JG Judgementally Comments...

Barbie

What’s the Movie? Barbie

What’s It All About, JG? Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives a perfect life in Barbieland with lots of other different Barbies and Kens. One day she has strange, rather existential thoughts about dying and her world slowly moves away from its perfect state as she becomes more human. To correct this, she visits Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) who advises her to go to The Real World and figure out who’s playing with her and fix the problem. Travelling to the real work (well, LA) with Ken (Ryan Gosling), Barbie is shocked to discover that men run the world, feminism hasn’t been solved and that the girl she thought was playing with her, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), in fact hates her. Turns out it was the girl’s Mum, Gloria, (America Ferrera) that loved playing with the doll and, after escaping from Mattel, they all return to Barbieland. However, Ken has learned about the patriarchy and tries to overthrow the rule of the various Barbies by having men – men! – take control. With guile, cunning and intelligence, the various Barbies defeat the men and “our” Barbie chooses to leave the perfection of Barbieland behind for the real world and becomes human.

Friends II

Right, it’s Major Update time!

*jaunty guitar, corny lyrics, frivolous fountain frolicking*

So, I am now up to Episode 15, The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break. I have intentionally stopped on the cliffhanger and I don’t yet know how it resolves (so please, no spoilers for the next couple of days at least – actually if you could avoid spoilers except for the very most general ones, that would very much be appreciated. Talk back, not forwards!).

Friends

A first-time watch-through from a series I have somehow entirely bypassed.

So here’s the thing. Despite being very much A 90s Person, and having now reached the grand old age of half a century, I have, or rather until recently had, never seen an episode of Friends.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

A cracking adventure for Indy’s final outing?

What’s The Movie? Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

What’s It All About? The film kicks off with a digitally de-aged Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, as if you need to be told) going through a typical punching-Nazis adventure/backstory towards the end of World War II. After shenanigans, he ends up retrieving the titular Dial of Destiny (or Archimedes Dial or Antikythera) which he leaves with fellow adventurer (sort of) Basil Shaw (Toby Jones). We then move to the present where Jones is old, divorcing Marion, retiring from teaching, and very much alone. But that can’t be it, so in waltzes Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Action Hero) to spice things up. She’s his Goddaughter and child of Basil Shaw, who was driven mad by his obsession with the Dial. Indy took it back off him to spare him his obsession but, rather than destroying it as he promised, hid it. Helena persuades him to reveal its continued existence so she can nick it and sell it.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

What’s The Movie? Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

What’s It All About, JG? Testing my patience. However, for the record, roguish and presumably-charming Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) and the subtly-named barbarian Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), escape from prison to try and resurrect his dead wife and reconnect with his estranged daughter, Kira (an insufferably brattish Chloe Coleman). In the absence of her jailed father and her dead mother, she’s fallen under the “care and protection” of Forge Fitzwilliam (an equally insufferable Hugh Grant) who has some plan about getting rich or something but it’s really difficult to give a shit. A Red Wizard was responsible for Edgin and Kilgore’s arrest so must be perfunctorily defeated by the end of the movie. Edgin puts together a motley band consisting of Kilgore, half-arsed sorcerer Simon Aumar (Justice Smith), tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), and paladin Xenk Yendar (Regé-Jean Page). The rest of the movie is basically a heist as they first try and get the Tablet of Reawakening to bring back Edgin’s missus, then rescue his daughter from Forge’s nefarious clutches. In the end, there’s a far-from-spectacular battle, Forge is defeated but escapes to fight another day, and the Tablet is used to save Kilgore, fatally wounded in the “climactic” battle with the Red Wizard, rather than the absent wife.

Forever

What’s the Show? Forever (2018)

What’s It All About, JG? Well, that’s a tricky one. Actually, it’s not all that tricky but this is definitely a show that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it going in and then allowing yourself to be surprised by it. It is, though, a lightly comic drama about relationships and what happens to them, though again saying more is straying into spoiler territory. Spoilers definitely wouldn’t ruin the show (and I’m normally fine with casting spoilers about aplenty) yet at the same time there’s definitely a pleasure to be had from seeing a show start going in one particular direction and then seeing what it develops into. But this isn’t getting us anywhere, so let’s get the basics out of the way.

