Modern Culture - Mostly Marvel Arse Drippings and Old Films

I know, it's not even December and already I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with stuff to talk about, but as this woeful World Cup will still be fucking up the TV schedules until a week before Santa gets here, I don't expect there's going to be that much to talk about after it, as there is usually very little new stuff unless you like pointless [small P] Christmas specials.

However, you can always guarantee that Marvel/Disney will come up with a pointless Christmas special and they did (albeit with a couple of Easter Eggs thrown in so that the next film makes more sense)...

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special was a sort of entertaining 38 minutes of nonsense with a mix of piss poor special effects, some jolly bits of Christmas cheer and even Kevin Bacon - who was surprisingly better than I expected, even if we didn't really need his little C&W Christmas tune near the end. This was really all about Drax and Mantis fucking up Hollywood with a little bit of Starlord and some cameos from Nebula, Rocket and Groot (so obviously a man in a wooden suit rather than actual CGI). 

We've heard that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 is going to be the last outing for this particular group of heroes, but the post credit scene of this Holiday Special suggested that until that film finally lands, Marvel and Disney is going to milk this particular subsection of the franchise until it bleeds from its putrid cock.

This wasn't a patch on the Werewolf by Night special, but that was the best thing Marvel has done since Infinity War and most of these 'specials' are probably never going to be that special. GotGHS apparently was an idea James Gunn had after the very first film; I do wish it had stayed an idea, but just to spoil it for you: Mantis is Peter's (half) sister and the Guardians have bought Nowhere - what they intend to do with it is anyone guess, but I expect the new and fucked up Adam Warlock will destroy it and the last dregs of my hope that the MCU might have a salvation movie in the future...

***

Despite their ubiquitous presence on Film4, I'd resisted the two Deadpool films for a long time; not because I didn't enjoy them, but because whenever I've been channel hopping at the end of the day, I've usually ended up watching five or ten minutes of either of these films. They remind me, in a perverse way, of An American Tail, a film I've never actually watched from start to finish but during the 1990s when I used to visit my mate Maurice, the film was always on, being watched by his then 5 year old daughter. I've probably seen the film a dozen times without ever completing it in one sitting.

Deadpool and Ryan Reynolds seem to be one of those guilty pleasures that's a bit like flannelette sheets when it isn't freezing cold outside and don't ask me to explain that analogy because it would probably fall apart if I did. 

The films are essentially throwaway nonsense that take place in a Marvel Universe that seems slightly different from other Marvel universes - of which we now know there are multiples versions of - possibly a similar universe to She Hulk because, you know, fourth wall breaking. The thing about Deadpool is his films, unlike She Hulk's TV series, are actually funny; laugh out loud funny rather than mildly amusing if you get the joke.

The first film is great, even if far too much of it is spent on Deadpool's origin and it falls into that abhorrent old Marvel film category of 'mutants can be created rather than being born that way' which has always made any Marvel mutant film immediately shite. Cut away the superfluous bollocks and Deadpool is a monster of a movie, with excellent set pieces and some really funny jokes and one can see why it was such a huge hit. Reynolds is a genuinely funny guy who brings essentially himself to the ball and has great fun with it; the script is mostly as sharp as a tack and it literally spends most of the time pushing the limits of tastelessness. 

The villains are a bit stereotypical, the use of lesser known X-Men suggests that when the film was made no one wanted to potentially hurt the X-Men franchise, but Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (who?) hold the thing together and while it ultimately feels like a bunch of comedy set pieces stitched together with a weak plot it was one of the highlights of 2016.

Deadpool 2 on the other hand is far too long and has far too many unwanted and poorly acted characters... well... character, that of Julian Dennison, the New Zealand 'actor' who shot to fame starring with Sam Neill in Hunt for the Wilderpeople and probably should have retired after that film. I don't have a problem with actors from New Zealand, even if they do sound very odd, but I do have problems with actors who can't act and bring fuck all to the show and Dennison fits that description perfectly. The only thing that's redeeming about his character - Firefist - is his name and that wasn't exploited nearly as much as it should have been.

I would have enjoyed this film had it simply been a series of set pieces where Wade Wilson just kills loads of people in inventive ways, but this film tries to be really clever and it fails. Don't get me wrong, it's great fun and doubles up on the LOL moments, but so much of it is unnecessary and feels like padding. It's like they tried very hard to hide a serious film under the slapstick comedy exterior.

I thought the idea of X-Force was a cool one; I thought the idea of killing all of them bar Domino off at the start of their first mission was even more inspired; but I didn't like Eddie Marsan's character or what he represented; I found Cable to be just a tad annoying and in places ridiculous (although when Wade calls him Thanos that was his best moment, but when Cable uses the C word that was his worst moment; that was not needed - like when Loki calls Natasha a quim) and there wasn't enough time with the original supporting cast. Domino, however, was a class addition and I hope Marvel finds a way to keep her around.

I think the main problem I had with the sequel is despite being a thoroughly enjoyable film, the final post credit scene sort of ruined it all without ruining it at all... 

Huh? 

