Modern Culture - Nothing is Ever What it Seems

As few spoilers as possible again this week, in a slightly shorter blog given that I've had two football matches to watch this week which has cut down our allotted TV time (much to the chagrin of the wife - the football not the TV watching)...

Lessons in Brilliance

In my humble opinion, the best program on TV at the moment is the superb Lessons in Chemistry with the physically two-dimensional Brie Larson as Elizabeth Zott, the female chemist in a man's world. This week is the birth of Mad, her daughter (watch it, all will be explained) and how she copes (or doesn't) with being a mother. It's funny, touching and beautifully acted.

Harriet's husband returns from Korea and their story is simmering away nicely in the background, while we get to see Calvin again - which is great because he really was a fantastic bloke - as Elizabeth becomes an 'editor' for all the local chemists to ensure she still has somewhere to live and can pay the bills. There's also a great scene when she discovers that her old boss has stolen her and Calvin's work - but he doesn't know what he's doing. All the while we keep getting flash forwards - seven years - at who we think is Mad and her school, but there's a twist in the tail of this which is explained at the end of the episode when we discover how Zott goes from chemist to 'domestic goddess'.

As I said, this is fabulous quality TV with a good story and an ability to drag you completely into it. Larson is great, but so are the supporting cast and the story. I'm not familiar with the source material and this has, apparently, been tailored slightly for TV. I look forward to reading the book when I've finished the series. I cannot recommend this enough.

Ren and Bradley

Last week in Loki there was a switch back to a more comedic feel, this week that was replaced with jeopardy and more shocks - quite unexpected shocks (and I know most shocks aren't expected, but this really flipped things in a way that I didn't expect). We discover who zaps Loki from episode one, we discover the secret of Ren Slayer and her recruiting of X5 aka Bradley.

However, this week's episode was far more serious, almost like they're switching back and forth to make the viewer unsure of what's going to happen next and that's a dynamic that has been missing from so many MCU things for many years.

OB - far from being the villain of the show - does some clever handiwork to neutralise Miss Minutes, who really deserves it and then devises, with the help of Victor Timely, a way of sorting out the rapidly unravelling time stream, however one thing that will blow you away is the end of the show, it mot only has a shock in it, which may or may not have consequences in the future/past of the MCU, it has something that will make you go 'blimey, I didn't see that coming' followed by a genuine WTF...' moment. 

Loki oddly enough doesn't have a huge amount of Loki in it this series, but it also doesn't have a lot of Mobius and the latter's general nonchalance makes you wonder if there's something going on there that you haven't seen coming. It's really good television, kudos all round to the people who make it even if it'll mean fuck all in the grand scheme of things (if my theory is correct from the bonus blog I posted the other day).

Blood Sisters

Secrets and lies is the real theme behind Gen V as things happen that may or may not have consequences in the finale. The crew decides to have a confrontation with Shetty and also decide that one of them needs to be with Cate for that confrontation - because none of them really trust her. However, when Andre's dad has a seizure on live TV that goes out of the window and we don't know if what happens with Shetty is real or a fabrication by Cate at the bequest of Shetty, who really does appear to have the telepath in the palm of her hand. The upshot here is Andre wasn't part of it, so he might hold the key to the final episode.

There's a couple of surprise guest stars from the Boys in this as the two series finally get tied together nicely and we discover that Marie Moreau and Victoria Neuman (the head exploder from The Boys) are more alike than you can imagine. There's lots of double crossing and the virus that was being developed has fallen into the hands of someone whose intentions with it are unclear. I expect the finale will have more links to the Boys with more guest stars, especially as we're heading towards a new series of that soon; this has finally acted as a proper companion piece to that, especially as it has dispensed with much of its shock value gimmicks in favour of an actual story. I'm glad we stuck with it.

Imaginary Tales

The wife put her foot down and told me what we were going to watch last Saturday night. Her choice was the best film Quentin Tarantino has ever made, in my never humble opinion. The 2019 imaginary/alternate history Once Upon a Time in Hollywood starring a host of famous actors, but mainly with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio.

DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a rising TV star of the late 1950s who by the late 1960s is a fading TV star who has made a couple of mediocre films and is now staring has-been in the face. Pitt plays his stunt double, PA and friend, Cliff Booth - a man with a chequered past, but as savvy as they come. The two bumble through 1968 Hollywood, while Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate have bought the house next door to Rick and when the camera is not focused on Rick or Cliff, we follow Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) around.

It's a long film, full of humour, famous actors impersonating even more famous actors from the late 60s. Damien Lewis is rather brilliant as Steve McQueen and there's a Hollywood party scene that was probably Tarantino being self-indulgent but made you wish you were in that 'scene' or even old enough to be. Considering this was made in 2018 and released a year later, LA has so many places that haven't changed, so making a film set 55 years ago feels more like a time machine has been used rather than just clever camera work and a few special effects.

I complained, almost bitterly, about QT's war film spelled wrongly because it was an alternative history film and I really didn't enjoy it - feeling it played too much on exploitation and not enough on actually making a logical film, however, this is just so damned funny I kind of want to see what happens to all of the characters given Sharon Tate didn't die and Charles Manson's acolytes were stopped before they even started. 

FFS Again

Several weeks ago I said under no circumstances was I going to watch anything The Walking Dead related ever again. However, the final God knows how many episodes of Fear have started and the wife, feeling all nostalgic for the rotting dead suggested we watch it despite having decided now that Morgan's story has concluded that we'd give up on it. After tonight's thing that masqueraded as a TV programme, I said "Never again. I don't want to watch any more of this shit." And the wife agreed.

KYAL

I never read Si Spencer's Bodies in comic form, mainly because I don't read comics any longer, so it's all new to me, so having four police officers in four times investigate four identical 'murders' in four different times is an intriguing premise and I worked it out very quickly that we're in the time travel arena, again. 

In 1890 Detective Hillinghead; in 1941 Detective Whiteman; in 2023 Sgt Hassan and in 2053 DC Maplewood have all been investigating what looks very much like the same murder. All of them have been compromised and are expected to do things - especially Hassan - and something is going to happen that will change the UK forever and it's all linked to Stephen Graham, who, it seems, is a time travelling saviour of everything in the UK as well as a proper evil bastard. It would appear that without him the UK won't become the utopia it appears to be in 2053, but at what cost to the past?

This series weaves a labyrinthine path through the lives of the detectives and everyone and everything connected to them and it all appears to be linked to a 15-year-old boy in 2023 called Elias Mannix, who holds the key to the future and unwittingly the past. It's a puzzling series and you really have no idea where it's going or how it's going to work out, but the key for all the police officers is breaking the time loop that Mannix - of the future - is creating thereby preventing what he has planned from ever being able to be stopped.

It gets a bit, to borrow a Dr Who expression, timey-wimey towards the end, especially after episode six when you start to wonder how they're going to get two more parts out of it, but in the end it has a conclusion that is both satisfying, confusing and unusual. However, I had proper gripes: first was the final scene which made little or no sense (and I wonder if it happened in the comic because I don't think Si would have resorted to such a cheap and corny trick) apart from giving something to someone who barely existed in 2023. Secondly, who and how did they manage to create an atomic bomb in the basement of a bank? And lastly, if you sit down and try to get your head around the story after the conclusion you realise that however excellently well-made a little thriller it was - that ticked all my paradox loving boxes - it actually made absolutely no sense at all - the entire story simply shouldn't have happened and technically couldn't have happened and the adaptation left so many loose ends and plot holes that all the enjoyment of watching it evaporated into the ether. 

