Modern Culture - Clowns, Clones and Dog Shit

Spoilers blah blah blah...

Chapter 2 - Attack of the Shits 

I fully understand and remember why this has been the only film I've ever walked out of the cinema before the end. I sometimes wondered if I was being harsh; I wasn't. 

First off, there's not a lot I can say about Hayden Christensen that hasn't probably been said many times before. I could ask what George Lucas was thinking when he hired a kid who clearly couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag and had as much presence as a grain of sand on a beach? However, as you can imagine, George has stopped taking my calls.

Star Wars - Episode 2 - Attack of the Clones is, in many ways, shittier than Episode 1. However, it's probably a little better in other ways but I'm not really sure why, possibly because it didn't have very much Jar Jar Binks in it and the overt racism was toned down to a three instead of a nine. 

It was such a disjointed, FX-laden slog that I'm amazed they managed to stretch it out to almost 140 minutes. There is so much to dislike about it, from the way the story changed to fit in with whatever Lucas was thinking, presumably by the minute. Natalie Portman is no longer queen, because it appears that on Naboo queens are elected for two terms - like Presidents - so you wonder why they're called queens. In fact, Amidala's piss poor explanation as to why she's now a trade ambassador felt like a necessity rather than a natural progression of the story. Or how about the fact that despite Annikin being a sullen-faced, aggressive spoiled brat she could go from you know not really fancying him to falling in love with him? I mean, she seemed to fall for him the twattier he got. I accept she has to fall pregnant and have the Skywalker twins, but apart from the moral dubiousness of it, it would have been better had he just raped her. [When I say 'better' I mean for the overall story and helping make Annikin the monster he became].

I suppose she couldn't really end up marrying Annikin if she was still queen and if he's still a Jedi padawan? So it was done under the veil of secrecy and not one Jedi, not even the little green fella with the pointy ears, had any suspicion? I suppose all will be revealed tonight when I suffer another 2½ hours of pointless shit. Natalie Portman must have been given wheelbarrows full of money to be in these films. Also, Boba Fett - the kid - is there or has there ever been a child that you would have applauded seeing him get squashed by something, accidentally? Oh and his bloody New Zealand accent got on my nerves like nails scraping down a blackboard. "Did, Did, kill him, did." Aaargh!

I have to admit because I'm not into Star Wars that I always thought Attack of the Clones was about the good guys being attacked by a bunch of clones, so my only surprise was they were helping the good guys in what was just a confusing mess with far too much unnecessary comedy, not enough wanton violence and acting which wouldn't have looked out of place in a Frinton Apollo pantomime performed by the East Essex Amateur Dramatic Society. 

FFS, why do so many people love this franchise (sorry Mark)? It's just an absolute load of wank... Except it isn't because orgasms, even from wanking, are more enjoyable, productive and intense. This is blockbuster films at their very worst and George Lucas is about as talented as an extra for the East Essex Amateur Dramatic Society. Fucking appalling movie with zero redeeming factors. As Jar Jar would undoubtedly say, "Meesa tink issa loada sheet."

It's Never Coming Home

The Women's World Cup has finished after being on for a month and the outcome was not what England fans wanted, but does suggest that we show some humility whenever one of our football teams gets to a major final. The often misplaced optimism I think tends to put too much pressure on the team; that sense of expectation followed by the familiar crushing defeat is almost an English pastime. Coming home my arse.

Being in Scotland and having adopted the country (as it is my ancestral home), I still do feel a slight sense of disappointment when the England team don't bother turning up for matches, but I also get over it faster than I forget what I had for dinner yesterday. 

This spectacle has been more enjoyable than the men's tournament but that wouldn't be difficult as I watched three matches from Qatar and I am proud to have boycotted it. The problem with this women's tournament is it's still mired in the fact FIFA runs it and that twat Infantino cannot open his slimy mouth without upsetting at least a third of the world. I might feel differently about international football if cunts like him were dropped into the bottom of a bottomless sea with some weights and no oxygen.

Chapter Three - Revenge of the Oh For Fuck's Sake...

I think the most incongruous part of this entire three-handed load of wank was the way Padme went from 16 year-old queen freedom fighter with more nous than two Jedis to squealing girlie who falls in love with wonder twat Skywalker and is prepared to believe he wasn't a complete and utter wanker. I mean, talk about contrived plotting. Lucas could write Hey Duggie with skills like that. Actually, he's not that good - maybe Hi-De-Hi the Utter Fucking Disaster Movie?

All I can say is this was as bad as the first two and I suspect it gets its higher IMDB score for the last few minutes when suited and booted Vader turns up and what happens to the twins is revealed, but as for the rest of the movie, Jesus wept what a load of convoluted horseshit and just how stupid were all of these people? Jedis don't seem to have much of a clue and got taken out like they were stormtroopers. Palpitation has been knocking around for donkeys years and yet none of the Jedi noticed that a fucking Sith was amongst them? Jedis are occasionally precognitive, but did one of them foresee their own deaths? How the fuck did Obi Wank know there was an emperor when Palpitation only just declared himself emperor of the new empire? It was good to see Jar Jar Binks not speaking a single word, but they chucked in some Wookies, including a youthful Chewbacca, so they had something furry on the side of the 'rebels'. 

It was just more special effects and the battle scene at the end between Kenobi (why did he take on the name Ben?) and Wankanin was preposterous - they're fighting on a molten lava planet and neither is barely breaking sweat, let alone catching fire or melting. The slightly Pythonesque lopping off of Wankanin's limbs or his insistence that he'd fight Obi Wank with just his teeth (okay, that doesn't happen, but it should have) was about as 'nasty' as this kids' franchise ever got and fancy Padme losing the will to live; I mean that's such a common way to die after giving birth to twins who probably needed their mother.

FFS, I think people forget how fucking awful these movies are because they're in love with those original films from a childhood they will never return to, in a simpler time, when special effects had to be worked on. Obviously as the Empire takes over the universe they retro fit it with rubbish equipment. How convenient that Palpitation told the droids to switch themselves off and never reactivate themselves, I half expected him to order all the clones into giant vats of conveniently placed acid so there was no evidence of them ever existing. Dog shit. Utter dog shit. Utter utter dog shit on burnt toast. People who love this franchise have brain disorders, FFS.

Even Better Than the Cloned Thing

I'm very white. I can't escape that. I like some MOBO music, but I'm not really hip or even hop, however I can spot a Blaxploitation homage a mile off and They Cloned Tyrone is most definitely a Blaxploitation homage; it's also a bad ass sci-fi action comedy that frankly despite only understanding about half the actual dialogue in it, didn't detract from it being entertaining and fun.

It also has a Star Wars reference in it - in the first five minutes, which felt like I was being haunted by that fucking film franchise - actually it has two, the other being John Boyega, who plays Finn in the final (so far) SW trilogy; you know, the black guy who was so prominent in The Force Awakens but almost got forgotten about in the following two, like George Lucas put his racist hat back on and told the directors to stop it now. But let's not dwell on him or his pile of shit franchise. This was far better than a fucking Star Wars film.

In fact, this also has a kind of Marvel link as it's really Electro, Monica Rambeau and the guy who people believed would replace Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, should he get the sack if found guilty in his forthcoming sexual assault trial. Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris and the aforementioned Boyega team up as a pimp, a ho and a drug dealer who discover there's something badly wrong in da hood and it's all going off underground...

Boyega is Fontaine a miserable local dealer who barely cracks a smile, who leads a boring life that seems to repeat itself day after day. When he has a confrontation with a rival drug dealer and gets shot you'd almost think that was it, until he wakes up the next morning as good as new. This, as you might guess, confuses him a bit and confuses others even more. It's especially confusing as people don't tend to come back from the dead, especially after having three bullets pumped into their chest. When he discovers that everyone thinks he's dead, including Slick Charles (Foxx) the last person to see him alive, it starts a chain of events that leads to the two men and 'retiring' whore Yo-Yo to uncover a full scale mind-blowing operation designed to alter the minds of the folk of the neighbourhood and also clone them, in case replacements are needed. You have to ask yourself about the logic in this...

Not only is this happening, but the food, hair products, drink and music are all doctored to keep the locals under control - have them being dodgy folk, but only up to a certain point. Slick Charles and Fontaine both seem important as they're able to be mind controlled by the agency that operates underground, but Yo-Yo isn't and when she's kidnapped by the agency and attempted to be brainwashed, Fontaine and Slick come up with a plan to break her out and expose the conspiracy.

It's all very loud, at times violent and has a lack of internal logic, but it's a fun film that does a good job of pointing out how black people in urban US areas have the world to beat just to be able to live. The three main actors are excellent in it - Boyega, in this, reminds me of an adult US version of his homey from Attack the Block, while Parris is anything but a Marvel superhero and Foxx is just bad - as in good, if you know what I mean? It's worth watching, I think I could have done with some subtitles though.

