Modern Culture - A Week of Near Perfection

The usual disclaimers about spoilers, telling you stuff you don't want to see and shit like that...

The Final Time

Wow. Just fucking wow. Loki ended and cemented itself as possibly one of the greatest things the MCU has ever done just as it looks like the MCU is about to die on its feet. What an absolutely brilliant 50 minutes of television in a week that has already thrown up examples of just how good the medium can be. This was unexpected, quite brilliant and desperately sad all rolled into a finale to absolutely die for.

The episode that concludes this epic series was called Glorious Purpose, but might as well have been called Yggdrasil, which is the sacred tree in Norse cosmology and that does give some clues to what Loki is all about; but what this episode really did was showcase what a brilliant actor Tom Hiddleston is and what an unbelievably awesome story about time, time travel and the time lines unfolded in front of us. Imagine Groundhog Day but on a cosmic level, an ending that throws into question the existence of Kang the Conqueror - giving Marvel an out if they don't want to use this character or Jonathan Majors again and breaking the hearts of so many people who have come to love this adopted son of Odin. I simply can't get over it, At the end I turned to the wife and all I could do was squeak out three words, "Brilliant, just brilliant."

The entire two seasons were a redemption arc, because the Loki snatched out of time in Endgame was a complete bastard and not the Loki we had seen in Thor films. I think it did just that; the rest of it was just window dressing. In reality all the TVA and Sylvie did was make Loki realise he was growing as a person and others meant more to him than his own personal achievements. He gets his redemption but the sacrifice he makes to get it is possibly the most heroic finale for a comics character I've ever witnessed. This is a 540 minute feature film; I can't think of any other way to describe it; everything from the first episode to the end slots together perfectly. I know people thought this series was boring, but I fear they didn't see the bigger picture.

What I didn't notice until the very end was this series was directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead - the guys behind The Endless and many other weird and wonderful horror, Sci-Fi and fantasy films. These are two people who know how to make weird and this is one thing you can safely say about this finale - it's as fucking weird as fuck. It will drag you in all manner of directions and it will make you think there is only one possible ending to put things right, but then it does something unexpected, fabulously heroic and, seriously, it made me want to cry. There won't be a third series.

Quiz Night

From the moment I saw the trailer for Quiz Lady I wanted to see it. I'm not a fan of Awkwafina nor Sandra Oh, but there was something about this movie that made me want to watch it. Maybe because I thought the wife would like it - she being a quiz lady herself.

This is a zany sisters comedy and it's very funny. It's rare I have many LOL moments in films nowadays, but this had a number of them, in fact far too many for me to pick out one or two to look out for - although Sandra Oh's wrist might be one of the silliest and daft things I've seen in a film for a long time - I missed loads of dialogue, had to rewind it and then promptly missed the dialogue again because I was still laughing so hard. 

We probably are all aware that Nora Lum (aka Awkwafina) is a funny woman, she was a surprisingly good addition to the Shang-Chi film, but I had absolutely no idea that Oh could be so... excellent. Her comic timing is brilliant and her portrayal as Jenny, the older of two sisters, is a thing of beauty - she's equal parts hilarious and annoying, while Lum's Anne is essentially a misanthropic, friendless lump, who just happens to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of almost everything and is an avid viewer of a nightly quiz show presented by Terry McTeer - aka Will Ferrell. 

Circumstances - the disappearance and sudden eviction of their mother from her residential care home - bring the sisters back together and it's clear that the 10 year age gap and basic disdain for each other is what drove them apart, but now reunited it's time to make some changes, that is until Mr Linguine, their 20 year old pug dog is kidnapped by gangsters and they have to raise $80,000 to get the dog back - cue the quiz show and what is essentially a riot of very funny scenes. Holland Taylor plays Anne's next door neighbour - she does a great line in elderly next door neighbours, albeit this time looking more like her actual 80 years than she did in Mr Mercedes and there's a poignant final film appearance by Paul Reubens, playing himself. There's very little in this movie that isn't good, even the post credit 'epilogues' are a riot, even if the one with the aforementioned Reubens foretells the death of the next door neighbour when it turned out to be the actor instead. I'd recommend this if you fancy a laugh.

Time and Again and Again and Again...

I saw that the Sky sci-fi series The Lazarus Project was returning for a second series so I read up on it and thought 'why didn't we watch this first time around?' So we did. Jesus wept, what a grim and nasty as fuck programme it is; it's also bloody excellent and plays with time in a truly unique way.

