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.