Who You Gonna Call? Modern Culture!

A Spoiler here, a spoiler there, a spoiler every bleedin' where...

Several columns ago I tore Ghostbusters to shreds thus proving that a certain number of my friends never bother to read this column because I wouldn't have got away with it if they did. It doesn't bother me too much because they'd all probably hate me for this, but... Ghostbusters (2016) is head and shoulders a better movie than the 1980s original.

What is wrong about the internet now is it's actually a tool that can be manipulated by Incels, haters and misogynistic wankers to their own limp dick agendas and this version is the perfect example of that. It's roughly the same length as the original but it packs so much more into it; it has some fantastic nods of appreciation to the original without being too pandering; the special effects are brilliant; it has some nice cameos from the living trio of remaining Ghostbusters and instead of it being a vehicle to essentially show what a funny guy Bill Murray was, it's a nicely rounded bit of hokum, with a sharp script, interesting characters and a classy finale that is so much better than the original's.

For me it's Kate McKinnon's film; she's the hugely funny Venkman-esque character but with a science degree rather than just a smart mouth. Wiig and McCarthy make great a Egon and Ray and Leslie Jones takes the Ernie Hudson role and makes it less about the token black person and more about the bombastic enthusiast who completes the team. This Ghostbusting team is as good as the original but they add a certain, dare I say it, realism to proceedings. Then it's complimented by the quite brilliant Chris Hemsworth as Kevin, the incredibly ditzy 'secretary' who ends up being the vessel by which the villain returns from the dead.

The thing is, we watched this seven years ago and both of us admitted that we remembered so little about it I'm beginning to wonder if age is eating our brain cells faster than we want to believe. I also vaguely recall having the same thoughts about McKinnon then, but maybe not liking the film as much, but I think I know and understand why.

Neither of us had seen the 1980s original since the early 1990s; it was a film that became so ubiquitous with holidays that it was always going to be on TV at one point or another - like White Christmas or Die Hard, Ghostbusters became essential missing, but when it was on over Christmas this time around I watched it because it had been a long time and these fresher eyes saw it for the pile of shite it actually was. Okay, not a pile of shite, but an absolutely overrated film that people think about with rose-tinted memories. Seeing the revamped 2016 version brought all the original film's faults to a head. Because of that rose-tinted memory, watching the newer version made us think it was a pale imitation, but having now seen it recently it does the exact opposite, it makes you realise just what a great film the reboot was and what a shallow, facile and slight film the original was. This makes the hate directed towards it unfathomable; it simply doesn't deserve it (unless of course you're a woman-hating moron).

I can't dislike the 2016 version because it is in virtually every way a far superior film. 

Now, BRING IT ON, Incel wankers!

***

Episode four of The English and my first real problem with the series. However, that problem very much takes a back seat to the brilliant Rafe Spall, who's just barrelled his way into this odd series. I remember watching War of the Worlds in 2019 - the BBC co-produced loose adaptation of HG Wells novel - when Spall played George like he'd read the script and doped himself up on Mogadon (nitrazepam) and phoned his acting in via Zoom. It left me wondering whether he was famous because of his dad and nothing else.

Then I watched Desperate Romantics (see a previous blog) and realised he was quite a good actor. As Melmont in The English he usurped any role he'd previously had and knocked it out of the park. Melmont is one of the greatest nasty bastards I've ever seen on TV; a proper Cockney geezer with a psychopathic streak that is both intriguing and devastatingly frightening. This fourth episode of The English was firmly about him and was mainly set 15 years prior to the events taking place in 1890.

It's worth watching this series for him alone and it also starts to knit the story together, making you realise that this isn't just a bunch of disparate stories but one loosely put together monstrous story where the person you think is the villain might not actually be the bad guy at all, despite some of the shit you've seen him involved with.

However, there is a major problem with this episode. When Melmont visits Cornelia in London, after he's been involved in a really nasty thing, he has instant access to her. Emily Blunt's character is the daughter of a Lord; she is probably aristocracy and lives in a huge house in London, yet there appears to be no staff; no butler, no housemaids, no personal assistants, nothing to suggest she is high born and when Melmont returns all there is is a piano tuner; still no staff or servants. This is Victorian England in 1875 and Cornelia is a much younger and vulnerable woman - where are the staff? Where is her father? Why is she all alone and in the company of a man who is a psycho working class cunt? This just doesn't ring true and I doubt it will be explained in the final two episodes...

The penultimate episode of The English was, like the others, a proper curate's egg of an episode. It was like whatever happened between #3 and #5 (#4 was all flashback) wasn't considered important enough to go into any detail because a character we'd seen for about one minute in #3 was [ahem] staring at us from almost the beginning of #5, briefly. It was like Hugo Blick couldn't be arsed to fill in the details and lurched from Cornelia threatening the dastardly Indian to threatening someone else and left it to the viewer to fill in the blanks. It was strange and so much like this series to go from hardly anything happening to shit loads in ten minutes.

The English was a TV series that astounded, baffled and infuriated me. Rafe Spall's David Melmont is without a doubt one of TV's nastiest bastards, a truly horrid human being. However, arguably Emily Blunt's Lady Cornelia Locke was one of the most tragic. Chaske Spencer's Eli Whipp had an air of Tonto about him, like he'd always been a few steps ahead of the story, apart from at the end. It twisted and turned and made you think things and then confounded you by directing you in another altogether weirder or different direction. The outcome was unexpected, unusual and I imagine when Hugo Blick sold the idea to the people with money they probably said, "You want to base an entire six episode series on that?"

The fact it boiled down to something simple yet far reaching is quite inspired; to base a truly awesome six-part series on something bizarre and pretty much historically extinct is probably a stroke of genius, but sometimes you don't need actual mega-complicated, labyrinthine plots to make something big, beautiful and ultimately heartbreaking.

***

Correction: last week I stated we'd seen all three Blade films. We haven't. If the wife is positive we haven't, I'm not one to disagree with her. We think we maybe watched the first one and decided not to bother with the others - this would have been when we were still hiring videos and DVDs and we possibly didn't bother wasting our money on sequels of films we didn't like, which might explain last week's Batman Returns.

Some interesting facts about Blade 2: 

It's directed by Guillermo Del Toro. 
The new version of vampires introduced in this film and championed by one Luke Goss were the inspiration for Del Torro's TV series The Strain.
The creative director on the film was Mike Mignola - who created Hellboy, the film Del Torro made after this.
It also stars Norman Reedus - aka Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead.
Danny John Jules - aka Cat - is in this film.
It also stars Ron Perlman - who appeared in other Del Toro films; Cronos (GDT's first feature film), also the two Hellboy films (and probably a couple of others, but I can't be arsed to check).

It's a really dreadful film that doesn't do an awful lot to improve or further the first film. That said, Del Toro at least knows how to direct a film even if he doesn't have much to play with. The FX were considerably better than the previous film (but four years had passed) but the sets and set pieces looked more like something out of Star Trek meets the Bloodsucking Sewer Monsters [a direct-to-video classic] and there was this feeling of Deja vu about it; like we've been here before.

I wasn't aware that Blade had a cure for vampirism as demonstrated in the opening 15 minutes when he cures Kris Kristofferson of his blood sucking problem - it was this that made us realise we probably hadn't seen it. It dropped the high camp in favour of gritty Aliens style bad asses, but it was still a load of kitsch bollocks, incredibly overwrought and with a plot that pretty much telegraphs itself to you the moment the Vampire Nation recruits Blade to help them; Wesley even suggests it. 

***

An aside: the other day, someone suggested I watch far too much television and maybe I do, but I'd probably argue that I watch considerably less than many of the people I know. Admittedly, since I was ill in November, we have watched about eight hours a week more TV than we did, mainly because I spend much less time on the PC and more time hanging out with my wife - who I will have hung out with for 40 years a couple of days after this gets published - but what I write about is probably about 30-40% of what we watch, but I've never sat down and worked it out.

What are the things I don't review? The things that we watch like QI, Only Connect, Mortimer and Whitehouse, Simon Reeve programmes, a couple of afternoon quiz shows: Pointless (when they're new), The Tipping Point, the wife watches The Chase and craft programmes will often be on like The Repair Shop and things like that - but that's because the wife is a crafter. I probably watch far less news and current affairs programmes than I used to, but that's because I'm no longer aligned to a specific English political party now and until Scotland is independent there's not a lot of point following Scottish politics, at least until England keeps its nose out of our affairs. There's also George Clarke, but we'll talk about him later...

We'll watch stuff like travel programmes like HIGNFY and if there's a special or something on that takes our fancy we'll watch it; but in general we're not ones for being swept up by public fervour or demand. We watched Line of Duty during lockdown and enjoyed it, but we've only recently decided to give Happy Valley a try and it could be a few months before we get around to binge watching that. 

We don't watch soaps or 90% of big TV series, in fact, less than 5% of our viewing comes from ITV and that figures dips to probably less than 1% for things after 6pm. We've never watched Strictly, in fact we've never watched more than 5 seconds of it at any one point. Love Island, Big Brother, or any reality TV shite has never been on our screens. The fact we've watched The English is probably more to do with Emily Blunt than anything else.

Weekends tend to be made up of catching up with stuff or watching films; I'll watch a bit of Final Score (usually on the PC), the wife will catch up with her craft or game shows. I watch less live football since before the World Cup, but that's more to do with who I support rather than anything else. We'll watch Indian or Asian themed cooking programmes. 

We also watch Dr Who but not because we're fans, but because it's a habit and we're always attracted to SF series and maybe horror ones, but they don't tend to be very scary or good. We might give the new Channel 4 sitcom a try, but I don't think we've watched a comedy situation comedy for 20 years, or at least one we've stuck with from start to finish... Oh, yeah we watched The Other One and found it fun, but we like Holly Walsh (who writes it).

No, I don't think we watch too much TV, but we do watch a lot of it. And this is really only a snap shot of at the moment, roughly. I can think of a couple of friends who really watch too much of everything and others who will watch shit loads and then watch it again. So we think we don't watch much. 

