Saturday, March 16, 2024

Pop Culture - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly Required

There are the usual spoilers or avoidance of them...

Across the Spider-Arse

The first question I have to ask is - and it will seem a bit strange given my own cynicism towards the writer - has Alan Moore considered suing Sony, Marvel and the writers of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse? Having finally gotten around to watching the film - in two parts, because the wife declared she'd been asleep for most of the opening 45 minutes, so I switched it off and decided to watch the rest of it while she was decorating the kitchen - all I could think of was Captain Britain - The Jasper's Warp. It's literally a huge rip off of that comic; or at least the filling in a sandwich was.

That aside, this is the best Marvel film I've seen in a while - maybe not as good as Guardians 3, but better than the live action Spider-Man films in the MCU. That isn't to say that I got it; it's been a long time since we watched the first film and I probably would have enjoyed this even more had I not been clueless to some of the references. There's also about 45 minutes of this film that feels like padding; the opening 25 minutes was a bit like an extended 'while you were away' recap with added, 'oh you should know this if you want to enjoy it better' and the 'end' couldn't have been more drawn out if they'd slowed the movie down by 50%. These elements aside, it's a rollicking good film, with some stunning animation - albeit a bit on the schizophrenic side at times - and the [comics reference coming up] Bill Sienkiewicz style of artwork, in places, really works, especially when it's used to its freakiest best. In fact the homages littered throughout this film tells me that while Sony make lousy - truly lousy - Marvel films, they make Spider-Man multiverse films better than anyone else by a country mile - there appears to be a genuine love for the character on display and more importantly his history. In fact, there are so many ideas here - including ripping off Captain Britain - it's going to make the MCU solution for their own multiverse problem a massive mountain to climb, because if they could use this scenario then they might pull it off, but you know they won't. Plus, The Spot is a really interesting and original villain, something else that has been missing from MCU films for a while now.

There were things about the movie that as a 61 year old man who has been away from comics for nearly a quarter of century I just didn't get. For starters, Spider-Man is Peter Parker, he isn't Miles Morales or Miguel O'Hara or a cartoon pig and however likeable Miles might be, this Ultimate Spider-Man incarnation passed me by 20 odd years ago and I'm not going to be drawn into it. I referenced the Guardian of the Galaxy in the opening paragraph - they are not my Guardians, my biggest problem with the first two Guardians films was the fact I was having imitations shovelled down my throat. Yes, maybe the original Guardians might not have made a decent movie, but it took me two films and umpteen guest appearances for me to finally accept them as Marvel characters in a team. This 'Spider-Man' is just a reboot that is now almost 25 years old; although that's 16 years older than the original Spider-Man was when I properly discovered him, so he's not exactly 'new' any more. 

The clever, fast-paced, little story that plays out in this does go a long way to make me accept Miles as a Spider-Man mainly because he was never meant to be a Spider-Man. If it's been five years since you saw Into the Spider-Verse then I'd have a recap before delving into this, but as probably everyone who reads this blog will have seen this movie already that probably doesn't even matter. I'm glad I got around to seeing it, I just feel the wife has missed out, even if this is just the first part of the story. 

In Distress

The biggest problem with Netflix's latest fantasy movie Damsel is the lead actor; a person who, it seems, has become something of a Marmite girl since her breakout role in Stranger Things. Millie Bobby Brown wields a lot of power in Hollywood, apparently, and she has valuable contracts that allows her to have a free rein on the films she wants to make. As a result, even when she makes something that isn't bad it tends to get poor ratings; she really isn't to everyone's tastes.

In her latest offering, she plays the princess of a poor nation struggling through a harsh winter who has the chance to marry the prince of a faraway island kingdom and bring prosperity to her lands once again; the problem is it's all a bit too good to be true. So when her father sells her off for what is essentially more gold than he'll ever need, it soon becomes obvious that she's got herself into a situation that won't have her living happily ever after. It takes a while to get to this point; the film does a good job of painting the new kingdom she's marrying into as a warm and friendly place - initially - but we soon see it is riddled with snobbery and contempt, especially for 'lesser' people. When her father - Ray Winstone - loses his jolly 'father-of-the-bride exterior and her stepmother - Angela Bassett - suddenly starts worrying about Elodie it becomes obvious we're not in Fairy Tale Land. What follows is a little bit creepy and yet probably very expected - otherwise there wouldn't be much of a film.

Suffice it to say there's an ancient dragon involved and she has a deal with the royal family of Orea which involves... a certain sacrifice here and there. The thing is Elodie - Brown - has already been established as pretty good at handling herself so when the dragon meets more than she expects we get into the realms of the unexpected. This is a movie that doesn't deserve its 6.2 rating, but you read the reviews on film sites and you'll see what the problem is almost immediately; it's Ms Brown, who is now 20 and has gone from pre-pubescent child star to a young woman who wants you to... well... look at her fantastic body and not her acting range. Damsel isn't a bad film; I don't really have a problem with Brown, despite the fact she clearly loves herself, as she is a bit of a fan of fantasy genres and seems to be trying to make films that are fun with a dash of sci-fi or fantasy about them. Her main problem is she's not a very good actor and while she might be worth a shit load of money, I can't see any Oscar roles in her future. She might not want that, but my guess is she does.

...But Not As We Know It

The Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson and Ryan Reynolds sci-fi vehicle Life is essentially a post-modern take on Alien. A kind of 'what if Alien took place in the 21st century on board the ISS orbiting earth?' It does a good job and probably bombed at the box office because it has bleak ending. Oops, I gave that away, but the film is 7 years old and has been on TV three times in the last four months.

It's a thriller about some soil samples collected on Mars which are going to be examined on the space station and it soon becomes clear that these samples contain life - the first not from earth - and this is a big deal. The problem is this life is very dangerous, highly intelligent and as it starts to pick off the six crew members, the future starts to look very bleak for mankind - this organism must not be allowed to reach earth. The first to die is Reynolds, which, when we watched it the first time around, was quite shocking because he was quite a big star by 2017. From that point on it was about stopping it, but the Martian has one thing going for it - the haphazardness of human beings. It's a taut movie that rocks along without ever reaching the heights that Alien did. It's currently doing the rounds on ITV4 and Film4 so if you keep an eye on the schedules it'll probably pop up soon enough.

Playing Catch-Up

Since we got the Smart TV (which is a misnomer as far as I'm concerned as it doesn't appear to be very smart), we have access to the free streaming services and therefore do not use the set top box to record TV programmes very often; the box is basically used to record films and anything that we want to watch that's on a commercial channel because we can fast forward through the adverts - watch something like ITVX or All4 and you have to put up with adverts you can't fast forward through.

The reason I'm telling you this is because the wife was recording something off of ITV (which means we can't access the Flash Drive of Doom) so we watched something off iPlayer we saved at Christmas - Lot No.249 - A Christmas Ghost Story adapted by Mark Gatiss from the Arthur Conan Doyle short story. It starred Kit Harrington and (the awful) Freddy Fox and wasn't particularly Christmassy, which is a good thing for a cold March night, nor was it scary in the slightest. It did introduce a proto-Sherlock Holmes, for what good he was, and the 30 minute story was basically a waste of time and money. There was nothing remotely good about it; it was superficial, had a very weak plot with zero motive and left me wondering if this was the adaptation that made a hash of the story or it was simply a shit story. I can only deduce that Gatiss fucked up because Conan Doyle did, I recall, have a quite successful writing career.

