Modern Culture - The Naked and the Dull

Spoilers warning on some not all, choose wisely.

Yes Sir, I Can Boogeyman!

I fear we're going to be entering the Vague Zone; essentially an area of my brain that can't remember much about things I've watched because I fell asleep during them. I don't know why, it's just every so often I go through a phase where I can't keep my eyes open at 7.30pm and all the minutes that follow until I eventually go to bed. With The Boogeyman I'd started falling asleep after 11 minutes and while I only really missed about seven minutes of the film they were probably the important bits that would have allowed me to understand what the fuck was going on. It wasn't bad, it wasn't good, I've almost forgotten everything about it that I needed to remember - it was switched off just over an hour ago at time of writing this. 

I think it's about something that lives under the bed or in the cupboard. It can be injured, possibly even killed. The film has actors in it, they do things. It stars Chris Messina, I think I know his brother. It's based on a Stephen King short story - a very old one and extrapolated on until the cows came home. There is little else to say apart from the wife didn't slag it off nor did she sing its praises.

Sweet Two-oth

It's been nine months since we watched the first series of Sweet Tooth and if I had to stick my neck out I'd say they made most or all of season two at the same time as season one because the kids haven't changed. Sadly neither has the programme's ability to make us want to watch it. The bits with the animal hybrid kids are a bit too Disney and the bits with the humans are like a PG-rated Walking Dead without the dead and using local am-dram actors. It's simply not engrossing enough to stick with, so we've decided to call it a day.

Haemorrhoid City

OK. It lost me almost from the start. Wes Anderson films are either slow, drawn out and have a story that you can follow, or you can't. This fell firmly on the latter's side. I can't really tell you what it was about because it doesn't really have much of a story. A family goes to Asteroid City on their journey into grief, while other things happen with other people. There appears to be some flashback scenes, some is filmed in black and white and it all has a 1950s feel to it but in a completely manufactured and surreal way. It might have been a filmed version of a play about some place or it might have been a deconstructed historical piece about a place where a meteor might have struck way in the past. I don't really know. There was an awful lot of famous people in this movie; I'm not sure why.

The film 'adapts' a play about a family [not] grieving for their recently lost wife/mother by travelling to Asteroid City to take part in a competition exclusively for geniuses, once there, their interactions with other families, also in said competition, meander around touching on things - sexual tension, snobbery - but the problem with it is it's interminably dull and all those talented actors mumbling and bumbling their way through a [deliberately] bad adaptation of something uninteresting seems like a great waste of so many things. 

The Paradox

It's coming up to nearly 30 years since Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys was released and for many it is the seminal time travel paradox film; there is some slight of hand used in it, just to keep the wool pulled over one's eyes, but other than that it's just a mystery - one that deals with paradoxes.

Bruce Willis might be from the future; a very typical Terry Gilliam future - a sort of a mishmash between Richard Lester's surreal films of the late 1960s and David Lynch - and Willis might have put the paradoxical idea into the head of Brad Pitt to use his father's chemical company to manufacture a doomsday virus to wipe out most of humanity and all of this is based on a phone call made to an answer machine in 1996. The double whammy is while we follow the red herring to its conclusion, the actual plague is having its debut mapped out by the obvious but overlooked MacGuffin. This is a film that feels equal parts prophetic and yet incredibly dated, especially given the soundtrack and the rather contrived way the story unfolds. I know a lot of people rate this film, but time hasn't been kind to it. Willis did a bunch of odd films in the 1990s; he wasn't frightened to do something off-piste. This almost felt like a misstep in many ways, but it didn't harm Pitt's career, which might be why it was a misstep.  

Used Cars

In Stephen King's 'Bill Hodges Trilogy' the main antagonist - Brady Hartsfield - features prominently in the first and third books, but is just a background character in the second part - he's there, but the story is something altogether different. When the books were adapted into three TV series, the logical thing - financially and narratively - was to have your main story as the main event and the back-up story as an epilogue. The 'problem' with season three of Mr Mercedes is the makers have managed to keep Hartsfield around - psychologically - but he isn't really the story here and neither is Lou Linklater's trial for killing him; they're just here to keep this from becoming just another detective series. However, there are times when the courtroom drama seems far more important than the other story; this might be deliberate.