***

Having never watched Michael Mann's Collateral - probably for some of the reasons mentioned above and previously - we recorded it off of ITV4 and watched it on Sunday night. The 2004 films stars Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx and is about a cab driver who unwittingly picks up an assassin and ends up getting drawn into his night of killing through no fault other than where his taxi was parked.

It also stars Jada Pinkett Smith and Mark Ruffalo and isn't a bad film until you start to actually break it down logically. It goes along at a cracking pace and Cruise plays a convincing psycho hitman, but with many films, especially Michael Mann ones, there's a few bits in it that stretch plausibility a bit much. Probably the worst one is the thing that ties the start to the end. Five minutes into the film Cruise walks past his intended fifth victim as she's going back to her flat; later in the film he uses a version of her name to threaten Foxx's boss and then asks Foxx if he's actually going to call her when all of this is over (although that might just have been psycho Tom being an arsehole), but the problem is why did Cruise go to her workplace at about 5am in the morning, why there and not her apartment and why not kill her at the start unless he didn't look at all five of his intended targets and just looked at the next one on his list. The plausible logic all but disappears.

I appreciate this was probably done to heighten tension and stretch it out, but it kind of ruined a quite tight thriller, but then again it wouldn't have spurred Foxx into becoming the hero if it hadn't happened, but you know, I have this thing about internal logic, especially in films. I like my plots not to have holes in them...

***

I forgot to mention that we also have a penchant for property and house programmes. We'll watch just about anything but not religiously. We're dippers, so if it's on and there's bugger all on elsewhere then it becomes default. However, we tend to watch everything that George Clarke is in. I don't know if it's because he's an affable Geordie or if it's the unpredictability of how far over budget all of the people he invades the life of go...  

George Clarke's Amazing Spaces should be renamed George Clarke's Amazing Budgets or possibly George Clarke's Budgets, What Budgets? It's not just this particular series, it's all of them. Anything with Clarke's name attached has to go over budget. It's not just him though, is it? Escape to the Country every day (I'm generalising but expect I'm correct) has a budget and at least one of the houses shown goes over that budget.

"What's your budget?"
"£500,000."
"Have you got any wiggle room?"
"Not really."
"Here's a house priced at £550,000. I know it's a little over your budget but we're the people who put cunt into Escape." 

With George it's usually, "How much have you got to spend?
"£20,000."
"Here's an architect who is going to charge you £18,000 before you even lay a brick."

I think it would be better if George asked how much they have to spend, laughed in their faces, commenting that his dog wouldn't piss in a hole in the ground for that kind of money and the only way these people were getting their 5 minutes of fame was if they sold their children's kidneys because that might pay for the windows in the extension. The cameras can follow the homeowners dying of starvation and then decomposing through various stages before being discovered by a distraught family member... While George talks to the camera about the need to overbudget. It could be called George Clarke's Budget of Death.

***

An interesting fact about Blade Trinity:
It's a complete load of horseshit.
It has Ryan Reynolds in it. Given what he appeared in prior to this film, it was probably his biggest part so far. One can see how he has become so successful despite doing nothing other than what he does in every film he's been in since. Be Ryan Reynolds. 
This film also stars Jessica Biel, Parker Posey, Callum Keith Rennie and Patton Oswalt.

There's a weird feel to this movie. There's this thing - the second and final Ghost Rider film was made under the Marvel Knights name, as was the woefully poor Punisher War Zone - this short lived 'imprint' was notable for having zero budgets and producing fucking abysmal lo quality rubbish. This final Blade film had all the (therefore no) qualities of these Marvel Knights films. Everything about it felt cheap, sensationalist and like it was a conclusion but also a bit of a reboot. Plot wise it's all over the place and you know how I bang on about internal logic, well this has very little and one bit of ridiculous nonsense at the end that literally makes no sense at all - they manage to get the dead body of Dracula (who has the ability to shapeshift) to turn into a copy of Blade, so that our titular hero can once again escape the clutches of the FBI. It makes no sense. It's one of those things that is done on the hope that the person who has paid to see the film doesn't question it or how it was achieved.

The entire Blade Trilogy is the definition of the law of diminishing returns in three bite sized chunks. Over six years, with technology improving, superhero films growing more sophisticated, Marvel and New Line Cinema (owned by Time Warner bizarrely enough) managed to take a poorly made first film, make the franchise less believable and entertaining with the second part and then destroy any vestige of self-respect the films might have salvaged with a third part that literally gave up on a story and plot after about ten minutes.

A special mention for Dominic Purcell, who seems to have carved a half decent career for himself in the DCEU in TV shows like Legends of Tomorrow and guest starring in virtually all the other ones. That's not bad considering he plays Dracula - or Drake - in this film with all the gravitas and pathos of a Serbian house brick taken onto The Repair Shop where Jay Blades is told, as insincerely as possible, that the brick was originally part of a grand house worth millions and perhaps the team could reconstruct it with what's left. It was like a Spitting Image puppet of Jason Statham voiced by the bloke down the road reading from a faded script translated from Swahili. Who did he shag to get the job?

Further to last week's comments about Blade, the MCU and Disney aren't going to have to do a lot to improve on these films, it's just the nature of vampires and the films they appear in that might be the problem.

***

The second part of The Last of Us was, in some ways, a vast improvement on the first. In terms of the sets and special effects used to make cities look like they actually would after 20 years of neglect and ongoing apocalypse, you have to wonder just what kind of a budget the Walking Dead was using considering by the time that series concluded it was getting on for 15 years since the Zombie Apocalypse and it looked like an army of secret gardeners and odd job men were travelling around the USA - undercover - ensuring the undergrowth never got too bad and the houses never got too dilapidated. 

Whether the fungal-infected zomboids (yeah, I made that word up) are frightening/menacing I'm not totally convinced; they're like a cross between the infected from 28 Days Later mixed with the 'vampires' from The Strain mixed with Athlete's Foot and they roam around in packs - which isn't particularly an original concept either; but I want to like this and the second episode had enough shocks, twists and turns to keep me watching.

We just haven't gotten very far; two episodes in and the three are now two and have travelled a few miles from the outskirts of the Boston Hell Suburb they came from at best. I expect this is going to run and run for as many seasons as it can milk before people give up or just keep comparing it to other zombie things. Apparently the next episode - #3 - will feature and focus on two characters who weren't in the original game story; what that actually means for the casual viewer I have no idea, but maybe it might temper the reviews a little because it's still being heralded as a kind of thinking man's serious zombie show and I'm not seeing anything - apart from the fungus - new around here.

***

The Personal History of David Copperfield is a bit of a strange film. I don't really know what I expected, but I've seen other adaptations of David Copperfield in the past and I don't know if I liked this new one. Armando Iannucci's unique take felt like one of those late 60s Dick Lester films where he let the writer loose on acid; there was a staccato twitchiness to the way the narrative was delivered. Like it was attempting to channel something like Ripping Yarns while simultaneously attempting to adapt Dickens in a Mama Mia contemporary way. Like the characters all knew they were in a film.

I was also sure the story of David Copperfield was slightly more interesting, but that's the dilemma one faces when you never take too much notice of Dickens for 40 years. This isn't a racial comment but I'm not sure the multicultural cast worked; it left my untrained brain too much opportunity to question what I was seeing which impacted on my ability to follow the story.

***

And that's about it for this week. I sometimes wonder what TV I have no intention of watching looks like. Take My 600lb Life - Where Are They Now? which, I presume is about unbelievably fat people and whether they'd lost enough weight to get out of the front door? 

There's also this show called The Curse of Oak Island and it's like on its 10th season now and for years I kept thinking, 'what is this programme'? It's about two men who bought an island off South Carolina and they believe something valuable is buried there and so far in ten years they're still looking so I presume they ain't found it yet. It's not a drama; it's a documentary; it's Real Life TV and despite giving it a resume that almost makes it sound interesting, I can guess it isn't. 

Sometimes when I'm looking on a torrents website you realise apostrophes don't appear, so something like Guys Grocery Games could actually be Guy's Grocery Games, is it a gay porn programme set in a greengrocer's, or a grocery themed game show presented by a bloke called Guy (who is probably C-List in the USA, maybe D)? 

Anyhow... Next Time: I want to watch The Fablemans because everyone is raving about it (I've had it for 6 weeks) but the wife doesn't seem that bothered. I've also been berating said wife because she still has a season and a half of Supernatural to watch (and conclude) and now she's got me collecting The Winchesters. We have M3GAN, which I'm not convinced I'm that bothered about; Extraordinary, which I want to watch and enjoy, provided it's done well and isn't too silly. I'm waiting for the right time to watch the Banshees of Inisherin or The Wonder (both are set in Ireland) and the 'Older Films' directory is down to 21. Oh and the next Marvel film will drop in between these words and the next blog; so that will get a standalone. 

Modern Culture: Returns

This will spoil you... 

Batman Returns is a film I came to the conclusion that either we have never seen it (because I disliked Batman so much) or we purged it from our brains because it was so bad.

Let's not be too controversial and start with the positive thing - the sets were fabulous. Gotham has never looked so Gothic, so creepy, so evocative; whoever was the set designer deserved an Oscar. However everyone else involved in this film wanted eviscerating. It is quite possibly one of the worst 'superhero' films I have ever seen. It is complete and utter shite, littered with misogynistic dialogue, casual sexism and where Batman had some 'logic' running through it, this was simply a lot of stupid nonsense.

It is two hours of my life I'm not getting back and as we plough our way through all the stuff on the Flash Drive of Death™, we get closer to dying and we're seeing fewer actual good things. I'm to blame because I've been the one downloading shite like these Bat films, The Rig and that dreadful X film (that one of my friends claimed were both actually really good, making me seriously question his taste - which, of course, is something we should never really do).

