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Local Hero (1983) dir Bill Forsyth A great early 80s British light comedy drama. Peter Reigert (who I have never seen in anything else) plays Mac, a lawyer / accountant / fixer working for Texas based Happer oil. The CEO, Mr Happer (Burt Lancaster), sends Mac to oversee the purchase of an entire Scottish fishing village that they want to demolish to build a new oil terminal. Mac expects at least some of the villagers, led by their lawyer / accountant / hotel manager Gordon Urquart (Denis Lawson - Wedge from Star Wars), to put up somewhat of a fight. But they are not quite the simple folk he expects. They already know what is going on and Urquart intends to squeeze as much cash as possible from the big oil company. It also co-stars a young Peter Capaldi, almost unrecognisable at times, as Oldsen, a Scottish Happer Oil employee assigned to help Mac and Jenny Seagrove as marine biologist Marina, working for them in what she knows is really just a job to generate good PR in case of environmental problems. Marina has slightly webbed feet, making her seem a bit like a mermaid as she swims, which her job requires a lot of. This is possibly a nod to the Jerry Anderson puppet show Stingray that had a mermaid called Marina. (And maybe having watched Team America last week this is what subconsciously made me decide to watch this film that I have seen many times before). It also features a host of other faces, mainly Scottish actors, familiar to anyone who has watched a lot of British TV over the years, like me. But sometimes it takes a while to recognise them, because this was made over 40 years ago. One of the non-Scots is Christopher Rozycki, who is great as the captain of a Soviet fishing trawler that makes frequent visits to the village. He quite clearly is not a believer in the political ideology of his homeland. He has a great line I wish I could remember word for word, but at one point he says to Mac something like “Don't look so worried. You are doing a great thing here. You are making people very rich!”. It is a beautifully made film, technically very, very good. It's set mainly in the village, but starts in Houston and switches back there a couple of times and has some stunning scenes of the Scottish countryside and coast. There's no great tension to the story, no massive plot twists. It's quite a gentle tale of Mac falling in love with the village he has basically come to destroy, but the locals just wanting the money. Forsyth got a well deserved BAFTA for the direction and a nomination for the original script. It also got a number of other worthy nominations including Chris Menges' cinematography and Mark Knopfler's modern score that includes the iconic “Going home” guitar – saxophone instrumental that accompanies the end credits. The only acting one was for Lancaster but the rest of the cast are very good, even down to some quite minor roles. I do have to pick it up on a couple of factual issues. The village is shown on a map in North West Scotland, but the oil is (was) all on the east, in the North Sea between Scotland and Norway. And I know, from a friend who used to live there and remembers the filming, it was mainly filmed on location in various villages on the east coast. The other thing might have been a deliberate joke at the expense of Hollywood. This is when Marina is showing Oldsen a colony of what are described as grey seals, but what we see on screen are quite clearly sea-lions, the sort you might well see in California but certainly not Scotland! Those don't really detract from the overall film though which is one of my all time favourites. 10 / 10

@LimeGreenLegend I remember watching some of Threads when at school, maybe a year or so after it was released, as part of an English project on nuclear weapons. I didn't live in Sheffield then, which I seem to recall making it seem more distant and as teenagers we kind of dismissed it with a "this can't happen to us" type of attitude. I do intend watching it at some point, I noticed it on iplayer, probably not this weekend.

What I Watched This Week #171 (Apr 7-13) Captain America: Brave New World dir. Julius Onah/2025/1h59m The latest entry in the MCU sees Anthony Mackie take up the shield as Captain America for the first time (on the big screen at least, I've not seen the TV show, which made a lot of this quite confusing), getting caught up in an international incident that I honestly can't remember anything about. The entire time I was just waiting for Harrison Ford, playing newly elected president Thaddeus Ross, turn into a big red Hulk, which is all I knew of this going in. It's actually quite amazing that I can't remember any of the actual plot because most of the film is made up of people spouting exposition at each other in bland locations. The villain, played by Tim Blake Nelson, looks so stupid that I thought his reveal was a joke after being kept hidden in the shadows for a lot of the run time, but no, that's the look they actually went with. I don't care if it's accurate to the comic books, it looks f*cking stupid on film. Mackie and Ford both give decent performances, and and I liked Danny Ramirez as Cap's new sidekick Joaquin Torres, but this just feels like content churned out to meet a schedule drawn up by committee. 3/10 Mickey 17 dir. b*ng Joon Ho/2025/2h17m Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a man who, to get away from some dangerous people he owes money to, signs up as an expendable on a colonisation voyage to a distant planet. His job is to perform all of the most dangerous tasks and occasionally act as a lab rat, and each time he dies they just print out a new one, an act made illegal on Earth. This is director b*ng's follow up to his Oscar winning masterpiece Parasite, and while this film shares similar themes with its attack on the elite it comes at it with a very different tone. This leans heavily into comedy, with Pattinson giving an almost slapstick performance at times. His whiny, weedy accent also took me by surprise, but it really does fit the character. Mark Ruffalo as failed politician Kenneth Marshall, the leader of the colony, also gives a very broad comedic performance, similar to the one he gave in Poor Things, and he steals every scene he's in. I had a lot of fun watching this but it all feels kind of inconsequential and throwaway, like all of the clones of Mickey, and a little short of b*ng's best films like Parasite, Memories of Murder or Mother. But this is still an excellently crafted film with great supporting performances from Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, and British comedian Tim Key as a man dressed as a pigeon. 