Based on the second in the Hodges trilogy - Finders Keepers - this probable final series extrapolates on events from the end of the third book while weaving them back into another mystery (the second book) for Bill, Holly and Jerome to solve. In other words, TV adapts the books in the following sequence 1,3,2 it takes elements from the end of book 3 and runs with that, in a slightly different direction. it's actually cleverly done, but the 3rd series needed that elephant in the room - Hartsfield - to be more than just a ghost and memories.

This time it's the killing of local celebrity author John Rothstein and how a simple robbery went so very wrong and started a chain of killings. Morris Bellamy has heard that his hero Rothstein has unpublished manuscripts and lots of cash in his safe, so he conspires to rob the old man. However things go south very quickly when Rothstein - played by Bruce Dern - pulls a gun, shoots Morris's partner and gets himself killed in the process. To add to Morris's bad day, he then drives his stolen car off the road and smashes it and himself up in the process; banged up and dazed Morris seeks help from a friend and forgets the suitcase full of money and unpublished manuscripts.

Pete Saubers - son of one of Mr Mercedes surviving victims - stumbles across the wreck, finds the suitcase and decides he's having some of that, while Morris is racking up his own victims in his search for who might have stolen his stolen goods, Pete thinks he's exorcising some of his own and family's personal demons. I'm not quite sure why Bill is even involved in this case; it's almost like that part of Ohio only has part time police officers, but he's there, working with his pal the assistant DA and, incidentally, he's also a huge fan of Rothstein. 

He has Jerome doing research into the writer, who then finds an embarrassing link to Bill's next door neighbour Ida - who, it seems, had an affair with the writer. Meanwhile Holly is working with Lou to try to get her ready for her trial, which she is able to attend because she's been declared mentally fit to face a jury. Holly has to push herself beyond what she's used to and fend off some potentially amorous gestures from Lou's lawyer, played with his usual slimy loucheness by Brett Gelman. This isn't really the main plot but because of its links to the first two seasons it's the one that dominates in the regular viewers mind.

My problem with this is a little like what I thought of late Genesis albums - most of the band are there but not a lot of what they're playing is particularly interesting. The Brady psychology is quite interesting, but because Brady is a peripheral player and there's no Harry Treadaway, it's just shadows, dark profiles and shots of his hand with a blue plaster on his thumb (or whatever finger depending on the continuity editor). It feels as though it can't be as important because Treadaway wasn't cast and therefore because there's no actual Brady, it does have a kind of epilogue, barrel-scraping feel, however it does illustrate how Brady had a profound effect and continues to have on the town of Bridgetown.

I'm enjoying it, but I am find some of the continuity and writing mistakes a little jarring; when Holly is on the witness stand testifying for Lou, she mentioned that Brady killed two of her aunts, but one of the aunts was actually her cousin. There's also this feeling that where the first two series had a definite framework to work from, because of the mishmash element on this third season continuity and common sense has been forgotten about. I still think Brendan Gleeson is fucking excellent in this series; he's one hell of an actor.

News Bytes

Who are these people?

Considering the BBC, especially for the last 10 years or so, has been extremely 'supportive' of the sitting government (I appreciate that alone is a contentious statement given people will diametrically disagree with me suggesting the BBC is too left wing), arguably not being journalists any longer just reporting on whatever social media is talking about. I really shouldn't bother with it and to be fair, my watching of the 24 hour rolling news channel has decreased by 75%, but the reason for that decline is nothing to do with the news and everything to do with the amateurish bunch of personality-less wankers brought in to replace all those familiar, professional and probably far too expensive former presenters and reporters. I wouldn't mind if they had confidence or public speaking skills or if they didn't look like some kind of AI-generated news reader, the problem is most of them look like they started yesterday and have been given a mic and told to get on with it.

Even the new-look, trendier Matthew Amroliwala isn't in the same league as a Martine Croxall, Maxine Mawhinney or Simon McCoy and he - Amroliwala - perfectly highlights the style over substance argument. I wouldn't mind if it was just that, but it's also full of errors (not factual), long gaps of silence, links that break or hang, and a growing list of things you wouldn't expect the BBC to do - such as give sections of the news a different name; like Verified Live is going to restore faith in the corporation with people who are forever accusing it of being left wing and anti-Brexit. 

Why the BBC's news department thought that employing all their former BBC World News reporters - the people who you might see if you seen on the channel after midnight most week nights - was going to improve things, is beyond my understanding; however it was and is clearly a cost-cutting exercise that has devalued the news channel in the same way as the UK's position on the world stage has diminished beyond belief in the last seven years. 

