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.
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