Batman Returns is just like Batman 1966 but reimagined as a really bad cheese nightmare. I kept wanting to see a comic sound effect bubble with CRASH, BAM or POW to appear or for Michael Keaton to utter the immortal words 'Holy Horseshit, this is a really bad film.' If any of those things had happened I might have been a little more benevolent.

Michelle Pfeiffer's origin was quite surreal and bizarre and how some 50lb wallflower turned into the acrobatic Catwoman still seems ridiculous, or the fact she could hold her own against Batman when she struggled to do anything but lick things and lose her claws. Danny DeVito's Penguin was actually quite scary, even if he made zero sense and there was no logic whatsoever to him, his existence or how he became a crime lord. But we are talking the ridiculous nonsense that is Tim Burton's Batworld and I suppose a mutated child could be raised by the penguins that live in Gotham's sewers and spew green stuff from his gaping maw - with pointy teeth.

I know some friends - probably Kelvin and Will - who will argue that this film is a genuine masterpiece and I'm not about to suggest they're wrong in their beliefs, I just personally thought it was an absolute load of rancid wank and I'm not about to argue with either of them because they're simply WRONG!

***

As a lot of my friends know, probably 50% of the films I watch are illegally downloaded using torrent files. I know some frown on it, while others just find it too much hassle to even contemplate, but I've been doing it since I had a fast internet connection (about 16 years) and I haven't been hassled by any one from any law enforcement or copyright police, ever. I'm a single downloader who doesn't distribute what I download and I never keep it...

However, the wife and I have been watching a lot of BBC4 recently and they've been airing the BBC archives with documentaries and specials from as long as 23 years ago - biographies, tributes and specials about some of TV and comedies greats who are sadly no longer with us and the other night we watched a documentary about the late, great Spike Milligan. I grew up with Spike because my dad was a huge Goon Show fan and the wife watched most of his Q series in the 1970s, read his books, enjoyed his poetry and because he was a bit of a leftie we both appreciated his politics.

During this tribute, made in 2004, two years after his death, there was mention of The Bed Sitting Room*, the surrealist comedy he was co-writer of - with John Antrobus - about a post-apocalyptic Britain and I couldn't recall if I'd ever seen it because I can't recall it ever being on TV, so I did a search for it on my usual Torrent website and it came back with zero results, so I decided to see if anywhere had it and whether I could download it for free so I typed it into my preferred search engine and added the word 'torrent' and I discovered something truly brilliant, free and legal...

The Internet Archive - https://archive.org/ - a place that houses literally millions of things from audio to video to books to news articles; basically anything that has ever been on the internet, legitimately, might be on there, depending on whether someone has uploaded it and not only did I find The Bed Sitting Room in MP4 format, I also found - from the BBC's archives - The Last Goon Show from 1972 (celebrating the BBC's 50th anniversary) and a BBC Video release from the mid 1980s of a compilation of Q6 from 1975 and as the wife was a huge fan and I remembered some of it very fondly I downloaded that as well and we watched it early on Saturday night.

Good God. I don't think I've watched a television program in over 30 years that made me feel as grubby and ... woke. It was unbelievably racist, sexist and mostly unfunny. There were numerous racial slurs about black people, Asians, Chinese, Jews and Arabs and all in the opening 15 minutes. It was remarkably sexist and misogynistic with much groping, leering and sexist behaviour; there was one scene where Spike lifted up the skirt of a girl who was lying prone on the floor and took a photo of her knickers in a suggestive pose and then threatened someone playing a policeman with blackmail. There was gratuitous nudity and suggestions that some women would sleep with anyone who wasn't white. Bearing in mind Milligan was born in India, so while his Pakistani Dalek sketch was quite funny it was also quite troubling and this from the man who had a short-lived sitcom in 1969 called Curry & Chips where he played an Indian. 

I think we both were appalled that one of our 'heroes' from our youth could be so... wrong, whether it was just through ignorance or what some people now call casual racism, but when you consider that some people feel Love Thy Neighbour was horrendously racist, we should remember that whatever racial slurs Jack Smethurst levelled at Rudolph Walker, the underlying joke and point was that it always backfired on him and his black neighbour always came out on top; this on the other hand was just nasty - a real BBC video nasty if ever there was one.

*Addendum - the copy of The Bed-Sitting Room I legally downloaded was two things: very badly out of synch - it was like a badly dubbed episode of The Water Margin and more importantly, despite having a veritable who's who of British actors and thesps, it was a load of old shite.

***

I totally get why people have fallen in love with Wednesday, it's brilliant lightweight nonsense that is so easy to immerse yourself in. The genius of it was the ability within three episodes for the viewer/fan to be invested in the characters, even the ones you have a wrong first impression about. It's episodic television of the 1970s in a thoroughly 2020s way.

I was strangely delighted to see that Burton directed the first four episodes because TV is a medium he should do more in, with a limited budget, less time and resources, he directs four cracking introductory episodes. If you're going in unfamiliar with the Addams Family or haven't seen recent films you are at a slight disadvantage, but in many ways that makes it better because the general enigma of the Addams family and the supporting cast is stunning - new eyes would get just enough for them to be as immersed as anyone else. It's a typical television set, it's a great mix of hometown and Gothic and has just the right amount of supporting characters with 'mysterious' back stories and a couple of - as they call them in the trade - Xanders. 

The problem for me is it dipped at episode 5. It stunk of... filler. Filler? In an eight episode mini-series? I know it technically isn't a filler episode, but it wasn't directed by Burton and concluded one of the subplots haunting the first half - why was Gomez suspected of murder 30 years earlier? The thing is it might have worked better if the entire Addams Family hadn't turned up for Parents Weekend. The tone was too reminiscent of an Addams Family TV or film episode; the plot doesn't really move forward, it in fact gets forgotten about. It's also the episode I began to suspect that I knew who the monster was despite offering up all manner of red herring roads for us to go down. That was just about 99% confirmed in the next episode, which was a vast improvement in all departments but still lacked the cutting edge of the first four episodes.

Then in the penultimate episode my theory and likely the theories of everyone else went out the window. I shouldn't be surprised, but equally it is surprising that while Wednesday is good at finding clues her powers of deduction are woefully [geddit] inadequate; she's only partially a good detective and is prone to a form of histrionics that means she's far too presumptuous and accusatory.

While the denouement isn't unexpected - you did get a hint it could be the people behind it - it does a great job of making you think it's someone else right up to the reveal. Yet for all the enjoyment it offered I couldn't help feel that it was all a bit contrived; a little convenient and, just to bang on about that internal logic that I'd already dismissed as not being essential for this particular idea, some of the things made too little sense. Obviously they needed to string this series out for as long as they could, but I can't help feeling it could have been done in five, maybe six, episodes that were each maybe five minutes longer.

There were just enough conclusions to satisfy; enough dangling plot lines to keep you coming back and it was definitely a winner. I mentioned last time out that Jenna Ortega was fantastic as Wednesday and I wonder if they used some Lord of the Rings film type process to make Wednesday look so slight and 15, because while Ortega is a quite slim and slight actress, she definitely wouldn't pass as a 15/16 year old, despite this series being filmed when she was 19, but she is only 5'1" so whatever manipulation they might have done wasn't probably that difficult. I'm just waffling; the point is if you haven't seen it you should, it's good value and is probably needed now we have a dearth of supernatural ensemble shows with a slightly ironic and humorous slant.

***

The Last of US is being heralded as the greatest video game to TV adaptation and a stand out brilliant show, so we sat down and watched the first episode. My first impression was have the critics seen more than the first episode? Were they treated to an advance box set or at least the first few? Because while episode one was reasonable, it pretty much felt a lot like a more dystopian Walking Dead instalment with a bigger budget. 

The free stronghold of Boston resembled as Soviet town circa 1960 (not that I know what that was like) and one has to wonder if living your life in shit with shit and surrounded by shit and fascists is better than being dead or one of the mushroom infected zombies. If the USA becomes a totalitarian shithouse after the apocalypse, I think I'd be walking around with a sign hanging round my neck saying 'infect me or shoot me'.

The first episode was 80 minutes long, plenty of time to set the scene and give us a good idea of what was happening, yet I felt like they could barely be arsed to do that and wanted to concentrate on the misery more than the story. You're treated to an opening 45 minutes where, in some alternative Earth history, the world is overrun by a fungal pandemic in 2003 and this good hard working bloke - played by the Mandalorian - is bringing up his daughter and his wayward brother only for it all to go to shit when his daughter is accidentally on purpose killed by a soldier (of which Pedro Pascal is hinted at having been once). Fast forward 20 years and he's alive, dumping dead bodies into an open fire pit and trying to get enough food rationing tokens to get a battery for a vehicle so he can flirt with execution to leave the safe, but very much a hell hole, enclave to go in search of his brother who he doesn't appear to be talking to any longer. Plus, it's hinted at that he - Pascal - is a hardnosed bad ass and is feared by people who aren't in the army with guns.

Then there's Bella Ramsey, the girl who was bitten by a fungal bearer three weeks earlier but hasn't turned into a zombified carrier and is therefore - presumably - mankind's last best hope for a cure and a return to a relatively normal life. She's got a massive target on her back if the rest of the world discover she's the cure because, apparently everyone will want her dead - presumably most people like this shit future world and don't want to return to a world where they can get things without fearing a firing squad or being hanged.

It's got Anna Torv in it and that should make me happy because Anna Torv in Fringe was the fucking bee's knees, but in this she's rather dislikeable and unpleasant and there's a bunch of people who represent a kind of 'resistance' against the totalitarianism, but most of them get killed in an unexplained massacre and it was pretty much all over ten minutes later. It didn't feel like 80 minutes, especially how much of the plot is actually explained or how invested we're supposed to get with the cast, but this was definitely NOT a five star TV show (according to The Guardian) or a 9.5 (according to IMDB); it feels as though some PR men are earning their money by selling the hype and people are believing it.

