Tuesdays Titillation; podcasts, the princess bride & the inner workings of my mind.

So I recently discovered a new podcast on films to listen to, it is called True Bromance podcast and is hosted by two American men, I think. The format of the podcast is that they discuss general films they have seen, recommendations and comments, feedback from listeners. Then they discuss their top five films on a specific theme.

I like that they have their own separate lists and don’t just have a ‘team list’ and that they disagree with each other occasionally. I also like that they are in my age group and so their cultural references and language I can understand (without the use of google). I like that they don’t just focus on latest releases, that they cover all genres and are open to recommendations.

I don’t like that they keep mentioning how brilliant The Princess Bride is! Only because I haven’t seen it. I think if I watch it now, there might be the potential for disappointment, as they have built up its brilliance.

The latest podcast included a review on a French film called Heartbreaker, it was recommended by me, and I was pleased that one of them took the time to watch it.

Just briefly, it is about a man who breaks people’s hearts on purpose and is hired to do so, and ends up falling in love with his latest client. It sounds trite right? Well, its not and it’s worth a watch.

He (I’m not sure which one) rated it a 6/10 regardless of his criticisms and I am happy with this, because the film is a fun watch and you can’t help but smile. My rating after having seen it was an 8/10 largely due to being entertained and in retrospect I would rate it as a definite 7/10. IMDB rating system has it at 6.8/10, rotten tomatoes 6.7/10.

It is in French with subtitles but I would still recommend it, the reason being, I took my sister to see it with me, she hates reading and would never watch a foreign film. We were walking to our screen when she said to me is it a comedy, and I said yes a rom-com, when we sat down, I casually mentioned that it was a French film, and when the film started I leaned across to her and said “its subtitled”! She was horrified! The trailer…

However, when we left the screen, she was smiling and laughing and saying how great it was, and that’s because it is entertaining. Romain Duris is a great leading man and perfect for the character, he is handsome but not perfect, so accessible to such an array of women. The supporting cast are great and provide the main comedy moments, it is silly, and clichéd and predictable, but it is all of those things done well. What annoys me about a lot of rom-coms is that they are more romance than comedy and the comedy isn’t even funny. If a comedy film makes me laugh out loud quite literally then it instantly has me feeling positive about it, sadly this is rare.

I see my film assessment much like a TV series, there is an overarching storyline and small storylines resolved beginning to end throughout.

Come a little closer as I am about to show you how my brain analyses a film! No really, and all with the help of a lovely graph.

The overarching storyline equates to the Entertainment (score) below – a film can be cheesy, tacky, have the most ridiculous storyline but if it’s entertaining all those factors can be muted. The line below represents the average, so a movie might start off ok and then get better, peaking in the middle and then dropping to the finale. Obviously this isn’t always the case, but for the purposes of this explanation that is the example I am using.

Now, the small storylines (that on a TV series would happen in each week’s episode) equate to the scenes themselves and this can disturb the entertainment arc. This is shown below as the Specific Scenes score. The increments are in 15 minutes – so the first fifteen minutes might not be that exciting but as it moves through the film there might be great action or hilarious comedy moments and the ending may not be so great or just average. In other films (mainly sequels) the ending might be high where they want to tease you and build your excitement for the next film in the series. The Films rating is taken as an average of both average scores for entertainment and specific scenes combined.

In the few reviews I have written so far I haven’t subjected you to my mental graphs but maybe next time I will, you lucky lucky things! But for the time being this is what happens in my head before I tell you my rating.