Game Night – some great movie laughs! #AmazonPrime #Rachelmcadams #GameNight

Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams give us some brilliant laughs in this new Amazon Prime movie. It’s a feel-good satire of middle-class rivalry (#FirstWorldProblems). A group of childless friends live for their Friday games’ night. They are ridiculously competitive. Then, Jason’s older brother comes to town and declares he’s gonna take games’ night ‘up a notch’! A real-time kidnapping and murder-mystery role play begins… and all too soon we’re not sure what’s real and what’s pretend. The stakes are raised when the older brother’s mafia friends start getting involved, closely followed by the FBI and so on. But our friends have brilliant ‘game skills’, including lateral thinking and problem-solving, meaning precious little can get the better of them. It’s the game of their very lives!

I’m a bit of a writer, and this is one of those movies I wish I’d written myself. There’s a laugh out loud joke every 5mins, and such a variety of joke-type that there’s something for everyone, including the hard-bitten viewer. Coming to the end of lockdown, this film is just what I needed. 8.5 out of 10 from me!

The Lost Generation: review of Hanna #dystopian #Hanna #AlexRider

Like the Amazon Prime show Alex Rider, Hanna tells the tale of a super-teen who has been abused and/or experimented upon by society (i.e. mean adults, the older generation, etc). The Hanna series is based upon the 2011 cult movie of the same name, so has tight plotting, just like Alex Rider (based on the Horowitz novels). Why is there a proliferation of series like this? Well, it’s the state of the world today, isn’t it? Who’d wanna be a teen in the modern era? Not me. It’s either a) become an unfeeling monster to survive or b) end up exploited and collateral damage. Bleak?

You bet. Bleak. But it makes these shows relevant, insightful and important. It exposes the brutalisation of youth (the key theme of the dystopian YA genre)… and there is still a dash of hope to be found. Our young protagonists, by hook or by crook, manage to survive while still holding on to their humanity. So it’s not all doom and gloom. Thank goodness for that. Hanna has great action sequences, touching humour, heart and… deep, deep understanding. Definitely worth a watch. 8.5 out of 10.

What a fantastic show! #AlexRider #Prime #OttoFarrant

Once more Amazon Prime shows Netflix how it’s done. Get yourself a top notch author (e.g. Anthony Horowitz)  of fantasy, thrillers or whatever, take their brilliant novel(s) and turn them into a TV series. Easy, right? You’d think. Yet Netflix still believes that getting themselves hack scriptwriters who really don’t have the craft or genre-knowledge required to write a quality fantasy or thriller novel will result in a great TV show: meaning we end up with utter junk like Bright, The Dark Crystal travesty, etc.

And I was ready to hate the Alex Rider series. Well, it’s YA, isn’t it? A cheap knock-off of James Bond. But my nephews and niece like the novels, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. And wow! It’s tightly-plotted, superbly acted (well done Otto Farrant, not to mention Vicky McLure), veeery inner city London, init, masterfully directed, properly multicultural and refreshingly cheeky (in the style of Kingsman, if you’ve seen that). Honestly, do yourself a favour and start watching it today, even if you have to pay the evil of Amazon for the privilege. This is one deal with the devil that it would be sinful not to take up.

Get down with ‘Upload’ on Prime #Upload @UploadOnPrime #TheGoodPlace #Downsizing #sciencefiction

Fans of The Good Place and the Matt Damon movie Downsizing will love Upload. It’s got some lovely near-future ideas in it, intelligently balancing the potential positives with the satirically dystopian, and serves up ten tightly-plotted half-hour episodes. I know people who watched all ten episodes back-to-back!

An app developer called Nathan (played by Robbie Amell) is in a driverless car accident and dying. Fortunately, his rich girlfriend is on hand to offer him a digital afterlife – if he’ll just sign here so his consciousness can be uploaded. Against his better judgement, he wakes up to find himself in the hotel of Lake View – a sort of eternal hotel full of awful people. He realises that the afterlife is effectively a prison. But how can he escape the machine? Is there a way to be downloaded back into a living body? And why does he have particular gaps in his memory.

He finds there are precious few ‘people’ he can trust. He has a ‘handler’ who seems nice, although she’s employed by the owners of the Lake View app/digital platform. He’s monitored at all times. And everything seems ‘loaded’ against him.

Sounds dark, right? Actually, it’s very funny and bitter sweet. They’ve got the tone and sense of wonder spot on. Amazon Prime, you’re really leaving Netflix for dead at the mo. During lockdown, the big stuff I’ve been watching has been the Bosch new series, all the series of Elementary and now Upload. I’ve not switched on Netflix in ages. Upload is a 9.9/10 for me.