There were episodes in the opening four seasons of The Walking Dead that are 9.5s; the one where Carol has to kill the 13 year old psychopath because she (the young girl) had lost all her perspective of how dangerous the world had become and ended up trying to feed her younger sibling to the dead, just for shits and giggles, was and still is one of the finest examples of futility in a bleak and uncaring landscape you will ever witness, The Last of Us has to go a long way to be as good as that and on this evidence it isn't. Yes, it might become as bleak and unforgiving as Cormac McCarthy's The Road or it might end up being the best video game to TV adaptation ever, but at the moment it's a lot of angry desperate people vying for arsehole of the week.

***

The only DC film we hadn't seen was Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn and I can't help wonder if our lives would have been richer, fuller and more betterer had we simply said, 'Let's give this one a miss.' That is mainly because it is a stinking pile of gibberish; I can't really describe it as anything else. Quinn in the two Suicide Squad films is annoying enough and I'm sure in whatever Batman cartoons she's pops up in the kids (young and especially older ones who live in their mother's basements wearing little but stained underpants) love her, but I'm flummoxed by her.

In said Suicide Squad films she's treated like some kind of human gelignite - something so unstable you daren't breathe on her for fear she'll explode everywhere and everything, but in this she was simply a really annoying ex-girlfriend; apart from a couple of scenes where she got close to the mythos of madness she carried with her in those other films.

The thing is Birds of Prey is a pretty shit film. It feels like a 1990s era Batman spin-off - at times - and a goofy psycho drama in others. There was not one single member of the cast you wanted to root for, not even Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Huntress and I'm usually a big fan of Winstead, but in this she came across as someone who had just made a seriously bad career choice and is still paying for it seven years later.

I appreciate that certain types of film are never going to be serious; that they are fantasies where you have to stretch your imagination a little to get the 'world' in which they're set. I suppose in many ways that could be an argument for liking Batman Returns, but I like my superhero spin-offs to have some form of narrative; to make sense and give me the sensation of... well anything would be nice; but with this I got the sensation of boredom and that I'd spent another two hours of my life wasted on something that wasn't pleasant and wouldn't leave me with a warm feeling.

A special mention for Ewan McGregor who was absolutely shit in this film and one to whoever the director was for having a finale that was one of the shortest in modern 'superhero' films I've ever seen. Watching McGregor explode was the highlight of the film. If you've never seen this film your life will be better if it stays that way.

***

Last week, after watching the first ten minutes of Velma and opting to never watch it again (it seems I wasn't the only person to think it stunk - yay!), I decided to watch Little Demon a new animated 10-part thing with Danny Devito (oh how this column is full of coincidences) as Satan, presumably his daughter Lucy as Chrissy - Satan's daughter - and Audrey Plaza as her mother.

It's a cartoon. It's not for kids. I didn't so much as smirk, let alone laugh at the first episode and decided the next nine weren't worth my time or effort... The animation is poor - but isn't most animation nowadays? I mean, look at some cartoons from the 1940 and then try to convince me that the genre has improved over the last 80 years. The script was all shouty, sweary and grossly annoying. It's full of huge amounts of violence, full front nudity, unimaginative demons and like I said, not so much as a snicker. It wasn't funny and I might be getting old but I can't see how anyone would have found it anything other than rubbish.

Oddly enough, I was only thinking about this last night; am I becoming too fussy? Is my threshold for what I regard as good entertainment now so high that any old shit that other people like I'm struggling to understand let alone enjoy? I find the tastes of others quite disturbing at times or simply (there's a word I'm overusing this week) annoying, like my mate who I believe purposefully tells people he loves the things everyone hates just for the crack and the adverse attention.

Take The Last of Us as an example. I cannot fathom how that got a 9.5 rating on IMDB based on a first episode that did very little but make us think we're going to be spending the next nine weeks in a really grim and gloomy place. I appreciate that I've never been a 'gamer' so perhaps I can't see the woods for the shit... um trees, but perhaps as my friend Chris, rather insultingly, pointed out, I'm getting old. I'm becoming all of those parents or grandparents who hated punk or long hair or... whatever.

I mean, I enjoyed Wednesday but still managed to find some fault in it, but thankfully I enjoyed it more than anything else. Anyhow, I watched Little Demon on the recommendation of the fucking Guardian again and honestly I need to cut that shit out of my life; not only do I find it full of neo-liberal horse shit, I can't get on the same page as most of their reviewers. Curiously, The Guardian was also about the only thing/publication that had anything positive to say about Velma and this point was picked up by one of their own columnists, so maybe it isn't just me.

I remember back in 2010, at the arse end of Yahoo's communities, before they all shut down because of Facebook. I was in a group of eight or nine likeminded individuals who relied on each other for new and interesting things - such as music, film, TV and things with words in them. I remember commenting that I was getting the impression that a lot of my peers were allowing their quality threshold to drop because of the dearth of inventive or enjoyable entertainment. I can't recall what exactly spiked my ire, but I'm starting to feel as though nothing I have scheduled for review isn't going to feel my disdain at some point of another.

Which brings us nicely to...

***

Chef which is essentially an Iron Man film...

Huh? No seriously, it is [not]. It stars Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha) and Robert Downey Jr (Tony Stark). It also has Dustin Hoffman, John Leguizamo, Sofia Vergara, Bobby Cannavale and Oliver Platt; it is also one of the best feel good films you will see for a long time. It was a genuine joy to watch and you'd have thought I'd deliberately planned to watch something as good as this after the last entry in this blog.

Carl Casper (Favreau) is a top notch chef - he's a savant and he's employed by Hoffman. His food is to die for but he's been cooking the same things for five years and he wants to change. He's got the top restaurant critic in LA coming to eat at 'his' place and he's come up with a fantastic new menu that he thinks will blow the guy's socks off. Except Hoffman wants him to cook what's on the menu and won't take no for an answer, so Casper does and the critic tears him a new arsehole on his social media.

Then Twitter gets involved - in a social media way - and with the help of Casper's son, Percy, he joins that world and proceeds to fuck up his career, purely by being an honest guy and not understanding the kind of shit one can get oneself into on social media - especially in 2014 when this was made. After a week that ends with him quitting/being fired, he makes a complete arse of himself and is left without a job, no prospects and his self-esteem is blown.

In steps his ex-wife who suggests he comes to Miami with her and their son and basically act as Percy's nanny while Inez (the wife) does her thing; this leads to Casper visiting Inez's ex-ex-husband, RDJ, who wants to give Casper a food wagon so he can go it alone selling street food. From that point onwards it's about friendship, family and a love of food and it's a fucking marvellous film that puts a smile on your face and warms the cockles of your heart. It's got a 7.3 rating on IMDB (and, yes I know I put far too much stock in this) but it deserves the 9.5 that the new zombie series got. It's just wonderful and plays out like the older brother/inspiration for what was last year's stand out TV series The Bear.

Watch it. Watch it and feel good about yourself and life again.

***

Meanwhile, as Chef finished early and we had nothing on TV or catch-up to watch, we decided to start The English because we'd heard so many positive things about it without knowing a great deal apart from it appeared to be about an English woman - Cornelia - and a former Pawnee scout for the US Army - Eli - we weren't even sure what that was about and where it would go, because we sort of avoided any hints or [ahem] spoilers, because we didn't want to [ahem] spoil it for ourselves...

If you haven't seen it all I can say is it's a very minimalist series; the first episode was 45 minutes long but whizzed past despite very little happening. Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds are both supporting characters and neither of them are in it for very long. It's a story about Cornelia who has travelled to the USA (with a lot of cash) because her son has been killed and her every move has been followed by representatives of the man she blames for his death as she seeks revenge against him. She falls victim to Hinds and is expected to be executed by him for the mysterious unnamed man. One act of kindness by her changes the course of her life and Eli's.

It stars the gorgeous Emily Blunt who could appear dressed as a bear in a bath full of shit shouting obscenities in Swahili and I'd still watch it and Chaske Spencer, who apparently has been around for some time but I've not noticed or seen him in anything. There's a slightly surreal feel to the entire thing, probably because it's a western written by an Englishman and has a lot of English in it (not that nationality is an indicator of the surreal, it just seems appropriate). I think the title is essentially reference to the fact that the English are pretty much responsible for everything that's bad as well as the few good things - so it's spot on there.

Episodes two and three very much kept with the minimalist feel and the story seems to be lurching along slowly but in as forward direction, apart from Emily going backwards to Oklahoma with some Mennonites in tow. We've been introduced to the man she wants to kill, at least I presume the English twat up in Wyoming is the man she wants to kill and if you think Emily and her Indian are a weird couple, things up North are looking decidedly wonky and borderline horror film.

This is very much a seriously good series, even if it still feels very British and surreal. It's brutal, unforgiving and with the exception of Cornelia and Eli full of very very bad people - the wild west it certainly is. You can see it on iPlayer or Amazon Prime. 

***

"What do you want to watch then?" I asked the wife? Then I proceeded to go through the 30 odd films on the Flash Drive of Death™ and she said, "Let's watch the Blade Trilogy again; it's been over 20 years since we last watched them." So we wasted two hours on one of the few 'Marvel' films we weren't tempted to watch during the re-watch Marvel films marathon we had last year.

It's a strange film and strange in that not all of it feels 25 years old; it's dated in big chunks but seems quite contemporary in others. Wesley Snipes is quite dreadful as Blade though and there are sections of this film that feel like a camp Martial Arts movie. 'Is of a time' isn't really a good generic description because parts felt like the 1970s - like the speeded up scene in the car and the almost balletic battle royal in the finale. The special effects were a mix of quite neat and Ghostbusters level and did I mention that Wesley Snipes really is quite dreadful. He's full of testosterone and he's so masculine you almost expect him to break out in a rash of massive penises.

