Pop Culture: Treading Water

Warnings of spoilers are genuine and should concern you 

Hello Tomorrow feels like it's going to peter out rather than end with a bang. Jack is now the only person who is still being fooled by himself, although I think Joey might be ruing some of his decisions. I've found the climax to this series very odd and with one episode to go all of the promise it began with seems to have waned away into a mix of surreal ordinariness and a directionless ramble. For all of the sumptuous looks it needed a story to go with it.

I said to the wife, if US TV did four-part series like the UK, this could have been four 50 minute episodes that whizzed through the story with some sense of urgency and maybe felt accomplished rather than a meandering masquerade party.

***

Taron Egerton is back, this time as Henk Rogers, the man who got the deal to have Tetris used outside of the USSR. I'm going to bet the film Tetris is a whole lot more exciting and full of intrigue than the original negotiations were. I'm sure it was quite scary and there might have been some double deals and maybe some threats, but I expect when it stated it was 'based on true events' the word 'based' is being used a loosely as possible.

It is, however, an entertaining film all the same with some genuinely funny moments. Whether it was a good film is up for debate and I say that because it did push all the right buttons, get all the pathos right and it built tension up in a way that made the film work; it was just a little too unrealistic - despite being very realistic. It was a little like Moneyball from last week; good film, interesting cast, entertaining story, it just felt a bit empty and unimportant.

It tells the story of how Rogers overcomes the Maxwell family, the KGB and stuff like language and cultural differences to secure the rights for a game which is still popular today. Special mention for Roger Allam as Robert Maxwell - deserves some kind of award.

***

Avatar: The Way of Water was so dull we gave up with it after an hour. I really thought I was going to write a sprawling review of the year's biggest film and kick the entire blog off with it, but I was bored after five minutes. I don't understand the fascination with Avatar and this didn't have a story worth following 57 minutes into it. Maybe I just don't understand.

It's not been that long since we watched the first film, although to be fair most of it disappears into a fog, but this kind of does a bit at explaining what has been happening, but really it's just an opening hour of reintroducing us to Jake Sully, his wife and the new family and how the mining company has returned with Hybrid Navi warrior avatars with the aim to kill Jake off.

Nothing in the first hour hinted at an actual story; nothing in the first hour made me want to sit through three and a quarter hours of it. How it's the most successful film of 2023, so far, is beyond my ability to comprehend modern culture trends? It's just a big boring video game that you don't get to play. Awful, should have been called Avatar: The Wan in Wanker. 

***

Yellowjackets wandered into the second episode at the same nonchalant pace the first part of season two did. Not a lot seemed to happen until the last five minutes, then the humour turned very black. I just have a bit of a worry that there's a need for padding already. In season one, while the plight of the crash survivors was really interesting, it was the genius way they brought the surviving members back together in the present that was the key thing to this series. 

Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Tawny Cypress and Christina Ricci were awesome in the first series and the way the story went with them was intriguing and enthralling, but now we've got the addition of adult Lottie and the imminent arrival of adult Van and I suppose there's a necessity to spread the adults thin because it was difficult to have four of them in scenes without making reference to the past, having six (maybe more) makes it obvious; however maybe that isn't important any more because the elephant in the Canadian cabin has been revealed; the secret that was never a secret has been exposed; it could be that Yellowjackets is about to go off in a direction none of us expected.

***

The interesting thing about season two of Carnival Row is that it's set a couple of weeks/months after the first series, but it was made almost four years later. Covid and I've read a reprieve is why it's here, now. Apparently it was originally cancelled after one series, but that decision was reversed in 2020 only for the pandemic to prevent travel to Prague and then other commitments for the actors meant a further year's wait, so it was a good job we'd just watched it rather than in 2019 when it was originally released.

The less interesting thing about it is now the mystery of series one has been concluded the focus of season two appears to have shifted, although there is a new murderous threat and Philo has been briefly 'welcomed' back into the police as a consultant, there's this feeling that the subplots this is going to conclude, such as Agreus and Imogen's crossbreed love story, just aren't going to be as interesting or exciting. We shall see.

By the next blog we will have finished the entire series; I'm expecting something big to happen, especially as the monster in season two is as fucked up as the one in season one, but we don't know what this one's motive is, yet.

***

24 Hour Party People is a film we'd never watched, probably because that scene avoided us in the 1980s and while the wife is a big Joy Division fan, I think it just passed us by.

Steve Coogan does a passable Tony Wilson and the mockumentary style the film takes on, while quite normal for Michael Winterbottom, must have felt a little bit edgy in 2001 when the film came out (and Tony Wilson was still alive). It's a who's who of British acting over the last 30 years, with comedic actors and thesps popping up all over this film. It was a laugh, but about as disposable as The Trip another Coogan/Winterbottom project. 

