My Cultural Life - Death and Taxes

What's Up?

I've said for as long as I've been interested in world politics that Israel will start World War 3. I've always been absolutely sure about this, to the point that I would have had a bet on it. It seems that these paranoid Nazi-aping bunch of psychopaths have taken the world one step closer to all out war.

It isn't enough that these wannabe Nazis have bombed Gaza back to the stone age and have been targeting children - the next generation of Israel haters - they have been flexing their USA backed muscle in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Now they choose to pick on one of the most volatile regimes in the world. Yes, Iran can't afford to have a war, but that means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

In 2010, I wrote a blog that forecast that by the time WW3 is over, Israel may well be a smouldering nuclear hole in the ground, allowing whoever is left to play the victim card again. The fact they continue to use the victim card as the main reason for all of their aggression towards just about everyone who doesn't think them wiping a race off the face of the planet is a good thing is no longer justification to allow this rogue nation to put the rest of the world at risk. Israel not only needs to be stopped, it needs to be muzzled and zero air time should be afforded to their bonkers supporters. The world sees them for what they are even if the media refuse to acknowledge this.

Best Thing on Netflix (Maybe TV)

Based on the novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen and following a brilliant but damaged cop leading a team of misfits in solving cold cases in Edinburgh, Dept Q has, without a doubt, been the best new TV series I have watched this year. It reminded me of Slow Horses but with more violence, nastiness and sex. It is a mixture of slightly comedic, bizarrely baffling and fucking excellent story telling. I know I've been banging on about this for the last couple of columns, but this really is the real deal. Matthew Goode - who I wasn't really familiar with - is superb as Carl Morck, leading his team including Akram - Alexev Manvelov - a former Syrian secret policeman, Rose Byrne as the equally mentally-troubled DC Rose Dickson and Jamie Sives as Morck's paraplegic partner. The entire series follows their investigation of a missing barrister, believed to be dead. The original investigation seemed botched and left a paper trail that suggested malpractice by every position from the original investigating team to the Lord Advocate (Crown Prosecutor played by Mark Bonner). There is also the running subplot about the shooting that paralysed Morck's partner, put him in hospital and killed a young police officer - this doesn't get fully resolved, so expect this to expand in the inevitable season two. This is stunning television; what the box was invented for. While I don't usually score TV shows, this gets a solid 11/10.  

Oh FFS

Yes. I know. I said I would never watch another episode of Resident Alien. After a very enjoyable first season, this show fell off a cliff with season two and was so bad in season three that I only stuck with it because I'd been assured it was going to end. However, it ended with a cliffhanger and the promise of season fucking four... So why am I talking about it now? Well, I saw a Tube of You video and read an online review that both said the show had got its mojo back. That season four seemed to return to the roots that made season one so calamitously hilarious and interesting. So against my better judgement I procured a copy of season four, episode one and put it on; this is what I thought... 

Shit. It was shit. Great dollops of stinky shit. As shitty a thing as ever came out of any arse ever. How the fucking hell did this heap of shit ever get to four fucking seasons? Everyone has lost weight in it. It's like the cast were told, "Sorry there's no more free food from the catering truck, you can buy your own food you fat fucks." When I say everyone has lost weight, that's everyone apart from Sarah Tomko who has taken all the weight lost by the rest of the cast and shoved it up her own arse, which is now bigger than the show itself. No more. There will be no more of this, ever. FFS, the standard of TV comedy Sci-Fi has slipped down a sewerage canal and is now wallowing in really old shit. Just fuck off and never darken my television ever again. Fuck off!!

The Incompetent Farmer

The finale of Clarkson's Farm was remarkable. Jeremy opened his pub, now called The Farmer's Dog, and it really shouldn't have been open for at least two weeks. Thousands of people turned up and nothing worked; the beer packed up; the food ran out; the toilets broke down; it absolutely pissed down with rain - which also impacted on his farming activities in a most depressing way and, of course, it finished before Clarkson discovered he needed heart surgery or he would die. Oh, yeah, some of his staff quit, the two ladies organising the pub quit on the third morning it was open and I ask the question again, how can someone go into something like this without doing his homework or realising he was making a massive error not waiting until everything worked? Oddly enough, at one point, when Jeremy discovered his durum wheat harvest was a complete write off and was literally worthless, he turned to the camera and said, 'People think Amazon are paying for this, but they're not. This comes out of my pocket. £25,000 out of my wallet because we can't sell anything we've grown.' You want to feel sorry for him, but he's extremely rich and plays the system to suit him, so if the pub doesn't work and he has to shut it down by the next series, I'm not going to feel sorry for him. This is a great farming programme that does more for the industry than Countryfile has ever done; running a pub isn't helping highlight any problems because most new pubs aren't fucking stupid enough to do it like Jeremy did. I'm still looking forward to season five because of what we've discovered has happened since this finished filming.

How Did I Miss That?

The great Mel Brooks will be 99 on June 28th. he has outlived pretty much all of his friends and loved ones. He is still remarkably able, or at least he was during 2023 when they made Imagine... Mel Brooks Unwrapped, the latest (and last) in what became a series of interviews with the American auteur over about 45 years. Brooks was just 97 when it was made and I wondered how old Alan Yentob, who had first interviewed him since 1982, was and the wife said, "He died about two weeks ago." I was gobsmacked. I think I keep up with current events, but I clearly missed the death of the 78-year-old former head of BBC2 and it really shocked me and seemed to prove my opening line about Brooks outliving everyone. About 60 years ago or so, Brooks and his lifelong friend Carl Reiner performed a skit called the 2000 Year Old Man and I'm beginning to wonder if the man born Melvin Kaminsky is going to outlast us all. Two years ago when this wonderful and funny show was made, he was still zooming around like a man half his age and capable of making me, you, Yentob, Alan the cameraman and everyone else laugh. It was great to watch this show, which was put on as a tribute to Yentob. I'm still reeling from the fact the man died at the end of May and I never knew about it. I wouldn't say I was a fan of his work, but he never did anything I couldn't respect. Totally shocked.

Stuck

It appears that Stick has more in common with Happy Gilmore than the actual game of golf. I'm not ready to give up on this yet, but I fear it might be one more episode and I'll be done with it. I apologise in advance but I'm going to be a bit anal about this third episode of Owen Wilson's golfing comedy: amateur golf competitions follow PGA and USPGA rules, therefore 1) players or caddies are not allowed to use buggies; 2) there is not a gap between the front nine and the back nine - you finish hole #9 and go straight to hole #10, you don't get time to sit around in a shed talking to a woman who just got fired from her job as a barmaid; 3) on course betting is illegal in the USA; 4) Santi and Pryce simply turned up for the tournament; there would have been entry rules and even wildcard entries system, who usually find out about a few days before it starts; 5) never in the history of golf has someone shot a +6 on a front nine, been given a one shot penalty for being late to the tee (+7) and then shot -9 on the back nine to win the tournament with -2: it's improbable at best.

This is Ted Lasso country without a doubt. In the football comedy, the truth was jettisoned to allow the jokes to work and because most of the USA has no idea how 'soccer ball' works, it could appeal to all the ignorant fuckwits while tickling the fancy of people who understood how Association Football worked. I can't imagine there will be that many people out there who would watch Stick if they had no interest in the sport; this is going to appeal mainly to the 10 million people who subscribe to golf channels and watch major tournaments; the crossover appeal is close to zero... Then there's the characters; Owen Wilson's Pryce Cahill is like a kid with a gun, but he's the most consistent thing about this. Maybe it's the mish-mash of oddball characters that is going to make this tick, but I simply can't see past the fact that it plays fast and loose with every aspect of the golf game and I know that makes me a nerd, but I do like my comedies to have an internal logic, which this is struggling to find. 