Petrol Station of Doom

Night of the Hunted got a really good review in the Guardian, or at least it was a good review by that particular piece of shit rag's usual standards. This was, after all, the newspaper that allows some of its reviewers to not even bother watching things before they give them bad (or inaccurate) reviews. The problem is, I learned a long time ago that relying on a Guardian review is a bit like relying on recommendations from my mate Chris; 50% of them are going to be a load of shite... (sorry Chris)

This is a film that when I acquired it - on Sunday - had a 7.6 rating on IMDB, which considering The Exorcist: Believers the 'official' direct sequel to the original film had been released the same day and had a rating of 5.1, despite having Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair in it, looked like a good bet. By the time we watched it on Wednesday night that 7.6 had dropped to 5.4, but regardless of this we persevered with it, based pretty much on The Guardian's review - I should really listen to my own advice... This was a bad idea, even if the film probably doesn't deserve a 5.4, but given it possibly reflects what a lot of gun-happy American fuckwits who without doubt lurk on IMDB to damn anything they see as woke I can understand why it plummeted like a stone.

A woman is having an affair with a work colleague and they're on their way back from a work convention (or they might just have booked a room for some extra-marital shagging, you never know for sure) stop at a service station in the middle of nowhere and become terrorised by a lone sniper, who has already killed the checkout girl - Amelia - and soon despatches Alice's boyfriend and wounds her. She's pinned down in the station when the walkie-talkie on the counter starts talking to her and what follows is an ongoing conversation between Alice - played by Camille Rowe [no me neither] -  and the shooter, while he picks off anyone stopping there for fuel, apart from a Native American whose credit card is rejected at the self-service pump.

The shooter is essentially a right wing wanker trying to justify his killing spree, or is he, because despite knowing Alice's name (she told him it over the walkie-talkie), he also seems to know an awful lot about her, which he might be getting off the internet or he might be something else entirely. Does her husband know she's shagging around? Is it a disgruntled former employee or is it Henry who used to work at the gas station - you actually never find out. In fact given the nature of the film and the bleak and slightly ludicrous ending you don't really discover much at all. Given the low budget horror flick Splinter was set at a gas station with seemingly no escape, that film made this film seem like a bad idea poorly executed (if you'll pardon the pun). It wasn't bad, but equally it wasn't anywhere near as good as the Guardian thought it was.

Now, you'd think that was it, but I haven't finished with the Guardian. You know how I've been thoroughly enjoying the Brie Larson TV show Lessons in Chemistry? Well, I almost didn't watch it based on The Guardian's review, but high praise elsewhere meant we gave it a go and were glad to. However, the now extremely centre right, gaslighting rag's review of it said that Brie Larson's Elizabeth teaches her dog 6.30 to talk and then went a step further and said the dog talked too much. Also in this review, whoever reviewed it said Apple TV had only released two episodes to review. 6.30 can't talk, Elizabeth hasn't taught him to talk (yet) and while the dog narrates episode #3, it's just really a book end and is more symbolic than actual. I don't believe the reviewer actually saw the first two episodes, I think whoever did it based their review on the Wikipedia entry for the book, not the TV series, which had some emphasis on Elizabeth Zott's teaching her dog to talk. Trust me here; avoid that fucking newspaper like the plague; avoid its lousy reviews and avoid its pro-Zionist bullshit. It might be a good investigative newspaper, but it also is a superficial piece of shit with a webpage that allows far too much clickbait and Islamophobic bullshit. It's not a big and clever daily, it's a load of off wank.

Injury Time

As Welcome to Wrexham reaches the final straight of season two, one wonders if the programme's producers realised that the Welsh club's last season in the National League was so unbelievable, they could have literally just covered the battle with Notts County and it would have made excellent TV. Instead of focusing on the utterly wild season of football, it's almost come in as a secondary thing to the stories of the people, the town and the history. Not that this is a bad thing, but the football does seem to have taken a back seat.

This week's two parts looked first at the mining disaster from 1934 and had less than 40 seconds of football club. It was poignant and needed to be told, to be remembered, probably more so for the way employers - pre unions - were a monumental bunch of cunts. While the second of this week's double bill centred on Wrexham Ladies and their battle to become a team in the Ladies Welsh Premier League. It was two parts that emphasised that Wrexham FC is more than just some desperate men hoping to get back into the proper leagues. 

With just two parts left, I expect one of those to be focusing on the titanic Wrexham v Notts County match, at the Racecourse, where Ben Foster pulled off a 95th minute penalty save to almost guarantee Wrexham win promotion, while the finale will be the championship winning last two games of the season and a chance to see just how much Ryan and Rob have grown to love this historic football club.

Snore Patrol

Zzzzzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzzzzzz. Four of the five actual members of the Doom Patrol are dying of old age. Vic decides he'd rather be Cyborg than a normal man. Rouge again tries to atone for her past and fails. The Butt monsters are back, now as Werebutts. A giant nasty looking skin tag on Immortus's neck is the answer to everything. This stupid load of crap gets stupider every week and I wish that wasn't the case but bad special effects, a lousy script, poor plotting, dodgy acting and lots of angst and shouting does not make a good thing. This is a superhero series that's never really been about superheroing, more about circumstances and deus ex machina moments. It'll be over soon and I don't know if I have the patience or the will to watch the final episodes.

Over the space of five years we occasionally see Crazy Jane do things that constitute superheroics, however Larry just moans about his existence and his space thing parasite creature tends to do anything bordering on heroic. Rita wilts into a bucket of sludge every so often but hasn't really done anything other than be self-absorbed and slightly annoying. Cliff, for all his robotic stuff, has spent more time being addicted to porn and working on his car, oh and moaning about being a shit dad, than he's ever hit anyone or used his ... I dunno, does he even have any abilities apart from being a pretty crap robot? Vic 'Cyborg' Stone has been the only character who is a superhero and it says a lot about the DC television universe that one of the Justice League is reduced to being a whiny wanker. You have to look past the dressing and see that if you've watched this from the start you've been watching all smoke and mirrors dressed up to shock and surprise, of which it does neither. This is a bit of a tragedy because season one at least was weird and true to the Doom Patrol comic, everything since has been shitty pants.

Seven Minutes and Eleven Seconds

This was the amount of time we gave Van Wilder before switching it off and declaring it to be a load of shite. In that time we were subjected to at least ten crude and unfunny 'jokes' and that really is all we needed to switch off and watch something less worse.

Compact and Bijou

The 2007 Halloween film Trick r Treat was short - weighing in at about 80 minutes - and was a portmanteau film, tying four unrelated stories together with a loose link and if I want to be honest about it, director Michael Dougherty did a pretty good job with it considering it was his first full-length motion picture and to date he's only done three - the others being Krampus (which also wasn't a bad film) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (which was an absolute monster-fest spoiled by a dreadful plot involving Vera Farmiga and Millie Bobby Brown). 

Trick r Treat is actually a neat little fun film, very nasty but also full of comedy. It has some awful special effects, especially the werewolf section, but it also has some really excellent ones. Everything from the sadistic serial killing headmaster to the conclusion it seemed to revive a tradition for releasing Halloween-themed films in October.