The people who work for the Lazarus Project are the only people who know that time gets reset, sometimes over and over again and that July 1st is the date to keep an eye on. The job of the project is to prevent world ending events, but sometimes it takes many many times and if they fail they have to start again, from July 1st. It exacts a huge mental toll on many of them and gradually as the series continues the back stories of the key players are revealed, because most of them have an injection that allows them to remember, while two characters are 'mutants' who have a gene that means they don't need the injection but they do relive life over and over again. Oh and did I say it was a grim and nasty as fuck show?

It also does a good job of explaining Déjà vu by following the lives of individual members and ex-members of the project and how they got to where they got to, including a moment in Eastern Europe that has to be replayed over and over again, exacting a heinous toll on the project, especially one team member who has to give birth to her daughter literally hundreds of times. Paapa Essiedu is the new recruit - an app developer who suddenly starts to live six months of his life over and over while all around him seem oblivious. The effects on him and his relationship with his girlfriend are harrowing until he's recruited and starts to learn all about time; he also learns about his team, past team members and how 'harrowing' isn't even touching the surface. Did I say this was a grim and nasty as fuck show?

The last few parts however take us in an altogether different direction and one that spells certain disaster for many of the cast as secrets start to unravel and then the Chinese develop their own version of the 'time machine' and it goes spectacularly wrong. Think Groundhog Day but as a nightmare spread over three weeks. Obviously it ends on a cliffhanger, of sorts, and sets up season two - which starts next week - extremely well. The entire premise of a world saving - at what cost - agency working above and beyond top secret needs to be addressed more - it has been an underlying theme throughout this season, but Tom Burke's character Rebrov starts to look more like the hero of the thing rather than the villain as time progresses, so you never know for sure what is what. The decisions of the Project might save the lives of many billions of people but the psychological toll it casts means that the people who work for it are essentially walking mental breakdowns and even the hardest of hearts and minds get ground down after a while.

I struggled to see why this series had so many negative reviews; admittedly a large number of those reviews came from the USA but many came from here and it does question whether some of the audience for intelligent science fiction should really not bother because anything more than Play School must be a massive problem for them. This is thinking man's Sci-Fi; it's cerebral and can be quite mundane in an explosive way (if that even makes sense). People who lack the ability to understand something as clever as this should not watch it, or perhaps have time rewound so that someone can prevent them from watching it. Oh and did I say this was a grim and nasty as fuck show?

The Pregnancy Test

Robert Downey Junior has not been in much at all since Tony Stark croaked at the end of Endgame. He was in the woefully awful Doolittle, which we haven't and won't watch and he's in Oppenheimer, which we'll see next week - Saturday night to be precise. He's been on something of a hiatus and frankly there's not been much he's been in that we haven't seen and largely enjoyed. However, we'd never seen the 2010 comedy Due Date about a man who needs to get from Atlanta to LA for the birth of his baby. This was also the first time we'd seen the ubiquitous (to a number of these blog entries) Michelle Monaghan for a few weeks.

This film in many ways is a kind of version of Trains, Planes and Automobiles and equally it isn't. It is about a man who has to get across 2000 miles of the USA with an extra arsehole, but unlike that classic movie from the last century, this film has Zach Galifianakis in it and he is about the most dislikeable actor ever to grace a screen and while I'm aware that this was a deliberate intention of this film it doesn't stop it from being correct and while the entire premise was for RDJ to have to travel with Galifianakis all the way, Galifianakis spoiled what was a middling comedy with some great acting from RDJ.

Galifianakis plays Ethan Tremblay an aspiring actor who is going to LA to make it big in Hollywood. He can't act, he's an absolute wanker (literally), a man child and RDJ's character really should never have warmed to this cretinous moron. If it had been me I would have killed the annoying fucker and left him in a ditch in Arizona. The problem I have is I get it, I totally get it - he's supposed to be like that, it's what the film is about; I just think Galifianakis is an arsehole and not a very good actor, so playing a guy who's an arsehole and wants to be an actor and isn't very good at it seemed like bad casting to me, although I'll admit it also smacks of genius. 

