Modern Culture: The Week of Nothing and then Dark-ness

I suppose you can always find something in the week between Christmas and New Year to get excited about, at least that's what I always used to believe. The wife had Call the Midwife or The Detectorists while I have wondered what 2023 is going to bring because 2022 has ended squibbly and very moist. As usual this contains some spoilers, but mainly for old films.

The film rush continued with White Christmas - a film I regard as the best Christmas film of all time, if you suspend your ability to think and accept that it all managed to take place inside about five days and there's a lot wrong with the internal logic of the film, but possibly the most overlooked bit of weirdness was that Bing Crosby was actually six months older than Dean Jagger who played the retired general Waverley. Bing might have been up for following the old man wherever he might go, but he would have been wrong to think of him as a 'superior'. 

Bing was 53 when he made the film, Jagger was also 53 but for not as long. This was something I never knew but started to ponder as I watched it for the umpteenth time Christmas morning, something I also didn't know was that Vera-Ellen was seven years older than Rosemary Clooney yet played her 'crazy' younger sibling and no one would have doubted it.

The film is actually a smart satire of film musicals and sentimentality, but most people remember it for the tunes and the closing section - which also has no internal logic either, especially if you look at the timeline of it, but who's watching the clock, it's just a fabulous 50s musical.

***

Independence Day: Resurgence is notable for one thing, I didn't fall asleep watching it on Christmas Day (we recorded it a couple of days earlier) it really does feel like a film that is missing great chunks and lacks any kind of pace or jeopardy. Everything about it says - BIGGER and more threatening and yet it felt like no ideas searching for an idea to wrap around its Godzilla-lite finale.

Three times I asked the wife if I'd been asleep and I hadn't, so all I could think was as we'd recorded it from 6.40pm that Film 4 chopped some bits out and didn't check to see if it had any effect on the flow of the story. I seemed to be reminded, at least twice, that Will Smith wasn't in it and his son was - not his actual son, but his son in the story. They got all the original gang back but not Will Smith and I think that upset someone somewhere. 

It's a bit of a shit film with an ending that should have felt and been much better and bigger and bolder than it was and Will Smith wasn't in it, goddammit, but there were some pictures of him to ease the pain.

***

I, Robot and another Will Smith film, except the Independence Day sequel didn't have Smith in it, just a photograph, so this is just a Will Smith film and there's a lot of him in this 2004 'blockbuster'. 

This was a film that I'd forgotten almost everything about apart from the big set pieces with the lots of robots. In fact, I was quite surprised by how many robots were in it; not as background and space filler but as actually important to the plot, despite this having little or no similarity to the source material apart from the concept.

It was also just before Will Smith got older; so he still looks like a young man and he has the body to pull it off. The problem with the film is the way it unfolds itself by trying to act like it's not what it says on the tin. It's actually not that clever and some of the internal logic struggles to work and because it was made in 2004 there are some genuinely innovative ideas floating around, there are also some terribly dated ideas and some that just ain't gonna fly. What I did like about it and found it genuinely creepy was the design for the new personal robot and how you would not want that living under your roof. After this film it seemed movies about AI and robotics went for the look of as human as possible, whereas this went for the 'they're robots, they're scary' angle.

***

Happy Death Day is a film written by a friend of mine. When I say 'friend' I've met Scott Lobdell three times in total and I spent many months before I met him slagging him off. Well, not him, per se, but his writing ability that was largely unproven and yet he had walked into the biggest gig on the planet in the early 1990s and he agrees with me that he struggled. I reminded him and everyone connected with him, like clockwork and his editor used me as a stick to beat him with.

I don't think I'd had more than a twenty word exchange with Scott in the last 15 odd years; that wasn't because I was his fiercest and harshest critic; no that part of our relationship got buried around 1998 when Scott told me it was my fault he didn't give up writing The X-Men because he wanted to prove me wrong - he didn't give a fuck about the readers, he wanted me to acknowledge he was the right guy to write the X-Men and I eventually agreed that he'd improved to the point where he was right to think of the comic as his baby. It was also his dad's doing, when Scott said to him he was thinking of quitting X-Men because his editor was beating him up with my reviews, his dad told him to grow a pair and prove this critic wrong; I'm glad he did. 

The last time I had any meaningful contact with him was around the time this film came out and I sent him my best wishes and he sent me a message back thanking me for everything. 

One of my favourite films is Groundhog Day and this is essentially that film with a couple of slight twists; one of which being our protagonist is the victim of her own murder before resetting back to when she wakes up the morning of her impending death. The crazy thing about it is it's actually very good and the twist is she's running out of time to catch her killer because her cumulative deaths are having a very detrimental effect on her health - no shit. Obviously because it's a time travel/loop film it has no real logic, so why the crazy thing should even be considered a crazy thing isn't an issue, it just adds to the sense of jeopardy that wouldn't be there if it hadn't been introduced; there has to be some kind of redemption otherwise how and why did it even happen?

***

It's probably been 30 years since I sat down and watched all of Ghostbusters from start to finish and what it does is make you realise that in many ways it's such a superficial film, which were it to be made in 2022 it would be an hour longer and full of special effects; ones that look realistic because with the exception of the Stay Puft man, most of the special effects in this film come from the Table-Tennis-as-a-computer-game school of special effects. 

It has razor sharp but massively dated dialogue and Bill Murray's schtick could almost be seen as sexist, misogynistic and offensive if you didn't already know what a funny man he is and this is essentially his film; Ackroyd and Ramos are his foils not his co-stars and Sigourney Weaver is actually in it less than you think, while Ernie Hudson must never have felt more like the token black man at any stage of his career. It's got some very 80s-like jobsworth people in it, making you wonder what made these people so angry in the first place for them to be such schmucks now and I can't get over how utterly superficial it is. I know I said that already, but it is. Watch it again and then try and answer 20 made up questions about the central characters; when it isn't a stream of Murray consciousness or a chat-up line or an insult, it's the other characters not really doing much apart from reciting words that don't mean anything; there's a lot of the 1940s screwball/crazy comedy about it.

Yes, it's a fun film, but a handful of funny lines does not make it a classic and this film isn't a classic apart from in the minds of those conned by its fake charms...

***

David Harbour is building quite a name for himself for appearing in either top quality films or films the cat dragged in. His latest, which won't be winning any Oscars, is Violent Night, where he plays a disgruntled Santa Claus who inadvertently stumbles into a heist involving the robbing of a wealthy and thoroughly dislikeable family.

Claus, it seems, was once a hammer-wielding Norse(?) warrior who somehow became Saint Nick and despite doing it for over a thousand years, he's still not sure how it all works. He drinks, he takes drugs and risks and he sounds like he's just about done with Christmas until the young girl whose vile relatives are being robbed does something that helps bring the fighting spirit out of Father Christmas and the film is transformed into a version of Die Hard but with Santa rather than Bruce Willis.

There is so much about this film to dislike, but it's got some laughs, it tugs at all the right strings and it's a load of enjoyable old bollocks that will not become a staple of late evening Christmas viewing, at least until the term 'Merry Christmas Motherfucker' becomes the Oxford Dictionary's new term of the year. We don't really understand why Santa is so disillusioned; maybe it's because people don't take Santa seriously any more or it might just be we're all cunts and none of us deserve Santa.

Whatever it is, Harbour needs the next series of Stranger Things or a reprise of his former Soviet superhero from Black Widow so he can earn enough money to mean he doesn't have to make shite like this and style himself the Michael Caine of the 21st century.

***

There seems to be very few films with Leonardo Di Caprio that we now haven't seen after finally watching The Wolf of Wall Street - Martin Scorsese's sprawling three hour story of Jordan Belfort and his debauched sex, drugs and money lifestyle forged from dodgy trading on the stock market. It's essentially a comedy with a couple of serious bits thrown in so you don't think having lots of money, sex and drugs is a temptation we should all aspire to. And who would have known that Margot Robbie got all of her kit off? I thought she was a serious actor who just played scantily dressed women.

If you ever watched Trading Places and didn't understand the stock market and share dealing parts then this film explains it in such a simple way you don't even need a rudimentary education to enjoy it. The film essentially follows Belfort from joining his first brokerage as a grunt who is treated like shit to creating his own company that makes millions initially from cheap stock market deals and eventually gets into the big money while not paying any attention to the rules and regulations while drinking, fucking and snorting coke until they were all psychotic.

It whizzes along at a cracking pace; Di Caprio is really quite good at comedic acting and the film doesn't feel like a Martin Scorsese film; if it wasn't for the excessive bad language, bags of Charlie and full frontal nudity you'd almost think Spielberg had something to do with it. I can see why it got nominations, I can also see why people really enjoyed the film and why some people wish they were rich, even if I felt a little grubby towards the end because while it was depicting events from a different time - the 1980s and 1990s specifically - it felt a little exploitative. Or perhaps I'm just becoming an old prude?

***

So we decided to give 1923 a try. We didn't know much about it apart from it's a post WW1 'western' starring Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, Jerome Flynn and a bunch of people who we'd never heard of. It's all very confusing at the moment with a wide screen of topics being explored - cows versus sheep; Native Americans having Catholicism shoved down their throats - almost literally; big game in Africa and how the wild west was not ready to be tamed - by anyone not from the wild west.

It's an intriguing mix of the old world mixed with a brave new world emerging to challenge the status quo with Native Americans thrown in as collateral damage. So far there's little to put your finger on - Ford is the old world and he does things his way, Mirren is a matriarch to this family and one expects wears many of the trousers and the wayward son out in Africa has the air of a young Indiana Jones about him, as he is Ford's screen son this makes it all the more interesting. Two episodes in and we reckon we're going to see this one out.

***

Finally something happened in Doom Patrol, although it still needed some silliness to get us there. Episode five was a strange brew, it started with a masturbation scene and quickly became an episode about age, de-aging and adolescence, so the start worked very well. 