The fourth episode, which we watched on Wednesday night, confirmed all my fears, but also allowed me to basically put into words the problems I have with this series... Pryce's golfing prodigy Santi (Peter Dager) is a young punk and a twat, I wouldn't say he's totally dislikeable, more like hateable. Pryce's former caddy Mitts (Marc Maron) who is their driver, isn't likeable and seemingly just brings Marc Maron to the show (the man who produced the most listened to podcast in US podcasting history); Santi's mother (Mariana Trevino), who has screwed $100k from Pryce to turn her son into a champion is really unpleasant and unlikeable. Zero, the barmaid who got sacked for having a giant chip on her shoulder is an argumentative bore, is thoroughly horrid and millennial. Meanwhile, Owen Wilson is more of a fucking doormat than suspected, he needs to grow a pair. However, I'm not going to be around to see if he does grow a pair or if this show manages to be better than it currently is; I'm not hopeful and I'm not watching any more.

Unforgettable 

We sat down to watch Immortals, a film with Henry Cavill before he had a nose job and his teeth fixed. It had Mickey Rourke as the bad guy and Luke Whatshisname as Zeus. It looked really dark, moody and quite sumptuous at times, it was unbelievably boring and almost impenetrable at other times. After it finished it was twelve hours before I remembered I hadn't written a review about the film I saw last night that I can't quite remember...

Weird Scenes Inside the Twat's Mind

Oliver Stone's 1991 biopic The Doors is a lot of pretentious bollocks. It might be reasonably accurate, but this overblown art house nonsense - because that's what it wants to be - just paints a picture of a complete narcissistic arsehole and his three gophers. It isn't the story of the Doors, it's the story of Jim Morrison and how though a mixture of drink, drugs and his own ego managed to become one of the Hippie Era's first sex symbols. The rest of the band were just cyphers, characters put in the film but not really in it. Kyle MacLachlan's Ray Manzarek is a wallflower; Frank Whalley's Robbie Krieger is portrayed as someone who only functions when Morrison tells him to and Kevin Dillan's John Densmore is portrayed as argumentative and demonstrative, until the closing scenes when it felt like his history had been revised.

This is a film that exploits women by pretending to be all about the Swingin' Sixties and the Hippie movement, but it simply felt like an excuse for Stone to get any female in the film to get her tits out. Kilmer is incredible as Morrison, but Morrison is an arsehole and you literally, from about the hour mark, start wishing for it to hurry up and let him die, in Paris. He's unpleasant, egotistical and dislikeable; but so are everyone else in this film, either overtly or passively. This is a film that was fantastic in 1991 and now feels of its time and like something best forgotten about. 5/10

A Song of Ice and Flatulence

At the age of 76, suffering from ill health and 14 years since he wrote the last published part of his Game of Thrones series of books, it is now blatantly clear, given his most recent blog, that the fat fuck who is responsible for said Game of Thrones nonsense isn't going to finish writing The Winds of Winter and will never begin writing A Dream of Spring, which, allegedly, would conclude the massive tome. Martin basically said in his most recent blog - which he manages to write with far more regularity than he does anything to do with Westeros - that people should be excited for all the other projects he has coming out and need to allow him to enjoy these things and not hassle him for the latest in the Westeros saga. So, it's not an actual admission that it isn't going to happen, but IT'S NOT GOING TO FUCKING HAPPEN! I've been convinced about this for at least seven years when I got embroiled in an argument about whether this ludicrously overrated writer owed it to his fans to finish a story so many were invested in. I was firmly on the side of 'If you start something and it's popular then you owe it to the people who have made you shit loads of money to finish it.' There were many people quite happy to allow GRRM 25 years to finish the story and others who claimed it was his right to do whatever the fuck he wanted. He can. He's still a fucking Grade A Tool in my books and he won't get another penny out of me. 

Almost Midsummer Santa

Time plays tricks with your mind. Over the last twelve months or so, ever since we watched a dodgy horror film about Krampus, I've been trying to remember this Nordic horror movie we saw that I was so impressed with I wanted to watch it again. Then I stumbled across Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a Finnish film which was the movie I'd been trying to track down. There's this American company drilling into a mountain in Finland and they hit a vein of pure sawdust and then it's a race against time to plunder this underground for everything they can get before Christmas. It's at this point in the movie that you think something is building to crazy crescendo; reindeer die, strange things start happening, like all the kids disappear and all the while Onni Tommila - Pietari - thinks there's something odd going on involving Santa Claus. There is this bizarre build up with hundreds of bearded naked old men running wild in the Finnish snow fields and a giant something encased in ice and then something happens, all the naked men stop trying to kill everyone and that's about it. 75 minutes, at best. I was convinced we'd watched a version that had had all the action removed; maybe to confuse non-Nordic people into wondering what the fuck they'd just watched. The wife said, "Maybe that's why it stayed in your mind, because nothing happened and it was really shit?" 2/10

Och Aye the Noo, Old Chap

The Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I'm Going made in 1945 and starring Roger Livesey and [Dame] Wendy Hiller is really of an age and utterly bonkers. Hiller plays Joan Webster, a selfish, gold-digging posh girl from London who is about to marry a rich man on his Scottish island, so she leaves on the overnight sleeper for the start of a journey to the Outer Hebrides. Along the way she meets Torquil MacNeil, a navy officer (and laird) also on his way to the same island and a host of interestingly accented Scots people - all of which sounding like the King, including the ones speaking Gaelic - in very un-Gaelic accents. Tha Torquil gu math dèidheil air Joan and because the weather is so bad she can't get over to marry her rich fiancée, so he does things to try and keep her amused, but she's a selfish bitch who only cares about herself, but he's smitten, so when she tries to kill them all instead of beating her senseless with someone's wooden leg, he decides to try and woo her instead and she's as accommodating as a porn star in her 51st movie. There's a good turn from Pamela Brown (pictured) as Torquil's mad (and questionable) female friend Catriona and John Laurie from Dad's Army has a role and also was the actual technical director for the ceilidh scenes. It was very much of its time and jolly strange, what, what. 5/10 

An American Mockumentary

For our Friday night movie entertainment, we decided to sit down and watch an extremely accurate depiction of what the USA is going to be like in probably a few weeks. Idiocracy is a film we have seen before, but as it has been almost 20 years, I wondered if it had stood the test of time or if it still felt like a stretch too far... On a tangent, it was interesting to see Luke Wilson - Owen's brother - in a film, meaning we've had a pair of Wilsons this week. It was also good to finally remember where we'd seen Maya Rudolph before, having seen her recently in whatever forgettable thing we'd seen her in. He plays a useless army grunt and she a slightly dense prostitute who are picked to take part in an experiment to keep them in suspended animation for one year, but they end up being in it for 500 years and when they wake up America is ruled by Jabba the Trump - a vile, slobbering semi-corpse... No, not that at all, but they wake up in a country so stupid it doesn't bother to wipe its own arse. It's mildly amusing but also quite disturbing, because it appears that the USA has not learned anything since this film's release. It has some sharp observational humour; many people acting stupid and a story that is essentially Wall-E with morons. It wasn't as cutting edge as I remembered it, but that might be because... you know... it's looking more like a documentary than a comedy. I'm surprised Trump never got a cursory mention. 6/10.

