I suppose we should get the Marxists in the room out of the way first. You know, the socialist commie Marxists what play football and have been taking the knee in support for racial equality and the end to racism... I've watched the general bemusement of people trying to fathom how three similar, but different, political ideologies have anything to do with footballers showing solidarity to their non-white counterparts and racism in general. Then it dawned on me...
Marxist, Communist and especially Socialist are no longer really meant as a 'political accusation', it now means very much what the general term 'wanker' means. A wanker hasn't really been someone who masturbates constantly for donkeys' years; it essentially means 'useless idiot'. Our three political epithets now mean someone who gives a shit; someone who is concerned about the growth of hatred across all divides. It's the new sandal wearing leftie. If you're accused of being a Marxist it's because you care about other people and those who don't care about other people don't like it being rubbed in their faces when they settle down to watch an illegal stream of their team's latest match and they especially don't want England footballers displaying compassion towards a minority; it's a sign of weakness, ennit? Like foreign aid - scrap that; feed our own billionaires before anything - that's what the BLM-hating divisionist Brit is thinking. Put food on these savages tables and they'll be wanting to illegally enter the UK and steal their once secure jobs...
Who would have thought that in 2021, after a mortality affirming pandemic we'd still end up squabbling about the colour of someone's skin, their cultural or personal preferences while ignoring widespread governmental corruption and their refusal to condemn basic racism?
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I mean, if there really was a God, surely he felt that all humans should be treated equally - a bit Marxist that God bloke - not just the ones who have more than the ones who haven't? In many ways that was the underlying theme of the second half of the penultimate season of Lucifer. (See what I did there?)
Everybody's (and it would appear to be everybody's given the ratings Netflix is crowing about) favourite crap LA cop show got another reprieve, so we're going to have to wait another 16 hours before we're finally put out of our misery...
What?
You love Lucifer?
I do. But, like a lover who thinks eroticism is shitting on your bedside rug, I've grown very tired of it, very quickly. It was clear by the 2/3rds point of this - initially final - season that it was simply about tying up loose ends, but while there were some excellent segments, on the hole it felt like these 'goodbyes' needed to be said, and then pack up the kit and get out of there. Except, Netflix in their infinite wisdom renewed it for one last time, leaving the production team with the dilemma of having to almost completely reshoot the final episode.
The problem with Lucifer is that, and I forecast this a couple of years ago, when it's just a crap procedural LA Cop show, with essentially no grounding in real police work, it's great fun. It was like someone dropped a chaotic loose cannon into a cop show and didn't tell the other cast members what he was going to say and Tom Ellis handled it perfectly. For every cringe-inducing rubbish murder or the inevitable 'first person who is interviewed is usually the killer' format, it was the crapness that made it endearing. It was too stupid and irreverent to step on the toes of the religious nuts who all campaigned for its cancellation before it started.
Then it did a 'Moonlighting' and simultaneously saw more reprieves than Babylon 5 - from that point on we were really into 'making it up as we go along' mode and it showed. As the routine murders dried up a little, we had to suffer the agony of Tom Ellis playing his own evil twin - badly; we had to watch as the writers tried to make the celestials interesting, but ended up making the entire of concept of angels and demons as a bit less harmful than an episode of Love Thy Neighbour. As the series drew to the denouement of Lucifer possibly becoming God, because his father wanted to retire, I was wondering how it went from a 42 minute bit of fun into an hour-long load of bollocks, with less realistic settings than a Marvel film.
The weirdest thing, probably because of the filming restrictions due to the pandemic was how unimpressive the 'army' of angels was. Not only were the majority dislikeable, there wasn't that many to start with, so the battle between Lucifer's side and Michael's looked a bit like an amateur rugby match where some blokes making up the numbers. Lucifer has never really done spectacle and should really avoid trying.
There were, as I said, a couple of great bits and usually involving Dan Espanosa - Chloe Decker's ex-husband and Lucifer's 'mate' Detective Douche. His standalone episode was an absolute joy and has you totally wigged out right until the end. While Dan's encounter with God was a genuine piece of WTF in a series that really needed a lot more. Denis Haysbert, who played God, ended up being as ignorant and aloof about humans as the majority of his angels and everything about the story felt contrived.
Obviously, we'll watch the 'final' series, if only to see how much they can fuck it up further.
***
Mare of Easttown is a 7-part mini-series starring Kate Winslett about a dysfunctional Pennsylvania cop trying to solve the disappearance of two girls and the murder of another. On the surface it sounded a bit meh, but one should remember that Oscar winning Winslett doesn't tend to do much dross. It's also an odd mix of drama with human comedy thrown in for good measure - it kind of feels like a reflection of what might actually happen in circumstances like that.
I can't say much because it's all deliciously tied into itself in such a way that just saying that could be interpreted as a spoiler. If you get the chance to watch it, you should.
***
We 'treated' ourselves to a Zack Snyder weekend recently. We watched Army of the Dead on the Saturday and gave Watchmen an outing for the first time in 12 years...