Stephen Dorf as Deacon Frost was actually quite a decent villain with just enough psychopathic tendencies and boyish charm, but he and the entire cadre of vampires was not explained enough, it almost felt like (and I didn't read a Tomb of Dracula or Blade comic since the 1970s) you needed to know the comic to fill in the blanks. There was a dialled in supporting role by Kris Kristofferson, which of course loses its impact as we've also seen the next two parts, even if we can't remember diddly squat about them.

All in all, we seen a lot worse in recent weeks even if this film is all over the place. It does, however, pose a really interesting question. The three Blade films are all extremely violent, seductive and suggestive because vampires aren't exactly cuddly fluffy monsters who drink lemonade, so how the MCU and Mahershala Ali are going to bring him into the Disneyfied MCU without wandering into Deadpool's 18 rated territory is anyone's guess. I'm of the opinion that the MCU is purposefully being bloated to allow them to take risks and play with all manner of ideas before they decide to streamline it back down again when the Kang/Multiverse storyline is resolved, however part of me is now thinking that instead of doing their own Crisis on Infinite Earths idea of reunification and new look old heroes, what it's going to do is allow them to have a number of 'Earths' each with its own dynamic - a superhero world, a horror world, a mutant world, a cosmic world - all earths and their universes, all similar but all very unique from each other.

How this will be achieved and whether it will be a success or not is in the stars, but I had this epiphany when trying to work out how they're going to cram everything into the same world without it simply feeling too fat, bloated and contradictory - but by having a number of variant earths it even allows you to have the occasional cross-universe team-up. It obviously has some logistic problems, because most people won't be interested in watching them all, but it would solve a lot of things and leave open the idea that at some point in the future they can reunify everything in another Endgame type phase.

I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner?

***

Next time: the conclusion of The English which I expect won't disappoint. The latest The Last of Us, where I hope that something original happens (and given the last actual novel I wrote was about a sentient mushroom you'd think I'd be all over this like a mycelium underground). The next two Blade films and a few other films and TV series will have my beady eye cast over them and what will possibly be the last Modern Culture before the Black Panther movies streams - which naturally will get a standalone review with added speculation. 

Modern Culture: Jesus Would Have Wept

This contains spoilers. You will be spoilt.

We kicked the week off with X because I'd heard it was a refreshing take on the 70s slasher movie and was somewhat stereotype breaking...

Absolute hogwash.

What a grubby piece of shit it was, a soft porn film masquerading as a horror film with anti-religion overtones and a feeble attempt at being a black comedy. It was awful.

A group of late 70s wankers rent a cottage on an old farm for the weekend to make a porn film for the new direct to video market and [ahem] come across a couple of actual wankers in their late 70s who appear to be sex fiends and mass murderers. The first 50 minutes of the film is dreadful then it actually gets started and the rest of the film is equally dreadful. It's exploitative and cheap looking (ooh look how they're parodying real late 70s porn films everyone) and there is literally nothing new to see apart from a woman (actually Mia Goth in prosthetics) in her 80s, maybe 90s, who likes a good shag and doesn't care if it's with a man or dark haired women - she doesn't like blondes as the blonde discovers.

I really have to start wondering about films where critics proclaim them to be something they're not. Even the Guardian - which I'm now learning should never be trusted with any reviews - claimed it was a 'groundbreaking' horror film. I'm thinking the critic was a retarded (cos they use that word in the late 1970s USA) blind idiot porn fan and he just soaked loads of rolls of toilet paper while watching it and not from blowing his own nose... Avoid this lump of excrement like you'd avoid an actual lump of shit. 

***

That's better. I already feel like I've got my groove back after last week's tortuous entry.

However, I'm now in a proper dilemma. Probably the most popular TV show in the USA at the moment is Kevin Costner's Yellowstone, but it's massively controversial because it's basically right wing of Hitler and apparently deeply offensive to some people. It isn't the kind of program I'd give house room to despite hearing that for all the bits in it that are morally objectionable, it's also addictive television with some apparently great episodes, which I'll never be able to confirm because I won't watch it.

While I was aware of Yellowstone, because of what I knew about it and wasn't likely to go near, I had no idea that 1923, which we've been watching for a month now, was a prequel to it and as a result this has kind of soured my growing enjoyment of it to the point where I'd started to question whether I wanted to watch it any more. The decision might possibly have been taken out of my hands by the knowledge that it's now on a month's hiatus and not back on screens until February 5th, which means that enough time might pass for me to never mention it to the wife again and because she feels we watch too much TV at times, she might never remember it or by the time she does I might be able to tell her that I can't get a decent torrent for it any longer.

It's a bit of a shame as with episode four I started to feel as though it had a lot of promise with the war between the cowboys and the sheep men ratcheting up, especially now the miners were getting involved and they want the Dutton's land to do with as they see fit (which I now know they won't succeed otherwise Yellowstone wouldn't exist). Helen Mirren is always good value for money as the Irish matriarch. The show is somewhat spoiled by Spencer's 'English' girlfriend whose accent veers between English, Irish, American with a little South African thrown in for good measure, even if she is one of the most attractive women I've seen on telly for a long time, she can't act. 

A month is a long time in TV, so hopefully I can just avoid mentioning it again and it will disappear into the void like a number of cancelled TV shows we've never been able to finish.

***

So with a stack of unseen TV shows, a number of unseen films and a stack of old films to re-watch, we opted to watch Iron Man 3 (or Iron Man Three as it called itself) again. It was probably the 3rd, maybe 4th time we'd watched it and it was a spur of the moment thing because I fancied something cosy and familiar to counter the fact that the winter lurgy that has struck me and the wife for over a month now has reared its persistent and ugly head again, leaving me coughing and sneezing and feeling like reheated shit.

I've been quite vocal about Iron Man 3 in the past, even suggesting it was the worst MCU film of the first few phases, but have since reassessed that opinion and now regard it as a messy but quite excellent addition to the Marvel line. The problem I have is I don't like Shane Black's direction and I think the film struggles from both Guy Pierce's dodgy villain Aldridge Killian and Ben Kingsley's 'Mandarin'. I also struggle with the way Rebecca Hall was used and treated in the film and what they did with Pepper Potts, but strip out the things I don't like about it and it's a pretty good conclusion to the Iron Man trilogy and makes you realise one very important thing/fact...

The MCU isn't as good without Tony Stark in it.

I actually got a little emotional at the end, thinking that they could really have made another three Iron Man films and I doubt anyone would have complained. What works in this film is that it's first and foremost a Tony Stark film, it's almost like Iron Man is a peripheral character who pops up when the going gets too tough for Tony. It acts as a great 'epilogue' to Avengers Assemble and it comes from an era of Marvel films when people dying/being killed wasn't an issue. While the finale and the superpowered villains were a stretch too far at times, it was, I suppose, necessary that Iron Man faced a bunch of superpowered beings, especially after the events in the first Avengers film.

I still think Shane Black is a bombastic film director, but this is probably his best film; whether that's because Robert Downey Jr was Tony Stark and no one else does it better (or will do it better in the future) or because it was made at a time when the MCU still made great films because it didn't have lots of baggage or needed to introduce us to new ideas. I just feel I've never really given the film the plaudits it deserves; maybe it needs to be seen three or four times to appreciate what a loss Tony Stark is to the franchise.

***

It's trailer time...

The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania latest trailer is out and given the first released glimpse of the film did little to suggest it was going to be a serious addition to the MCU, this latest trailer pretty much lays out the fact that this is going to be a very, very serious movie. The first two Ant-Man films were family affairs, literally and metaphorically and the tone was light-hearted and fun; I'll stick my neck out and say this is going to be anything but.

I have a theory (don't I always) that as this is the third Ant-Man film it's probably going to be the last Ant-Man film; we had three Iron Man films and we're getting three Guardians of the Galaxy films - with this cast - if there are going to be others it won't be with this team, so this will be a conclusion (of sorts) to Scott Lang's adventures. I mentioned a while back that the film introduction of Kang the Conqueror (the next Big Bad Villain) to this subsection of the franchise is both a brave move and quite intriguing and the new trailer suggests that this is going to be hugely important to the future storylines. 

I'll take this theory one step further - I'm convinced that a number of the Guardians are going to die in their third film, I think we're going to see some real tragedy in this film and the reason is because Kang manipulates time and that means that Marvel can do stuff like they did in Infinity War in the knowledge that they might/will sort it out in the future. I think 2023 could be the year of the pyrrhic victory...

An extra thought on the MCU in general: I think the schedule has changed especially for the coming two years; 2024 now has the new Captain America film, the Thunderbolts film and the reboot of Blade and frankly that sounds and looks like a really weak year for the MCU and I expect that schedule might change, in fact I expect there to be some big changes in the future of the MCU depending on how Marvels performs in the summer of this year (especially as there will be nearly a year between this film and the new Cap film, which of course won't feature Chris Evans and will be a direct sequel to the Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series, which while good was hardly astounding). 

There is also no longer a new Spider-Man film on the schedules - up until the autumn of last year there was a fourth unnamed Spidey film, it's no longer on the list which is inclusive until the end of 2025, which, of course, now has the rescheduled Fantastic Four film, despite no one really knowing what that's going to be about, who is starring in it or how it's going to fit into the MCU. If I was a casual MCU fan I'd probably be quite excited about the coming three years worth of films, but anyone who's followed the franchise since 2008 it actually looks like there's a lot of problems and uncertainty...

Still, things change as Kevin Feige has shown repeatedly over the last few years.

***

I'm not sure why we'd never watched Underwater especially given it's a monster movie and I am, at least, a wee bit partial to them, but we hadn't. It hasn't got a brilliant rating on IMDB - but that usually doesn't stop us - but considering X has a 6.8 rating (which should be 2.8), I figured that a 5.8 couldn't be all that bad, especially if it has Vincent Cassel in it, as well as TJ Miller and Kristen Stewart.

The reason I was tempted was there's a theory going round that it was originally going to be part of the Cloverfield family of films, despite not having JJ Abrams anywhere near it and that made me think it wasn't going to be just a film about being under the sea but was going to have some kind of monster in it. It actually has three kinds of monster in it - small ones, human sized ones and fucking huge ones the size of skyscrapers (hence the 'desired' links to Cloverfield).