Blink and You Miss It

This week's thrilling mini-instalment of Murderbot featured a panic attack; a graphic operation to remove a neuro-fibre from Murderbot's back; a betrayal; a gory death scene and from what clues we got the beginning of a mystery that might include the company allowing our team of space hippies to study the planet they're on. It also puts the space hippies into a strange place as Murderbot saves their lives from the murderous Leebeebee only for them to be shocked at the way the sec unit does its job. There's a bunch of usual segues into the rubbish Murderbot watches for relaxation and the growing feeling that this is going to be a set-up series and it will end on a cliffhanger meaning a second season. It's not that this is a bad idea, but we've had about an hour and a half of this so far and I swear I could grow mould on my face quicker...

Reshuffle

As we hurtle towards the end of season four, this week's Welcome to Wrexham focuses on the changing times and faces at the football club. Former CEO Shaun takes on a new role as club ambassador - he could have gone anywhere but the feeling of family at this football team means he's staying to help with overseas development and taking the club forwards (as a brand). There's a look at the fading lights that have been Olly Palmer and Paul Mullin - both heroes for what they've achieved at the club, but now finding life tough as the team basically pulls away from them and their contribution wanes. Then there's a focus on Humphrey Ker, who used to be a director but now has a different role within the club and is running a marathon to raise money for one of the things he's now focused on. It also features the story of a 12 year old young man who is a huge fan of the team but is in hospital with a rare form of leukaemia. He has a bond with hero Paul Mullin, who has taken the boy under his wing and there is a scene where the Wrexham legend calls Ryan Reynolds up to have a chat with the kid - there isn't a dry eye in the house. It's at this point when you realise what the two Hollywood stars have done for this club and the city is beyond words. It also was nice to hear that as far as the management is concerned Paul Mullin's career at Wrexham is far from over, but whether that will be as a player or as a future coach remains to be seen. This is still the most enjoyable actual documentary on TV.

What's Up Next?

If there's still a planet left once Israel has finished with it, the coming week doesn't feel like it has a lot going on. A couple of shows reach their penultimate episodes and there's usually always something new that crops up. As usual, what you read about is what I've seen. 

My Cultural Life - Shedloads

What's Up?

Sometimes there is a pleasure in not having much to talk about. Given the amount I'm going to waffle on about, that's probably a good thing. 

A Fitting Finale

It's funny. I have mentioned on numerous occasions how I almost gave up on Your Friends & Neighbors [sic] but stuck with it and in the end it was an absolutely stunning TV series that had both of us heavily invested in. John Hamm's Andy Cooper is the kind of antihero you want to place your money on and after eight almost flirtatious episodes, we got down to the nitty gritty and Coop's D-Day. This was by far and away the most emotional and also the best part so far. This largely frivolous story of rich cunts and the pretentious games they play, suddenly had a real life thing chucking shovel loads of shit at the fan. Coop's entire freedom was at risk because he didn't know how to deal with it. It was almost like he was going to give in even if he didn't murder his lover's husband.

As a season finale it had everything you'd want and yet I got the decidedly strong feeling that this was originally intended to be a one season story and no more. That's because almost every stone was turned; every i was dotted and every t was crossed. Then it was like, "Uh, guys, we've been renewed for a second series" and a couple of scenes were tacked onto the end. That's not to sound like I'm complaining because I'm not. A show I would happily have given up on after three weeks ended up being one of the most enjoyable things I've watched this year. It's a more than satisfactory conclusion which was both unexpected and totally expected. In fact, with the exception of James Marsden who is joining the cast, everything is almost back in its place, where we started, except for one thing. You'll just have to watch it to work it out.

Cash Cows

There is this Tube of You channel called James May's Planet Gin, which is essentially an advertising platform for May's pub, gin, old age mucking about and various television projects. It also acts as an explainer about both Top Gear and The Grand Tour. In one of the many episodes that float around on the internet, one of them was a viewer Q&A asking about things from May's past. Recently one of the questions was: how much of Top Gear and The Grand Tour was scripted? This garnered a cagey and very telling reply from the former BBC man. "Er... That would be telling." He said, floundering around for an answer where no answer was needed; May's response said everything we needed to know - much of their car programmes worked to a basic script. Yes, there were moments that were both impromptu and unscripted, but largely everyone knew what was going to happen from the start all the way to the end. It was expertly done, but a lot of the time a horrid faux pas or the pissing off of an entire capital city because of three buffoons was staged. Yes, I know, it takes some of the comedy and the magic out of TV and my place isn't to do that. Except...

Clarkson's Farm is one of those TV programmes. It has to be. Because someone as wealthy as Jeremy Clarkson isn't going to wander blindly into money pits and bureaucracy that is going to cost somewhere between six and seven figures. This pub Clarkson has bought - The Windmill at Burford - cost a little under £1million, but once you factor in all the work that's needed, all the frivolous nonsense that's being added on and all the other things I'm sure he must have known about before mugging it for the cameras, the final cost is likely to be getting on for £2million. It's obviously a tax write off - like Diddly Squat farm was, despite Clarkson's protestations to Victoria Derbyshire last autumn - and he will get tax allowances, but where Clarkson's Farm has done a good job, for most of its life, at painting accurate pictures of farming life, this takes the series into a different territory and one that stretches the viewers belief in Jezza's project.

This week's double bill focused mainly on the pub and the home grown products Clarkson wants to sell. We got unexpected cameos from both James May (telling Jeremy about the stupidity of buying a pub) and Richard Hammond (whose company is going to chromium-up an old tractor to hang from the rafters of the pub that will eventually be called The Farmer's Dog) and it was during the meeting with the latter where we had an unspoken and mental "Er... That would be telling" moment. Hammond's bill, along with other bills flying at Clarkson from all angles (and all around the £40K mark) was presented in a Well, you're pissing money up a wall, so give me some kind of way and that made me wonder just how much of this show is re-shot to make some of the things in it more... dramatic? Yes, I know I'm probably being very naïve, but when this show dealt with farming problems, it still dealt with real farming problems, it might have had Jeremy arsing around or Kaleb speaking to his boss in a way you would never believe Clarkson would put up with, but you knew that the issues being raised were pertinent and relevant. This pub venture feels more like it was paid for by Amazon for the craic.

The finale has had to wait until next week and I wonder if it will include Clarkson's heart valve by-pass that he underwent shortly after his pub opening. The penultimate episode at least spent some time back on the farm and started to show Jezza looking old, fat and unwell. There were genuine moments of tension between him and Kaleb, mainly because the thick farm manager decided to do things he knew would piss off his boss - my belief that Kaleb is becoming hoisted by his own petard seems to be coming true, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the two part company in the fifth season.

Mystery Bot

I still can't quite work out why this show is only 20 minutes of original content per episode. I could understand it if Murderbot was an out-and-out comedy or if it just told one 'story' inside those 20 minutes, but this is an ongoing show with some serious undertones, for all the quirkiness and fish out of water antics the bunch of scientists Murderbot (or Sec Unit as they call him) is assigned to protect. This week continued where last left off, with the Sec Unit being dragged through the other group of scientists lab space by a far more advanced version of Sec Unit which is obviously working to an agenda we're not privy to. Yes, this is corny, some of the Sec Unit 'daydreams' are inspired and crazy, but there's a serious story hammering at the fourth wall trying to get out. The most recent episode at least moved the narrative forward, but the limited time makes it difficult. We're halfway through and I suppose I shouldn't be disappointed about where we are in the story because ordinarily we wouldn't be this far even if this just spent its time explaining to us what has been happening so far... However, I threw a theory at the wife after watching Friday night's fifth episode. This feels like it was originally made as a feature film, but was slashed into 10 parts instead and made into a TV series.