I acknowledge that The Hangover has its moments, however it's largely spoiled by the presence of Galifianakis. I looked at his IMDB entry and noticed apart from the Hangover sequels his film career was basically between 2009 and 2011, that's about 23 months too long; he's made other films but you've never fucking heard of them (apart from Birdman which was good but I forgot he was in it, so it couldn't have been an important part otherwise he would have spoiled it). I wonder if RDJ thought the same when he was making this film or perhaps he was wondering why he was making this film at all.

Trailer Trash (with actual spoilers)

The final teaser trailer for The Marvels arrived four days before the film's release and I'm still not convinced that what we're going to get is anything like a coherent or half decent movie, especially now that Marvel are touting it like it's going to be some mega important part of the Multiverse saga - a concept that has so far failed spectacularly to ignite interest. It appears the villain of the piece - Dar-Benn - has torn a hole in the fabric of reality allowing things from other places into the MCU, but I somehow suspect this is going to be the subplot that is relegated to the background as the three heroes battle the aforementioned villain to the finish. I also suspect that this could well be the make or break film for the MCU and all those reshoots we heard about will all be to do with this hole in reality and we now know for sure that we're going to be teased with X-Men - I've seen the post credits scene and I can confirm this is the case.

There's a rumour going around that Disney is prepared to throw money at Robert Downey Junior, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Hemsworth to reprise their roles in the next Avengers film because they've finally realised that very few people give a shit about the MCU without its icons. Personally, I think this is major wishful thinking. Kevin Feige did say that RDJ is part of the Marvel family and did not rule out a return by him or any other of the 'fallen Avengers' but equally he might have just said that because he knows his arse is on the line.

Whatever the MCU does, it will be short term and it won't solve the fact that superhero films are no longer a box office certainty and what is needed is a long break from them, not attempting to rediscover the past when the viewing public is exhausted. As was proved this weekend when Marvel announced there would only be one 2024 film - Deadpool 3 - all the others are either put back to 2025 or cancelled and that includes the finished and in the can new Captain America film. The numbers up for the MCU, you mark my words...

The Kitten of Wall Street

While I was faintly aware of the Game Stop stocks and shares business back in 2021, it was something that largely passed me by. You see I struggled to fully understand Trading Places, mainly because despite having a few shares in the company that used to be called Standard Life, I got them by virtue of being a customer and not opting for the cash option, so now I get about £25 a year in cash for my meagre amount of shares, but I don't really understand how they work.

The film Dumb Money is all about Game Stop and how a guy who had as many You Tube followers as I have Facebook friends invested $53,000 in shares and ended up with considerably more and all because he had faith in the product and he convinced thousands of others to have that same confidence.

Starring Paul Dano as Keith Gill aka Roaring Kitty, he managed to persuade, initially through Reddit and then through his You Tube channel to get ordinary people to invest in Game Stop and everyone made a shit ton of money, although it did look like it could all go tits up when the Hedge Funds and big boys got involved and tried to cause the stock to plummet - and as I said I didn't understand the maths in Trading Places so I'm not about to try and explain this. Suffice it to say, this is a weird film that cuts back and forth to different people with vested interests in Game Stop's success or failure - including Seth Rogen, Vincent D'Onofrio, Shailene Woodley, Dane DeHaan, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Sebastian Stan and Clancy Brown, who actually gets through a film or TV show without dying in the first reel. It's an entertaining romp and pretty much proves that sometimes the little guys win.

There Shall Come a Reckoning

The Jimmy Savile story is a bit like the Lazarus Project but without time travel. It's a grim and nasty piece of television, however while extremely disconcerting and disturbing it's essential viewing if you didn't see it first time around. We caught up on iPlayer and the first thing that comes to mind is hindsight is a thing because if this is an accurate reconstruction of the life of a national icon who also happened to be a vile monster then people knew just what and who he was as early as 1962 and yet still allowed him to destroy lives.

The story starts with Savile running Eric Morley's nightclub in Manchester and having a roaring success with it and this is because for all this monster's faults he knew how to wow a crowd, get people dancing and he understood the youth of the day, even if that was only so he could get into their knickers.