It's got a bunch of famous people in it, from Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker, Brian Cox, Leslie Bibb, Tahmoh Penikett and Britt McKillip, who we last saw in the excellent TV series Dead Like Me. If you want a slightly spooky, fun comedic horror film for Halloween you can't go much wrong with this; there are four stories - the sadistic serial killer who is also headmaster of the local school, the bunch of girls out for some Halloween fun, the slightly street smart trick or treaters with a prank of their own and the old man in his house, who lives next door to the headmaster. It's bookended with a short story about the dangers of blowing out Jack-O-Lantern candles before October 31st has finished.

Next Time...

The finale of Gen V, the penultimate episode of Loki, the next Lessons in Chemistry, possibly the last two parts of the Wrexham show, another bore fest with the wanky DC superheroes, absolutely no Walking Dead at all, maybe a couple of films - although the wife really is getting fed up with watching films at the moment; she's not said so out loud but I've known her for long enough to know when she's getting overloaded with stuff - she wants to watch a few things on iPlayer, plus we have stuff on the catch-up box we need to watch, so it's really a case of pot luck and whatever she decides. 

 

A Bonus Pop Culture Blog - Marvel's Endgame?

This is a largely self-indulgent blog about where Marvel/Disney went wrong and why they have nothing in their armoury that suggests they're going to reverse the trend. From the fall out from Endgame to geopolitical problems to simply lacking a definitive way forward, Marvel is entering it's own Endgame.

There's an awful lot of comics and film related shite on You Tube. Fan films and lots of conjecture and theories floating around; it's like a poor man's Movers & Shakers at times but without my knowledge and masses of wishful thinking. However, just occasionally I see something that makes me think and one of those things was an almost throwaway comment about some things the Russo Brothers said at a recent comics convention. This was regarding the Test Screenings of Avengers: Endgame.

Test screenings are where a selected or invited audience see a pre-release version of a film and offer feedback to the producers in the form of questionnaires and in some cases this results in reshoots or changes. I think we've all heard about these but I don't know anyone who has been in one or even knows how exactly they work. Apparently the analysis of Avengers: Endgame returned an intriguing amount of responses - allegedly almost 20% of the people who saw the film thought it was a great 'jumping off' point, while a smaller percentage thought introducing time travel into the MCU was a bad decision - many responders called it 'Confusing.' This wasn't considered to be negative enough feedback to make any changes and the film literally was released without any changes to the story, just some small changes to the end of the film.

Now, fast forward a few years to arguably Marvel's best television series - Loki, which essentially sits outside of the MCU timeline and features the Loki from Endgame, who is a variant of the original Loki? It's literally all about time travel and it only exists because of that last Avengers film. The biggest problem with Endgame is it's an emotions film; there is no logic to it and if you analyse it, it is a giant mess. If you can recall the Ancient One's conversation with Bruce Banner and watch Loki you know there's a sacred timeline and any alteration to this causes branches in said timeline and creates variations. Except Doctor Strange's mentor was quick to point out that if the Time Stone is used it will create a multiverse and that would be a very bad thing. Plus there's a kind of emphasis that the Time Stone exists can't actually be used because it poses a threat to reality. This alone creates more problems than it solves, although Doctor Strange does use it in Infinity War to scan millions of alternate futures to work out how to stop Thanos; it's used to see into the future rather than as a physical time altering device. 

However, it isn't the Time Stone that causes the problems; it's the Quantum Universe, which offers a thin, almost weedy, explanation as to how time travel can work. So in reality the Time Stone is a MacGuffin, it's almost a red herring as it is used once in the two Avengers films, by Thanos to reverse the destruction of the Soul Stone so he can complete his Infinity Gem collection. If there's another physical use of it, I don't know when it happens. It doesn't even come into play at the end because Tony Stark is adamant that if the Avengers are successful in their mission and can reverse the Blip/Snap, everything that has happened has to remain - this alone is the first major error in this time travelling mess. In many ways the Infinity Gems are barely used on their own, only used when they're all together, which in many ways is another red herring.

The problems Endgame causes are almost insurmountable - just the presence of the film does more damage to the MCU than any other thing or film. It not only defies the Ancient One's wishes, it rides roughshod over it and creates multiple timelines and makes events at the end of Endgame completely wrong - yes, it might have been an unbelievably awesome conclusion to the Infinity Saga but it's also a massive pile of shit, creating an MCU that, at the moment, is actually a variation. The moment in Infinity War when Thanos reverse time to retrieve the Vision's gem he creates an alternate timeline. 

Tie into this the fact Captain America spends the rest of his life in the past with Peggy Carter, thus preventing her from having the life she originally had creates the next alternate timeline. Factor in that there's two Nebulas, a living Gamorra, the aforementioned living Loki [who as many others have commented was completely written out of character in Avengers Assemble] and you start to realise what Marvel did was open a can of worms that the average film goer wouldn't dwell on, but hang over it like the foul stench of an uncleaned toilet. Then there's Thanos, who is dead but his past self is able to travel to a future he doesn't exist in and play a crucial part in this finale; he may well have been erased at the end, but regardless of Bruce Banner's weak explanation about time travel and how the present is always the present and it doesn't matter what you alter everything will still have happened - the Grandfather Paradox can't really exist in his theory - common sense and logic go out of the window. If there's a Thanos out of his own past, surely his past self would know what is going to happen, unless of course he just creates another alternate timeline... 

There are a number of other very clear changes to the past, present and future - thus creating a multiverse from the mid-1950s onward and while we never see Steve Rogers return the Time Stone to the Ancient One in 2011, I imagine she's not very happy about what the Avengers created. This is the biggest flaw in the culmination of the Infinity Saga and personally I hate it. I think Avengers: Endgame ends up being a bit like Christopher Nolan's Tenet, where paradoxes are essentially laughed at in the face. It almost suggests that paradoxes can't exist and time carries on regardless - which it might do for Steve Rogers, but what about Peggy Carter, the man she marries or that Rogers exists in a time when he would have been needed but turns his back on being a hero so he can do a lot of catch-up shagging? It doesn't make sense, especially given the kind of man Rogers was portrayed as. However, technically speaking if Steve Rogers spent the rest of his life with Peggy Carter, thus creating a different timeline, he should not have existed any longer in the sacred timeline and not been able to give Sam Wilson his shield; but let's not get bogged down with too much minutiae; Endgame did, after all, just do what it wanted and threw logic out with the baby and the bathwater.  

Actually let's dwell on it, because if Iron Man and Captain America both knew that Loki stole the Cosmic Cube during Endgame, meaning they had to travel back in time further to retrieve it from the 1950s, they were aware that that a previous version of Loki was now loose in the MCU and both would have known from Thor that 'their' Loki died at the hands of Thanos; so therefore what was there to stop them from 'time-napping' Natasha from the Battle of New York and bringing her back to their present day? If Gamorra died and an older version of her was now existing in the MCU then surely they could have done the same with Natasha? Surely they could have even done it with Tony Stark; grab a Stark from before his demise so he can carry on living? The reason this would work is because there were instances with others where this happened; it wasn't like at the end of Endgame they decided that the rogue Loki needed to be found and killed and Gamorra should also be killed because she was dead on the sacred timeline. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Obviously actors contracts played a big part in this, but if you're left with enough to time to think about it, you see that Endgame was selectively flawed and the execs simply hoped it wouldn't lead to so much handwringing from die hard fans - they might know cinema, they don't seem to understand comics and in the case of the MCU this is inextricably interwoven.