Fletch Lives

Channing Tatum is the latest Hollywood superstar to drop into North Wales. The 45-year-old actor and friend of Ryan Reynolds was one of the focal points of last week's Welcome to Wrexham, which spent some time on Tatum making an advert with the team; some time looking at how the youth academy and the women's team need investment in and then on the 37-year-old goal machine super-sub the team has in Steven Fletcher. He's the man with the dodgy haircut who comes on with 15 minutes to go and wins the game for the Championship-bound football club. This was an episode laden with subtitles, presumably because Americans might struggle with a subtle Scottish accent or even a vaguely Scouse one. It's like when TV shows subtitle the Asian appearing despite him/her speaking better, clearer English than people who aren't subtitled. Like Clarkson's Farm this is often about the money that needs to be spent, unlike Clarkson's Farm you realise these fiscal discussions are not scripted. This Friday's most recent episode was all about departures and people moving away from their positions they once held. What was really lovely about this episode was the way Rob and Ryan paid tribute to one of the fans who recently died - the 100 year old fan who was honoured by the club  last season and was now honoured again in the TV show. This was also about the likes of Olly Palmer and Paul Mullins no longer being the first names on the team sheet and about the emergence of new heroes. Yes, it's about football, but as a football fan, I watch this and keep an eye on Wrexham and it brings back that feeling I had in the 1970s, when football meant a lot more to me...

A Racist Paradise

Scandinavia boats some of the happiest places on the planet. They have socialist or semi-socialist politicians and they embrace nationalism. To say they are Nationalist Socialists would be an insult to them, but they have essentially shunned migration and do not view asylum seekers or refugees as being anything other than temporary. Which begs the question - does Sweden have such a high crime rate because of this policy or is there another reason? Because during the third and final part of Simon Reeve: Scandinavia we saw two sides to Sweden and Denmark. We saw these rich, happy countries with free health and child care, high taxes but even higher disposable incomes, yet Sweden in particular is blighted by one of the highest murder rates in the world! The problem it seems are all the foreigners; 90% of all crimes in Sweden are committed by non-Swedish nationals and despite this rich and welcoming country doing everything it can for its own people, migrants are treated badly (and have become a scapegoat).

It's not so bad in Denmark, but that's because Denmark has already made non-Danish people second class citizens. They literally outlaw places from becoming migrant ghettoes; they forcibly move, mainly Muslim, families into areas with a higher concentration of Danish people in the hope that Danish values and principles will rub off on these people and make them 'better' people. It smacks of racism, yet the figures unfortunately back up what a lot of right wing politicians claim - it's the foreigners what did it, Guv. It's difficult to say whether this is a chicken or an egg situation, but in Sweden particularly there's this fabulous country blighted by crime and the crime is being committed mainly by migrants. It is the same all over most of the Nordic countries; the reason you don't hear about it in Norway is because Norway only takes a fraction compared to Sweden and Denmark. It's a situation that fuels the far right over here, yet over there it is political parties left of our current Labour party enforcing these policies and looking like they're taking notes from Mein Kampf. 

An absolutely eye-opening but scary mini-series, you should watch it on iPlayer, but it raises so many questions, especially about migration. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a tolerant, inclusive person (despite my general dislike of right wing idiots), but recently I had a tradesman in the house, originally from Middlesbrough, and during a conversation with him over a coffee, he wheeled out anti-immigrant, anti-asylum seeker rhetoric like he was calling bingo numbers. "Too many foreigners." "Too many black people." "Asylum seekers stealing our jobs." And the most scary: "Maybe when Reform get into power we can take our country back?" However, he also claimed the weather was being controlled by the government... We should laugh, but deep down I knew I was staring at the future of the UK...

The Song & Dance Vampires

There is so much wrong with Ryan Coogler's new movie Sinners, the good news is that there is actually a great film trying hard to escape. My favourite expression in this blog is 'the problem is' and with Sinners there's a bunch of them. From the mumbling, southern dialects that make a third of the film difficult to understand to the extensive song and dance routines and the weirdly time-twisting scenes where different eras all merge into one. There are some great things about it; the 21st century take on From Dusk Till Dawn plays out extremely well, with the main antagonists being vampires rather than the KKK - this is the deep south and the year is 1932 - but... and there are copious amounts of buts...

Apparently being turned into a vampire also gives you musical and music hall powers - you can sing and dance, play instruments and hold a tune. You also get turned faster than a rabbit bolts down a hole and you become part of a sort of collective hive mind. Michael B Jordan mumbles his way through this as twin brothers - Stack and Smoke - back from working with Al Capone after spending four years in the trenches before that. These are hardened criminals but they're home and they want to open a bar for blacks that keeps them away from the violence and racism of the white folk. Unfortunately, a trio of vampires arrive at their speakeasy and cause all kinds of bloody havoc, leaving a handful of human survivors. Parts of this film were excellent, other parts left me slightly bewildered and wondering what Coogler was trying to convey and maybe it had something to do with the ending, which given the final stand off between the head vampire - Jack O'Connell - made little or no sense; but there were many such moments in a film that at times felt like it was being made up as they went along. It was still entertaining, but the inconsistencies mean I can only give it a 6/10.

An Idea (Possibly Several)

Doctor Who. I actually carried out my intention and stopped watching it. For the first time since 2005, I simply forgot it was on, only being reminded it had been on by posts or stuff in The Guardian. So, on Saturday night, while the wife was sorting out a couple of bowls of strawberries, I happened to flip over and catch the last ten minutes and obviously absolutely none of it made any sense and then he was back in the Tardis having left his companion with a child (!?), off into space where he regenerates into Billie Piper. Spark immense amounts of internet traffic about something that's been a huge disappointment since Matt Smith left and Peter Capaldi's writers lost the plot. The feel of the programme changed. It stopped being fun and sinister, puzzling and somehow omnipotent...

Davies created a Get Out of Jail card before Ncuti Gatwa came on board. By bringing back David Tennant and managing to keep him to allow the show to soft reboot (badly). We all know it's not the last we'll see of that particular Doctor and now there's Billie Piper. A lot of critics and Who fans seem to crave for something different and when they finally did something different it really was quite awful in comparison to the past. Disney likes the past. Disney still has the rights to five more episodes and may well decide to renew their option, despite poor ratings. Doctor Who has always nodded to its past. From The Three Doctors to the most recent episode. It's a time travel show, first and foremost. Timey-wimey. 

What this show has been missing is the Daleks, the Cybermen, The Master, Jack Harkness, the Weeping Angels, stories of peril, jeopardy and fun. If I was Davies, I'd be bringing 'Rose Tyler' back. She has a connection to the Tardis that no other companion has, she's in a different dimension that will never be her home and she's littered throughout the entire history of the modern show. By bringing Rose back instead of The Doctor, in some concocted reason why he/she looks like a past companion you can do something very different. Have a Doctor Who series with Rose trying to work out what the hell just happened and where the 'other' Doctor is - he did expunge all that Time Travel goodness into the universe rather than into a transformation. Rose coming back closes a loop that is now needed to find and save the Doctor. They can literally have an entire season without the present day Doctor and have a relatively simple, but potentially exciting quest to find him; plus you can have David Tennant drop in and give us that extra blast of nostalgic goodness. If I was Disney, I'd be seeing how many other past characters I can bring back for cameos. It allows the series to regain some standing, giving it an opportunity to do something radical when the time is right. It just needs strong writers with solid ideas, rather than the namby-pamby sci-fi RTD serves us up.