French spies! The Bureau reviewed #AmazonVideoPrime #TheBureau

Imagine an up-to-date Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy crossed with a French romance… and you’ll get something approaching the superior French spy drama that is The Bureau. Seeing the modern tricks of spies is fascinating in its own right, and then you get international politics and a love story thrown in for good measure. It’s engaging and compelling on a number of counts – there’s something for everyone really.

Our protagonist (let’s call him Paul, although he has loads of different names, and we’re never quite sure which is the real one) has just returned to Paris from a successful 5-year mission in the Middle East (Syria, Jordan and Algiers). He has to break up with his Syrian girlfriend (Nadia) while still in character as a French teacher before coming home. He feels bad about it, particularly cos Nadia is smart and has a cat-walk model’s body (is she a spy for the other side, a ‘honey trap’?). A week after dumping her, feeling guilty and alone, he phones her… only to find out (with delight and horror) that she’s in Paris!!! Apparently, she’s on a course related to her work. Against all protocol, Paul meets up with Nadia in secret, still maintaining his cover as a French teacher. He has to lie to his colleagues, and the lies have to get bigger and bigger. And, of course, he has to lie to Nadia, cos she doesn’t know he’s a spy for the DGSE (the French CIA, sort of thing). Paul can’t trust anyone. He can hardly trust himself. He’s bound to make a slip, it’s so tricky juggling his different identities every day. Then Nadia’s Syrian entourage start to get suspicious of Paul, and enlist Russian operatives to investigate.

The pressure and close-calls become unbearable. But what can Paul do?

It’s an exciting and entirely tense affair throughout. Gripping. And it’s not just done for the thrills. Being French, of course, the series indulges in philosophical ruminations about identity, trust, reality and sanity. Don’t let it worry you (English ninnies inevitably get put off by all things philosophical), cos you can ignore the philosophical bits and go get a cup of tea.

The series has a dud episode or two (episode 8 is just a rehash of 7 really), but it is entirely worth persevering with. The culmination of it all is unexpected but credible. And means you’ll be keen for the next series. 8.5 out of 10. So there. (By the way, I’m half-French, but you don’t need to be to enjoy said proceedings.)

Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger is far better than DC’s Black Lightning

So, the first two episodes of Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger have just landed on Amazon Prime – which is odd, cos most other Marvel series like Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, The Defenders and Cheesy Iron Fist have appeared on Netflix. Strange that Marvel have changed platform? Well, Netflix had already shown DC’s Black Lightning, you see, so Cloak and Dagger would have been far too similar to what the Netflix audience had already seen.

Which one is better: Black Lightning or Cloak and Dagger? The latter, by quite a margin. Where BL is very hammy, preachy and cumbersome, C&D is nuanced, ambiguous and non-expository. Both series deal with serious issues about what it is like being a person of colour in today’s America, but BL is moralising and about taking individual responsibility, where C&D is about empathising with those who are victims/creations of their circumstances through no fault of their own. Put simply, BL is old-fashioned and stereotypical goodies v baddies fare, whereas C&D is real-world and morally confusing. Where BL’s storyline jumps around illogically in order to permit a big set-piece fight scene (always popular), C&D is about two young people coming of age, fearing the adult world into which they are emerging and seeking to suppress their incipient powers that will make them even more of a target. The two series are almost photonegatives of each other in terms of story-telling approach and plot organisation. They have competing philosophies, fundamentally.

Cloak and Dagger is not only better than Black Lightning as a TV show, but also it is markedly better than its own original comic strip. I grew up reading Cloak and Dagger (from their first appearance in The Spectacular Spider-Man), and they were a simple pair of heroes representing light and dark as superpowers, fighting an array of very silly baddies. There was no actual social context within their stories. Yes, Cloak was a person of colour, but literally only in how he was coloured in – there was nothing about his ordinary travails in the real world – and there was no real attempt to deal with (or discuss) their implicit inter-racial relationship. The TV show on Amazon Prime, by comparison, is fully ‘woke’ (if you’ll forgive the term).

The young pretty blonde who is Dagger is a petty thief. The way she steals from others is quite distressing to watch – and her crimes become less and less justifiable. We do empathise with her, because we’ve seen her upbringing and abusive mother (and she is as pretty as she is well acted by Olivia Holt), but at the same time we are increasingly horrified by what she does. Then there is Cloak, who is a young black guy who is morally upstanding but still ends up getting into no end of trouble (in part because of his colour). Dagger rides her luck and uses her colour to her immoral advantage, whereas Cloak (as buff as he is well played by Aubrey Joseph) does the right thing but always has his colour as a disadvantage. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition and complementarity. Their lives are a mess – and, we ironically suspect, things will only get better when they embrace their opposite. Roll on episode 3! So far, it’s an 8.5/10 from me (not more yet cos of the incipient evil-corportation cliche).