If the Multiverse was created in the early 1950s as that was the earliest point the modern day Avengers went back in time to then one of the reasons I've got such a bug up my arse about this is during the third episode of season two of Loki, Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Ren Slayer (why does she have that character name?) says she had been running the TVA - Time Variant Agency - for eons, which doesn't make an awful lot of sense and neither does the presumption that Kang the Conqueror was the creator of the TVA because there's no suggestion that Kang was created as a result of the actions in Endgame. I'm probably overthinking this, but if you cast your mind back to season one of Loki when we were introduced to a huge number of variant Lokis, this actually doesn't make any sense because these would all have been created prior to events in Endgame - it made funny TV, but it also made no sense. Plus the TVA exists because of a paradox Kang himself created even though we have no real idea how he was created (yet).

Now a Loki exists in the MCU, Thor doesn't know but who cares. I know the general consensus has been to overlook the flaws in the narrative of Endgame but, if you can selectively have heroes still alive to enable a Guardians of the Galaxy film or a Loki TV series, then why can't you have Black Widow or Iron Man, or even an earlier version of Captain America brought back from the past to replace those that died or retired so valiantly? You realise this means anything that happens in Loki won't resolve what has been created, which means it becomes a pointless TV series [like so many others] and if you want to be brutal, nothing and everything since Endgame means anything because it all takes place in an alternate timeline. The sacred timeline possibly ceases to exist the moment Thanos turns back time because the Time Stone has been used and there is no sacred timeline any longer...

Let's put to one side that most of the films since then have been inferior and with a couple of exceptions most everything else have been critical flops. In fact, because of the creation of a multiverse, however and wherever it is, pretty much anything that has happened can be altered; nothing has any real consequence because with the creation of time travel in the MCU nothing can be sacred any longer - the Time Stone might no longer exist, but the Quantum Realm does, rendering the Time Stone as a plot device only. Therefore the TVA presumably only exists because lots and lots of other people have used the Quantum Realm to travel back and forth in time long before and after the Avengers did... That alone dilutes the entire idea and makes Endgame a right old mess and a half. No wonder people found it confusing.

This is why the MCU struggles on a logical level; it struggles enormously with the fact there isn't a Steve Rogers, Tony Stark or Natasha Romanov. The fact that Tony Stark wasn't prepared to let Bruce Banner click his fingers and return everything back to where it was - five years earlier - created its own paradox, on top of all the other paradoxes. This might seem like nit-picking, but the events in Endgame whether they make sense or not have essentially created a problem that cannot be solved. It's an absolute shower of shite film that not only was quite extraordinary, it made every superhero film that followed it like a poor encore, it also killed the franchise.

Like I said, Endgame was an emotions film; it dispensed common sense with 'ooh look favourite characters have been killed/retired' - it swaps logic for sensationalism and by doing that makes everything that comes after it as moot. Plus when you kill off the three cornerstones of your universe, it doesn't matter who you introduce, one of the reasons the MCU's first 20 odd films were so successful was because of Steve Rogers, Tony Stark and Natasha Romanov. Without them there's no Avengers, without them there's no backbone, no cornerstones. No real interest. Endgame wasn't just a confusing mess, it effectively took the three main reasons the MCU was popular out of the equation. It gave people no reason to stay loyal to the brand - imagine if Heinz stopped making beans, but carried on making everything else? Would they be as successful? Forget all the absolute bollocks the story was, it created problems and then Marvel walked away from it. 

I think, deep down, a lot of people did view Endgame as the perfect jumping off point; many might have stuck around to see what happens next, but what happened next was always going to be inferior. You can't really top Endgame in terms of its scope and the massive battle to end all battles - nothing reaches the emotive levels it created and there's not a superhero film since that feels like it's doing something new or different. 

Moving on to other issues that face the MCU and the superhero genre in general...

This is what was foreseen as the MCU timeline back in 2019
when Feige announced the acquisition of Fox and
pre-Covid19 - how things have changed...

Marvel and Disney are not yet suffering from the law of diminishing returns to make the line unworkable, but the relative failure of Quantumania and the forecasted returns on The Marvels - which is expected to be the lowest yet in terms of box office takings - should send a shiver of panic down Kevin Feige's spine. Disney execs must be wondering how long the MCU has got before drastic action is needed. Couple this with the strikes in Hollywood which means, like the Covid pandemic, things are being pushed back even further and every month a film is delayed is another nail in the coffin marked 'box office returns.' The abject failure of the recent DCEU films might not be directly applicable but every time DC/Warner's release a new crappy superhero film it drives the stake further into the heart of the genre. The first phases of the MCU had an arc that people could understand and get behind; subsequent phases are literally all over the place and all the multiverse has done so far is tease us with some things and used nostalgia as a tool in others.

Now we're entering a critical 'phase' in the longevity of the MCU; we're a number of years and films from any potential conclusion to this Multiverse Saga and nothing on the schedules until The Kang Dynasty really looks like it's going to solve the problems that Marvel created by not listening to it's test screening audiences of nearly five years ago - time travel is a bad idea. If a fifth of them watching felt it was a good jumping off point, there's not a lot you can do if your main stars don't want to be in your films any more, but if almost as many think it was confusing then you stop that in its tracks, you don't carry on regardless making things even more complicated and churning out films that don't advance the overarching story. 

The Marvels has already had extensive reshoots because of executive shuffling at the top of the management and Test Screening reactions have been poor. This is a film that among other things has a huge Bollywood style musical number taking place on the Planet Aldana [a place where everyone talks in rhymes and often break out into song and dance routines] for Carol Danvers marriage to Prince Yan - this might appeal to certain audiences, but I expect it's one of the reasons why the film has been projected to have a catastrophically bad opening weekend - key to a film's overall success. Also, it's main star has joined a long list of other MCU stalwarts and declared she's had enough of the criticisms personally aimed at her, she's grown tired of the genre in general and simply doesn't want to be Captain Marvel any longer. So you can add Brie Larson to the list that includes Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Chris Evans, Elizabeth Olsen and others who won't be coming back and when you consider comments made by Mark Ruffalo that he believes his time playing the Hulk is coming to an end than all you're left with is a new generation of actors and heroes, none of which set the world alight and aren't the icons the MCU needs. The Young Avengers anyone? A team made from TV characters and younger versions of existing heroes? Sounds riveting [he said with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek]. 

There is also the fact that Ms Marvel hasn't been a huge success in the USA, but has been in Muslim countries; this is a point we'll be dealing with in the next paragraphs...

There are rumours that not only was the fourth Captain America film title changed because of fears about the potential Nazi connotations, but another three months were spent reshooting loads of the film. That suggests that whatever they were doing originally wasn't good enough for the franchise and this will have been before it even got to test screenings - Marvel must have seen that Sam Wilson as Captain America was not going to prove as popular as Chris Evans, but what can they do about it? 

The addition of half the 2008 Incredible Hulk cast - minus the actual Hulk - suggests the nostalgia route that the MCU is taking isn't just a coincidence - we'll get onto Deadpool and the X-Men in a bit - but if Marvel can't see a way of introducing new and interesting heroes, then all they can do is bring back things from old films - whether they're 'MCU' films or from further back. 