Let me explain: as an aficionado of time travel films, they're usually made with a degree of logic and common sense, but Marvel's excursions into time travel - be it The X-Men, Deadpool or the Avengers have dispensed with logic completely; it's just a vehicle not a plot and with Deadpool 2 it's reduced to being a trivial sideshow. Cable has come from the future (with his daughter's teddy bear) to kill Firefist before he turns into a psychopathic killer who offs his wife and kid; Wade stops him, converts Firefist to not being a killer and everything in the future become nice again. Wade wouldn't have been involved in any of the film had Ness not been killed by a token Russian mafia thug; he wouldn't have joined the X-Men and he wouldn't have ended up in the Ice Box (a stronghold for evil mutants) with Firefist... Cable not returning to the future also causes a paradox that could result in him never marrying his wife or having the daughter the entire film was based around... So far so good?

At the end of the film Wade using one of Cable's time travel doodads goes back in time and prevents Ness from being killed, which technically speaking would prevent any of his subsequent involvement in the rest of the film. She wouldn't die, he wouldn't be rescued by Colossus, there would be no X-Force, Cable would come to the past and kill Firefist unopposed and the same outcome would be achieved except we'd have one dead New Zealand actor. Deadpool 2 suffers the same paradoxical bollocks that made Avengers: Endgame such a stinker of a film when you put it under any scrutiny.

That said, I totally love the Deadpool films and I cannot believe that Deadpool 3 - whenever it arrives - will be a patch on the first two because I do not believe that Marvel/Disney would allow such a massively bad taste movie to exist under their banner. The MCU has embraced 'shit' as an expletive, even this week's Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special has at least one shit in it and that 'special' was essentially aimed at kids, but I can't see them allowing something that moves the boundaries of bad taste to entirely new horizons.

On a related subject, I was totally unaware that there is something like 30 Deadpool shorts - not the clothing, but little filmettes that Reynolds has made since the first film debuted in 2016. I get it that the character has essentially helped turn Reynolds into an A list superstar but this smacks a little of overkill.

***

I don't like Christmas very much and I think the last decent Christmas film was made in the 1950s, but I've changed my mind recently when I saw a film - in November - called The Man Who Invented Christmas starring Dan Stevens and the late, great Christopher Plummer.

It's a fictionalised story about how Charles Dickens came up with and developed A Christmas Carol and it was absolutely delightful, extremely funny and felt like it should have been the Christmas Day afternoon film on any of the major TV stations. Oddly enough, one of the best Christmas films ever is Alastair Sim's version of Scrooge made in 1951, this wasn't as good as that but it's a close run thing and I urge you to watch it next time it's on TV and you get the chance. 

***

We watched Eternals again. Given that we found both Black Widow and Shang-Chi better the second time around (although I still don't get the latter and why it was even made), we expected to go into this one feeling like we might enjoy it more. I don't think we did...

One of our friends thinks this is the best MCU film of all time, but I'm now convinced he just likes being contrary, probably to be slightly controversial and maybe to get people talking, but how anyone can think that this abomination of a film is the best thing Marvel has ever done probably needs therapy, because it simply isn't. It's full of bad acting; it's driven by a implausibly bad script and it simply makes little or no sense. It has moments in it that are great, but these are so few and far between that they lose any impact they might have had.

It's also either far too long or not long enough (I'd go for the former because if this had gone on for longer than the 2+ hours I would have lost the will to live). The characters make little or no sense; we have an Indian guy, an Asian guy, a black gay guy, a deaf woman, another Oriental woman, a Hispanic woman and an American woman; we have a child, a Scottish guy and an Irish guy - why? Why are they a selected bunch of ethnicities when they arrived on Earth before even such a concept even existed? Why is there a deaf woman, but not a blind one or one that can't smell or one that is incontinent? Why does this film even exist?

In the comics, Thanos at some point (which has probably been retroactively re-written) was classed as being related to the Deviants - the villains the Eternals are trusted to protect the earth from, yet despite a kind of generally plausible reason for them never getting involved in the Infinity War, it kind of feels like they're not really protecting anything, especially if the entire reason for them being there is to ensure the population of the planet exceeds a certain number in the billions so that a new Celestial can be born, thus ending the lives of all those billions of people. Surely, when Thanos cut the world's population in half that would have been classed as a threat to the creation of the new Celestial and good reason for the bunch of mismatched heroes, with strange unrelated powers and accents, to get involved? Or how come there's never been a recorded sighting of the Deviants by any other hero or person in the MCU before this film?

It's a fucking abortion of a film. Laughable for so many reasons. Probably the biggest being that Chloé Zhao, the director, publicly stated she wanted as little CGI in the film as possible and it's probably the most heavily CGI'd film in the MCU's existence and most of it is shit. Or how about when Thena - played poorly by Angelina Jolie - goes all rogue for absolutely no reason whatsoever, out of the blue, with no foreshadowing and it takes nearly an hour for the script to even bother to address her crazy bat shit attempts at killing all her 'siblings'. 

