Matt's Movie Musings

I really wanted to get writing again to get through these weird times, but every time I try and write about movies I just get depressed about cinemas being closed. So with that in mind, I reverted back to my first love, professional wrestling. The thing is, I literally don't remember a time when I wasn't a wrestling fan. My household was one of the first in Burnley to get a satellite dish and cable so I've been watching the WWF since before I have memories, and that early introduction soon grew into a passion for the entire medium. I choose that word, "medium", with great consideration when it comes to trying to explain my love for the wrasslin' business to my non-fan friends. In my opinion, the essence of pro-wrestling is as a medium for the telling of dramatic stories and conflicts, between dynamic personalities, that blur the lines between truth and fiction utilizing a language of physical combat. All of my favourite matches tend to be some combination of c...

This list may seem a little redundant at this stage (it currently being February 2020) but as the Oscars have just gone down, and several of the films on this list didn't get released in the UK until January, I feel I can just about sneak it in here. Now the first entry I made on this blog was listing my favourite films of the year up to that point. As a result, several entries on this list are carried over from there with slight modification. If you're at all interested in seeing how that list aged, and how some of my opinions have changed I'll include a link at the bottom of this post. Honourable Mentions: THE IRISHMAN, UNCUT GEMS, HUSTLERS, AD ASTRA, PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, DOLEMITE IS MY NAME, ROCKETMAN, JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 and my beloved CRAWL. * I haven't yet had chance to catch THE FAREWELL, 1917 or THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO Now let's get on with it, here are my Top 10 Favourite Films of 2019. 10) FORD v FERRARI aka LE MANS '66 (D...

I imagine how much you’ll enjoy DOCTOR SLEEP (2019) will rest a lot on how familiar you are, and how you feel about, Stanley Kubrick’s infamous adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, THE SHINING (1980). Personally, I am not a fan of Kubrick’s film. While I will be the first to hold it up as a marvel of production design and exalt its technical brilliance, the film itself has always left me cold. I won’t dwell too much on what I consider to be the failings of such a universally acclaimed piece of cinema but for my viewing experience, the fundamental flaw is the film’s treatment of its central characters. Kubrick’s depiction of Jack, Wendy and Danny Torrance results in, for this viewer, some of the least likeable or interesting characters in horror cinema history. Jack Nicholson is typically excellent in the lead role, but the choice to depict Jack Torrance as so thoroughly resentful of his familial obligations from the very beginning shifts a lot of the emotional weight of the film onto ...

It's that time of the year again, Halloween. Every October I enact the same ritual of watching, and rewatching, as many horror films as I possibly can before November 1st and this year I figured I'd but all that time spent to good use. So, if like me your ideal Halloween night involves getting comfy, turning out the lights and indulging in some cinematic terror, here's a few recommendations in the form of my favourite horror movies of all time... 20. TRICK R' TREAT (2007)  This is one of those films that truly fits the bill of a "cult" hit. Flying largely under the radar on it's release, this Horror anthology flick seems to be gaining more and more fans with every passing year. Approaching Halloween with a sentimentality usually reserved for Christmas movies, what this films lacks in scares it makes up for with sheer entertainment and clever storytelling. The film tells a series of seemingly isolated spooky stories that become increasingly intercon...

It's taken longer than I would have liked but I'm back with my next bout of random film musings. As I mentioned in my first post, the aim with this blog is to take a positive approach to discussing my love of film. By which I mean, only focusing my time on the films I love and while that may be an easy enough goal to state, it's actually more difficult in practise. You see it's easy to criticise something we don't like, to list all the things that made us mad or disappointed us about a film, but to break down exactly why we like a film with any degree of critical awareness I for one find much more difficult. Hence this second post arriving almost a week after I originally intended. It was easy enough to pick out the bits and pieces I liked but to try and figure out exactly why they resonated with me the way they did and form some kind of coherent essay from those thoughts took a lot more work than I was expecting. I think I felt a little more apprehensive as the sub...