McConaughey Rules

I commented a few months ago that I can't recall us ever watching anything with Matthew McConaughey in that we didn't enjoy. This is not a challenge; we are not watching his films hoping to be let down. we're just happy that we're batting a solid 100% average with the actor and we watched another of his films that we knew little of and we walked away with that 100% still intact.

The Lincoln Lawyer is about defence attorney Micky Haller, who operates out of the back of his Lincoln Continental and has a reputation for a) taking on scumbags no one else wants and b) being very, very successful. Haller isn't a Saul Goodman, he's a genuinely good lawyer who is driven by money and is the ex-partner of one of the LA District Attorneys (played by Marissa Tomei). He's entrenched in the law and while he's unorthodox, he's reasonably well respected. This is a movie with an all-star cast - William H Macy, Bryan Cranston, Ryan Phillippe, John Leguizamo, Frances Fisher, Michael Pena, Bob Gunton and Shea Wigham are just some of the excellent actors involved in this project. Haller is given the job of defending the son of a realtor who is accused of sexual assault; there's a lot of money to be made from this and everything seems to be going as planned when some discrepancies start to appear in his client's story. 

When it starts to become obvious to Haller that his client might be guilty, he realises that the man might also be the killer of a woman one of his former clients is in San Quentin serving life for; the problem is the further Haller digs the worse it starts to become for him as his client might be a psychopath, but he's also very clever and appears to be one step ahead of the lawyer all the time. This is a great film and what makes it especially good is that you know everything by about the hour mark yet it still remains a tight thriller where you don't know what is going to happen next. It's been on Film4 recently, which means it'll be on again in the not too distant future - you should check it out; it's a quality film.

Prelude to War

The second of the rebooted Planet of the Apes films is in many ways a better film than the first, not because it fleshes out the apes more, but because the special effects were better and it focuses on one specific story. Obviously the success of Rise led Matt Reeves to have a bigger budget for the second part Dawn (although I think that Dawn would have been a better title for the first part and Rise a better one for the second - but what do I know?). That said, I've always thought Cesar never looked like a proper chimp whereas the other chimps all look like apes, if you catch my meaning?

Dawn is set 10 years after the first film and it appears that about 90% of the human population of the planet has been wiped out and in a little corner of northern San Francisco, where it always seems to rain, the apes colony is thriving and for 10 years they have enjoyed life and for two of those years they've been free of human interaction, which is what they like the best. Unfortunately for everyone some humans turn up and immediately fuck things over by shooting one of the apes - not the best way to start when you realise that a kingdom of apes lives between you and your easiest way of restoring power to parts of the dead city you live in. These humans want to restore a hydro-electric dam but need to travel through ape country to get to it...

From this point on it's all about trust and while Cesar tries to do the correct thing, Koba - his right hand chimp - grows to despise his boss's way of thinking. The problem is the guy wanting to make things right between mankind and apes is the right hand man of someone who is all for starting a war against what he sees as a primitive species and obviously the looneys on both sides have enough followers to ensure that when the shit hits the fans it spreads far and wide. What seems to be a terrible waste here are some of the subplots, which given time to develop might have made a good movie in their own right, but became almost pointless little segments in the grand context - such as Cody Smit-McPhee's relationship with Maurice, the orangutan. 

A Modern Day Spaced?

I said last week that Extraordinary reminded me of Spaced and while we were concluding the series the wife said, "This reminds me of Spaced." And she doesn't read my blogs... There is nothing about this that is remotely like Spaced but the vibe is there; that feeling that you're watching it through a fever dream inside one of the character's brains.

It was clear from the start that Jen and Rob aka Jizz Lord's relationship would be the main thing in this series even if Jen's missing powers is the main plot that intrudes as often as possible. Carrie's indecisiveness and Kash's being an imbecile will always be guaranteed laugh makers, but it takes some slightly unexpected turns towards the end of the series. Jen's Powers Therapist (Julian Barrett) has more than just a key role to play in things and as she edges closer to finding out why she's powerless. There is a quality threshold that it sometimes fails to meet and sometimes the sets are remarkable (and expensive - like the trailer full of dildos) and other times the special effects are rubbish (like that's done on purpose), but for all the things you struggle with, there's an honesty and sense of fun permeating it all the time. It's silly and quite modern, but the wife made an observation; there's something a bit eighties about it at times and all the characters dress like they're trainee clowns. It also has a really poignant conclusion as well as a very interesting looking cliffhanger for season three.

Dreamer, Nothing But a Dreamer

Peter Dinklage doesn't make 'normal' films. I suppose if you're a vertically challenged man who has an uncanny knack for being an excellent actor then you're going to make unconventional films and his 2022 movie American Dreamer certainly doesn't fit into any category I can think of apart from gentle quirky comedy.

Dinklage stars as a college professor with more failures behind him than success, while Shirley MacLaine (she's nearly 90, you know) and Matt Dillon co-star. Dinklage's life has been, for better or worse, a series of unfulfilled dreams and now he's lecturing on Cultural Economics and obviously not liking it very much. He is looking for a property to buy, to get him on the ladder, but every house he's signed up to look at is far too expensive for him - he has about $200,000 to spend and the cheapest houses he looks at are always over $1million. He has an imaginary ex-wife and he's miserably delusional, he also wants to be the next great American novelist but doesn't appear to be able to actually write a book. Then one day he sees an advert in the classified for a house that is for sale at $5million or $240,000 if the owner can remain in it until she dies. Dinklage cashes in everything he's got to raise the money, he signs the papers and moves into an annex to the main house - a gorgeous sprawling mansion, on the beach, in New England and that's when he meets MacLaine and that's when the film gets a little weird. 

What starts out frosty becomes a good friendship, but there seems to be something not quite right; it appears that MacLaine, instead of being a childless widow actually has loads of children and one of them is a lawyer who tells Dinklage that he hasn't got a hope in hell of keeping the house when the old woman dies and everything seems to be on the verge of falling apart for him; that's when things start to get very odd indeed and you need to see it to fully understand the twists and turns that are going to both screw with our protagonist and also work out in his favour. What I seriously cannot understand about this film is it was delayed in its release for two years (this wouldn't be the first Dinklage vehicle this has happened to) and the day after its release it was sitting at 8.0 on IMDB - that was enough for me - however, when I was looking at IMDB during the writing of this review I noticed it was now down to 5.7 and I thought it was one of the better films I've seen this year and just confirms that IMDB ratings seem to very inaccurate nowadays - however, the biggest complaints seem to be the lack of 'dreaming', which simply explains to me the lack of intelligence of some of the reviewers and why some of them need post-it notes with Arse and Elbow written on them. 

The Great Esc-Apes

We concluded the POTA reboot with the third and final film in Matt Reeves' trilogy - War for the Planet of the Apes, set a couple of years after Dawn, is essentially a remake of The Great Escape with a little bit of Apocalypse Now thrown in for good measure. 

The thing that's most telling about this movie is how tragic it is. It is by far and away the saddest of the three and all the films have sadness running through them in some form or other. I think the underlying theme for the entire trilogy has been just how fucking awful humans can and are and this is the pinnacle in many ways with Woody Harrelson's The Colonel demonstrating how supremacy will be man's ultimate downfall. The intriguing thing about this film is how it actually sets up The Planet of the Apes - this rebooted franchise does something you don't often see, it takes an idea and does it much better. There was always this feeling in the original Charlton Heston POTA movie that mankind had caused its downfall by some nuclear war and not through a man made virus. With this film, we begin to understand that once it - the virus - had wiped out most of humanity, it mutated and came back in a variant form 15 years later to strip humans of their humanity and intelligence - as the apes grew cleverer man became the savage.

