friends, and Tanroh Ishida and Jeremy Irvine as the younger Takeshie and Eric. I will let you figure out who goes with who.

Don’t just assume races stay consistent, is all I am sayin’.

I don’t think the entirety of The Railway Man lives up to the song. It’s sad, but true.

The ending is fantastic. The encounter between the two older men, combined with flashbacks during World War II. It was very dramatic, tense, and even a bit beautiful. It really kept you glued to the screen.

On the other hand, the first half of the movie tended to drag on. I think it is because see the meeting of Eric and his wife play out, then they are married. They have to give us that whole story. Then we have to have flashbacks of the POW camp. Finding out that the guy is still alive doesn’t even happen until the second half of the film.

It was quite a bore, and ruined the much better ending a bit for me.

This is a true story, but things were changed enough to ramp up the dramatic elements. I don’t care about that. I just care that presumably the beginning wasn’t changed enough to make it more interesting, just the ending. Come on. Enhance All is a way better option than Enhance End.

Somehow, when Steven Spielberg makes a movie, people take notice. But when I heard about War Horse? I thought meh. Whatever. Horse movie. Animal movies in general just seem weirder to me. And the last two Horse movies I saw (both racing) were incredibly boring to me.

That’s why for this movie, that I’ve had access to for a month, I am finally watching. Just never felt like the right time to watch it.

And you know, Horses a- aww look at it’s eyes.

The movie is about 140 minutes, and packs a lot in it. It starts from humble beginnings, the birth of the horse on the farm. Learning to walk and run. Once it is old enough it is taken to an auction in the city. Albert (Jeremy Irvine) convinces his dad (Peter Mullan) to bid on the horse, despite it being a colt and them really needing a nice plow horse. But when the landlord tries to drive up the price, the dad stubbornly out bids him, using all of their money (and making it hard to pay the landlord his rent). The mom (Emily Watson) is mad, but they agree to pay the full rent by autumn and want to plow an extra rocky field to make the money.

But first the horse needs training, and is trained to follow a call. Can’t jump well, but can run fast. If only he can teach it to PLOW though.

World War I comes about, and due to the rent circumstances, the horse is sold to the army. Albert is pissed, but the officer (Tom Hiddleston) claims he will protect it as if he did all the raising himself. In training with another officer, the horse meets another horse, a darker bigger horse, who might be going on the adventure with it.

The horses find themselves switching sides, to be cart bearers for the Germans (with Leonard Carow), an old man jam maker (Niels Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens), back to the German side to face the gruesome heavy artillery duty (under Nicolas Bro). Many close calls over the years.

But will he ever get to see Albert again as promised, who is now a soldier (with Robert Emms and Benedict Cumberbatch as other soldiers).

Horse BFFs.

This film is also based off of an old children’s book in the 80s, and a play that came out about 4-5 years prior. Not an original Spielberg picture.

But boy was it powerful.

The only thing I really knew about the tale was that it featured a “lot of different stories” and that made some people uninterested in it. Well, sure, quite a few plot points end up happening, but at least its all the same horse. Not a whole bunch of “War horse” stories (well, because it is in so many different horse positions, we get to see them all, but still one horse show). To me it felt like an entirely epic Homeward Bound, without talking, just how the horse changed so many lives.

I got way more into it than I would have guessed, even crying near the end. Sad things occur. Since you know, it is a war after all.

I do think that they could have put more effort into making sure we knew the many different characters, and how they related. I had to wiki some of the characters at the end, not knowing how they all mattered for the story. That was the landlord’s son? Oh okay.