Knock At The Cabin

Can M Night Shyamalan knock this one out of the park? No. No he cannot.

What’s The Movie? Knock At The Cabin

What’s It All About, JG? A gay couple, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), and their daughter Wen (Kristin Cui) are vacationing at an isolated cabin somewhere in the woods. Wen is approached by Leonard (Dave Bautista) while out collecting grasshoppers. Turns out Leonard and three of his cohorts believe the world is about to end in a religious apocalypse and the only thing that can prevent it is one member of the family killing another. They must decide who should die and they have to do the deed – suicide won’t cut it. So who will die, the gay guy, the other gay guy, or the young girl? And are the four cultists/zealots right in what they say about the end of the world? They believe so fervently that every time the family refuses to murder each other, the zealots kill one of their number while a terrible natural disaster occurs. Eventually, one member of the family does indeed kill another as the evidence for an Actual Apocalypse adds up. Is it real? Anyway, the world is saved but only after all four cultists are dead. Was it all just in their heads? Na.

Quantum Leap (2022-)

Can an old early 90s sci-fi show make the leap into the 21st century?

What’s The Show? Quantum Leap, the unexpected return.

What’s It All About, JG? Well, pretty much the same as the original series, unsurprisingly. But for the sake of completeness, Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee), Our Hero, is a physicist working on the Quantum Leap time-travel project thirty years after when the original show was set. Ben “leaps” for reasons which remain murky throughout much of the first season, jumping into various different people across time as he “tries to put right what once went wrong”. You know, saving a restaurant, helping a family get over a tragedy, defeating prejudice, giving Brandon Routh some guest-star work, that kind of thing. He’s aided in his missions by his fiancee, Addison (Caitlin Bassett), who appears to him in the form of an insubstantial hologram, and the rest of the Quantum Leap team. In the present they’re trying to figure out how to get Ben back while also trying to understand what it was that drove him to leap in the first place and what he’s really trying to achieve. In the end, he did it to save Addison’s life, which he successfully does despite the machinations of “Leaper X”, another time-traveller hell-bent on stopping him.

Picard: Season Three

Can the final season of Picard give the Next Generation crew a better ending than Nemesis did? Um…

What’s the Show? The final season of Star Trek: Picard

What’s It All About, JG? Fanwank, largely. But fine, there’s a plot. Beverly Crusher, in absentia for twenty years, turns up on a ship being fired at accompanied by A Mysterious Man, Jack. She needs rescuing, so sends a desperate message to Picard who, along with Riker, attempts a rescue by redirecting the Titan, a ship Seven of Nine is also now serving on (don’t worry about the details – nobody else did). The ship is captained by a spectacular asshole of a captain, Shaw, but Seven redirects the ship anyway against his orders. Arriving at the location Bev sent over, they are attacked by another ship, the Shrike, which is captained by – get your collective gasps ready now – a changeling! The captain, Vadic, wants Jack, Bev’s far-from-inexplicable sidekick.

Luther: The Fallen Sun

Luther’s back! And on Netflix! But can The Fallen Sun live up to the expectations of the BBC show?

What’s the Movie/Show? Luther: The Fallen Sun

What’s It All About, JG? When last we saw him, Luther’s increasingly extreme measures caught up with him and it was to jail with the disgraced DCI. The Fallen Sun picks up with the self-same Luther (Idris Elba, of course) in prison, where he’s broadcast the sound of people being tortured to death. Nice. This is all being orchestrated by David Robey (Andy Serkis), a wealthy psychopath who enjoys using surveillance tech in order to get people to kill themselves and/or cause convenient plot distractions.

Luther escapes from prison to stop him. There is, inevitably, a mole in the police investigation as DCI Raine (Cynthia Erivo) and Luther’s former colleagues try to get him back to jail while also pursuing Robey. The whole thing ends up in Norway, with Robey having build a “Red Bunker” – a torture chamber where Luther and Raine end up having to fight each other for the prurient interests of watching pervs. The police turn up to shut down the bunker, and Robey ends up drowned at the bottom of a lake. Luther is flown back to England to recover to recover from his wounds, but is offered a potential way out of going back to prison, as MI5 are maybe offering him a job. Watch this space…?