In many ways, the War depicted in this was never about the apes; they were caught in the middle of a war between two factions of humanity - the intolerant and the not so intolerant. It is, in many ways, the best of the trio of movies, but it's also the one with the least hope. I'm surprised it was such a hit at the box office because it doesn't really have a happy ending, as such. It does however set things up for the next trilogy beginning with Kingdom in the summer - this is a new film that will be much more like the original 1968 sci-fi classic. It made me think about watching Tim Burton's 2001 reboot, but I watched some clips on IMDB and saw it has a rating of 5.7, which in this instance I'll treat as a recommendation rather than a false rating.

Please Make It Stop

Stupid. It's the only word I have. Stupid. This is what Resident Alien has been reduced to. A pile of unfunny, uninspiring horse shit that has dispensed a story in favour of ludicrous antics and stupidity. It's truly an insult to everyone's intelligence.

It's difficult to even try and explain to you what is going on now. Harry has fallen in love with an Avian alien and all they're doing is shagging wherever and whenever they can. He's also insulting his friends and is no longer that fussed about saving the planet. D'Arcy makes an intervention to the mayor about his alien abductions, while his wife is even more convinced she's been abducted and had a child stolen from her. Sheriff Mike has an encounter with the hot female detective he dumped and other stuff happened and we didn't give a flying shit about any of it. The problem is we're invested in this turkey of a TV show and with an alleged three episodes left it feels like we need to continue subjecting our eyes and brain to this horror show for a resolution that isn't going to be fulfilling. The wrinkle in all of this is that SyFy has not confirmed or denied if there'll be a season 4, despite the first episode of season 3 being watched by only 285,000 people - according to figures I saw on the internet, which might not be true but have a ring of absolute truth about them. What is tragic about this is how it started off, it genuinely felt like a good idea and was executed well, but it quickly wandered away from what made it interesting and focused on too many characters - the makers made it an ensemble piece when it was fine as an Alan Tudyk vehicle with supporting characters. What is worse is that SyFy has cancelled some great shows over the last decade, shows that have been excellent and they replaced them with dollops of stinky shit that do not warrant anything but derision and scorn. People get paid to produce excrement like this and that is unbelievable. 

Madame Wank and More Underpants 

What a fucking awful way to end the week. I'm beginning to think that I'm either drawn to torturing myself or the quality of anything that reaches my Smart TV is so low it's on antidepressants. Friday night in the Hall house should be a great movie night or maybe a binge of brilliant TV, instead it was a very nice rice pudding and two of the most atrocious loads of vomit ever made...

I wasn't going to watch this. I thought, 'It won't be as bad as everyone says it is but I'm not going to take the chance. I won't watch it!' So I downloaded it and we watched it. Well, when I say we watched it, I mean I switched it off at the 30 minute mark. I'd given it ten more minutes than it deserved but I felt I needed to watch enough of it to be able to say why I switched off. I switched off because this was a movie with almost no redeeming features at all. It was badly acted, badly scripted and even by the 30 minute mark, Dakota Johnson's medic character seemed only able to administer CPR to all and any problem. "IBS? CPR!" "Sprained wrist? CPR!" "Headache? CPR!" "Inability to get an erection? CPR!" Then there was the acting, or in the case of the guy who stole the spider from Dakota's mother, his lack of acting ability and the fact that most of his lines were delivered with his mouth off camera, because it had obviously been dubbed with new words because, heaven forbid, the original words he spoke were obviously so much worse than the new ones.

We never got to the part where Dakota recruits the Spider-Gals and they battle the black spider; but we did meet Peter Parker's mother and his uncle Ben and Dakota's inability to interact with other human beings or the CPR she did... 3.7 on IMDB? That high?

So, because I chose to watch Madame Web (in case you were wondering what I was going on about), the wife, by default, got to choose the film we watched in its place. There might be less on the Flash Drive of Doom now, but I'd replenished it with seasons 2 and 3 of Fargo (because we need to catch up with that), there's Constellation and Silo to watch or at least give a chance to, but no, she decided that we should watch one of the two Underworld movies we hadn't watched, despite having lived through the first three and realising just how fucking awful they all were and that Awakening (or perhaps it should have been called Awankening) had a considerably lower rating than any of the previous three...

This was 88 (actually closer to 78) minutes of my life that I'm never going to see again and a grand total of 108 minutes of my Friday night obliterated by excrement - I might have had more fun sitting in a bath of shit. This 'movie' about Kate Beckinsale's vampire and the 'child' she managed to have - but didn't know it - with her hybrid boyfriend who wasn't in the film so they CGI'd his face onto someone else for the fun of it was literally as bad as Madame Fucking Web except it had no pretence at all; it knew it was shit, the special effects were like a cross between an Atari ST and Ray Harryhausen and the story was so poor that I'm fairly sure a child with brain death would have come up with something better. This was abysmal; it was the kind of film where you wonder why someone like Charles Dance would even have considered being in it despite someone waving a big fat cheque in his face. I mean, I can understand why Beckinsale did it; she's getting on; her tits are probably dangling round her knees; she hadn't had a decent role for a few years and the Total Recall remake flopped badly; she probably thought she could buy a new house or get a boob lift with the cash. Did she think 'Should I really be making this?' at any point? Was she not visited from the grave by her brilliant father who whispered in her ear that maybe prostitution was a more honourable and honest occupation to pursue? The wife wants to watch Underpants: Blood Wars, she can fucking watch it on her own...

Next Time...

Who gives a fuck? Why should I torment myself and you with promises of what might be when I finished the week watching mainly shit films and TV I wouldn't usually give houseroom to? There were some good films - in a week where we seemed to watch so many films - and so little TV. Speaking of which, TV had better get better soon or I'm giving up on it - 3 Body Problem is out next week, I'm desperately hoping its the quality we're lacking, but you can never be sure, especially now. We're told by so many that 2024 could be the best year ever for TV and I'm beginning to think this is a marketing line from an increasingly desperate executive who wants to keep his job... 

Films? I might run out of old films to watch soon enough and that will be terrible because very few recent films have been worth wasting my time on. It seems every time I watch a new film I want it to be excellent but it turns into a pile of dehydrated shit. I might as well have five wanks a week.



Thursday, March 14, 2024

Ode to a Dying Genre (Part One)

Fantasy is the new superhero film. If you need to have a genre favourite in cinema then fantasy films are the new it. Whether that's science fantasy, medieval fantasy, monstrous fantasy, surrealist fantasy or just elements of fantasy in 'normal' movies, it does seem to be the way some films are going and they're going in this direction and leaving 'superhero fantasy' in their wake. No one, it seems, wants superheroes any more and to be fair to the people, it isn't their fault. That falls squarely at the feet of the companies grinding out the shit cluttering up cinemas and streaming platforms.  

The irony is that the last film from DC - Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom - was so bad it was like they were shooting themselves in the foot. There's hype surrounding James Gunn's new DC superhero universe and much of it is tentatively positive - he does have good form - so DC releases the final 'old school' film and it is execrable and arguably one of the worst superhero films ever to grace the big screen. Why is that? Why would they do that? More importantly, the Batgirl film that Warner's pulled completely must have been so bad, because if they felt Aquaman 2 was worth a release... Actually, I can answer this quite confidently - Aquaman was a success at the box office (remarkably) so they figured as it had form then the sequel would probably be far more lucrative than a Batman spin-off they weren't enamoured with. From a layman's perspective, Batman films usually fill the Warner Bros coffers, even if Batgirl had been made with marionettes and retired actors from the Troma dynasty of films, it would probably have made some money. The thing is confidence isn't high at Warner Brothers, even with a reboot on the horizon.