Now, with the current crisis in the Middle East and growing anti-Semitic and Islamophobic problems across the globe and Shira Haas's addition to the cast of Captain America: Brave New World as Israeli superhero Sabra, the MCU could be alienating a large percentage of the world's largest religion from wanting to see the film. Sabra's presence is in this film is going to at some point focus on Israel - Muslim countries have been huge in the world wide response to the MCU; Disney has already proved that it will pander to their Chinese audiences and as it is a moneymaking machine and I cannot imagine it would alienate the world's Muslim community, even if there's nothing Islamic in the Captain America film - however, if the film is seen promoting Israel in any sense at all, multi-millions could stay away from the cinemas and some countries might ban it altogether - Disney hates that when it happens.

Captain America: Brave New World has been pushed back in the schedules, originally it was set for a March 2024 release, that is now July and if rumours are correct (and when it's scheduling they usually are) it might not hit the cinemas until September or October of next year; whether this will be because of reshoots or just the ongoing strikes (the writers one has been settled but the actors one looks like it could rumble on for ages yet). is unknown but the longer the Israeli/Palestine atrocity continues the more the divisions will widen and the more problematic CA:BNW becomes... If Marvel panders to the Chinese, are they going to ignore the Islamic world for Israel, which doesn't really represent a huge market for a multi-national film company?

Then there's the suggestion that CA:BNW might be the first part of a two-handed affair with Thunderbolts following on directly from it, with Harrison Ford voicing a new Red Hulk. There's also suggestions that this could be Bruce Banner's last outing as the green Hulk with Mark Ruffalo's aforementioned comments looking like they could come true. Maybe Marvel/Disney thinks the New Avengers line up (which won't feature any of the originals and will no longer feature Brie Larson) will succeed. I think anyone will be sceptical about this approach and just who would they have?

But wait, there's even more problems on the horizon...

The Fantastic Four film, scheduled for May 2025 still hasn't got a working script; there have been no actors cast and Marvel executives have stated there is real concern about the project, not just in how they do it but whether it will arrive too late to save the franchise. It's already been pushed back in the schedules and as one writer for Marvel stated recently in a comment on his Facebook page, "For all the faults the Fox films had, their depiction of the FF was pretty much spot on. The reboot threw all of the team's Marvel history out of the window and failed miserably and now the MCU has to decide how it's going to pursue this project or whether it's worth pursuing at all..."

Does the MCU/Disney just start again with an origin story or do they do something radical? They can't go the nostalgia route because three of the four stars of that film are much older and are no longer viable for the roles and there's Chris Evans who is obviously Captain America; so they have to recast the characters and they desperately need to have a film that takes over the MCU; becomes the new Iron Man, Cap and Black Widow - it needs to be the new #1 and even before a word is placed on a page that is almost impossible. I wouldn't be surprised if the FF film isn't pushed further back in the schedules or even shelved for the foreseeable future. The Fantastic Four have always been Marvel's First Family, how can they become that if they're introduced into an extant universe? Reed Richards is supposedly the most intelligent man on the planet, where was he when the earth faced all of its life-threatening moments in the past? How come he's never been mentioned by Tony Stark or Bruce Banner?

The Fantastic Four film now has had three directors attached to it, several writers, new writers brought into fix the problems created by the original writers and now a film that was originally set to be released on November 8, 2024 and then February 14, 2025, it's now scheduled for May 2, 2025 and according to some sources is now looking like it will arrive late in 2025, possibly September or November. That's two years away for a film that hasn't even got a working script and no actors - that's a big ask even by MCU standards, because they're films are often finished a year before they get released.

Similar problems plague the X-Men and might be why it seems they're going down the nostalgia route with Deadpool 3, they simply can't introduce the X-Men to the MCU because of the way Eternals bombed. There was a number of reasons but primarily die hard fans asked the question: where were they when Thanos came knocking? And yes, I know that Icarus explained why, it was just a pathetic excuse. The same question will be asked as to why no mutants stepped up to help in Infinity War or at the end of Endgame? So the new Deadpool film - the MCU's first taster of mutants to come has Huge Ackman in it, it might have other Bryan Singer X-Men in cameo. It is probably going to go the route of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was like Endgame - an emotions film, one that dispenses logic for heart strings.

If Deadpool is going to hurtle through the multiverse meeting old Marvel heroes from before the MCU that's being done for monetary nostalgia reasons not for a company that needs to move forwards. It's simply to make money from people who fancy seeing what the MCU will do with other pre-MCU Marvel heroes (who are all 20+ years older). There's even a rumour that Jennifer Garner might reprise her Elektra role in Deadpool 3... Have I mentioned the barrel scraping yet?

Which brings us to the X-Men proper. Kevin Feige announced four years ago that now Disney owned Fox, there would be that long-awaited X-Men return to the MCU, but that hasn't materialised and there's nothing on the schedules that even hints at it - other than Deadpool 3, which even if it does introduce us to new versions of the X-Men and mutants in general, it falls straight back into the 'where the fuck have they been all these years?' category, so the wait for the X-Men might be a lot longer than anyone expects. Feige also recently said, "As we move forward and dive deeper into the Multiverse Saga, you never know when timelines may just crash or converge" which sounds to me like a cop out.

For the X-Men to work properly it needs to be given the air the original comic series had; it almost has to fail to be resurrected into this brilliant thing and that, in film and TV time, means four or five years of visual development. Oddly enough the Multiverse saga would be an ideal place to introduce the X-Men, the same as it would be (and has) introduced the Fantastic Four, but the multiverse is also something that fans of the MCU are growing tired of already - probably because there's been so few actual references to it it outside of Doctor Strange and Spider-Man films. The best you can hope for is films like Deadpool 3 bringing back existing X-Men characters because Marvel has absolutely no idea how to introduce a new team and integrate them into the existing MCU without, again, falling into the Eternals trap and I start sounding like a stuck record. Plus you've got X-Men '97 the animated series returning - this suggests it's all they have.

Let's not even think about Blade, another film beset by scheduling, scripting and actor problems. This has also had a number of reshoots and no longer looks as though it will have any links to the Black Knight as hinted at in the much-maligned Eternals and frankly I can't really understand why it would. This is scheduled to appear in February 2025 - that almost 18 months after it was originally mooted. Disney has just announced that a number of TV series are being pushed back in the schedules of Disney+ and to say there's a buzz about Agatha Harkness: The Darkhold Diaries (now in it's third or fourth name change) or Ironheart would be a lie. Daredevil: Born Again is now set for the summer of 2025 and that's been changed, moved and fiddled around with. Proposed films such as Armour Wars, The Young Avengers, and another Shang-Chi film, not to mention a fourth Sony Spider-Man (possibly featuring Venom) are all in limbo and execs are not going to be keen to move forward if any of 2024's proper MCU films flop. There is a worry that even Deadpool 3 needs to match the first two or things will get seriously wobbly...

And then there's the far more existential problem of superhero films falling out of vogue. Yes, I know this has been said for the last four years, but at some point that forecast is going to come true. There's has been an almost relentless conveyor belt of superhero films over the last 25 years; a stream that has increased since 2010 and if there's not a Marvel or DC film (or television series) there's someone else having a bash at doing the genre in their own way (I'm thinking Fast Color, Super, Green Hornet, Glass, Megamind, Kick-Ass 1 & 2, Chronicle, Big Hero Six and Incredibles 2 just cluttering up the place along side all those Marvel, DC and the largely woeful Sony films and the animated stuff that often gets overlooked). There has been over 100 genre films made since 2000 alone, that's over four a year; on average one every three months for 23 years. That's too many and too many of them have been inferior and probably only two of them in the last five years have been good proper enjoyable films.