8/10 The Foreigner dir. Martin Campbell/2017/1h53m The Foreigner is an action thriller starring Jackie Chan as Quan Ngoc Minh, a London restaurant owner whose daughter is killed in an IRA bombing. He suspects that politician and former IRA member Liam Hennessey (Pierce Brosnan) knows something about it, and seeing that he's former Chinese special forces he'll stop at nothing to find out what. A conventional yet well made film from the director of two of the best Bond films: Goldeneye and Casino Royale, what really kept me hooked here was the totally serious performance from Chan, something I've never seen before. That extends to the fight scenes where there's none of his usual fun and games with random props. Here he just wants to hurt people. There's a haunted look in his eyes that he has for most of the film that feels so real and full of pain. Brosnan is also very good as a politician with a murky past, and he does a good job at keeping us guessing as to how much he actually knows. 7/10 Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw dir. David Leitch/2019/2h17m The Fast and Furious franchise takes a little detour with this spinoff film starring The Rock and Jason Statham as the titular Hobbs and Shaw who must team up to defeat Idris Elba's evil cyborg Brixton who is searching for a virus that could wipe out humanity. The virus is in the hands of Shaw's sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby) because what would these films be without family? Just as mindlessly fun as the recent films in the series, what let this one down for me is the constant trash talk between The Rock and Statham. It's cute for a while but over two hours of this pissing contest is just tiresome. There's also an extended cameo from Kevin Hart who I can't stand. The action scenes are totally ridiculous - Elba's transformer like motorbike is a personal fav - but they're all fun and unique. The final act showdown set in Samoa is also a nice change of location. This does feel like a script where they changed the names of the two main characters to make it fit into the Fast and Furious universe just for the name recognition, but this film delivered exactly what I expected from it, which I guess is both a positive and a negative. 6.5/10 Threads dir. Mick Jackson/1984/1h57m Made for BBC TV on a tiny budget, Threads is a docu-drama set in the Northern English city of Sheffield during the lead up to and fallout of a nuclear war. With its use of actual BBC documentary narrator Paul Vaughn, stock footage and text on screen detailing the time line of events this could be mistaken as real. The drama part of the docu-drama comes from following young woman Ruth (Karen Meagher) who has just become pregnant with her boyfriend and is just about to start her life. In the background on news reports and newspapers tensions are rising between the US and Russia. This lead up to the bombs dropping is incredibly well executed, the tension slowly being cranked up as these reports come to the foreground slowly but surely. It begins to invade the normal everyday lives of the people of Sheffield. The second half of the film details the bombings and the breakdown of society in the aftermath and it is the most grim, brutal, depressing, hopeless, scary, and sadly realistic (judging by the extensive list of doctors and professors in the special thanks section of the credits) depiction of the apocalypse I've ever seen. I nearly stopped watching at a couple of points because it's all just too much. That says nothing of the ending, a horrific series of events set over a decade after the end of the world which snaps into a freezeframe just as a character is about to scream and then the end credits roll in total silence. This is one of the best films I've ever seen and I urge you all to watch it, it's on the BBC iPlayer if you're in the UK or have a VPN. 10/10 Lime's Film of the Week! The Devil in a Convent dir. Georges Méliès/1899/3m Another short from Georges Méliès sees him continue his fascination with demons and religion. Here he plays a tricksy devil who appears in a convent, disguises himself as a priest and torments the nuns there before being banished back to hell. As well as his continued perfection of his special effects techniques what really stands out in his films are the gorgeously detailed sets that look like they're taken straight off of the stage. His films are also becoming longer and more intricate, three minutes was considered long for a film at the time, and his 12 minute Trip to the Moon a few years later was initially mocked for being too long to keep people's attention. A wonderful slice of magic from the dawn of the artform. 8/10 Monsters University dir. Dan Scanlon/2013/1h44m This totally unnecessary prequel tells the story of how Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman) met at college, starting out as adversaries before having to work together to help their fraternity win the annual scare games and keep their place in school. Mostly a collection of tropes, cliches and stereotypes from every college film since Animal House this still does have some good jokes scattered throughout and, as usual, the animation is excellent. Crystal can get grating at times but Goodman is always a pleasure to listen to, and there's a good supporting turn from Helen Mirren as the dean of the college. In my opinion Monsters Inc is one of Pixar's best films with a perfect ending, so I'm glad they didn't try to do a sequel (and I hope they don't in the future), but that stuck them with doing a prequel, and the characters aren't really that different at the start of the film than at the end, so there's not even any growth or development. It's just more time to spend with them, which isn't a bad thing, but it's time spent doing nothing. 5.5/10