Modern Culture - Aliens Fishing for Dead Cats

Spoilers, spoilers, nah, nah, nah...

Jules in the Crown

There's a gentle innocence about Jules, a new film starring Ben Kingsley, Jane Curtin and Harriet Sansom Harris, it's kind of how you might expect Wes Anderson to have made ET. It's not a long film; it weighs in about just over 80 minutes and follows the life of Milton, a 78-year-old man who might be succumbing to the first signs of dementia; so when he starts telling people about the alien that's landed in his garden, possibly damaging his azaleas beyond being saved, most people smile sweetly and move onto the next thing. Milt even goes to regular town meetings and announces the crash landed craft to everyone there and gets told off for making old people look stupid. 

Jules is the name Milt and his two friends Sandy and Joyce give the apple-eating alien invader, although Joyce thinks he's more a Gary than a Jules. He's just trying to repair his ship and get going, or at least that's what appears to be the case, because Jules never speaks, in fact Jules doesn't do much at all apart from possibly steal the corpses of dead cats (which he needs for repairs), eat apples and a couple of other things that ordinarily would make this stop being a gentle comedy and start making you think you'd just wandered into a David Lynch horror film.

There's lots of gentle comedy, a couple of genuine 'Oh My God' moments and a charming and entertaining little film here, which deserves your attention and has a lot in common with Close Encounters of the Third Kind Special Edition, in fact, at times, Milton could be an elderly Roy Neary. This is a really likeable movie with a simple story told in a matter-of-fact way and it has an ending that we all deserve. Lovely little film, highly recommended.

Sailing Into Boredom

Perhaps the worst thing about The Last Voyage of the Demeter is the fact it's nearly two hours long; they somehow managed to drag it out longer than it probably takes to read the entire novel Dracula. This is a film that is interminably dull, has a strange logic sufficed throughout it and has lots of earnest and overwrought acting going on. It does have an interesting take on Dracula even if it sort of makes the rest of the story a bit redundant if you're going to have a vampire monster who doesn't shapeshift into a human being, how's he going to get on when he meets the locals in Whitby? I'm sure the person portraying Drac probably had a hoot and picked up a handsome cheque. I'm sure the rest of the cast just picked up cheques.

This was an unnecessary, pointless and redundant film. If you knew the 'story', you knew how it ended before it started and if you're depending on telling a compelling story with this in mind then the first thing you have is interesting characters and an actual story, not just a selection of characters in search of a fitting death. This is not a particularly good film and whoever thought of the blood transfusion idea missed a trick. At no point during this film did they twig that the vampire didn't like the daylight so mount your attack during the day rather than waiting until it was dark. There's also the other fact that you can sail from London to the eastern Mediterranean without ever being more than 10 miles from a shoreline, so there was never a reasonable chance they could get lost at sea. I could go on but I wanted this review to be short and pithy, what the film needed to be.

Gorn Fishing

With TV dribbling back onto our screens, I caught up with Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, which is amazingly up to its sixth series. Paul Whitehouse is now 64 and Bob is a year behind him and they're still alive, otherwise this would be a strange series indeed. It's 'the same' TV, just an episode, probably filmed with a hi res camera to get the best of the British countryside and with a general sense of well-being as the underlying message.

I sometimes wonder if Paul Whitehouse is interested in anything with any kind of passion if it doesn't involve going fishing because he seems to like leaving Bob to do all the actual donkey work and while we have no idea how long it takes to film each episode (usually a couple of days would be my guess), Bob always seems to have a better strike rate of catching fish to the number of minutes he has a line in the water. I sometimes think even Paul doesn't like being there, with Bob, but they get paid for it and he gets to fish. Sorted.

It's Miller Time

Never trust a film by its IMDB rating isn't usually an ethos I stick by because I've seen good films with low ratings and crap films with high ratings, but when I saw the rating on this was 7, I thought it might be worth watching given Ted Lasso was in it and we're batting well with Sudeikis films. 

What We're the Millers tries to be is a stoner comedy without the stoned; a Sicario - the PG-Rated Comedy or maybe Ozark with a comedian holding balloons, featuring a slightly schizo Ted Lasso and one of Friends trying to prove to everyone that being in your 40s (this was made in 2013 when Jennifer Aniston was 44) doesn't mean you're not still one hot piece of arse (she's not that much). What We're the Millers is, is a load of weak beer masquerading as something special with a number of actual funny bits studded around but tough to find. Imagine jewels in shit, except the jewels are cubic zirconia and the shit is quite stinky and a bit runny.

