glowingfish

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I have an enormous soft spot for Paddington, having grown up on his stop-motion shorts – which at their best are glorious. The big-screen series has largely kept his charm, but Paddington in Peru is definitely the weakest of the trilogy. Admittedly the superb Paddington 2 was a hard act to follow, but this third instalment sometimes feels like it's trying too hard. Perhaps the change of director had something to do with that. I don't especially mind the casting change for Mrs Brown: yes, Sally Hawkins did a wonderful job, but Emily Mortimer's version of the character is still fine. Julie Walters as Mrs Bird is unsurprisingly excellent, too.

The real problem is that it feels rather by-the-numbers. Look, the Brown family are growing up and drifting apart, what a fantastically original setup! Hey, they're going on a big adventure that may just bring them back together and lead them to realise what family truly means! And so on. You can get away with that, but only if the execution is perfect, which it isn't. It all feels very linear compared with its predecessor, and far too much of it is predictable almost from the start. It's not as funny as Paddington 2, either. I don't want to make out this is a bad movie. It's not. As a family film it's warm and agreeable, just like Paddington himself. I just hoped for more. ★★★

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I'd been a bit scared of Reddit, although I've had an account there for a while. But I thought "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" and decided to see if I could make a serious post about Sandra Peabody's abuse on the Last House on the Left set be noticed by anyone at all. I was expecting one of three things: either that it would get basically ignored and pick up about two upvotes and one comment, or that it would be downvoted to hell by diehard fans of Last House, or that it would get deleted because I'd accidentally broken some minor rule and the mod on duty was feeling grumpy.

In fact, as you see above and to my enormous surprise, the post resonated. After 18 hours it's just hit 250,000 views – though that's not a terribly helpful metric, as someone who just scrolls past it on their feed counts there. 774 upvotes, which is probably low for a 250k-view post but isn't bad at all considering how many people dislike "liking" a post that is about abuse. 341 shares. 200+ comments, most thoughtful. And the one that really surprised me: 96.9% upvote ratio. I was absolutely expecting considerably more pushback from the "It was the 1970s; you're indulging in presentism" crowd.

I've left linking the post until now because I need to warn folks that it includes uncensored extracts from the actors' commentary track and that they contain disturbing comments, including stories of threats being treated as amusing anecdotes. The post is all text (the image at the end is a scan of magazine text). So, if you do want to see the #1 post on r/horror today then here:

Last House on the Left (1972) - the actors' Blu-ray commentary track is pretty disturbing