BBQ of the Titans

There are a number of awful things about the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans, but Sam Worthington's Aussie accent was probably the most jarring. This Greek son of Zeus was distinctly fair dinkum and g'day mate. In fact watching him reminded me of a young Ange Postecoglou biting the heads off of chickens and feeding them to his goats. This really was melodramatic style over substance with a dodgy story and a plot that jerked around like a schizophrenic on a wood lathe. The thing was this was 2010 and CGI was having something of a heyday and this was absolutely piss poor considering what we were getting by this time. We've lined up the sequel, which we also haven't seen. Sequels are usually much worse than the originals, so I might just take a big shit on the carpet and we can watch that instead. 3/10

Shitty SHOTY

The house we wanted to win Scotland's Home of the Year 2025 ended up second to a house that looked like it had been built by committee and was lived in by office workers who were into 22 hour shifts. The house/home we liked was local-ish and looked and felt like a home, the winner from the North-East and Northern Isles was all steel, wood cladding and the kind of place that Kevin MacLeod would disappear behind a shed to have a quick wank about. The more relevant point was this used to be eight regions - now six - and the final was an hour long with a little more oomph than the three close pegs who now present this show. I've been warming to Banjo Beale a little; he has a good line in off the cuff remarks and slightly pinky blue innuendo, but in this final he looked like he'd thrown together a new pair of pyjamas out of some old quilt covers and a blue biro. Anna Campbell-Jones is just fucking annoying and the irrelevant Danny Campbell had an interesting kilt and a pair of fucking crocs - he, yet again, looked like a prize cunt. SHOTY is an object of ridicule, nothing more.

Wrath of the Shite-Ans

In the two years [real time] that pass between the first film and its sequel, Sam Worthington manages to grow a head full of curly locks, lose his wife (Gemma Arterton obviously baulked at the idea of being in the sequel) have a 12-year-old son and reconcile with his father, who is the God called Zeus and all that happens in the opening 60 seconds of Wrath of the Titans. The interesting thing about this film is it's probably a wee bet better than Clash but it does seem to forget that it's set in Ancient Greece as the dialogue could have come from a hip coffee shop in Shoreditch and because you're more likely to meet an Aussie there than you are in Greece. Yes, Worthington has not lost his Aussie accent, it's just a) a little disguised and b) he doesn't seem to have as much to say in this second film as he did in the first. This is a bit of a mish-mash as far as the plot is concerned. Ralph Fiennes is back as Hades, Liam Neeson as Zeus and they're fighting each other again, this time with the help of Ares, a proper God, who hates his father and wants him dead. Zeus comes across as a really half decent and benign kind of... er... God in these films, so he was either a complete cunt when he was younger or his brothers and offspring are obviously entitled anti-woke bastards with several axes to grind about their errant father. But it's all all right in the end because they all team up to help beat Cronos and everyone lives happily ever after apart from Zeus (and Cronos and Ares). Utterly bonkers hokum, which, as I said, was actually a bit better than Clash of the Titans. 4/10

Morck and Mingey

The excellent Netflix mini-series Dept. Q is one of the best crime dramas you will watch this year and I say that having only watched half of the episodes so far. It is based on a Scandi Noir set of books and films, about an irascible police detective being side lined by a department increasingly dominated by outside politics. Morck takes on the new Cold Case unit and decides to go looking for a barrister who went missing four years earlier and was believed to have thrown herself into the Minch (an area of sea between mainland and Hebridean Scotland), but because she was a prominent lawyer the case wasn't as such closed just marginalised and forgotten about. There is a certain amount of contrived plotting here, but that might be down to trying to translate the Scandinavian to a more British setting. Anyhow, Morck assembles a team of misfits, including a Syrian refugee - Alexej Manelov - who is his civilian aid and Leah Byrne, a detective constable who, like Morck, has been marginalised because of a health issue. He's also roped in his former partner, who is helping the investigation from his hospital bed. Morck - Matthew Goode - is a cantankerous and angry man, but it doesn't stop him from being excellent at what he does. He doesn't think Merrit Lingard (not really a Scottish name) is dead and he might be right. This story flashes back and forth, making you wonder when and where some of it is taking place; it's violent, funny and very complicated. It is well worth your attention.

Family Day Out

Every so often I do an IMDB search for something I've never seen, but I figured I'd exhausted just about every search I could, so in an act of desperation I typed "great films I've never seen" into Bing and it gave me a column with 60 films you've probably never heard of but are worth seeing. To be fair, there were about 15 on the list that I've watched and most of these were pretty good, so I took this list as a positive thing. One of the films on it was the 1996 Greg Mottola debut movie The Daytrippers, which reminded me a little of a Billy Wilder film, the way it lingered on dialogue and the humour of a situation. Starring Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci as a married couple living on the outskirts of New York, where she's a teacher and he works in publishing. Also involved is Parker Posey as her sister, Liev Schreiber as her boring boyfriend and Anne Meara as the sisters' overbearing mother - a typical New York mom. Davis's Eliza has a fantastic night out with her husband, they go to a show, come home and make love, everything is fabulous. The next morning he goes off to work in the city, says he might be late home from a work's book launch party and everything is rosy in the world. Then Eliza finds a letter - a love letter - signed Sandy and it sets her off on a quest to find out if her husband is having an affair. This is essentially one set piece after another, introducing unconnected characters and finding clues all the time. Let's just say these things never have the outcomes anyone expects. It did feel like it was 30 years old, but it was a reasonably enjoyable film. I can only really give it 6/10 and that feels a little generous, but there was nothing wrong with it.

Caddy Shed

I like golf. I don't play it any more and I rarely watch it on TV (because it isn't really on terrestrial any longer). Golf movies tend to either be crap comedies or earnest racially historical biopics. Golf TV shows are as common as me getting a hole-in-one, except now there is one and is stars Owen Wilson as a washed-up has-been golfer who had a shot at the big time but blew it in a catastrophic meltdown. Stick is about a man reduced to giving golf lessons and selling clubs to overweight club members. Pryce Cahill is drifting towards middle age with nothing in his life until he sees Santi hitting balls at his club and realises this might be a kid as good as Tiger Woods. All he has to do is persuade the kid, the kid's mother, his own ex-wife and his former caddy to support him and help turn Santi into the Next Big Thing. I'm going to echo other reviews by suggesting this is Ted Lasso for golf, but really it's not that at all. Lasso was about a man out of his comfort zone in a strange place; this is about redemption and being able to look the world in the eye again and say 'I did okay.' It's not really about golf either, it's about a group of people all searching for something - with added golfing metaphors to keep it on message.

A Numbers Game

A couple of weeks ago we watched one of the most enjoyable movies we'd seen in ages, the 2016 action movie The Accountant, starring Ben Affleck as an accountant [der] who has special skills outside of numbers. He's basically a one man army who does the books for anyone willing to pay him a lot of money. It was a strangely cerebral film considering it dealt with both autism and shooting people. The reason I even heard about the movie in the first place was because the sequel had just been released in cinemas and I wondered why I'd not seen it. I have now seen the sequel, The Accountant 2, which continues the story but eight years later and reunites Affleck with Jon Bernthal (as his brother, Braxton) and Cynthia Addai-Robinson as deputy director of the US Treasury Department. This time she teams up with the man she spent most of the first film trying to track down. Her former boss - JK Simmons - is working on a private case about a family from El Salvador who arrived in the US but something tragic happened and he's trying to find out what. Suffice it to say, he ends up on a morgue table and it's time for Affleck and co to sort out the bad guys and save the day. It might not be as fluid as the first film, but it still packs a punch, has many LOL moments and is a great way to kill two hours. I'm giving this film a 7.5/10. 

What's Up Next?

My word, what a busy week and what a great end to it with the sacking of the fat Australian fraud who managed my football team. While it was largely a good week of TV and film, I've been bouncing around like a happy schoolboy since the Aussie got the boot. If ever I'm feeling down through the summer, if the weather is crap or things don't go the way I want them to, I'll just remember that fat fuck took my team to 17th in the league. Trophy? I'm glad we won, but it was a devalued competition with the also rans contesting it - and that includes Spurs...