Badlie Spelt Tytle

We're down to just two Tarantino films we've never seen - those are Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Part Two, after we finally watched Inglourious Basterds and I can safely say that with the exception of his first two feature films, which we haven't seen for a long time, I've only really enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the rest of them I really don't care that much for.

That's not to say Inglourious Basterds was a bad film, it just didn't do anything for me and when it was revealed that it was another alternative history movie it just got me wondering about Tarantino in general and whether he can make actual 'real' films. It's the story of a platoon of Jewish US army men who travel around occupied Europe during WW2 scalping Germans in response to Hitler's 'final solution', while simultaneously it is the tale of a Jewish girl who survives the wiping out of her family in rural France, inherits a cinema and takes the opportunity of a Nazi film premiere at her cinema to attempt assassinate a number of leading German military figures including Goebbels, Hess and Adolf Hitler.

The film is held together by Christophe Waltz as a slightly rogue officer who is also a detective and known as the Jew Hunter because he notoriously tracks down Jews and has them killed; he was there at the start and he pops up throughout the film until he comes up with his own final solution and a way of him walking away from the war with the best possible outcome for himself.

I simply didn't find the film very enjoyable; it has some funny moments, but essentially it was a nasty, small-minded movie, full of characters who were neither pointless, likeable nor expendable which all took you down a garden path to the conclusion. I also thought the title was slightly redundant, I mean it starts off by suggesting the name of the film is A Band Apart but everything else says it's the badly spelled title referred to earlier in this review. The actual 'Basterds' were on screen for about 25 minutes in total - out of 2½ hours - but it was really about the Jewish girl, Waltz's Hans Landa and a little bit of Brad Pitt's character, and he was really just a vessel to go from A to Z. 

I didn't enjoy it. I'm not in any hurry to see the other QT films I have yet to subject myself to.

The End is Nigh?

Usually I'd write an entire blog about this, but, it seems the Marvel Cinematic Universe might be about to be curtailed, cut back and concluded. The news out of Disney this week is not good reading with planned cuts to film and TV and the prospect that the MCU's Phase 6 might be just three films and one of those a conclusion/reboot - with no continuation imminent.

The death of the superhero film was always going to be a foregone conclusion. I know that sounds like hindsight given what's happened in the last couple of years, but overkill coupled with below par offerings appears to have Disney execs running for cover. With the writers' and actors' strike still going and an intransigence from the money men keeping it going there are an abundance of delays, postponements and now, it seems, Disney's Bob Iger has suggested the MCU might end after Phase 6 - which at the moment stands at a Fantastic Four film and two Avengers films and doesn't look like it's going to be added to unless something 'special' comes along. 

Disney has been looking at the numbers and now regard the third Guardians of the Galaxy film to be an 'event' film; a conclusion to a popular sub-franchise and a buck in the general trend of superhero films, which have lost their mojo and are unlikely to respond and bounce back into favour, especially with some of the less than awesome things on the horizon. So at a time when DC appears to be ramping it up to try and compete with the MCU juggernaut, the MCU is looking at calling a halt to all superhero films after 2026 - at least for a few years, to give it time to breathe and rethink the way forward. This doesn't mean the end of the MCU just a much slower output level, probably with more focus on one or two TV event series per year and allowing Sony to go and play with the Spider-Man universe, while picking up residuals from that. I expect the Secret Wars film will be a conclusion to everything with an ending that leaves the MCU open to being rebooted in 2030 at the earliest. I also expect Kevin Feige to depart in the next year.

Is it Safe?

The 2012 film Safe House with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds is memorable for a number of things but the fact there's not a single joke made from the the Deadpool star is probably a first; however that's no reason not to watch this relentless and twisty action thriller.

Reynolds plays Matt Weston - a caretaker at a Cape Town Safe House operated by the CIA. He's got a cushy life, a nice French girlfriend and a cover story that no one seems to question, but he's bored and wants to be a field agent; the problem is no one else at CIA HQ wants him to be. Then one of the most wanted men in the world turns up as a 'guest' at his house - Washington's Tobin Frost, a former CIA agent who's gone rogue and has half the world's secret agents looking for him. He's got something that someone wants badly and within minutes of Frost being admitted to the safe house it is under attack from hostile forces.

What follows is a cavalcade of violence, double crosses and a chase across South Africa to stay alive - at least that's what Matt needs to do, because Tobin is on a mission, one that involves him making a lot of money with a file that contains the names of every dodgy spy for every spy agency on the planet and that makes him expendable and therefore everybody who comes into contact with him.

It's quite a brilliant film with twists, turns, red herrings, dark blind alleys and unexpected - yet totally expected - shocks. In fact it's one of the best thrillers I've seen in a long while with some fantastic set pieces and a clever ending that you don't see coming but makes you feel a lot better about some people who work for the CIA. There are some great turns by the likes of Sam Shepherd, Brendan Gleason, Vera Farmiga, Ruben Blades and Robert Patrick - some of which are almost blink and you'll miss them. It does one thing I never really considered though, Reynolds is a good straight actor and he doesn't need to be 'Ryan Reynolds' to hold a film together; he can actually act.

Trailer Trash

Rebel Moon has a bit of a history. First mooted as an adult Star Wars film, George "I'm a Total Wanker" Lucas apparently turned the idea down and it's been floating around unmade for years, until Netflix chucked loads of money at Zach Snyder and said, 'Here you go son, fill your boots.'

It's basically Star Wars had it been done by someone who understands films, stories and how to make a space opera - or at least that's what the trailer looks like, even if Sofia Boutella is the main star (readers of this column will know I have my doubts about the French actor's ability to act) and there are things that look so like a Star Wars film that I wouldn't be surprised if Disney don't have their lawyers scouring the trailer as I type this to see if there's something they could sue Netflix for. 

I'm not going to get excited about this, but given the success of Dune and the imminent failure of the entire superhero genre, I expect this will be a big hit as will the next two or three years worth of space fantasy films, because that's going to be the next big thing. Science fantasy is here baby and you'd better believe it. The trail looks meaty and chock full of action, adventure and Star Wars-esque characters done right. I mean, come on, they could have made it with puppets carved from human faeces talking like Pinky and fucking Perky and it would be better than fucking Star Wars...

All Hard Feelings

Here's a weird one for you: what happens when you don't think you want to watch a film, get ten minutes into it and are convinced you don't think it's the film for you and end up thinking it's a very nice film with a lot of heart and quite enjoyable?

I know, that's a very convoluted entry paragraph, but Jennifer Lawrence's latest movie No Hard Feelings is quite distasteful on a number of levels, yet still manages to end up being one of the best feel good comedies I've seen in a long time; or at least it's morally questionable for about the first half an hour and then turns into something else entirely.

Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, a 32-year-old Montauk Point 'good time gal' who lives in a house that was bought for her late mother by a rich New York holidaymaker who accidentally knocked her up with Maddie. She drives an Uber, while working at a bar and is struggling to make ends meet with state taxes and is in danger of losing said house because ... life in the USA is essentially expensive to even breathe let alone live in a nice house with a low income. When her car is repossessed and her home comes under threat, she takes on an unusual job of bringing a shy, reclusive 19-year-old 'out of his shell' - or in other words, she's employed by the kid's rich parents to bonk his brains out before he goes to college. She effectively becomes a sex worker to obtain a car to help her remain in her house and living in Montauk. So far so seedy and Lawrence does seedy far better than you would imagine - not only does she have an extremely potty mouth, she appears to have slept with just about everyone in the holiday resort she's spent all her life in.

What happens though is ... not the fact that Maddie and nerdy Percy become friends - that is almost a given - but that Lawrence gets completely full frontal naked in a beach fight scene that is both unexpected, funny (especially being punched in the privates) and not really necessary but almost essential for the progress of the story. You see Percy might be a bit of a geek, but he's actually a nice guy with a lot of hang-ups and so is Maddie, although she didn't know this until she met Percy. The evolution of their friendship and the inevitable revelation that she was essentially a set-up is handled with a lot of humour and satirical jabs at rich Americans. What happens is a really nice - but bawdy - film with some funny set pieces, unexpected twists and poignant moments that are handled, as you might expect, very well for a film that has one of Hollywood's A listers in it.

Andrew Barth Feldman is excellent as Percy and there are good turns from Ebon Moss-Bachrach (of The Bear fame) and an old looking Matthew Broderick as Percy's father who doesn't seem to want to let his son grow up but realises he has to and probably goes about that growing up in really bad taste - but, hey this is the USA and foisting your son on someone the parents think of trash and a sex worker is probably normal for that extremely fucked up society. It is an enjoyable film and ends up being quite the feelgood 100 minutes.

