Modern Culture - I Didn't See That Coming

Spoilers involved somewhere in the following words, tread carefully... 

Please Stop (part 5)

There are only 12 episodes in this final series. If the remaining seven are of the same quality as the fifth one then if I kill myself now will someone ensure that I don't come back from the dead with weird teeth?

Reality [Redacted] 

Reality isn't a description or a state of mind, it's the name of the young girl accused of being an NSA whistleblower by the FBI. It's an odd film because it is literally based on the transcripts of the FBI's arrest of Reality Winner and there's a slightly surreal feel about the entire thing, especially when [redacted] bits are phased out of the film like interference.

In many ways it's a dramatized documentary with Josh Hamilton (who once played a weaselly and nasty bureaucrat in later seasons of TWD) as the lead FBI agent, obviously playing it all a bit like a nervous Columbo and Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner is brilliant who still doesn't really understand the mess she's in, but because she's ex-military she accepts the harsh scrutiny she's put under, but then things start to go wrong...

It's a cold, stark and harsh film that plays out like a stage play. The acting is... detached, but that might be down to the fact it's all transcript - there isn't a single word uttered in this film that wasn't documented or redacted previously. I'm not sure this film has a scriptwriter. 

Did I enjoy it? I was happy it was only about 80 minutes long, but that might be more down to the fact that the USA is really just a fascist state with bright colours and balloons.

It's All Going Terribly Wrong

Someone suggested I was joking about the Captain America 4 name change because of antisemitism - I wasn't. Interestingly, it appears that some of the people originally announced to appear in this film are no longer being mentioned, while a bunch of new characters have been 'introduced'. I expect this film will be an absolute mess.

Deadpool 3 has been moved almost a year up the schedules and takes the release date originally planned for the Cap film, that now is moved to the Thunderbolts release date and that film is delayed until at least November 2024. Instead of cancelling The Kang Dynasty Marvel are simply putting it back to the summer of 2025 and the follow up Avengers film back a further year. The rate we're going, the much-heralded Fantastic Four film should debut around 2032.

Tenoch Heurta - the Mexican actor who played Namor in the impressively dull Wank Ada Forever - has been accused of sexual assault by a Spanish saxophonist, she described Heurta as 'violent and [a] sexual predator'. I'm guessing someone somewhere in MCU headquarters is holding their head in their hands and wondering what the hell is going on. 

A new book called Burn it Down has been released that exposes a lot of things Kevin Feige and Disney execs will not want people to see or will go a long way to denying. One of the key elements has been the lack of autonomy for writers, with Marvel/Disney insisting that an 'executive' was in the writing rooms and has final say over what would happen. This goes hand in hand with some of the things Chris Hemsworth hinted at and suggests that all the issues Marvel has had since the end of Phase 4 are down to management and not writers.

Genetix

We remembered watching Splice back in 2009 when it first came out and I specifically thought it wasn't the film I expected it to be. You get the impression it's going to be a little like the late 90s monster thriller Relic - but that's Del Torro's involvement - with a bit of action and thrills thrown in. What you actually get is a Cronenberg-esque homage to Frankenstein with characters called Clive and Elsa and more of a psycho-sexual drama than a monster movie. It isn't the film you expect to see based on what you know about it going in; this is far more uncomfortable.

It stars Adrien Brody - renowned for as many weird films as potential Oscar winners - as a geneticist trying to create a farming chemical to save the future of the company he works for. His partner and fellow scientist is Elsa, played by Sarah Polley (most recently seen by us in Zach Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead), who maybe manipulates things to go her way without thinking through the consequences. They create a human/animal hybrid that soon takes on a life [lives?] of its own and that's when it stops being a sci-fi film and becomes a cross between a body horror and a good old fashioned horror film. There are a lot of flaws in it and sometimes the narrative feels unconnected, like different parts of the film were written by different writers who only had a vague idea of what the previous scene was about. 

It was strange, quite compelling and also a little disturbing, especially considering this was made 13 years ago and science has moved on apace since then. Again, the special effects were quite excellent (if a little flawed in places) and it begs the question - why are the special effects in modern movies so poor compared to 10, 15 or even 20 years ago?

The Blah of Blah

I used to listen to the James O'Brien LBC radio show religiously for over five years, but I stopped about four years ago when I grew tired of his relentless attacks on the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. No, this isn't about politics specifically, but I decided to tune in again in the days after Boris Johnson resigned his seat in parliament.

The reason I gave up on JoB wasn't because of his attacks on the Labour leader, it was his refusal to have a debate about it. He had his opinion/belief about the politician and he wasn't going to have his belief challenged by people who might be allowed to make a proper argument. To me, the refusal to explain why you are not prepared to debate something reduced his stature to me alarmingly; he sounded like the modern day equivalent of Lord Haw Haw.

I'd been listening to my first JoB in five years and actually remember thinking that it hasn't changed at all really when, almost deliberately, a caller mentioned something that really appealed to me, the press's involvement in allowing Boris Johnson carte blanche in a discussion about how the ex-PM got where he got. O'Brien agreed with him, then the caller said, 'They did the same in reverse with Jeremy Corbyn' and suddenly it was like someone had shoved a live wire up his arse. It was an unpleasant radio experience and whatever the caller did to try to back up his claims, O'Brien was adamantly sticking to his character assassination and kept banging on about how unelectable he was, when the caller mentioned 2017 when Corbyn cut the Tory majority to needing a deal with another party and polled almost 40% of the country - higher than Blair ever achieved, and how from that moment on the media relentlessly attacked Corbyn on a daily basis to ensure that never happened again and O'Brien accused him of living in an alternate reality and went to a break.