TV - there's the rest of Dept. Q to watch and finale of Clarkson's Farm, plus more of the stuff that is still ongoing. There's a bunch of new films to watch and I have a busy week of committee meetings and other real life shite, so expect a much shortened version again. As usual, what I watch is what you will read about...

My Cultural Life - A Week of Extremes

What's Up?

Let's talk about the weather. This last week has seen the settled and predominately dry weather of the last 6 weeks or so replaced with something a little more... usual. There's nothing we can do about the weather. What I do find interesting is watching the Met Office's Tube of You channel at their 10 day forecasts. They are done with a painstakingly huge amount of disclaimers and probability reminders, but they prove to me that this dream of being able to do actual long range weather forecasting is like some ridiculous mythical quest, like discovering the fountain of youth [oh, they'll see what you did there!].

As the dry, sunny, warm and not very humid weather slipped away, the Met Office and their affiliates, who they compare conclusions with, said this period of unsettled, Atlantic-driven, weather would be replaced with high pressure again and a return to what we're already thinking might have been summer. Every one said 'a week of wet and windy back to warm and sunny' and they continued to say that until they stopped and replaced it with 'continuing wet and windy, maybe the odd nice day' which is predominately what a British summer has felt like over the last few years.

The thing is, the forecasters were so wrong on this that you have to wonder if there's ever a successful 10-day forecast whenever there's a low pressure area on the chart? Low Pressure = chaos, while High pressure = order. A meteorologist might say that's simplifying it but forecasters really don't know what a large percentage of low pressure areas are going to do and more importantly how they will change the forecast based on how far away they are from the predicted course or how much deeper or flabbier they are. We can't tell that, therefore small things change the weather, as the recent one about returning high pressure has proven. 

So as a result, the weather has been and will continue to be average early Scottish summer. But after last year, which I think many of us have forgotten just how fucking awful it was, that sun wave we had will have whetted our appetites for more actual British summer time. It would be nice. The nice days outweighing the nasty ones. Jumpers for goalposts. Isn't it.

Fountain of Shite

Sometimes, The Guardian and I agree wholeheartedly and this was one of those occasions. The new guy Ritchie film - Fountain of Youth - is really awful. I mean, there are very few, if any, redeeming features. It feels like an amalgam of a number of Indiana Jones rip-offs ranging from that thing Nick Cage did in the noughties to things with The Rock and other things with a young Michael Douglas and a younger Kathleen Turner. It however possesses zero amount of charm; there is never a sense of peril, the apparent dynamic between alleged siblings John Krasinski and a truly abysmal Natalie Portman feels like some bad comedy double act of the 1970s and the few special effects it has look like they were created by the guys who brought us Babylon 5 in the 1990s. It should also be pointed out that Krasinski's smug, slightly narcissistic lead character is not and does not convey a feeling of devil-may-care adventurer and artefact returner. He just comes across as a twat. 

Anyhow, some artefacts bloke persuades his sister to get fired and join him on the quest to find the Fountain of Youth with his billionaire mate, who is obviously a baddie. The church (?) send mercenaries to dissuade these people from continuing their quest, quite a few times, in pointless action set ups and, of course, the ages old puzzle is solved by a child who decides to go all musical youth on our arses with some funky synth-drums built by the ancient Egyptians. This really is a pile of dog shit. A truly awful film, badly made with the wrong choice of actors in the roles. Don't be tempted, because if you happen to let slip you've watched this after I warned people not to then I will mercilessly take the piss out of you for being stupid. 2/10

In A Scottish Basement

New TV series from Netflix. Knew nothing about it. Gave it a try. Dept. Q is a cold case TV series with a difference. Quite what that difference is I'm not sure, but it is entertaining so far. Matthew Goode is Carl Morck, a Detective Chief Inspector who was seriously wounded in an ambush that killed another officer and left his partner paralysed and depressed. He's returning to the force, but appears to have pissed someone off, so he's been given this new department to run, which is in the basement, he has no staff - unless you can count the Syrian refugee he's been given to help him - and it's clear that he's being marginalised and hopefully forgotten about. Morck is a miserable bastard, no one seems to like him and he's not very happy. There's a lot of clichés floating around but they're handled in such a perfunctory way you don't mind them. Goode is very good as Morck, looking for some kind of redemption while trying to find out who ambushed him and his partner. So far, so reasonable. We'll see how this one grows... 

In a Scandi Wonderland

What was it I said last week? That it's like autumn in terms of the great TV that's suddenly dropped in the week before summer starts. Back this time is the fantastic Simon Reeve and his look at Scandinavia, which started last week and was possibly one of the best stand alone Reeve episodes I've ever seen. His documentaries are often eye-opening, but this shone a light on the Nordic countries that was both fascinating and frightening. He started in Svalbard, which is considerably further north than I ever thought and sits on a political knife edge, given that Norway is basically its lease holder, but other countries are allowed to be there, in their own settlements. This includes the Russians who no one likes at the moment and they're quite happy with that. Svalbard could be rich in minerals and rare earth elements and that's why Russia has a military presence there, one which is enough to scare the shit out of any discerning Norwegian.

He later travelled south to the snowy wastelands of Lapland - an area that covers Norway, Sweden, Finland and parts of Northern Russia. Here we saw how the Sami live, how they're struggling to deal with modernity and how making the world a greener place is actually bad for them as a people. Then it was on to northern Sweden where pre-school children are chucked out of their houses and into -18 degrees of cold and told to enjoy themselves. It sounds cruel, unusual and nasty, but nothing could be further from the truth. The 'bloody hell' count for this first episode? Two (and I went for one and the wife for none).

The second episode was almost as good as the first. Basically Norway is this fucking fantastic country with so much going for it and it's probably the most beautiful country on the planet. it is also unbelievably wealthy but the weather isn't a patch on Scotland and that isn't a patch on England and Wales. Iceland on the other hand is almost the antithesis of Norway despite the similarities in the people. This has been a great little mini-series so far and it's just a shame they didn't have an entire series in Norway alone. No 'bloody hells' at all in part two.

The Last For Us

14 episodes, one of which was action packed, two were reasonably good and the other 11 were dog shit. That isn't a good return and if I paid for HBO I'd be asking for a refund. The Last of Us has been a thundering disappointment. It has proved that Bella Ramsey can't act. That Pedro Pascal isn't the fucking messiah and I will accept, grudgingly, that Kaitlin Dever is a great actor and will probably add to this series. But it's too little too late. This season finale continues with the baffling subplot regarding Dever's Wolves and the religious nutters with the scars on their faces. This has been bubbling away in the background and will probably be the focus of season three, except that will be a season that we will not be bothering with. Ellie actually meets these religious nutters and is about to be killed by them when a deus ex machina moment saves her life, in a really very contrived finale that was full of what I call bullshit. I know I've said this before about series and then slipped back into them, but the wife was reluctant to watch this series and I persuaded her on the basis that something must happen and it ended up a little like being told you've won the lottery and then discovering it was £2.48. I have seen enough and I've had enough. If you stick with it I hope it pays you back for your loyalty.

Ain't Gonna Work on Jezza's Farm No More

It's back! The programme with more belly laughs per episode than anything else I can think of and it's educational as well. Despite the criticism and hate that's poured onto it, Clarkson's Farm is proper good and while it is probably as scripted as Top Gear, it is, in this house, must see TV. This season starts in the winter of 23/24. Caleb Cooper is off with his one man show (which we saw some of on TV and switched it off because it made us cringe), so Jeremy's on his own and struggling. He gets Charlie - his farm manager - to hire a temp and Harriet from Derbyshire quickly arrives with her TikTok following and her youthful exuberance (and her almost automatic disdain for her new boss) and away we went on another farming adventure. While she is doing an even better job than Caleb, Jeremy is thinking of buying a pub so he can wind down the Diddly Squat farm shop that has caused him so many headaches with West Oxfordshire Council.

