Pop Culture is Dead to Me 4: The Umpire Strikes Back

Corny titles aside, I was walking up the stairs, thinking, "Ooh, I can write something about















..."

A bit like when you go upstairs for something and can't remember what it was.

It might have been about the Marvel Cinematic Universe films we've been slowly reworking our way through over the festive season or how Doctor Who shoved off all the pretence and became a full-fledged, badly-scripted, kids TV show.

I might have been considering admitting to all the apparently cracking telly we haven't watched. While all my erudite friends watched The Handmaid's Tale, I was torn between grief and elation at the renewal/salvation of Lucifer. Trying to persuade my wife to watch the second season of The Good Place has not been successful and because I'm forced to play second fiddle behind cheap quiz shows and BBC4 we pretty much need a major sporting event to catch up on things we've missed. Also, she's just not much into it, which I can understand, unlike people who now claim it's the greatest thing on TV since that little cat ornament your nan had on her Rediffusion set...

The problem I have is TV doesn't really mean that much to me. I sit in front of the computer as long as I sit in front of the TV and, frankly, despite what the wife thinks, there's more choice and diversity here than there is with our limited Freeview choice...

Shall we begin? Yes, let's...

About a month before Christmas, because we haven't already got a year's worth of TV to watch but couldn't be arsed, we watched Iron Man. We realised it had been a while since we last saw it, because so much of it had been forgotten. It had been inspired by us watching Iron Man 3 a few weeks earlier and forgetting what a lousy film that was - possibly the worst of the MCU... Except, it isn't that. Like The Predator, the new Shane Black film; there are some great ideas, it's just executed with the finesse of a herd of incontinent goats force-fed vindaloo. Shane Black makes Guy Ritchie look positively Spielbergian. Iron Man 3 is one of those episodes like the one before The Body in Buffy, where you think you've just watched the worst episode ever and then something so important happens at the end you realise that it is both shocking (metaphorically as well as literally) and essential at the same time. Well, Iron Man 3 has moments in it that are essential (but nothing to compare with the comparison I cited) but the rest of the film is pants. So when we saw Iron Man on the telly, we thought, shall we see if all the older Marvel films have aged well?

Iron Man is probably not as action-packed as you remember. Compared to something like X-Men from 2000, Iron Man is like a rollercoaster gone insane, but for Marvel films, it wisely set the bar quite low to start things off. I mean, there's no point in Tony Stark meeting a Thanos-level villain straight away; is there? The good thing about this film, which set the tone for what was to come, was it felt fantastic but grounded at the same time. Tony Stark as a kind of brainy Elon Musk figure but with all the add-ons and that probably resonates more with the general public than a billionaire misanthrope in a Bat suit or a super-human alien.

The Incredible Hulk still feels like bits of it were tacked onto an independent project to make it seem more MCU and less Ang Lee. Like its predecessor it's a pretty dull film, helped slightly by being more 'Marvel'. This is the worst film in the MCU, but that might be because it was almost wasn't in the MCU.

Iron Man 2 was one of those films I remembered being good, was surprised at how good it still was and how Mickey Rourke doesn't spoil the film at all. We get Black Widow, lots of Nick Fury, a clever and relevant story and it worked on so many levels the rest of Marvel's cinematic universe was probably never in doubt. It's up there as one of the top 3 Marvel films.

Thor is great fun and does a very good job of not seeming at all like a Kenneth Branagh film. My biggest problems with this film was the poor use of the Destroyer and Natalie Portman. My only problem after this film was Asgard was never portrayed as this magical again.

Captain America: The First Avenger is possibly my favourite so far and this alone is weird because I have never been even remotely a fan of Steve Rogers in whatever guise he's opted for over the years. Captain Amateur (or Stinky) is what I usually call him, but the Star-Spangled Avenger's first appearance was like the return of an old friend; like a new - good - Indiana Jones film or anything with a dollop of nostalgia well made.

Avengers Assemble is odd. All the pieces were in place, but some of them could have done with being fleshed out a bit. Having seen this film 3 times now, I'm still bothered by some of its ambiguity (Loki's general appearance and demeanour for the first half of the film and the lack of a plausible reason how he aligned himself to these aliens in league with Thanos), it also bothers me that some of the scripting is naff or how much is shoehorned into the plot. It felt rushed.

Iron Man 3 has been covered, probably in shit. This is a great Tony Stark film; not so good everywhere else.

