Hot Fuzz (5 Stars)

Here they are again, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the greatest comedy duo of the 21st Century. The only others who come close are Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. In this film Simon Pegg (on the right, in case you didn't know) plays Nicholas Angel, a police officer who's been transferred from London to Sandford in Gloucestershire. The London police force didn't want him because he was too efficient and showed everyone else up. Nick Frost (on the left) plays Danny Butterman, a Sandford police officer who joined the police force because his father told him to do it.

The biggest crimes in Sandford are people cutting their neighbours' hedges. There hasn't been a murder in the village for years, but Nicholas soon discovers why. Whenever someone is killed the coroner declares it an accidental death.

Nicholas is all business. He refuses to eat Black Forest Gateau at work.

But he's willing to eat a Cornetto on duty. It's not a problem as long as he isn't driving.

In 2006 Olivia Colman was still unknown. What a cute smile!

"Hot Fuzz" takes a while to get going, but once it starts it's an amazing film.

Success Rate:  + 4.7

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Jojo Rabbit (5 Stars)

"Jojo Rabbit" is such an evil film that I'm surprised it was ever made. It's a comedy, but so much of it is a portrayal of things that really happened. You need to have a twisted sense of humour to enjoy what's shown. That explains why I like it so much, but it doesn't explain the film's huge box office success.

Johannes Betzler, nicknamed Jojo, is a 10-year-old boy who lives in Germany during the Second World War. Based on the events, it probably starts in autumn 1944 and continues into May 1945. As a blue-eyed Aryan boy he loves the Führer. He's a member of the Hitler Youth and loves going to their outdoor camps. It's just like the boy scouts, except that the boys shout "Heil Hitler".

Another difference is that there are girls at the camps. Jojo is at the age where he's beginning to tell the difference.

One... two... three... all together now! "Heil Hitler!"

Jojo sits next to his best friend Yorki, who doesn't look quite as Aryan. Don't worry about it. Hitler didn't look Aryan either. But what are they listening to so attentively?

The beautiful Fräulein Rahm is showing the children what a Jew looks like. On another occasion she tells the girls that she's had 18 children for Germany. And yet she's still a Fräulein, not a Frau? I wonder if the children were from 18 different men.

Before the children go to bed, they indulge in exciting activities like burning books.

Then comes Jojo's big test of manhood. He's told to pretend that a rabbit is a Jew and snap its neck. He can't do it. Everyone has his limits. He lets the rabbit go, and everyone laughs at him. The camp leaders give him the name Jojo Rabbit, and it sticks.

But there's one thing that makes Jojo special: he has an imaginary friend. It's not just any imaginary friend, it's Adolf Hitler himself. Adolf appears to him and gives him advice on how to be a good Nazi.

I've been told that it's common for young children to have an imaginary friend. It's not a mental illness, it's a normal part of growing up. I can't relate to this, because I personally never had an imaginary friend. Is it normal to speak aloud to the friend, as Jojo does? I don't know. It's something I need to read about.

Jojo's world falls apart when he finds out that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in the house. She looks nothing like the Jews described by Fräulein Rahm. She doesn't have horns or fangs. Jojo falls in love with her. His friend Adolf is furious, telling Jojo that Jews have the power to mesmerise their victims.

"Jojo Rabbit" is a comedy. It's a coming-of-age drama. But it's also a picture of what life was like in Nazi Germany. What would I have been like? Would I have been a Nazi? Probably. I've never had to live in a country where I'm subject to propaganda every day. Only a beautiful Jewess could change my ways.

It wasn't just about the society. Hitler himself was overwhelming. Ernst Hanfstaengl said of him, "What Hitler was able to do to a crowd in 2½ hours will never be repeated in 10,000 years. Because of his miraculous throat construction, he was able to create a rhapsody of hysteria". There have been many populists over the centuries, but none as powerful as Adolf Hitler.

Let this scene from the film be a stark warning of the dangers of a Nazi ideology. "Never again!" That's what people say. And yet Russia has become a Fascist country, led by a dictator called Vladimir Putin. He holds speeches against the Nazis in order to hide the fact that he's one himself. He's brainwashed his people to believe that he's only invaded Ukraine to protect Russia from NATO. When we hear them giving interviews they sound stupid, but don't be so fast to criticise them. If I lived in Russia and were subjected to Fascist propaganda 24 hours a day, would I be any different to them? I hope I would, but I can't guarantee it.