While Jane was discovering her naughty bits (for it appears the first time), Willoughby dropped back into the lives of our 'heroes' to bring a forewarning about the return of Immortus and how reality is in imminent danger of ending. Rita who ended episode four in a coma wakes up and discovers she's getting older and eventually we discover the answer to a question that has no doubt bugged a regular viewers - how come they never age. So in terms of 'important episodes' this was one of the key ones in the four years it's been going.

Rita, in her usual numbskull way, thinks Niles might have a cure for her aging - because she missed the meeting with Willoughby - and unleashes a magic spell that unless stopped will revert the Doom Patrol to a load of sperm and eggs; what follows is one of those confessional tales where the team all basically fill in some missing pieces from their pasts; that is apart from Larry who is searching for Keeg and gets trapped by one of Immortus's minions. 

Bunbury the rabbit saves the day in terms of the magic spell and we appear to be heading towards the actual series story after pfaffing about for five episodes. 

***

Subtitles are something that puts people off of watching foreign language film and TV. Scandinavia helped make it very fashionable and shows like The Killing and The Bridge cemented foreign TV as something Brits weren't afraid to watch and last year Squid Games became one of the most watched foreign language TV shows of all time.

We recently watch Troll - a Norwegian 'monster' movie that we loved despite some negative reviews and during our film and TV binge of the last few weeks, I've been trying to track down a German TV series that was on Netflix - something we don't subscribe to. This week I found it, but I needed to do some jiggery-pokery that I expect would put most people off even contemplating it. I had to download it illegally, in a format that doesn't play through my set-top box and then convert it into a format that does play on my TV and ensure that English subtitles were hard-coded into my versions, otherwise I had to convert again. I had to use software called Handbrake, which converts formats into playable versions, but takes almost as long as a programme lasts - a 50 minute show takes about 45 minutes to convert, so if you don't do it properly you lose that time and start again...

So, the reason I'm telling you this is because Dark seriously needs to be as good as everyone says it is and from the first episode all I can say is, this could be one of the most intriguing sci-fi/horror series I've ever seen. I can tell you nothing at the moment as keeping up with everything that was going on almost gave me a headache. It's set in a German rural town called Winden, where a nuclear power plant is situated and is about to be decommissioned; something happened there 33 years prior and now something is happening again.

Stay tuned... There's more to come. 

***

My mate Mark asked me if I'd seen Shining Girls, a mini-series starring Elizabeth Moss and it took me almost five minutes to remember that I had. I was doing these columns regularly by then, so all I can think is it was so throwaway that I'd forgotten all about it by the time I got to write one of these columns. Further investigation found I'd mentioned it back in May and that it was lined up to watch...

It was a strange series involving a serial killer who can travel through time, one of his victims - the only one to survive - and her ever changing present as the things Jamie Bell (said serial killer) does in the past impacts on her present/future. 

I suppose it's essentially a 'what if a serial killer discovered time travel' story, but is told from an interesting angle that Moss's 'now' reality changes almost from episode to episode. Despite its high rating on IMDB and the fact it's from AppleTV, which is usually a good sign of quality, I found it wanting. There were a lot of unanswered questions and being a bit of a time travel fan there were obvious things that didn't happen, but ultimately it came and went like, I imagine, a lot of TV shows did before I started writing about almost everything I watch.

Which brings me nicely to last night's News at 10...

***

Suburbicon is a film with Matt Damon and Julianne Moore; it's directed by George Clooney from a script by the Coen Brothers and also features Oscar Isaacs - certainly an A list if ever there was one. It's only just over 90 minutes long and throughout watching it the wife reckoned we'd seen it - we hadn't - and I couldn't help shake the feeling that the TV series Them took a lot of inspiration from this film, which was made four years earlier.

The problem I had with this film is while the background story - about a black family moving into an all-white neighbourhood - is just that, it is suggested that what befalls the Lodge family (Damon, Moore - in two roles - and their son) is firmly rooted in the frenzy relating to the black family - because the two children played catch together - you quickly realise that was a red herring and this is something else entirely; the element of surprise or plot twist is gone inside half an hour and that lets the film down.

It's labelled a black comedy, but frankly there's very little if any humour of any kind and the direction feels like it's a paint by numbers script; Clooney brings nothing new to a very Coen Brothers story and presumably that's why they didn't direct this because they obviously thought it up on a bad day.

The weird thing about it is that at the end I couldn't help wondering if we had seen it five years ago and realised it was such a [here comes that word again] superficial story that we purged it from our minds. I think parts of it were so similar to Them* that we just got confused, but given that we've watched films we really liked five years after the event and found ourselves remembering very little, this might be a case of we didn't enjoy it so we couldn't remember anything but fleeting moments?

* Them the 2021 Amazon Prime TV series rather than the 1953 film about giant ants, in case you were wondering, despite me saying 'TV series' in the opening paragraph.

***

Meanwhile, back in Germany...

I don't know what the fuck is going on in Dark but I will say it's the most intriguing and slightly bonkers thing I think I've seen in years. Given the first episode basically set up the premise - 15-year-old boy goes missing and there are no clues to his disappearance, followed swiftly by 11-year-old Mikkel's also going missing and Mikkel's father, Ulrich is a police officer and also his own younger brother went missing in almost the same place 33 years earlier, you might start to get the idea of how labyrinthine this is turning out to be. 

But that's barely the start of it; there is also the other characters, all of which might be involved in the bigger picture - the woman (who is having an affair with Ulrich) and her son who are trying to come to terms with the death of her husband and his father; the chief of police whose husband has come out as gay and has a secret hideaway with an air raid bunker, a daughter who is deaf and an older daughter who is pretty screwed up, oh and a father in law who seems to know what's going on but might have Alzheimer's... There are other characters who have parts to play either in 1986 or now, it's all very twisty and cleverly put together. 

Then there's the dead birds, dead sheep, the dead body of a child who appears to be from 1986 - possibly Ulrich's long missing brother Mads (but not likely)? Mentions of Chernobyl and the fact the nuclear power station appears to be dumping cannisters of waste into the Winden caves, which also appear to be the focal point of all the weirdness going on. Oh and who the fuck is Noah?

The thing is, despite an entire episode set in 1986 featuring most of 2019's main players as they were when they were younger and Mikkel turning up there unable to properly relate to anyone that he appears to have travelled through time; it just gets murkier, weirder and utterly compelling. This is a time travel story that has me stumped; it's also a story that I feel is going to be laced with red herrings, designed to lead us away from what is going on by making us think it's all interconnected - it might be, but I somehow think the denouement - which we're 21 episodes away from - could be something simple. 

I don't think anyone wants a running commentary on this series, especially if I've wetted your appetite to actually watch it, so I'll give a general impression of season one once the 10 episodes are completed and see how the land lies with the following two series. I will say one thing for it; it might be in German, but that doesn't make it more confusing or any less brilliant.

***

Next time: there might be a stand alone review as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is released to stream and that means I'll obtain it. I'll precis the first season of Dark and pad everything out with more film reviews and any new TV series we decide to watch (we have a few), but as the aforementioned German show is the only thing I want to watch, January might be a sparse month.

Have a happy New Year, don't let the cunts grind you down.

Modern Culture: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Desperation

There are very few Christmas movies I like and most of them were made in the 1950. One of the best is A Christmas Carol (Not Scrooge as many people think it's called), the one with Alistair Sim as Ebenezer and a host of British actors supporting him. It was made in 1950 and while film techniques have changed and progressed, there's something quite brilliant about the way the actors are allowed to carry this film, especially Sim who had the most glorious of 1950s starring in numerous brilliant films.

There are few films that embrace and encompass the true spirit of Christmas and illustrate it so well; but it is probably the closest adaptation to Dickens's original short story. I have a soft spot for Bill Murray's Scrooged however much it has dated and because I've never really liked the Muppets, I've never liked their version. You can call me a heathen all you want I can take it...

***

I have to admit to feeling a little emotional when watching the fifth part of the final series of His Dark Materials, mainly because all my fears regarding the Mulefa have come to nowt. In fact, this section of the story is being handled wonderfully well, it's just most of the rest of it that I'm having problems with. I'm okay with Lyra and Will's story, but the rest of it has been turned into some loose adaptation similar to that what made me so angry about the first, failed, film adaptation, innit. It seems so unnecessary and strange to have the very much anti-progress Magisterium, their zealot President and this new fantastical bullshit of a Lyra Bomb forced onto us when they played such a fleeting - but important - part in the books and had a far more nasty and devious way of trying to end Lyra's life.

Father Gomez is still in it, but he's now been elevated into some higher power and is actually doing what he was supposed to do in the books but is now after Mary Malone instead of Lyra, which makes me question why Philip Pullman allowed such pointless changes to his original idea when much of that 'original' idea is so much better than the bullshit HBO or the BBC seems to think is a far better, more melodramatic and fulfilling direction. How often do we hear about massive criticism of a project because they simply couldn't keep to the simple brilliance of the book and opted for something 'better'? Did Pullman agree to this rewriting of half of the third book or was it dumped on him? Was it a case of him saying 'you can change what you like but you have to keep Lyra, Will and Mary's story as close to the book as possible or it will deviate far too much from what I was trying to say'. 

It makes me glad I opted not to write novels because I think the most brilliant thing is having a story adapted into a film and the worst thing is being told by script writers and producers they think it will be improved by adding some bullshit that cheapens or lessens the overall impact, or simply because they feel it would improve on it. Who are these pompous cunts who think that taking a writer's original idea and fucking it up somehow makes it better? I think they're just arsehole control freaks who I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire...

Still episode five was Mulefa heavy and Mary's really learning a few things about the entire nature of the universe - exactly as she did in the third and final book and Lyra and Will are in the land of the dead and that also was going along fine, but then this outside influence of the Lyra bomb is unleashed and we're left on a cliffhanger designed purely for TV, except some TV can be watched all at once.

