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.