The opening episode focuses on Jimmy's relationship with a mother who didn't really love him, how he finally got to work for the BBC and also infiltrate Leeds Royal Infirmary as a hospital porter - voluntarily - and hospital radio DJ and where he first started to be seen by some people as some kind of predator. The episode cuts back and forth from the past to around 2005, as he is being questioned by a biographer for the book that needs to be written about him. My first impressions, despite hearing how good the make up had been, was to think that Savile at 35 didn't look much different than Savile in his 80s, but then I remembered that everyone over the age of 30 in the 1960s looked old and almost dead. The sets are fantastic and the camera work easily makes you think a time machine might have been used to get the feel spot on. But as the series progresses, the admiration for the accuracy of the era is replaced by an overwhelming feeling of sickness and a wee bit of sympathy for Steve Coogan who plays Savile brilliantly considering the risk his put his own career in portraying one of the worst monsters ever to emerge from television history...

The second and third parts looks at Savile's meteoric rise from Top of the Pops to all round celebrity with an OBE and all of his 'fabulous' charity work, done largely as a front to continue his devious and deviant behaviour. As he climbed the ladder of fame he became even more depraved and his victims got younger and their gender no longer mattered as long as he got his rocks off. There were numerous rumours circulating, but he had friends in very high places and often the people casting aspersions were often silenced if not believed. The thing was as he became more monstrous he became more powerful and that is possibly the most scary thing, especially as whenever anyone got close to uncovering his secrets he managed, like a slimy snake, to slither free.

The concluding part focused on the downfall of Savile; his deteriorating health and the fact that as the walls started to fall in on all sides, he still managed to persuade people he was the victim. Some saw through him; the man writing his biography starts to question Savile more intensely but the monster remained in denial until his death and as we all know, it still took almost a year before the truth started to come out. It was a harrowing mini-series that, fortunately, was not particularly explicit, but it didn't really need to be. I'm sure there's going to be more said and made about the man over the next ten or 20 years.

My Gay Dad and Other Parental Stories

Okay, I thought episode 13 would be the finale of Welcome to Wrexham but there's actually three more and two of them dropped last night (Wednesday). The first one - #13 - seemed to be an appreciation of fathers (first) and parents (in general) and focused on the forward Ollie Palmer's parents marriage failure because his dad was gay - this all happened 20 years ago, but seemed to be significant, especially as Rob McElhanney's mother left his father for another woman and Ryan Reynold's dad was a policeman, emotionally detached, had Parkinson's and died before Ryan became hugely famous. Other fathers featured as well, but much more fleetingly.

Episode 14 looked at the last four matches of the season, or actually at two of them - the 0-0 draw with Barnet and the potential banana skin against relegation threatened Yeovil. This was the comeback game for Anthony Forde, the Wrexham player who took a sabbatical because of his wife's brain tumour diagnosis, which not resolved but does seem to be more positive, and there was a lot of focus on him, especially as he scored the opening goal leading to a 3-0 win and leaving Town just one win away from the holy grail of a return to actual league football. The producers are dragging this out, but it still remains one of the most watchable reality TV shows on the box and next week it concludes.

Final Patrol

I am so fucking glad I stuck with this show until the end. I was sure there would be two more episodes, but #12 was the last Doom Patrol ever and it was probably the best one of them all... I'm still in a slight state of shock, not because this show found its mojo in the last two episodes, but because I didn't see this coming and it's one of the saddest finales I've ever seen. I mean, I'm getting on a bit now and a lot of things bring a tear to my eye, but this almost had me blubbing.

When I saw the episode was called 'Done Patrol', I checked and saw it was indeed the final episode of them all, but what the next 50 minutes delivered was far above what I expected, even if it did start off being the usual silly nonsense the last few series has dumped on us.

This was the end; the conclusion; the last time you're going to see any of these characters again. It was a story of absolution, of endings, of deaths and new beginnings and it was handled in such a pitch perfect way I literally almost lost it, especially the final scenes when the most annoying of all the Doom Patrol had his moment and it was beautiful and unbelievably sad.

I know some of you watch this but will not have seen this yet, so I'll try not to spoil it for you, but there's such a finality about this that it needed to be handled with care. This was the final journey for three of the team and a new beginning for the other three. The first finality brought a tear to my eye, while the second made me happy, but the final one, jeez, I never expected that and it almost floored me in its... power and yes the person in question finally made it home.

I'm crying? No, you're fucking crying. 

Shhhhhh! II

One of the breakout films of 2018 had a sequel in 2020, which while not as good is still a cut above the rest in terms of sequels. A Quiet Place, Part Two literally follows on from the point where the first film ended after a ten minute prologue that deals with the day the monsters arrived. We then jump forward to the day after John Krasinski dies saving his family and new born son and from this point on we all know where we are and what we need to do to survive as Evelyn, Regan, Marcus and the baby travel to their friend Emmett's for help, as quietly as they can.