Jason Sudeikis plays a drug dealer who gets robbed and to pay his supplier off he has to go from being a dealer to a smuggler by transporting two tons of weed from a Mexican cartel, which turns out to be a heist in a way, in an RV. The premise is actually as thin as a 190-year-old's skin; it's really quite stupid and only moves along because of circumstances rather than planning; it is essentially a vehicle for Aniston and her wonder bra as a stripper pretending to be Lasso's wife and they take on two errant waifs and strays as their children. This family then spend most of the time inadvertently avoiding a DEA officer and his family on holiday and the comedy Mexican Cartel who don't kill the 'family' so often that you start to lose the will to live. It's a vacuous mess; a void not dissimilar to the space left in your colon after you've eaten a lot of salad and beans and evacuated it into a local toilet. Will Poulter's in it; he probably didn't realise.

No Dogs' Bollocks

Strays is like that BBC comedy natural history program where someone is shouting for 'Alan' a lot. It's a dog comedy with special effects designed to make you think 'if dogs' could talk', except it's like we'll fit the words around what the stunt dogs are doing rather than try and spend any money on it. We got 11 minutes into the film and then stopped. I've had enough shit for one week already and it's only Saturday night.

Confidentially Speaking

It's been over 25 years since we last watched L.A. Confidential the film that had far too many Antipodeans in major roles - just kidding, mate. I recall being enthralled by the complex story and the layers that needed to be unpeeled to get to the heart of the story, but I seem to think it was more difficult to get your head around and there were more twists and turns than there actually was. This film really stars Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce yet it's Kevin Spacey who gets top billing; it's notable for having the farmer from Babe - James Cromwell - as a police captain, Danny DeVito as a sleazy paparazzi and Kim Basinger as a Veronica Lake look-a-like.

This is a movie that essentially is about corruption on the LAPD but it's also about the era and the fight between staying true and straying from the path. It's a deliberately obtuse film at times with unnecessary red herrings because the film's plot and story is pretty clear from the word go and while there was no real attempt to make you think the main bad guy has always been in plain sight, you don't need to be an Agatha Christie detective to work it out or how the two independent investigations were going to lead in the same direction. The only real shock in this movie over 25 years after it was made is the unexpected early death of one of the main characters. It's a solid film, but it's really more atmosphere than good filmmaking.

A Cop and Mole Story

Martin Scorsese's The Departed is a bit of an all-star cast kind of film - Matt Damon, Leo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, (the lovely) Vera Farmiga and even Ray Winstone, doing one of his bad accents; it's a veritable who's who with a top notch director, based on a best-selling book with a high IMDB rating, yet there's something missing from this film... Maybe it's a heart? Maybe it's whether we care about any of the characters? I don't know, it just felt a little contrived and it reminded me of that Ryan Reynolds film we watched a few weeks back - Safe House - not in the actual film just that all the important stuff will probably happen after the camera stops rolling.

DiCaprio and Damon are their usual pristine selves in this movie, but I kept thinking that Jack Nicholson thought he was remaking Batman because his Costello reminded me a little of his Joker persona and the mole inside a rat-infested mob balanced against a mole inside the police department twist wasn't really that twisty and the reasons none of Costello's men didn't realise it was Leo DiCaprio is because people in organised crime are great with guns but not very good with brain things; or at least that appears to be the message a lot of films give out - thugs are thick (so therefore their victims must be even thicker?). It's an entertaining film, but I never felt like I was committed to it; there wasn't a great deal of investment and I didn't really care about any of them.

Never Mind...

...The Buzzcocks was resurrected a few years ago by Sky TV and it's still about 30 minutes [too] long, except now they manage to fit it into almost an hour of screen time. There are lots of familiar things still in it and lots of unfamiliar things, such as guest stars you've never heard of and others you wonder why they agreed to this. I found it boring and outdated. Greg Davies is okay; Noel Fielding is co-captain with Jamali Maddix on one team [why?] and Daisy May Cooper captains the other side. It's essentially the same old shite that the BBC got rid of in 2015; it has some funny bits, but so does things like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was really a misunderstood black comedy. This isn't even really nasty anymore either and that spoils it somewhat for me; we need more wanton offence distributed, because there's nowt more spleenal [sic] than an offended person.

