Pop Culture - Endings and Beginnings

Usual spoiler disclaimers etc etc etc...

A Cruise Missile, Part One

Apparently Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One has been something of a flop at the box office with it taking less money than any of its predecessors. Frankly, this doesn't surprise me. Not because it's a bad film, it's just post Covid and barely anything has been mega-successful since 2019 and neither of those mega successful films have been particularly expected. I mean, Oppenheimer is a biopic and Christopher Nolan's last film - Tenet - was a failure on multiple levels, while Barbie was quite excellent but it wasn't excellent for the reasons you'd imagine a blockbuster movie to be. So why was MI:DRp1 a flop?

Could it be because Tom Cruise is over 60 and is actually starting to look it? Is it because it's the first part of a two part film, weighs in at over 2½ hours and feels like it's only halfway through, even if the end of this film was a little like a conclusion, even if it wasn't? It's certainly not because it's a bad film; it's a Mission Impossible film, with a few twists, a bit more comedy than usual and it's a tried and tested formula. I think it flopped - relatively - because it's a little confusing; it's about an artificial intelligence that is on a submarine trapped under the Bering Sea, or is it? If it is how has it recruited people to do its bidding? You see there's a villain here, but Gabriel isn't working for himself and whoever he's working for doesn't appear to exist in human form; it's a super computer and it feels a little like one of the more implausible James Bond films. It also seems to link back to pre-IMF days for Ethan Hunt, with Gabriel responsible for the thing that ends up as the catalyst for Ethan becoming a secret agent. I expect this will be explored more in the second part because it was almost a superficial thing in this and that might mean using the de-aging process that the MCU utilised, most notably with Robert Downey Jr in the third Iron Man film and Harrison Ford in the last, pointless Indiana Jones film.

It's not a bad film; it's a little overlong and the set pieces feel like they were ramped up a little to compete with or better set pieces in previous films. As much as I like Hayley Atwell, I don't really understand the need for her to be in it (and her hair looked awful and a bit ratty) and there was this feeling of bittyness; like it was taped together rather than made as a continuous film. It's also going to be at least another year before the second part is released, which means it's going to be 2025 before it starts streaming by which point you might want to watch it again to remind yourself what happened.

I did enjoy it. I did feel that it wasn't anywhere near the best in the franchise and it seemed a little predictable. However, it's still better than a lot of films I've watched over the last few months, especially the 'blockbusters', but you'd expect that from a Tom Cruise/Mission Impossible film, wouldn't you?

A Night on The Town

This was a Batdevil meets Hawkeye film, as Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner played a couple of Bostonian bank robbers with time running out on their activities. The movie starts with them knocking over a bank and worrying that the manager of the bank might be able to give the FBI evidence that might incriminate them. So one of them - Affleck - decides to keep an eye on her and they meet and fall in love. I know it sounds a wee bit corny, but it was actually a pretty good film.

The film is The Town and it's basically about a small part of Boston that has produced more criminals per its square mile than anywhere else in the city/ It's the bank robbery capital of the USA and Affleck, Renner and their two buddies are the latest 'professionals' to take on the cops and FBI.

The authorities - Jon Hamm and Titus Welliver are on the tails of the bad guys, they just need some proof, but Affleck's mob are good; they never leave anything that can trace things back to them; but when Affleck meets Rebecca Hall - the bank manager - and realises she's a really nice women things start to get dicey. While the FBI have nothing they can pin on Affleck's team, he realises that Renner is a loose cannon who takes far too many risks and while they're very careful never to kill anyone in their robberies, Renner is getting dangerously close to breaking that edict.

There's a few subplots going on in this as well; such as the man they 'work' for; Affleck's aching need to know why his mother left him when he was six and his desire, since meeting Hall, to get the hell out of Boston and try living a normal life. This might sound like a bit of a corny film, but it's taught, violent, extremely nasty in places and a terrific crime drama. All the actors do a great job, especially with the Bostin accents, and it keeps you guessing right up to the end and the ending is... satisfying. I've never seen it on TV, so it's the kind of film you might need to hunt down on a streaming service and it's worth the effort.

Ghosts in a Shell

For reasons that are not important, we almost didn't see Spectral, a Netflix original from 2016 starring James Badge Dale and Emily Mortimer, but after a bit of Anglo-Russian co-operation it became a reality and I have to say I was very relieved because it could have been a really naff film, but instead it was quite an excellent little sci-fi horror film.

