Dissapointment Came Early

Bit worrying today as two things failed to live up to expectations for me. Firstly The Warriors was a film that has been on my radar for a little while now. It recently turned up on Netflix and it has a cult status, figuring I'm typically up for any cult movie I dived in and was treated with a film that was a chore to finish. The premise sounded great at the time, a street gang are wrongly accused of killing a high-up guy who attempted to unify the gangs and are chased back home by the cops and rival street thugs. But the dialogue was simply awful as character kept changing their minds and generally saying things no human would ever say. Stiff delivery from the actors didn't help and the ending was just anticlimactic. The most annoying thing is that you can see the potential in it at every turn. At points it hints at being a commentary on an unstoppable youth culture but just barely hits the mark. In fact, a lot of the overtones come off as accidental, a by product of a script that wasn't very confident in itself.

Next up was The Witcher 2, a game I was also very excited to play after completing the original a while back. After grappling with it over the past few weeks I realise now that I kinda forced myself through the last hours out of my love for the first game, playing it felt like work rather than pleasure. I think its because I lost my sense of purpose once far to many characters and provenances were thrown into the mix. The more that were added, the most lost I felt and the more I felt that my in-game decisions couldn't be made efficiently; moral choices became misguided guesses. Hopefully that doesn't bleed into the third game which has gotten rave reviews so far.

Leave it to Alex Payne to make my evening feel well used however as Nebraska was a a quiet triumph. If you took Tokyo Story and The Straight Story and put them together, you'd have something a bit like this. A old man goes cross country with his son to respond to a letter from a magazine claiming that he has won a million dollars. Along the way there are some really genuine moments of comedy and heart-break in this low-fi flick that all have that great Payne feel to it. Louis and I sat down to watch this together and as the credits rolled we just quietly nodded our heads; it gets the Durrant boy's seal of approval.