Drab Sparrow

Is the international language of spies and secret agents English? I only ask because the number of movies I've seen in recent years where all the agents/spies all talk English to each other but occasionally slip back into whatever native tongue they speak when the dialogue isn't essential to the plot. I only make this comment because the Jennifer Lawrence film Red Sparrow has a lot of Russians in it, who all speak English - to each other - but fall back to native Russian when ordering drinks or buying a plane ticket. Why bother? Why not just have it all in English or add subtitles? Why switch between Russian and English whenever bits of the plot are being discussed?

That aside, this is a really dull movie. It's painted as a straightforward spy thriller with double or triple agents and is cleverly handled in that you see everything as it happens, but don't think too much about what is happening because you're looking for something else - or in this case, I was looking for a reason to like the film, so I missed some obvious plot points (although, in my defence, I suspected something was afoot when Lawrence stole Joel Edgerton's whisky glass for later on; that was when I realised this film was more than a spy thriller).

What this is defies its appearance. It is not a spy film, or a secret double agent film, it's a revenge thriller and nothing more really. This is about Lawrence's character getting revenge on her uncle for putting her in a position she had no control over to let her believe she had some control over her life and the looking after of her invalid mother. It's just well done in making everyone think it was about Russian spies, the Red Sparrow programme or CIA manipulation inside the Kremlin; they were just plot devices and nothing else.

As I said, I found the movie a bit dull, not really what you'd call an action adventure, more of a voyeuristic exploitation film dressed up as high art. I don't really know what I expected but I thought I might at least enjoy the movie, but I didn't. It's brutal, unflinching and uncompromising; there's a lot of sex and violence in it, quite a lot of torture, Russia is portrayed as a misogynistic country where women have a purpose only seen fit by their male overlords and while all of this might be true, I didn't care about any of the characters, what their motives were or who I would have trusted more was it my life on the line... I don't think we're having a good week as far as films are concerned.

A Quick Round-Up

Yes, it's been another slow week. The Wigtown Book Festival has been on and doesn't finish until most of the people who read this will have read it. The wife has been working all hours and sitting and watching the telly every night has been curtailed with other stuff...

That isn't to suggest we haven't been watching stuff, it just seems pointless to be discussing stuff like Welcome To Wrexham every week because it is what it is, but more importantly it is an entertainment show and not really a documentary. Yes, there is a reality TV, documentary feel about it but because it is also high entertainment there is ironically a feeling at times of mockumentary. This week's two episode instalment plays around with the chronology of last season's football, while suggesting that three events that happened while the CEO was on holiday were far more important than they really were. It is telling interesting stories about the people involved in the club and the show, whether anyone gives a shit about these is up for debate.

I stand by my suggestion a few weeks ago that Paul Whitehouse doesn't really like Bob Mortimer and he would rather be off fishing on his own without the Wearsider or the camera crew or the dog. Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing in my eyes appears to be coming to the end of its natural life. They have caught every fish they set out to catch; have been to Scotland, Ireland, the south coast, Wales and the west, the east, the north and most of the Midlands. The scenery has been fabulous, the retreats magnificent and most of the off-piste bits - usually led by Mortimer - have been well called; but I simply don't think the two have much left to talk about or places to fish. Perhaps a few Christmas specials once this series has wrapped up and then a quiet retirement?

I've also asked this question before, but do many of the people who go on early evening quiz shows - such as The Tipping Point, Pointless, and The Chase - actually have functioning brains? Do they ever watch the programme they're appearing on? Why do they think they will suddenly develop a general knowledge when faced by cameras? I appreciate the shows' producers want 'interesting' guests, which usually means 'stupid' and if everyone who went on quiz shows was good then it would get a bit boring; but Tipping Point has easy questions and you just need to have reasonable hand to eye coordination, yet I've owned dogs with more knowledge and skill than some of the absolute wankspanners Ben Shepherd has to suffer...

Next Time...

Good news! New TV to digest next week - Gen V which is a The Boys spin-off and already getting fantastic reviews. Then there's an entire eight-episode season of Brassic, which dropped a couple of days ago - Joe Gilgun is back in this hybrid of Shameless, Last of the Summer Wine, This is England and a host of others. Oh and then there's Loki season two, meaning the wife and I should really watch season one again, just to make sure we know what's going on. This and a whole lot more...