Bowie Invasion

Invasion is back. The Apple TV extra-terrestrial thriller that baffled more people than it won fans when it first appeared in 2021 and the first thing I took from it was how much quicker the pace of it had gotten. The second thing was these alien invaders presumably like David Bowie - but you'll have to watch it to find out why.

It's a tough show to explain given that series one seemed to focus more on the humans and there was about five minutes in the entire season that had aliens in it. It was essentially introducing you to the five main protagonists; the people who seemed to have either a connection with the invaders or were going to play a key role in stopping them and this first episode of the second season focused on Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani) the Iranian-born American who is on the run from the US because she fears for her family's safety and she's a Muslim (having lost her husband already to trigger happy good ol' boys because of that) and Misuki (Shioli Katsuna) the only person to have contacted the aliens and the woman responsible for the only victory Earth has had against the aliens so far - as witnessed by a huge ship downed in the Amazon basin.

The episode kicks off with Misuki fighting aliens with Molotov cocktails and making them seem rather tame considering they're winning this war. She's wanted by the world government to help work out why the aliens are here and what they want - which seems obvious given they're killing humans and terraforming the planet with ammonia and for the next hour it shifts back and forth between her and Aneesha's struggle to stay one step ahead of the [US] army, until she or rather her son falls foul of a patrol and they are captured, only to be released soon after by a new plot in the story, a group called The Movement, who, it seems, are also interested in beating the aliens but not in the same way as the world government.

It's all very overwrought still, but you somehow expect that given the scenario and the other characters are ignored (until the final scene) in favour of fleshing out the two main protagonists stories moving forward as much as they can. I'm still not 100% sure that this is a good series, but we now seem to have more focus on the actual invasion and less pfaffing about with introducing us to the humans. It's still early doors, so anything could happen in the coming weeks.

Extra Terrestrial Hijinks

I think there are maybe a dozen films that I rate as my favourite films and we watched one of them to round the week off. Given how intense and serious Invasion is, we needed something that is both feelgood and funny and you really don't have to look much further than the utterly brilliant Paul.

Made in 2011, when Simon Pegg was looking like he would become a serious A list actor (I wonder why that never happened?) and Nick Frost wasn't typecast as a Nick Frost kind of character, this is one of the best homages to almost every great Sci-Fi film ever made and yet is quite fantastic in its own right. It follows the adventures of Graeme and Clive, a couple of British geeks in the USA for the San Diego Comic Con and to take an RV across the US visiting all the famous UFO places like Roswell and Area 51, who just happen to pick up an actual ET on the way, one called Paul - voiced by Seth Rogan. Your stereotypical looking 'grey' who smokes, swears and generally likes having a beer and a good time.

The three are pursued by three shady characters from a secret organisation which includes Bill Hader as an ambitious and suspicious agent and Jason Bateman as the quite superb Agent Zoil (first name: Lorenzo - yes, it's that corny). Heading up this secret organisation is 'The Big Guy' played by Sigourney Weaver and also involved is Kristen Wiig as Ruth and her ultra religious father played by John Carrol Lynch. It's a road movie, an alien movie, a love story and a secret organisation out to kill you film and it simply never gets old or boring. Paul is simply one of the best 'sci-fi' films ever made and I struggle to find any fault in it at all.

Next Time...

More of the same I expect except with less Star Wars, which in itself will make the coming week a lot more enjoyable. There might even be some more new TV, but given the autumn schedules are being leaked, I'm sceptical about TV coming to the rescue any time soon...

Pop Culture - The Okay, the Bad and the Quite Lovely

The usual spoiler warnings are in force and as the things I'm reviewing at the moment are old films there's going to be much discussion of plots and things in these films, so be aware if you haven't seen them and want to...

Entertainment Guaranteed

Revisiting a film that we thought was fantastic when we watched it ten years ago hasn't always been a recipe for success but occasionally it proves to be an even better experience, it really depends on how much we remembered. With Safety Not Guaranteed it was a case of we remembered very little (specifically the ending) but it didn't detract from what a terrific little film it is.

Audrey Plaza plays an intern at a Seattle magazine who get's chosen by journalist Jake Johnson to accompany him and another intern to cover the story of a man who has placed an advert asking for someone to join him on a time travel mission. No one thinks it's real but it's a quirky enough idea for a fashionable magazine to cover. So off they travel into Washington State in search of a story, except Johnson is really just there to try and hook up with an ex-girlfriend, so it's down to Darius (Plaza) to get the skinny on this would be nutter.

The problems start when Darius starts to fall for the nerd-like Kenneth (played by Mark Duplass), because he's essentially a nice guy and she's not really cut out to be a journalist. What follows is how their relationship builds and also how Johnson's hook up with his ex also goes to places you didn't think were possible given his initial observations on how she's aged and is no longer this skinny blonde bombshell. Things start to get serious when it's clear that paranoid Kenneth, who believes he's being watched by government agents, is actually being watched by government agents. The rest is just perfect, prosthetic ears and all.

What the Actual Fuck?

If you look at the many lists of 'best time travel films' that litter the internet, Primer is always on those lists and usually near the top. After watching all 77 minutes of this I'm wondering if the guys who made this movie paid every single list compiler to include this, because if I thought Donnie Darko was as confusing as fuck, this was like someone explaining to me the plot of Donnie Darko in Albanian sign language.

The thing about this film is even when I figured I'd got an idea what was happening, it made no real sense to me because there was no logic involved. Let me, probably forlornly, try to explain... Primer starts with 20 minutes of discussion between four colleagues about the creation of something that probably isn't a time travelling device, then at around the 22 minute mark one of them discovers something to do with fungus that suggests the device might be used to travelling through time, although this is not specifically said. In fact, much of the entire film is made up of mumbling and vague science; it might not be vague, but I'm no physicist so Albanian sign language is back in the equation.

The two main protagonists Shane Carruth - as Aaron and David Sullivan - as Abe, decide to go it alone and keep their two other colleagues out of their [ahem] loop and it's from about the 30 minute mark that we get into some actual, physical time travel, except where none of this movie made an sense for the first half hour, the next 47 minutes is quite remarkably as nonsensical as you could possibly imagine - think Albanian sign language for Koi carp.

It simply made no real sense. There's this thing about them putting themselves in man-size cages duplicating their initial experiments and something about their present selves locking themselves into a hotel room for the amount of hours that their other selves need to enact whatever they need to do before, presumably, there is no longer alternate versions of themselves running doing the things they planned on doing. Then something goes wrong, there's something about a man following them, a man with a shotgun at a party that is lived over and over again to determine exactly what action to take to prevent it from happening and then some scenes from earlier in the movie are played out again, making you think that what happened earlier was the future returning to the past that the viewer hadn't yet.

Then I read a review on IMDB that suggested you need to watch the last 30 minutes a few times to fully comprehend what was going on. Fuck right off. I'm not going to watch it a number of times, especially when I thought it was a badly made piece of crap, just to understand it. I fancy myself as an aficionado of time travel films, paradoxes and think I've seen just about every twist and concept known to man, yet this simply made no sense from any aspect; the dialogue was mumbled and vague, the time travelling made little sense and you saw nothing of benefit come from it and some of the ideas used made the Grandfather Paradox redundant, in fact Aaron at one point suggested the entire concept of said paradox was 'bullshit.' This isn't a good film; it's not an intelligent film and if people think confusion is a good concept for a time travel film then good luck with this.

Signs and Portents

I am going to stop harping on about having seen films that we've seen that we don't remember because it's getting repetitive and boring. Therefore The Mothman Prophecies is an inventive and intriguing supernatural mystery starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. It's based, after a fashion, on possibly a true-ish story about a shared phenomena in the West Virginia town of Point Pleasant that also ties in with the Silver Bridge disaster in December 1967.

According to the story, a number of people in said town of Point Pleasant all witnessed the appearance of a supernatural apparition called Mothman, which allegedly appears when a (major) disaster is about to happen [but is more likely a huge constructed story to try and benefit from the bridge disaster and provide the town with some kind of tourism income after the main factory closed down in the 1970s - probably due to the bridge disaster]. Richard Gere plays a grieving reporter for the Washington Post, whose wife dies of a rare brain tumour but shortly before it is diagnosed has a car accident where she sees a strange winged moth-like creature seconds before she crashes their car.

It's described as a horror film but I prefer my supernatural mystery description because there is no real horror in this but plenty of mystery and while it's filmed and dealt with in a slightly forensic manner it does enough to convey a sense of dread, foreboding and jeopardy, especially with the bridge disaster. The downside of the movie is that a lot of the witnesses to the strange events all come across as mad hick locals who give off the impression, even in the film, that you simply wouldn't believe them if they told you the time. Gere does a reasonable job of being earnest and compelled to get to the bottom of this mystery, but generally the feeling of a self-fulfilling prophecy prevails, such as when Alan Bates explains to Gere that all that happens when you forewarn people of an impending disaster is you either get looked at like you're mad or you become a suspect.