One thing is abundantly clear about Lyra's parents; they're both psychopaths in their own way and she has inherited the madness that infuses them. Yes, she's a good kid, but what the TV adaptation fails to deliver is why everyone that meets her falls in love with her (no, not in a sexual way, you perverts). Why she is so special to all of her friends; this isn't and possibly can't be conveyed on screen because it lacks the nuances that the written word has; you just get everyone professing their undying devotion to her and you wonder why.

Anyhow, more of this later...

***

Ever feel you've been conned by TV guides? I hadn't until this evening when we sat down to watch something we recorded off of Film4 thinking it was an old horror film we'd never seen before and it ending up being a 2020 reboot.

Despite both the wife and I being huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, we'd never really seen any of Sarah Michelle Gellar's feature films, so when I was flicking through the TV guide - on the TV - and saw that The Grudge from 2004 was being shown, I opted to record it. It was one of those films from that era that had a lot of publicity but having seen the first The Ring US adaptation we probably decided not to watch The Grudge for fear of being severely disappointed. A lot of time has passed and we've been watching a lot of things we haven't seen before.

So we sat down to watch it and it soon became clear that we weren't watching that film at all but watching the 2020 reboot/remake/continuation and when I checked IMDB and saw it had a 4.4 rating I thought we were about to watch 90 minutes of solid gold turds. Yet it wasn't, it was surprisingly creepy and quite well made; why did this film get such a shitty rating?

The thing I took from The Grudge is that while it calls itself a horror film it's really a psychological horror film because whatever spirit possesses an individual isn't the actual killer per se, but is the thing that drives the targeted individual completely mad allowing them to either hurt others or themselves. This is the underlying theme throughout the film as it jumps back and forth between 2004, 2005 and 2006. Andrea Risborough plays the cop who literally stumbles into a cold case and then really literally stumbles into the property that houses ... the grudge and from the moment she walks into the house her life, which is already a mess, gets fucked up even more.

The thing is it's a creepy little film with some jumpy moments and for most of it I was thinking 'this got a 4.4 and The Conjuring got a high 7s rating - how did that happen?' Well, I only had to wait until the end to find that out because after 90 minutes of it being one film it not only jumped the shark but it gave it right good fucking in its blowhole. It threw its own rules out of the window to give a shlock horror twist ending that had me shaking my head in disbelief. The grudge somehow followed Risborough from the house she burnt down, presumably ending the curse to her own house, changed into her son, who was not dead and then allowed the woman who did killed her family at the beginning of the film to manifest as a real 'ghost' and drag Risborough down her own hall to her eventual death. This film got it's low rating for it's 0.1 rated ending. How did the film's writer come to this appalling ending? Did he think that people wouldn't draw a line between the inferred and the absurd?

***

Meanwhile, at Chapter 6 (of 8) of His Dark Materials, we were treated to nearly 55 minutes of entirely made up for television padding. The remaining minutes did actually take place in The Amber Spyglass but considering the aforementioned glacial pace of this TV series, why we needed an entire episode to explain away the entirely new and made up subplot introduced and how it has now been resolved just as we re-enter the world of the actual story in the book.

I understand why this TV show cannot leave the great and humungous war between Mankind and God and his angels to be a inconsequential subplot that mainly padded out Will and Lyra's story, because by the actual nature of the suggestion of the concept, it surely has to be the joint most important plot on the billing and people would probably wonder why the war between the Republic of Heaven and God and the Authority has been relegated to a mere sideshow. Therefore I understand why there has been a largely pointless interlude involving Mrs Coulter, the Magisterium and just how fucking psychopathic Asriel actually is. This is the redemption cycle for Marissa Coulter, because viewers couldn't possibly cope with the idea that she, like her ex-lover and co-parent, was just a nasty, slightly psychotic piece of shit who really only had herself in mind - she's the girl's mother!!! It was hinted at that Marissa had a soft spot for her daughter, but even when she was 'protecting' Lyra, there was always a Coulter agenda at play; at least in the books. Perhaps the production teams felt making Lyra's parents completely without fecks or attrition; just selfish, self-serving power hungry nutters maybe wouldn't go down with the much greater 'people-who-haven't-read-the-books' mass audience?

Yet they manage to get away with it with Asriel; there was always a suggestion in the books that he had a massively soft spot for Lyra; this was never conveyed in any of the three series and, if he wasn't the hero of this subplot, he would have been thought of as a proper villain by any third party bystander. His complete disdain and dismissal of his own daughter having some role to play in a specified destiny to his flat, cold and couldn't-be-arsed reaction to his daughter's death when Marissa is duped into thinking Lyra had been killed by the bomb.

With the penultimate episode came the interesting thing, despite all the above sideshow red herrings, it still had an issue to deal with and without giving anything away, it handled the battle between heaven and humanity the vague and slightly indefinable way it does in the book; there's a lot of 'staring' and heavy artillery and machine gun fire and posturing witches but nothing specific is really seen close up and yet it all managed to be resolved with the minimum of fuss. Despite Mrs Coulter's toing and froing she does the right thing in the end and in some ways the resolution hinged on one thing - a distraction. And then the sun comes out and the war is over and Will accidentally kills God and if you don't know the books you're wondering what happens next?

The finale, like the book, is the real ending, despite the feeling that it's almost an epilogue. There's no big bangs or crashes, it's a simple story about love and realisation and most importantly loss. There's a lesson to be learned from this and that is it doesn't matter what you achieve you have to lose something in the process or at the end. The story of Lyra and Will is the same as almost everyone has ever gone through - of first discovery, first love and first loss and while the concluding chapter of this sprawling trilogy might seem to be almost understated, it has always been Lyra's story and the TV series managed to capture that. There's been very few YA series that has captured the hopelessness and joy of a first love, this did that and despite many quibbles, I am happy with the series as a decent adaptation and the Mulefa were fucking excellent!

***

Doom Patrol might be leading us towards this season's big bad at last or it might be running out of ideas and searching for a direction with some urgency. No sooner do we discover that something is after Rita's emotions and we're presented with an almost genuinely weird episode, the first in ages, than we go done the next path in Danny's shoes...

Rita's emotions are just part of something that appears to be bigger, mainly because whatever was after them isn't really interested in anybody else's whatevers just specific ones belonging to Rita Farr, leaving Rita comatose as the team returns from whatever psychological battlefield that was created by whoever wanted Rita's hopes and fears. While all of this goes on Rouge gets drunk as she agonises over leading the team and trying, again, to heal the rift with her and Rita.

Just as episode 4 starts you realise you're somewhere else, I suppose what surprises is that you realise after about 10 minutes that it isn't going to suddenly switch to the Doom Patrol and it's going to be an episode about lame ass Dorothy Spinner, the dog-faced girl. What this actually is about is that the perpetrator of Rita's emotion amulet is now after the one Dorothy recently (and conveniently) stole/acquired thus linking Dorothy back to Cloverton and the Doom Patrol. She gives it up pretty easily considering how important she sounded about it and the big villain now has two components for his Infinity Gauntlet.

So apart from a villain called Immortus, it's also the return of Dorothy Spinner, what could possibly go wrong?

***

And that's been it really. What looked like an excellent week to catch up on even more films didn't happen. It was like the World Cup finished and my schedule got tighter than a gnat's chuff. So, the next one of these could be a year end review (but it won't be) or even a thing about Christmas week and what we managed to sneak in between festive shite (more likely). 

What some of you, the ones who have followed my blogs over the last 20 years, might have noticed is that these 'review' blogs tend to be 95% of my literary output nowadays; I suppose I picked that habit up from writing a popular magazine column for 13 years - stick to a format you're happy with and don't deviate off the path unless you can see a palpable improvement by doing it. I write very few 'other' blogs and I've just about given up on recreational writing (which was once called 'ambitious writing' when I thought I could become a proper writer), although I have had an idea buzzing around my head for getting on for a year now; it's not so much an idea as a character who needs a story building around him and usually I do it the other way around and have a story that just needs inhabitants. 

The thing is, it's not that big a thing otherwise I'd be all over it like a rash and re-watching old shite would be very low on my priorities list. Being very ill at the end of October and most of November has altered my habits to a certain degree. I think if you said I was pulling away from television during the 21st century I'd struggle to disagree despite having seen a reasonable amount. I'd say 6 months ago that watching the box (be it TV or film) took up about 12 hours a week, whereas now it's closer to 25 hours. I spend less time on the PC, less time on line and more time sitting in the lounge watching things - it's no more or less practical and, in general, I'd say I've had a few 'I'm glad I did that' moments than I haven't.

I am also aware that many, if not most, of my friends will watch a film three or four times, sometimes inside a couple of years, where I have a two year moratorium on all films and usually by the time two years has passed I've sufficiently forgotten about the film to even remember it so it ends up being six, eight, ten years, usually more, so I get that new movie buzz in a weird way in that I've seen the film but I can't remember a thing about it and that sometimes helps because you're more familiar with the characters in it than you would have been had you not seen it at all. I've seen a lot of films in 2022 I've watched before and didn't remember but the one I enjoyed the most is probably Limitless, made before Bradley Cooper became a serious thespian who made Oscar-nominated films, it was like Lucy with brains.

Before I started doing these blogs regularly, we watched Cooper's Nightmare Alley, [probably about a year ago this week] it's a big cinematic Guillermo Del Toro film, which looked atmospherically brilliant, but wasn't at all a keeper. You know, some films you'd like to cuddle but this one felt like it needed flushing away, even down to the pulp-like tenement story ending. Now that's a film we might watch again in about ten years when I've forgotten that I wasn't terribly impressed by it and it will either dazzle us or we'll go, 'that's why it's been 10 years since we watched it!' 