It was quite a strange movie because how it started and how it ended up was a red herring... Dale's character Clyne is a scientist working for a company making sophisticated tech for among others the US Military and in the opening scenes he finds something that can be turned into a bullet that will have extraordinary effects on whatever it's fired at, whether that's ice, metal or whatever - and therefore you see this as the smoking gun introduced for the film's denouement, but it isn't. The US Military says they want to know what effect it will have on humans and Clyne's boss basically reminds him who pays their wages and how quickly that would stop; so when the rest of the film happens you almost wonder if JBD had been wrenched out of one film and dumped into another, as he's asked to go to Moldova to examine some footage taped by the headgear he developed for the military.

When he gets there he finds he's entered the top secret world of knowledge means death as he has to jump through a lot of US hoops to just see what he's been called out to look at and that turns out to be what looks like ghosts with the ability to kill soldiers. So far so weird. This idea is taken even further as countless US Marines get killed by this 'spectres' almost instantly whenever they come into contact with them - frozen on the inside and burned on the outside; Clyne comes up with a way of seeing these entities even clearer by mounting a special camera to the top of an operations wagon. For much of the next hour, it's a slaughter as more and more soldiers and others die at the hands of these malevolent ghosts, but Clyne the scientist begins to understand what they are and how they might be stopped.

It reminded me of a lot of video game adaptations that promise much but always fail to deliver, but this was an original idea and while it felt a little like Aliens meets The Day After Tomorrow, it was actually a really clever idea utilising a few of Einstein's more controversial theories about compensates and how to create the perfect fighting machines. In fact, it ended up not being supernatural at all, but very super natural. It was a little overwrought at times, but I failed to see why it only had a 6.2 rating on IMDB because it definitely was better than the sum of its parts; the acting was okay, Emily Mortimer seemed a little miscast as the War Office official more interested in harnessing the technology they'd discovered than destroying it and in many ways the conclusion reminded me a little of the latest Mission Impossible film but with more science fiction.

Who Let the Wolves Out?

The new season of Wolf Like Me picks up a few months after the events of season one, with Mary now heavily pregnant and the 'family' in a good place. The problem is Mary is suffering from huge amounts of anxiety because she doesn't know if she has a human inside of her or a wolf and all the reassurance Gary offers isn't helping.

The theme of this season seems to be whether Gary and Mary can cope with the changes imposed on both of them and whether Mary moving from her old house was a good idea; technology it seems might not be the best way to go when you have a werewolf in the house.

Emma continues to be the best character in it; she's growing up and gaining in confidence, even if she's still prone to the odd panic attack, but when your step-mum is capable of ripping off your head and eating all your internal organs that's to be expected. Gary's faced with a dilemma in the opening episodes, Emma makes a new friend that just adds to Gary's dilemma and Mary continues to spend a lot of time running around and encountering fucking strange people. The best line in the opening three parts is when Mary explains to her gadget pimp that the reason she needs a Glock semi-automatic hand gun is because she's worried she might eat her own baby and she'd have to get her boyfriend to put a bullet into her brain. Yes, it's getting complicated and fraught with paranoia and lots of reasons for everyone having panic attacks.

The second half of this series continues along in the same vein, but new wrinkles appear, such as an old boyfriend of Mary's and the consequences of the season one finale somehow conspire to play a bigger part than they really should. Mary goes into labour and the finale really is a rollercoaster of an episode, with secrets spilled, disbelief, the theft of an ambulance and the birth of Gary and Mary's baby and trust me all that information does not spoil any of it because you know it was going to happen from the outset. Like the old saying, it's not the destination, but the journey getting there and all I can say is I can't wait for season three because this has been one of the most enjoyable, slightly crazy and well made series we've seen for a long time and it's Australian. It's just a shame the episodes are often so short and it's such a short series, but maybe that's why it's so good, it doesn't overdo it, mate.

You Want Creepy?

I do not like 'found footage' films. There's always that feeling that the camera should be the last thing on anyone's mind when faced with a monster, ghost, psychopath etc etc. However, As Above, So Below gets around that problem by having all the main characters having 'pin cameras' attached to their head lights. This is a film about a really annoying woman who fancies herself as a modern day Indiana Jones, searching for artefacts that will uncover something that proved so elusive it eventually killed her father, or rather drove him to suicide. Perdita Weeks plays the main character, someone who is prepared to go to great lengths to get what she wants and doesn't really give a shit about who gets taken down for her to achieve it.