It's an entertaining and cleverly done piece of work with a good cast including Deborah Messing and Will Patton, but there are some jolting parts which don't aid the narrative, a few obvious red herrings and some things that are not in keeping with the rest of the film - such as the appearance of Gere's wife two years after her death, suggesting an even more supernatural aspect that the film didn't need. It was worth watching and if it ever reappears on TV it's worth checking out.

Leftism 

Serious question: how often do you wander around your house/flat with the lights off at night? I mean, I don't switch the light on in the middle of the night when I'm going to the loo but it's 20 feet away and my eyes have pretty much adjusted to the darkness, but if I was going to go downstairs or into one of the front rooms, I'd pull the bedroom door closed and switch on a light. However, why is it in horror movies that when someone hears a sound, especially a spooky sound in a house they've only just moved into, they wander around in the dark? Do they not think of, you know, turning on the fucking lights?

This was the first thing that bothered me about Sinister, a 2012 film from James Wan, the guy responsible for a number of torture porn films and popular ghost/apparition/found footage nonsense over the last 20 years. It stars Ethan Hawke, who probably should have known better and on the surface it's a creepy horror film about a series of linked murders through the decades dating back to the 1960s at least.

Hawke plays a true crime writer, one popular with the readers, but unpopular with the police because he paints them as largely incompetent. He's had his 15 minutes of fame and now he's struggling to write another book as popular as his first. He's onto something new and he omits to tell his wife that he's moving his entire family into a house that saw four murders and the disappearance of a child. He's warned off almost immediately by the local sheriff, but Hawke's character Ellison is determined to recapture his former glories while watching his marriage slowly disintegrate. His first mistake is not to tell his wife about the house's history.

His second mistake and the other logically stupid thing is he finds a box in the attic with home movies of a series of murders the ones briefly mentioned in the second paragraph. This is where he should have contacted the police, because these are graphic 8mm filmed 'diaries' not just of the four who died in his new house but all of the families who died in horrible ways. If it was you or I we'd have gone to the police straight away because this would have helped no end with their investigations. Not Ellison, he does enlist the help of fan-boy deputy - referred to as Deputy So and So - but doesn't tell him anything much until it's getting too late. Of course, our crime writer is drinking a lot, not sleeping much and generally getting obsessed, while his family starts doing odd things that don't seem to bother him the way they should.

Did I mention it's quite a creepy film? I suppose if you enter into this kind of junk with your logic and common sense switched off you'd find it as jumpy as hell, but I was just watching the clock and wondering what I was going to say in my review...

I think I should mention that a few years ago I stopped watching horror films because I can't take them seriously. There is nothing in real life that you wouldn't confront head on, because there is nothing supernatural and there is only natural. If I met a ghost, what could it do to me? It isn't corporeal, it's a ghost. How's it supposed to scare me? Monsters don't exist - at least not supernatural monsters - and most of the fictional ones thrive on fear; what if you don't get frightened by imaginary horse shit? How does it have any control over you? Be frightened of human monsters by all means (which was why last week's most frightening film was Sicario), but the supernatural? Bah humbug and all that nonsense. I don't like blood and gore so a film series like Saw does not appeal to me, it's not frightening; Torture porn isn't big or clever; it isn't scary. The dark isn't frightening, especially when you have light at the flick of a switch and if you haven't you have a fucking torch built into most smart phones. It's just bollocks, like this film. 

Time Stands Still

Sixteen years ago, we watched a film called Cashback. It was a sort of time travel film only it wasn't; it was about stopping time and living in that moment. I know I'd seen it because this morning, while looking through Facebook's Memories section I stumbled across a blog I'd written called Phil on Film, arguably one of the first versions of this blog and I mention a couple of other films in it, that oddly enough are being queued up to watch again over the coming days.

Now, the thing is, as I've gotten older I've become a bit prudish about unnecessary female nudity in films and my review, which absolutely reckoned Cashback was one of the best films I'd seen all year, has lots of nudity in it, but I claim that while the film is literally full of gratuitous nudity it's essential for the film to be enjoyed. This sounded like 45 year old Phil simply reconnecting with 15 year old Phil, but I was intrigued about why I rated this film so highly, so I downloaded it and watched it on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, while the wife was crafting in her cupboard. What would 61 year old Phil think?

It's the story of Ben Willis, an art student who breaks up with his rather stunning girlfriend, or rather she breaks up with him and he struggles to get over it. He becomes obsessed with not being with her any more and eventually this leads to him suffering from insomnia. He cannot sleep and wastes his time trying to, until he finally decides to do something constructive with all this new free time he has, so he gets a night shift job at his local Sainsbury's. Then he discovers he can freeze time. 

The film is told from his perspective, so it's a lot of him explaining off camera about the things he likes and one of the things he's quite obsessed with is the female body, especially when it is without clothing. The thing is he's an artist and a very good one, so his obsession with the female form is more aesthetic than sexual, but this doesn't stop him from using his new found ability to undress a number of extremely beautiful - but frozen in time - women, but only so he can draw them. However, while he still struggles to get over his former girlfriend, he's slowly falling in love with the checkout girl called Sharon, played by Emilia Fox.

Now Ben is played by Sean Biggerstaff, someone I can't say I've seen in anything since (although, apparently I have as he was most recently in the first season of Good Omens) and he's a likeable and affable young man with some good friends and a few dodgy ones. His new obsession with Sharon leads to him drawing, painting and generally worshipping her in art form, but when he finally gets the chance to take her out, his past catches up with him and his former girlfriend seemingly ruins his chances. As he says, Sharon saw one second of a two second meeting, unfortunately it was the wrong second...

This is a comedy, but it's also a love story and a strange timey-wimey barrel of weirdness and it's also a fucking fantastic film. I mean, a really lovely film that makes you forget about all the boobs and vulvas on display and just leaves you in a really nice place. It's possibly the best thing I've watched in ages and that's exactly what I said about it 16 years ago. Quality persists it seems. If you ever get the chance and can see beyond the actually very necessary and Ben's explained fascination with nudity, I reckon you will absolutely love it as well.

https://youtu.be/4M8zAJQsxQY is the theme tune of the film and it's also really good.

Atomic Bollocks More Like

Every so often I see a film that someone I know has been involved with. My old sparing partner Scott Lobdell wrote Happy Death Day and tonight, unbeknownst to me I discovered someone I thought of as a pretentious wanker wrote the Charlize Theron vehicle Atomic Blonde, which I thought was a load of wank. This end of the Cold War era movie with a backdrop of spies and double agents was full of violence, sex and meh - it had some funny moments in it and some of the violence was borderline slapstick, but in general it was style over substance with foreseeable plot twists allowed to run rampant...

I really didn't like it. In fact I found it quite boring. It was trying to be clever but ended up just washing over me. James McAvoy was okay in it as was Bill Skarsgård, but in general it was a lazy, poorly executed double/triple agent film that barely registered as a thriller. This felt more like the then 42-year-old Theron wanted to show the world what a fantastic body she had and that she could do sex scenes or sit naked in a bath full of ice cubes without her layers of belly fat showing like Saharan sand dunes. I didn't enjoy the film at all and the wife thought we'd seen it, but that was because it was just like so many other films of its ilk but not as well made. I'd give this a miss if you haven't already.

WTAF2

A few weeks back I reviewed a movie called The Endless, a confusing story of a couple of former UFO cult members drawn back to the cult to see how things are. It turned into a very strange and confusing film about time loops taking place within linear time. It looked very good and some of the imagery was top notch, but ultimately it made little or no sense. This didn't put me off watching the prequel - Resolution - made eight years earlier and featuring two of the characters from the latter film - Mike and Chris - who seemed stuck in a strange repeating cycle that never stopped regardless of what they did. Mike was trying to get Chris off of his crack addiction. 

This 2012 movie focuses on the relationship between these two best friends as Mike arrives at Chris's with the intention of either talking him in to rehab or forcing his old friend into cold turkey. What follows is really odd as Mike starts discovering films, photographs and evidence that suggests things that can't possibly have happened and the more he delves into the mystery the more he becomes convinced that he's walked into someone else's nightmare. Some of the pictures show events from many years ago, while others, including video tape, show things that have yet to happen. Or have they?

It's not as overtly loopy [if you'll pardon the pun] as The Endless but it is as weird, with other characters that pop up in the latter film dropping by as well as dodgy Native Americans, crack dealers and people Chris either owes or is indebted to somehow. Mike also can't really understand why Chris is so intent on killing himself - his way - but it soon becomes as clear as mud that Chris thinks he's reliving his life, or at least a portion of it, over and over again and it appears that Mike is now trapped in the same nightmarish situation.

It's not a particularly good film, but it does try and convey a point and a theme that is explored more deeply in The Endless, but ultimately you don't care enough about any of the characters to give a shit about their trials and tribulations, especially Chris, who is essentially an arsehole.

