The quarantine is coming to an end. Sport clubs are opening up, schools, public transport, restaurants and a lot more. Which means we can finally start enjoying the summer and maybe even go on a holiday. I just got back from France so that's why this blog is a little late.
During quarantine you’ve probably watched a lot of films or series (at least I know I did!), and out off all the things I watched I wanted to share 6 films and 5 series I thought were the best I’ve seen the past few months.
So get your tickets here ↓ and lets get started!
FILMS
Blood Diamond
The first film (starring Leonardo DiCaprio) is so so so incredibly good! To be honest I do NOT understand why he did NOT win an Oscar for best actor but then again I still haven’t seen Forest Whitaker in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ who won the Oscar.
A Blood diamond - also known as conflict diamonds – is a diamond that is mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency, an invading army his war effort, or a warlord’s activity.
The film is a political war thriller film (as Wikipedia likes to call it) which is set against the backdrop of civil war in 1990s Sierra Leone. Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an ex mercenary from Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - and learns, while he is in prison for smuggling, that Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a fisherman who was taken from his family to work in the diamond fields, has found and hidden an extraordinary pink diamond. Danny Archer releases Salomon and proposes to exchange the diamond by Solomon’s missing family, with the intention to actually steel and keep the diamond to himself.
With the help of Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), an American journalist, the two embark on a trek through rebel territory to find Solomon Vandy’s missing family and to retrieve the diamond.
Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood
I have seen this film once before in the theatre with a friend and it was the first Tarantino film I’ve seen. A few months later it came on Netflix and I just had to show my dad the amazing work Tarantino has done on this one. Not to mention the actors who portrait the main characters are just the best. My dad isn’t a big fan of Quentin Tarantino films because of the violence and I kind of said there isn’t that much violence in this one, which is true if you compare it to Tarantino’s other work. I'm always very quiet when I watch a good film so when the scene started with DiCaprio using his flamethrower I just started laughing. My friend looked at me suprised by my reaction but oh well...
Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood visits 1969 Los Angeles, where everything is changing. Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), once the star of a highly popular 1950s television Western, is now struggling to find meaningful work and is wondering if he should quit the show business all together. Most of his time he spends drinking with his best friend and longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). While Booth ekes out an existence), Dalton still lives a life of relatively luxury and in fact also happens to live next door to Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie).
The ninth film from Quentin Tarantino contains multiple storylines in a tribute to the final moments of Hollywood's golden age.
Call Me By You Name
I wanted to read the book before watching the film but I kept postponing it and two, and a half years after the release of the film I decided to just watch the film first and read the book after. I still haven’t read the book but I truly think that was the best decision.
There is no way to put it besides that Call Me By Your Name is a nostalgic, magnificent, and mesmerizing film.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film is an Italian-American romantic drama film set in 1980s Italy. During the summer of 1983 on the Italian Riviera Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a 17-year-old young man, spends his summer in his family’s 17th-century villa with his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an Greco-Roman culture professor, and his translator mother Annella (Amira Casar). One day, Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American college graduate student working on his doctorate, arrives as the annual summer intern. But over the course of six weeks the emotions of a timid friendship between Elio and Oliver will bloom into a powerful romance that will alter their lives forever
Steve Jobs
We all know Steve Jobs. The man who is the iconic name and face of Apple computers. This film is biography and drama, and at the beginning of the film I didn’t quite understand it. Maybe because I felt a bit under the weather that day. So I decided to stop and continue to watch it another day, which made a complete difference and I actually became to like it.
Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) always wants to be in control, in large part an outcome of his childhood, where he knows his biological mother willingly gave him up for adoption.
The film takes you behind the scenes of the digital revolution of Apple, to paint a portrait of Steve Jobs. The story unfolds backstage at three iconic product launches: the Macintosh computer in 1984, the NeXT computer in 1988, and the iMac computer in 1998. During the film there are flashbacks that give us further background.