Thor: Dark World was recently described as 'If the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just a TV series, Dark World would be the non-plot episode', except I think maybe, considering two of the film's writers are the guys behind the Russo Brothers and all of the current movies story arc, this has more clues in it than you can imagine. Everything from the Aether to the blackboard behind Erik Selvig in the asylum are clues to what was the come and what is yet to. I think this film has an Infinity War/Endgame deus ex machina hidden in it.

We watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier and pretty much couldn't remember anything apart from the run round the Washington monument with Sam Wilson and in many ways it's as good as the first Cap film but in a completely different way. The clear things to come out of it was how the superhero universe was expanding - and growing darker.

I still have problems with The Guardians of the Galaxy but that's more to do with my age and my history in Marvel Comics. The film is one of those rare things, a good space adventure without feeling too much like Star Wars or Trek or somewhere between the two. However, on watching it again recently, I don't actually think it's that good. The script was pretty awful; Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, John C Reilly and a host of other actors all hammed it up in a cringeworthy kind of way, that had it been filmed in a darker way would have just looked like bad acting. Don't get me wrong, it's very clever but it knows it's clever so it didn't seem to bother with anything else. I mean repeated "A-holes"? Really?

We got almost up to date so far with Avengers: Age of Ultron. It is essentially the continuation of Winter Soldier and how the events in the first Avengers film truly affected the person - Tony Stark - involved in it the deepest. It's kind of the end of the beginning and that's fine, but there are a couple of things about it that could have been done better. Ultron's malevolence should have been explained better; I'm still presuming it's because it is essentially the bi-product of an Infinity Stone, but it is confusing. Other than that, it's actually quite an odd film; part love story, part nightmare and very impersonal - there's a coldness about the interaction of all the characters. There is also a lack in the fluidity of the special effects; whereas the films all seem to have prided themselves with seamless, this film's SFX felt, jarringly, like SFX. It's also considerably better than I remembered it to be, which sounds like a contradiction but isn't. This is a film that probably needed to be 20 minutes longer even though it wasn't overstuffed to begin with.

I suppose Ant-Man is the levity after the angst and anger. To say it exists in its own little pocket of the MCU is a pun. It's a fun film without enough special effects (which in itself is a very unusual thing to write). It obviously is here for a reason; the comedy interlude, perhaps? It coincided really well with our viewing by being on TV. That was last week, I've forgotten loads about it already.

And the other night we watched Captain America: Civil War, which was really The Winter Soldier, part 2 (with a big superhero battle dropped into the middle) or maybe Avengers 2.5 and the amount of time the core earth-bound Avengers were in it you can see why. This is the thing (bearing in mind everything after this is too recent and only seen once); the more heroes in it, the less interesting it is. The battle of the two hero factions in this film felt so contrived it actually spoils it; in fact the Black Panther kind of spoiled it, even if he was a vital component. It is the oddest of movies; if you knew nothing of Marvel films you can just about watch everyone of them and get an idea of what has gone before or how it works; Civil War literally carries on from one end point and goes through to another beginning point. It's also far too much a soap opera considering the amount of action in it. It's also essential viewing - in places.

[An aside - I've always had more of a problem with Bucky Barnes than I have with Steve Rogers, so when he was brought back as the Winter Soldier I accepted it as inevitable. Comparisons are made between Barnes and Natasha Romanov, which must be the logical reason for Cap's determination to save his friend; the problem is, for me, this is a plot that needs concluding. There have been lots of dead ends and red herrings in the MCU so far, but this has been considerably less interesting. I expect, as well as the defeat of Thanos, other issues in the MCU to be concluded in Endgame, I hope this is one of them.]

The next on the list is Doctor Strange. I remember watching it first time around (and wondering why they'd given DS such a stereotypical American accent, when a New England or Mid-Atlantic one would have worked so better...) Maybe I need to give it a year before I return to the MCU?

***

While the next MCU film is less than 3 months away, it's going to be over a year before we dip into the world of Doctor Who again. This, given the last series, might be a good thing. We can all forget how dreadful it was until it is, again. The thing is, I want to go back in time, to the 1970s; some of you can do that...

Morecombe & Wise move to ITV. Les Dawson moves to ITV. Someone you like moves to ITV. Suddenly everything from production values to the way it's written is all wrong. In my house, moving to ITV was the kiss of death (and if you started on ITV and went to the BBC you were either something special or you knew the secret about Jimmy Savile).

Despite remaining on BBC, but moving to a Sunday for the first time ever, Doctor Who moved to ITV. It won't be the same again unless it moves back and as it is really already there I think we can safely say that the reboot in 2025 was always doomed to fail...

***

Is that it? Three bloody paragraphs on Doctor Who? Is that it?

No one really cares any more and I've never really cared. I seem to care more than you think because I'm of geek stock; why else do I write things like this?