999s

Ryan Reynolds' was still very much a bit part actor, despite having been the lead role in a couple of dud films. I'd argue that his big break came in the 2007 film The Nines in which he essentially played God, or did he? I think this was the film that proved he was something of a future star. It's a three-handed piece with the Wrexham FC owner, Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis playing different people in three sections that are all linked to each other in one way or another. Usually through the number 9.

Is Reynolds a TV actor who has fucked up? Is he a screenwriter who gets shafted? Or is he a video game creator who is led into the wilderness to have his godliness spelled out to him? Or is he actually God who's taken a holiday from heaven to play the role of three different people because he loves being with all the little plebs?

I'm not totally convinced it worked, but I did think it was a good idea. I was totally blown away at how young McCarthy looked and how Reynolds was convincing as a body who starts to no longer understand what is happening to him - an on-screen existential crisis. Does this film explore the reality of unreality or is it a fantasy sci-fi film with the chief protagonist an extra-terrestrial omniscient being carrying out a review of God's work? There are a number of clues throughout the film, but the way it's played out you don't realise they're clues until the film ends - a kind of existential Sixth Sense.

The red herring in the film is in the second vignette when McCarthy appears as a 'version' of herself along with her actual husband Ben Falcone, who then reappears at the end/epilogue of the film when McCarthy is trying to understand what she has been through and asks her daughter what mommy's name is. It's confusing, but it's also quite compelling and the fixation with the number 9 appears to be something to do with where Reynolds' character sits in the grand scheme of things. Humans are 7s, Koalas are 8s (because they're telepathic and understand what is happening to the world) and Reynolds is a 9, one short of being a God. Given that his final character is called Gabriel it could be surmised that he's actually an angel and angels were who really created the world we live him while God just watched.

Um... No I Almost Can't Believe it Either

So many films we have and haven't seen and yet there's a small series of them we never completed. The story goes something like this - we watched part one and wasn't that impressed, but you know it was a special event. Then with part two we actually did something we'd never ever done before, we walked out of the cinema half way through the film because we were even less impressed and I had already fallen asleep twice, so we never bothered with the third part and that has been the case now for almost 20 years. In fact, I take great pleasure telling people I never watched this trilogy and even deride fans of this franchise for liking something I've always felt was a tad overrated...

So what on earth compelled us the watch Star Wars - Episode One - The Phantom Menace again?

I dunno. Perhaps it's been the fact that some of the films we've watched recently have been proper stinkers, outweighing the good and the quite lovely by far too many. Perhaps we wanted to see if this was as bad as we remembered and if it was it would round a shit week off with a shit film (it's been a shit week because I've had another chest infection and have spent most of the week feeling worse than a shit Star Wars film).

The thing is, it wouldn't have been a half bad film if it wasn't for the overt racism, the bad script, the subliminal racism, the woeful dialogue and the fucking Gungans, who were like walking racist caricatures. Other than those things and Annikin - badly acted by Jake Lloyd - (and here was me thinking the awful Hayden Christensen was in all three films - I'm that much of a SW fan) - it wasn't a bad film. The aliens who sounded like the Chinese were even badly dubbed so Lucas really went to town with the stereotypes and a lot of the large scale special effects looked like computer generated landscapes.

Actually, it was a bad film, it just wasn't quite as shit as I remembered and if they'd cut about an hour and 40 minutes out of it, it might have made an entertaining half hour short. McGregor wasn't bad as Alec Guinness, Natalie Portman was Natalie Portman as the Queen of Naboo. What the fuck was Samuel L. Jackson doing in it or Celia Imrie for that matter? Ray Park was such an awful actor they had to get Peter Serafinowicz to dub his voice - and he is soooo short! Lucas even managed to squeeze Warwick Davis in, which isn't really difficult. 

We've still only seen seven Star Wars films all the way through. Saturday night is going to change that with an Attack of the Clowns night, but that and Revenge of the Slithereen will have to wait to be eviscerated in next week's blog.

Next Time...

Invasion is back. I just hope we can remember much from the first series that only really seemed to improve just as it was finishing. we might find out what the kid does, how the Japanese astronaut fits into all of it or what the Iranian woman's part is - everything else, apart from Sam Neill's brief appearance is a bit of a blur; the wife might even suggest not bothering.

More Star Wars nonsense, more time travel films and maybe They Cloned Tyrone (because my mate Chris rates it) and/or whatever else there's left on the increasingly marginally interesting Flash Drive of Doom. I bet you can't wait? I know I can...

Modern Culture - Monster Balls, Vampire Weak Ends & Paradoxical Paradoxes

This is full of spoilers because everything discussed is old.

Not What it Says on the Tin

Don't be fooled by the title or the trailers, the last ever 20th Century Fox movie is not what you think it is; not by a long chalk. The Empty Man is pitched to the same audiences that watch teen slasher/horror films, but this is not a rip off of The Slender Man, the Boogeyman or It Follows, it's considerably more cerebral than that, even if you're not sure at times what you are actually watching. 

This is a film that defies typical horror film tropes, while cashing in on them at the same time. It starts with an almost 25 minute 'prologue' about four people who go to Bhutan to experience the Himalayas and the culture, but end up in some tragic situation that is both creepy and slightly understated. One of the people - Aaron Poole - falls down a crevasse and when he is found he's sitting catatonic in front of a fucking weird looking skeleton of some kind of human hybrid monster with many ribs and fingers. What follows is almost typical, yet atypical, slasher material and results in his three companions all dying, leaving him still catatonic atop a mountain in the snow. 

Switch to James Badge Dale's former cop, working in a home security shop who gets roped into the disappearance of his neighbour's daughter - someone we meet briefly when she visits Dale at his home to see if he's okay. It seems he's recovering from some tragedy where his wife and son were killed. The neighbour's daughter's disappearance is a bit fishy, there's a message scrawled on the mirror in her bathroom in animal blood and it's all looking a bit dodgy. Our ex-cop protagonist starts doing his own investigation, interviewing the girl's friends and it suddenly becomes a bog standard creepy bogeyman slasher movie with kids on bridges blowing into bottles while thinking about some entity called the Empty Man. The next thing you know, all the kids, bar the neighbour, are found dead, hanging under the bridge. 

It's now things start going a bit weird and when I say weird, I mean well weird. There's this secret organisation full of young people who are all obsessed with the Empty Man, there's riddles and encounters that make little or no sense and the feeling that is it Dale who is going mad or is it something to do with the secret society or the Empty Man himself. I've seen the film described as cosmic horror and others suggesting there's an element of HP Lovecraft and Cthulhu in it and that might be the case, but what is both clever and interesting about it is how it's wrapped up and concluded. It might leave you with questions or with the feeling you've been conned and that's okay because in an ingenious way you have been conned; what you thought was a bog standard horror movie is much more than that, it's almost mind-blowing in its concept and it's extremely well executed even down to the denouement, which you wouldn't have seen coming.

Don't be put off by this film and its description, it defies description in many ways, it is disturbing and at times is very creepy and disconcerting, even if some of these scenes don't make much sense to the narrative, but, in the end, you'll either understand what it all means or you'll think it's smoke and mirrors with a soupcon of Rosemary's Baby-styled obfuscation. It's worth watching and is probably the best thing I've seen this week.

Mummy Dearest

What was Tom Cruise thinking when he looked at the script for The Mummy - Universal Picture's Dark Universe 'reboot'? Was it the slightly comedic, almost slapstick approach or maybe the fact that it was so full of half-arsed badly executed ideas he figured at least he'd look okay even if everybody else didn't? Whatever it was it must be a true nadir in his movie career; one he hopes people won't remember when he's dead.

It's a remarkably awful movie almost from the word go and as much as I'd like to go into some detail about what was wrong about it, I find myself compelled to keep this as brief as possible because I might lose the will to live. Obviously I can't ignore Russell Crowe's Doctor Henry Jekyll - yes, that Dr Jekyll - and his famous alter ego's brief and unnecessary appearance or the fact that his crack SAS-like team were about as effective as an ice teapot. Or Jack Johnson's homage to Griffin Dunne in An American Werewolf in London, possibly the two lady actors who literally couldn't find a stage with either of their arses and a number of torches. But I'm not going to because it will remind me that I sat through about 100 minutes of the stinkiest* arse droppings imaginable...

* Did you know that 'stinkiest' is a superlative adjective?

Vampire Weekend

Good God, speaking of stinkiest arsedroppings, hasn't dramatic television improved so much over the last 25 years? It has become sophisticated; the scripts have matured; the acting is much better and TV we loved and admired from the 20th century needs to be re-evaluated and condemned to fond memories and/or septic tanks, because when you dip your nostalgic toe in those murky far off waters of time you might find yourself wondering what drugs you were on...