Further, a few significant people are presented. Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), Apple’s co-founder. The film tells the story about the internal conflict inside his company that cracked Jobs’ relationship with his co-founder. Whereas Jobs’ focus purely is on his product being launched, Wozniak wants as much focus on Apple’s successful brand; Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), his ethnic-Polish head of marketing for each of the three launches; John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), Apple’s CEO who is more concerned about meeting the wants of the Board and the shareholders than Jobs’; Any Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is chief engineer for the Mac; and Lisa Brennan (Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, Makenzie Moss) who is his biological daughter, a claim he tried to deny to spite her mother Chrissan Brennan (Katherine Waterston).
Everest
I am a huge fan of survival stories. Whether they’re non-fiction or not. I have seen this film before a couple of years ago and it was so intense and emotional. The visuals are stunning and the way the camera shots are made gives you a an idea of how dangerous the climb actually is. The film is not perfectly structured but that didn’t bother me that much.
Everest is based on the book ‘In to Thin Air’ by John Krakauer and is the story of New Zealand's Robert Edwin Hall (Jason Clarke), who on May 10, 1996, together with Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), teamed up on a joint expedition to ascend Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth.
Back in 1992, New Zealand's intrepid mountaineer, Robert Edwin Hall, started guiding amateur climbers on Mount Everest. With his company named "Adventure Consultants", he successfully led 19 clients to the summit without a single fatality. As a result of high demand for expeditions to the Everest Hall’s team was joined by Scott Fischer’s company to attempt the summit. On their way down a furious and violent blizzard strikes the mountain and challenged by the harshest conditions imaginable the team must survive and make their way down.
All the Bright Places
This is a very good movie if you really need to pick a few tears. It is full of emotions and intense themes that are really important to talk about, such as the loss of a loved one, depression and suicide.
Based on the book with the same name, All the Bright Places is about two teenagers Violet Markey (Elle Fanning ) and Theodore Finch (Justice Smith) who are struggling with trauma’s from their past. Violet is a popular girl who is secretly dealing with the loss of her sister, who died in an car accident, and feels responsible for her death. Theodore is obsessed with death and labelled a freak by the other students. He suffers from depression and experiences near-constant thoughts of suicide. One day, they have to partner up for a school project in which they have to explore their home state, Indiana, together. They travel around Indiana to see important or unusual sites.
Theodore is trying to help Violet get out of her depression but at the cost of his own mental health.
SERIES
Fawlty Towers
I remember my dad watching these series when I was younger. Whenever I couldn't sleep and went downstairs I found my dad watching this show. And it is so incrediby funny!
The script is written by John Cleese (who plays Basil Fawlty) and Connie Booth (who plays Polly Sherman) and inspired by hotels they've visited. Both the two series contain six episodes, that all describes a different toppic of the hotelbusiness.
Basil Fawlty is an inept and manic English man, who happpens to be the hotel owner of Fawlty Towers. However, he is intolerant, rude and paranoid, and most definetly very cut out for his job. Whenever he tries to run the hotel, all hell breaks loose. He's constantly hindered by the incompotent but easy target, Manuel (Andrew Sachs), their Spanish waiter. Basil's wife, Sybil Fawlty (Prunella Scales ) is not very helpful in running the hotel, since she's almost always on the phone with one of her friends.
From brick walls appearing in doorways to mishaps during fire drills, from guests dying overnight to getting the right food for a gourmet this show has got it all.
Now, I know that critcs recently removed the 6th episode from the first serie called 'The Germans' from BBC. I do not agree with them. John Cleese and Connie Booth wrote the script to be funny and not to be an attack or anything like that at all. Racism is a very sensibe subject and I do understand that, but for this one I stand with John Cleese. Mindhunter
I have seen season one with my mom right after it came out and was just completely mindblown. I don't feel like there is a show who portraits a subject like this that well, like this show does. The combination of storytelling, acting, editing and directing is just so incredibly fantastic. Before I watched the second season I binged the first one all over again.
