Modern Culture - The Good, The Bad and the WTF

There's a lot more to get through this week as TV makes a comeback and I discover films I hadn't seen. Don't forget there be spoilers ahead, so tread carefully or avoid...

Let's Get Serious

Loki is a light-hearted TV series about the Asgardian god of mischief, yes? Not any more. This was the episode where the fun went out of the series and it suddenly got a little grim and went off in a dark direction that I never saw coming. I'm wondering if anyone did.

I was probably very wrong about that first episode and the reason for its existence because it became clear in episode two of this second series that the new characters were there for a reason and that reason was to take the show into new, darker, places. Although to be fair it probably needed something to happen because for all the serious stuff in season one it still had this undercurrent of 'comedy' about it. 

I have to admit that I understand why critics rate this series so highly, it's because it's bloody good television that just got a whole lot better. I really don't want to spoil it because it deserves to be seen fresh, but the TVA is in big trouble and half of it has just gone rogue with murderous intent. This week we see the proper return of Sylvie, we discover just how important OB is and the partnership between Loki and Mobius finally hits its stride; if the rest of the series is as good as this episode then we might be able to forget the last few, rather dire, MCU TV series. Also a special mention for the TVA set; it's a wonderfully anachronistic mix of future technology and the past - it works as well as the actors.

Also Getting Serious...

The wife and I agreed that this would be the last episode of Gen V we'd watch if something didn't happen to change our minds. Guess what? Something did happen and it's changed our minds. There was an improvement in part four but not enough to save it from the scrap heap, it did prolong its demise and in part five it finally delivered.

After the events of the fourth episode, our main group of teens wake up the next morning with no memories of the last day - which then turns out to be the last two days - it seems they've lost that time and have no idea what happened to it. When Sam turns up at Emma and Marie's they have no knowledge of him and it sets off a set of events that make 'our heroes' realise that they're either being manipulated or they haven't a clue what's really going on and then Marie discovers they've all had trackers implanted into their necks and that one of them is a traitor.

It was the shortest episode so far - at 35 minutes - but it was also by far the best one and rolled along at a cracking pace and we now have a definite direction and the kids know there's someone who doesn't want them to know what's going on; the problem is who else is in on it and how do they deal with a friend who is also a traitor. The series gets a reprieve and I'd like to think that we've got past the introductory episodes and we're heading for the meat and bone of this first season.

Time's Wonky Arrow

Look, without being conceited, both the wife and I are intelligent people, we understand shit; she's a font of knowledge and I, among other things, am an aficionado of time travel movies. Three years ago, we watched Tenet and I wish we could remember what we had to say about it because we watched it again and ... nope, not got a clue. Nor did we remember much about it apart from the weird car chase and someone jumping off a boat.

Essentially, this is a film about stopping a man from destroying all life on earth by all means necessary. That man is Kenneth Branagh, as a dying Russian oligarch arms dealer and the people who have to stop him are Neil - Robert Pattinson - and the Protagonist - John David Washington; there are others but these are the two main people. That much seems understandable, however it starts to get complicated when you realise that time plays a big part in the story - time as in the future, the present and the past and this is where I pretty much lost it - which is to say about 15 minutes into the film when the concept of the future sending stuff back to the present or the past which then exists in an inverted state, meaning it doesn't act like linear time, it acts backwards in a forwards kind of way and like you're struggling to understand that sentence, following and understanding this film is somewhere between WTF and unfathomable. What is also difficult to get your head around is to exist in the past you have to have your own oxygen/air supply because... faux science... so how does Elizabeth Debicki exist in the past - in the same time as her past self - without an air supply? Is this a mistake? Did Christopher Nolan not realise this? Did I miss something?

It is quite an excellent movie - the faults aside - even if you don't really understand it. I expect it's the kind of film you need to watch several times before you start to get a rudimentary comprehension of what's happening, happened and going to happen. Except it's literally a whole bunch of paradoxes on top of each other, which might all work out in the end, but because we're in paradox city there's no guarantee anything is as it seems. I really want to be able to give you an idea of why you should watch this film if you haven't seen it (or want to watch it again to see if you're more the wiser), but it's pretty much impossible. You might be watching a film that is both forward in time for half and then backwards in time for the other half, but I'm not sure that is even correct. I don't know. I'm not sure I will ever know. I expect it has a lowish rating on IMDB because most people just thought WTAF and marvelled at the bizarre special effects before watching an episode of Only Connect to get their heads straight. I'm amazed I've written so much about it - not that any of it makes much sense. 