I sometimes wonder if film critics watch a film more than once? The number of films I've enjoyed more second time around is a huge list that continues to expand - thankfully - and the need for retrospective views and opinions is, in my never humble opinion, probably more accurate and enjoyable than initial reactions, which is why I see a difference between me reviewing a new program and me reviewing an old film.

Which brings us to the point where I say have a very Merry Christmas and there'll probably be an end of year last one next week. Huzzah!

Modern Culture: Begin with Begins

I feel I need to quantify something, a bit like I needed to quantify something with the Marvel films and the fact I've never been a huge fan of Spider-Man. There was a period in Spidey's comicbook history that I look back with some fondness, but generally I always liked other Marvel comics more. The same could be said about Batman; there was a period in Batman's long history where I actually liked the comics - the run in Detective Comics by Steve Englehart, Marshal Rogers and Terry Austin; a time when DC Comics was actually in danger of going under (the late 1970s). I know a lot of people look back to the Denny O'Neil written era, especially when Neal Adams occasionally drew him, and say that was the true halcyon days of the Caped Crusader. I wasn't into DC comics at that time (circa 1970-72) and by the time I might have been they were already too expensive and, you know, I was never really into Batman.

There was a period when I liked the 1960s Batman TV series, but I was under 10 and it was great if you were under 10, but despite running and owning a comic book shop when Tim Burton's Batman came out, I never really got excited about it. In fact, I've seen the two Burton films once, when they came out, and I've never seen them again, so when I decided it was time to watch some Batman films, they were the perfect place to start, so I watched the Christopher Nolan reboot first; starting at the beginning with Batman Begins. 

We'd seen this film way back in 2005 and the first thing I noticed was how little the film had aged; other superhero films of that specific opening decade of the 2000s now look terribly dated and of a specific era, but this has a timeless feel you don't know if it's the 40s or the 90s or any time between until mobile phones appear, they're obscured enough for you not to pinpoint an actual time in the 21st century.

The second thing I noticed was that it was surprisingly better than I expected; having recently seen Robert Pattinson's emo The Batman and having my customary dislike of it. This appears to be mainly because I was so vocal about hating The Dark Knight (despite it's 9.0 rating on IMDB) because I really disliked Heath Ledger's Joker - but that's for another review... But, yeah, Batman Begins was most enjoyable, even if all of the main actors, apart from Morgan Freeman and Katie Holmes, were all British and it was made mainly in the UK - not that that's a problem, it's just weird for a quintessentially American character and film style to have been made on this side of the Atlantic.

The third thing I take from this film is I probably think it's a better film than any of the Spider-Man films, in fact, as a superhero film it's remarkably level headed and as a DC film there's been nothing I've seen since that's a patch on it (and I liked Shazam a lot), but a lot of that might have been the approach taken and the unorthodox re-writing of Batman's origin - not the killing of his parents bit, but the way he eventually becomes the Dark Knight. I've always loved the line in Justice League when Flash asks the Ben Affleck Batman what his superpowers are and he replies, 'I'm a billionaire.' and Batman Begins expands on that idea despite being made 12 year earlier.

***

10 Cloverfield Lane is something of a curate's egg. Starring geek film 'superstar' Mary Elisabeth Winstead, it's essentially two films grafted to each other and for the first 90 minutes, with the exception of one 90 second incident with 'the woman from the car' there is nothing that makes you think this is a film about anything other than a survivalist nutter and the people he's 'collected' to keep him company while he sits out the apocalypse that either has or hasn't happened 30 feet above their heads, one he's been constructing for a number of years.

Then, of course, it goes a bit wonky and the rational part of your brain starts to wonder if 'the woman from the car' might be some kind of stooge, or maybe one of the victim's of Howard's (John Goodman) master plan. Winstead's Michelle, Goodman's Howard and John Gallagher's Emmett are 'trapped' inside Howard's nuclear bunker with just his word that the end of the world has arrived either by another country or possibly extra terrestrials. He's quite batshit crazy which doesn't help things and he never really looks like he's going to be anything other than a scary threat. Once Winstead manages to escape, the film wanders into the territory promised by its title as she inadvertently draws the attention of a space ship and the really strange and creepy aliens.

We get a bit of Die Hard meets Independence Day and then Michelle is on the road, in the car belonging to 'the woman' and not being hassled by aliens, deciding whether she's going to help with the resistance or going to help with the makeshift hospital that's been set up, all about which she finds on the radio on an open frequency, suggesting that while Howard knew there's was bad shit happening above, he just wanted his own little 'family' that he could control and... maybe... just maybe, be more monstrous than the things invading the planet.

The Cloverfield franchise/trilogy in itself is a weird set of movies; the found footage monster movie featuring a kind of fucked up Godzilla; this psychological thriller with an extra terrestrial twist of and then the final film which killed the 'franchise' off with bad ideas, acting and no budget. The thing about 10 Cloverfield Lane is the psychological part is both scary, feasible and well made and the wacky extra terrestrial bonkers is the same; I'm just not sure the two work as one even though it doesn't feel like a different ending stitched on. I'm sure the small and perfectly formed cast knew what they were making, at least Winstead must have. Watching this for the first time in 6 years, made me realise that had they made the 3rd instalment with half as much thought, the Cloverfield thing might still be going strong today.

***

Next up we went for the second of James Wan's horror films about the Warrens. This was The Conjuring 2 and where we quite enjoyed the first outing, this one was fucking awful. Let me explain why...

It was loosely based on the Enfield Haunting, a famously debunked 'haunting' that took place in Enfield, Herts in 1977. Ed and Lorraine Warren start this film by looking into the Amityville Horror where Lorraine encounters a malevolent nun demon who seems to have it in for everybody; she tries to persuade Ed that they need to give up on the demon hunting because it's getting dangerous and she fears for his safety. Then the Hodgson family turns up with their own demonic possession thing going on and they decide, at the behest of the Catholic church, to travel to England and find out if this is a hoax or real. So far so meh. Then as a natural born Hertfordshire lad things start to get a wee bit hokey...

Barely any of the film was actually filmed in London or Enfield; scenes with Ed & Lorraine outside the Hodgson house were on a soundstage with a recreation of the Enfield house doubling up. The house itself was remarkable - from the outside it looked like a simple end of terrace house in a normal English street, however inside it resembled a North American house - by its dimensions; every room was fooking huge; I mean big enough to fit your average poor family home into a couple of times over. It also had a back to the house that was more like the arse end of a US tenement building rather than an Edwardian house and then there was the cellar... Anyone who's ever had a cellar in this country would be amazed at the cathedral sized room given to this house, with its windy stairs and more space than the airship hangar in Cardington, Bedfordshire.

With two (almost) exceptions, none of the kids were English; their mother was an Australia actress who worked most of her acting career in the UK and the bloke playing Maurice - the would be psychic investigator was British and was last seen as the bishop in Rev, everyone else was either Aussie or American. The nun looked like Marilyn Manson - no, really - and it wasn't scary, creepy or particularly enjoyable; it felt like a half-arsed attempt at schlock horror and it failed on almost every level. I wasn't remotely tempted by the umpteen other Conjuring spin-offs, now I'm going to avoid them like a plague that's shit itself.

***

I have a confession to make. I hated Batman: The Dark Knight. It was more to do with Heath Ledger's Joker than anything else - I said then and still feel the same way now that his Joker is essentially him channelling Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundell in Cronenberg's remake of The Fly and not at all what I feel the Joker should be. I kind of want the Joker to be a cross between Cesar Romero and, well, Heath Ledger. For me in 2008 this spoiled the film and led me to not bother watching the third part of the trilogy; I had enough of a bug up my arse about disliking Batman then, that I was going to stick with my principals - after all, I'd never watched the second Andrew Garfield Spider-Man film when it came out because I didn't like the first.

The thing is, The Dark Knight is arguably the best superhero film ever made. It is relentless, dark - very dark - and probably needed some humour in it, just a little levity to stop it from being ... um... dark and relentless. Apart from that it's incredibly well written and a much better film than Batman Begins.

There are some key things I noticed having watched the first part less than three days ago. The first is Maggie Gyllenhaal isn't Katie Holmes and isn't really a leading lady, but I can forgive that, Holmes had probably married Tom Cruise by this point and gotten involved in all of his scientology nonsense. The second is Gotham was now like New York and had lost all of its gothic feel; it was new and shiny and this was only about a year after the first film. There was no monorail any more and that sense of timelessness had gone, replaced by a, dare I say it, Metropolis. 

For a film that's 2½ hours long, it's incredibly well paced and has some brilliant set pieces that would have graced any other film's finale and the finale of this was almost understated, like everything else had been awesome so you needed a little less dynamic; something with more pathos. There are elements of it that I found problematic, but in general the main problem I have with it is Batman's code which, considering what the Joker puts him through, should have been broken into pieces as he tore the Master of Mirth to shreds, but he doesn't and the Joker's 'demise' is almost anticlimactic. Ledger's death meant there was never going to be a reprise so in the end it felt a little pointless.

It is an absolutely brilliant film and I've changed my mind about it 180 degrees; if anything there wasn't enough Batman in it... Now we have The Dark Knight Rises, a film I can reliably say I've never seen. I know nothing about it at all apart from Tom Hardy playing Bane, who became the Caped Crusader's main antagonist in the era when I was running my own comic shop and Batman was one of my top sellers (I didn't read it then so all I know is it involved a broken back; whether that happens in the third part of the trilogy I'll find out this very soon). 

***

Reach for the Sky was made in 1956 and starred the brilliant Kenneth More as Douglas Bader. More was much maligned because of his outspoken views - mainly about other people for which he was sued at least three times - but I always thought he was a genuine British star.