Mindhunter is based on the 1996 book Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, by former special agent John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. For years, Douglas pursued some of the most notorious serial killers and rapists, developing profiling techniques to catch them. Just like the book, the film goes behind the scenes of some of his highest-profile cases, including Edmund Kemper, Charles Manson and Richard Speck.
Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) is attached to the FBI's Behavioural Sciences Unit, headed by veteran agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany). A new type of killer is emerging, one that kills regularly and without apparent motive. Due to the lack of motive, it is difficult to profile and apprehend the perpetrator in a murder investigation. In order to reduce this knowledge deficit, Tench and Ford set out to question incarcerated 'sequence killers' and build up a database of their backgrounds, behaviours, drivers and motives in order to make apprehending such criminals easier in future.
You should definitely watch this one. After all: it's a masterpiece.
Big Little Lies: season 1 and 2
Every good show needs a good script. We can all agree on that. Every good show needs a good cast who can crawl into the skin of the characters and become one with them. This show has both of those aspects. The characters are perfectly worked out and have an entire background story. Not to mention the directer's skills!
The show is a seven-parts mini-serie about the apparently perfect lives of upper-class mothers, at a prestigious elementary school, in a quite little town near the coast in California. They all seem to live a perfect, rich and carefree life but behind those perfectly little ... are a lot of secrets. When Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) and Celeste (Nicole Kidman) take new-in-town single mom Jane (Shailene Woodley) under their wing, none of them realize how the arrival of Jane and her inscrutable little boy will affect them all to the point those secrets unravel into murder.
13 RW: season 4
Personally, I feel like the second and third seasons weren't as strong as the first one and a lot of critics didn't like it very wel either. Despite that the laste season isn't well-received by most of the critics, I think it is a whole other level then the previous two. The new season is back to its roots. Things as sexuality, hallucinations, depressive feelings and uncertainty are the main topics of the show, which (almost) everyone can relate to.
The last season is about the mental wellbeing of Clay Jensen (Dylan Minette). Every where he goes he sees dead classmates, he's getting anxiety attacks and does things that he can't remember. Justin Foley (Brandon Flynn) is back to a rehab clinic as he's trying to figure out his relationship with Jessica Davis (Alicha Boe), who's still going strong on the justice activism. Like I said, the show contains hallucinations, which can make it confusing sometimes. It is not always clear what is real and what is not, and that confusion makes it exciting to watch.
13 Reasons Why has a very well written script (written by Brian Yorkey) and the ending it deserves.
The End of the F***ing World: season 1 and 2
After the first season ended people were begging for there not to be a second season. Their argument: ''it couldn't possibly be that good as the first one.'' Well, they were wrong.
The first season is based on the graphic novel of Charles Forsman and written by Charlie Covell. There were 8 episodes of 20 minutes ending in a 'Thelma and Louise' kind of climax. In the first season you get to meet James, who's 17 and is pretty sure he is a psychopath, and Alyssa, also 17 and the cool and moody new girl at school. The two make a connetion and embark on a trip to search for Alyssa's real father. Trying to escape from police cars they end-up in the house of a philosophy professor. (SPOILER ALERT). Where as the first season ended in James being shot, the second one begins with Alyssa getting married. We meet new characters and have to deal with more loves and deaths. The voice-overs, in which you can hear the characters thoughts, are again very well timed.
The End of the F***ing World is not just a serie for teenagers but also adults that are looking for a good, funny and dark roadtrip show containing strong comicbook vibes and amazing soundtracks.
That's it for today's blog. I hope you liked it and found some inspiration to watch. I know that these are well known films and series. But maybe if you haven't decided to watch them yet I helped you make a decision. Whether you decide to watch them or not.
I'm planning on making more of these blogs, so if you have any film or serie tips just let me know!
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