Welcome Back to Wrexham

The next umpteen episodes of Welcome to Wrexham should be edge of the seat stuff, especially for people who don't follow football but do follow this. The season Wrexham had last year was straight out of a Hollywood scriptwriter's best imagination bits and while I quibble about the general chronological narrative of this opening episode in season two - the football season started in August 2022 and Ryan and Rob met the King in December 2022, they managed to meld the two of them together to make it seem like it was all happening that week.

We all know, those of us who watched this rather excellent thing first time around, that there will be about 50% of the episodes that will be brilliant and about 50% will go so far over the heads of viewers in the USA they won't know it even happened. The thing is the 2022/23 season was tumultuous for the Welsh team, their supporters and the guys who own the club. Not wishing to spoil it for you but having the opening episode where in the second game your team loses 2-0 doesn't auger well for the coming months, the thing is Wrexham only lose two more games for the rest of the season, but I believe so do main rivals Notts County so we're in for a hell of a ride.

This is a well made, cleverly edited (unless I'm watching it with critical specks on) piece of television; it probably makes Wrexham (football club and town) a shedload of money and has made them something of a global name, despite them not being a top flight team. King Charles' appearance will boost TV ratings and we'll soon be wondering whether Humphrey Ker will have a beard in one scene and be clean shaven in the next - Ker is the executive manager, probably a director of the club, possibly a minority shareholder; he's a funny guy and in the first part he looked different in almost every scene he was in. I expect this series will take care of itself in terms of drama; it will have a finale that is worthy of a blockbuster, it'll be how much of Reynolds and McElhenney they can put it in to keep the people not interested in football or the Welsh watching.

Dead Copbusters

So, we decided we hadn't had enough Ryan Reynolds so we watched RIPD again. I'm not really sure why because the first two times we saw it I don't think we were that impressed, but like many throwaway pieces of trash you can't remember much about the bits in between and that usually makes things bearable. It wasn't like watching a new film but it was a bit like watching a best bits reel with the less best bits sewn back into it.

Imagine Ghostbusters but with police officers and then mixed with Men in Black, throw in some Ryan Reynolds - becoming a big thing - and someone classy like Jeff Bridges. Put Mary Louise Parker into the Rip Torn role and you have box office success oozing from its sores in abundance. This had everything to make it a) the start of a new franchise and b) enough inspiration and state of the art special effects to be able to make something that transcends both GB and MiB; however, what you get is a film that doesn't know how much of a comedy it wants to be, but knows that it wants its monsters to be ludicrous, stupid and obviously created inside a computer. Bridges is shite (and stupid) - he dials his role in and he was bored when he did that, Parker acts like she'd rather be somewhere else singing Burlesque showtunes and Reynolds has an air about him that tells me that he realised very early on in the making of this film that he might have another Green Lantern on his hands, except a whole load stinkier. This is a film you really should allow your better judgement to have the final say; it might do the sensible thing and persuade you to do something more satisfying, like having a massive wank.

Talking Out of Turn

Modern horror films, eh? There's just nothing remotely scary about any of them. I know that people will disagree with me there, but sadly those people would be wrong. The highly rated Australian movie Talk to Me wasn't bad but it was hardly a jump a minute scare fest and while it did try to be something a little different, the problem I had with it was I simply didn't give a shit about any of the characters in the film, in fact some of them were simply annoying and a couple of them were just so fucking annoying you wanted them to be the first to die. 

There's a viral video doing the rounds of kids weirding out when they hold onto a 'plaster' hand, which might have been the hand of a seer or something once upon a time - all you have to do is hold the hand and say the words 'talk to me' and you see someone who's dead, then you say some other shit and you become possessed by the dead. You should only hold the hand for 90 seconds otherwise bad stuff happens. Suffice it to say, one of the characters Mia - Sophie Wilde - whose mum committed suicide, gets hooked on it pretty quickly, because the experience is like some fantastic rush from a new drug, the problems begin if something hangs around after the candles have been blown out as she quickly discovers.

It's a bit weird, slightly disturbing with some imagery that would probably wig out a few teenagers, but it isn't scary and it's not really a horror movie, per se. I mean, it is but you know, it isn't really. It has some shocking scenes, some make up and a creepy idea - not much else. I also find Australian films relatively difficult to watch; I think that's largely down to Australians. 