AotD is toilet. Its trailer makes it seem like an intense lot of fun, but when you pack in the rest of the film around it... oh boy. It's a stinker. It might be a lot of mindless fun to some people, but it was 2½ hours of me wondering why it was even made...
Watchmen on the other hand was surprisingly better than I remembered, with the quibbles I had about it in 2009 no longer really bothering me in 2021. Those 'quibbles' were the fundamental changes to the story that could have made it obsolete, but I now think doesn't...
The Watchmen TV series is said to have spun out of the comic rather than the film and there are obvious signs, but the bottom line is both endings probably would have worked with the TV series because of Rorschach's Journal. The film doesn't feel overlong (we watched the Director's Cut) and it works on a number of levels. One thinks that maybe whatever backlash there was about the film might be down to the lack of Alan Moore's name on the credits and chunks of his dialogue lifted into the film. My take has always been Hollywood wins and the only people who suffer, albeit financially, are those who go against it. The money he could have made from projects such as this could have been ploughed into projects that soothed his wounded pride or a new jacuzzi...
***
The stand out Sci-Fi show of the year so far has been Debris, even if it feels it might be going off in a direction that the fantastic element of the series doesn't really need. It's like the X-Files meets some twisted mutant version of Tales of the Unexpected and the main characters are not conventional in a lot of ways. It has a bit of Fringe in there, just to keep you off balance, but essentially it's about fragments of a spaceship hitting earth, each bestowed with a peculiar power or ability - from dimensional shifting to time travel to reverse terra-forming. However, the acting lets it down a little and the fact it feels like a 'lockdown TV show'.
***
[Joss Whedon's] The Nevers was a bit of a curate's egg. There was much to like about it, but a lot to worry about and feel uncomfortable about. We've only been treated to the opening 6 episodes because the creator has been fired and someone else will handle the second half of the series and any subsequent efforts - at least this was the case at time of writing. It's like an almost exclusively female version of the X-Men crossed with Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children with a bit of period drama - it's set around 1899 - and some, frankly, unnecessary sex and nudity thrown in (which kind of makes you squirm a little knowing some of the reasons for Whedon's exit). It's not without its merits, but considering the length of each episode, we seemed to be no further to anything until the last part of this series section when it dumped almost far too much info into our brains.
It's about the future and a race of aliens who can essentially fix the planet for us but the armies of the God believers want the aliens killed/destroyed/obliterated so it appears it took some minds and travelled back 300+ years and 'started' again... Or at least that's how I think it is.
There's too much going on; too much mystery and not enough character development and even when that is done - which was actually redundant in the end - it feels like a sketchbook rather than a finished painting. It gets 10 out of 10 for sets and costumes, but much less for the rest. I will give the next part a go, if it's ever made.
***
Many series are falling by the wayside, either unwatched or given up on. We gave Invincible three episodes before realising that however 'adult' it might seem, it's still just a thinly-veiled anime rip-off and not very good. We tried to catch up with Manifest during the dark part of the winter, but gave up after 10 episodes because it felt like a slightly more religiously overt Lost, and even if it ends up being great; we got bored.
We aren't bothering with Lisey's Story, the latest Stephen King adaptation, based on the fact the book was a bit pants and the reviews all suggest the series is even worse.
We watched Line of Duty and while we agreed with many on-line critiques that the series was really anti-climatic, I have no doubt that at some point towards the end of 2022 we'll see adverts for THE FINAL SERIES OF LINE OF DUTY! And apologies if I've done this bit before; I remember commenting about it but no longer can remember who I am let alone where I said things...
***
Bob Odenkirk's Nobody is 98 minutes of mindless violent fun. I really enjoyed it. I shouldn't have.
***
We finally watched Sharp Objects, the Amy Adams dark deep south mystery from 2018. It was hard watching and has a post credits scene that puts all other post credit scenes to shame...
***
And that brings us to Loki...
I'll admit to have been looking forward to this one and I'll also admit I fell asleep twice during the first episode. I think the first episode is more of a cryptic map for the coming four years of Marvel films than anything else, but because nothing really happens it just felt like it was already treading water. It felt strangely diluted.
It's also tough to really guess what's going to happen, because pretty much every teaser of the series came from the first episode. I'd like to put it out there that Owen Wilson's Mobius M. Mobius could well be Kang the Conqueror in disguise because the premise we're given for his and Loki's involvement seems uncharacteristically 'human', not at all TVA. Also, we're being teased that the six-part series (already renewed for S2) is a 'heist movie'.
I believe, seeing as Loki is a little bit more A list than WandaVision and TFATWS, that this series, if it hasn't already, will begin to introduce us to alternatives, paving the way for the hinted at themes of the upcoming Spider-Man and Doctor Strange films.
I'll tell you what I also firmly believe...
Avengers: Endgame was the perfect JUMPING OFF POINT.
