Pop Culture - Coats of Manky Colours

This blog contains mainly reviews of what is often billed as shit product and these will contain many spoilers, so if you know the drill avoid the things you don't want spoiled...

Poo Beetle

Oh. The problem here is I didn't go into this film with any expectations whatsoever. I watched it with a faint hope that it would defy expectations, especially as I enjoyed The Flash much more than I expected. However what I can say about Blue Beetle is it was very colourful; (our hero) Jaime's very noisy family were unbelievably annoying and um... er... there's a couple of erection jokes, about penises not building skyscrapers.

It's an absolute [I'm really sorry about using this word] abortion of a film and I don't think this is another nail in the superhero genres coffin, I think this is the last nail. I feel I'm done with them (I know, I'm not, I just wish I was), I think they are movies for a different audience and for more modern times and that might seem like a really horrid insult to younger people and late 2023 but it's all I've got.

There is so much to dislike about this; from the aforementioned family to the contrived way the story 'worked' to the comedy superbad villain - this time Susan Sarandon, another in a now growing line of villains you literally want dead within seconds of them coming on screen. From her private army of machine gun happy wankers to her general disdain and racism to anyone other than herself makes her the latest in the line of manufactured bad guys, or in this case gals. This is a really crappy film, a very colourful and noisy crappy film, but crappy all the same. It tries to make some social points about Hispanic racism, it does a reasonable job of pointing out that corporations are bad but families are good and when it finished after two hours and seven minutes both the wife and I thought it overran by about two hours.

Will someone please put a stake through the heart of fucking superhero movies for at least a decade or until I die... I'm not sure there is anything that can be done. Blue Beetle epitomised what is wrong with superhero genre, it's the perfect example of a comicbook film - the superhero genre died with Avengers: Infinity War and had its epilogue in Endgame, after that we entered the world of comicbook movies. The genre has lost its edge; there is no longer a sense of jeopardy about any superhero film, with a couple of weak exceptions. DC films, because by nature they're usually dull can be as edgy as they like, reinvent themselves so often it's kind of lost that intrigue and taken on a sort of who gives a shit approach - it will be what it will be. Even the dialogue in the films resembles that of the comics and the way forward seems to be with villains trying to outdo each other in terms of their general cruelty and that is usually off the Alan Rickman scale and counterbalanced by a hero and entourage being as happy as Larry despite the shit life they live or the prejudices they face.

I appreciate both Disney and Warner (also Sony, I suppose) have a vested interest in breeding and cultivating new audiences in a dwindling post Covid market, but the writing must be on the wall to them by now even if films still manage to make some money - it's not going to be long before they stop making money. They need to start killing heroes off and have a threat that's not just some nutter with dictatorial psychopath leanings but perhaps someone willing to sacrifice people for the sake of the planet?

Horrible Film

I suppose I'm being a little unfair on the 2011 film Horrible Bosses, it might be because it was made during Jennifer Aniston's 'I need to prove to people that I'm still a hottie' phase (she was 42 when she made this) and her presence in this movie kind of got my hackles up - I never watched Friends and I never understood the fascination with it; however Aniston has aged better than Courtney Cox who looks like she's been plasticised. Hackles were raised because she doesn't really act, she just plays ... Jennifer Aniston.

Horrible Bosses stars Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day (no, me neither) and also features Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, Donald Sutherland and Jamie Fox as Motherfucker Jones - which alone is probably the funniest joke in it. It's a funny film without ever being a good film and a lot of the humour feels almost accidental. In fact, the pre-credit outtakes scenes are the funniest bits of the movie. It's all a bit pantomime - albeit a noisy one; it's a bit comedy melodrama and very contrived - it's a plot with a story moulded around it. I can't see myself falling over anything to watch the sequel.

Shit City

Heavens above; I'd forgotten what an absolute load of stylised shit Sin City was. I completely understand what Robert Rodriguez [and Frank Miller & Quentin Tarantino] was trying to do but in the 18 years since the film was made it has dated so very badly ...

Yes, it's a film based on a hard boiled noirish comic book series from Dark Horse in the 1990s, but that was a comic book series that was all hype and all shite. I have a personal disliking for Frank Miller; I think his work is over-rated and he now has some rather distasteful right wing attitudes that make him quite a loathsome character. I never understood why people thought his Daredevil was so good, I wasn't drawn in by The Dark Knight Returns and stuff like Sin City, Hard Boiled and 300 were all smoke and mirrors - he conned the comicbook reading public into thinking he was some kind of genius, when he was just of his time.

Sin City is in four parts (really only three because one of the segments, with Josh Hartnett, is neither relevant or long enough to be thought of as anything but a 2 minute interlude) and three of those parts interlink in a way that some people might find clever. The first part is the sleazy tale of a child molesting killer, who just happens to be the son of the mayor and features Bruce Willis; the aforementioned second part features Hartnett as a serial killer/assassin; the third part has Mickey Rourke as some kind of musclebound super strength thug called Marv and the final part has the wholly unconvincing Clive Owen as someone who's got himself into something that makes almost zero sense.

It's boring, the then state-of-the-art special effects look as cheap and shoddy as some of Miller's earliest artwork and it's got attitudes and angles that make it just a bit too misogynistic and exploitative. It is a film that does not deserve the 8 it gets on IMDB. It's a dislikeable load of bollocks with zero redeeming features and it's equal parts offensive and offending.

Welcome 2 Wrexham

We got a double dose of this fly-on-the-wall documentary revolving around Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney's purchase of a non-league football club with bags of history. This scheduling is probably down to the historic double length opener which features King Charles. 