Success Rate:  + 4.5

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Jojo Rabbit (5 Stars)

Disney Wednesday #18

After watching "Jojo Rabbit" on Disney Plus today, I have two questions:

1. Why haven't I watched it since 2020?

2. Why isn't it in my top 100 films list?

I'll watch it again soon and decide where it deserves to be in my list. But please don't hold your breath while you're waiting?

Success Rate:  + 4.5

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Fighting with my Family (5 Stars)

True Stories #35

Name: Saraya Bevis

Lived: 17 August 1992 – still alive

Film dates: 2005 to 2014, mostly 2010 to 2014

Film made in 2019

This is the story of the WWE wrestler known as Paige. The young woman from Norwich had a whirlwind career, leading to winning the WWE women's championship

Saraya started wrestling when she was 13. Her parents and her two elder brothers were all wrestlers in the family owned business, the World Association of Wrestling. In 2011 she and her brother Zak auditioned for the WWE in London. Saraya was accepted, Zak wasn't. This was heart-breaking for both of them. It had been Zak's dream all his life to join the WWE. It hurt Saraya because she loved her brother and didn't want to be separated from him.

The training in Florida is hard. At first Saraya, who's now taken the name Paige, isolates herself from the other female trainees. She's the only woman from a wrestling family. The others are models or cheerleaders.

People who don't understand professional wrestling say that it's fake. It's not fake, it's scripted. The level of athletic prowess needed to perform in the ring is immense. Despite Saraya's former experiences in England she had difficulty getting through the training programme.

The film ends with Paige's debut on Monday Night Raw on 7th April 2014. It's unusual for a true story to be made so soon after the real events. Florence Pugh does an excellent job portraying Paige. She had help and coaching from the real Paige. Several real wrestlers appear in the film, including the Rock (Dwayne Johnson), the Miz and the Big Show.

Success Rate:  + 1.8

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Jojo Rabbit (5 Stars)

This is the fourth film in the Stuttgart White Nights Festival.

Johannes Betzler, nicknamed Jojo, is a 10-year-old boy living in Germany in the final months of the Second World War. He's a proud member of the Hitler Youth, and he wants to impress everyone, despite being awkward and shy. He has an imaginary friend called Adolf Hitler, who encourages him to try harder to be a good Nazi.

Things are complicated when Jojo discovers a Jewish girl called Elsa hidden in his house's wall by his mother. His Hitler friend tells him to denounce her, but he's attracted to her. She's nowhere near as ugly as the Jews in his picture books, who have horns and tails.

The film is hilarious. It's brilliant satire. Towards the end it becomes more serious, but that's to be expected in an anti-war satire. I hope to see it again soon.

Fighting with my Family (5 Stars)

This film tells the true story about how the wrestler Paige progressed from a small wrestling company in England to becoming the women's champion of the WWE, the world's largest wrestling company. The film ends with her winning the championship on 7th April 2014. It's unusual for a biopic to be made so soon after the events on which it's based. (The film was released in 2019, but it was filmed in early 2017). Maybe it would have been better to delay the film a few years so it could have included later occurrences in her career. On 27th December 2017 Paige was injured in a match, leading to her permanent retirement from wrestling. She's still employed by the WWE, frequently appearing in television broadcasts, but carrying out other roles, such as managing tag teams.

I've seen Paige as a wrestler, and I can verify that the actress Florence Pugh is very similar to her. She's a few inches shorter, but apart from that she's made up to look like her and successfully imitates her mannerisms. They could be sisters. Florence Pugh also appeared in "Midsommar", which I watched earlier this week. I'm starting to notice her as an actress. She seems to have great talent. I'll give a final decision after seeing her in this year's "Black Widow" film.

Success Rate:  + 1.6

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Logan (5 Stars)

"There are no more guns in the valley".

This film is based on the western "Shane". I can see the resemblance between the two films, but after watching the film today for the third time I had to ask why. The speech that Laura holds at Logan's grave isn't relevant to his life. Instead of quoting directly from the film she could have paraphrased it to make it more of a eulogy.

Nevertheless, this is a brilliant film. It's a shocking end to Logan's life, but it neatly rounds off his time in the nine X-Men films so far.

Success Rate:  + 4.4

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Fighting with my Family (5 Stars)

There's a sentence I've used a few times in my blog, and I'm not ashamed to keep repeating it: "I knew this film would be good, but it's better than I expected". That's definitely true of "Fighting with my Family".