I really wanted to like this film more than I did first time around and I ended up hating it even more. Only Avengers: Endgame, which I liked as a spectacle film, until you put it under actual scrutiny, has had such a negative reaction from me. Even the fact that a few of the Eternals are actually cunts and a couple of them are essentially cowards doesn't make this a good [as in clever] film and the most heartbreaking thing about it is at the end when you get ... The Eternals will return caption, like we've just watched an Avengers or Thor film. I don't want them to return unless they get killed off in the pre-credit scene before the film actually starts.

There has been some extremely ill-judged decisions by Kevin Feige and the MCU but it seems that both Marvel and DC, at present, seem to think that ideas Jack Kirby had in the 1970s are the next best thing to the ideas he and Stan Lee had in the 1960s - they're not. Kirby stopped having good ideas around 1964, by the 1970s if you weren't aware he was an old man you'd think was on crappier versions of the drugs that Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart were taking. Nothing this one-time comics genius created after 1970 is worth anything at all and this proved it beyond reasonable doubt; it is the worst Marvel film ever made; even worse than the Punisher films, the Ghost Rider films or that Man-Thing film they made in the early noughties. Eternals is irredeemable shit.  

***

I take that back. The Eternals is not the worst Marvel film ever... It's the third worst film but absolutely the worst MCU film. 

I said I wasn't going to watch the two Ghost Rider films having seen the first one 15 years ago and never having seen the 'follow up'. So we decided to be gluttons for punishment and watch both films in one sitting rather than subject ourselves to more World Cup bollocks.

The first thing I noticed was that Ghost Rider (2007) must have impressed us so much we put any memory of it out of our brains so that if we ever watched it again it would seem fresh and unwatched because neither of us remembered anything about it at all. The second thing is that it's described as 'action fantasy thriller' on IMDB and has an almighty 5.2 rating. What it should have been described as was 'action comedy bollocks' and been given a 3 rating, mainly because the special effects weren't that bad for a film with a budget of $25.

The third thing I noticed is that Eva Mendes - who played Roxy, Johnny Blaze's love interest, must have felt a little soiled and desperately hoping for her own personal 'Me Too' moment because the director obviously told her to spend most of the film with as much cleavage showing without her bra or nipples getting in the shot and the fourth thing about it was how utterly shite it was from Nick Cage's phoned in acting to the things in it that made so little sense I'm still scratching my head about them - such as why Sam Elliot was in it and what the point of his original Ghost Rider cameo near the end was. Yet, compared to the sequel it's an absolute masterpiece; a Titanic of a superhero film that at least had some ideas in it which might have been redeeming had it not been a load of diarrhoea gushing from the anus of abysmal films.

Yet, you might have noticed I said the words 'compared to the sequel' and that's because Spirit of Vengeance is a film that simply made as much sense as a drunken stoned Scotsman with no teeth explaining his theory of nuclear fission to a chimpanzee. For starters even though it was a 'sequel' it felt like the Marvel Multiverse was at play again with a twisted recap of Johnny Blaze's origin but this time really different from the first film and without Peter Fonda's devil, now replaced by Ciarán Hinds' Rourke - also the devil, but not, or maybe he is... The entire film had lost me within the opening five minutes.

Blaze was now in eastern Europe running away from his past and straight into a new story involving the son of the devil and the promise that he can be cured of his curse by Idris Elba's religious brotherhood - led by Anthony Head. A curse you might recall the devil offered to lift himself but Blaze turned him down (at the end of the first film). If the script, acting and general feel of the first film was bad this film's only redeeming feature is that the actual Ghost Rider looked a little more realistic than the first film's, even if very little of that film remained. This really must be another universe's Johnny Blaze unless the people who made it thought that people who watched the first film would do what we did and completely forget everything about it.

This is the worst Marvel film ever made, by a country mile and a half. This film makes Eternals seem like Citizen Kane or Casablanca. It is every bad shit you've ever had put into one of those washing machine balls and shoved into your entire wardrobe with some dynamite on a hot wash. Don't be tempted to watch it on that recommendation because you will want to die horribly at the hands of slugs with teeth.

***

The World Cup... As a fan of football (although as a Spurs supporter that is debatable at times) I have to say outside of this morally bankrupt competition, this has been one of the most boring tournaments I've ever witnessed. Yes, there have been a couple of thrashings and 6 goal thrillers, but generally it's been dull and uninspiring with a heap of 0-0 draws, which has made not bothering to watch most of it really easy.

However, putting my proper footballing hat on, I expect a lot of footballers will be retiring from the international scene at Christmas and a lot more managers will find themselves out of work before Santa brings them their massive payoffs. While I expect the eventual winners will be one of the chosen few (France, Brazil, Spain), it has been one full of weird results - such as Costa Rica losing 7-0 to Spain and then beating Japan 1-0 after Japan had beaten Germany 2-1. 

I expect whoever wins it no one outside of that country will give a flying fuck.

***

In the last couple of weeks, we've gone out of our way to watch two films with extremely high ratings on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, which for one reason or another we'd never got around to watching.