Not A Superhero Film

Every so often you stumble across a film that pushes all the right buttons and you wonder why. Fast Color is a film that doesn't grab you by the balls; it doesn't have you on edge of your seat and despite having super powered individuals isn't a superhero film, even if the ones with powers are true heroes. However, it is compelling, beautifully acted and is an excellent example of what you can do with this genre of movie.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Ruth, who is on the run and trying to get away from someone or some people; she is desperate and she's trying to cover all of her tracks. She's running out of options and it looks as though her last salvation is to go home. Ruth is capable, it seems, of causing earthquakes and it soon becomes clear that she's being tracked by the US government. This is a world where it hasn't rained for eight years and civilisation is on the brink. The only place left for her to go is back to her mother and to the child she left with her many years earlier - in acrimonious circumstances. Ruth is from a family of people with unique abilities, but they have kept their secrets very secret and now that is in danger of crumbling and exposing everything to the wrong people.

Ruth's mother, Bo played by Lorraine Toussant has brought Lila, Ruth's daughter up like her own and when her own daughter crashes back into their lives it takes everything she can to not push her away again. When her lover and Ruth's father - the brilliant David Strathairn - informs them that the government is in town and on Ruth's trail everything comes to a head.

This is a slow pot boiler of a film with excellent performances and a sense of mystery about it. It focuses more on the people rather than their powers but they're always in the background because all the women in their family have them it's just that Ruth has never been able to harness hers properly. This film - made in 2018 - reminds me a lot of Midnight Special another story about someone with special abilities being chased across country by the authorities, but this is much more underplayed, almost desolate. It is an extremely well made movie - by Julia Hart - and deserves to be seen and appreciated. It has an excellent soundtrack - a mix of classics and some wonderful ambient music from Rob Simonsen. At the moment it's very much the film of the week.

The Devils Made Me Do It

There has only really been one film about demonic possession, all the rest were rip-offs, imitations and largely rubbish. The Exorcist was pretty much the first high profile film to deal with the subject and it has never really been surpassed. Most films or TV series about possession just don't pass muster and if we want to be honest about it the slightly ludicrous nature of the idea - outside of mental illness - means it's quite difficult to accept without either lots of scepticism or derision.

That said, The Exorcism of Emily Rose is possibly the closest thing you'll get to a serious movie about alleged demonic possession. It has a pretty good cast - Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Deborah Carpenter, Colme Feore to name just a few of the people in it - and it treats its subject matter with a sense of maturity. It is also more about a court case than it's about a girl possessed by six demons. Emily Rose might have had a serious mental illness or she might have been possessed by demons, whatever she was it killed her and her parish priest is charged with her murder because the law looked at him and saw a scapegoat.

This is a film about beliefs - the prosecutor is a deeply religious man, the defence counsel is an agnostic woman - the juxtaposition is one of the things that makes it such an interesting watch. However, there are a number of holes in its plot which make it feel like the people who made it chickened out - although I'm not sure how or where. Generally speaking though it's a good film, well made with some excellent acting and more importantly it's a little creepy - which The Exorcist wasn't. The basic premise is was Emily mentally ill or was she possessed or did she believe she was possessed as a result of mental illness?  As we can't prove God's existence, we then can't prove demonic possession and mental illness is as good an explanation as any. Downsides - it feels a little like a TV film in its necessity to not overplay the possession part and to treat the subject seriously it avoided shocks and schlock. It is still a good movie even if it wears its faults on its sleeve.

More Broken Than Brassic

After the opening two episodes of Brassic, I suppose the series was going to take on a bit of a lull, although the third part should have been a riot because its main focus was Tommo - the sexually ambivalent, slightly mad new right hand man of Vinnie's. Ryan Sampson [pictured] has been the break out actor in this series; from a small bit part in the first two series, his rise to prominence is probably down to Sampson's ability to turn a quite loathsome character into an essential part of the madness.