OK. More then.

Jodie Whitaker's debut drew as many people watching as peak Tennant - which, I believe, is good numbers. By the end of the series no one was quite sure how many viewers there were and the BBC, usually quite bullish (until the Top Gear reboots) about viewing figures went all quiet and the Whovians retweeting DW viewing figures like coordinates to free treasure one day, were all at their mums on the last two Sundays the Doctor lectured her way through an hour sounding like a pissed off teaching assistant in a room full of pensioners on acid. [Oh if it was weird as that]

I bloody love the idea of a woman Doctor. I also love the idea of a dog Doctor. A truly alien Doctor or a board of Plywood covered in jam Doctor - I think DW embraces diversity like Ikea do weird names in fake Scandinavian. One of the weirdest things was the time it took them to fiddle around with its gender.

I have spent the last few months defending Jodie Whitaker like she was my sister and I realised earlier on - the way my weird head works - when I was talking about the Avengers that I've been lying to myself; I don't actually like Jodie Whitaker. I don't think she acts particularly well in this role with these scripts and directors and she's too... average. Normal. Human, if you will. There has been 'otherworldly' about a number of Doctors, with the least alien being Ecclestone and Tennant, who made up for it with mannerisms (and making John Hurt like a tooled up version of Ecclestone also worked). Whitaker has nothing to bring to the table - no quirk, no point of focus. She does seem like a female extension of Tennant and Smith but without any depth.

The last series of Doctor Who struck me as more Chris Chibnall re-imagining it as a post-modern Mr Benn without the costumes. Except that would be crediting Chibnall with an intelligence he clearly doesn't possess. Everything from his obsession with Sheffield to avoiding (most of) the old toys in the box; everything about the new Who and her showrunner has been largely negative even if there has been a vociferous call-to-arms in support of the female Doctor. The problem with this is it isn't about Whitaker (although she could have been improved on), it's about Chibnall's inability to write this kind of family TV and the production company's inability to make 50 minutes of anything half decent. The sad thing is the couple of almost reasonable episodes were themselves woeful examples of British SF TV making, but the bar had been lowered to snake shit levels by then.

The thing is, DW has a certain level and this season plumbed depths not seen since the days of polystyrene production sets. If someone had said, "We're doing Doctor Who for CBBC now" and then offered this series up you wouldn't have objected to the massive drop in standards; the fact it's something we actually see our license fee in makes people with time invested in it angry/happy/ambivalent. It is a bi-product of the growth in social media.

Love Beach was an album by ELP. However awful it was, the die-hard ELP fans were happy because it was a new ELP album. ELP aficionados quite rightly were justified in shitting on their copies before posting them to either Mr Emerson, Mr Lake or Mr Palmer. People who wouldn't know ELP from a hole in the ground wouldn't give a fig unless one of them bit them on the arse and then maybe not so much. Some DW fans are going to swallow as long as they have holes in their arses, but a lot of people - not just misogynists, idiots and cretins - are going to spit and just find everything a bit too unpalatable. The thing is it could be that like ELP, this DW is a step too far (too soon).

***

One thing that seems to have become a trend is the success of naff films. If anything is an indication of how bonkers the world is becoming, it's when truly woeful examples of film making become big hits. Three films in 2018 have defied logic and become blockbusters - Hugh Jackman's The Greatest Showman, the Venom film and Bohemian Rhapsody. As I type this I'm hearing that Aquaman might end up being a huge money-spinner for Warner/DC even if every critic on the planet thought it was dull and a wee bit damp. When the general public are no longer being guided by critics it is a reflection of society as a whole.

Over the last two years, we have seen the end of 'Facts' as a bonafide way of verifying the truth in something. It has been replaced by 'Belief' and therefore instead of looking at reviews of Aquaman and thinking, "Hmm, that looks like a big pile of wank." You're going to think, "If I believe it's as good as Citizen Kane, it will be." And then because you believed really hard, even though it was a pile of wank you can't possibly admit to yourself you were wrong, so you perpetuate the lie by telling all of your friends - specifically the ones who are governed by lowest common denominators - that Aquaman needs to be seen at a cinema.

The Greatest Showman is this decade's Mamma Mia or Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. The fact it came out before Mamma Mia 2 was a stroke of genius because all those old Mamma Mia fans needed something to get the juices flowing again... Plus, punters like the odd sing-a-long-a-musical - I'd never begrudge them it just so long as I never have to suffer watching one of them myself.