By episode three, Caleb is back and one wonders if his sulky, spoilt brat demeanour is an act for the cameras or if he really is just an ill-educated prat. Fortunately for Clarkson, he soon finds common ground with Harriet and things go smoothly until she leaves to return home. Jeremy's search for a pub - now bear in mind pubs are going out of business almost daily - ends with him finding a place that came with its own historic dogging site, which is protected by the same council that continues to make his life a bureaucratical nightmare... This show really does a good job of showing people just how fucked up the country is towards any one wanting to do something different.

Groundhog Slasher

Apparently, Until Dawn is based on a video game and given the backlash about the woeful The Last of Us TV show, watching this was probably a bad idea. The wife wanted to stop after 20 minutes, "This is just a shit slasher movie!" She said, but was actually wrong. It most definitely is a horror movie, but it felt more like a Resident Evil or Silent Hill type film than a Halloween or Friday the 13th. Considering it was on for over 100 minutes there didn't seem to be a lot of character or plot building and I think the viewer was supposed to work out a lot of shit for themselves. It had some curious special effects, not bad at all and very odd at times and while it wasn't really scary and didn't feel unnecessarily violent it did try to convey a sense of strangeness and horror. Was it any good? Well... it felt like it could have done with some logical explanation but given the subject matter then maybe a reason for us to understand why it happens or even how it happens. I know Groundhog Day didn't have any explanation at all, but this tried to go all psychological mumbo-jumbo on us and it sounded more like mumbo-jumbo bollocks - monsters created through massive populational trauma? Bollocks, more like. Still, I'm giving this a 5/10 because it didn't stink the room out.

What's Up Next?

This has been a shortened week, having been busy on Monday and Friday, meaning that the finale of Your Friends & Neighbors [sic] will have to wait, as will Murderbot and two more episodes of Clarkson's Farm. I expect we'll watch a few more Dept. Q and there are a few other things that occasionally get mentioned drawing to a close. I've also started to scrape the bottom of the barrel for films to add to the FDoD, so I have some right tripe lined up. I can't wait...

 

My Cultural Life - Homecomings

What's Up?

Green energy. That's what's up. I write this on Monday morning. The house is overrun with workmen. At the last count there were 10 of them. They are deconstructing my hoose and putting in a air source heat pump, solar panels and extra insulation. It is organised chaos. literally. They're going to be here for about a week; four days of installation and then a couple of days of making good - putting it back the way it was before they started (after a fashion, I suspect).

The cost? Pretty much nothing. It will cost us, but this is thousands of pounds worth of work compared to the couple of hundred it will end up costing us. We're losing a brand new radiator, about a fifth of a tank of oil and our electric heaters are now obsolete; there's always a cost for everything though, isn't there?  

Why are we doing it? I've been noticing the cold in this house for the last couple of years and we know people who have had it done; we looked into it and by the end of the first phone call we'd signed up for it. Two days later the house had a cavity wall insulation and we noticed that the difference almost immediately, so that pretty much made us realise we were doing the right thing. this disruption is going to be a bagful of stress though... [and it was!]

Welcome Back

When the documentary series Welcome to Wrexham started four years ago there were 18 episodes in the first series and it won over so many people with its frank look at a struggling town/city in North Wales that had just been given hope because Hollywood stars had just bought the football club. Season two was 15 episodes as we watched the football team get promotion from non-league back into the big leagues. It was still a cracking TV show full of human interest stories and Hollywood banter. Then series three came along, a very important football season - which saw Wrexham back in the EFL and aiming for promotion from League Two to League One - was only eight parts and felt rushed and a little superficial. It was like the interest had disappeared - when it clearly hadn't - and it had wrapped itself up before it felt like it had started. It wasn't as good as the first two series and it seemed that as the club grew the TV interest waned. Season four has just dropped with the opening two parts. The worrying thing is, yet again, it is only eight parts and this time League One is going to be a really tough ride. League One is a graveyard for former top teams. It look Man City three years to get out of, the same for Leeds and former Premier League teams - 8 of them - were wallowing in a division that is possibly one of the most difficult to upwardly get out of...

For those of you who don't follow football, the season which was focused on in the opening two episodes of series four, has just concluded with Wrexham finishing 2nd and winning back-to-back-to-back promotions. That's a spoiler only if you've lived under a rock for the last year or are not interested in football, in which case you're probably not watching this show. However, it felt like the original Welcome to Wrexham was back with a great mix of the people, the players and the Hollywood A and B listers. Last year I found series three a bit of a slog despite its seriously curtailed number of episodes; I get the impression that this year, despite knowing all the spoilers, this is going to feel too short. Even if you don't like football, I'd recommend this because it's funny, poignant and real.

Silly Nonsense

Why on earth did we decide to watch Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story when we could have watched something else? Probably because we're getting to the stage where anything we haven't seen is going to get elevated into the realms of 'must see.' The thing about this movie is it's quite amusing, very silly and very cringe-inducing. It has an absolutely brilliant cameo by Jason Bateman playing a Dodgeball pundit called Pepper Brooks, in what is one of his zaniest roles (and given he has made some reasonable comedies is a compliment - or maybe an insult - I dunno...). Vince Vaughn plays the owner of a crap gym that's in danger of being sold off because he hasn't bothered to do any paperwork for about 20 years. Ben Stiller plays his nemesis, the owner of a swanky gym across the road and Christine Taylor (of Brady Bunch Movie fame) as the lawyer who is charged with sorting out Vaughn's problems and facilitating its sale to Stiller. So far so relatively normal. Vaughn needs to raise $50,000 in a month or he will lose everything. One of his customers says they should enter a Dodgeball tournament to win $50K and Taylor joins their underdog team when it's discovered she has a great right arm throw.

It's clear from the outset how it's going to end and the journey is full of unexpected belly laughs, cringe-making moments and ridiculously stupid set pieces. I'm sure it was a great success back in 2004 but feels tonally all over the place 21 years later. However, it wasn't that bad and I've seen much worse films. That said, I can only really give it a 6/10 and that feels generous...

Shine On

I finished the Stephen King novel Doctor Sleep on Sunday. It's the sequel to The Shining (the book not Kubrick's film) and while it's been over ten years since I last read it, I was surprised at how much I had forgotten and that was mainly because of the film, which takes so many liberties I'm amazed King even allowed it to happen. The one thing about the book that I'd really forgotten about was just how good it was and how different from Mike Flanagan's film. The interesting thing for me is I really didn't like Kubrick's film, but that might have been because I didn't really enjoy King's original novel. It was the third novel of his I read, after Salem's Lot and Carrie. But here's the main point; I don't think I've read the thing more than once; as a 17 year old it hadn't grabbed me by the balls, not like his book about the telekinetic teenager or the town full of vampires; this haunted hotel thing with the annoying cast of ghosts simply didn't have the same effect on me that it had on others. Maybe it's a story I should return to now I've read the sequel twice? I think of myself as a proper King aficionado and while there are a few of his stories I have yet to read (the Mr Mercedes Trilogy; Billy Summers and some of his short story collections) and about half a dozen I've yet to reread, my lack of interest in The Shining is probably something that would confound other King fans. 

