BUBBLEGUN EXTRA: ALIENS RE-REVIEWED... PLUS BONUS HELLFIRE CAVES RANT!
Added 2025-08-27 15:58:32 +0000 UTCDoes what it says on the tin... we also talk about Escape From New York and The Last Showgirl, of all things.
Also: a reminder to Biffo's Brain that we're doing a Zoom tomorrow night!
#bubblegunextra
Comments
I do feel that an awful lot of films these days seem under-written. There's a lot of movies which seem interesting to me or promising when I read the synopsis, but then kind of don't stick the landing or are compromised in some other way. I'm not going to name names here but loads of newer directors (people who've come up over the last 20 years or so) keep making films that lack a vital human element, or have some very ill-thought-out ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny after the film's ended, and tell you more about the director than whatever story they were trying to do. It's not helped by the weird way the film press has a tendency to massively overexaggerate how good a film is. That isn't a new problem by any means, of course, but it feels like something that's become worse and way more exasperating what with social media, etc etc. This certainly isn't the same as The Last Showgirl, but I saw one of Nicholas Cage's recent films (The Surfer) several months ago. It left me in a bit of a bad mood tbh, and even though my feelings towards it have shifted more to thinking it was basically sort of alright (and my initial unhappiness was mainly to do that I almost suffered heatstroke in the cinema, and had to run off to the lobby for a bit to cool down), it's not a classic by any means. It was just another Nicholas Cage film. And yet! I was quite staggered at the reaction of the audience at the end of that screening. Almost everybody spontaneously broke into applause at the end, like they'd seen something new and extraordinary in N. Cage's standard performance that was actually worth applauding for. Sometimes I worry if I'm asking too much of entertainment, I keep finding faults with everything.
Michelle Lyons
2025-08-28 18:32:02 +0000 UTC