This is where the sequel takes on an interesting twist as this is part two, the story splits into two parts as Regan and Emmett go in search of an island that might be a sanctuary, while Evelyn, Marcus and the baby battle to survive when a monster gets into their shelter, below a steel works that Emmett has been using. I still think that it's strange that Evelyn's alien body count appears to be higher than all the combined forces of the free or not-so free world, but it makes for entertaining movie watching even if you could do with subtitles during some of the lengthy scenes with her deaf daughter Regan. The signing is as general as they can be but you need to concentrate on it harder than if there were actually subtitles. I suppose it adds to the jeopardy. Anyhow, it's a great sequel that flounders a little at times as it seems to be driven by humanity's stupidity and complacency rather than common sense. Every one in the film does a great job of conveying the fear and jeopardy their characters face every minute of every day. There's going to be a third part, possibly even a fourth part; this concerns me a little.

Lessons in Discrimination

A week of absolute top quality television continued as our Friday night line-up was an almost perfect mix of fantasy (Loki), history (Lessons in Chemistry) and science fiction (For All Mankind) and we made the mistake of watching Loki first...

However, that said, Lessons in Chemistry really is the best ongoing series on TV at the moment and there's only two more to go as I can't imagine this will have another season.

This week was all about racial discrimination and sexual discrimination, parental bullying and work place bullying and a little girl who is desperate to discover who her father really was. Elizabeth goes head-to-head with her arsehole of a boss, but turns the tables on him just when he looked like he'd pushed her into a corner she couldn't get out of. Harriet's attempts to stop the freeway from being built in her neighbourhood's back garden comes to a violent and nasty impasse and an old enemy becomes a new ally. As I said to the wife, this isn't action-packed, it's not got much in it apart from a fictionalised version of history, that probably couldn't have happened in the 1950s, about two extremely strong and resourceful women who empower others. What it does do is give us rounded characters, interesting stories, likeable and thoroughly hateful characters and this week a glimpse into the troubled and tragic past of Elizabeth Zott, as we discover her father was a cold, callous fraudster who might have been a preacher but was also a shit.

The Return of the Best Show on TV

Or is it? For three years I've banged on about how brilliant For All Mankind is and tonight (Friday) it came up against Apple's other brilliant show (see directly above) and the finale of Loki which I still can't get out of my head. We're in 2003 and those who are left from the first three seasons are all getting old and are suffering from differing health problems. 

Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) is still in space and seemingly avoiding returning to Earth; he also appears to have early stage Parkinson's disease. Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) has retired from the space program but is being tempted to return to run the Mars colony. Aleida Rosales (Coral Pena) has not risen through the ranks to run NASA, but still resides in Mission Control and is suffering from PTSD after the tragic events at the end of the season three finale. And Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) appears to be struggling with her health in the new Soviet Union, that is now forming alliances with the USA, and it's clear that life as a defector has not been kind to her.

As opening episodes go, this was quite subdued when compared to previous season openers, even if there was a disaster involving pushing a multi-trillion dollar asteroid to Mars that goes tragically wrong. Former president Ellen Wilson won a second term and her vice president Al Gore is now in the big chair, while the USA's first openly gay leader has retired and it feels unlikely that we'll see much, if anything, of her as the series focuses on making money from the space race. NASA now operates out of the Molly Cobb Centre, a fitting tribute to a character we only knew died by the way her non-appearance at the end of the previous series was handled, and is now in the hands of Daniel Stern's Eli Hobson - put in place by Gore as a cent-pinching bureaucrat. Politics still has a hugely prominent place in this series as do actual true life events - they all have a context in this alternate history sci-fi series. However, this week For All Mankind only came in with the bronze medal rather than the gold for TV excellence because it was up against some strong competition.

Next Time...

What will we make of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters? We have the penultimate episode of Lessons in Chemistry and For All Mankind will hopefully get into full swing. The new series of The Lazarus Project starts and the finale of Welcome to Wrexham promises 45 minutes of things we already know wrapped up in such a way it will all seem new and exciting.

Oppenheimer is our big Saturday night film and I expect there will be some others that get some air time, including the new Peter Dinklage movie and the new David Fincher thriller called The Killer. The world of TV and film is pulling itself out of its malaise and grabbing us by the balls again, at last...