Modern Culture - In Limbo Rubbish Reigns

Spoiler warning...

Better Than the Real Thing?

Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire started Christmas off with a start. Let's be honest about this, people hated it because it does Star Wars much better than Star Wars has ever been. There's this nostalgic over-expectation that Star Wars is brilliant and everything that uses it as inspiration cannot possibly be given the same ground; it must therefore be inferior; it must be rubbish. The Guardian gave this a one star review; it's on 5.8 on IMDB two days after its release (now 5.7). Every rabid Star Wars fanboy is doing everything they can to make everyone else think this is a massive bucket of shit. Let me put you straight, this pisses over Star Wars films from a great height. This is everything Star Wars wants to be. Yes, it 'borrows' extensively from other films and ideas, but arguably so do most things, maybe not as blatantly. The people who loathe it perhaps don't understand entertainment and I make no apologies for enjoying this film. Its never going to be a masterpiece, but I think the Star Wars films are a load of wank and have no place in cinematic folklore.

This is the Seven Samurai, it's the Magnificent Seven. it is in many ways Star Wars and it has some awful acting, everyone is overwrought and everyone is in full thespian mode - that is apart from Sofia Boutella, who isn't a very good actor. It's fast paced, it's action-packed, it's Zack Snyder and it's really not as bad as people will want you to believe. It's a little over two hours of exceptional film making, with arsehole villains and wannabe heroes. It's got some twists I - amazingly - didn't see coming, it has a relatively simple plot and if Ed Skrein turns up in the second part wearing black cape and a face mask then I will laugh out loud.

Boutella lives on a farming community that is invaded by the 'empire' who kick arse and kill a few people for most of the food produced by the peaceful farmers. They leave some army types to ensure the farmers' side of the deal is kept. They're nasty bastards and she despatches them faster than you can have a piss. She then goes to recruit the baddest asses in the known universe to fight the nastiest bastards - she assembles Wrexham FC to battle Man City, but one of the team is a skunk. I believe the girl at the farm, who doesn't do much but dish water out is maybe the daughter of the late king, somehow escaped from the death you don't see on screen and the 'Jimmy' voiced by Anthony Hopkins - a robot with the fighting prowess of 100 men - will start fighting again for the rebels. I also think the skunk might still be alive to play a crucial part in the conclusion. It's all a load of hokum and baloney but it's fun, it doesn't dawdle and Star Wars fans need to stop being so anally retentive.

Ooh Fancy A Goblin, Mate?

Ncuti Gatwa's solo debut as Doctor Who was essentially a pile of shite. We saw a completely different type of episode here, with a musical number, some dreadful special effects - on the Goblins - and while Ruby Sunday came across as an interesting new companion, just what kind of accent does the new Doctor have? Is it Irish, Scottish, Cornish - it wavers all over the place and occasionally there's some patois in there. Is he gay, straight, still metrosexual? I'm not sure his campness is really a family thing. On a different note, has anyone else noticed that if you lose Gatwa's moustache, he looks just like TV cook Nadya Hussein?

I have always struggled with Christmas Specials, there's never much that is special about them and despite the appearance of a rather decrepit Anita Dobson - who knew what a Tardis was - this entire episode felt a little... slimy. It also harked back to Amy Pond's debut when Matt Smith had an influence on her life growing up and it all felt a little icky and contrived. I think the main thing about this... 'reboot' was that RTD was going to bring the 'special' back into a series that became a bit stale brown bread, but there was very little to really like about this and there was a few - I accept nitpicky - problems with it; the main one being that Ruby would NEVER have been adopted by a single black woman in 2004; it's almost unheard of in 2023 but for more cultural reasons than just general racism. I know this because I worked around the edges of the adoption system between 2002 and 2012. At least the new Doctor came up with some new look gadgets and accidentally/purposefully killed the main antagonist with a church spire, but the redeeming features were few and far between. A poor solo debut and the sneak peak of the next series doesn't fill me with a lot of anything but dread. 

Sherlock Superman

We started watching Reacher on Christmas Day; I was ill, there was the usual fuck all on telly and we'd spent the afternoon finishing season one of Evil, so we wanted something a bit different. First impressions? Is it a joke? Is it a parody? Is it really Sherlock Kent or Clark Holmes?

I mean, is it for real? I know the USA is a horrid place, but does shit like this really manage to happen in the Deep South without federal authorities getting involved? Don't get me wrong, the opening episodes were fun (after a fashion)... Alan Ritchson is one beefcake of a human being, but his acting range falls somewhere between house brick and corpse and with the exception of Willa Fitzgerald's Roscoe Conklin he's surrounded by arrogant, idiotic misogynists and fools, even the police captain, who is depicted as an intelligent man is a massive twat and as the small town of Margrave in Georgia (population 1300 with about 40 police officers) faces a spate of murders - all obviously related, yet somehow not in the eyes of the bent mayor cum new police chief. Reacher starts as a suspect (although I'm not quite sure why) and ends up being essential in the investigation. I've never read any Lee Childs, whose books these are based on, but I hope his work isn't as badly plotted and unbelievable as this series depicts them to be. As a result, when I suggested we continue watching the series on Boxing Day, the wife said she'd rather throw herself into a vat of shit, so that's the end of that.