You would think Warner Bros would want to give Gunn's new look universe some help. The next Superman film and the first in the new look is scheduled for 2025, that's only just over a year since Aquawank came out, it's not like people are going to have forgotten about it and audiences are not known for their bad memories or their forgiveness. Giving superheroes a year off isn't going to whet appetites; 10 years maybe, but a year isn't enough...

However, as woeful as the Aquaman sequel was, it wasn't even in the same league of shite as Madame Web which currently sits at 3.7 on IMDB, which is almost as low as Sharknado (3.3). I mean Dakota Johnson has form for being in shit films - the 50 Shades franchise - but this is taking it to a whole new level of piss poor. I can't tell you how bad Madame Web is because I haven't soiled my eyes watching it, yet will probably when it becomes available to stream - just so I can tell you all how bad it is. This is a nadir in Sony's woeful attempts at creating a Spider-Man universe where Spider-Man doesn't exist - an idea that makes no sense at all. Yet, here we are and with the delayed and delayed Kraven the Hunter about to finally show up in August we're probably witnessing the death throes of Sony's Spider-Verse as a live action universe. This film, originally scheduled for autumn 2023, has, like Madame Web, undergone extensive rewrites and reshoots - probably by AI - to try and kickstart a franchise that should never have gone further than Venom and that's me being generous.

The thing is there might be salvation on the horizon. With Marvel/Disney in turmoil over their future, Sony has been toying with the idea of bringing back Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield or even both of them. There is nothing in the deal between the MCU and Sony that states Sony can't make Spider-Man films, they just have problems with Tom Holland - he is MCU Spidey and I won't even try to explain the legal side of this because when I read about it, the entire thing made my straight hair curly. Simplistically, Tom Holland's Spidey exists in the MCU he cannot exist in Sony's Spider-Verse; that doesn't mean there can't be a Spider-Man, but it has to be an extant Spider-Man not a new one. Plus Sony doesn't want to do another origin film, so the avenues of workability narrow all the time, unless they use Maguire or Garfield or both. Just to add a wrinkle to this, there's no guarantee Garfield will be interested; he stated he'd love to do another 'team-up' but he feels he's too old and has moved on from helming a solo Spidey film; while Maguire, whose career isn't exactly booming at the moment, is 100% up for reprising his role, albeit as a much older and wiser web-slinger.

Would a 'new' Spider-Man film work outside of the MCU? It depends on who made it and who wrote it; if it had the feel of Sam Raimi's originals but also the modern feel of the MCU then you'd struggle not to see it not working to certain extent. It would also throw a curveball at Disney because they essentially need to make a new MCU Spidey film inside five years and nine months of the release of the last one or they essentially renege on the deal they have and if you've been paying attention you'll be aware there's been friction between Disney and Sony over the character already and while Sony have been able to make Spider-Man films, there's a sort of gentlemen's agreement between the two companies that this would be limited to animation. There's nothing in the agreement between companies that states that Sony can't bring Maguire or Garfield back and frankly if they did it would probably limit the MCU Spidey to appearances in Avengers films or even complete retirement, as the third film in the MCU's trilogy effectively ended Peter Parker's association with the Marvel Universe. Disney wants to have a new Holland trilogy starting in 2026 and Sony's Beyond the Spier-Verse is scheduled for 2025, but there is a spider-sized hole in the schedules at the moment...

The problem all the companies have is whether there's going to be an audience for anything they pump out. The MCU has shelved everything on its schedules apart from Deadpool 3, which they have renamed Deadpool and Wolverine, which is essentially one of the most shameless attempts at manipulating a film's potential audience as you will ever see. It might be an R rated movie, but you can guess there will also be a PG rated version as well (like there was for Deadpool 2) because Disney will want to maximise the audience for what will be their only 'superhero' release of 2024. Plus there's going to be so much tying it in with almost everything that has happened before, it's going to feel like a ride at a theme park rather than an actual story. I want to say I'm looking forward to it but I don't look forward to anything Marvel/Disney does any longer.

What we now know is the film will have the TVA in it, it will also have appearances by some of the X-Men and the main villain will be Cassandra Nova, the 'sister' of Charles Xavier, who will be played by Emma Corrin (she played Lady Di in The Crown and was in the execrable Murder at the End of the World). This character's inclusion has meant that rumours are rife that Patrick Stewart will reprise his role as Xavier - another forward thinking move by Disney, given that Stewart is in his 80s, so therefore has longevity on his side... The new trailer that was released last month also hints that The Hulk will be in it - this might be Eric Bana's Hulk or maybe even Ed Norton's, because if it had been Mark Ruffalo, he would have told everyone by now. Ruffalo might be back playing Ol' Greenskin soon enough, but more of that in a bit... We also know that almost every pre-MCU superhero film will be 'tagged' with even Jennifer Garner reprising her role as Elektra. Some are seeing a way to accept every Marvel film ever made as alternates from the multiverse and therefore give Disney a shot at showing all these films on their streaming platform if they can obtain the rights to show them. I mean, that's a cynical suggestion, I know, it's not like Disney is renowned for its altruism.

What I'm dreading and a lot of people are watching very closely is the Fantastic Four film, largely because many believe it's not going to be the saviour of the MCU. We're at a position with Disney where they want Marvel to continue to work for them and make loads of money, otherwise its purchase will be seen as a short term thing and if that happens many see them trying to sell it off - it's how these kinds of things work in US business. The comicbook industry is a cottage industry now, especially when the average price of a single issue is as much as it costs for 10 issues in 1990 and 25 issues in 1975 - I don't buy the 'inflation' argument, I do buy the 'we're going to screw as much money as we can from our dwindling audience as we can' theory. The films do not want to be going the way of the comics otherwise we might see an end to them all in the next ten years. The thing about the FF is simple, there's already a lot of negativity on line about it. Pedro Pascal might have replaced John Krasinski as the 'fan favourite' to play Reed Richards, but even that jars with many people. The rest of the casting hasn't gone down too well; Vanessa Kirby might have the right name but doesn't quite look the right fit. Joseph Quinn might have impressed some people in Stranger Things but is a relative unknown (both he and Kirby are Brits as well), and while I really like the casting of Ethan Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm that's my only real positive, internet buzz has been quiet on this.

Nothing else about the film is known, apart from Matt Shakman is directing it and the release date is two weeks after Superman: Legacy, the first James Gunn DC film. That alone is probably the biggest risk because if Gunn's film flops it's not going to ignite people's appetites for more super heroics, but if Gunn's film is a huge success it could go either way for this MCU film, depending on how good it is and what the audiences think - word of mouth could be essential. Shakman has MCU form as he directed (and produced) WandaVision, which considering what has happened since then was an absolute masterpiece of television.

Coming out a couple of months prior to the FF is Captain America: Brave New World (Feb 2025) and rumour has it that Thunderbolts (May 2025) might also be out before the first family make their bow and this is where rumours start to become just that - rumours. The latest Cap film has allegedly had a number of rewrites and reshoots - which, frankly, is usually the death knell of any MCU film - and Thunderbolts, which is going to be a Sebastian Stan, Florence Pugh, David Harbour and Wyatt Russell project with the Red Hulk as their leader might also feature the green Hulk and Mark Ruffalo, or it might feature Skaar, the green Hulk's son setting up his joining the Avengers or it might not be any of these things at all. The truth is far more simple - not even Marvel/MCU/Disney knows what is going to happen with these two films and there's even the chance they might not even appear. Blade is scheduled for the autumn of 2025 and there has been less than 10 days filming done on that film, despite what you might have read. The reality is if Deadpool 3 is a success, it depends how much of a success it is as to whether there will be four MCU films in 2025 or just the one.