The second episode focuses on the team's top striker Paul Mullins and his autistic son while tastefully intertwining the story of one of the clubs fans, a 17 year old girl who also has autism and how the club seems to embrace diversity. It's a poignant and extremely moving 20 minutes of TV. The third part switches back to the football with the main focus being on the impending battle of the season between Wrexham and another, arguably bigger, team who fight them all the way - Notts County. It's doing what I thought it would, focussing on Ryan and Rob for maybe one part in every three, but it feels like they have more interesting stories to tell now that the programme has become a huge hit.

Round the Benz

As someone who has read most of Stephen King's books, I don't think he's ever created a literary villain quite as vile and nasty as Brady Hartsfield. Mr Mercedes season two is a strange beast; it is simultaneously better and worse than the first series - it's a curate's egg of a TV show, with some bits that are great and other bits that just feel unnecessary and literally just there to act as plot devices to move the story along.

Brendan Gleeson is, as usual, quite brilliant and Harry Treadaway is dark, malevolent and utterly scary as Hartsfield, while Justine Lupe is great as Holly Gibney as we are in the front row to watch her becoming a good detective rather than an OCD fuelled bag of neuroses. There are some other intriguing supporting cast members - Jerome and Ida, but everything else feels like padding or characters you're supposed to become invested in, somehow, who are simply being set up for a nasty ending. However, one thing about this second series that was different - the way it ended, or rather the way in which the last three episodes seemed to go off piste. Because we're in 'Stephen King Land' now you kind of expected something weird and wild, what you get is something slightly unsettling and unexpected; this has a finale that will have you wide eyed with incredulity in more ways than one - but mainly with how the US justice system works. If you ever needed another reason not to ever visit that country it's in the - based on fact - US criminal justice system. Whether it's the same denouement in the book I don't know, but King often doesn't stray too far from the path of reality even in some of his more fantastic book ideas.

Imaginary Tails

Some people who read this will be aware that around the turn of the century I acted as Simon Pegg's PA and Minder when he was the guest of honour at the UK Comic Book Convention held in Bristol. It was my job to basically hang around with him, keep him watered and fed and ensure he wasn't mobbed by hordes of Spaced fans. He wasn't.

I had this image that he would be a bit like Tim, his character from Spaced - untrendy and a bit of a pot smoking hippy. In reality he was an untrendy nerd who liked a drink and enjoyed the company of some of my other nerd friends rather than the pot smoking, super cool comics guy that was me. It was the year that I ended meeting a bunch of guys from Image Comics and spending more time hanging with them at the bar than keeping Pegg occupied. There was one particular moment when he spent more time talking to a couple of dear friends of mine about 2000AD - the comic - than paying attention to the awards he was supposed to be hosting.

Anyhow, I only tell you this because before I watched this new film, I'd wondered if Pegg made any other movies recently other than the latest in the Mission Impossible franchise and it seems he has. Had I known I might have done more research about his new film, read some reviews and then decided not to watch Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, because I could have watched something where I didn't keep falling asleep because it was so boring.

This adaptation of a true story about a renowned parapsychologist of the 1930s, the Hungarian Nandor Fodor, who investigated claims that a talking mongoose was living in a farm on the Isle of Man [Yes!] and concluded that the farm's owner - John Irving - was as mad as a box of mongeeses [sic]. The story has been tweaked a little to add to the mystery and make the viewer wonder if the mongoose is perhaps symbolic of something or exists but only in the hearts of those who listen to it, but the overriding thing is how boring it was and how ludicrous it was that people could have been so gullible to believe such a load of existential bollocks in the face of overwhelming evidence - I've been reading about it and the film could have been so much better if they'd examined Irving a bit more.

Its beautifully shot; the sets are perfect and Pegg and Minnie Driver put in reasonably good performances, its just a load of shite really and Fodor's scepticism has essentially been toned down until the final scenes to help the film pass the 90 minute mark, otherwise it would have been a short film of about 45 minutes. There's an element of comedy about it - such as Irving's daughter being an accomplished ventriloquist or the gardener being the only person on the island who saw what was going on but wasn't about to rob other folk of their hopes or dreams - but it needed to be funnier and possibly shorter or perhaps not made at all. When I downloaded the movie it had a 7 rating on IMDB; 48 hours later when we watched it that rating had dropped to 5.5; I rest my case.

Abandon Hope

The first thing you notice about No One Will Save You is how few words are in it - I think there are less than a dozen. The second thing you get is the impression you're watching a nightmare, that what is happening is happening inside someone's sleep and then eventually you come to the conclusion that you might be watching exactly what you theorised or you might be watching a deconstructed and stylised version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Whatever you think about No One Will Save You it probably won't be to think it's an Academy Award winning effort, because however earnest Kaitlyn Dever (she off Booksmart) is with her miniscule amount of dialogue this struggles to be anything more than just a an pretentious load of twaddle.

Dever's Brynn is a slightly alienated member of the community who we discover is responsible for the death of her friend when they were much younger and this is pretty much the only discernible backstory because the rest is a relentless cat and mouse game between her and a number of aliens of varying sizes. I have to admit to falling asleep inside the opening ten minutes and then struggling for the next 80 because while it had the feel of a kind of cosmic horror, it also felt like in a few months time many people will be recommending you avoid this film like the plague...

Next time...

How about that for a compact and bijou week of reviews then? Still no Barbie - the wife doesn't seem to understand it isn't what she thinks it is, but I only say that based on the miniscule amount I've bothered to read about it. 

I'd have a stab at guessing what's going to happen in the next week, but I think whatever we'll see, we'll see. I was asked if I'd watched the new Daryl Dixon of the Walking Dead series and I said I have no interest in it at all. We've even decided to not bother with the last eight parts of Fear because it's a load of shit. We need a new load of shit to follow.