So with a genre that needs serious resuscitation will there even be an Avengers: The Kang Dynasty in 2026 or an Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027 and just who are the Avengers going to be? Are there any superheroes left in the MCU who could be classed as a box office draw? The Hulk? Maybe. Spider-Man? (after a fashion given that Sony own the film rights and aren't going to relinquish them unless Disney buys the company?) Can you think of any current Marvel superhero that fits into the Avengers roster who will carry a film the way Robert Downey Jr or Chris Evans or Scarlett Johansson could? No, you can't, so that makes the two proposed Avengers films either needing to be the salvation of the MCU or the absolute end of the big studio superhero genre. My money's on the latter...

We pretty much now know this proposal for
future Marvel projects isn't going to happen; 
in fact Marvel hasn't released a definitive Phase 6
and later graphic at all since the one with the FF movie
and the two Avengers films.
'Everything is fluid,' said one Disney exec...

Pop Culture - The Shape of Things That Come

I've been trying to keep the spoilers to a minimum - if you hadn't noticed - less so if a film is over ten years old, but in general I'm trying to not spoil it for anyone who reads this. That said, there's always going to be something I write that someone will complain about [avoid Loki or Gen V reviews] and this week there's in excess of 15 reviews and a preview overview...

D'Ya Ken?

Sometimes the unexpected happens and you find yourself having something of an existential crisis; except not me, because I've always been a bit of a feminist. That said, the entire premise of Barbie is about that exact thing - something unexpected happening followed by an existential crisis. 

I went into this film really not expecting to like it and guess what happened, I thought it was an exceedingly good film - a movie that defied logic. Yes, it was a fantasy and it was endearingly silly, but it had a clear message and it was fun. It sagged a wee bit towards the end when Ken took centre stage and there was several musical interludes, but in general it took me (and the wife) by surprise and I can't remember how many times I actually laughed out loud. 

Margot Robbie, who I find a little annoying at times, was fantastic and Ryan Gosling as Ken was vacuous and pathetic and that was also fantastic. This was absolutely chock full of famous actors, many of who were British - there was even a cameo from Rob Bryden as Sugar Daddy Ken, oh and Helen Mirren does an excellent job as the narrator. There was a serious message here wrapped up in a bright pink and really rather silly movie and that is essentially women are taken for granted and it's a man's world. I left this film glad that I'd watched it and admonishing myself a little because I really shouldn't have thought that a Greta Gerwig film wasn't going to be something different and unexpected. See it, have your preconceptions blown apart; oh and it very much isn't for kids and I'm gobsmacked Mattel allowed it to be made.

My Psychic Wife

The problem is I can't tell you why my wife is psychic otherwise it will completely ruin the end of what was another exceptional episode (the second) of Lessons in Chemistry, but I will give you a clue. Halfway through she suggested the episode would end with something happening that I literally couldn't see and the episode ended with exactly what she suggested happening. It was uncanny and I'm still wondering if she'd read a synopsis of it without telling me.

This mini-series about a brilliant woman in a male dominated world could almost be an extension of Barbie in many ways - a brilliant, intelligent and good looking woman who is treated like an object by her male 'superiors' and a snob by her female colleagues has to battle the patriarchy to make a name for herself but it's an almost impossible task given the level of misogyny she has to suffer.

Brie Larson is great in this and because I know nothing of the source material every part is like a new day and a new lesson. This week her love affair with Calvin, which seemed doomed at the end of the first part is back on, but at least we now know why she's so uptight about being in a room alone with a solitary man - she was a victim of rape at her college and this has left her emotionally scarred. This particular bit of nastiness from her past was hinted at in the first part but we get confirmation and another valuable lesson in just how being a woman in 1951 was about as emancipated as being black. 

As I keep banging on, this is an Apple TV production and if you aren't subscribed to it or prepared to illegally download their products (they are richer than you'll ever be) then drop Netflix for it, you won't be disappointed. Oh and Elizabeth gets a dog called 6.30.

Because of the quirks of watching this, we watched episode three before I put this column to bed and I'm not going to elucidate on anything specific without giving away key elements of last week's. I will say that we learn more about 6.30 and he essentially narrates this episode, which is a stark examination of a human emotion; plus Elizabeth discovers she's pregnant; becomes friends with Harriet and gets fired. In many ways this was a much slower paced episode, but it's still very much a highlight of the week - in what has been a pretty good week of viewing given how recent weeks have been. One observation about Brie Larson - she might be Captain Marvel, but she's so fucking skinny she's almost two dimensional.

Trailer Trash 

I hate November. It's the worst month of any year. However on November 10th the new season of For All Mankind starts and anyone who follows this blog will know I rate this as one of, if not, the best, TV shows being made. It's now 2003 (because the show makes 11 year leaps with each season) and Mars is colonised and the space race is now between the CIA, the KGB and the North Koreans and there's an asteroid floating in space worth more money than the entire wealth of the planet earth...

Meanwhile on November 17th, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters starts - also on the fabulous Apple TV - and it's Godzilla, Kong and all the other Monarch monsters woven into a conspiracy-based TV series that ties all the films together and takes us on a different ride - complete with monstrous guest stars. It might be a load of shite, but I somehow suspect it will end up being better than all the films put together, especially if the trailers are anything to go by, which, of course, mean absolutely nothing given superhero trailers make them look brilliant and most turn out to be dog vomit.

I Didn't Feel at Ease with this Film Today

We like a bit of Melanie Lynskey - oo-er missus - we try to watch her whenever we can. However, I'm not a huge fan of Elijah Wood; I find him tedious and uninspiring, prone to playing annoying characters because I find him a relatively weak actor. His addition to the cast of Yellowjackets happened at the same time an incredibly good TV series jumped the shark.

The two actors worked together before that series in the Netflix film I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, which is a strange film with odd pacing and dysfunctional characters. Lynskey plays a care assistant in a post-op care home called Ruth who returns home from work one day to find her house has been burgled and when the police essentially give her a crime number and forget about it she decides to take the law into her own hands, with the aid of Tony - Wood - a man she threw dog shit at a day earlier...

What follows is like a Cohen Brothers film without the Cohen Brothers involvement, as this odd detective duo first find Ruth's stolen laptop in a rather bizarre confrontation involving ninja weapons and then stumble across the actual burglar when trying to track down Ruth's stolen silver, after she is warned off by the police who really still couldn't give a shit. The thing is that's kind of the point of the entire film, Ruth's growing dissatisfaction with the world and the people in it and while pursuing her stolen stuff she gets even more examples of how shitty her world view has become.

Like I said, this is a strange film with a lot of comedy violence; people being shot, fingers broken, Wood getting stabbed multiple times and nasty head injuries. The dialogue is odd and you get the impression that neither Lynskey or Wood's characters are supposed to be particularly clever, but then again none of the people in this film come out of it with a hi IQ level given some of the shit that goes on. I'm not convinced I liked it; there were some moments, but they were few and far between and there was too much... meh going on; like this was a good idea for an hour long story but needed severe padding to get it up to 90 minutes. Lynskey is good though and I find her far more attractive than some of the glamour actors of a similar age - mid-40s - even if that sounds a wee bit sexist in 2023.

As Finale's Go...