Regarding the Hulk, Kevin Feige has essentially dashed hopes of the third (second MCU) standalone movie, suggesting at a recent festival that the Hulk's story would be played out across a number of other MCU films where he would guest star. Industry insiders think this is likely to be the Cap and Thunderbolts films, possibly Avengers 5 and one other. It appears there is no appetite within Disney for a solo Hulk film, which seems strange given the character's popularity, but equally it might be down to the fact that Ruffalo isn't particularly liked among Disney execs, given his propensity for talking or exposing things that are usually covered in Disney's standard NDAs.

There are even suggestions that the Cap film might be turned into a four-part TV special, this is just a very unconfirmed rumour at the moment, but given that the film has been finished now for over 18 months and has been rewritten and reshot three times during that period suggests there is a major problem with it. Talking MCU TV; Agatha: Coven of Chaos is still scheduled for this year, no one at Disney has high hopes for what is likely to be a musical series and the proposed Ironheart series for 2025 has even less optimism around it, with several MCU people preferring the in limbo Armour Wars to be the 2025 series (it's supposed to be a film now but with the schedules already planned until 2026, who knows when that might happen) and maybe tying Ironheart into it or maybe even aiming that at a younger audience. The bottom line is the MCU's future in cinemas and on TV all depends on Deadpool and Wolverine and even then it isn't nailed on. There are lots of ifs and buts and Disney is playing its cards close to its proverbial chest. The feeling is Deadpool and Wolverine will be a success because the two Deadpool movies have appealed to non-comics fans and like Guardians of the Galaxy the character has built up its own standalone following; bringing Logan back in this film might smack of cynicism and commercialism, but Disney are a business and they will do anything they can to maximise profits. The problem here is that word 'standalone' - the third Guardians film was a hit because it appeals to a large group of people who weren't followers of the other MCU films; Disney aren't really going to be able to gauge what 2025 will bring off the back of one 2024 film.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with the majority of superhero films is the overall quality; the refusal of Disney, Warner or whoever to let a writer's vision be the sole input. Too many films are being ruined by committee and if what we hear is true about rewrites and reshoots to delayed projects from 2023 and 2024 then we can't really expect a return to the glory days of the MCU any time soon. The Jonathan Majors debacle hangs over their heads as well; had Disney dumped the disgraced actor as soon as allegations emerged then it would have been seen as judging a man guilty before his guilt had been proven, but waiting for the courts to decide has, ultimately, fucked Disney over. However, it might have solved a lot of problems, a friend of mine who is connected to Marvel and knows people connected to the film division said to me recently, "Avengers: The Kang Dynasty is dead. Whatever Avengers 5 will be called it won't have Kang as the villain. Everything hinges on the Fantastic Four - that needs to be something special and I expect Dr Doom will be the lynchpin here. If Victor is a good villain in that movie then he'll return for Avengers 5." The dilemma here is that history isn't on the side of an FF film. Disney/MCU is trying to market the new film as a kind of de facto 'debut' of Marvel's first family, but we know there's both history and baggage and none of the previous incarnations - or their casts - are going to feature in any of the multiverse crossovers (they probably don't want to confuse the issue). If ever there was a case of putting all your eggs in one basket it's this one.

The other issue with Avengers 5 is who is going to be in it? As it stands, the only original Avenger still 'under contract' is Ruffalo. Chris Hemsworth has not gone back on his criticism of Thor 4 and has never stated he'd return to the role. There were rumours that he had an agreement in place to be part of the fifth Avengers movie, but aside from fan-made promo posters he is absent from MCU promo. It's unlikely that Jeremy Renner will return to Hawkeye, especially in the wake of his life-threatening injuries from 2023 and with the original Cap gone and Iron Man and Black Widow both dead, you either have their replacements (Sam Wilson, War Machine and the new Black Widow) or you pad the team out with the likes of Captain Marvel (unlikely as Brie Larson does not want to reprise her role) Doctor Strange, Shang-Chi and Spider-Man and even writing this paragraph I see an issue. Without your titular icons everything looks a little like barrel scraping. 

Things change and in the world of superhero films those changes happen almost overnight. Given that superhero films have probably passed their sell-by dates it would probably be safe to say that nothing is carved in stone at the moment and whether something is in development or in the can it depends on the movie before it whether or not it will actually happen. There has been a tremendous amount of time and money invested in the genre and given the amount of money it has earned over the last 15 years it probably still has some good will left. The problem - the final and main problem - is whether or not the cinema going public has the appetite for more superhero films and because the quality of the most recent releases has been poor that appetite has diminished. There's still a core audience but that isn't big enough to make it a profitable practice. The next twelve months sees just one superhero film from the two major players and that is likely to be a success even if the film itself is a pile of shit (there's two from Sony - Kraven and Venom 3 - but no one takes them seriously any longer; in fact all they do is just help precipitate the demise of the genre). 

On its own Deadpool and Wolverine isn't going to revitalise the genre; it's a placeholder, it's there to remind people that superhero films are still going strong. What follows it is the most important; will the six expected superhero films in 2025 be able to attract people back to the cinemas in drovers? The answer to that has to be a resounding NO. Six? Four from the MCU and two from DC doesn't sound to me like aiming for quality over quantity; it sounds like desperation and a touch of wishful thinking. Of course, if the unthinkable happens and Deadpool and Wolverine is a flop (or doesn't make a shit ton of cash) then we might see yet another rethink. Watch this space. 

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Modern Culture - Is BACK!!!

I wanted the new look blogs to reflect something, but all they did was show me that I don't generate enough 'copy' for two regular blogs about roughly the same thing. Plus, there were some things that have happened I wanted to wibble on about but felt it was not important enough to have its own blog. So, let's reset the clocks and continue on where we left off at the end of December...

There might be spoilers here...

The End of Civilisation as We Know It

The first question I need to ask is why are there so many fucking atrocious movies being made? Who is stupid enough to finance these things and is it a form of masochism or do the idiots giving money to wankers really think they're going to make money from them? Over the last year or so we've watched some absolute stinkers; films that are worse than a really bad case of the norovirus, yet they still pump them out, like the dregs of your colon after having had more shits than your anus can withstand.

To review the film Argylle I would need to be many things; a pedant about bad spelling, a critique of wankiness, a lover of faecal matter, a sexist twat - because, frankly, either Bryce Dallas Howard is having a secret affair with the filmmaker Matthew Vaughn or she knows where he's buried his bodies. The daughter of Ron Howard has rather gone downhill since her Jurassic Park days; she's carrying a lot of excess weight, her hair is bad, she's looking her 43 years and a bit more AND I really hate myself for being so cruel about her but I figure someone has to because it needs to be said. She was fucking awful in this film and when she 'fulfilled her potential' she was even more fucking awful. As a red head she's cute, as a blonde she looks like Adele before the diet but carrying extra weight. I'm sorry, this is not like me at all; I'm a bloody feminist and I should be glad that Vaughn cast the fat girl as the star of his new film, but he should have cast a fat girl who could fucking act.