It also goes along at a cracking pace, pretty much starting at a point that some horror movies would take half an hour to get to and from then on it's pretty relentless; a bit like Alien but underwater, but also nothing like Alien at all. In fact, apart from the fact that a lot of it is so murky and difficult to see, I can't really understand why it has such a bad IMDB rating. Perhaps it's the same reason that Captain Marvel has one of the poorest MCU ratings, because Incel-inspired Frat boys don't like the fact that Kristen Stewart prefers girls to boys and these people who deliberately watch and review films - with women who are unobtainable to them - badly in some feebleminded attempt to make other people not watch them so they flop.

It is the murk that makes this a problematic film, because whenever they're out of the internal scenes, it's like watching a film through your fingers in a thick fog while wearing some else's glasses and being extremely pissed. I appreciate that at nearly 7 miles down in the Marianas Trench you're going to struggle to see anything, but you'd think for the sake of the film they would have made the creatures more... defined, just so you get some idea of the horror facing the five protagonists remaining to face them.

That aside and the rather downbeat and almost sudden ending, it's not a bad film and is Academy Award inspired compared to the aforementioned X, but that might have got a better rating because there are lots of boobies in that film, where this one just has Kristen Stewart running around in her underwear a lot (and she hasn't got big boobies either). It's not Shakespeare, but it is 90 minutes of entertainment, which the crap horror film - I keep referencing - definitely isn't. One gets the impression that this might have been cut down in size a little, but the pithy, cut the waffle approach worked just fine for me because far too often in films like this you get too much padding that isn't why people are watching the film - they want action, adventure and people imploding, not some earnest character building of people who are ultimately going to die in horrible ways - that's almost a waste of screen time.

***

Words beginning in E.

Enlightening. Endearing. Educational. Entertaining. Emotive.

I know I said in the last thrilling instalment that I tend to steer clear of domestic television, that's because I probably feel that these Modern Culture blogs (that have rather taken over my writing for pleasure) are designed to perhaps be a mixture of two things; my opportunity to write about the things that I get entertainment from and perversely as a way of perhaps inspiring people to watch stuff they wouldn't usually watch or might have given up on. I also appreciate that because I give away a lot of spoilers and many of these entries between the *** are like running commentaries rather than actual reviews this is pretty much a stretch and therefore you could argue it's just me being self-indulgent.

However, I do know that some people have watched things I've recommended, others have avoided things I've slagged off (or have watched them and understood why I slagged them off and wished they'd heeded my advice). So there's a decent enough reason to continue, even if over the last few months they seem to have morphed into that running commentary of everything I watch on telly, which is also why I don't tend to review stuff that's on terrestrial TV that often, because, you know, some people have iPlayer...

That said, perhaps I should do that more often because people have free terrestrial streaming services and it's a lot easier for them to watch something that's been on the Beeb or C4 than something that's on Apple TV or Disney+ (or Disnae as they [don't] call it up here).

That's why I'm giving a whopping great preamble to one of the jewels in the documentary crown that has just finished on BBC2, because Miriam Margolyes' Australia has been one of those joyous things that I'm dead chuffed I gave a fair go to.

As most people have come to realise, the 81 year old Ms Margolyes is a national treasure, or maybe an international treasure as she's lived for over a decade in Australia, with her partner of 55 years. Her trip along the southern coast of Oz and Tasmania has been revelatory, absolutely brilliant and all those E words I started this section with. 

This three-part excursion started in Tasmania, moved to Victoria and then onto South Australia. It was supposed to venture into Western Australia, but time, her age and a few other things got in the way. Although I feel she'll probably fly to Perth and then maybe over the east coast in any follow up series if they can schedule it before she gets too old to do this kind of thing, because she is old and isn't as mobile as she was.

There's also the fact she's been making her Channel Four series with Alan Cumming about Scotland and the West Coast of the USA and seems to pop up on daytime TV a lot promoting her book(s) and her TV series. She appears to be busier now than at any point in her career and I can remember her from as far back as the 1970s - I suppose I just want her to do as much as she can before, you know, the inevitable happens.

Australia has been a brilliant series, full of colourful characters all being grilled by this larger than life and extremely blunt woman; like any good documentary/travelogue it hasn't shied away from contentious issues, unusual subjects or things that maybe Australians would rather the rest of the world didn't know about their country. It's on iPlayer; if you didn't watch it on live TV, go and check it out, it's utterly brilliant.

***

My first impression of the Amazon Prime TV mini-series The Rig was just how overwrought and full of testosterone it is. Yes, it's about a lot of men and a few women on an oil rig but it's all machismo and talking through gritted teeth with seasoned older men trying to prove they're still capable of being hard men. I also noted that it's billed as a new Martin Compston drama, but the Line of Duty star isn't really the main star, in fact he plays an almost peripheral role in the opening two episodes, taking a back seat to Iain Glenn and Owen Teale (both of Game of Thrones), Mark Bonner and Emily Hampshire (who was in the woeful Chapelwaite), who is Compston's onscreen girlfriend and company woman, specifically designed as a cross between the Mayor of Amity and the one in horror movies that is always playing devil's advocate and ends up in a rather sticky end.

A lot of the characters have great names: Compston is Fulmer Hamilton - I went through the first two episodes thinking Fulmer was his surname, probably because Teale is referred to as Hutton all the time and his name is Lars Hutton - a very [not] Welsh name if never I saw one. Famously un-famous Bonner plays a Scotsman (natch) called Alwyn Evans and you have an Easter, a Leck and it's all led by Magnus, also a Scotsman with a Scandi name. It's like whoever cast this series didn't know what the characters names would be so they just arbitrarily got some British actors (apart from Hampshire) and got them to draw their given names out of a hat and an ornithology book.

We've watched two episodes so far and we'll probably finish it by the time I finish this, but so far it's a thriller with supernatural overtones, except it also appears to be some kind of mutant ecology show with some kind of parasite inhabiting an ash-like material that starts settling on the soon-to-be decommissioned oil rig that is carrying some kind of creature that is able to completely cure all ailments while simultaneously expunging the body of anything alien - like fillings and tattoos - all a bit The Thing. I also noticed when checking the names that considering it's only a week old it already has a 6.0 rating on IMDB and while I really shouldn't take any notice of ratings, given what I've noted about them already, it seems about right and will probably drop even further as time goes by.

So far it's not very thrilling; it's full of pantomime villains and anti-heroes and it doesn't appear to be very good, especially in some of the performances - in other words, some of the acting is okay, while other bits is fucking awful.

Update: after watching the third part we came to a unanimous decision that The Rig is an abysmal lump of shite and we've waste two hours and 15 minutes of our lives watching three parts and we're not prepared to waste another two hours and 15 minutes finding out how this substandard Chibnall Dr Who-esque bollocks is going to conclude. As the wife put it, there's more tension and suspense in an episode of Escape to the Country; it's full of horrid characters, there's fuck all internal logic, none of the characters are believable, it doesn't make sense and frankly I've had dreams that made more sense and were far more enjoyable. Amazon Prime strikes again with a piss poor TV series. 

Please, you have been warned, don't subject yourself to this abomination of a TV series, you'll have more fun and enjoyment from diarrhoea.  

***

If I had to count the number of films Tim Burton has directed that I enjoyed or thought were good I'd probably struggle to get halfway through one hand's worth of fingers. He's either an acquired taste or overrated, I can't really make my mind up.

After a few weeks of Bat hiatus, we decided to watch the 1989 film Batman tonight; it is 33 years since I last saw it and I only saw it the once - that was more than enough. Like Christopher Nolan's reboots, my biggest problem - other than my general disdain for Batman - is I've never really enjoyed any depiction of the Joker since Caesar Romero and while I really didn't like Heath Ledger's Master of Mirth, I probably hate Jack Nicholson's even more. Why? Because it's shit, unconvincing and is just bad makeup. 

My overriding feelings about the 1989 film is a) how young Michael Keaton looked and how unconvincing a Batman he is/was, and b) how Burton films are literally all style with little or no substance. It's a ridiculously dreadful film with bad pacing but it looks really nice - at times - and is spoiled by numerous things but most of all by the woeful special effects and the fact Batman is as menacing as Hey Duggie. 

Obviously the film has dated like nobody's business, but the words contrived and stupid spring to mind. It is very much an homage to the 1960s series but with added attempts at trying to make it a serious film but with a lot of silliness and naturally, as a result, it fails on all counts. The fact Batman became such a bankable product because of this film shows you how much film making has changed over the last 30 odd years and how tastes have also changed. It is of an age and we should all be glad that age is long gone.

It is also a remarkably superficial film given that it's slightly over two hours in length; the main characters are literally just ciphers to allow the Joker to steal centre stage and it's always amused me that Nicholson gets top billing in a film that isn't about his character. What is the point of people like Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Dent, the Mayor, the reporter, even Vicky Vale if they're all there to be space filler and there's a strangely sexist and misogynist feel to the dialogue and the attitudes of the men. I struggled to stay awake during the denouement, which was strangely muted and lacking in suspense or intrigue. It's a quite dreadful film.

***

Welcome to Contradictory Corner; where I disagree with a statement from the last review and I link it in to the first review... What a weird coincidence and was definitely not planned.

We followed Batman with the first episode of Wednesday and it is of course Tim Burton's Netflix series, which he also directed (the first episode at least). It stars Jenna Ortega, who played Lorraine in X and unlike that and Burton's Batman, this was fucking excellent television; possibly one of the best monster/horror/TV things I've seen in a long time.

I never really got the Addams Family; it was something my folks used to watch in the late 60s and we watched, at least, the first of the two 1990s films - it was all right, but not something I've ever cared to watch a second time (I was more of a Munsters person); the concept is good and the way it juxtaposes right and wrong/good and evil is amusing, however, for me Wednesday was going to be a tough thing to get behind.