The first was Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain with Huge Ackman and Rachel Weiss. Despite its 7.2 rating on IMDB - even though it's almost 17 years old - we found it, like other Aronofsky films, a trifle weird, strange and probably not worth such a high rating despite it looking good and having some great acting in it. The film is essentially about love and loss and living forever all wrapped up in three different but interconnecting stories. As the wife said, it isn't a film we'd go out of our way to watch again.

The other was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which we'd avoided largely because of Jim Carey, who neither of us like and the last film of his I watched was actually The Mask and that was like 1994. We were pretty much blown away at how good the film was and how, like The Fountain, it all clicked together - but in a far more coherent way despite the number of headfucks it dished out. Oddly enough, like so many other films - like Godzilla had Wanda and Pietro together in different roles - this had two Marvel alumni in Gwen (Kirsten Dunst - being ultra sexy) Stacey and Bruce (a young Mark Ruffalo) Banner in supporting roles, as well as a Hobbit and the often brilliant Kate Winslet. It's a film I wished we'd watched ten years ago so we could watch it again and not remembered much about it at all. I expect most of the people reading this will have seen it but if you haven't it deserves the extremely high rating it gets from all film websites; it's a cracker.

***

We've been recording films off the TV a lot in the last four to six weeks - basically because since I was ill my lifestyle has changed and I spend about a tenth of the time I did on the computer; less social media, no games and pretty much blogs only, because I was not writing as much as I should have been and procrastination has always been very easy for me.

Our go to channels are Film 4 and ITV4, both of which have an array of old films, classics and things we've seen but not for a very long time - such as Pitch Black and Predator 2 - but lurking in the wee hours of a midweek I noticed the first Bill Murray film, directed by Ivan Reitman and scripted (partially) by Harold Ramis; yes, the Ghostbuster team and I realised that I hadn't seen the film for at least 40 years and given it was made in the mid-70s and called Meatballs I expected it was going to be dated and probably full of boobs (of the mammary kind)...

Oh heavens above... No wonder Film 4 had a warning about the themes and language of the film being from an era when it was considered okay. Meatballs is a deeply, deeply offensive movie that I expect most paedophiles have in their collections. Does Bill Murray look back on this film and wince with pain? We literally lasted until the first advert break, a little over 20 minutes, because it wasn't funny: a character was called Spaz; the older camp leaders (it was set on a summer camp for kids aged between 6 and 16) were making almost continuous sexual innuendos (and some not even innuendo) to 13 and 14 year old girls and while it might have been a realistic commentary on what the sexually repressed Mid West might have been like in 1976, it was more like a bad porn film than a comedy.

Why on earth did Film 4 show this film, even in the small hours? Are there not a bunch of better, more appropriate films to show? I can think of a list of films I have either never seen on TV or haven't been shown for donkeys years that would have been better and not caused such offense and while I'm aware that offense is a very personal thing, I expect any parent watching this film expecting to see Bill Murray in a film like Caddyshack (his second film) will feel dirty and slightly soiled and astounded that someone at Channel 4 and its sideshows didn't at least watch this first to see just how anachronistic and morally objectionable it is.

After I deleted it, we watched Pitch Black again; the first time in over 15 years and while it still has really poor acting and some of cinema's worst mumbling, as a creepy sci fi film it's still pretty good and has some of the best aliens since, well, Alien. One thing I did notice about it was that the only thing Vin Diesel does nowadays is the voice of Groot and given the vocal range of this alien tree, he probably doesn't spend a lot of time in any studio or sound booth.

Modern Culture: The Morally Ambiguous meets The Morally Dubious

Oh yeah, spoilers ahead...

There's not much to talk about TV at this time of the year unless you want to waffle on about the World Cup (which I will) or hope that something turns up on TV or at the cinema that is worth the effort. That said, I managed to find some things to write about, even if most of it has made me feel slightly queasy and make me want to burn my eyes out with phosphorus exposed to air.

Black Adam has to be one of the best examples of a mix of offensive and contradictory - if such a beast actually existed before this latest DC/Shazam spin-off. Before I even get into criticising this film, there's a point in it when the Justice Society turn up in the Wakanda-esque Arab kingdom of Kahndaq to stop and apprehend Black Adam because, presumably, the USA thinks he's too powerful to exist. This just smacks of US imperialism and shows what a thoroughly horrible and morally shit character Amanda Waller is, either in films, TV or originally comics. This is even pointed out by female lead Sarah Shahi when the JSA turn up and start destroying her city to stop a character who is, initially, saving her city from dodgy invaders. It's just offensive and regardless of how potentially nasty Adam might be you immediately want the four members of the JSA to die horrible deaths like most of the Intergang members suffered, but for some strange reason Adam is unable to destroy the heroes as easily as the villains.

Then there's the fact that it's essentially a sort of Shazam with some dark tweaks and gets even more Wakanda with the introduction of Eternium - a fabulous rare element that yadda yadda yadda... It's Vibranium with Arabs and an anti-hero who is like a cross between Superman, Flash and Batman, but black and Arab and 5000 years old and misunderstood etc etc etc...