In Doctor Sleep we rejoin Dan Torrance as an alcoholic adult following in his father's footsteps and we stick with him until he reaches what he feels is his rock bottom; it's at this point in his life where the only directions are death or redemption, so Dan chooses the latter and that brings him to a small town that's close to a young girl with powers that make Dan's look like parlour tricks. It also brings him in contact with one of King's group of villains - the True Knot - travelling vampire-like creatures who essentially hunt kids with the shining, so they can feed on them and live forever. The opening third of the book takes place over 13 years; jumping in and out of Dan and (the new kid with the shining) Abra Stone and then the rest is pretty much a rollercoaster that takes place over the space of a few days and it really is one of those stories that you don't want to put down. I'd forgotten many things about this story, crucial things that were completely ignored in the recent film. If you're a lapsed King reader, this is something I'd recommend dipping your toes into; it's a little like King at his peak and it will send a shiver down your spine and put a smile on your face.

The Zzzzzs of Us

Joel is back! He didn't really die and now he got better! Actually, this is a flashback episode that fills in the blanks about why Joel and Ellie weren't really talking. The problem with it, like most weeks, was that fuck all happened and even the one moment of potential fungal mayhem was muted and full of betrayal. It was more balanced with Pedro Pascal back in it; there was a sense of two different characters interacting and driving a narrative forward rather than the rather putrid and faux romance of two girlfriends out on a revenge spree. The problem I had with it was that this is the penultimate episode of the season - a season, incidentally, that has been about one episode with lots of flowery padding around the edges - and it dwelt on the past rather than setting us up for a bonza finale. Of course there isn't going to be one. It's going to end on some kind of a cliffhanger, because there's going to be a season three and this is going to be an extension of the computer game rather than following its lead. I think the general reaction of both the wife and myself suggests that season three might not be playing in this house.

Bookkeeping 

Well... that made a tremendous change. What a cracking film The Accountant is. Starring Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, John Lithgow, Anna Kendrick and JK Simmons, it really was so much better than I expected, especially for a one-man-army-action-flick. Affleck plays a man - let's call him Chris - who is autistic but has managed to manage it to the point where he simply comes across as antisocial and a bit boring. He is also a maths savant and doesn't care who he works for because he doesn't get personally involved, whether that's a good company, a bad one or a dodgy organised crime one. You get his backstory through a series of flashbacks and to be honest with you, it deals quite truthfully with autism and yet manages to mesh it with one of the best action thrillers I've seen in ages, jam-packed full of unexpected twists, turns and even a little cliché busting - because the chief protagonist is autistic and people with autism might have routines but they're often not cliched. 

To go into details would give away what ends up being one hell of a 'I didn't see that coming' moment, but it's safe to say that if you haven't seen this film before and you stumble upon it, you probably wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone else. This is an excellent film and deserves an 8/10 at least.

Benvenuto a Casa

It feels a little like the autumn... Obviously I'm not talking about the weather, which is due to break by the time you read this, but by the better than average fayre we've been watching so far this week. After weeks of mediocrity and having to sit through fucking The Last of Us, there are some things, this week, that have been great; none more so than on a warm Tuesday evening, watching the above Ben Affleck feature and then following it with something I didn't know existed until Tuesday morning. Tucci in Italy is a companion to Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, the TV series I raved about a few years ago. Well, Stan the Man is back in his favourite country, sampling his favourite cuisine in some of Italy's most wondrous settings. It was a joy to behold, even if the opening episode seemed to feature foods you would be hard pressed feeding your dog...

Tucci in Italy is a love letter to Stanley's best loved places and it kicks off in Tuscany, specifically Florence, where he eats among other things diced tripe, swordfish marrow and cured lard. He seems to love them all, even if many of the 'food' stuffs actually made the wife turn away while pulling that if-I-have-to-watch-this-I-will-be-sick face. It's just a shame it's only five episodes, because I could watch Tucci wander round Italy every day. We loved Stan's first foray into the home of his ancestors and while the food in this, so far, hasn't been that palatable (apart from fake tripe - yes, you heard that correctly - which is a vegetarian dish), it makes us both want to go to Italy before I die...

A Complete Twister

Oddly enough I remember State of Play the TV show from the noughties, but knew little about the US feature film from 2009. Updated and written to fit into US expectations and understanding, this is a meandering great mystery that will fragment the way we think government works. This time it's Russell Crowe playing a high-profile Pittsburgh-born political journo, Rachel McAdams as a 'junior' reporter and Ben Affleck as a Republican Congressman mixed up in mysterious deaths and dead end paper trails. It starts with a thief's death, which is quickly followed by a cyclist's demise, then it's person after person targeted for death by what appears to be a well-oiled number of deliberate hits. After the beginning of this story, it appears that there is nothing untoward, but when the death of a Congressman's aid, in an apparent suicide becomes linked with the first two deaths things start to get murky. A private company of mercenaries is implicated in this, especially as this is a company Affleck's character is after; but appearances can be deceiving... 7/10

Men Behaving Badly

With Coop out on bail, despite everyone thinking he's a murderer, things get a little fractious in this suburbia-is-really-hell series. First off, ex-wife Amanda Peet has an actual fight with Olivia Munn in a coffee shop, which ends up being caught on video and goes viral. Coop's introvert son, Hunter, gets an older more forward girlfriend, while his daughter Tori finally realises that the boyfriend her father thinks is a dick is actually a dick. Meanwhile, sister Alison, whose back story is basically that she was mentally fucked up by an ex-boyfriend who shat on her, is now getting mentally fucked up because the same ex, now married, has been screwing around with her and just for his own jollies, it seems...

So, what's Coop been up to? Well, he's blackmailed his lawyer into representing him; everyone thinks he's guilty (apart from us, because we know he didn't do it) or is leaving him like rats from a sinking ship; so he does what is best for everyone and goes partying with his ex's new boyfriend, Nick and Barney, his injured business manager and this is what most of the episode was centred on. Considering next week is the season finale and I don't think Coop will spend it in a prison, I expect there will either be some revelation in the works or an absolute I-didn't-see-that-coming cliffhanger. Whatever happens, Your Friends & Neighbors [sic] has really been a grower.

Blink and You'll Miss It

The third episode of Murderbot was yet again so short you could have popped out to get a drink and it would have finished. There's an interesting idea here, but what I can't get my head around is while there are some funny moments, this is clearly not really a comedy led show; there's a sinister backstory that's trying to come to the surface. So why are the episodes literally 20 minutes long? This week, Murderbot and four of the scientists are travelling to the other side of the planet to speak to the other scientific camp about the strange creatures and what the hell they're doing. Of course, we already know what they're going to find so Murderbot sends the scientists away and goes into the other camp, armed but with little idea what he's going to face. I like this, but I get Sunny vibes from it. Remember Sunny? The Apple TV+ show about the robot who is Rashida Jones's dead husband's gift which got very tedious extremely quickly. Well, I'm hoping this doesn't go the same way because I want to like this, even if Alexander Skarsgård really isn't the right actor to be playing this role. He's playing a synthetic robot with organic elements, the problem is those organic elements are human-based, but he plays this like they're wood. 

What's Up Next?

I should be buzzing. My football team won a European trophy, but for reasons I don't want to talk about and you're not interested in, let's just say it might be a victory with an unhappy outcome... Other than that most of the football season will be over so people can enjoy a football free world for a couple of months - except for the internationals, the World Club Cup and the start of the Scottish season by the time July gets here, so a few football-free days might be more accurate...

There's a new series of Clarkson's Farm and we have FIVE parts of it to watch next week. There's the season finales of the dreadful The Last of Us and the very good Your Friends & Neighbors [sic], more Welcome to Wrexham and there's even a couple of new movies to watch. The thing is summer used to be a graveyard for television, but not any longer, it seems!