This is a deliciously creepy, claustrophobic horror film that has at least one utterly genuine jump out of your seat moment (which took me completely by surprise). Set in and under the catacombs beneath Paris, Weeks' character Scarlett leads her ex boyfriend, Ben Feldman's George, and a bunch of French bohemians under the capital in search of a hidden tunnel that might lead to something called the Philosopher's Stone - the ultimate alchemist device. It is a fairly ludicrous concept and has some pretty crappy ideas, but in terms of tension, imagery and scares it's probably one of the best films of its kind I've ever seen. Like I said Scarlett is a really annoying woman who you pretty much want to die after five minutes; while George and documentary filmmaker Benji have to put up with her selfish shit. However, once in the catacombs things start going very weird very quickly and it literally ends up like Indiana Jones meets the Blair Witch. Yet, I couldn't help but like it. One of those films where you don't really care what happens to the characters, but it doesn't matter because the film drags you in and leads you through it in such a captive way. It probably couldn't have been made as a normal feature film because part of its charm and horror comes from the fleeting images and weird tone. It's a lot better than the sum of its parts - which is the second time I've used that expression this week...

Morning Televisions

This morning, Wednesday November 1st... 

Eating my breakfast and the TV is on... BBC1 has Morning Live with them hyping Survivors - a show the BBC cancelled after two fucking episodes 22 years ago because it was shit, but now it's back and it needs hyping...
BBC2 has the news presented by... this is how I see it: BBC news execs scour the canteen for someone, preferably black, Asian or Antipodean, ask them if they can read and if they fancy doing the news slot on BBC2 today. It's such an amateur hour that any respect I might have had for the Beeb goes down the toilet with my morning shit...

ITV - as camp as Christmas Andi Peters - a man with no soul at all - is gushing like a queen on speed about a woman who won £1million on Lorraine's competition. I almost heaved...
C4 - day 2773 of Frasier repeats, not in widescreen, not funny.
C5 - a woman of ethnic origins called Mitra phones Jeremy Vine's show to ask 'just who could have done a better job than Boris Johnson?' 
I've never used the acronym FML before, so here's a first. 
I'm surprised I haven't had an embolism given how fucking angry I am about the world at the moment and now we're getting the most oppressive regime on the planet being handed the World Cup... I think we need a really bad WW3, one that wipes 90% of the population out, preferably selectively so decent people can rebuild it if they want.
And breathe...

Wrexham? Blew the Bloody Knackers Off...

I was absolutely spot on; the 12th instalment of Welcome to Wrexham was all about the match against Notts Co. That means the finale will be about them winning the league and finally, after 15 years, getting back into the league. This season has been enjoyable and proves what a crowd pleaser this series has been as well as thrilling stuff on the football pitch. 

This was really all about a penalty save, arguably a £1million+ save by Ben Foster, who has again retired. Oddly enough, a quarter of the way through this season and Wrexham and Notts County are tied in 2nd place in League Two with only Stockport County preventing these two former giants from leading the league.

It's All in the Game

We'd never heard of Game Night. I only found out about it when it was mentioned that it's proving popular on a streaming service in Australia. I thought, 'Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams' and a reasonable rating on the film sites. What could go wrong?

Actually very little. There were some slightly contrived moments but in general it held together quite well for what was largely a slapstick comedy of errors. It was a film, which as keen quizzers, the wife and I really enjoyed. The premise is simple; a group of friends get together every week to play games; everything from Scrabble to Charades to Trivial Pursuits. There's a subplot where they avoid their neighbour - played by Jesse Plemens - who used to come to games night, but after his wife left him the rest of the gang didn't really want him there. However the main plot is about Bateman's brother, played by Kyle Chandler, who is joining them one night - he's a successful Wall Street guy with loads of money and wins at everything, to the point where Bateman's character sort of loathes him. After basically taking over regular game night, Chandler gets the gang to come to his huge LA house for his version - which would be a sort of kidnap mystery with the team who finds Chandler winning his Corvette Stingray.

Things start to go wrong when the kidnap night gets hijacked by what seem to be real kidnappers. This is where some of the story gets a bit fuzzy and if you watch this film and then think back to how it all started you'd struggle to draw a line through its authenticity. Then McAdams accidentally shoots her husband in the arm and it spirals out of control from that point on. Danny Huston and Michael C Hall turn up and so does a man who isn't Denzel Washington. Sharon Horgan is also in it and she offers some grown up comedy to the film. There are set pieces that are extremely funny - the best involving a West Highland terrier - and when the movie gets a bit silly it doesn't really matter because by this time it's just a comedy and you don't really know what's going on or care.

Blummin Eck Patrol

WTAF? I mean, What The Actual Fuck?? After so long this increasingly horrendous ordeal/TV series finally - FINALLY - got its mojo back and that mojo was quite simply Niles Caulder. It could be that Covid was the cause for this series falling down a well (past episode reference there, folks) and the Chief finally reappears and everything becomes good again. It was good to see him and have an awful lot explained that has never been touched on; even Cliff manages to shout common sense rather than moaning about his shit life, and even Larry manages to tone it down, a little.

