Jenni from the box

Tis the season to stay home and watch TV! We may have had some freakish hot days so far this autumn, but it feels like the cold is setting in, which means so too are the nights in. To bridge the gap between now and finding the motivation to finally write my Nice/Monaco blog post, I thought I'd share my thoughts on some recent bits I've been watching. Naturally a few spoilers ahead!

Sex Education's fourth and final season came out a few weeks ago and having loved it since the beginning, I was intrigued to see how they'd wrap up. I say 'intrigued' rather than 'excited' because the end of the third season very much felt like it could've (and maybe should've) been the end. Especially since loads of the main actors in the series have since had their big hollywood break, so I didn't even know if they'd manage to get them all back again. Well, I was right to be apprehensive. The fourth season was very disappointing, not least because they didn't have Otis and Ruby end up together in the end. Whereas the show had always excelled in its subtle, raw and real-world problems, this season seemed to focus on the extreme, the niche and the over-dramatized. They brought in a whole new batch of characters and then focussed on them relentlessly without the time to really develop them, while simultaneously ignoring the characters we'd grown to really love. All of the OG characters got a fitting ending, but I think they could've done something really great if they'd just given it a bit more time. They also seemingly tried to make the show needlessly deeper by chucking in topics like child abuse and coercive control in relationships, but without the time to handle them with proper care, it felt really shoehorned in and unnecessary. My initial feeling definitely ended up being right; the end of season 3 was a good enough ending and they could've just left it there.

We all remember the press tour for this movie don't we? The romances, the rumoured rifts, Harry styles allegedly spitting on Chris Pine? Well, among all the social media-fuelled drama (which we love), the actual film seemed to get lost. I certainly had no idea what the plot was, and the trailer doesn't do a fantastic job of shining any extra light on it. It's actually about a 1950s-style small town where all the wives stay home and look pretty, and all the husbands go to work on a super top secret project they can't event tell their spouses about. Alice and Jack seem to be the most perfect of all the perfect couples in the town of Victory, but then Alice disobeys the one rule; to never go out into the desert. Once she gets back, cracks start to appear and suddenly her perfect life doesn't seem so perfect. As Alice begins to dig and question what's really going on in the town, can she get to the bottom of it before time runs out? Well, I really enjoyed this film. It was pretty slow starting and it was one of those where you weren't quite sure what you were supposed to be figuring out before it was all revealed. But once it did become clearer what the secrets of the town really were, I thought it was really clever. Florence Pugh was great in it and I loved the comments on the patriarchy that the movie made. It may have been overshadowed by the drama on set, but this film is definitely worth a watch.

If you want a truly feel good film then look no further than The Out-laws. I feel like Adam Devine plays the same character in every single film he's ever done, but it's a funny recipe that earns some good laughs so if it ain't broke don't fix it I guess. In this one, he's once again a lovable oaf (slash bank manager named Owen), who's finally meeting the parents of his fiancé for the first time. But then his bank is robbed the very next day and he starts to piece together that his in-laws-to-be might be the infamous Ghost Bandits. The straight-laced Owen then has to go over to the bank-robbing dark side to save his fiancé - with naturally hilarious results. Listen, if you're hoping for a well-crafted, high-brow or intellectual film then you'll be severely disappointed. But if you like the occasional bit of slapstick, slipping-on-a-banana-peel type comedy then you'll enjoy this movie. It's light, it's nice and short (why must movies now be SO long?) and it makes you giggle. The only truly terrible part was Pierce Brosnan's accent - I don't know what was going on there.

There's nothing that gets me in my nostalgic feels like The Summer I Turned Pretty. Originally a book trilogy, I fell in love with it the year I turned 14 (the summer I turned pretty coincidentally) and it's held a special place in my heart since then. While I loved the To all the boys I've loved before movie trilogy, I had always hoped it'd be this series that got translated onto the screen and so I was super excited when Prime took it up as a series. The only problem with turning a series of relatively short books into 8 episode series is that there's not enough content to really fill the time you've allocated. So you have to come up with a load of random extra stuff. Season 1 of this show had been quite bad for not sticking to the book. It was good overall, but the main part of book 1 was that it flitted between different summers to show us a full timeline of Belly's childhoods spent at the summer house in Cousins Beach. Naturally because of problems aging the actors, the TV adaptation didn't bother with any of that, and then crammed loads of other stuff in instead, so it was quite far away from the book. Knowing that book 2 is much simpler in that regard, I was looking forward to seeing how season 2 played out. I will say that season 2 was better as not only was it closer to the book, but it had also got into its groove with the characters and the chemistry between them all. There was a still a lot of unnecessary added storylines (random aunties and cousins who hadn't been in the book, random volleyball camps, random days at the beach that didn't happen). I think the beauty of The summer I turned pretty book series was its simplicity and how single-mindedly it focussed on the love triangle between Belly, Jeremiah and Conrad. That gets a little watered down in the TV series, but it's still compelling and really heart-warming. I'm obviously biased by my nostalgic love of the books, but I reckon it holds up. So far they're sticking to the books too in terms of when she's with who so I only hope that continues in season 3. For all the ways they haven't stuck to the book, I really love that they've changed it so that Steven and Taylor are together in the series. Their chemistry obviously spoke volumes enough to change their original narratives!

I'm hot off the press on this one as it's only just come out on Netflix but Reptile was a pretty good film! Framed as a creepy whodunnit thriller, it tells the story of an estate agent murdered in one of her homes, and the story of the cop trying to solve the case. I thought it'd be a bit more of a straight-forward whodunnit than it ended up being, and the mystery was a bit of a wider one, but it was a good film. There were lots of creepy characters throughout (it's like they weren't allowed to be in it if they weren't creepy) and it did keep me on the edge of my seat. The problem with keeping an audience on their feet though is that they need to feel ready to fall off it by the end. In comparison to what it had built up, the actual revelation at the end felt a bit too simple and like it fell a little flat. Worth a watch but not the most mind-blowing thriller I've seen.