Argylle is abysmal. It is everything that is bad about movies that try to be a) clever and b) satirical. It is a giant turd on the rug outside your bedroom and it stinks like it's been there for a week. What on earth was Henry Cavill, John Cena, Bryan fucking Cranston, Sam Rockwell and Samuel L Jackson thinking? Actually we know what Jackson was thinking because he has form for appearing in films that are worse than having a squirting arse ejecting warm brown liquid. This is essentially a film about a rubbish women writer who has a James Bond like hero who discovers she's being pursued by spies because she might be writing the truth in her shit books, except she's not that at all, she's really a former spy who is so fucking brilliant she makes James Bond seem like a valet, except she can't remember anything apart from being a shit writer who is scared of her own shadow. It's two hours and fucking 12 minutes long? Vaughn - who made the King's Man films, which are fun secret agent movies - managed to make a movie that was simultaneously too long and one of the worst things ever made and it was released by Apple TV, proving that even this beacon of brilliance is capable of shitting on the rug and not cleaning it up.

THIS. IS. A. FUCKING. EMBARRASSING. AND. DISGUSTING. MESS.

The The?

Huh? Did you know that the film Bad Times at the El Royale actually translates to 'Bad Times at The The Royal'? It probably should be called Bad Times at El Royale but the double 'the' helps the title flow better. If this was the only thing I have to say about this 2018 movie then we'd be in dodgy territory, but actually it's a bloody entertaining film.

Four unrelated strangers turn up at a hotel that straddles the California/Nevada states border all looking for a room. Jon Hamm is a vacuum cleaner salesman who is full of himself; Jeff Bridges is a slightly bewildered priest, Cynthia Erivo is a singer and Dakota Johnson just tells people to fuck off. Lewis Pullman is the young guy - Miles - with the responsibility of doing everything from receptionist to cleaner to bar keep. All of them clearly don't want to be there... or do they?

Before this encounter at the El Royale there's a flashback to 1959 - ten years earlier than when this is set; there's a man - played by Nick Offerman - who 'buries' a bag under the floorboards in one of the rooms and is then shot and killed. So far so mysterious. What we discover quite quickly is that Hamm doesn't sell vacuum cleaners, he's in the FBI. Bridges isn't a priest, he's an ex con and he's after the money. Erivo is a singer, but because she's black and this is 1969 her life isn't straight forward and Johnson appears to have kidnapped a girl and is keeping her hostage in her room. These rooms are all... remarkable for a specific reason and Miles is as shady as fuck. What follows is a Tarantino-esque interlocking story that jumps back and forth in the now and is embellished by flashbacks to explain the backstories of the guests.

When all kinds of shit hits the fan it's time for would be Messiah Chris Hemsworth to enter the picture. This dime store Charles Manson brings his own kind of mayhem and chaos to proceedings and the film spirals out of control in a continuing orgy of violence and terror with a mysterious twist involving a reel of film that could incriminate someone extremely famous but now dead... It's a really 'fun' film with all manner of shocks, twists and turns with unexpected shit happening almost from the first few moments on. This is most definitely a movie you can't second guess and as it was on Film 4 a few weeks ago, there's a good chance it will reappear before long, so set your recorders for it, it's worth watching.

Strictly Come Barking Mad

As it was the wife's birthday, she could choose whatever she wanted - off the Flash Drive of Doom - to watch and she opted for Silver Linings Playbook, a film I never really been that bothered about (otherwise we'd have watched it by now) and have sort of managed to put her off in the past when she's suggested it.

This is an Oscar winning film starring Celeb A listers - Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, with back up from Robert De Niro - we're talking BIG guns in a film that was probably made with the Academy Awards in mind. Both Lawrence and Cooper had emerged as big stars and the idea of a comedy/drama/romance about a man who is bipolar and a young woman with her own - undiagnosed - mental health problems was probably the kind of thing that gets award givers massive orgasms and to be fair it wasn't a bad film. My problem with it was it took me ages to like the film or to feel anything like interest in the characters, which was probably the entire point. Cooper is obsessed about his ex-wife, he is a mass of OCDs, mood swings and potentially is a danger to himself and others; Lawrence, since the tragic death of her husband, has been sleeping around, is reckless and potentially dangerous. The thing is even De Niro, who plays Cooper's father, is a bag of superstitions and were it not for the family safety net around him would probably have been diagnosed with his own mental health issues.  

Once you start to like the characters, to see past their flaws and foibles, the film begins to unfold, but it takes its time and even when the two leads do their thing - getting involved in a dance competition - it all feels a bit contrived. I mean, I get it that Cooper's character has to be seen still obsessed about his wife, but it was obvious almost from the moment Lawrence walked into the film that this was going to be about these two people and the love story that was inevitably going to happen, but they stretched it out and played it to the point where the reveal at the end was always going to go the way you thought it was. There wasn't really ever a moment where you think 'will they, won't they?' The biggest thing for me was how they miraculously cured each other, because apart from one time you never saw him take his meds and yet he became a calm, reasonable guy with little or no evidence to suggest otherwise. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, it worked as a birthday night treat, but I felt as though... I dunno... it was dressed up to be more than it actually was.

The Thick End of It

The conclusion of Criminal Record was neither straightforward nor was it expected. The real antagonist had been seen a few times throughout the eight parts, but never with any or even the slightest indication he might be involved and while there were several things in the end to implicate Peter Capaldi's DCI Dan Hegarty, it appeared to be mainly his loose cannon henchmen and helpers who did all the donkey work.

The thing about that last paragraph is, it isn't precisely true; it appears that way but when all the facts are out there's still this nagging thing in DSI June Lenker's mind (Cush Jumbo) and the last thing she does is figure it out. It is possible that Errol was framed for his girlfriend's murder so that the Met could be seen being tough, especially in the wake of the 2011 Tottenham riots and it was most definitely sloppy police work by Hegarty's #1 undercover cop and his right hand man, but when all the pieces started to fall into place and Lenker was finally getting to the crux of the matter, this was a series that still managed to deliver some shocks. The most shocking thing about it though was its stark depiction of racism within the Metropolitan Police - something that is still a millstone around the Met's metaphoric neck, among many problems facing the capital's police force. There is something decidedly 1980s about Hegarty's top men and one has to ask, in a show about modern policing, how can these dinosaurs still function and get away with things. There were some factual inaccuracies about the series; stuff that whoever wrote it should have known or been informed of by whoever was giving them relevant information and it was probably two episodes too long, but it's worth watching, even if, in the end, you still feel a little cheated despite the 'happy' ending.

The Madness of Parents

The wife struggled with The Big Door Prize while I struggled with why the wife didn't like it as much as me. It's been an inventive and slightly bonkers series that highlighted something existential rather than physical. It was a wee bit strange and not always in a good way, but I thought that was what made it all the more agreeable.

I think it was the juxtaposition of the situation that played well. Something you'd imagine the kids would be obsessed with becomes the property of the adults. That's not to say the kids haven't been sucked into it but they quickly moved on in most cases, while the parents and adults remain obsessed with the the Morpho machine that has been telling them what their true life potential is. It's a bit like Facebook 15 years ago, when the youth were into it and the adults cottoned on and suddenly the kids were no longer into it because their parents had taken it over. That's this show in a nutshell and it not only took over the lives of the adults it turned them all into strange versions of themselves; versions that stopped being normal and became extravagant versions that people stopped liking or respecting. Or at least that's what you think until the last couple of episodes, then you start to realise that's there's more to this than you imagined and that this is simply the first stage - arguably the caterpillar in the Morpho's life cycle...