Big Nose to Fill

Forget all the nonsense about Bradley Cooper having a prosthetic nose to play a Jewish composer when he isn't even Jewish; this was just inflammatory nonsense created by on-line trolls (probably Zionists) who have bugs up their collective arses about things most Jewish people wouldn't lose a second of sleep over; especially as Leonard Bernstein's own children endorsed the film and approved it. What you should focus on is essentially how fucking boring it is and what an absolute narcissistic pompous wanker Bernstein was. 

Maestro will probably win awards, most likely for Carey Mulligan who is outstanding as Bernstein's wife Felicia Montealegre, who had to put up with her husband's overt homosexuality, the fact he was an absolute monstrous egotist and was the perfect example of privilege and entitlement. What this film does better than anything else is show what a complete cunt this genius of a composer was and how the upper classes of the New York set were amoral and elitist. It's also really fucking dull and long, but I said that already. It's a pretty straightforward biopic and I'm surprised the family endorsed something that painted their father in such an unflattering light; Cooper was excellent as the chain-smoking composer - and when I say chain-smoking, I mean there is barely a minute of the film where he doesn't have a fag in his mouth. It's ironic his wife died of lung cancer and he made it to 1990 and the age of 72 - he looked much older. This was in many ways a really unpleasant film, something I wouldn't recommend if you want entertainment.

Evil Musings

Evil has to be one of the oddest things we've watched in a long time; a kind of spiritual X-Files with added digs at the Catholic church. I know I've touched on this in the last couple of weeks, but we finished season one and immediately went into season two, which added sex, violence and swearing to beef up a series that strangely didn't really need it.

As we finished season two, the most accurate thing I can say about it is I'm not sure what we're watching any longer; there appears to be multiples strands of plot being followed and it has taken on a whole new level of surreal and ludicrous. There's still a lot wrong with it, but the creators - Robert and Michelle King - appear to feel that throwing a shed load of shit at the fan is better than just a tiny bit. It also feels like a slow descent into hell for almost every character as we wrestle with evil fertility clinics, angels scarier than demons, UFOs, rogue cops, demonic cops, madness, science, exorcisms by proxy, self-harm, body dysmorphia, casual sex, cults, tapeworms, botflies, cannibalism, a villain that literally no one takes seriously, wankers, djinns, inconsistent plotting and everything in between. It's like a fever dream made for network TV and things happen in it that will literally have you gasping or whooping in disbelief. It's highly addictive but also a little bit... cheesy. There needs to be some sort of resolution at some point, or maybe just a closing of a few of the plots, because it's a bit like a soap opera at the moment; it just carries on and nothing is resolved. There is no closure for anyone - a little like purgatory, I suppose.

Shitty SCHOTY

Maybe Kate Spiers and Michael Angus weren't... flamboyant enough for Scotland's Home of the Year, but their two charisma free replacements do nothing for the show and in this first post old presenters foray - the Christmas home 2023 - you might feel that this is now about the presenters rather than the houses they assess. 'Buckeroo' Banjo Beale, the campest Antipodean man on Mull, is back from his guest presenter stint as a full time replacement and if this man is a 'style guru' then he really should look at himself first - he's an abominable mess. The newest guy - a 25 year old Glaswegian architect - is as interesting as week old emulsion and both these men have enormous feet. They join Anna Campbell Jones - always the weakest (and least Scottish) of the presenters - on the team that doesn't appear to have a personality between them, but they are enamoured with each other. I might leave the next series to the wife to watch on her own, unless we can watch it with the sound off. Another example of something being 'fixed' that didn't need it and I am aware that Spiers left to have a baby, but Angus was perhaps too Scottish and 'of a time'. 

Legacy of Boredom

In many ways Monarch: Legacy of Monsters deserves some kind of award; perhaps most inconsistently written show of 2023? I appreciate we're talking about a TV series based around Legendary's Monsterverse or whatever it's called and we have King Kong, Godzilla and a number of other fabulous creatures, but the bits with the humans in it are about as exciting as watching two old bastards playing draughts. It's just really dull and I actually think it's acting as a bridging exercise for the New Empire film coming in 2024, because I can't understand the point of it otherwise, because it's not achieving anything else.