I haven't seen that or the Venom film, but I figure the latter's been successful primarily because of Tom Hardy and also because the trailers do a good job in piquing your interest; big monster crime fighter, comedy lines, eating people's heads - ticks all the boxes. Plus Ragnarok did wonders for the comedy superhero film, Infinity War killed a bunch of people and Venom does both - win win. The chances are people see the word 'Marvel' and blindly accept it must be part of this big MCU (because the average punter doesn't care that Marvel was divided like a spit roast party gone wrong back around the turn of the century and is only just making some sense of how its comics will eventually fit into its cinematic universe).

The thing is I've spent about 3000 words talking to you about stuff I like or don't. What I have written is essentially reviews, except I like to tart things up and make it more of an experience than just giving you an encapsulated review of something, even if what I did was give you encapsulated reviews of the MCU films. It's about presentation, innit?

Joe Bloggs already thinks The Guardian or Daily Mail film reviewer is a posh twat, so if he doesn't like something it's like being told that leaving the EU is a bad thing - you lost, get over it - so if this posh twat doesn't like it that means I might like it... It's not as wide a sociological step as you might think - imagined reverse psychology; it's the basest level to why we do not allow ourselves to accept our own culpability when we're fundamentally wrong about a belief - cognitive dissonance.

Take Hereditary as an example. Now this is a genuine exception to this rule. Most press rated it highly and most people who saw it agreed with the press - they believed the hype. This in itself is an example of how we can one day say, "Oh, I read it in the paper so it must be true." and the next day say, "Oh, I read it in a paper so it must be bollocks." The truth with Hereditary is probably simple; one of the earliest reviews influenced the way the future reviewers and potential audience would go and often with a film with a reasonable budget it's the choice of how the film is marketed that determines its success. Words such as 'unnerving', 'unsettling', 'otherworldly' and 'genuinely creepy' tend to be triggers.

Mark Kermode is often derided for suggesting The Exorcist is his favourite film of all time, because, you know, it's a horror film. The fact it's a clever, scary and unbelievably well-acted film is secondary to a genre prejudice. Lots of people don't like horror/scary movies so Hereditary was desperate to appeal to as many of its core audience as possible and maybe win over some sceptics. My mate thinks this film is the scariest film he's seen and he is a godsend to filmmakers because if enough of his friends know he thinks it's a fucked up movie and go see it or catch it on a streaming service then the word of mouth effect helps continue to make the film money in a world where DVDs are now a niche market.

Personally, I had all kinds of problems with Hereditary and thought it ended up being weird for weird's sake and was full of dislikable characters all waiting to die. But, you see, in my world, the best horror movie ever made is Alien. It's not a SF film; it is a haunted house; thing in the cellar/under the bed/in the closet film. It has more tension (= frights) than pretty much any other film, apart from maybe The Thing, which also isn't a SF film.

Also, I could have substituted Hereditary for Guardian of the Galaxy - both average films done slightly differently; marketed extremely well and grew off of and out of the initial reviews. Sit down and analyse the films and you'll be found wanting. [Guardians would have been a success whatever the reviews, but it was a phenomenal hit because it tapped into a demographic the other Marvel films couldn't or didn't.]

Apart from when a genuinely half decent film comes along that unites all sides of the process, the market is so crowded the film industry appears to be relying on an area that they've often forgotten about - the people who actually pay for their films at a cinema and that means making mainly half-baked vacuous 'entertainment' instead of groundbreaking intelligent story telling. You could argue that what makes money is what works and you would be right, but cinema is one of the arts and we're going into an entirely new can of worms just as I was trying to finish up. We'll maybe come back to that, one day.

I'm not about to suggest that the critics were wrong about the critical flops that were box office hits, but outside of the general obsolete nature of reviewers nowadays, a thing sells if the people want it and if it doesn't it's because they don't want it. This actually really isn't rocket science. A successful movie makes money by making money. A producer doesn't give a fuck what Joe Bloggs says about his film as long as he's getting a return on his investment. If he's making a cheesy 21st century disaster film remake with The Rock and it will have as much cultural impact as a donut, he's still probably going to be earning more and subsequently making more of this kind of film. You could argue that the feel-good films and fun adventure films are filling cinemas because they're a spectacle, an escape, a little like going to the cinema in the 1930s when it was the only entertainment most people could afford (and there were no boozers, in the USA); they offer something different from the dirge we all live through on a daily basis. Critics might hate this common denominator crap, but the punters - the average ones who make up the majority of people - lap it up.

I think many people are looking for a change, when that is the driving force behind an existence people do all kinds of strange and unusual things; there's nothing that says it can't be expressed in other ways other than politically.

That's your lot. Go and do something constructive.