The wife and I were both big fans of Ultraviolet, the British vampire series with Jack Davenport, Susannah Harker (yes, really) and a young Idris Elba. Over the years, we've often pondered why it never got a second series because to our knowledge it was very successful and was critically liked. It even has a high score on IMDB, but time hasn't aged it at all well. In fact, after watching the first episode all I could think of was how can I get out of watching the next five without killing myself or letting the wife down?

Ultraviolet is the story of a government/Vatican funded police squad charged with ridding London of its vampire infestation - depicted as blood drinking parasites with barely a fang in sight. Davenport's best friend and police partner is mixed up with them and ends up becoming a vampire to avoid the consequences he'll face if the police force he works for finds out he's as crooked as Stephen Hawking's spine. Oddly enough, this character is played by Stephen Moyer, an actor who I've only ever seen in one other TV series - True Blood. 

Unfortunately, the wife put episode two on without me being able to protest. It doesn't get any better. Neither was episode three which dealt with the thorny issue of abortion in a 'what if the baby you're carrying is actually a vampire wrapped in a human embryo' or something like that. It was terribly overwrought, with terrible acting and yet somehow it was still more enjoyable than some other vampiric things I've been discussing recently.

However, it gets even more overwrought and badly acted, but this time with an appalling script that perpetuates a stereotypical lie about gay men, paedophiles and public toilets. There are moments in this series where Jack Davenport really looks like he can't believe he signed up for this shit and I can't believe that we thought this was cutting edge stuff 25 years ago...

The most spectacular thing about the penultimate episode was seeing the price of petrol and diesel in 1998 - it was 66p a litre for diesel and 77p a litre for petrol. This also had Corin Redgrave in it as a vampiric guest star and more really bad acting and I've yet to see a fang in nearly five hours of boredom.

Oddly enough I remembered bits of the finale; especially the bridge setting, however it and the thing in general was just a very poor attempt at doing a vampire ecology thing. I now understand why a second season was never commissioned because 25 years after seeing it I can't believe how our tastes have changed. Two things I took away from the series was that Idris Elba was really the only team player in the series but he was misunderstood from the word go and that Stephen Moyer's Jack must have moved to the Deep South of the USA, changed his name to Bill and invented some ludicrous story about being in the American Civil War...

Classic Teen Angst

Nope. Still none the wiser.

22 years since last watching Donnie Darko and being a huge fan of time travel and paradox stories, I can honestly say that this film has me flummoxed. It's really a great film, with a fantastic cast and yet the only thing I could think of, after I'd finished watching it again, was Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, although I can say quite assuredly that it's nothing like that film, only probably considerably more confusing.

Watching the director's cut apparently makes the film easier to understand because of the use of Roberta Sparrow's book The Philosophy of Time Travel, which doesn't feature as prominently in the theatrical release, but in the Director's cut suggests that Jake Gyllenhaal's Donnie is in some kind of tangent universe that is physically connected to the wormhole that leads to the aircraft engine - the artifact - that destroys Donnie's bedroom and that Donnie is the Living Receiver who must somehow ensure that he is in his bedroom when the vortex throws the engine - from the airplane his mother and younger sister are in - through the wormhole, onto the Darko home and thus killing Donnie. There are also the Manipulated Living - the characters closest to Donnie who play their part in facilitating the paradox and the Manipulated Dead - such as Frank the bunny - whose job it is to ensure the paradox within a paradox happens... And if you understand that previous paragraph you're doing better than me.

So, if I understand this correctly, the Donnie who has visions of the bunny man Frank and strange events taking place and the perpetrator of a number of interconnecting crimes is actually the Donnie from the original reality who somehow transfers himself into alternate reality to ensure events happen and he dies in an event that no longer can happen because none of the events that lead up to it will occur, thus creating a paradoxical paradox... It's fucking mind-blowing because just trying to get your head around it makes your head hurt. No wonder it has such a cult following with all manner of different interpretations.

Like I said, it's a great film; it doesn't really ever make a lot of sense and for large periods of the film - with the exception of the jet engine - I thought it was all in the mind of a truly fucked up, possibly schizophrenic teenager, but, of course, that was completely wrong and couldn't be what it was about because of the jet engine that could not have happened because the event that causes it will probably not happen because of the things that won't happen because of Donnie's death - such as Donnie not killing Frank who will then somehow travel backwards in time to attempt to ensure Donnie does all the right things to ensure he dies when he should have. For fuck's sake...

Underpants 2: It Needed to Stop Here!

I don't want to give you all the impression that the wife likes shit TV and film, but the wife likes shit TV and film... Well, it's more a case of memories distort with age and she clearly thought the Underworld films wouldn't deteriorate as badly as they have with time.

Underpants: Evolution is the sequel to the dreadful film reviewed last week and while I was watching this I was trying to come up with a witty and humorous way of describing what a heinous crime against filmmaking it was, unfortunately I was unable because like vampires drain the blood of their victims, this vampire franchise has drained me of all my flare, panache and ability to write cutting edge appraisals. What you're left with is me going 'Oh for fuck's sake' a lot and wondering what poor old Richard Beckinsale would have thought of his quite sumptuous daughter almost getting her kit off in yet another ludicrous piece of celluloid garbage.

I think they were making it up as they went along because frankly if someone had actually sat down and written the plots and dialogue down on paper they would have been burned alive by the most benign priest in existence. This film was so awful I almost lost the ability to write coherentz\skjcHOG SH...

Tomb Stoned

After watching the 2018 reboot of Tomb Raider I realised why computer game adaptations don't work on film - other than they're usually rubbish. It's because there's no sense of jeopardy; no real risk; no likelihood that the main protagonist will die despite whatever situation they find themselves in.

However, to be fair, this was a far more enjoyable version of Lara Croft, because I felt the two early noughties versions suffered from a number of things, mainly Angelina Jolie being massively miscast and the fact they were crap. This felt more Indiana Jones and rolled along at a fast pace which meant that some of the logic which was missing was overlooked.

Two times in the film Lara acquiesced - first time to Nick Frost and then to Walton "I'm a villain in everything I'm in" Coggins, when using a bit of logic would have worked better for the film and would have made more sense. I'm not going to bother telling you what they are because if you haven't seen the film it would be a bit out of context, but I think I'm becoming hyper-critical of films to a) have noticed them in the first place and b) for it to be bothering me a few hours later enough to mention it in a review.

Anyhow, it was okay. It was clearly setting us up for a sequel that never happened so in many ways the way it ended left us hanging in a state of (I'd like to say suspense, but it didn't really have any) anti-climax, well almost, but not quite that good. It was an origin story and most of the first hour was introducing us to Lara and the people around her, who never appeared again and could easily have not been in the film at all. The historical narrative was also all over the place and had it not been tied up you would have thought that the bike-riding MMA fighting Deliveroo employee Lara was only about 14 years old. Again I could go into detail, but all I'll say is Dominic West, who plays her father, looked older when Lara was 7 than he did when she was about 13 and despite living wild on a desert island for the last seven years didn't look that bad at all.

Butterflies

Virtually every week I make the point of how little we remember films we've seen less than five years ago, and how 20 year old films now feel as though we maybe only thought we'd watched them or maybe our memories are so buggered that we remember nothing at all, apart from the title and who was in it. This was very much the case with The Butterfly Effect, the Ashton Kutcher time travel film that we absolutely might as well have been watching for the first time.

Not that this is a bad thing, because it was considerably better than we thought it was going to be; in fact it's probably much better than most people will remember. Kutcher discovers that he has the ability to travel back in time to events that were so traumatic for him he blacked out and never remembered what happened. Once he works this out there's no stopping him going back and trying to right wrongs that were caused, only whenever he does that one of two things happen - there's always a consequence and it's slowly destroying his brain.

There are some really quite shocking elements of this film, such as Eric Stoltz playing the paedophile father of siblings the younger Kutcher befriends or the scenes within the State Penitentiary when he has to do some extreme things just to survive. There is the slight logical dilemma that any change to the past of someone is likely to have far reaching consequences - hence the title The Butterfly Effect - so when he goes back in time to try and prove a point his then present should be different, but that would have upset the narrative and made the film confusing. The writer tries to convey the fact that it's only the major events in the protagonist's life that have consequences - which, of course, is the principal for the concept of the Multiverse - and minor things have no bearing; but any aficionado of time travel stories and paradoxes will tell you that even a sneeze where one wasn't originally will have consequences and alter the future. Everything is basically the Grandfather Paradox.

One thing about this film that I was impressed with was how tragic it was, almost all the way through and I mean 'tragic' in that it is littered with tragedies from almost the word go and ends with what could be described as the greatest tragedy and sacrifice of them all. It's a remarkably compelling and emotive film and the cast do a great job of playing the same characters in different realities. It's worth a watch (or a re-watch, especially if you can't remember it).