It's a film let down by poor everything apart from Dwayne Johnson, who is playing a silent but deadly version of Dwayne Johnson. It's an alright film given how shite most DC films are, but it's a very poor film given how good Shazam was. Shazam is pretty much how most DC films should be, even if Mark Strong is starting to be typecast as a DC villain, whether he's bald or red and bald or just bad (as in evil).

The problem with this film is it's so morally all over the place that you're with the guy who wants to kill people and I'm loathe to admit this but revenge seems to be a fitting reason for wiping out an evil king and his minions; fuck this altruistic US superhero bullshit; whatever Black Adam's secret is, frying wankers is a far more effective method than simply telling them off.

DC continues to have far more misses than hits and even with the imminent arrival of James Gunn as their films' showrunner, I can't see there ever being a consistency that is admired from afar. Whatever I think of Marvel films, DC makes movies to make as much money as they can for the least amount of thought, until they stop that's all she wrote. 

One last thing: at the end of the credits there's reference to Jack Kirby's Fourth World and I can't understand why. What was in Black Adam that had anything to do with Kirby's short foray into the DC Universe? I couldn't find anything when I googled it, but to be honest I didn't look very hard because I didn't really care, but if someone knows, please let me know!

***

Okay, I can't resist talking about the finale, the final ever episode of The Walking Dead, subtitled Happy Ever After, which is a lie as is the words final, last ever and ending. This bloated corpse of a TV series didn't promise us resolution, it promised us the last episode of this specific part of the expanding franchise suffering from the law of diminishing returns. Some long lasting cast members died; there was some maudlin music and there was some conclusions that felt like they'd been shoehorned in to make it easy for some people to call it a day and jump off the horse and find some other shite to become engaged with.

What we got in the extended finale was the ending to the story of season 11 with an epilogue tagged onto the end which felt more like an extended advert for the three new spin-off series and for the fast descending back into shite Fear the Walking Dead. We had the preview to Rick & Michonne, which is basically Andy Lincoln's sadness at leaving the franchise in the first place and not becoming the A-list star he thought he would; where as Danai Gurira is quickly becoming a top actress, so why she's getting involved in this is beyond my understanding.

Then there's Daryl Dixon, the adventures of Daryl (but not Carol, because she didn't want to spend 9 months a year in Europe filming the series, which begs the question why they're filming it in Europe - is it cheaper? Does Daryl find a plane, a 747 maybe, a decides to see how the rest of the world is fairing?) The fact that Daryl is a one-note character whose one responsibility was to look after Judith after her dad and step mum fucked off and doesn't do a good job at that suggests this is a series that will need some strong supporting characters.

Then there's Dead City (or is it Cities, I can't remember and can't be arsed to check), which appears to be a Negan and Maggie spin-off series. Now there's a match made in hell if ever there was one. Negan is actually quite a decent character albeit one who has gone from megalomaniac psychopath to anti-hero with a heart and Maggie hates him because Negan turned her husband's head into an ashtray. A Negan spin-off I could almost get behind, but this is a stretch too far.

Plus there's the return of Madison to Fear. For those of you that give a shit, Madison was the main protagonist in the first three series of this spin-off. She was a woefully dull character who should have died multiple times but somehow didn't until she was 'killed off' - but we never saw the body. Now, just as her only surviving child is infected with the zombie virus, she's back with Morgan in tow tracking down dodgy child stealing armageddonists and subsequently making Fear once again the most want-to-be-missed show on AMC.

The finale of TWD is my jumping off point. There won't be any more mentions of the franchise from me; if you care about it watch it, just don't expect me to slag it off eloquently any longer...

***

Eleven years ago, the BBC had a six-part historical drama called Desperate Romantics, the wife watched it and recently recorded the repeats off BBC4 for a bit of nostalgic viewing. I decided to watch it - for the first time - and I can only say if you get the chance watch it as well. It's quality TV with Aiden Turner playing pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti - a thoroughly cuntish human being if ever there was one. It's a cracking series and proves one thing I doubted for a long time, Rafe Spall can actually act and Turner might be an absolute heartthrob but he's at his best when he plays thoroughly rakish bastards.

***

 Which brings me nicely to the World Cup in Qatar...

Yeah, I know, I write about football elsewhere but this isn't really about the football more about the politics - which I also write about elsewhere - and the general feeling that we're witnessing the afterbirth of the coupling of the most corrupt organisation in the world - FIFA - and one of the nastiest quasi-Conservative Muslim countries also in the same world - Qatar. A place that is essentially a modern front for Saudi Arabia, a country that makes North Korea seem like an adventure park with clowns.

Speaking of the Saudis, just after they caused a seismic shock by beating one of the pre-tournament favourites Argentina (who got the competition when led by a well dodgy military junta back in the 70s), they beheaded 17 prisoners - in three days, as opposed to the seven people a week the country usually executes. Qatar might also execute people but they have balloons and colourful things to make you think that homosexuality and women's rights actually are allowed to exist and aren't punishable by death. If ever there was part of the planet that was morally shot to pieces it's this part of the Middle East and before you start saying shit like 'When in Rome...' or 'It's their culture, innit?' If England and Wales weren't playing there the criticism of this country would probably be widespread, even among the gammons who are trying to justify it because...you know... football. 