This has been one of my favourite films since I first saw it, a biopic about the British war hero with no legs and re-watching it this week it's a proper stiff upper lip tale of derring-do and one which perfectly suited Kenneth More (a sort of serious actor's Richard Briers of the 40s, 50s and 60s). Yes, some of the dialogue is questionable and it used a lot of stock footage of planes and air fights, but it had a solid cast of well-remembered British actors and the only thing that really let the film down was the way it casually breezed over Bader's time as a WW2 POW and the fact this man, who lost his legs in a plane crash that was undoubtedly because he was pratting about, caused the Germans so much trouble by continuously trying to escape while simultaneously treating Germans like they were all beneath him.

***

The Dark Knight Rises is a film we've never seen, mainly because of my now oft repeated disdain for The Dark Knight, so coming into the film fresh and with no real idea what it was about was interesting and obviously more so because of my about face regarding the film prior to this.

My first thoughts were that it was far too long and didn't have the focus the first two had. It soon became clear that this 3rd part of the trilogy was also more of a follow up to the first film, although it obviously has many links to the second film. Bane - played by Tom Hardy - was a strange one; he sounded like a Russian trying to do a posh Englishman reciting Shakespeare and apart from his vague origin - mainly spoken about - there was not a lot of explanation about him or why he had the strange contraption over his mouth - which at times made it difficult to actually understand what he was saying. Like the second film, you sometimes wondered why a carefully placed sniper bullet didn't simply remove him early on, but I suppose if your villain is offed in the opening hour it makes the rest of the film tough to make.

I liked the film and I really liked the little nods to the past, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Robin character, who does what very few others were able to do and realised Bruce Wayne was the Batman almost immediately, which makes you wonder why if by the end of this film about a dozen people knew his secret why he insisted on putting on the gruff character voice when he was around them. The problems with the film, IMHO, are the pacing and the ... bittiness of it. It didn't feel like a film, it felt like three hour long programmes stitched together to make a film and the big reveal/secret towards the end was both unexpected and a bit silly. I say silly because there were clues to it but they weren't obvious enough and it was only when the three army guys trying to contact Lucius Fox and the Wayne Industries board had their cover blown for no apparent reason that you started to think that maybe there was a mole in the outfit. I also don't know if the copy we watched was cut for some of the violence or if they just 'looked away' when it was being done - to maybe secure a PG-13 certificate, but it kind of made Bane less psychopathic - not that I thought he was a particularly good villain in the first place, but they wanted to wrap up the Ra's Al Ghul and I suppose making him another disciple allowed that - but even that ended up being a sort of red herring.

I applaud Christopher Nolan for making this a finite trilogy with no real chance of Christian Bale returning to the role or them carrying on with this franchise in other ways, although the randomness of Selina Kyle and her Catwoman persona was a bit of a stretch, especially if you know about the character's comicbook origins. I just felt there was things in this film that felt like it was a showpiece rather than a story and the eventual demise of Bane felt, with the Joker in the previous film, like an anti-climax or the fact that it wasn't Batman who took him out or that there was no 'what happened to Bane?' part of the epilogue. I just had problems with this film that I didn't have with the first two; it was almost like in its attempts to be the biggest and best of the trilogy it ended up being the least effective and the most clichéd. 

The next Bat films we have planned are the two Tim Burton films, which I expect I'll remember more about than any of these three, whether I'll like them is another thing entirely. 

***

In 2007, a film came out that I was stoked up to see and when I walked out of the cinema I was almost apoplectic with rage. In fact I went on about how much I fucking hated The Golden Compass I swore I'd never watch it again and would kill anyone who didn't agree with me that it was an abomination, the worst of all anathema. The reason for this was the His Dark Materials trilogy, which I had just finished reading and still consider to one of the greatest series of books I've ever read - so much so I've read them three times in the last 17 years.

My dear best friend Roger made a passing comment after that fateful night, suggesting it would have been done better had the BBC done it as a series, so imagine my happiness - tinged with trepidation - when His Dark Materials was announced and eventually landed. The first two series were as good as I could have expected, even if there had been some changes to allow it to be made into a finite series, otherwise it would have been a lot longer and much of it relatively superfluous to the specific narrative.

The wife and I have both enjoyed the books, however she felt the entire story was slightly diminished by the third book - The Amber Spyglass - while I thought it was possibly one of the greatest works of fiction I'd ever read. If the story - essentially a series of YA book - was designed for the reader to grow older while reading them - from maybe pre-teen with The Northern Lights to young adult with the final part, then it worked brilliantly well. Philip Pullman became something of a hero for me. However, I've harboured a fear from the very first episode of the BBC/HBO series - how would they do the final book justice?

The reason is because it goes along at a cracking pace and honestly if they did it all they would have needed 12 hour-long episodes and had some dubious bits in it that neither broadcaster would have fancied dealing with; so I expected they would ... abridge it, and two parts in, with another two to watch before it debuts on BBC this coming Sunday I'm beginning to panic a little because we don't appear to have moved on very much. My biggest problem with series two was they cut a lot out and spent too much time dwelling on some things and overlooking others; now, without giving too much away because I will have finished the series (thanks to BBC America/HBO) before you even get to episode three, I'm concerned that chopping swathes of the book out and rewriting other bits means the most important part of The Amber Spyglass might get lost in the 'bigger picture'.

One of the segments of the third part of the book was when Will, Lyra and Mary Malone find themselves on an alternative earth that is vastly different from all the others, the world of the utterly spellbinding Mulefa and a world with the answer to everything. From the opening titles animation it's clear they will travel to this world because the opening sequence features the trees where the amber spyglass is fashioned, using the resin from the giant seed pods, but are they going to have the tripod-like Mulefa, with their wheels instead of feet and their totally wonderful and unique loveliness; their innocent brilliance and the fact that without them the entire story will lose so much? For me the Mulefa completed the books; they added that je ne sais quoi that set the trilogy above any story of its ilk. Yet every preview and clip of the third series has not shown them at all and I will be just as apoplectic if that happens. I'd fucking write to Director General of the BBC, the boss of HBO and to Pullman, asking him why he allowed it to happen, but I almost didn't forgive him for allowing The Golden Compass film to be made with such horrendous changes that ruined what should have been the start of a brilliant franchise.

That feeling doesn't change in episode three and I feel that with the exception of Lyra and Will's story the impending war with God and his angels has been exaggerated, changed and made far more prominent in the TV series than I remembered it ever being in the books. The books were about Lyra and Will, what her parents were doing in the background was secondary because Lyra and Will would eventually be the reason for the conclusion of the story. However, if you've got James McAvoy, Ruth Wilson, Will Keen and other big names, including Lin Manuel Miranda (who will pop up, unexpectedly, in episode five - unexpectedly because he doesn't re-appear in the book) in your cast, I suppose you want to give them something more than just act as supporting characters to a couple of teenagers.

The overriding thing about this entire series has been the glacial pace it's taken to reach where it's going to; so much so that there has had to be references made to how much older the two young protagonists have got and how little they've actually done compared to the books. That doesn't necessarily detract from the enjoyment, but by the time episode four gets underway, there is a distinct feeling that Pullman has allowed the show's makers carte blanche to change the story to whatever degree they feel in order to make it more... dynamic. So by the time I punched the air in sheer delight at the first appearance of the Mulefa most everything else about this final, concluding, series had changed in order to give Asriel, Mrs Coulter and the Magisterium more prominence. My personal jury is out as to whether I will be happy with the conclusion because it appears that Will and Lyra's story remains relatively untouched, just the supporting characters have been developed in a far greater, expansive, way.

The final four parts will be covered in next week's thrilling episode...

***

So, the World Cup is over and I can say, very honestly, that I watched a grand total of three games and about 90 minutes of all the others put together. I stuck to my principals and I'm aware that others either relented or showed no scruples whatsoever and just watched it regardless of the corruption, the pissing all over human rights or the corruption that swamps the world's most legitimately corrupt organisation. It was clear that FIFA wanted this one to be won by a South American country, preferably one with Lionel Messi in the side; the Qataris wanted it as well, with the head of their World Cup team suggesting it wouldn't have been a success if Messi didn't claim the trophy. Any follower of any British team needs to understand that FIFA doesn't allow teams it doesn't want to win this trophy.

I might have approached the 2026 World Cup with more enthusiasm, especially as only a third of it is held in the USA, but we've seen corruption, fixed matches, biased referees, laughable VAR decisions and no one is even trying or tried to hold anyone accountable; it's like FIFA told the BBC and ITV if they wanted to continue covering the tournaments they had to stop criticising them. It has been a vile spectacle of privilege and power, money and hatred stamping all over human rights, fair play and allowing normal people to think it's been a success. I think the one thing I'd like to see before I die is the end of FIFA - an organisation that makes the Mafia look like a benevolent society...

Modern Culture: It'll be Alright at the Bottom of the Barrel

Jesus H Christ...

Is anyone here old enough to remember Denis Norden? He'd have been 100 earlier this year and he was mostly famous for It'll Be Alright on the Night, a clip show using outtakes and, as he used to succinctly put it, cock-ups by actors when recording TV and films. It started in 1977 and he did it for nearly 30 years and it was also very much an example of the Law of Diminishing Returns, because the longer it went on the weaker the outtakes became.

The first few compilations - usually done as Christmas, Easter and Bank Holiday specials - were full of fantastic clips of A list actors cocking up, forgetting lines, swearing or in the case of the brilliant Peter Sellars corpsing and infecting everyone else on the set to bouts of uncontrollable laughter. It was unmissable TV because you saw the untouchables being human. However, by the middle to late 1980s the quality of the outtakes had dropped considerably and the level of celeb had also taken a dip.

On the 6th December, we watched a new film and it finished about 9.15, meaning we didn't really want to start watching another film and we had nothing recorded we fancied watching that was about an hour long and the only things on TV were repeats. We started watching a sensationalist documentary on the 1976 heatwave, which I had masses of problems with*, so we turned over and settled on the latest incarnation of IBAOTN now presented by, or rather voiced over, by one of the UK's most overrated and untalented wankers David Walliams and that's where the opening three words of this blog come into play. It's like some kind of existential fucking nightmare presented by a cunt who makes Matt Lucas seem mildly amusing ...