That was a bit of a let down... The final episode of season five of Brassic summed up the entire series - started well, could've been a lot better. Yet again it ended on a sort of cliffhanger as the comedy villains all circled for Vinnie and his gang again. There was a definite invitation for Michele Keegan's Erin to leave the show and a fleeting cameo from Damien Molony as his story ended. I know there's going to be another series, I hope it will be the last...

Unbelievably Awful

I know I never touch albums/CDs in this blog. Music tends to have its own place, but I wasn't going to waste a blog entry on this particular album just in case people thought I might like it. I've used the analogy of watching some TV to buying Genesis albums after 1979; that hope that the next one [album or series] would be as good as albums prior to 1979 and always being disappointed...

When Phil Collins left Genesis, I really thought we'd all been put out of our misery and the remaining members would go about producing their solo projects that I could relentlessly ignore. However in 1997, Rutherford and Banks announced a new Genesis album with a new lead singer - Stiltskin's Ray Wilson - it seemed like a logical album to avoid like the plague. Which I did for 26 years, despite my elder brother giving me a ripped copy of the album in the early 21st century. It has sat on my CD rack ever since, gathering dust and becoming the only CD in the house that has never been played EVER.

This last week or so, I have decided that I have so many CDs that I really need to play them again because if I don't the wife is going to have an awful lot of shit to throw away when I finally kark it. I mean, she'll have all that shit to dump anyhow, but at least I could die knowing that I'd listened to them all and thrown away all the things I'm probably never going to listen to again. I had a stack of about 100 or so CDs that were likely to be binned, but I gave them a listen to mainly to see if they could get a reprieve and quite a few did. In fact, a number of them I couldn't understand why I'd even put them on the crap stack [what a great term that is - Crap Stack].

The last one in the crap stack was Calling All Stations by 'Genesis' and today (17th October, 2023) I finally put it on. I made it to about a minute into the third track before I removed it from the CD player and hurled it into space, so it would burn up on re-entry, never to bother me ever again [I actually just threw it in the bin and then emptied said bin into the larger bin that will be collected later]. It was unbelievably awful. I've heard cats being castrated with spoons that sounded better. I've snored better tunes in my sleep and if there's anyone reading this who thinks this is an album of music - please, pour acid into your ears now. That is all. 

Let's Get Visible

There's an awful lot wrong with the logic in the 2020 version of The Invisible Man. Things happen that you know almost immediately wouldn't happen even if such a thing as an Invisible man existed, but the pacing and tension in this film is so intense you tend to forget the inconsistencies (well I did, but the wife was quick to spot them). 

Elizabeth Moss plays Cecilia, the abused victim of a violent but brilliant narcissist and the film starts with her enacting a daring escape from his 'prison'. However, despite her getting away and him faking his own death, Cecilia starts being 'haunted' by Adrian, her former partner. The problem is no one believes her and thinks she's just terribly traumatised, possibly borderline insane.

However, things start taking a grisly and violent turn as first her sister and then others fall foul of the psychopathic invisible man. There are some twists but in general it does a better job as a revenge thriller than it does as a horror film - although the horrors of being under the control of a violent narcissist far outweigh any fictional monster.

One point I've made before elsewhere: what is the point of being invisible? I know people say things like, 'Yes, but, you'd be invisible, that would be great, you could do all sorts of things!' To which I say, "Yes, but think about it, you'd be invisible. That means no one would see you. You would have to be extra aware of your surroundings because people in cars, buses or trucks wouldn't see you. People wouldn't see you; it would be incredibly dangerous for the invisible person and if you got killed, no one would see you so you'd just lie there decomposing and stinking up the place."

Back to the '80s

We decided to watch some more Melanie Lynskey and we'd heard good things about Candy, so we started watching this five-part mini-series and I will say one thing about the Americans - they have so many places that are stuck in time in that country that making a show that looks like it was actually made in 1980 is almost easy for them - almost any era from the 1920s to present day seems to have somewhere that can double up.

Jessica Biel is the eponymous Candy, while Lynskey plays her 'friend' Betty Gore, who probably suffers from some form of post-natal depression and is depicted as a woman who just might cause great annoyance among the people who know her. This is a series that is set in the middle of the Texas Bible Belt; a place where the bible sits on mantlepieces along with the family revolver.

This is the true story of a brutal murder that blows a tight knit community apart; except is it a murder? What we do know about this is it happened and there was a definitive outcome - a look on Wikipedia would spoil the ending for you almost immediately. There have also been four adaptations of this already, it's such a compelling and interesting piece of history, this one made in 2022 has taken a few liberties with the story, but hopefully not at the cost of the actual known truth. It's got great acting, looks fantastic and for nostalgia reasons alone is a must see, even if it feels a wee bit odd at times. 

Back to the '80s, Part Two

I used to play basketball when I was a teenager. I made the county squad a few times, but I was a regular for my school and sport club teams. I was reasonably good at it, because of my height I was a Guard and sometimes played Pivot when the main kid was off the pitch or sick. I used to understand the game and while it wasn't a particularly popular sport in the UK after school finished, it was important to many kids who didn't play football, cricket or rugby. 

We've had Air sitting on the Flash Drive of Doom for a few months; it's never been a priority but over the last week or so I've noticed a general disgruntled feeling emanating from the wife about the films on it and her general disdain for watching films. To be fair to her, there are a lot of films on it that either we've seen, she's not interested in or just don't seem very appealing. However, about 50% of the movies we've watched recently haven't been bad and she might just be feeling filmed out.

Anyhow. the film was much more interesting than either of us thought it was going to be. Matt Damon plays a kind of A&R man working for Nike who is charged with the responsibility of finding a rising basketball star that Nike could sponsor and get behind; he's supported by Jason Bateman (as head of marketing) and Ben Affleck as the Nike CEO, plus an assortment of other company men. When Damon's Sonny decides that the company needs to go for Michael Jordan, despite the player's complete refusal to even entertain Nike, it becomes the story of how Nike's Air Jordan was created and how the pitch to try and change the superstar's mind came to be. It's a factual biopic essentially, with a class A cast which probably lifts it above your average biopic. It's funny and poignant and much of the film revolves around everybody's attempts to woo Jordan's mother Deloris - played by the brilliant Viola Davis - the person who wore the trousers in that family. It's worth watching.

More Wrexham

One wonders if Rob and Ryan knew that taking on the Welsh football club they would be mining some TV gold? The latest two episodes of Welcome to Wrexham dropped and the focus was on the team's push for the title and the to-and-fro of their battle with Notts County for automatic promotion. Yet it was also about some of the people in the series - such as the Irish player Anthony Forde who took an indefinite leave of absence in light of his wife's brain tumour diagnosis; and the fan, who has been featured a lot and his battle against alcoholism and coping with his wife leaving him. The series has loads of reality TV perfection in it that's not down to the Hollywood stars involvement.

What has come to light recently is that McElhanney and Reynolds barely knew each other before buying the club, which might have been the brainchild of Humphrey Ker - the man who is currently the management liaison between the actors and the rest of the club's main people. The two stars met for the first time in person the day they went to Wrexham to see what they'd bought, having done all their work via Zoom and phone calls. However, it is clear that they have become firm friends as a result and if anything this series is better when it's dealing with actual people rather than the football team; which is amazing considering the titanic tussle between Wrexham and Notts Co was one of the most remarkable battles football in general has ever witnessed. It is still excellent television and comes highly recommended.