***

DC, now under the control of James Gunn, has released the first trailer for August's Blue Beetle, which seems to be taking the idea of the Blue Beetle I remember and chucking that out of the window in favour of a kind of Spider-Man/Latino/Green Lantern/Cyborg thing that looks, on first viewing, to be another reason why, perhaps, I should think about giving up on superhero films. It looks well made; the special effects seem better than the trash Marvel is doing at the moment, but, you know, meh...

***

A quick word/mention for the news revamped BBC News, which I touched on a few weeks ago. It's now amateur hour at the BBC, with 50% less content than before, bemused looks from old hands - like the weather presenters - and the feeling that it will no longer be the channel of choice when there's nowt else on. The BBC's money is your money, look how well it's working for you.

***

Apropos of nowt, I found the original version of this blog. It was called something long winded and finite and just 12 years ago we were watching some completely awful rubbish and I was raving about a show called No Ordinary Family - oh how times have changed...

***

In Simon Reeve's Return to Cornwall the reporter returned to... um... er... Cornwall to catch up with some people he met three years ago, during lockdown. Life must have got better since then surely?

In some ways I'm surprised the BBC allows Reeve to do such stark reporting from the UK. It's okay to put a spotlight on third world countries and their injustices but not the UK. The way the country has fallen apart since the pandemic alone and the fact we just calmly accept it is both frightening and humiliating for a nation that once regarded itself as great. This is depressing television brought to you by 13 years of Tory sadism.

***

I shouldn't do this here, really, but I can't resist it. Having had another case of the lurgy this week, I settled down in the lounge and decided to watch Earth versus The Flying Saucers, a film I hadn't seen since I was a kid and with special effects by the brilliant Ray Harryhausen. 

I managed 25 minutes or so before I had to turn it off. I absolutely cannot recommend this film enough if you want to watch people on screen talk in bizarre non-sequiturs and characters that walked out of the minds of people who know nothing about what they're writing and don't understand science fiction. The film essentially starts with a newly-married couple, who also happen to be working for the US government sending new-fangled 'satellites' up to orbit the earth. There has been much in the news about strange flying saucers and when the two of them are almost run off the road by a saucer the most logical thing for these scientists to do is tell the US government.

But no, they can't be sure the giant saucer floating above them is really a giant flying saucer so they decide to keep it to themselves. Then they discover they've recorded it on a tape recorder and her father is also a general in the US Army, but isn't allowed onto a US Army base because, despite being a general, he has no clearance, so he has a nice chat on the phone with his daughter about her recent marriage before being in the same room as her in almost the next scene. The married couple seem more interested in the fact that now they're married they can't go off canoodling with each other and that's fortunate otherwise he wouldn't have inadvertently discovered the aliens were trying to speak to him - albeit in a way that sounded like screeching. As chief scientist he goes to US government who put him under arrest - for his own safety - and I switched off. 

The SFX are shoddy (even for Harryhausen); the acting is banal, the sets are pretty good, but surely Hugh Marlowe (who was the lead and does have Hollywood form) or one of his co-stars must have said to the director, 'this doesn't make sense; it's like dialogue from a dream about flying saucers.' I suppose they said their lines, got paid and moved onto the next job. It's not like actors even bother to point out to directors, even in 2023, that what they think isn't always what something is. Just look at Ted Lasso.

***  

Speaking of Ted, Ted Lasso continues to impress me with its refusal to succumb to story stereotypes. This week Richmond got stuffed by West Ham in a real grudge match that left Nathan feeling even worse about himself while embracing his inner sociopath.

The weird thing about this show now is it has found its funny feet again yet veers further away from being a comedy. An unexpected guest star this week (which won't mean much to people who don't watch For All Mankind) and an ending that opens the realms of possible closure.

***

There were moments in the first two series of Picard where it really felt like they just jumped the shark and went all wobbly on us - more so in season two. I got the impression that this was the episode where the so far excellent season three did that. We had a kind of conclusion to this first phase but there's still a load of unanswered questions and there now doesn't appear to be enough time to conclude them all, plus we've spent eight episodes to get here and I'm not sure where here is.

Just what is Jack Crusher and why were some people so keen to have him? What connection does this series have to the Dominion War and why am I losing the plot a little with this? This was an episode far too full of psychobabble and nostalgic nipple tweaks and not enough explaining.

I do agree with the clamour for a Captain Liam Shaw series though, especially if he gets beaten up for half the series.

***

Next time: There'll be a few conclusions and maybe something new, but the beauty of this time of the year is you get what you know and then you get things you weren't expecting. I already have the finale of Hello Tomorrow and the latest Yellowjackets to watch, plus the latest Shazam film to spend some time on. 

***