Modern Pop Culture: Bitty

Spoilered warnings

Yellowjackets seems to have got back on track in the present with an episode focusing on Melanie Lynskey and her slightly surreal situation; all appears to go well but no one has accounted for an ambitious cop with a gut feeling.

Juliette Lewis discovers some home truths about Lottie, unfortunately everyone else knows them as well, while Christina Ricci's character's natural paranoia has repercussions in the past and present.

Lauren Ambrose's adult Van is a useful addition and it will be interesting to see how she's come out of Canada given that she was a Lottie convert. I have no idea where the story is going but one thing is sure it's definitely going to be following a slightly supernatural angle and that again brings the spectre of Lost into the mix and that should worry anyone who has enjoyed this show so far.

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We dipped into the old film file and opted for the very first Coen Brothers film Blood Simple. It had been almost 40 years since we'd last seen it and we remembered nothing at all. It had lots of trademark Coenisms in it; a very young Frances McDormand and it's essentially a black comedy of errors and misunderstandings.

It's an entertaining film but it's dated and techniques have changed. It's a curiosity more than a must watch.

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If I've ever had a bug up my arse about something it's been the revamp of the BBC News channel. I mean, it's that much of a bug this is the second time I've mentioned it in my TV blog in a month and it's hardly the kind of TV I normally write about, but I'm just infuriated about it, probably in the same way gammons get infuriated by helpless people trying to get asylum in our country by means of rubber dinghies. 

However, if people are allowed to moan about any old shit that isn't going to affect anything then I want my five minutes. I've never seen a more amateurish load of nonsense in my life; are they trying to be a less controversial GB News? Non-sequitur stories; poor newsreaders, far too much focus on everywhere else but the actual UK, repeats programming, radio shows on TV, a complete lack of professionalism in everything from presentation to lack of awareness and not a single 'personality' among them. The news channel was always my go to place when there was nothing on TV and I didn't want to do something less boring instead; now it's two fucking hours of televised radio between 9am and 11am, with Nicky Campbell (serious TV's Michael McIntyre) which is a phone-in where listeners get to share their opinions with Nicky*.

Woo! It's not news and it doesn't belong on a news channel. It's cheap cost cutting and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't end up being the end of that station. The next round of BBC cuts could see them lose this waste of air space and at the moment I hope that's exactly what happens.

*One of those opinions was from Paul in Dunstable who thought perhaps the best way to solve the crisis in Sudan at the moment would be 'just stop fighting each other'. Fuck me, we pay a licence fee for this kind of genius opinion.

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As people who have read this blog for some time will attest, I don't rate Sam Raimi. I think The Evil Dead was a fun film made by a young film maker with drive and imagination, but by the time he remade it as The Evil Dead 2 you could see he was very much a one-hit wonder.

However, I recall seeing The Quick and the Dead back in the 1990s and thinking it was a cracking film. 28 years later and I've had to reassess that opinion. It's not the film I remembered; it's a lot more style over substance and soft focuses on Sharon Stone and 'in yer face' direction whenever the baddies were on screen. I still think it's Raimi's best film, but the bar has been lowered considerably. This isn't as good as I thought it was, but that might have more to do with me remembering it differently. 

Sharon Stone has never looked sexier; Leonardo Di Caprio never looked younger and Russell Crowe is also so youthful its amazing when you see him now as an old, fat, bloated Aussie. 

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I can understand why the documentary series Welcome to Wrexham has been so popular, but equally it's a bit of a puzzle. What is essentially "The Ryan Reynolds Show with Rob McElhanney" actually isn't and I'd hazard a guess and say they're in less than half the episodes. It's about supporting a football team that has never been brilliant but was once much better than it is; it should really only appeal to Brits and people who understand football. It also has a socio-economic angle that while quite universal also really only is understood by Brits, so why it's been so popular, especially in the USA?

When the series isn't examining the local community, it's focused on non-league football, which as a football fan, I find fascinating and quite compelling. In a few years time, getting out of the National League will be easier than it is now, so the achievements this plucky little Welsh football club have achieved, even with more of a budget than many around them, needs to be acknowledged and the fact they can spin out a UK styled documentary real life series for 18 episodes a proper achievement. It is a wee bit boring at times though...