Trailer Trash...

The first trailer for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom has dropped and I think we can safely say that superhero films will take another lurch towards their own endgame. I know the first film defied logic and had good returns, but that didn't stop it from being a bit shite. Everything I've seen in this trailer suggests that hasn't changed, but Jason Mamoa fans couldn't give a shit.

It's just another FX-laden load of bollocks and if this teaser is supposed to make us want to go to cinemas to watch it then I think we're heading into a new kind of territory here, the one where fans of superhero films are going to be very annoyed that this is going to be the straw about to deal a death blow to the camel. Honestly, the first one was bad enough and I don't care this is part of Gunn's vision or that James Wan directed it - so fucking what?

Graduation Day

We'd seen Booksmart four years ago, but as we've discussed many times before this means nothing when you have memories like what we have. It was the wife who spotted it, but it didn't spoil any enjoyment we got from it, because it is a bizarre, slightly surreal film that isn't what you think it's going to be and spends a lot of time essentially trying to wig you out and piss on your preconceptions of what you think the film is going to be.

It's the story of two high school nerds who realise that on their last day of proper school that they've lived far too sheltered lives because all the party animals are all also going to top universities, so they decide to spend their last night before graduation partying hard and catching up on everything they'd missed out on. There's a lot of actors you've seen in other things in this and while the duo of Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are the stars of the film, it's the character called Gigi (played by Billie Lourde) who, I think, steals the movie, because she's literally everywhere, all at once and she comes out with some fabulous lines that you could almost imagine were from a different film entirely.

It's rude, funny, embarrassing and has a feel about it like it knows it's good, which is no bad thing. If you haven't seen it it's worth finding because while you might wonder at times why you're watching it, you'll still find it a very good film.

The Brady Hunch

Season two of Mr Mercedes begins by filling in the gaps between season one's finale and its epilogue. I think this is for two reasons, to act as a nice rounded synopsis of 'previously' bits and because it probably needed a little more padding out than you would normally get.  

Harry Treadaway's Brady Hartsfield isn't dead, gawd knows he should be given the amount of times Holly took it out on his skull with a pug (you need to watch it) and he's a bit of a ghoulish celebrity because of what he did. He lies in hospital with a brain that's, seemingly, made of mush; however this is where the new characters - the Babineaus - come into things, because Felix, the skilled neurosurgeon who saved Brady's life is now being funded by the Chinese and they're giving him a drug that they need to be trialled on humans (why they wouldn't do this in China is never explained) and Felix starts pumping it into Brady because he's going to lose his Hollywood patient because the hospital no longer can afford to keep the mass murderer hooked up to their machines when other, paying, customers might need them, so they're shipping him out to a cheaper, more prison-like hospital. 

As Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson) recovers from his near fatal heart attack, trains Holly Gibney his trade, the two of them run Finders Keepers (their detective agency and also the name of the second book in the Bill Hodges trilogy), he's trying to put Brady behind him, but when an old friend and colleague dies of a heart attack in Bill's kitchen, his own position and that of the still alive Brady brings his own existence back into sharp focus. Obviously the situation with Brady just compounds the anger and guilt Bill feels, while we have no idea how and what the drugs Babineau is giving his 'brain dead' patient are going to do, you don't need to be Stephen King to tell yourself that the first series was almost a straightforward police procedural with some excellent character padding; for Brady to return and play any significant part in the next nine episodes we're going to start entering a world that King knows much better - the weird and supernatural.

Next time...

It feels like I managed to cram in loads more films this week than usual, but I think a lot of that has been down to the encroaching autumn and us starting TV nights literally about 7pm rather than usually after 8pm, which means that if we watch an average length film then we can usually get something else in after or before - it's the freedom having iPlayer has given us [again].

What's on the horizon? Well, the rest of season two of Mr Mercedes, more Welcome to Wrexham and maybe more of other weekly watches, it depends on whether there's anything worth saying. On the film front, we're still to give Barbie a go, while the other 2023 films I have to watch - include The Boogeyman, Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, Asteroid City and Air - really depends on the wife's feelings about them. There might also be some newer films, it depends on what's out there by next weekend.

Just remember, Huge Ackman is splitting with his wife so now might be your time to shine...