Tommo is the ex-manager of the local gentleman's club, owner of a 'fuck wagon' - a kind of mobile brothel - and one of the chief protagonists in Vinnie's drug selling business. He is a man of highly questionable morals and he's just discovered he has a German son and this has, in his own words, 'somewhat fucked me up.' However, what should have been yet another example in how to escalate the madness in this TV series, it was actually quite subdued, almost psychoanalytic in its story telling. Vinnie - Joe Gilgun - takes something of a back seat in this and a few of the subsequent episodes; although his own bi-polar disorder and shit upbringing are explored when he meets his new psychoanalyst. The entire middle section of this series felt like a scene setter for the finale, where we discover what happened to Dylan?

I'm beginning to feel as though my love for this show is waning. When I said last week that sometimes you wonder why you're watching it, well I'm entering that phase again and feel it needs something to bring it back into life, not just guest stars and Tommo getting off his head again.

Kingpin versus Aunt May

What happens when you put Marisa Tomei and Vincent D'Onofrio in the same film?

I don't know, what happens when you put Marisa Tomei and Vincent D'Onofrio in the same film?

You get Happy Accidents. A film about a man who might be a time traveller and a love story between him and the girl he's come from the future to save; or at least that's the premise of the story. It's a lot like K-Pax for much of the 100 or so minutes with Tomei (the most recent Aunt May) and D'Onofrio (the Kingpin from Daredevil) meeting, falling in love and then it all goes a little bit weird when Sam (D'Onofrio) tells Ruth (Tomei) he's from 2470. From that point on the film takes on an 'Is he from the future or is he just very insane?' perspective with Ruth not knowing but beating herself up about it because she's got a catalogue of failed relationships behind her and Sam seems to tick every box she needs and she doesn't want him to become the latest in a long line of arseholes she's fallen for.

It's a nice film, although it feels a bit dated and feels very low budget, but don't let that detract or distract you because it's also very enjoyable and entertaining. Tomei was and still is a very attractive woman and seeing D'Onofrio looking young and with hair is a little off-putting. The supporting cast are excellent and the addition of Holland Taylor as Ruth's therapist was strange as she played Bill Hodge's next door neighbour Ida in three series of Mr Mercedes and is now 80 years old - in this she was nearly 60 and looked older in 2000 than she did in 2020.

The Thing From the Gas Station

If you want to watch a concise and impactful little horror then I can't recommend Splinter enough. It's 80 minutes long and doesn't really hang about. It has six cast members and is mainly set inside a gas station in the middle of nowhere, Hicksville, USA.

The film starts with loved up couple Polly and Seth going on a camping trip to celebrate their anniversary, but when their tent breaks they decide to go to a motel instead. That's when trouble starts, because further down the road is Dennis (Shea Whigham - the only actor you'll recognised) and Lacey his drugged up girlfriend and they're not nice people. They manage to get Polly and Seth to stop and that's when everything goes to hell in a handbasket, because they are taken hostage and forced to drive the fugitive couple to whatever destination they're aiming for. Except that never happens; first off they get a puncture, then the car overheats and they're forced to stop at a filling station that appears to be deserted...

Something has escaped a local lab and it's after blood - warm blood - something humans have a fair bit of. After consuming and taking over the gas station employee, it lays siege on the four in the car, killing Lacey almost immediately and forcing the other three into the station with no way of escaping. What follows is a taut and quite creepy scaled down re-imagining of The Thing - although it isn't quite; it's the most comparable film I can think of as the parasitic creature waits for the humans to make a mistake or give it the chance to infiltrate the inside of the garage. There's a degree of contrived plotting, especially involving Shea Whigham's redemption, but equally when faced with something you can't explain and having lost your arm you might be inclined to change your worldview of things, however stupid you might have originally been depicted as.

It's a film I'd never heard of until the other day, but it is one that I'd recommend to fans of good horror films because this is a full on in yer face bit of nastiness with surprisingly good acting, special effects and script, especially for something you might think is going to be a low budget poorly made movie. It was never going to win any awards, but it's creepy enough to make your flesh crawl and there's a good enough Thing vibe to ensure you're hooked until the very end. It's another film this week I'd recommend - that's not a bad average given recent weeks.