Everything about the competition was guaranteed to not be right once we passed the point of no return and it couldn't be held somewhere else. For all the Qataris promises, anyone with half a brain knew that once the tournament was underway anyone who isn't heterosexual was going to be in fear of their lives and anyone who doesn't have a penis is going to feel as though they've been transported back in time to a bygone age where women were third class citizens after slugs and sofas.

I don't care if England do well because this is an abhorrent spectacle, which incidentally cost £191billion more than the last World Cup, which at £9 billion was the most expensive and was held in Russia, which had already annexed Crimea by this time and Putin was already being heralded as the latest dictator en vogue. If FIFA doesn't stand for how to be so transparently corrupt and only interested in swelling its coffers with filthy cash then I need someone to tell me what good they actually do, because Giovanni Infantino's rant just before the tournament had no less than ELEVEN factually inaccurate lies in it as he berated the West for being far worse than the Middle East. If ever a man deserved to be beheaded by the Saudis it's this bald cunt.

One of the things that has annoyed me about gammons is their feeble attempts at justifying the barbaric culture of these extreme Muslim states. I have absolutely no problem with Muslims; I'd defend them more than Christians - who I've had experience of being truly nasty people - but the particular brands of Islam that these Middle East countries follow is the same kind that the gammons would be frothing at the mouths about if it happened in Bradford. The double standards of British arseholes is crazy, but hey, the UK press is still trying to convince everyone that people going on strike are worse than paedophiles, while conveniently ignoring the fact that the bosses of these 'private' companies wallow in massive amounts of cash they probably don't need. But, you know, people struggling are far worse than arseholes with yachts. 

The same gammons who defend Arabs owning their football clubs and indulging in sports washing are quick to morally judge the LGBTQ+ community, therefore basically showing us what kind of people they truly are; but we need to remember is these are the same idiots and arseholes who resort to whataboutery whenever they're faced with a moral dilemma that they shouldn't even have an opinion on. However, the other side of the coin has people outraged by this World Cup using the same tactic about the European clubs backdown regarding the One Love armband; conveniently pointing out that the country where the England kit is manufactured pays its workers less than £1 a day, because, you know, pointing out some other fucking wrong thing in the world makes the original wrong thing less wrong.

The bottom line is FIFA should disband or be abolished, replaced by a non-corrupt World Football Federation with extremely tight rules that disallows lobbying, backhanders and blatant examples of rich cunts benefitting from allowing morally dubious countries from having a competition that shouldn't be subject to the amount of justified criticism the last two have been. 

One of the worst things about this anathema is the TV stations' belief that everyone wants to watch it therefore meaning the rest of television is old repeats and crap reality bollocks. Personally, it simply highlights to me what a crap world we live in and how it's unlikely to get any better.

Modern Culture: Oops, I Did it Again (eventually)

This article - like the previous - contains spoilers. I know I should warn you every time I do one, but Elvis is dead and so is the Queen... Oh and most of this was written before I got ill, so it's nearly a month old.

The epic conclusion to series one of House of the Dragon leaked a few days early, much to HBO's anger and our otherwise dull Saturday night's delight. It was... bleak, grim and uplifting and had a conclusion, if not in some ways expected, that was still one of those, 'Oh shit, I bet you wish you hadn't been such a twat' moments that you know will have far reaching consequences for the next three series.

It was proper Dragon v Dragon stuff, except it was like Mike Tyson meeting Eddie the Eagle Edwards in a MMA boxing match with no skis rather than any fair contest. In fact, after a belligerent start, the smaller dragon was taken out with just one bite, rider and all. So if anything was needed to tweak Rhaenyrs' nipple it was having her second son become dragon lunch and the final scene of the black queen's shock and awe was all you needed to set you up for a year long wait until the next 10 episodes drop.

It's been much better than I thought it would be and has reinvigorated the GOT franchise without too much sex and convoluted plots. Let's hope it doesn't get bogged down in usual GRRM bullshit. Even Matt Smith has been slightly restrained and less Doctor Whoish...

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If there was ever a TV show that I probably obsess over more than anything else, despite not really being a fan of is Doctor Who. I think I allow myself to get caught up in its fan side and the industry that has grown up around it. I find myself drawn to speculation as much as any Whovian and even more compelled to write about it. The thing is I've been trying to think of a comparison in the TV world; a program I feel so important to watch yet don't really care much about it. I don't think I have one.

I got hooked on the Doctor back in the early 1970s with the arrival of Jon Pertwee as No.3 and for four years I lapped it up. Sarah Jane Smith, Jo Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, Sgt Benton, Bessie... it was cracking stuff even if the sets wobbled and the special FX weren't. I was 13 when Tom Baker took over and by the time I was 14 I'd stopped watching the series, I couldn't get on with this 4th Doctor and for seven years the show passed me by. I got a jolt back into it with the arrival of Peter Davidson and stuck with it until Colin Baker started fighting Liquorice All-sorts Men and I never watched a single episode of Sylvester McCoy's tenure - Doctor Who was dead to me.