I accept Corbyn would never have been PM, but it seems the media is so scared of policies that aren't neo-liberal in origin and beneficial to the rich they'll go to great lengths to rewrite history, carefully erasing things in the past that are incongruous with present history. I won't be listening to LBC again, probably ever.

Oh FFS

Dear Tube of You, sometimes I might be looking at something out of pure curiosity or even accidentally  and given that I switched it off after 30 seconds doesn't mean I am now a life long fan of that thing and now want nothing but suggestions related to that thing. Thank you, a disgruntled user x

A Sucker For Punishment

We've been slowly working our way through the Zach Snyder filmography over the last six months and tonight it was the turn of Sucker Punch. 

Oh for heaven's sake, I'd forgotten just what a complete load of old bollocks this film was. A mixture of the unpleasant and unsavoury wrapped up in typical Snyder visuals - it looked fantastic, but it was like watching a Duran Duran video directed by David Lynch on cheap crack. This has very few redeemable features about it; sleazy, violent, salacious, exploitative and illogical and they're just the positives. Fortunately we were spared anything more than vague titillation as this film could have been 'highly questionable' had it had any sex or nudity in it, but here the film showed admirable restraint.

It starts off a bit silly and just hurtles along making no sense at all as it throws zombies, orcs, robots and monsters at a group of imaginary heroines fighting for their freedom against the oppressive regime of the nut house they just happen to be locked up in that doubles up as a night club cum brothel or does it? Who cares? No one; it's shit. Snyder made a toilet film and threw up the suggestion that he might just be a little perverted. Move on; nothing to see here.

Faulty Faculty

Robert Rodriguez's The Faculty is essentially a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing mashed up and remixed with a bit of Terminator thrown in for good measure. It's also not dated very well, probably because it's now 25 years old and special effects weren't up to scratch then. What this film is really is a bit of a who's who of would be famous actors and some people we've long forgotten.

The people who would haunt us for the next 20 years plus include Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Bebe Neuwirth, Salma Hayek, Famke Jansson, Laura Harris, Jon Stewart and Usher. Plus the likes of Robert Patrick (who had a couple of moments of renaissance), Jordana Brewster, Clea Duvall and Danny Masterson (now convicted of rape) - this was a road map of the future, but in reality it's not a very good film, purely and simply because it acknowledges the films it's paying homage to guarantee it any critical success. Still, it's another old film off of the Flash Drive of Doom.

A Lot of Grunting and Numbers

Due to the lack of TV, we watched another Snyder film. 300 on a hot sweaty night seemed appropriate and in the 17 years since we last saw the film one thing is clear, it's certainly a Zack Snyder film without a doubt. This is almost a forerunner to every film he made after 2017 in that it looks like it was filmed through some filter that makes everything seem gritty, muscular and a bit grubby.

What a film it is though; absolutely jam-packed full of bare chests, growling and testosterone oozing from everybody's pores like absinthe at a French orgy. It's got lots of stylised violence, quite a bit of flesh on show and has David Wenham doing what David Wenham does best - soliloquise in a deeply heroic English voice. It is an absolute load of pants, full of bollocks - literal and metaphorical.

It's essentially a reverse-Gladiator with a [vague] Scotsman doing his best Spartan impersonation (which is better than a naturalised Aussie from New York playing a Scotsman) - Sparta is a region of Greece so this is like Russell Crowe playing Zeus or Anthony Hopkins playing Odin. Given that Wenham is Antipodean, Fassbender's a mix of German and Irish and this film really is a bit of a league of every nation except Greece, but that last sentence feels like filler because I've run out of anything to say about this film apart from RAHHHHHHH!!!!

Please Stop (part 6)

Look, I just watch them. I don't know when they're going to be on. This is the mid season break all the same and it featured actors working from a 'script' in a post-apocalyptic setting. Morgan's lost it [again], Maddison saves the day [again], Mo is turning back into a normal child and Padre needs ending quickly so they can cram a few more nutty dictatorships in before it all ends.

Ich Bin Dein Mensch

Who knew that Dan Stevens could speak such excellent German? 

I'm coming to the conclusion that the former Downton Abbey star doesn't really do bad films as most of what I've seen him in I've thoroughly enjoyed and no more so than this fabulous little German-language comedy about the human condition, which is fully explored in a story about a woman test driving a humanoid robot who ticks all of her 'desire' boxes. The problem is Alma - played by Maren Eggert - has no intention of doing anything as ... wrong ... as falling for an automaton, regardless how lifelike he might be.

I suppose in many ways given this is a romantic comedy and most romantic comedies have happy endings you can guess what's going to happen almost from the opening scene, it's just the journey that is most amusing and poignant. There are a few laugh out loud moments in this, not something one usually associates with German films and while 'Tom' is a bit too perfect, I think that's the point - if you're going to be offered the person of your dreams they're going to be almost unrealistically fabulous. There's also a very amusing short scene where Alma asks Tom why he has a British accent, even though he is speaking in German. This film will show up on Film4 again soon, it's worth watching if you don't mind subtitles.

Next time...

Just when you think TV's going to dry up like a perimenopausal woman, it's time for Sam Jackson and the Secret Invasion; I'm going to try and do a round-up of stuff you can watch on iPlayer that originated in Scotland and might not have found it's way down south (or might not have been watched by any Scottish readers). And pretty much whatever turns up between now and then. Summer's just about over.