Fancy a nostalgic trip to the pictures this weekend? You could do far worse than Fight Club. Although the first rule of Fight Club is clearly that you don't talk about it (pretty sure it's the second rule too), I only saw it for the first time last year whilst on holiday in Staithes. Our Wi-Fi went down, and we resorted to the DVD collection in the attic of our cottage. I really enjoyed watching it, and now Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham-Carter are back on the big screen for its 25th anniversary.
I expected from the title that it would be a violent, pulpy, fairly brainless movie, but it's nothing of the sort. It's intelligent, nuanced, and really well directed by David Fincher. It's a little embarrassing that I went to see The Mummy and Austin Powers : The Spy Who... in 1999, and not Fight Club, but here we are.
Also continuing, Lisa Frankenstein. It's not often these days you get a retro horror high school comedy, and this one is set in 1989, as loner Lisa Swallows befriends a Victorian corpse in a creepy abandoned graveyard. The object of her affections comes to life during a thunderstorm & moves into her closet. So far, so normal. It's a bit of a reversal of Weird Science, and he doesn't speak (but has some fairly expressive grunts on occasion!). Several grisly deaths follow, along with searches for missing body parts, and an unconventional love story. It's all fairly daft, but not as terrible as it might sound. The gore is slight, the scares are non-existent, but it's a fairly fun way to pass 100 minutes.
I watched American Fiction again earlier this week to celebrate its arrival on Amazon Prime Video, and it's a smartly observed, witty, multi-layered story that tackles racial stereotypes and dementia with equal aplomb. It's got some genuine laughs, and is astutely observed. Erika Alexander as Coraline is a highlight. Superb stuff.
And I'm a sucker for a dodgy Adam Sandler movie, so definitely plan to watch new Netflix arrival Spaceman over the weekend, especially in light of the startling news that he earned more than Tom Cruise and Margot Robbie in 2023, according to Forbes. Sandler plays an astronaut marooned in space on a far-flung mission at the edge of the solar system, when he realises his marriage may be crumbling back on Earth (Carey Mulligan plays his wife). He's helped in his mission to fix things, I'm told, by a 'mysterious creature from the beginning of time he finds hiding in the bowels of the ship'. I shall report back next week, but it's garnered a fairly respectable Rotten Tomatoes score so far.
The cinema is quite light on new releases, but I'll also have my take on road trip comedy Drive-Away Dolls and Late Night With The Devil next time round. The following week, a couple of big ones with the arrival of Ghostbusters : Frozen Empire and Mothers' Instinct, the new Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain 1960s-set movie.