The announcement of the feature film was greeted with a lot of interest; the world of special effects had moved on considerably in the seven years since the last BBC episode and this big budget thriller, set in New York looked great, unfortunately it just wasn't that good, but it became canon and the movement to bring the Doctor back really got underway. Fast forward nearly a decade and we had a Doctor Who for the 21st century brought to us by Russell T Davies and what had always essentially been a kids program that adults watched, became a for-all-the-family program with much darker elements than ever before and dealing with issues that had never been touched upon in such an environment.

Chris Ecclestone was good, broody and enigmatic and either should never have been cast or should have been coerced into at least doing more than one series. David Tennant, Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi and Jodi Whitaker (with a brief interlude by John Hurt, just to confuse things more) all followed; there were some great episodes and there were some real stinkers; Davies moved on, Moffatt arrived and annoyed lots of people and then Chibnall replaced him and did what I like to think of as a Truss on the show; he fucked it up big time...

Jodi Whitaker was a great choice as a Doctor, but I think any woman would have been and having a token woman demeans it greatly. Chris Chibnall was a woefully inadequate show runner and by trying to 'fix' the Doctor he royally fucked her up. Absolute stinky stories, poor quality supporting cast and scripts that would seem poor for CBBC; Whitaker's Doctor persona was fucking awful and became unbelievably annoying every time she opened her mouth. It wasn't ever her delivery, it was the words she had to speak... Ugh...

Which brings us to Doctor Who: The Power of the Doctor and Jodi's final farewell. So much about this was good that it made you wonder where Chibnall had been hiding his stories, but even this better-than-usual story was contrived nonsense; it was the cone game yet again. If it wasn't the sonic screwdriver to the rescue it was the cone game; how the fuck isn't the Doctor dead? Why hasn't one of their really nasty villains, like the Master just picked up a gun and shot the Doctor - twice - one through each heart, then incinerated the body in a sun? How come every weapon-wielding alien in the universe is a worse shot than a Star Wars Stormtrooper? How did the Cybermen or the Daleks conquer the universe? Basically the Doctor's biggest weapon is his/her name. 'I am the Doctor' has more effect than facing down someone with an army. 

Essentially this was a big plan by The Master, who somehow survived the destruction of Gallifrey (again) has managed to team up the Daleks and the Cybermen to help him finally destroy the Doctor - an obsession that is fantastically realised, but I've struggled for years to understand why. The Master is an utter enigma and if Steven Moffatt did anything right it was Missy; why the new incarnation (if he is indeed the most recent) has reverted to psychopathic type seems like poor character development to me. Anyhow, he swaps bodies with the Doctor, except she's now dead and he's her, looking like him. She's at a cliff edge meeting selected versions of her former self who are telling her some cod bullshit about choices and not being ready and it was at this point the wife prodded me awake. Boring boring boring... Is it just me that believes the BBC has a fantastic template for a brilliant ongoing TV series but just fucks it with a big stick so much it's become impossible to make it linear and comprehensible?

The show is full of nostalgia to the point it almost brings a lump to your throat even if you don't give a flying fuck and then the big reveal - the new Doctor... Except... Except the BBC announcer prior to the start of the show said something like 'It's time for a new doctor or maybe an old one' - not exactly those words, but most definitely an oblique spoiler. The new Doctor is an old Doctor, the David Tennant Doctor, looking a wee bit older but most definitely him. Oh no, what's happened? Where's the new gay black man Doctor we were promised? Why have I written so much about something that shouldn't bother me so much? I have a number of friends who are huge Doctor Who fans, fuck knows what they feel like about this dog's dinner of a TV series.

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Scraping the bottom of the barrel time...

Part of me wanted to go into this and probably the next column without finding something MCU to talk about, but it's a drug, an addiction and I have three trailers to dissect...

There were three trailers for Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever before it was released a ferw weeks ago and you can pretty much work out the following things: T'Challa is dead, there's a bunch of vibranium-wielding aquahumans who have suddenly appeared, led by a Hispanic looking bloke with small wings on his feet (Namor) and he wants Wakanda's vibranium and a new female Black Panther is going to turn up. The first and last parts seem fine, it's the Atlantis, Sub-Mariner, secret war elements that bother me. 

I appreciate that Namor, the Sub-Mariner has been in the [extended] Marvel Universe since the early 1940s and including him in the MCU is a no-brainer, but... on the balance it just adds more baggage to a story that's expanding faster than Brendan Fraser's waistline. You know the trailer is going to deceive and deflect from what is really happening, you know that Namor and his Atlanteans will probably team up with Wakanda against a common enemy, but ... Look, I know some people who liked the Aquaman film, but it felt a little like a post-modern The Man From Atlantis writ large with a budget and as Drop the Dead Donkey asked back in the 1990s, 'just how much crime is there underwater'? As The Boys likes to point out, The Deep is the most fucked up member of The Seven because of his weird aquatic fetishes and general stupidity. Underwater is often a joke. 