Chris O'Dowd and the ensemble cast all become different versions of themselves; like they were all given a weird drug that reawakened their adolescence and blocked their sanities as their 'potentials' became the overriding thing in almost all of their lives rather than pod people from a bizarre Sci-Fi story. The thing I liked about it especially was while O'Dowd's Dusty and his family are the central point of it, it spent every episode focusing on someone else; someone important to the town of Deerfield and someone who has possibly been driven slightly insane by the Morpho's 'command'. Of course the main problem I have is I think it's a shaggy dog story, because I don't know if there's really an explanation because there would be no explanation that would satisfy the joke. Season one leaves us with a cliffhanger ending with more mysteries than we began with and the biggest one being the blue spots, which we first saw on Dusty in episode one and have taken a back seat since. The thing is I absolutely loved this show; it has a mixture of really likeable characters and arseholes with hearts of gold. I want it to have some resolution and I really want there to be explanations, it hits all the right weird buttons for me but in a gentle understated way; we could be talking about something really sinister in a year's time, but I somehow can't believe that. Absolutely highly recommended. 

Super Boring

What if The X-Men was made as a low budget heist movie? That's pretty much the premise for Code 8 a film about 'enabled' people set in a world that's slightly different from our own. It's about superpowered individuals who have been outlawed because of their unique abilities and it is essentially everything The X-Men has ever wanted to be, apart from the fact it was badly acted, had a lousy story and the special effects were... limited.

It's about a man with superhuman abilities who works with a group of criminals to raise money to help his sick mother. It stars cousins Robbie and Stephen Amell (no, me neither) and the best thing I can say about it was the people responsible for it tried very hard to make a half decent film but failed because they didn't have a particularly good story to work with. It was overwrought, heavy on the earnest and tried admirably to create a universe that borrowed so heavily from the X-Men that I expected to see more than just people who can generate electricity, or heal people or are telekinetic. We opted to watch this because the sequel came out recently and we figured if it was good enough for a sequel it might be worth watching. It wasn't; they shouldn't have; don't be fooled, it's 90 minutes of your life you'll wish you'd spent punching yourself in the face or wanking off an 80-year-old tramp with syphilis. 

A New Nadir?

We watch Resident Alien in the hope that something positive might happen; that these caricatures of the characters from the first series will remember who they are and forget they've spent a season and a half jumping sharks for fun, but instead we are left with something that surely the actors must realise is a load of ridiculous pretentious wank.

The halfway mark of this (hopefully) final series was something of a real low point for the series as Big Arse Asta and her adopted daughter (the one she gave away not got) meet their adopted family at a big Native American shindig for the marriage of their gay cousin. Meanwhile D'Arcy has realised she's a fucking mess; the Mayor's wife is creating grisly children's books and Harry has fallen in love with the bird alien who has been trapped here by a banana. This, on a good day, would have been far too much for a 40 minute episode, but we also had a new subplot, the demented sheriff and his assistant Liv discover things (or rather Liv does but Mike takes the credit, as usual), Linda Hamilton, who came across as menacing once, is now old and stupid in her bunker of alien fighting and there was an alien portal fixer who likes stale pretzels. There is so much going on you'd almost feel as though it's good value for money, but it's shite; big stinky shite with sweetcorn you wouldn't give to a dog. There are four more episodes to go and it all has to be resolved because if it ends on a cliffhanger and there's a threat it might be back for more I'm going to [redacted] with prejudice. 

Aping About

In anticipation of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes coming out in a few months, we decided to watch the 'first' trilogy and that meant giving Rise of the Planet of the Apes a second watch, almost 13 years after the first. It's a cracking film spoiled by some dodgy special effects, but one gets the impression there might not have been that much confidence about it making a trilogy.

It is a movie that predates the pandemic but is really about the start of one that will leave the planet ravaged and depleted of humans - but that comes later. This is about Cesar and his development from son of a lab ape to leader of the first rebellion against humanity and his 'father' James Franco, the man who develops a cure for Alzheimer's with a sting in the tail and then Cesar's journey from lovable family chimp to an ape (I almost called him a man) who sees all that is wrong in humanity - as well as much of what is right - and decides, fatefully, where his beliefs lie. As an 'origin' story it works exceptionally well and even the potentially far fetched ideas being developed at GenSys - the company that likes experimenting on primates - have a ring of truth about them, because money is the thing that drives this - the be all and end of humanity. If I could of had one thing done different it would have been to have Cesar smile occasionally - after his epiphany. I get it he was the reluctant Messiah but, you know, dark and brooding got too intense at times; maybe a sly smile or a grin whenever things went his way wouldn't have gone a miss.

Onwards to Dawn... Next week.

There's Something About Cena

Do you remember the Farrelly Brothers? They did comedies around the turn of the millennium that pushed the boundaries of good and bad taste. Well Peter Farrelly is back with a new film called Ricky Stanicky and it doesn't matter how hard I try not to, I just can't recommend this enough. It's simply a riotous comedy that pushes all the buttons of 13 year old me.

Zac Efron and two other actors play lifelong friends who use their imaginary mate Ricky as an excuse to get away with all kinds of shit throughout their lives. If they need an excuse for something, they use Ricky. Weekend away? Ricky Stanicky. To get out of a family occasion, they use Ricky. The thing is over the years they have used and abused Ricky so much he's now a superhero - he's a charity working, tree-hugging liberal who knows Bono, works in Africa, has survived cancer a number of times and people in our trio of friends' lives are beginning to think that Ricky doesn't exist. So they decide to use the talents of a jobbing actor they met in Atlantic City to pose as Stanicky to convince friends and family once and for all that the eponymous hero exists.

That actor is John Cena and he's given a 'bible' of Stanicky's life, which he has to memorise and hoof his way through a circumcision ceremony and he doesn't just do a good job, he's startlingly great at being the man who doesn't exist. The problem is he makes so much of an impression he can't or rather doesn't want to go back to his own life. This is a crude, rude and lewd film, but it's also hilarious without being too OTT. Cena is brilliant as Rod aka Ricky to the point where you wonder what he has up his sleeve next, because since Peacemaker he's been the best thing in almost everything he's been in. He was probably the best thing in Argylle, he just wasn't on screen for long as Matthew Vaughn opted for all the wankers in his cast instead. This is a feelgood comedy that has an abundance of penis jokes, a brilliant turn from the wondrous William H Macy and while it is nothing but a silly and very contrived comedy, it is funny and it is worth your time and it's the best thing I've seen this week.

More Than Ordinary

This week also saw the return of Extraordinary, the TV comedy about superheroes that managed to make it into my top ten TV shows of 2023. We're only two episodes in at the moment, but it has retained its weird quirkiness as Jen - Máiréad Tyers - the only person without superpowers in a world full of super powered people and Jizz Lord finally start to date. He was once her cat but has returned to being human and at the end of last series also discovered he had a wife and child.

Jen's raised the £12,000 she needs to find out and uncover her latent superpowers while still working in a second hand clothes store and trying to sort the lives of her two roommates out - one who can channel dead people and the other has control over time. Tyers is a quirky and very attractive lead (despite this only being about the fourth or fifth thing she's ever been in) and she is both funny and sexy at the same time. One wonders what her character sees in Rob aka Jizz - Luke Rollason - because he's extremely odd looking and doesn't have much of a personality; but it works in a weird sort of way and this is a series that has a feel about it, like Spaced did in the late 1990s - like there's going to be a lot of breakout stars. 

The running subplot in the background is Carrie and Kash's split - these are Jen's two roommates who split up at the end of the first series, but are struggling with that decision. Carrie is ditsy and not really sure what she wants to do with her life and Kash might be able to manipulate time but he's largely an absolute wanker without an iota of common sense.

I suppose it hasn't got the anarchic feel the first series had because we're familiar with the four main characters now, but it has a strange charm that makes it likeable. We'll have finished the series by this time next week so more of a review then, but so far so good.