I presume this is supposed to be some kind of hilarious comedy? The kind of thing that will have the average punter rolling on the living room floor in fits of Peter Sellars-like uncontrollable laughter? If people falling over, the wind turning umbrellas inside out, a news presenter spilling tea on her blouse or a presenter of GMB's phone alarm going off are supposed to be hilarious then for fuck's sake can someone put ITV out of its misery. We don't watch ITV, mainly because of unmitigated horse shit like I'm A Cunt Get Me Out of Here and now we have another reason.

I wouldn't mind so much but because we live in the arse end of TV reception hell we literally get BBC 1, 2, 3 & 4, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC Scotland, the BBC News and Parliament channels, ITV 1, 2, 3 & 4, Channel 4, E4, More4, Film 4, Channel 5, 5Select, and The [fucking] Bible Network; as well as five +1 channels and less radio stations than a broken car stereo gets, so boycotting ITV completely (apart from films) doesn't really fuck up our viewing, but it would be nice if we could get some alternatives because ITV is simply a massive load of diarrhoea, in a bucket, without a cherry on top and it represents a weighty % of what we have available to us. 

* The main problem I had with the 1976 heatwave documentary was it was chronologically inaccurate. The actual heatwave, per se, started at the beginning of May 1976 when we had about six weeks of seasonably higher temperatures and little rain; then we had a four day period between June 20-24 where we had slightly above average rainfall and then from the 25th we had the 11 week drought (not in parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland though) and heatwave, which included 28 consecutive days where the temperature in the UK exceeded 30 degrees (in the south of England, not across the entire country).
The doc also suggests that the heatwave ended on the weekend of the August Bank Holiday, but what actually happened was over a three day period the UK recorded three times the monthly rainfall in three days before returning to hot and sunny weather until the end of September. What this documentary has done has rewritten history to make it sound like the summer of 76 was just an 11 week period, when in truth, apart from 7 days, it was actually a 20 week period. I know I'm nit-picking but you only have to check the Met Office's own data for 1976 to see that the doc was being selective and sensationalist rather than being accurate, because it was actually longer and far worse than the producers made it out to be...

***

The new film we watched, prior to our ITV nightmare, has been out about a week and already has a 5.9 rating on IMDB, which makes me think people who use IMDB are either xenophobic cunts or wouldn't know a fun film if it offered them a blow job that made them ejaculate repeatedly, because the Norwegian fantasy action film Troll is a good little movie with some awesome special effects.

I won't spoil it for you because it's too good to be spoiled by a twat like me, but I will say it's kind of like a modern day Scandinavian King Kong and while it's full of clichés they work extremely well because it knows it's full of clichés. It's also got subtitles so some of you might be put off.

Basically a new underground road/tunnel system disturbs a long dormant mountain troll who is disoriented and disturbed after hundreds of years of sleep and goes on an unintentional rampage as he heads towards Oslo. It takes a palaeontologist, the adviser to the Norwegian PM and a trendy army captain to resolve the problem while the Norwegian government are portrayed as simpering wankers with a desire for mass destruction (or as the collective Mayor of Amity in Jaws). I thought it was a funny, poignant and extremely well put together film and I would rather have watched it again than sit through David Walliams having his own private wankfest to unfunny clips of cunts doing unfunny natural mistakes...

***

If ever I needed an example of having watched a film 5 years ago but not remembering a minute, it was watching Suicide Squad (the 2016 film and not the one preceded by a The). The things I could remember about it was that Will Smith, Joel Kinnaman and Margot Robbie were in it and that Jared Leto is the worst Joker ever. However, if you'd asked me before my second viewing what it was about I think I might have made it up on the spot and got nowhere near what actually happened.

The main problem with this film is it needed the humour and irreverence of THE Suicide Squad, which was written and directed by James (Guardians of the Galaxy) Gunn, it also needed to have a coherent story that didn't unnecessarily stray down avenues that weren't really needed. Essentially this film acts as an origin story for Harley Quinn, but not for anyone else, which either suggests they figured there was a big future for Harley or they needed to justify having the Joker (and his love interest) in it. The thing is it adds about 20 minutes to a film that needed to be more concise and half an hour shorter.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it and it's a shame that some of the 'villains' used didn't appear in the 'follow up'. That said the Boomerang fella could easily be forgotten about and Killer Croc was a bit weedy looking considering he ate people for fun. In fact, for a film that's over 2 hours long there was a lot of things that were either left unexplained or just left open and up in the air (and we watched the extended edition with added Joker... not the best advert considering Leto can't act and his was about as menacing as Boomerang's pink unicorn - which equally had no real explanation).

The thing is it wasn't actually a bad film, it just felt badly assembled. Smith, Kinnaman, Robbie, Viola Davis (Amanda Waller) and Jay Hernandez (Diablo) were all excellent, while Cara Delavigne proved without a doubt that she's really not an actor (they even dubbed someone else's voice onto her when she became the real Enchantress) and there were some fun cameos, such as Ben Affleck and Ezra Miller, who we may end up seeing as The Flash next year unless DC have another Batgirl moment and cancels it because of Miller's crass lunacy. It was also the first chance we had to see Amanda Waller - the woman who wields so much power, but is actually nastier than all the villains rolled into one; this is a character with no redeeming factors and I expect if and when they kill her off it will make whatever film it's in a blockbuster just so people can finally see her bite the big one. Davis plays her excellently well...

However, neither of us really remembered any of it, not even enough to make us go 'oh yeah, that happened.' Either it's a film that improves with age and a second viewing or the extended version is a bit like Zack Snyder's Justice League which bore little or no resemblance to Joss Whedon's Justice League despite them both being the same film.

This also marks the beginning of a bit of a DC fest, as we've decided to watch the Birds of Prey film (which we know we haven't seen) and the two Tim Burton Batman films (but not the Joel Schumacher ones) and the three Christian Bale reboots; more of them in later blogs...

***

Just when I thought the countdown to Christmas was going to be films and fuckwitted ITV bollocks, a new series of Doom Patrol rocks up with two episodes at the same time...

A quick recap: series one was fantastic and without a doubt the best thing DC has had any involvement with in recent years. Series two was also of a high standard but started to run out of steam with the introduction of certain characters and because of COVID it ended prematurely and on a [ahem] cliffhanger which was resolved far too quickly at the start of series three. The third season lost the plot somewhat for me; the premise was clever but it felt like a great simple idea that was spread out across 13 episodes when maybe three would have been enough, plus the weirdness simply became silly and seemed to be thrown in as much as possible without any real thought.

I had big hopes for Season four mainly because the show seemed to have sorted out all of its psychological issues, like the dull uninteresting waffle that seemed to be there to pad out episodes and it looked, for intents and purposes, like we were finally going to go in a direction that was complimentary to the brilliant first series. 

Season four kicks off with Vic in a post-apocalyptic future before cutting back to present day where Vic and his dad have built Cliff a hand with a finger that actually feels things. The first thing he wants to feel with his new hand is his grandson so they jump into the modified 'time' machine to head for Florida but end up 20 years into the future where the opening sequence takes place. They discover they're probably responsible for the ... Butt-pocalypse because one of the Butt monsters they were supposed to have exterminated in season three had escaped, as a zombie, and this was the catalyst for the end of the world. So far, so fucking stupid. 

The [I hesitate to say this but I will] beauty of season three was despite it being really boring and silly it all eventually fitted together and made sense - in a Doom Patrol kind of way - and I'm sure that season four will end up the same, but season three had some great new characters, not least Michelle Gomez's Madame Rouge - who has now become 'probationary' leader of the team because Rita is really shit at it. However, a really bad sign is I fell asleep four times in 45 minutes because frankly Vic is boring now; Jane has never been electrifyingly interesting since the end of the first season; there's not enough Larry and if there was he's becoming a little tedious and Rita's had her spotlight series, she's just returned to being a selfish and dull character. Oh and Cliff (annoyingly voiced by Brendan Fraser) has never really been anything but annoying.

I struggle to wonder why I thought it was such a good series; it's made on such a small budget that the butt monsters appear to have eaten most of it up and Doom Patrol appear to be a team of misfit superheroes that exist in the least populated part of the world because this series has always had the feeling it's made with about 20 extras - even crowd scenes feel empty and forced. I'm not enjoying it so far, but there are 11 to go, so it might surprise me. The problem with it is it's just silly; it needs to be weird, but it isn't. 

***

Back to the films and we decided to watch another film we thought we'd seen but it became clear very quickly that perhaps we'd intended to watch this but never got around to it. This time it was the 2015 Christmas 'comedy' horror film Krampus. I toyed with the idea that perhaps we'd seen a foreign film that this was a remake or adaptation of, but no, if we'd seen this film it had flown from our memories like Santa from rooftop to chimney...

Do you remember the 2007 adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist? It starred Thomas Jane, before he was relegated to making shit films like The Punisher and The Predator and perhaps The Mist was why his star fell so quickly. The thing about this film and why I bring it up is that it's a bloody brilliant adaptation, one of the best King films of all time; it's a Frank Darabont film and it's unbelievably faithful to the novella it comes from, apart from the ending that US viewers found so downbeat and sad that they stayed away from the cinema in droves... Without giving away the ending of Krampus too much I wonder if this film also suffered a similar fate because there isn't a happy ending for anyone in this and it's what makes the film so good.

It's about a decent and nice family being invaded by their thoroughly horrendous right wing relatives for the holiday season and how one loose wish by the young and persecuted Max leads to their eventual demise at the hands of the nasty spirit of Christmas and his fucked up helpers. It's actually a really enjoyable film in a nasty, sometimes poorly made way and if anyone's showing it this Christmas you should go out of your way to watch it.