Pop Patrol

Jesus wept, musical episodes are just so Buffy. Old news, nothing new and really fucking annoying when all you want is for a fucking TV series to get to the end without wanking it up any further. Yes, I'm talking about Doom Patrol, which has just about worn my patience so thin it's like a 200 year old virgin's hymen...

Immortus blah blah blah. Yes it was good seeing Cliff and Larry in their real personas - Brendan Frazer is ... or was... good value for money, but this series is just a load of horse wank now. An all-powerful supervillain who is also a world class narcissist might sound like good TV but frankly it isn't and this episode really was the bottom of a really scraped barrel originally full of diarrhoea - the stinkiest kind. 

Again it's Michele Gomez who rescues this from being a truly awful episode but even she struggles as we suffer nearly 50 minutes of inexecrable dog shit. This is episode nine, there's four left and I suppose I've got to stick with it until the bitter end. This was DC's one single thing that lifted it above all the other wank it produces but now should be flushed down a very dirty toilet. 

Ginger's Snapped

On what can only be called a whim, we opted to watch something called Wolf Like Me with Isla Fisher and Josh Gad - someone who is famous for being the voice of Olaf in some Disney film about ice or snow or something. It is - the TV series not the film with Olaf in it - one of the best little shows we've seen for a long time. Its six parts weigh in at about 2½ hours in total and could easily have been a feature film. It's about a neurotic single dad and his depressed daughter and the werewolf dad falls in love with. It is a quite glorious comedy/fantasy/drama and I cannot recommend it enough.

Season one, which came out in 2022, starts with Gary - a widower - taking his problematic child, Emma, to school; she's seeing a therapist and doesn't have much of a relationship with her father who seems overly protective of her to the point where she literally cannot stand to be in the same room as him - she's 12 going on 40. He's at the end of his tether and doesn't know what to do.

Then they get hit by a car and their world changes almost instantly. Neither are hurt, but the woman who caused the accident - Mary - has a profound effect on Emma. What follows is a slow and sometimes awkward period where Gary and Mary do their best to avoid each other but fail spectacularly; the main problem is they're both attracted to each other but Mary keeps doing strange things and Gary isn't in a good place so he doesn't really know how to deal with it. Then Gary follows her home because she inadvertently picked up his car keys and he quickly discovers that Mary really isn't what she seems to be; she's a werewolf.

That's the first half of the series, the second half is all about Mary and Gary falling in love and dealing with the fact she has to lock herself in her basement for three days every month and eat live goats and chickens, while he deals with the aftermath. Then she discovers she's pregnant and they decide it's time to tell Emma about Mary's situation, so they go off on a camping trip - conveniently a few days before a super moon - and naturally the car breaks down, leaving them all in a real pickle. It is then, for the first time in the six episodes that you see Mary as the wolf...

This is a wonderfully funny love story with a quirky 'problem' getting in the way of true love. Josh Gad is excellent as neurotic Gary, Isla Fisher is sexy and funny as Mary (it's quite weird that she was 45 when she made this) and Ariel Donoghue is fantastic as Emma and we now have season two to binge on, but not until we get a few other things out of the way first. If you get the chance, you really need to watch this despite it being Australian - don't let that put you off.

Gen Memories

Gen V continues to become more interesting and intriguing even if I'm getting too old for this teenage kind of shit. It's a strange series at the best of times but this week it got very weird and didn't give us an explanation for something that probably needed addressing even with a throwaway line.

This week's episode pretty much takes place inside inside Cate's - Maddie Phillips - memories as the rest of the gang confront her about her mind controlling shit and end up inside her head, suggesting she's probably far more powerful than any of them believed. There's also a cameo from good old Jenson Ackles reprising his role as Soldier Boy but as Cate's dream boyfriend and masturbation tool. 

Cate's ability is essentially killing her and she's been forced to use it for years by Dean Shetty as we learn that The Woods is far more nastier than we imagined and that the Dean might not be working for Vought at all. The series is fairly going at a pace now after what were a very slow opening three episodes given how much has happened in the last three parts. With just a couple left before it either ends or leaves us on a cliffhanger for season two, it has won us over, even if we struggle a little bit with some of inconsistencies. 

For example - what happened to the other guy who gets dragged into Cate's memories - he's despatched by the memory of Luke - Cate's now dead boyfriend - and no mention of him was made when they returned to the real world. The other thing is more general: I've made it quite clear in the past that I struggle with nudity in TV shows now, especially if it's unnecessary, but if two people are going to spend the night shagging (and this applies to other shows) how come, despite being in bed, they seem to keep most of their underwear on or in post coital scenes how come they have all their underwear on? Do they shag and then get partially dressed before lying in each other's arm in a warm glow smelling of sweaty popcorn?

A Timely Intervention

Loki reverted back to type in many ways this week. The tragic events of last week seemed to get swept under the carpet as Loki and Mobius go back to the 1890s and a burgeoning Chicago. They're in pursuit of the Ren Slayer and Miss Minutes but instead they stumble upon a much bigger prize...

This was another episode that played to the audience rather than really moved the series along. While the sets were magnificent and there is a genuine sense that the people making this really enjoy making it, the fact that so many billions of people died at the end of the previous episode seemed to be breezed over because there's a Kang variant on the scene and that's exactly what they need to save the TVA (and if that's too many spoilers I apologise but unlike other current TV shows this is probably the most difficult to do a spoiler free review because it's so plot specific).

Sylvie who has grown a bit annoying does the right thing at the end of this episode, while Ren Slayer's purpose seems to have gone AWOL; I rate Gugu Mbatha-Raw, she's great, but I kind of lost the reason she's even in it or why her mission has even got a reason for existing. We did learn much more about Miss Minutes and for a while you get the impression she's the real villain here - and she might be - or it might be Sylvie because she's still a far looser canon than 'our Loki' or it might be, as suggested on a couple of Tube of You videos I watched, O.B. who has a lot of reasons to be the actual bad guy in this series, many of which he outlined in the opening part. Or it might be Victor Timely - Jonathan Majors - who we get our first exposure of and when I say exposure it was essentially all about him and whether or not Miss Minutes is creating a paradox by completing the plan given to her by He Who Remains, of which Timely is a variant... There was too much borderline slapstick in this and not enough pathos, plus I'm not sure I rate Majors as an actor; in fact I'd go as far to say that his namesake Lee Majors was a much better actor...

Time Cops

The opening part of Bodies was intriguing if a little contrived - four naked bodies with a bullet wound to the left eye in four different times - 1890, 1941, 2023 and 2053 - and all in exactly the same place, in the same pose and all the victims sport a tattoo of three vertical lines dissected by a perpendicular one and these are all on the wrists of the victims.

In 1890, the detective investigating this crime in the East End of London might be a closet homosexual who's only suspect/witness to that specific murder is a journalist and gay. In 1941, the detective in charge of the case is a Jew and has a far more tacit involvement than he wants his colleagues to know. In 2023, the detective is not a detective but a police officer who also happens to be a Muslim woman who was specifically led to the spot where the body is in this timeline. Oh and in 2053... you get the idea, except maybe you don't.

This is the genius of the imagination of my friend Si Spencer who died in 2021, so all I can hope for is Netflix paid his wife Colleen enough money for the adaptation rights. All eight parts dropped at the same time, but we have quite a few shows we're watching at a slower pace so I suspect we'll still be watching this come next week's blog, but it was a solid start even if I felt there was something missing from it - which might be found in subsequent episodes.

Next Time...

More of the above; some films and anything else that comes along in the next seven days.