And Monsters of a Different Persuasion Entirely...

We rounded the week off with something completely different, or was it? If there's one thing you can safely say about Sicario is that it is full of monsters, more than capable of doing evil that supposed real monsters are incapable of.

It's a brutal, relentless movie that starts off horrendously and just keeps the horror coming. Emily Blunt and Daniel Kaluuya play two FBI agents seconded to the DoD to aid in the supposed capture of a high ranking Mexican drug cartel leader, except it's really a CIA operation that has one thing in its mind and that's putting an end to the cartel and it's bosses in the most extreme ways possible. This isn't a good guys versus bad guys film, this is a bad guys versus really bad but legal guys film with Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro as the good guys not afraid to blow anyone away to achieve their goal, even if that means the FBI's top field officers.

There's an almost documentary feel about it at times, which is what makes it all the more horrifying because what you witness on screen you can believe happens in real life and worse. It's without a doubt del Toro's finest film, even better than The Usual Suspects and Josh Brolin is about as far removed from Thanos as possible, yet you'd probably argue that the Titan has more integrity and is probably more trustworthy. This is an awesome film that simultaneously feels like two hours in Hell and given this week there's been a real theme running through it, this is by far and away the closest thing to a proper horror movie out of all of them.

Next Time...

More of the same probably as I can't imagine any new television coming along to distract us from the Flash Drive of Doom. On a related note, I will say that we purchased a Soundbar and after four days of fiddling and tweaking we finally have it working with the TV and the set top box, although you have to use it in two different modes. It's not really a patch on surround sound but that seems to have gone out of fashion.

Expect more time travel as a theme next week unless the wife puts her foot down and insists on more Underpants. We might venture into No Hard Feelings or Asteroid City as there's A list full frontal nudity in both and the priapic teenager in my head is intrigued, while the prudish 60-something is dreading it.

 

Pop Culture - Underpants

Usual spoilery things apply and don't forget if you haven't seen something I review it's probably best not to read that section...

Endlessly Endless

One of the main problems I have with televisual entertainment is making something the wife's never heard of sound appealing enough so she'll want to watch it; just occasionally I'll simply say, 'We're going to watch this.' I rarely get any grief, she saves that until after the film has finished.

So I was looking through lists of under-rated and overlooked sci-fi films of the 21st century, trying desperately to find something I've either never heard of or something I've overlooked in previous searches. One thing I'd never seen on any list was Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson's The Endless, which just about every film website rated a lot higher than its IMDB rating (6.5). It's described as a cosmic horror with elements of Lovecraft and that's probably a fair description. It also showed some fascinating and disturbing images that made me think we could be on to an unseen winner.

It starts very slowly with two brothers living a meagre existence as cleaners but with a back story that struggles to make a lot of sense, chronologically, but has enough weirdness to keep you interested. They were both members of a 'UFO Death Cult' or at least that's what brother Justin told everyone when they escaped 10 years earlier, but their life hasn't panned out as well as they could expect, so when a video tape arrives at their apartment with scenes from the cult on it, Aaron is suddenly spurred into returning to the camp to see if it was as bad as his brother described it.

The first 50 minutes of the film is as slow as a snail with very little weirdness of any kind, just the start of a mystery unfolding. It's when they start feeling a bit odd and see others acting very strange does it start one of them on a journey of discovery that ends up being more of a rabbit hole. This is where the idea (not sure if it was good or bad) unravels; increasingly strange things happen to or around Justin, from seeing something at the bottom of a lake to meeting people who gradually explain to him what is happening to them and what will happen to him if he stays.

There is a creature in this desert-like US terrain and it manipulates time and space and has essentially trapped a number of people in time loops of differing size across the area it lives and inside these loops life goes on as normal but then resets when the three moons in the sky are all full. The people in the loops do not age, they do not die, they remember everything and it's probably been going on for decades, at least.

This is where the film's logic breaks down and it doesn't matter how much you try and argue in the film's defence it simply makes no logical sense... The brothers managed to escape the camp when they were younger, which suggests they were there less than 30 days, as anyone inside a loop when the moons are full stays there. However, by the way everyone is talking to them, they had been at the camp for a long time, long enough for everyone to have fond memories of Aaron at least. 

One of the other 'loopers' appears to be able to co-exist with dead versions of himself and another one appears to be stuck in a 10 second loop of him just running across his tent. Everyone knows they're in a loop and presumably from the way they were talking they know there's no escape... therefore how could the Death Cult sell their beer to people in a nearby town? How come they know that Justin went to the press to badmouth them? How come they're helping people in the knowledge that if people stay long enough they can never leave? If one of the 'loopers' knows how to get out why doesn't he get out? If people are missing, how come outsiders haven't come snooping around? Plus the most obvious, that no one sent them the video tape so how did they get it and why? This final problem, for me, is key because without it there wouldn't be a film, but there is no explanation as to why it happened; it's like having a smoking gun without being introduced to the non-smoking gun earlier in the film; it makes no sense. I expect whatever the creature was did it, but that's the only 'solution' I have to any of the paradoxical anomalies in this film. 

Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie as an idea. It was a unique take on time travel/loops, apart from the fact when you place it under general scrutiny it falls apart as a concept and surely Benson and Moorhead must have seen this, considering they're clever enough to have dreamt up the idea in the first place. It reminds me a little of Annihilation - another film that dares to fiddle with the entire nature of things. However, if you're going to have a premise of an invisible space creature holding different groups of people hostage in time loops, then don't spoil the logic immediately by having things happen that contradict what is happening. I think 6.5 is a better score than it probably deserves.

Signs and Portents

If you haven't seen this yet then don't read this review...

Four years after Good Omens comes Good Omens 2 and you probably need to watch the first series if you want to be up to speed. We started season two on a Saturday night, with the intention of watching all six episodes by the time this blog goes public again - that is, generally, how this works.

There's a slight discrepancy about the start of this second outing - what was supposedly the first meeting between Crowley (Tennent) and Fell (Sheen), at the Garden of Eden, now happens billions (?) of years prior to that with the formation of the universe - which seems to be Crowley's doing (in terms of constructing it) when Fell, who seems attracted to his fellow angel (soon to be fallen) and strikes up a convo.

Fast forward to present day (fictional) London and the former angel and demon are living as mortals when an amnesiac archangel Gabriel (John Hamm) wanders into Fell's bookshop, start naked. He is now called Jim and to protect him from harm the angel and his demon friend perform a very small miracle to make him 'invisible' to non-humans. Naturally this goes a little skew-whiff. You see, something's gone wrong upstairs and while heaven is in disarray a new look devil wants to know what  and why. The bemused angels simply don't know what to do without an appointed leader and naturally think Crowley and Fell are involved, which they are.

There's a subplot about two gay women who may or may not be destined for a relationship and what the relevance of a Buddy Holly 'B' side might have on things. But generally not a lot happens in the opening four episodes (of six) and most of what does happen is in the form of flashbacks that will have some relevance to the overall story, or at least you hope they do otherwise it's just fleshing out Crowley and Fell's 'platonic' relationship.

By the penultimate episode, Crowley's replacement, Shax - Miranda Richardson - has brought about 100 demons with her from hell to attack the bookshop, while Fell lords it over a 'retailers meeting' that somehow has become like a scene from a Jane Austen novel, while Crowley returns to heaven for the first time in millions of years...

I thoroughly enjoyed this, probably more than the first series, but it has an incredibly sad ending, almost tragic and is quite unexpected, almost out of keeping with the rest of the show. It's probably just a scene setter for a third series, but in case it isn't, it doesn't have the ending you'd probably want.

Toothache 2

If you require a film that's 105 minutes long and has 95 minutes of relentless, full on action and violence then Chris Hemsworth's Extraction II is definitely the movie for you. After a quiet opening, this essentially explodes into action and doesn't stop until the antagonist is dead.

There are lots of plot holes, things that make no sense and you need to have the subtitles switched on because half of the film is in Georgian. It has familiar tropes, usual betrayers and a child who causes all the grief because he's a little shite. Idris Elba turns up for about six minutes and Chris Hemsworth's Tyler is harder than Thor. It's not a film I will watch again but it was better than punching myself in the face or sticking needles up my Jap's eye - hot ones, mind, cold ones wouldn't be tough enough. Expect Extraction III at some point before 2025.

TOTALLY MASSIVE

In late 2016, I downloaded a movie that sat on my hard drive for five years until at some point in 2021 I figured I was never going to watch it so I deleted it. I decided this week that maybe we should give it a go, so I downloaded it again and we watched it before I could chicken out and not bother and go through the entire process all over again in 2028...

