Modern Culture: Sleep Perchance to Dream

Oh the spoilers go a-rattlin down the road... 

My favourite Stephen King book is Insomnia which has absolutely nothing to do with Chris Nolan's 2002 murder mystery starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams also called Insomnia. It's never been clear to me if Pacino's character can't sleep or simply can't get to sleep because of 23½ hours of daylight in this remote part of Northern Alaska (that still manages to have a very large squad of police officers despite there being about 10 people who live there).

Al and his buddy are up from LA to help an old pal solve a grizzly murder case but things start to go tits up when the Internal Affairs business back at home catches up with them in Alaska, throws tensions between the two friends and colleagues and ends in a tragic mess. From that point on it's a game of cat and mouse with the cat suffering more and more from sleep deprivation and the mouse getting braver and more reckless.

It's a good thriller, but is spoiled - IMHO - by a couple of obvious things the local police surely would have realised without the help of the big boys from California, and the entire frame within a frame concept worked but I don't quite understand why (which suggests I found a flaw in its internal logic). 

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The main problem with Paul Whitehouse: Our Troubled Rivers is that it's 2023 and this documentary had to be made. We all know Tories hate regulation because regulation stymies business and as water is big business why allow it to be stymied by regulations, better to let it do what it wants for the sake of the shareholders and fuck the people, wildlife and the environment. We are the only nation in the top 50 nations in the world that has privatised water, that was thanks to the Tories and they promised that privatisation would lead to more choice, competitive rates and more money being spent on the infrastructure needed to bring our water up to the same standard as everyone else; that's up to the same standard not better or different...

This is the problem with anti EU Tories they don't care who or what they screw as long as the bottom line keeps on increasing and red tape is cut and this was a message that was drilled home almost every ten minutes of this first part, except the focus was on the private companies rather than the government who allowed this to happen. We want to be leaders in green energy and cleaning the world up, yet we're still 1950s savages unleashing anything into our rivers because who needs wildlife when there's money to be made?

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We Need to Talk about Cosby is disturbing because we're talking about a black man in the USA in the early 1960s who spent the next 40 years serially abusing any young woman he could while remaining one of the USA's most popular icons. We're not talking Jimmy Savile protected here either; Cosby didn't have politicians and royals as his friends, he didn't have the charity work to hide behind, he was already a despised minority in a country that still has problems with some successful black men. 

I grew up with Cosby, like many people of my age and older. He was a funny guy and more importantly he was vitally important in his era and this documentary sort of asks whether or not you can still like the comedian's material or if you have to hate it because everyone now hates Cosby?

You need to ask a similar question: What if we discovered Elvis or Bowie or Prince or [insert any iconic musician or actor] was a really bad person, do you stop listening to that person's music or watching their films? Do radio and TV stations no longer show any Spielberg films if it's discovered he spent 40 years kidnapping and dismembering children? If Mozart was a nonce would we stop listening to Mozart? 

I hear the argument about times, attitudes and sensibilities, all of which have changed since the 1960s or 70s and usually that argument is discounted by people arguing that the people making that argument are from the same era and are therefore indoctrinated to a certain degree, but it doesn't stop it from being true. I like the way that, in some marginal cases, celebrities are penalised for indiscretions made in the 1970s, but the facilitators and the other doing it got away scot free. 

I'm not about to suggest that Cosby is innocent because of the culture of the era because it's clear he's a quite loathsome individual who used his influence to gain much sexual pleasure. I just don't buy into the fact he was unique or even in the minority - women, especially in the USA, had a way, in those days, of being devalued when standing around men with power and those men will have had their own mentors or met the men who behaved the same way before they did. Cosby exploited the fact that women for decades literally bent over and took it up the arse because men ruled their world. 

The documentary series isn't likely to dig that deep, but Cosby was a sort of victim of a Hollywood Mogul Mindset, he was dazzled by what the rich and powerful could get away with; how they could abuse with impunity and he wanted the same thing. 

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We're into the home stretch with Hello Tomorrow and it's quickly unravelling as the 'is it/isn't it' a scam is finally revealed with unexpected consequences. Two things are clear; Billy Crudup is a massively underrated underused actor and Alison Pill is beginning to be typecast as either a sociopath or a vindictive bitch. 

I've enjoyed this series; it's been a novel approach to design it how 1940 and 50s home designers saw the future and I still think most people simply don't get it. That said, I'm not sure I do either.

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The opening minutes of the penultimate episode of The Last of Us felt very much like it was going to meander around again and fifteen minutes in there was little to make you think I was going to be wrong and then some things happen...

Were they trying to scare us with cannibalism? Were they trying to shock us with the psycho-preacher cult leader? I doubt it because the people making this would have known about the cannibal episodes of TWD where it was a life choice and they would have been familiar with the cultish leader of whatever bunch of desperate psychos were being lined us as villains of the season. No, they wanted to spell something out and quite clearly: Ellie is feral and dangerous and if you give her the slightest opportunity you can kiss your face goodbye.

I still struggle with a lot of things in this series; it's been inconsistent and didn't do as good a job at laying foundations as it should have done, but I'll be interested in what big finale we can expect next week.