Poop Patrol

And so it came to pass that the final half of the last series of Doom Patrol appeared and perhaps the best thing that could have happened would have been not to release it and hope that as time passed people would simply forget all about it...

I'm beyond disappointed. For a TV series that started so brilliantly, with a first season to absolutely die for, this has gone down the toilet in spectacular fashion. Only Michelle Gomez - an addition in series three - has come out of this with anything like a thumbs up. Perhaps it was Timothy Dalton's reluctance to make any more episodes after the arrival of Covid that killed it or maybe it was because this was maybe just a one season wonder that should never have been allowed to continue? Everything the showrunner did after that first, exceptional, series has been an increasingly stinky pile of shit.

The first two parts of Series 4B dropped and I suppose it's the amount of time since it was last on - almost a year - that made me feel a modicum of excitement and then I remembered the cliffhanger the show ended on and all hope was lost. It has gone from a bizarre and unusual superhero idea to essentially a lot of self-pitying wankers seeing who can shout the loudest. Cliff - Robotman - Steel is an arsehole who shouts a lot. Crazy Jane is a bad tempered idiot who shouts a lot. Rita Farr is a self-pitying blowhard who shouts a lot. Larry Trainor is equally self-pitying and self-loathing and speaks very calmly all the time, regardless of what threat they might be facing and Vic - Cyborg - Stone is everyone of the above and completely out of place in this series from the very beginning. He belongs in the JLA not with a bunch of weirdos battling arse monsters and people who don't exist.

I'm at a real crossroads because I've persevered with this show the way I persevered with the rock band Genesis, hoping it would regain the heights of its inaugural season but it's just been a lot of dribbly shite only enlivened by the aforementioned Michele Gomez who has added a bit of zing to a bunch of worthless wankers, who, incidentally, don't do anything super-heroic and usually rely on someone else to solve whatever mess they've got themselves into. Will I watch the final six parts? I really don't know, it was a struggle getting through the 75 minutes of the first two parts; I'm almost positive my life won't be enriched by subjecting myself to the end...

Fall Fails

I have an admission to make, I don't rate Mike Flanagan as highly as it seems most other people do. I struggle to find the positives that others do in his TV series and films and his latest, an contemporary update and retelling of Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher hasn't really ignited my appetite. It's just about okay and when you've only watched the opening part you'd expect it to be better than just 'okay', wouldn't you?

It feels like this adaptation is trying to take a leaf out of Succession, the TV show about who is going to inherit the multi-billion dollar company owned by Brian [Not the Scientist) Cox. The Ushers own a massively successful pharmaceutical company that appears to be as dodgy as fuck, but because of their wealth and influence they get away scot free every time they get into trouble.

This latest attempt at telling the tale of the fall of Usher starts with a court case and the US government trying very hard to finally pin something on Roderick Usher, the patriarch of the family and a ruthless bastard if ever there was one (although apparently not as ruthless or bloodthirsty as his sister Madeline) and the revelation that the case could be turned on its head by a whistleblower from inside the family prepared to give State's evidence against them. The problem is we're talking about a mega-rich family who are all monstrous in their own way and I don't really give a flying fuck, even when all six of Roderick's children die - as revealed in the first episode setting up an eight-part story told mainly in flashback. 

The newspapers all seem to think it's 'deliciously creepy,' 'gleefully terrifying' and 'a story for now' and other hyperbole that makes you think Netflix has paid reviewers off handsomely for their praise - as is the case with so many other Flanagan shows which I've struggled with, such as his adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and the series I thought was a massive cop-out and let down Midnight Mass - I half expect him to do a series called The Unscary Haunting of Your TV. This series starring Bruce Greenwood, Mary McDonnell, Carla Gugino (who appears in so many Flanagan films and TV shows you have to wonder if there's something going on between them), Henry Thomas and Mark Hamill just didn't hit the right notes - although I somehow suspected it wouldn't - so we have decided that it's not for us and we've dumped it.