***

There's this advert out at the moment for a perfume called Daisy. My dearly beloved old friend Pat Fish, who shuffled off this mortal plane earlier this year would have probably had an embolism had he still been alive, as would my old chum Malcolm Alsop (who left us a few years ago after a long battle with cancer) as would the also dead and brilliant Alan Vega of Suicide fame (the 70's electronic punk duo/band, not the act of killing oneself), because Suicide's awesome 1978 song Cheree has been bastardised and stolen for this facile and trite perfume advert. It's a fucking affront to a genius and the fantastic people who loved it and are no longer with us, but if Chanel can 'steal' a Lorde song about inner city squalor and gangs and turn it into a cutesy perfume advert then there really isn't any hope for anyone...

***

The Conjuring is a film we'd never seen before. We kind of gave up on 'horror' films about 15 years ago and while we've seen a few since - the pointless Poltergeist remake, the hyped-up bollocks that was Insidious, the quite dreadful Midsommar and now the aforementioned Krampus are the ones that spring to mind; they might not be the only ones, but they are the ones that spring to mind - there hasn't been a better time to try some of those we disregarded without a second thought and The Conjuring has the highest IMDB rating of the ones we opted for.

What you get is a very well-made cross between The Exorcist, Poltergeist and The Haunting set in 1971 and based loosely on a supposed 'true' story. It stars the lovely Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson and Lily Taylor (at her least weird looking I've ever seen her despite being possessed) and from the opening sequence it's clear we've wandered into a film that figured out it was going to be a franchise before it started. 

That said, it wasn't too bad a film and while it wasn't scary - what horror films are? - it was not short of the occasional shock and jump. Much of the plot is telegraphed ten minutes ahead of the action and there's quite a bit of superfluous flotsam masquerading as supporting characters, but it wasn't too bad and we're going to give the follow up a try.

***

As England were losing in the World Cup or as I now like to think of it as The Mafia and Pablo Escobar teaming up for Billionaires in Need show, I was discovering a truly awesome film. 10 years ago Cloud Atlas was released and all I really knew about it was: a) it's a Marmite film with people either loving it or hating it and b) it's one of two films Tom Hanks he actually likes - I can understand why; it's a wonderful 2½ hours, a truly fantastic work of genius and I can't understand why I've never been tempted by it before.

It's not even like I can start to explain what it's about, but it tells a story over about 1000 years, from the perspectives of different people who all have a birthmark that resembles a comet, It's a tale of love, betrayal, determination, hope, redemption and tragedy; it will make you smile, it will make you go 'Yeah!' and it will leave you on the brink of tears. I think it's one of the best films I've seen in the 21st century and I look forward to 2025 or 6 when I watch it a second time and relive the experience. The weird thing is after 30 minutes I was wondering what the actual fuck I was watching because it really does jump backwards and forwards through time without really giving you any clue as to how it would all fit together.

I feel as though I should have led a blog with this, or even given it an entire entry on its own. Tom Hanks, James Darcy, Susan Sarandon, Ben Whishaw, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant, Bae Doona, Keith David, Jim Sturgess, David Gyasi, Jim Broadbent and Hamish MacBeth's Ralph Riach (TV John, in probably his last role) knocked the ball out of the park in this Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski sisters film adapted from the David Mitchell (not that one) novel. Watch it; be stunned and amazed.

***

Weird, ennit? I sometimes struggle to do one of these in a month and usually aim for one every two weeks, but have managed one, on average, every six days since the start of the 2022 Corruptionfest. I think the WC has annoyed me so much I've needed to focus my attention on something else and this is much better than having my comments moderated by The Guardian or getting bans on Facebook for suggesting that bald cunt Infantino should be beheaded.

At least this week's instalment has something new as well as a bunch of films, which, on the whole, have been better than watching a goalless draw between two teams of highly paid footballers with the moral fibre of plankton...

Next week there will be some Batman films - probably the Christopher Nolan ones first because I'm loathe to watch the Burton/Keaton ones again because I hated them so passionately 30+ years ago when they first appeared. There'll be the sequel to The Conjuring and apart from that I can't tell you because it really depends on what the wife fancies and the usual 'other stuff'.

[Not So] Modern Culture: More Old films and New Trailers

I've changed my mind on a longstanding belief. Opinions are not like arseholes, because to my knowledge most people only have one arsehole, unlike opinions. I often have lots of opinions about Marvel films, yet despite sometimes thinking I have more, I only really have one arsehole. For example, based on the trailers, I knew immediately that Thor: Love & Thunder was going to be a stinker because the trailer didn't do anything it was probably supposed to do; it left me thinking it was going to be unnecessary and frivolous - it was. However, sometimes I get a good feeling about trailers and wish I'd kept my mouth shut and sometimes - although quite rarely - I see a trailer and think positive, almost optimistic thoughts.

When the Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantomania trailer dropped a few weeks back, I got something I hadn't felt for a long time, that frisson of 'oh hello, this could be different' (even if it did have a kind of Micronauts meets the Guardians vibe) and I'm still of the opinion that it's going to be a very serious Ant-Man film; it's going to be choc-a-bloc full of trademark Ant-Man silliness, but it's going to conclude the trilogy with something unexpected and slightly dark. How could it not? It's introducing to the MCU film franchise the next Big Bad. The villain who we already know will take on the next incarnation of The Avengers. That said, a friend saw the trailer at the cinema last week and echoed what I said last time out, it's a green screen nightmare and the SFX don't appear to be very good (this seems to be a recurring problem with post Endgame films; it's like they spaffed most of the next ten years' budget on that and are having to make do with old Pixar programmes.

The first Guardian of the Galaxy Vol 3 trailer also arrived last week and while I think this is going to continue in the theme of being a comedy film, I'm even more convinced that it's going to change tone very suddenly and fuck up a lot of people - on screen and watching it. The trailer starts off with a laugh out loud moment, but quickly grows dark and ominous... 

I think the next two MCU films, considering they both feature the more light-hearted characters, are going to be what execs like to call 'game changers'. At least that's the impression I got from the initial trailers for both films and the dying embers of the child who fell in love with Marvel Comics is hoping these two films have something in them that will reignite my passion for the MCU, ironically by using two franchises I've had little or no time for thus far and by killing off people. 

There are lines in both these trailers that suggest the gloves get taken off and things are going to get serious to the point of life or death serious. I got a palpable buzz of excitement when I heard Kang tell Scott Lang that he's way out of his depth because we all know he is, but we also know when the baddie tells the good guy something like this we're heading into the business end of the franchise.

In the Guardians trailer, you get the impression that Rocket is being serious again, like he was in Endgame and serious enough to know he won't be walking away. There's also the most angry, emotive and exciting 'We are Groot!' scene where the tree and Peter Quill are looking like they're fighting their last battle - it won't be, but if the trailers are anything to go by then both these films third outings are going to go out with a bang and at the moment I want to hold onto that feeling of pessimistic optimism... That might be down to the fact that I think a lot of main characters are going to die in Guardians, with my bets on all of them bar Quill and Groot! 

I also really don't want to feel as excited about the Guardians film as I do, given that I had absolutely zero love for either of the first two, but, you know, I hate goodbyes and this feels like it's going to be a really, really, sad one - at least that's what my heart is telling me and the reaction I get every time I watch that trailer. You get the impression that the High Evolutionary is going to be one screwed up and twisted villain and there's a short burst of a scene where Peter looks like he's just seen one of his pals dissected on a table.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will stream any day from December 25th onward; the likelihood is that it will enter into our homes sometime in the first week of 2023. I'm told I'll like it, which is always a worry...

***

Does anyone else feel like December is a really shit month? I get it that Christmas is coming and (usually) it's a happy time of the year with much excess, but in recent years the arrival of December has usually meant the departure of regular TV shows replaced by repeats and Christmas Specials that aren't at all special.

It's probably down to the amount of TV channels we have, the amount of streaming services and the lack of imagination - even things like Netflix, HBO and [insert any of the others here] seem to have given up on quality entertainment in favour of nostalgia and cheap reruns. I can remember when there was only three channels and Christmas week was so jam-packed with new films and proper specials that you had to carefully plan your viewing, because without a VCR, you had to sacrifice some things. This year, things have not been helped by the fucking World Cup, which I have largely boycotted for a number of political reasons but mainly because I fell out of love with international football around 1997 and I've never rekindled it. 

It might have something to do with where I live and how I feel about my adopted (and ancestral) home, but it's more than likely to do with the fact that England are like Spurs, it's been decades since they won anything and it doesn't look like that run is going to end. My journey of watching England and Wales's progress in this year's FIFA Corruption Fest has been to watch old films rather than subject myself to a football tournament I feel can never achieve the hype because of where it is and because Qataris like the Saudi Arabians and other Middle Eastern desert state dictatorships are humans I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire, although I might help them to be on fire. I'm not being racist or religion intolerant, I'm being human and that's something these extremist wankstains have no concept of - whether they're Qataris or members of FIFA.

The reason we're watching so many old films is because there isn't an alternative. Bearing in mind we have a total of about 25 TV stations - which are essentially the BBCs, the ITVs, the Channel 4s, two Channel 5 offerings and some +1s; outside of this we get TBN - the God channel - and nothing else; not that it bothers us because I doubt we'd watch anything else because most of them are full of shit shows and repeats. When Roger Waters said something about 200 channels of shit on your TV screens he wasn't lying (and he has an accounting background, doncha know!).

Yet, I still manage to find something TV and cinema related to talk about, which suggests to me that I'm far more brilliant than any of you ever suspected - an easy trap to fall in given how modest and self-effacing I appear when people are allowed to meet me in person...