Next Week...

We've got Damsel lined up for our Saturday night film and the rest of Extraordinary to get through. The usual stuff - that would be fucking Resident Alien - that we're cluttering the week up with and the other two POTA films plus whatever finds its way onto our screens in the interim. We were going to give The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin a try by gave up on it after less than three minutes because it reminded me of Rentaghost and I didn't like or watch that. We might start on Constellation and equally we might give up on it as well. Whatever we watch you'll be the first to know about it. 

Saturday, March 02, 2024

TV Culture - Compact and Bijou?

Another short one with just four things reviewed this week (we watched a lot of films) and there's likely to be some spoilers, so tread carefully...

A Scandi Fling

I suppose the first thing you can ask about Martin Compston's Norwegian Fling is why Phil MacHugh doesn't get equal billing? I know he's not as well known as the Line of Duty star but he is just as much the equal star of this show as he was when they did the Scottish Fling in 2022. 

It's a fun series, with two very amiable (and Scottish) presenters obviously having a great time in a land that is similar but very different from Scotland. There's an honesty about both men that makes you realise that there's no acting or pretending here, especially when they're facing something out of their comfort zone - such as eating a sheep's head, being kissed by wolves or going through oil rig training, or in MacHugh's case, anything that's about about six feet off the ground - he's a wee bit afeard of heights. One observation though, it's clear that there's some judicious editing taking place and things that happen in each 30 minute episode were not chronologically filmed, so what you're left with is a series that seems to meander back and forth in the opening episodes. The aim is to get to the furthest northern most point in Europe and there they discover that summer usually lasts about TWO days a year, which sounds tragic, especially considering the sun doesn't set for nearly a month! 

It's surprisingly camp and the two lads' affection to Euro-pop and rave music is even more obvious in this series than it was in the last and when Phil meets Dagne - Norway's pop superstar you worry about the state of his underpants he gets soooo excited. It's all very entertaining even if, sadly, it's a wee bit superficial at times - that's not to say it should be cutting edge, because it isn't that kind of show, but like so many of these travelogues there probably could have been so much more they could have seen. 

A Dud But Not Crap

We found something from Apple TV+ that we decided wasn't for us, so much so we switched off before the 25 minute mark deciding it was simply too twee and ridiculous to be able to take seriously...

Home Before Dark is an intriguing premise; a nine-year-old investigative journalist with a nose for true crime, but, you know... utter bollocks in almost every other conceivable way. It's not badly made, in fact it has all the hallmarks of an Apple TV show, but how do you take something seriously when your main protagonist is nine and unlikely to be taken seriously? The answer is simple, you can't unless you live in American TV land. Yes, her father is or was a good journalist, but he got fired, either for something he did wrong or being surplus to demands, in which case he couldn't have been that good. What I did learn from the half of an episode we watched is that the child doesn't trust anything; she has a suspicious nature that reads mystery into everything she sees and I don't mean in a Sherlock Holmesian way, but in a paranoid way and for a nine-year-old this is a worry. It might float your boat, it didn't float ours.

Grow Your Potential

I'd never heard of the newish Chris O'Dowd 'comedy' The Big Door Prize until I was searching for Apple TV shows I'd not heard about and while I wasn't particularly enamoured by premise - a mysterious machine suddenly appears in the hardware store that tells people what they should be in life - I decided that ATV comedies have been good so far so it would be worth our while checking it out.

O'Dowd plays Dusty, an Irish-born schoolteacher who it appears is well loved by the entire town of Deerfield where he lives with his wife and daughter. It's his 40th birthday and he is about to venture into the biggest midlife existential crisis of them all...

The arrival of the new 'machine' has a totally unexpected effect on the town and everyone is talking about it and it is causing a profound change in the population. Add to this the subplots - the main one being the death of O'Dowd's daughter's boyfriend and the suspicion that his death was caused by his own brother; but there's also the decision by Dusty's parents to happily divorce, or his wife being told by the machine that she is Royalty! It's most definitely an 18-rated comedy and there are your usual annoying USA people in it, but it could easily have been set anywhere in the world. I don't know if I'd call it a comedy because there isn't any particular laugh out loud moments, but it is light hearted with a dark undertone and O'Dowd - who relocated to the USA a few years ago - makes a genial lead. His own crisis begins when the machine tells him what his true potential is and then the intrigue begins. We're sticking with this one, probably to see how dark and tragic it can get. 

Almost Done?

"Well, I suppose it was a bit better this week." These were the words uttered by the wife after the third episode of the third season of Resident Alien finished. There were some more amusing bits in it - provided mainly by Liv - and it showed its ability to deal with tragedy and the nastiness of humanity, something it's been loathe to do for a long time.

The problem, however, is whether or not we're going to stick with it. The wife also said, "It's better than Monarch: Legacy of Monsters," which left me asking how she could say such a thing. It turns out her main problem with that Godzilla-themed mini-series was the actual lack of monsters in it and boring story line. From my perspective, I think Resident Alien is a load of shite; it isn't without its charms, but they are so few and far between now I'm desperately hoping for some sign those charms are going to reappear. My gut feeling is it has outgrown (or maybe shrunk) its welcome and we need to leave it alone and move into and onto other things. It is unlikely to jump the shark and get better. Watch this space.

Criminal Minds?

There isn't much doubt that the newly finished Apple TV show Criminal Record is about black and white policing - literally and metaphorically. Peter Capaldi plays a Detective Chief Inspector and was the lead officer on a murder case from 2011 - one that seemed cut and dried but has since had certain events bring it back into the minds of the police and the campaigners for justice. Cush Jumbo plays a Detective Sargent who is given a simple domestic violence case to deal with that opens up a proper can of worms for her.

What is black and white about this is the murder from 2011. it's clear that Capaldi's character Hegarty is trying to cover his arse about something, while Jumbo's Lenker is doing something she really needs to back away from - ruffling the feathers of powerful colleagues. As a result there is an awful lot of deceit, lies and double crossing going on in the opening two episodes, as Lenker goes down what she feels is a new path for an old crime and doesn't realise she's been set up, big time, by the powerful Hegarty, who already has the police's Internal Affairs department on her back, not least because she's been doing some dodgy police work to try and placate her seriously paranoid and elderly mother. One thing is clear though, the man who has been jailed and initially admitted to killing his partner in 2011 probably isn't guilty, but the powerful policemen are going to ensure that this conviction is safe because if there is a doubt about it, it could be far worse than we, the viewer, thinks it is - shows like this rarely deal in simplistic stories. However, what you think is going to be a police procedural with a few twists and turns gets very weird, especially when it becomes clear this is going to be a stand up fist fight between Capaldi and Jumbo.

Next Week...

The conclusion of Criminal Record, which I expect will be straightforward because nothing else in this series has been. The secret of whether we've given up on Resident Alien will be revealed (my guess is we won't have) and the conclusion of The Big Door Prize, which I am finding very good. Whatever else floats our collective boats, but I do feel we're being short changed by TV at the moment - that's us personally, I can't speak for everyone else, because everyone else tends to have dreadful taste and likes stuff we wouldn't shit on from a great height.

I have to be honest, since changing the style and look of these blogs, it does feel like a chore trying to juggle the two rather than an opportunity, so the biggest decision this week might be the one where I decide to bring back the old style blog. I mean, we've actually watched more films this week than TV, some weeks there's more TV than film and the film blog has become erratic because I want there to be a reasonable amount of content. It's just another immaterial existential crisis I don't need... 




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