The concluding two parts of Welcome to Wrexham were a mix of failure and Rob & Ryan ensuring the TV series had some star quality as it concluded. No real spoilers here because we're talking about events from a year ago now, but the Welsh team not only faltered at the final hurdle in seeking promotion, they also capitulated to Bromley at Wembley in the Non-League FA [Cup] Trophy, losing to a team they should have beaten easily. Then losing 4-5 to Grimsby in the play-off semi-final put a shitty sheen on the entire season. Wrexham had failed when all the hope had them winning.

Obviously season two of WtW is already pretty much in the can and I expect season three is already being planned. Wrexham won possibly the greatest two-team tussle outside of the bigger leagues there has ever been, with both them and Notts Co finishing with over 100 points each (average winning points for the National League is about 80). The National League has had a season like no other and with the added coverage, because of Wrexham, there is a clamour for this 5th league to have some parity with the four proper leagues above them.

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Trailer Time - it's about now, in some weeks, I pontificate about the latest BIG trailers released and while this week has been wee bit quiet, we were treated to a few things, most of which went under the radar...

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire comes out in 2024. The 30 second trailer was a reveal of the title and asks the subliminal question - was that Kong or his ginger cousin? There was literally nothing to see until about two hours later when a slew of 'concept' trailers started popping up. Don't get me wrong, the effort and skill that goes into concept trailers is pretty remarkable, I just think the people who do them are utter cunts. A concept trailer is just a public CV posted by people who want to work in film. What I suggest is these people send film studios their concepts and not inflict them on the public. If they do we should be allowed to fire them into the sun.

The Marvel Entertainment Channel on the Tube of You offers, amongst other things, the latest clips and trailers from forthcoming features and it offers up a strange insight into why I felt Quantumania seemed like such a short film. There were 21 minutes of the film leaked in trails and clips over the space of about three months; of those 21 minutes approx. eight of them were duplicated scenes leaving about 13 minutes of the film, out of context. That's almost an eighth of the film you've already seen; no wonder if felt familiar and not as long as it was.

The same issue will be had with the Guardians film; a week until release and we're up to 14 minutes of film has been shown in one form or another, by the time it streams that will be closer to 25 minutes of which more than 15 will be new... Do you see where I'm going here? 

Plus, the Ant-Man film's trailers were cut in such a way to suggest more peril than was actually faced and that Kang was on screen more than he was. I expect the first trench of people out of the cinemas will have not been impressed by events and word of mouth is far more important, even today, than teaser trailers. This might explain why the film bombed at the box office and is on course to be the MCU's least profitable film. There are going to be some very worried executives looking nervously at box office figures for the Guardians film.

And then almost unannounced the second Flash trailer dropped and it did the opposite of enhance my expectations, it lowered them quite drastically. I don't know if this is a result of Ezra Miller being a bit barking mad or if it was always intended to be like this, but there seems to be a lot of alternate reality superheroes popping up in this now, as well as old villains and the focus seems to have been taken away from the original trailers, which suggested a superhero film with some thought gone into the story; this second trailer - the film is out in June - suggests the opposite. 

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In what was undoubtedly the most laugh out loud episode this season, Ted Lasso rediscovered itself in an episode that was a mixture of surreal and strange mixed with a little bit of schmaltz. The team are still in a slump but Ted's solution is either going to work or be a massive misjudgement, especially now Richmond are being talked about as a relegation team again. It turns out to be a bit of both with mixed outcomes.

Keely's relationship with Jack is going like the clappers and Nathan's wooing of the waitress finally pays off; it's also got Roy Kent saying some extremely funny things, which he hates himself for and I'm still debating whether Ted is what this show is about or if he's just the framing sequence around a bunch of other lives...

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We had an inkling we'd watched A Cure for Wellness when it came out, this was confirmed about 20 minutes into the film and shortly after that realisation we opted to not bother. The wife said, "I've got a feeling this is one of those films we were underwhelmed by first time around." So we switched off.

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In its place was a film we never bothered to watch despite enjoying the original a lot. It's also been a while since we watched Kick Ass because if we had watched that we wouldn't have spent the first 20 minutes of Kick Ass 2 trying to remember key things from the first film.

KA2 is competent. It has some genuinely funny moments in it, but it felt pointless and ultimately unnecessary. It's also a little crass and appears to want to shock rather than allowing people to be shocked. It's also all over the place from a narrative perspective. It's like this blog title... bitty.

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Next time: Ted Lasso continues, as does Yellowjackets (although it's on a week break) as we hurtle towards that period when barely anything happens on TV worth talking about. Things will get erratic.