***

The Riddick Trilogy... Do you know I didn't even know there was a third film? ITV4 showed Pitch Black and then three nights later The Chronicles of Riddick, which had [amazingly] Judi Dench in it and an extremely youthful looking Karl Urban. It wasn't what I expected because I'd always wrongly believed it was the prequel to Pitch Black, it clearly isn't. Chronicles is an odd movie; like the bastard off-spring of an obscure corner of the Star Wars galaxy and despite some excellent set pieces, a real sense of menace and a two hour running time, it ended up feeling like the poor middle part of a dodgy trilogy (which it is). You get the impression that lots was cut out of this film because coherence is less important than an accessible running time and how Judi Dench got involved is the greatest enigma of them all - perhaps she fancied a new conservatory or a foreign holiday?

The ending of Pitch Black was, at least, an ending, even if you didn't see Radha Mitchell's death coming. The sequel ends on an unfinished note, but is most definitely setting you up for part 3, with Richard B Riddick now in charge of the universe's Nazi Death Cult worshippers, the Necromongers and all that comes with it. One thing you can guarantee about Riddick films is he's completely upfront about things and doesn't shy away from confrontation - it's Die Hard on steroids. This film tries to explain why he is what he is and plays fast and loose with some of the things he said in the first film - like why his eyes are the way they are. It would have been nice to discover how this member of a super powerful race called the Furyans ended up with such a human name...

The Nazi Death Cult spends most of its time, when not usurping worlds, trying to kill off whoever's in charge. Being the boss is a dangerous occupation and frankly why anyone would want the mantle is beyond me. Plus whatever the Underverse is and what the Necromongers are actually seeking has been inconveniently overlooked in favour of naked torsos and tortuous posturing. 

By the start of the third film, ten years have elapsed since the end of the first film and now the eponymously titled Riddick is about how he fell out with the Nazi Death Cult and ended up on a very inhospitable planet. The opening ten minutes pretty much explains how our shiny eyed hero was alone, vulnerable and injured on the run from crazy alien nasties. 

From that point on, we essentially get Die Hard meets Aliens as Riddick first acclimatises to the planet, then decides it's time for him to get off of it. This is achieved by activating a Bounty Hunter alarm beacon, notifying all the mercenaries nearby that he is alive and well on this planet. Enter two teams of bounty hunters; one featuring Dave Bautista and a rag tag bunch of incompetents led by a wanker called Santana. 

The other team is led by the father of the arsehole from Pitch Black who Riddick allowed to die because he wanted to sacrifice a young girl to save his own skin. Daddy wants to find out what happened to his son ten years earlier and for most of the film isn't interested in the truth. On his team is former Battlestar Galactica alumni Katee Sackhoff, who it has to be said didn't have the kind of acting career after that series finished that she probably thought she deserved; that much is proved when about half way through the film we get some gratuitous nudity from her. She's a fine looking woman, but I can't help thinking I would have felt better about it had she kept her tits to herself.

As an action/adventure film it's really top notch stuff - seriously - but like both the films before it, it suffers from poor dialogue and once the slightly far fetched conclusion arrives you're left thinking that the remaining arseholes Vin Diesel hasn't killed simply wouldn't have the change of heart they jump the sharkingly do. Then for an epilogue we're back to the Necromongers for a (not so) neat and quick bookend sequence setting us up for Riddick 4 or Furya as it is, at the moment, called. 

Riddick was made in 2013, Karl Urban's brief cameo suggests to me that he agreed to his three minutes on screen as a favour to David Twohy, who had overseen the trilogy, despite becoming something of a bigger star in the seven years between Chronicles and Riddick. 

Furya isn't likely to come out for another three to five years - it's in production, which could mean it's anywhere between script and final polishing. Diesel claims it's not far away and frankly it needs to be soon because our titular hero's now 55 and I'm thinking he's not likely to be doing many naked torso shots, especially as his moobs are going to be less interesting than Katee Sackhoff's boob.

***

The old film fest ploughs on without a pause, as the wife and I re-engage with films we've seen and ones we've missed. The first bunch on our list were all from 2011 and began with the prequel to The Thing interestingly titled The Thing, which features weird SF alumni (and nerd crumpet) Mary Elisabeth Winstead. I remember watching this film the first time around and thinking, it's just a remake of the Kurt Russell film, but this time with more diversity in the cast, but while it's easily passed off as a 'remake' there are elements of it that work very well; not least the director's painstaking detail to recreate the Norwegian Antarctic based exactly as it was shown in the 1982 film and make sure the end of this film mirrored the start of the 'sequel'.

I have a few problems with it, such as what happens to Winstead after she blows up the alien on his ship and then fries Joel Egerton as he too has been 'assimilated'? Or did the grenade used to off the ship's alien create the massive collapse exposing the alien ship that is found by the scientists at the US base in the 1982 film, because it certainly didn't look like it? The other problem the film had was there were literally too many people in it, so it was difficult to even keep a track of who lived and who fried, but I enjoyed it much more than I did 11 years ago. 

It's an interesting curiosity, especially if, like me, you think John Carpenter's remake of The Thing From Another World is one of the best SF/horror movies ever made.

***

I remember watching Battle Los Angeles when it came out in 2011, but it obviously left little or no impact because watching it again the other night I felt like I was new to the party. This Aaron Eckhart vehicle originally involved the Strause brothers doing the special effects, but they quit the film to do their own version called Skyline (a film that hasn't aged well at all). The FX in the latter film are excellent even if the rest of the film is a big mound of poo; the FX in Battle Los Angeles aren't excellent, at least not when it involves the alien invaders and as one reviewer described - it felt like Black Hawk Down with aliens. It's a film full of testosterone (even Eckhart, who made a third of the film with an unknown broken arm) and actors who would go on to do other, more memorable, things and for the first time in literally months, I fell asleep during it a number of times.

It is a really boring film; even when the marines are fighting aliens. It's just a war film and not a very good one at that. 

***

Source Code also came out 11 years ago and we both remembered the premise but had forgotten just how totally fucked up it was. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a Air Force captain who finds himself repeatedly transported into the last eight minutes of a train journey that ends with total annihilation. I'm actually going to avoid spoilers for this because if you haven't seen it, you should. It's a cracking little film - weighing in at barely 90 minutes - and while the ending smacks a little of wishful thinking you can't help but feel it was right for the characters involved. 

It was directed by Duncan Jones, who many might recall is also known as Zowie Bowie; son of the late great singer/songwriter/auteur and proves, without a doubt, that genius might be running in the DNA. If you've never seen it, go out of your way to.

***

The Adjustment Bureau is a film also from 2011 and one I remember loving first time round. If anything it got a bit better watching it again because while I remembered the premise I forgot all the details. I think the only real problem I have with the film is that at its heart it's deeply religious and works on our acceptance that there's a supreme being in control of the destinies of everyone.

I think it was also the film when I fell in love with Emily Blunt and acknowledged that Matt Damon is actually an A list actor. For those of you who haven't seen it, Damon plays a politician who on the eve of losing his first attempt at being elected as a senator meets Blunt and they hit it off like they had always been destined to, except according to the person that writes the grand scheme of things that meeting was to be a singular one and Damon can't meet up with her again because she would prevent him from becoming President and he wouldn't be able to go on and do great things, so the Adjustment Bureau do everything in their power to prevent this, even resorting to exposing themselves to him to prove to him that it's the way it is for a reason.

Screw that, says Damon and spend the rest of the film trying to track down this woman who has had such a profound effect on him. It is one of the best examples of True Love Conquers All and I don't think there's been a stranger movie that sends the message out that God exists [he doesn't]. 

Interesting factoid: This film features the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Howard - Tony's father - Stark (John Slattery), but I'm thinking that most actors at some point are going to end up in an MCU film. However, last time out when I reviewed the two Deadpool films, I forgot to mention that The Vanisher - one of X-Force (but also one of the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) - was played - in the three seconds he was actually on screen; while being electrocuted - by Brad Pitt. I'm also sure Matt Damon has appeared in a Deadpool film as well...

***

A quick mention for Silent Hill (from 2006, but who's counting). We switched it off after 20 minutes; for a creepy horror movie it was full of dire acting, illogical motivation and felt like the video game it was based on (although I've never actually played it). Radha Mitchell might have been a kick ass character in Pitch Black but in this she was reduced to running around a lot and shouting. Sean Bean also brings nothing to the film apart from a bad US accent. It had creepy ideas but these don't make an interesting film, that usually needs a decent script and a plot that is easily understood.

***

This is the End from Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel, with a host of other Hollywood A and B listers in a parody end of existence comedy, was funnier first time round, although Emma Watson is great in it. It's the kind of film that really needed to be half an hour shorter, mainly because some of it was really unnecessary, such as the five minute argument between Danny McBride and James Franco about where they can ejaculate in Franco's house to cause the most offense; which might sound funny but actually makes you feel a little queasy.

There's no shortage of massive penises in this film, some of which are actually erect (although only seen in shadow, in that instance) and a very poorly judged discussion about raping Emma Watson, which was also unnecessary and quite distasteful, even if the original intentions were supposed to be chivalrous. In fact, it's essentially a film about Hollywood A and B list actors (they all play vacuous, self-interested versions of themselves) and how offensive they can be and still get laughs; the problem with the film is the laughs are actually few and far between and become even thinner on the ground the further into the 2 hour running time you get. Plus the denouement is extremely weak and it struggles with consistency, even if it's supposed to be a zany comedy in bad taste.

***

And that's it for this week... Next time: pick any number of films from the following - Troll - a new Norwegian film. Chappie a 2105 film about a robot. Chef, Cloud Atlas, Django Unchained, Interstellar, Life of Pi, Moneyball, Mystery Men, Prisoners, The Change-Up, Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive and a few other films I've recorded off the TV; I might also get around to watching Black Bird, a six-part TV series which I've downloaded on recommendation of The Guardian. Plus the usual rants, raves and cunts...