At the end of the previous episode Immortus threw the team - minus the dying Rita - into a vortex and Vic's new tech detected there were three time wormholes which the team could go through in the hope of stealing Niles' shrivelled skin tag of life to restore their own longevity. Rouge goes back to the Ant Farm in 1948, Jane and Larry to 1996 and Cliff to post war Paraguay where Niles has found the skin tag of doom, but is being pursued by Nazis and he finds Willoughby, drunk in a bar, who can get them away from his impending death. Meanwhile Vic is stuck inside himself looking for help from somewhere else and finds it in his own future...

What this episode does is literally tie up all the loose ends from the first series and a half of this and in its own strange way, despite all of their hate for Niles, reunites them for their ultimate fight against Immortus and the were-butts. The thing is it felt like it had been written by whoever wrote that first series; the appearance(s) of Niles added to the fact this has been a rudderless, shouty load of shite without him. Who would have thought that Timothy Dalton could hold a TV series together, apparently he wasn't even a particularly good James Bond? This was such a great episode, it almost pains me to admit it. Lots of things happen and all of them in a redemptive way - there's two more episodes left, let's hope Jeremy Carver and the team behind this don't let the side down and keep this standard up till the end...

Happy Sequel 2U

An actual friend of mine is Scott Lobdell - a former comedian, writer of the X-Men and the man behind the hit comedy/horror/slasher film Happy Death Day, which was a surprisingly successful movie in 2017. He just wrote it, but it was a clever play on the Groundhog Day idea of reliving the same day over and over until something of a redemption happens. In the original, Tree Gelbman played by Jessica Rothe, is repeatedly killed and repeatedly wakes up in the bed of Carter Davis on the morning of her birthday and has to try and work out why and how to stop it.

In Happy Death Day 2U, it's pretty much the same idea except it isn't. It starts with minor supporting character from the first film Ryan Phan - Phi Vu - doing the same thing, a couple of times, before he's told what is happening by Tree. It seems that Ryan and his friends have developed a machine that has created a time loop and now he's experiencing the same thing as Tree was. However, he has Tree and Carter, who have both been here before to try and work out who's 'killing' Ryan and how to stop it. The problem is the person 'killing' Ryan is Ryan from an alternate reality and the attempt to 'uncreate' this loop backfires and not only resets Tree back to the morning of her birthday, but also sends her to a different version of her reality - a multiverse version - that is both horrendous but also difficult to want to leave.

In this sequel, it's not so much the murders that take top billing; there are very few of them until the loop starts to get complicated, it's about the Star Trek-esque way the young scientists have to find out how to stop the loop and the only way that the memories can be carried over into the next loop is by Tree memorising all the science despite her not being a scientist. All the while, every time she dies, she's getting weaker and might eventually just die for real. It's an ingenious sequel in many ways because it starts making you think it's going to be different from the original, then makes you think it is going to be like the original and then goes off in a weird direction that makes you wonder if it's going to be like the original at all, which it is but isn't. It's actually an intelligent, slightly clever, if flawed sequel that tries to do something different with the sequel concept. It's been on ITV2 recently, if you've seen the original but not this it's worth it for Jessica Rothe because she literally lives and dies the role of Tree and she's very good at it.

Violently Puzzling

Guest stars galore in the finale of Gen V yet it didn't really live up to the improvements throughout the series. There was something a bit off with it and it had an especially puzzling ending, which not only didn't conclude anything also set things up for a second season, which I think slightly disappointed me. I felt this would have been better as a standalone series that leads into the next series of The Boys.

And that's it really; my red herring theory about Cate didn't pan out, which may have been brilliant scripting and plotting but ended up needing some kind of explanation as to how she went from resting her head in Shetty's lap acknowledging that the twisted dean of Godolkin really did love her, to forcing her to cut her own throat. That was just one of the puzzling aspects of this series. The other huge puzzle was how it concluded and how did it happen, because something obviously happened between Marie and Andre saving the board of governors and Ashley to when Homelander turned up and everything went a bit wonky. I don't expect much of this will be explained in The Boys despite Billy Butcher's post credits appearance.

It ended up being a bit disappointing to be honest; it was shorter than most of the other seven episodes and it felt rushed and relied too much on comedic violence and panic than good storytelling. 

Out of Time?

Loki season two has really been an improvement on season one and that was a cut above most Marvel TV shows. I think what has made this season better is we know half the characters quite well and the addition of OB, KC and briefly Victor Timely has expanded on things, while the sense of the unexpected is never too far away. TV shows work when you expect things to happen that don't or things happen that don't feel... right - at least not for a Marvel TV series.