All I can safely say about Colossal is what a fucking excellent and unexpected film it is. Ann Hathaway is fantastic as the alcoholic waste of space who gets dumped by her boyfriend - Dan Stevens - and ends up back in her home town and hanging with her old school friend Oscar - Jason Sudeikis - who now runs the local bar. The first half an hour is sharp and witty comedy as we get to know the main characters but also puzzle over the events taking place in Seoul, in South Korea, as a giant kaiju monster suddenly appears, causing destruction and death.

It's about at the 30 minute mark that Hathaway's Gloria starts to suspect she might be the kaiju, or at least she might be controlling it, because its mannerisms mimic hers almost like a mirror image - she scratches her head, the kaiju scratches its head, she waves her arms around, so the does the monster and all of this happens when she's on the kids playground and always around 8am in the morning, when the kids are on their way to school. So she does what any sane alcoholic person would do, she tells her new drinking buddies about it. So far so freaky, but the comedy is good, you just wonder what's going on.

Then what is ostensibly a very funny comedy, with some slightly disturbing ideas (all of the dead people in Seoul as a result of Gloria's drunken rampages) turns into a really quite nasty film as the good guy in the movie turns out to be a really nasty guy. It's weird seeing Ted Lasso playing a man-baby-control-freak-abusive-psycho but he does it with far too much ease and the film takes some really unexpected and unpleasant turns. He is also a giant monster, because whenever he enters the playground with Gloria a giant robot appears in Seoul. It seems they both have some link that dates back to when they were children.

I won't give the ending away because it's a quality film, with a great cast including Tim Blake Nelson, and I can't understand the low rating on IMDB - not that I take much notice of that nowadays because there are too many impotent moronic male twats prepared to vote a film down because it didn't do something they wanted - but if it ever comes on TV or on a streaming platform then give it a go, I absolutely loved the film and feel slightly aggrieved that it took me seven years to watch it.

Trailer Trash

Yeah, yeah. I know, no Marvel till October 6, but how can I ignore the two minute teaser trailer for Loki season two? Well... I could just slowly move towards the exit to my left and slip out without anyone noticing?

All I can say is the following: Tom Hiddleston is looking old - much older than the Loki who was snatched out of the timeline back in 2012. Jonathan Majors is still in the trailers, which suggests that Marvel is going to stick with the actor regardless of how his impending sexual assault trial goes and the actor from the worst Indiana Jones film and that thing that won the Oscar last year, with Michelle Yeoh, he's in yet another thing about the multiverse, I mean talk about being typecast...

It looks like more is going to happen than in season one, but equally we might have just seen all the action scenes and the rest of it will be boring and full of debate and discussion. It looks like it should be fun but you could say that about anything Marvel brings out. Anyhow, it might feel like October outside but it's only just August, you have two whole months to prepare for both things.

A World of... Underpants

It has been 20 years since I last watched Underworld and I figure those 20 years have been well spent not watching Underworld again. It seems that the weird coincidence of watching things with Michelle Monaghan has switched to watching things with Michael Sheen in and doesn't he look young in this 2003 film that once might have been regarded as a cutting edge action horror film as vampires take on werewolves in a ages old war. 

Whenever and wherever this is set it's now machine gun wars with silver bullets and silver nitrate bullets and lots of bullets everywhere because all the people firing them are worse at shooting guns than stormtroopers from Star Wars. The first thing I took from the opening ten minutes was how much money they all must waste on bullets and whether it might be time to re-evaluate bullets and maybe use silver knives or silver nitrate jet washers.

However, the main thing I took from this is what an absolute load of pants it was. I mean, I'd say it was style over substance but frankly it had no style and the substance was mainly teeth, hair and blood. The acting was diabolical, it looked like it was filmed in an abandoned Prague and the script was written by a seven year old (actually it wasn't but maybe it might have been a better film had it been). I'd say it was a load of cobblers but I reckon that would be much better and probably more intelligent.

Kate Beckinsale is Selene, a vampire who hunts werewolves. Scott Speedman (you know, Mrs Speedman's boy) plays Michael who just might hold the key to creating a vampire/werewolf hybrid capable of becoming the lord and master of all. Michael Sheen is Lucien, a werewolf who married Bill Nighy's daughter and as he's the grand poohbah of vampires he wasn't keen on his daughter being porked by some low-life wolf so he offed her and started a war with the creatures who had been their servants for centuries. Now 500 years later and in cohorts with vampire Kraven - so badly acted one hopes Shane Brolly never again appeared in front of a camera - Lucien is trying to create this hybrid and overthrow the vampire dynasty once and for all. Oh and Sophia Myles is in it as well although quite what she was doing other than inexplicably being a double agent who got her baps out (off camera), I don't know.

I'm going to have to sit through at least two more of the five film franchise, because I think that's what it's going to take to wean the wife out of her desire to finish a franchise she stopped watching after the third - flashback - movie retelling and fleshing out the story Sheen tells Mrs Speedman's boy towards the end of this film. To put this into some kind of context, Underworld isn't as exciting nor as interesting as Michael Portillo's Great Train Journeys of Norwich...

Some Brief Observations

We're re-watching Black Books and I have to say it might possibly be the last best sitcom ever made. We've just finished watching the first series and I've laughed more than I have at any comedy for years. There's many memorable scenes, but the one with Bernard's underpants is worth mentioning given the title of this week's blog.

My opinion of George Clarke took something of a weird downturn. I mean, I've never been a huge fan of Mr Please Go Over Budget but while checking up something about him that the wife asked, I stumbled across a fact in his Wiki entry that made me seriously doubt the man's sanity - and I'm not joking.

Has anyone ever watched any of Michael Portillo's Great Train Journeys. They're often very interesting, educational and despite being a fascist Portillo is a genial host, however and this is something only a few people will understand, when he's summing up direct to camera at the end of each episode it's so like Tommy Cockles doing an introduction for Arthur 'Where's Me Washboard' Atkinson that I struggle to stop myself from laughing hysterically. Simon Day could fill in for him for an episode and I doubt anyone would really notice as long as the comedian wore outrageously colourful clothes.

Moore(s) the Murderyer

We seem to have recurring themes - recently it was Michelle Moynihan, who we seemed to see in more things than I believed she was in, this week it's a toss up between Michael Sheen and Jon Hamm. Hamm is in Good Omens 2 with Sheen, while Sheen was in Underpants and now Hamm is in Maggie Moore(s) a new film about a double murder.

It's a strange movie, but one I'd recommend purely and simply because it's not too long and it's quite enjoyable in a slightly wonky kind of way. My personal jury is out about Hamm, there's something a bit Hollywood classic actor about him, yet he likes to do experimental or slightly off-the-wall stuff. I never watched him in Mad Men and I wasn't interested in his Fletch reboot, but there's an everyman charm about him that makes him quite likable. 

Maggie Moore(s) is the story of a woman called Maggie Moore who pisses her dodgy husband off so he arranges for her to be scared shitless by a local thug, however that goes wrong and she ends up dead. What follows is a complex case for Hamm's chief of police and his assistant played by Nick Mohammed, because a week later the town's other Maggie Moore also turns up dead and this sets off a chain of events that seemingly keeps running up dead ends.

Involved in this is Tina Fey, the first Maggie's next door neighbour who becomes Hamm's love interest after witnessing something that might have some bearing on the case. Also tied up in this is the husband of the second Maggie who is having an affair and looks like he might be responsible. Then a neo-Nazi former colleague of the second Maggie is implicated in the deaths of both women, but there are inconsistencies that Hamm doesn't like. Also involved in this is Happy Anderson, who plays a deaf mute called Kosco, who is actually the murderer, except he isn't deaf and he isn't mute but he is very nasty. There's also a slimy food salesman with a penchant for lewd pictures of children, just to make it a tad uncomfortable at times.

Now, this all feels a bit Fargo and in truth it would have been had it not essentially been a comedy*; a slightly off-key comedy, not black, but also not laugh out loud either. The more it twists and turns the more it moves away from the funny side and veers into a different territory entirely and by the last ten minutes it's gone full on drama with unexpected deaths and a twist you saw coming but only as it was about to happen. It's an entertaining film that probably suffers a little from having some largely stereotypical characters in it that feels just a little too... if you excuse the expression... hammy. Hamm does hammy? 

Actually, he's the least hammy in it. It does feel as though it could have been half an hour longer with a little more character development; in fact it feels like it might have been but got cut down for no other reason than to spoil what might have been a better film. That's just how it felt, probably not how it was made. Worth checking out if you see it anywhere.

* I am aware that Fargo the film and subsequent TV series are black comedies, but the humour in them comes from the narrative rather than specifically being a comedy.

Next Time...

Maybe more of the Underworld saga unless I can't avoid it. Possibly a TV mini-series called Candy and you never know something new might come along or something might return to install me with a sense that TV hasn't died and we're just living off the tender pieces of its corpse. It's essentially too loose and up in the air to decide on anything at the moment, so I might end up doing a long winded review of [insert crap TV show here]. Who can say? All the fish are blue.