He also appears to have been retconned. Namor always had a faintly Oriental look about him, possibly a little bit of Japanese, but in Thor's body. Now he's Hispanic, the actor is Mexican, the look is more Conan than green briefs and I feel bad commenting about Marvel/Disney's diversity policy in a negative way, but...

Anyhow, we get a sneak peak of Ironheart and a lot of Angela Bassett emoting about loss all the while a remixed version of Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry plays over the top. I still struggle a little with the first film, being one of the few people who doesn't really rate it as more than average MCU and the feeling you get from this film is it's going more for the Infinity War styled Wakanda action rather than anything else... 

Do you know, writing that above sentence I saw the end of the MCU franchise... Every superhero film is essentially the same formula when it exhausts everything else - it's a big fight that you know, ultimately, the heroes will win. The thing that connects them and makes them less like copies is the difference in the characters and I'm seeing less character development and more set pieces as we become more familiar with the players. 

I hope I'm proved wrong, but I think Wakanda Forever might be a real stinker (it got 3 stars in the Guardian).

On the 25th October, the first trailer for Ant-Man & The Wasp in Quantumania arrived. It came out of the blue and wasn't really what I expected. Could it be that after two relatively benign films, Ant-Man is about to properly enter the real MCU (in a film with his name on it)? Scott Lang has faced Endgame, so his experience of dealing with crazy should be easier to control, but what we get with Quantumania is straight forward; there's (yet) another universe existing underneath our own one and it's far more dangerous. Natch. 

The trailer sends our heroes, the Wasp's parents and Scott's daughter into the Quantum Realm, which appears to be another MCU attempt at recreating a Star Wars-type world full of wondrous creatures and the initial excitement I felt at Marvel doing something 'proper' with Ant-Man was lost. It's a cosmic space film set within a micro-cosmos and Kang the Conqueror is either behind it or is manipulating events to allow him to escape (that last bit is pure speculation, if Kang is offering Scott something he needs you can bet there's a 'but' waiting in the wings.

It looks fantastic but it also looks 95% green screen and needs to be more than just a Guardians of the Galaxy meets Micronauts mash-up. A lot might change between now and February when it's released, but if this is a 'serious' Ant-Man film it needs to deliver. 

And finally The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which allegedly streams from November 25 and after seeing the trailer for it will someone please pass the bleach...

I want to give you a complete breakdown of the trailer including the fact that Kevin Bacon is in it, playing Kevin Bacon, or that Groot (might) be almost grown up again or that it appears to be set in the same universe as She-Hulk, but I'm not going to because I can no longer see the keyboard to write because my eyes and ears are full of bleach...

All trailers available on YouTube at the Marvel Entertainment page.

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Vesper is a feature film made by Belgians, Lithuanians and a few Brits. There are some deeply disturbing things that happen in it despite it largely being targeted for a YA audience. Eddie Marson is creepy, the sets are strange, the entire thing was grim, dirty and not overly enjoyable. It reminded me of a cross between Monsters and Annihilation but its problem was it was neither weird enough or compelling enough for a story ten minutes short of two hours.

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During my unexpected illness, we've been watching a lot of films, some of them memorable for all the wrong reasons...

I spent much of my time on the sofa watching the Legendary monster films - Godzilla (the Gareth Edwards 2013 version), Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla - King of the Monsters and Godzilla versus Kong and I enjoyed all of them to a certain degree. Edwards' giant lizard reboot was hampered by the acting and lack of Godzilla, but much of it had the Monsters maker's trademark feel, especially during the scenes in the overgrown Japanese township near the beginning. Skull Island was spoiled largely by an overblown and slightly stupid performance by Samuel L Jackson and the last two were ruined by the current fascination with Millie Bobby Brown, who really can't act and brings films (and TV series) she's in down to her level of crap acting.

It has been 45 years since I last watched The Exorcist II: The Heretic, the John Boorman follow-up to one of the greatest films of all time. It is a truly dreadful piece of shite with no less than three Oscar winners in it all hamming it up with a dreadful script on some of the most unconvincing sets you could possibly imagine. I remember leaving the cinema in the late 1970s, with my brother, wondering what the actual fuck I'd just watched and that is pretty much what both the wife and I thought after watching it the other night. It's probably one of the worst films ever made.

The Exorcist III: Legion is about midway between I and II, it's pretty much a great film until the last ten minutes when it goes a bit wobbly and is both creepy and really clever. The book, which is a direct sequel to William Peter Blatty's original is better, but he did write and direct this far better sequel than the second sequel ever could be.

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The Walking Dead finishes in the next few days; it has been on a constant decline since series four and while the wife has been a fan, I watch it out of habit alone. There's news of more spin-offs - one featuring Daryl and another with Rick and Michonne reunited (without their kids), plus there's Fear, which was quite good for a while then got lost up its own arse. Once TWD is over I'm probably never going to watch another zombie related thing ever again because they're all shit.