This entire episode find Loki time slipping again and then realising that his allies have all gone back to their respective timelines and he needs to reunite them prevent all time from unravelling and destroying everything. It was good to have a Hiddleston-centric episode because, as I said last week, he's been oddly peripheral in his own series, but that might be because this has been a series heavy on plot and consequences; even Sylvie has taken a bit of a back seat, but that's not to say any of the regular characters in the cast have had a lot of focus on them, this has very much been an ensemble piece.

This week we saw who some of our regular characters were before they became members of the TVA, why Mobius has a thing for jet skis, how come OB has such a brilliant mind and what B-15 did before she became a hunter. Probably the weirdest was KC and what he was prior to becoming a co-ordinator at the TVA - that will knock you a bit sideways. I have a bit of a problem with Sylvie's mullet and this episode really felt like all humour has been drained from it, even if it still retains a kind of light-hearted feel. The relevance of Loki's returning time slipping finally lays to rest my theory about the first episode and it really isn't a red herring and one wonders if He Who Remains knew that this was going to happen all along, although just why it's happening to the God of Mischief hasn't been made clear and I somehow doubt it will be. 

It's just a shame that recent news and developments at MCU/Disney might mean the conclusion of this series becomes slightly obsolete if the need to replace Kang as the future big bad does happen... In case you haven't heard, Jonathan Majors' life and career appears to be unravelling like time is in this series; his agent has dropped him, new allegations have arisen, the case against him appears to have gotten stronger in recent months and there is very strong rumours that the execs at Disney who green lit him remaining in the MCU might have to do some serious refitting and rewriting if they want to come out of this with any credibility at all.

As an aside, there is a rumour that the Kang Dynasty could become the Doom Dynasty, with Doctor Doom stepping in to replace the master of time, which means even more emphasis on the Fantastic Four film needing to be more than just a film... Even daily newspapers are pointing out the general irrelevance of most of the MCU output at the moment and when it isn't being slagged off for being shite, there is a feeling that the multiverse has pretty much rendered everything moot or pointless. Let's hope that the concluding part isn't just the restoration of the TVA and actually has something important happen in it.

Lessons in What Women Want

The best thing on TV at the moment continues to astound, if only because you wonder if it can get any better and it continually does. Lessons in Chemistry is a real winner and so, it appears, is Elizabeth Zott as she takes live television by storm and completely wrong foots her 'boss' the station owner, played convincingly by Rainn Wilson - a man who is so rooted in chauvinism it takes money to get him to pull his head out of his arse and, of course, when that horrible Zott woman's new show dazzles the women of America he has to reassess his entire way of thinking.

This week starts with Elizabeth trying for another chemistry post, having an evening meal with Harriet and her family and putting any thoughts of being a TV star out of her head - it isn't what she wants, so it isn't in her head. Then another meeting with Walter Pine - the TV producer - begins to change her mind because Mad needs to go to a private school if she's really going to fulfil her potential and private school's cost money and Elizabeth doesn't earn enough money from selling Tupperware to afford it. 

Then things start to go at apace, from having three weeks to 'dress rehearse' her show, there's a need to bring it forward in the schedules and go live with it when she's barely ready. Test audiences made up mainly of men hate it, dislike Elizabeth and find it boring, so it looks like she's onto a hiding to nothing, but Walter has faith in her and so does the female American public. However Mad is struggling not having her mum around as much as she used to or all the attention she's now getting. Brie Larson continues to knock the character out of the park; yes Zott is a bit strange - probably slightly autistic, definitely on the spectrum, but she plays the role with a charm and beauty that is quite wonderful; her supporting cast are also fantastic and this week the wonderfully atheist Mad befriends the local priest as she begins her quest to find out more about her father. This is an absolutely cracking series and I'll say it again - drop your Netflix or Amazon Prime and get Apple TV; not just for this but for all the other fantastic shows it has. You won't regret it. 

Next Time...

The season finale of Loki is probably the big thing... or is it? Episode six of Lessons in Chemistry and in a week For All Mankind returns, two things that might overshadow the God of Mischief a little, plus in two weeks there's Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (also from Apple TV). The finale of season two of Welcome to Wrexham promises to be a really upbeat episode and there's going to be something new that I'll discover in the next seven days...

In the films corner, probably Quiz Lady (unless it really dips on its IMDB score), possibly Oppenheimer but that might not be until later in the month, a bunch of stuff off the Flash Drive of Doom and anything that pops up that we weren't aware of - past or present.