The beauty of Charles Addams world is the way it doesn't necessarily have to have a narrative that makes any logical sense - it's set in a world where the weird and wonderful co-exists with the normal and that's accepted even if normal people have a problem with it. What is quite brilliant about Wednesday is the way it has taken the story forward and given it an entire world to engage with rather than just the family and that world is, so far, really interesting.

Ortega is astounding as the eponymous lead; she might not be Christina Ricci (who is in this) but that's not important; if anything she's taken the look Ricci had and streamlined it into a teenager who knows she's as cool as fuck and extremely disturbed. The premise is quite simple, after being expelled from her 8th school in five years, Morticia and Gomez have pulled some strings and gotten their daughter accepted into their old school the Nevermore Academy. Wednesday hates school, doesn't want to be there and starts by trying to work out a way to escape this forced encapsulation but by the end of the first episode has had enough intrigue and shocks to make her want to stay, explore this new ability she has of being able to see into the past and the future and solve the mystery of the murders that are taking place in the nearby town of Jericho.

As the series progresses, we get to know more of the supporting characters - the vampires, the werewolves, the magicians and the other strange creatures that inhabit the school and the teachers - it's a bit like Hogwarts with warts mixed with blood and guts. I can see why it's got such high ratings and people love it so much.

***

Next time: Most probably I'll conclude my review of the Wednesday series and probably slagged off Batman Returns, hopefully I can tempt the wife to watch The Banshees of Inisherin or The Fablemans which I've had for nearly a month but we've never had an appropriate window of time to watch. We've decided to watch Happy Valley given how much others have recommended it, but we'll wait until season three has almost concluded before we start, so if I review that it won't be until February. Plus as it's the New Year I also expect some new series and return of some regulars, although most of the regulars have finished.

We want to watch Moonage Daydream, The Menu, The Pale Blue Eye and Triangle of Sadness (which I got hold of on the strength of the strange trailer and the reasonable reviews on IMDB) and we still have a stack of older films to watch, plus I've heard the first John Wick film is on this weekend so I might, finally, watch that even if I've always avoided it because of the dog getting killed. I hate films where the dog gets killed.  

Modern Culture: New Year, Mainly Dark Things

This contains so many spoilers you may need to tighten your belts...

I suppose the best thing to do is get Dark out of the way. Mainly by real time blogging about it as I finish each season knowing that by the time I get to the end of the week and have finished it much of what you're about to read in these opening paragraphs is probably going to be bollocks, but as I make a point of this later you'll possibly understand my logic behind it...

Without wishing to sound like I'm dismissing out of hand something a friend said about this series, but Dark isn't 'weird' and it's especially not weird for the sake of it. On the contrary, it is labyrinthine and extremely complex - the apparent weirdness comes from the fact it deals almost entirely in paradoxes, which to anyone who might not understand the strangeness of paradoxes might seem weird.

In fact, while Dark is three seasons and 26 episodes long it's probably going to be the first 25 episodes that are the padding - the meat inside the sandwich. As it's a tale about paradoxes, nothing will be resolved at all until the final episode, if, indeed, there is a conclusion and the paradoxes simply don't reset themselves and the time loops they cause begin again. The reason I don't think that will happen is because there are certain characters in this - Jonas and Claudia to name two - who now know they're in a paradox, whether this is the first time the loop has happened or the umpteenth is the key issue here. If it's the latter then we might end up having a very unsatisfactory and frustrating finale.

What I find totally brilliant about this series is the fact that it's all up front; it isn't like an episode of Star Trek where it takes Data to work out they're in a paradox; this is about people who do things that simply fuck up the paradox even more, usually by finding out what is going on and thinking they can fix it. So we have people from different 33 year cycles wandering into younger or older versions of their own pasts or futures either trying to work out what's going on or trying to fix it and, of course, it just makes matters worse. To confuse matters, there appears to be some kind of doomsday cult that may or may not be responsible for the grizzly part of the story and also probably responsible for the creation of the portals into the past and future - although how they do/did that isn't clear and is only hinted at in the opening episodes of season two.

My biggest problem with the series is because it's in German, you spend a lot of time following the dialogue, which means that you kind of need a notebook to explain who is who in whatever timeline they're in - although to be fair, I don't know if it would be any easier if it was in English. I have some theories about it, but these have just become slightly murky by the addition of 1920 and 2052 to the equation - when it was just 1953, 1986 and 2019 it seemed neat and well tied up. I also think there are a bunch of red herrings, as I said last week, but because of the astounding writing I'm no longer sure that everything isn't connected - after all, one of the characters has already said, a number of times, that it's all interconnected so even the 'human interest' bits, the fleshing out of characters, might all be relevant in the grand scheme of things. However, the number of paradoxes at play here have just made this such an addiction for me.

I have to admit that as a fan of the entire concept of time travel stories there have been times in the episodes I've watched so far where I've almost punched the air in elation and astonishment. It's a quite remarkable and, at the moment, unique approach to the entire genre. However, I'd just like to say I think I've sussed it out; I think I know how this will be resolved or at least how it will ultimately be resolved and what specific incident was the cause of all the paradoxes. I don't want to say because a) I might be wrong and b) if I'm right then it will spoil it for others and c) people who have seen it might tell me I'm right therefore possibly spoiling my enjoyment of it...

[2 days later]

Anyhow... Disregard what I said in the opening paragraph of this blog; Dark is weird. I didn't think it was but after season two - which we watched over two days and nights - I'm no longer even sure that it's got a simple explanation. I do believe that I'm right with my theory about how it ends, despite being constantly told - in the series - that my solution won't work any more, but it does start to get a wee bit strange about half way through.

Hannah Kahnwald - the mother of Jonas and wife of Michael who is also Mikkel - is a raving psychopath and arguably the loose cannon in this series. The wife thinks she might be the key to the conclusion because she's arguably the only character that isn't following the time loop but pursuing her own agenda. There are at least three different Jonas's, except they're all the same one and I'm not convinced any of them are sincere, some might be misguided and at least one of them is stark raving bonkers. Considering Jonas's mother is Hannah and his father is also the brother of his girlfriend, who is also his aunt and her father is Jonas's grandfather you'd think this was weird enough, but no, this doesn't even come close to fucking fucked up.

Charlotte - the chief of police is Elizabeth's (the deaf girl) mother, but by the end of season two we also discover that Charlotte is also Elizabeth's daughter by Noah who we all thought was a serial killer but might actually have been a half decent chap had he realised what a psychopath Adam aka Jonas would become; just the fact we have a character who is both the mother and the daughter of the daughter who is also her mother and ... BOOM! Mind blown...

Then there's Clausen who arrives in Winden to investigate all the disappearances but is also investigating his own personal tragedy as his brother disappeared 33 years prior to this and the head of the nuclear power plant has adopted his brother's name and he's married to Regina who is Claudia's daughter and Claudia is the White Devil - Adam/Jonas's enemy - who is killed by Noah, who then regrets doing it as he starts to realise that anyone with the surname Kahnwald (apart from Michael/Mikkel, but he's really a Nielsen) is absolutely fucking barking mad. 

Meanwhile, Ulrich Nielsen is stuck in 1953/4 and is believed to be a murderer of young boys - all killed by Adam/Jonas and Noah (who just happens to be a pastor) and his son is trapped in 1986 and living with Ines Kahnwald who is about as mad as her own daughter-in-law and the weirdest thing? Everything I've told you or given away doesn't even scratch the surface of this series. I'll tell you who I feel sorry for, that's Egon Tiedeman, Claudia's father and Regina's grandfather because he just about works out what's going on before being accidentally killed by the person who is there to try and stop him from being mysteriously killed...

Do you remember the comedy from the 1970s with Billy Crystal called Soap? That had a strapline, 'Confused? You soon will be.' Well Dark is as confusing as I hinted at in earlier reviews and then some. Seriously, if you haven't seen it and you have Netflix, don't be put off by the subtitles (you can get a dubbed version apparently), just watch it and feel your mind get blown to smithereens.

[A further 2 days later]

Meanwhile in Germany (and it's alternate world counterpart)...

We're in the home stretch of Dark and you could argue that I should simply wait until tomorrow to write and conclude this review, but what's the point of that? I mean, we all enjoy a running commentary; don't we?

Let's put it this way, a lot of things have got to happen in the final three episodes for this to make any kind of sense at all. If anything season three has stopped blowing my mind and become somewhat... tedious. There just seems to be too much going on and the end of season two threw a spanner into the work - big time. Up till then this was a fascinating and crazy time travel story full of paradoxes and then we appeared to be introduced to another world - an alternative Winden, in a slightly different universe, with mostly similar characters but with some notable exceptions.

What made series one and two so brilliant was this concept of a character that only existed because of something that happened 17 years after his birth but created a paradox that allowed him to be conceived and born only to discover that his father was actually his girlfriend's brother who disappeared back into the past, who grew up to have his own life and family while keeping his own secrets hidden - and trust me when I say that what I've told you is probably how the series was originally sold; it might be a spoiler, but by the time you get to series three it no longer seems to matter.

Now, as well as having a 1921, a 1954, a 1987, a 2020 and a 2053, we also have an 1888 and things don't become more clear they become murkier and very grey. Just who is the villain here, is there a hero and who are the three people - all the same but from different parts of their histories - going around killing off characters, who may or may not be able to prevent this whacky time loop from happening? Is it/are they the child of alternative Martha or maybe they're the child of the clockmaker's son and daughter-in-law who disappeared without a trace when the parents were killed in a car accident? 

We're going to conclude watching it tomorrow - which according to time means nothing to someone who's reading this; I mean, tomorrow is a relative term. What I will say about this is that time is linear and if today is the 5th of January 2023, then if you travel back in time 33 years it can only be to the 5th of January 1990. If you want to travel back to the 4th of January 1990, you have to travel back to the 4th of January 1957 and then wait 33 years and the same applies if you're going into the future. This may or may not have something to do with anything, but it makes the concept of time travel a very fixed thing and one that you can't simply play around with; so you can't travel back in time, fail to achieve what you set out to do and then try again - linear time doesn't work like that...

