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...
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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