Something to watch tonight: Monday 16 October

Unstoppable (Scott, 2010) is on Disney+

Subscriber AA from Wellington put out a request on Facebook last week­end look­ing for ideas for what to watch with his two teen­age boys. Well, that’s exactly what we are here for:

That’s the one I’d love to hear ideas for. Especially clas­sics. We like com­edy (as long as it’s not filth, I’m not too pre­cious about language/content) e.g we’ve done the Pythons, action (again, not into hard out real­ist­ic crime/violence, but not totally anti swords, guns & explo­sions etc if it has cool story, themes fantasy ele­ments or sim­il­ar – they’re teen­agers). And also keen to intro­duce a few qual­ity serious/mature films to them too (e.g. Boy last week­end). Would love some sug­ges­tions to build a list so we’re not hunt­ing for some­thing each week­end. We have Netflix & Disney, but almost everything is on YouTube Movies, if it’s worth­while don’t mind rent­ing from there. Any thoughts very, very welcome!

First thing is, if you are happy to rent then the mar­ket is much, much big­ger and I would always recom­mend you try AroVision first in order to keep those pre­cious dol­lars float­ing around the loc­al economy.

Second thing is that there are some abso­lute bangers hid­den away on Netflix and D+, it’s almost as if they don’t want you to find them or something.

Disney+ in New Zealand has all the Planet of the Apes films (all three gen­er­a­tions), all the Die Hards, all the Pirates of the Caribbeans.

But I want to dir­ect your atten­tion to a film that didn’t quite get the atten­tion it deserved and one that I feel should still hold up today. It’s a straight-up race-against-time adven­ture, and there’s no viol­ence to speak of. It looks sen­sa­tion­al – shot by New Zealander Ben Seresin. My review at the time:

In a dif­fer­ent realm entirely, I enjoyed the pre­pos­ter­ous Unstoppable, about a giant run­away train loaded with tox­ic waste career­ing through Pennsylvania with only Denzel Washington (and Chris Pine) in pur­suit. It’s a the per­fect defin­i­tion of a “boys movie”, spoilt only by the assump­tion that the audi­ence will need a run­ning com­ment­ary to under­stand what’s going on.

Unstoppable was also Tony Scott’s last film. He passed in 2012 leav­ing us clas­sics like Top Gun, The Last Boy Scout and, one of the best sub­mar­ine movies ever made, Crimson Tide.

Other films reviewed in that January 2011 column for Capital Times include Natalie Portman in Black Swan, Wahlberg and Bale in The Fighter and Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. It was Oscar season.

Publisher’s note

After Labour Weekend some of these posts are going to be for paid sub­scribers only – basic­ally any­thing that con­tains all-new con­tent like the Friday reviews.

Posts like this one, that recycle from my greatest hits, will remain free to any­one for the fore­see­able future.

Essentially, those Friday reviews take at least a day and a half to pro­duce and I need to account for that time.

But, there are ways to keep get­ting these emails at a dis­count. Substack has an excel­lent refer­ral scheme which offers a free month to any­one who can per­suade three new sub­scribers to sign up (and longer dis­counts for more).

I will also be com­ing to the party once a month with a free gift for the sub­scriber with the most refer­rals. For November it will be a brand new 35^th anniversary Blu-ray of Miyazaki’s clas­sic My Neighbor Totoro, cour­tesy of Madman Entertainment.

And, once AroVision gets its gift card option up and run­ning, win­ning sub­scribers who don’t want phys­ic­al media can swap their prize for one of those.

You also have the option of gift­ing a sub­scrip­tion to a friend. Christmas is com­ing, just saying.