[A day later]

Dark could easily have outstayed its welcome, especially as the final season felt like it was all over the place at times, but when you're juggling numerous timelines, various incarnations of the main characters and all of the paradoxes, which in the end might not have been paradoxes at all, it's not surprising.

As we entered the final three episodes, I really hoped that it would start to make some sense, but the two episodes before the finale just seemed to make everything very... dark and not in a menacing way. It wasn't until the final episode that things started to make some sense, but when I say 'sense' even I'm not sure what I mean.

For starters, I was 100% completely wrong about my theory, which involved preventing Mikkel from staying in 1986 and bringing him back to 2019 so that he didn't stay long enough to end up fathering Jonas. It became quite clear that what I thought was a red herring - even if you change the past the future already exists so nothing will be changed - wasn't at all, given that the younger versions of certain characters simply could not die - there's a massive ongoing clue there that like, say The Sixth Sense, makes perfect sense once you understood what was going on. But my theory had been pretty much blown out of the water by the time the idea of multiple worlds became an issue. That said, the only element of deus ex machina in it is the fact that a subplot that almost looks shoehorned in ends up being the thing that causes everything, but once you understand the relevance it makes sense - not perfect sense, just sense.

Making the series about two people, ostensibly, was inspired if a little grating and what actual red herrings there were all got exposed in the closing episodes, although some of them seemed quite pointless or undeveloped, even if they were just ciphers for other things to happen. Ultimately, the ending was about one of the peripheral characters who had featured a lot throughout the story but didn't actually seem to be part of it and without giving too much away this character was instrumental [ahem] in all of the worlds' explored. 

Was it a fulfilling finale? I'd have to say, yes, probably. I had issues with it that I can't really discuss without giving too much away, but if in the end some of the characters ceased to exist in the 'real' world, how come others did - specifically Claudia's daughter Regina if Claudia didn't exist... The thing is, all in all it was satisfying and incredibly well made considering the multitude of strands, timelines and concepts at play. It seems fitting that the entire series was actually about trying to prevent something from happening and it concludes with preventing something from happening that was simultaneously unrelated to but all about the actual story. 

We were going to follow this up by watching 1899 because it's by the same creative team, but on discovering that it won't be getting renewed for a second season (it was only planned to be three series in total, like Dark) we have opted not to bother. I'd still urge people to watch the series, the second season alone is probably one of the greatest single seasons of a TV show I've ever seen because it never fails to blow your mind in almost every single one of the eight parts. This is still probably one of the most fulfilling TV shows I've ever watched, even if it made my head hurt.

***

Well, if I didn't know what was happening in Dark then I'm also clueless about Doom Patrol as we reach the half way point of season four. What I do know is that in this weird TV world of DC's oddest comic book we've reached the point where Grant Morrison's ultra-strange DP arrives, except it obviously doesn't because we've had three and a half series so far...

When the bonkers Scottish writer was given the chance to turn an oft failed superhero comic into something altogether different, it went from a straightforward DC superhero comic to became one of the leads in the Vertigo imprint and that happened in the four-part story arc called Crawling From the Wreckage. Obviously we're well into the lives and adventures of the TV Doom Patrol, but this current season is a loose adaptation of the story that defined this incarnation. Think of DC's original Doom Patrol as a bit like Marvel's X-Men (some similar creators were involved as well at times) - a failed concept that was reinvented and became huge... Except Doom Patrol never became huge.

I've struggled to like this series since the first season - as mentioned in previous blogs - but I saw some redemption in last week's episode that suggested the stupidity was being replaced with the weirdness that made season one so enjoyable; the problem is the baggage of the last three and a half series has reached overload and while this might be deliberate it's also really annoying and while Immortus and his Scissormen might be the biggest threat the team has faced so far, I'm beginning to think that maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if the villain won and that world was plunged into whatever vision he/she/it has planned for the it.

I think the problem DP has is it's very reliant on the past and you need to have a good memory to remember all of the references, characters and little clues left behind - that would normally be the sign of excellent writing, but this doesn't hold my interest the way most other shows have. This season's big bad and subplots all seem to be focused on things that have already been hinted at, which suggests to me that Dorothy's cameo episode is going to be relevant because she'll probably be this season's deus ex machina - as she is extremely powerful and she's on her way back to the mansion to hook back up with her dysfunctional 'family'. 

I'm wondering if this show will see a fifth season. Most of the characters are dislikeable and only Larry seems to have a heart - literally and metaphorically - and even that has been sacrificed in aid of something I can't quite relate to. I appreciate I'm being vague and that isn't because I want to avoid spoilers, it's more to do with the fact that I probably haven't been as invested in the show as I once was so I'm slightly confused about where it's going, but Cliff, Jane, Rita and Victor are all just angry shouty people and while the addition of Michelle Gomez as Madame Rouge hasn't been a bad thing it hasn't exactly done anything to further the story. It just feels like a rambling mess now, whereas Grant Morrison's comic at least had a direction and for all its weirdness stuck to that direction and made some sense by the end of his run.

I'm simply no longer enjoying this show; it needs some kind of major overhaul.

***

There was a moment about 20 minutes into the third episode of 1923 when I started to wonder what it was all about. We have this nostalgic look at Montana in the USA 100 years ago with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren being old and parental, while their son/nephew is off having a wild adventure in colonial Africa and attracting stunningly beautiful socialites. In Montana, there's some soft focus love making and someone selling new fangled washing machines and refrigerators just to prove that we're actually in the 20th century and there's the feud between the cowboys and the sheepherders, but in terms of actual drama it's been quite tame, almost lame.

Then Spencer, in Africa, and his debutante love interest get pounced on by a rogue bull elephant and from that point on it goes full tilt into action adventure before switching back to Montana where the Dutton family's day out in the local town/city suddenly telegraphs us the fact that something is going to go horribly wrong when Ford tells his team of cowboys that they won't need an escort on the way home because the cowboys are out front and they're likely to run into trouble first. I mean, if you want to make the obvious bleeding obvious just do that, why don't you?

From that point on you start to wonder just whose show this is and whether your big names are just the draw to get you into the series. I will say this about it, from the midway point of this episode you suddenly want to know what's going to happen. What has been a pedestrian but very well made series so far has taken off and now promises to be intriguing.

***

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is a lot of fun, even if you somehow feel a little cheated by the end of it. It's really a film in two halves - everything up to as point is the first film and everything after it is the first half explained from the point of Benoit Blanc and his unexpected 'assistant'.

Edward Norton is an Elon Musk type billionaire who every year gets his five best buddies together for a weekend of hijinks and fun and games; this year it's a delicious murder mystery on his island in Greece where his pals have to work out who 'killed' him. His pals are a group of people who all got friendly before Ed became rich and famous - at a bar called the Glass Onion and then helped all of them become rich and famous in their own way. There's a social media misogynist, an influencer with a line in dodgy sportswear, a politician and a tech wizard and there's the woman who brought them all together but then got fleeced and shafted by all of them looking after their own interests; add in a couple of assistants and a walking talking red herring who has little or no explanation and is there as nothing more than a comedy distraction and you have the perfect set up for a proper crime to be committed.

It's all very up front and in your face, more so than the original Knives Out film, and like any great Agatha Christie mystery all the clues are hidden in plain sight. Ed Norton's billionaire is a buffoon and as thick as pig shit, which means Benoit pretty much sees through him very quickly and there's a fortuitous twist half way through that neither he or us saw coming and a riotous ending that leaves you with that feeling of being cheated I mentioned at the beginning; but it is satisfying and has a few neat twists and a little bit of karmic redemption.

It's a fun film with lots of larger than life and sexy people in it; fabulous settings, great sets - including Norton's very own fantastic 'glass onion' and is dripping in the kind of cash you'd expect from an Elon Musk type dickwad and I'd probably recommend it for that alone.

***

Next time... I have a number of TV series lined up: The Rig, The English, Wednesday and Blackbird, as well as Chernobyl, which while now a few years old is one of the highest rated shows of all time according to both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. Then there's a bunch of films...  13 from the last 18 months and a further 20 from as long ago as 1976. Obviously I won't be reviewing them all as there isn't enough time...

However, here's an interesting thing (or at least I found it interesting); there's a meme floating around with a list of 150 top rated TV series from 2000 (including ones that started in the 1990s but finished in the 2000s) and you have to tick the amount you've watched; several of my friends have scored in the 30s and one in the 40s, so I had a go and mine was just 25, which surprised me a little because we often think we watch too much TV. Perhaps we do, because this list of shows doesn't include things we watch every week when they're on, like Only Connect, Pointless or QI or news programs, some sport or documentaries.

The thing I was taken with was out of the 150 'top rated' US TV shows of the last 25 years, it was the 125 we haven't watched or didn't stick with because almost all of them still don't appeal. In my list of 25 there were at least 3 series we maybe watched the first season of and never went back to it - The Good Place is a perfect example; it was okay but not okay enough for us to want to sit through two more seasons. I know a few of my friends who absolutely adored it and couldn't understand why we didn't stick with it, but equally we've watched some things that others have given up on.

"Why don't you watch much British TV?" asked a friend recently; things like, say, Happy Valley or The Bodyguard or any number of top rated homegrown hits and I can't really give you a definitive answer; possibly because I always feel that British TV struggles to hold my attention because there is a distinct difference between US and UK styles. That's not to say I don't watch British TV dramas and comedies, I just don't seem to want to be drawn into the hype of certain things. During the 90s, everyone was watching Lynda La Plant programmes and none of them interested me in the slightest; I suppose it boils down to what I fancy watching, which might explain why I had so few US series listed in the first place.

As a mate of mine - who probably watches more film and TV than anyone I know often says, it's all down to taste, innit?