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We Have A Ghost isn't as bad as IMDB would have you believe. Part of me thinks the film has such a poor rating because the white guys are the bad guys and they're picking on a black family with Asian neighbours and a nerdy ghost with a dodgy combover.

This is a 21st century approach to the comedy horror films of the 80s and 90s, like House or 13 Ghosts and I started to like it almost from the opening scene when the hero Kevin reacts in exactly the way the ghost (played by David Harbour) didn't expect and from then on, despite the lack of logic and common sense, it's two hours of good solid fun. It ain't going to win any Oscars, but one gets the impression that David Harbour realised a while back that his niche is fantasy stuff rather than high brow award winning stuff.

One thing I did notice was that Anthony Mackie has bulked up considerably since last year's Falcon TV series and Marvel/Disney is obviously getting him to look more like a musclebound superhero so that when he makes the next Captain America film his biceps alone look like they could hold the film up.

We're starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of the Flash Drive of Doom with the wife being the dominant force here, deciding what we do or don't watch. I put this on. I didn't give her a choice. She laughed a few times and enjoyed the film. That's a win in the house at the moment.

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We'd never seen Sexy Beast and I don't really know why, especially as it's a Jonathan Glazer film. Perhaps it was because I expected something else entirely, but at the end I was glad we watched it. What an odd gangster movie it is and what a stunning performance from Ben Kingsley.

In brief: retired safe cracker is tempted out of retirement by threats and recriminations and it all descends into a fraught and paranoid last 30 minutes. 

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After watching the first part of the three-part Beatles: Get Back documentary compiled by Peter Jackson we decided that one was probably enough. However much we both loved the Beatles, watching four men in their late 20s sit around jamming and, in the case of Paul and George, bickering was quite enough. 

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Covid has been an unwelcome addition to our lives over the last week and I've suffered badly from it, clogging my chest up and making breathing extremely difficult at times. I'd suggest the virus is a little like the Assyrian Empire in that it's up and down a lot, but when it's been bad I've not felt like joking.

While the wife has been trying to be as normal as possible, I've been confined to the couch. That means days of filling up my time with old films and stuff - or not, as the case has been. I've literally not felt up to it half the time, but I did treat myself to one of my favourite films, Gareth Edwards' Monsters with a soundtrack by Jon Hopkins and I noticed something for the first time in five viewings - the literal end of the film is right at the very beginning. I'd never realised it before.

I'm not going to get involved in an argument over this film. Genre nerds hate it, I think it's wonderful. I don't think people who hate it fully understand it and those who do understand it and don't like it are either being bloody minded or really don't get it.

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The latest Picard finally saw us break free of the weird nebula they've been stuck in for virtually all of the series so far and deliver a crushing blow to the villain. I get the impression that this final season will be split into three parts and the first one has concluded.

It is by far and away the best series of Picard and yet... I don't know, there's something no longer right about Star Trek in general. It's become too bloated and confusing and when this is over it may well be the last we see of the franchise for a long time.

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To nick a 'quote' from an old chum; in the Covid Lockdown Lounge we finally got around to watching Happy Valley and after watching the first six literally in one day, all I can say is...

Wow! 

Someone said the first series was the weakest of the three. Wow. 

Halfway through season two and it's strange but I guessed two of the subplots by the end of first part and two of my other theories might be right. Still great TV, but I struggle to see the Scandi-Noir suggestions a few of my friends likened it to. 

I also have a problem with real time continuity in films and TV. It always pisses me off - in an OCD kind of way - when I'm watching something and in one scene the characters are standing in a street and it's clearly autumn, but five minutes later there's another scene and it's clearly the summer and then there's a scene and there's Christmas decorations up everywhere but no one is acting like it's winter. This has been my biggest gripe about this second series, that and the fact that it's trying to be more complicated than it needs to be. The beauty of season one is how simple the story ended up being and how deliciously ironic it turned out for the perps. This time around it feels... like it needs to do more when it simply could have done something no more or less complicated.

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Part six of Hello Tomorrow was the most important and least comedic episode so far and perhaps the viewing public might have seen this series in a different light had this been the opening episode. We're given a lot of backstory while simultaneously moving the story forward in an episode that explains and delves into the truth far more than any of the previous parts.

I really like this series, I just think most people will find it too anodyne despite its fantastic sets and crazy retro-futuristic ideas.

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Kathy Burke: Growing Up is a two-part documentary about getting old and about being young and how the two cope. It's another one of those compulsory TV shows that everyone should be forced to watch because not only does it paint an interesting picture about getting old in the 2020s, it juxtaposes this with what it's like for under 25s in a world that is vastly - socio-economically - different.

It'll be available on All4. You should watch it. It isn't political, but it is educational without a right wing bias.

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I'm struggling with the BBC at the moment. I feel I want to do something like write a letter of complaint or tweet angrily to the void. I think both the Gary Lineker and David Attenborough 'controversies' of the last 24 hours are too big to go away as hard as the BBC and the government will try and divert away from it. Football is hugely supported at the best of times and now there's a bunch of people who don't give a shit about it interested, the BBC could fuck itself big time.

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Next time: The finale of the mushroom zomboid show; the rest of the Valley of extreme Happiness and whatever else passes in front of my eyes and is absorbed by my brain.