The story tells the true story of the British wrestler Paige, real name Saraya Bevis. It deals with how she became one of the biggest female wrestlers in the company World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). I wanted to see the film because I used to be a big fan of the WWE, or rather the WWF (World Wrestling Federation), as it was called until 2002. I first saw the WWF on television while I was on holiday in Scotland in 1990, but I didn't become a regular viewer until 1997. For me the WWF's greatest years were 1997 to 2002, referred to as the Attitude Era. In those days it was all about flamboyant wrestling, with most wrestlers being anti-heroes. After 2002 it was all about faces and heels, i.e. good guys and bad guys, which I found boring. The audience was programmed by scripted speeches to like one wrestler and hate another. I found this trite, and I stopped watching the WWE a few years later.

During my years as a WWF/WWE fan I watched all the Pay Per View events. I taped them and built up a large collection, which I eventually threw in the trash after unsuccessfully trying to give them away. I'm sure my tape of Over The Edge 1999 would have been valuable to wrestling fans, because it's the only PPV event which has never been released on VCR or DVD. PPV events were broadcast live on Sunday and repeated on Monday, but Over The Edge 1999 wasn't repeated because of Owen Hart's death during the broadcast. His accident happened off camera, but there was a long break while the commentator Jim Ross talked to the audience at home about what had happened. My tape is gone now. Tough luck.

The film itself is about the struggles of a young woman who was an underdog and outsider. She was fortunate enough to be born into a wrestling family. Her father Rick was the founder of the World Association of Wrestling (WAW). Despite its glamorous name, it was a small independent company in Norwich with very few employees apart from his family. Rick's children Zak and Saraya dreamt of joining the WWE, the world's biggest wrestling company. Zak was refused, whereas Saraya was accepted and became Paige. The rest of the film deals with Zak's reaction to being rejected and Paige's difficulties fitting in with the WWE wrestling community.

Most of the actors in the film aren't wrestlers, with the exception of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Nick Frost is absolutely brilliant as Rick Knight. He looks and talks like a wrestler. The WWE trainer Hutch Morgan is played by Vince Vaughan, who has the size and muscular build to be a wrestler. It's excellent acting throughout. I've always liked true stories, and this has immediately become a film I want to add to my Blu-ray collection.

P.S. I wrote this review on March 21st, but I've backdated the post to the day I watched it in the cinema.

Logan (5 Stars)

"There are no more guns in the valley".

Success Rate:  + 4.4

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Logan (5 Stars)

As soon as I saw the first trailer in the cinema I knew this would be a different sort of X-Men film. If anything, Hugh Jackman himself must have insisted on the film being a change from his previous roles as Wolverine. He said well in advance that he wanted his next film as Wolverine to be his last. After eight films spread out over 17 years he felt that he was growing too old to play the role. He wanted his ninth and last film to be different. He's succeeded.

During Wolverine's lifetime it was commonly assumed that he's immortal. In the chronology of the X-Men films he was more than 100 years when he joined the team. In "Logan" we see that he's not immortal, he just ages slowly. The film takes place in the near future, 2029. His healing powers are failing, and he takes longer to recover from injuries. Some injuries don't heal at all, as we see from the fact that he walks with a limp. He's given up being a hero and prefers to use his birth name, Logan. He's a limousine driver, struggling to make a living.

All of his former companions in the X-Men are gone, presumably dead. The only survivor is Charles Xavier, formerly one of the most powerful mutants on Earth. Charles is suffering from dementia and has trouble controlling his powers. He has frequent seizures that cause everyone around him pain or paralysis. Charles is being kept in a fortified building in an uninhabited territory in Mexico where he can't hurt anyone. Logan visits him and brings him medication to calm him down.

Logan can't escape the past, however much he tries. In Mexico a woman approaches him who recognises him as Wolverine. She begs him to take her 11-year-old daughter to North Dakota, but why?

The film tells a very powerful story. It's a dark story that takes place in a dark world. To say more would give away too much of the plot for those who haven't seen it yet. However much I may have liked Hugh Jackman in the past, in "Logan" he gives the best performance of his life. It's probably the best of the X-Men and Wolverine films so far. I'll have to watch all nine back to back to make sure.

Up until now it's the most successful film of 2017, having earned $523 million at the box office. That's well deserved. It's also my favourite film of the year so far.

Hot Fuzz (5 Stars)

I went to a New Year's Party with other members of the Birmingham Film Club last night. It was a great time. It continued into the early hours of the morning, and we ended up watching a film when most of the guests had already fallen asleep. "Hot Fuzz" was a good choice to start the year.

The new year began with a film, but the old year ended with a game of Twister. I was amazed. I always thought people had to be naked to play Twister, but it seems it's possible with clothes as well. Possible, but not as much fun.

Mike McAuley, the overlord of the film club, observes his minions. It seems that Jo has already fallen asleep.