Wales Holds Reynolds' Heart

I totally understand why Welcome To Wrexham is such an addictive TV series even if it's about football. I know people who don't like football who watch this because it's compelling viewing and Ryan Reynolds is in it.

The latest episode is a 40 minute (again out of chronological order to an actual footballing year) exploration of the FA Cup and how Wrexham almost pulled off two giant killing acts by beating Championship side Coventry before succumbing to Sheffield United in a replay after being less than two minutes from causing yet another shock win.

It's funny that it's the Americans who make a documentary series about a Welsh football club and do such a good job at it, but this specific episode is really about focusing on how Ryan Reynolds has gone from this excited superstar who co-owns a non-league football team to someone who literally lives and breathes Wrexham as a football fan. While his football team often steals the show, it's this one where you see how much the Deadpool actor loves his adopted football team and the game as a whole. It's one of the TV highlights of the week, so much so Wrexham have become a team I keep a eye out for other than my beloved Spurs and the mighty Stenhousemuir. 

Tossed Salad and Scrambled Shite

We managed 17 minutes of the Frasier reboot. Not a single laugh was uttered or even hinted at by either of us and when I suggested I'd had enough, the wife encouraged me to turn the bloody thing off. It simply wasn't as funny as the papers told us it was; but saying that I struggled to find anything particularly funny about Frasier Crane in his original series, finding most of the humour came from everyone else rather than the eponymous protagonist.

There's no Niles or Daphne - both taking the best option available and not opting to drag their careers even further down the toilet, but there is their son, who is essentially a younger, crappier version of Niles. There is also Frasier's son who is gay, in the closet with his father and just like his father not very likeable. There's Frasier's old Oxford buddy played by Nicholas Lyndhurst, who teaches at Harvard and is terminally unfunny and the head of the college, who unsurprisingly is also not funny. It's a load of crap and again one wonders what some reviewers are on to think this is anything but the shittiest of barrel scrapings imagined. Avoid like the plague, especially if you were a fan of the unfathomably popular original series.

Cooking with Captain Marvel

In a week full of surprises and disappointments on the TV front it was good to finish the week with something we both enjoyed and look forward to watching more of, although I wonder just what and how the story in Lessons in Chemistry is going to go and whether it's a limited series or there's plans for multiple series.

Brie Larson stars as Elizabeth Zott - a female chemist in a very male world, who just happens to be on the spectrum and is traumatised by an event that took place when she was studying her MA at university. Not only is she an excellent chemist, she's also a very good cook - but of course, cooking is just chemistry with different forms of chemicals.

The opening episode introduces us to Elizabeth who is struggling in a male dominated workplace in 1951 and is expected to be like all the other women where she works, subservient and feminine - something she isn't at all. Larson pulls off the slightly-backward-in-her-emotions subject of the series very well, while Lewis Pullman is excellent as the male chemist who sees her potential (and is also quite attracted to her) and pulls her from the obscurity of working in a lab with bang average chemists and gets her to work with him as a lab tech - in name only - but also to work on her own ideas about the origins of life.

This is yet another example of a brilliant Apple TV show, a company that seems to excel in picking the right shows to produce. It was an extremely entertaining opener and we've still got the second part to watch before it goes weekly for the other six parts. Again, it's yet another series I hope people get the chance to watch; in fact I'm getting to the stage where I'd recommend my friends who don't believe in breaking piracy laws to dump one of their other streaming packages and get Apple TV instead.

I think the positives have outweighed the negatives this week and that makes a change!

Next Time...

Gen V, Loki, Lessons in Chemistry, the finale of Brassic, possibly Doom Patrol, it really depends if I have the will to live with it and a couple of UK TV shows that we have on iPlayer to catch up with. I'm looking forward to Bodies, an adaptation of my old friend Si Spencer's graphic novel which he sadly isn't around to see. 

On the film front, there's a good chance we'll watch Barbie next week as we almost did this week, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, and a whole bunch of new old films to work our way through off the Flash Drive of Doom. You can tell autumn has arrived and the nights are drawing in, there's something on TV you might want to watch. 

So, after a bumper week where it looked like all we did was watch TV, expect another bumper week next time around...