Having characters where the viewer doesn't know whose side they're on from one moment to another, or what they're planning on doing or why they're doing it, who continually change depending on whatever half-arsed writer is co-opted in to write whatever week's episode just doesn't make for good TV and while we briefly saw some kind of monster at the end of this eighth episode and we got some explanations about 1955, this was really about whether the viewer has the stamina or the willpower to stick with a series that doesn't seem to know what it's doing or what it's trying to convey. I really wanted to like this; I found positives when others were struggling to find their best disparaging words to slag it off, but it feels like this was written by AI and a very basic one at that. There are two more episodes left and the finale is subtitled 'Beyond Logic' which could easily have been the actual title of the entire show: Monarch - Beyond Logic. This has turned out to be a really uninteresting and dull slog; like trying to have a wank to Bluey. 

Double Crosses & Lies

If I had to stick my neck out about the conclusion of series four of For All Mankind it would probably be Kelly Baldwin discovering life on Mars; this has been the almost forgotten subplot in the entire fourth season and one thing you learn about this show is that everything means something or it wouldn't be there. However, the main thrust of this eighth episode has been Dev and Ed's plan to sabotage the Earth's plan for Goldilocks, but that hasn't been exclusively the main element...

This episode starts off with Sergei, the forgotten man in the Margo Maddison story - the reason why Margo had to defect to the USSR - who now is desperate to see her again in what appears to be just a chance to reconnect with his lost love, but you soon discover there's far more to this meeting than just unrequited love. The irony is Sergei needs Aleida's help to fulfil his wishes and in doing so he reveals to her the real reason for Margo's defection and what it means to be a defector in the USSR. However, arranging such a meeting is a logistical nightmare because Margo is chaperoned by a Soviet KGB agent and a marine.

Back on Mars, Ed recruits his grandson to become a cat burglar, while Miles and the rest of the below deck crew discover that the USA, NASA and Helios are more like the Soviets than they could possibly believe so not only is their bar and contraband service shut down, trying to capture Goldilocks for Mars and hijack all of Earth's plans is going to be an almost impossible task. Two episodes to go and while this series hasn't had the exploratory brilliance of the first three, it has been more than above your average excellent TV series. I'm already wondering what 2013 will be like and how much more than can age Ed and Margo, or if either of them will even be in it.

Fishy Hogmanay

I suppose you expect a witty and vibrant subhead for every entry, do you? Well sometimes it's just not possible. Sometimes I'd like to be wrong about TV shows when I forecast a gradual decline, but it seems when I declared that Whitehouse and Mortimer: Gone Fishing was reaching the end of its life I wasn't factually correct, but in spirit I might have been...

The Hogmanay Special was an hour of barrel-scraping, if I want to be brutally honest; but I suppose there are reasons for this and some of them were explored in this 'special'. Bob has had an awful year of health and we learned that shingles can be extremely serious as you get older; the former partner of Vic Reeves looked older and frailer than he's ever looked since his heart surgery and Paul seemed far more receptive and involved, seeming to want to spend more time with his pal than fish. If this had been a final episode it would have been apt, even if very few fish were caught during the entire filming. There were some guests - Arabella Weir, looking fantastic for 66, and Clare Grogan, looking like someone's great gran at 61 - and the usual nice shots of the countryside, this time in Scotland - hence the title. It was also filmed probably either late September or early October, but the boys were mindful of this. Maybe it is time for the BBC to send this boat back to harbour.

Thoroughbreds

The third season of Slow Horses has been anything but slow. It started quickly and barrelled its way through like an escaped racehorse hurtling along Epsom Downs. This spy and espionage thriller returned and it never fails to impress or shock. It proves that most of the output from Apple TV is excellent and if you're thinking of dumping one streaming channel for another then you should dump any of them for this one.

In a Christmas of poor television and the low par shite we've subjected ourselves to this has been a proper TV show with an excellent cast and a hero who is one part Sherlock, one part Kreskin and one part Wayne Slob - it could be Gary Oldman's finest acting role and as Jackson Lamb he is always one step ahead of whatever is going on and able to infiltrate himself into the unlikeliest of situations. This time around it's a 'Tiger Team' threat, which goes wrong. A 'Tiger Team' is a rogue outfit set up to infiltrate and challenge the security systems of an organisation - this time MI5; but when some of the team involved in this embarrassing exposure decide that they want answers to something else - something they can't have - it spirals out of control and it's up to the Slough House crew to outdo their MI5 'betters' yet again and, naturally, involved in this is the now home secretary Peter Judd played by Samuel West, whose mug seems to crop up at all the wrong times when Slough House has a job to do. We've watched three series over the last six weeks and it's quite gutting that we're going to have to wait a year before the next one comes along.

Next Year...

The return of some old favourites - I hope. Maybe some new favourites - I'm sceptical. Things we'll not bother with - I'm sure. The strikes in Hollywood might curtail a lot of the expected in 2024, but I'm relatively confident a long winter of some form of entertainment to banish the blues is on the cards and hopefully a positive year with little real life drama. 

It would be nice to have a year where we don't question the point of existence. Have a better New Year and instead of celebrating 2024, perhaps have a piss out of the back door just as the bells start.