Run Fatboy Run (4 Stars)

The film begins with Dennis (Simon Pegg) on the day of his wedding to his pregnant fiancee Libby (Thandie Newton). Overcome with fear (and, as we find out later in the film, an inability to finish anything he has started), he climbs out of the window and runs away. Five years later Dennis is still single. Luckily he is still on speaking terms with Libby, who is bringing up her son Jake as a single mother. Jake idolises his father, forgiving him for any mistakes he has made or continues to make.

Dennis is happy with this situation and wishes it would last forever. But not Libby. She's swept off her feet by Whit (Hank Azaria), a rich American businessman, and it looks like marriage is only a few months away. Dennis decides to fight to get Libby back. Whit is a dynamic person, in both his business and his personal life. Among other things, he takes part in the London Marathon every year. Dennis decides to prove he's just as good a man as Whit by running in the Marathon as well, even though (1) he's overweight, (2) he only has three weeks to train and (3) the deadline has expired for registering for the Marathon.

As a comedy I find the film only slightly funny, but it's very uplifting and encouraging. It's a story of how a person who is a failure in life can succeed against seemingly impossible odds. And it's a romantic film, a good choice to watch on Valentine's Day.

On another subject, even though I bought my first Blu-ray player in 2010 (May 12th 2010, a few months before I started this blog) I've been buying mostly DVDs rather than Blu-ray discs. When given a choice of buying a DVD or a Blu-ray I've chosen the cheaper of the two, which is usually (though not always) the DVD. I've rebought a few of my favourite films on Blu-ray, such as the Spider-Man trilogy, but to be honest it's been very few. After almost four years of owning a Blu-ray player I only have about 40 films on Blu-ray, compared with over 1600 films on DVD. Over the last few days I've watched a few films on Blu-ray, such as "Avengers Assemble", "13 Hrs" and "Run Fatboy Run". I've decided that the quality difference is enough to make it worth buying films on Blu-ray, even if they're slightly more expensive. After all, the price of Blu-rays today is less than I was paying for DVDs in 2002.

Of course, I'll stick to the general guidelines that I laid out in a detailed post on Blu-ray discs in September 2010:

• 2006 to present: Blu-ray is better quality
• 1996 to 2005: Blu-ray may be better, especially in big budget productions
• 1995 and earlier: Blu-ray is not better

This means that I'm willing to pay a pound or two more for Blu-ray releases of newer films, but I'll only by films older than 1995 on Blu-ray if they're cheaper than the DVD.

For those of you who watch most of your films on your computer with a streaming service like Netflix, let me put things into perspective. The quality of Netflix films is superior to DVD, but only if they are well mastered, and only if you are using a high quality monitor or television screen. DVD pictures have a vertical resolution of either 480 or 576 pixels, depending on whether they are encoded in NTSC format (used in America) or PAL format (used in Europe). Netflix's high definition films are broadcast with a vertical resolution of 720 pixels, which means a big improvement for American viewers (50%), but a lesser improvement for European viewers (25%). However, the majority of Netflix customers in both countries don't use a viewing device that is sufficient to give a noticeable improvement over DVD.

Blu-rays have a vertical pixel resolution of 1080 pixels. This is a noticeable improvement over both DVDs and Netflix. If you are a real film fan you won't be cheap and stick to Netflix, at least not for your favourite films. Blu-ray is the only choice for top quality pictures.

Hot Fuzz (5 Stars)

It's very difficult to describe the plot of this film without giving away too many spoilers, so I'll have to keep my description to a minimum.

Nicholas Angel is a highly successful London policeman. He arrests five times as many criminals as his fellow policemen. Both his colleagues and his superiors think he is making them look bad, so he is promoted to sergeant and transferred to Sandford, a village in Gloucestershire. This village has the lowest crime rate in the country, but in the week after he arrives five murders take place.

Today was the third time I've watched the film, and it gets better every time. It must be one of the best films ever made. I realise that my very brief plot description might not make the film sound attractive. It doesn't turn out the way you would expect it to when it begins. As I've said before, individually Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are great actors, but together they're perfect. Somehow they remind me of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.

The town used as the location for the fictional village of Sandford is Wells in Somerset, the home town of the director, Edgar Wright. In one scene Edgar appears stacking shelves in the same Somerfield supermarket where he once worked stacking shelves. Many great actors appear in the film in small roles, some of them uncredited: Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward, Martin Freeman, Cate Blanchett, Steve Coogan, Bill Nighy, just to name a few. Peter Jackson, best known for directing "Lord of the Rings", also appears briefly.