Modern Culture - Who Are You?

There's at least 14 things to get through so... Spoilery things...

Meep Meep

I have a confession (or two) to make. It never occurred to me during the entire hour of the new Doctor Who that there was a lot of trans references; the ones to Donna Noble's daughter Rose literally went over my head and the one with the Meep I thought it was simply a joke aimed at cockwombles who don't understand that people can identify themselves as they see fit. 

The second confession is, I really rather liked this. It was a return to good old Doctor Who with a sense of peril, some funny lines and a Doctor I could relate to, but I always did like David Tenant's version and this was peak Donna Noble - absolutely totally Donna and even better than she ever was first time around. If anything the big reveal seemed to come a little too early, but they had a lot to get through and much to do in these three hour long shows before the new new Doctor arrives. The Meep was quite a lovable character in that you'd never have guessed it until it was revealed and then the cute became rather nasty and menacing. Excellent special effects, good to see UNIT back in it and I liked the way Donna was saved by sharing her 'knowledge' through the birth of her daughter. It was clever and that's something else the series has been missing, the feeling we're back in the science fiction with added fun arena, which was missing so much from Chibnall's truly appalling run. Don't get me wrong, I really think Jodie Whitaker would have been a brilliant Doctor had she been written by someone who understood what this show needed. I'm looking forward to being entertained again next Saturday...

Cold Cuts

My mate Chris has finally scored a hit! He recommended a film, we watched it and found it to be enjoyable. Wonders will probably cease from this point on... The film even starred Liam Neeson, so you can imagine how peculiar it was watching a Liam Neeson film and thinking it was good rather than just Liam Neeson being himself with a multitude of weapons to kill his enemies with.

Neeson played a snowplough operator whose son gets mixed up with the wrong people and ends up dead and in typical Taken fashion Liam doesn't stop until he's killed everyone who's connected to his son's untimely death. That is essentially the film and I apologise if it's spoiled it for you but this is a Liam Neeson film made after 2006 so that's essentially every film he's made since then.

However, this is full on surreal in places and is based on a Scandi-Noir film and as Chris said, they manage to make a film almost as good. In fact, Liam manages to do what the CIA couldn't do in last week's Sicario sequel and get two 'cartels' to war with each other with little or no effort. People die - lots of them - in this and not all by Liam's hands and to make it more entertaining it's actually a very dark black comedy coupled with a lot of surreality and oddball weirdness. The characters, with the exception of Liam, are all almost pantomime in their melodramatic approach and the villain is pure twat, nothing mongrel about him. The bottom line is this is an enjoyable romp with lots of unexpected twists and turns, some great cameos and you probably wouldn't have thought so unless you actually watched it. It surprised me and I (intentionally) laughed a lot more than I should have at what is essentially a revenge 'thriller'.

Pooey Potatoes on Mars

The wife has been banging on at me for weeks about watching The Martian again so I relented and we did. I could suggest that whenever Ridley Scott makes a film set in space you're guaranteed for something special, but then I remember Prometheus - the film with the spaceship rolling after Noomi Rapace and all she has to do is run left or right to avoid it but she chooses to try and outrun it... Still, let's not dwell on that shit because what Matt Damon had to do in this movie was dwell on his own shit - how to turn his poo into a form of fertiliser so he could grow potatoes which he then ate.

The Martian is a bloody brilliant film. It pushes every button it needs to and it really does feel like a biopic rather than something based on a novel set 40 years in the future from about now. Damon plays the botanist Mark Watney, who because of a freak accident in a massive storm on the surface of Mars is believed to have been killed and the other five members of the crew leave without him. He wakes up the next day, discovers that the spike that breached his bio-suit and penetrated his own flesh didn't kill him, in fact his own coagulating blood blocked the hole and saved his life; but for how long. His team have left Mars and he's a minimum of four years from being saved.

What follows is essentially Robinson Crusoe (on Mars - a film with Adam 'Batman' West) with no Man Friday and a lot of potatoes, probable science and a film that essentially glorifies the technical brilliance of the physics, chemistry and biology of the scientists who work for any space agency. The thing about The Martian is whether it's factual or not it highlights the ingenuity of human beings; the will to live and the extremes we would go to just to cling onto life as long as we can. If there was one thing that bothered me, it would be the denouement and the rather Hollywood ending - the need to have a nail-biting climax when, perhaps, something simple and easy might have been just as gripping, filling the viewer with a sense of peril without resorting to pandering to the action junkies. Still a quality film.

Tomorrow Never Knew About Gojira

We decided to watch The Tomorrow War again, given that we often can't remember shit about films made two years ago let alone longer and as this came out in 2021 we figured 'ah what the hell.' As I said to the wife, I sometimes think when we watch movies for the first time we don't actually take anything in, we just sit there watching the television and nothing goes in and stays there.

The interesting thing about this was just how enjoyably bad it was, from the fascistic opening to the ludicrous ending, it was literally gung-ho all the way. In fact, an hour and six minutes had passed and we were gobsmacked it had been on that long, it was so in yer face at times.

Chris Pratt plays the part of an ex-Marine who is also a scientist and works teaching high school science because he can't get a well paid job in the private sector. He lives with his wife and daughter in a nice house in suburbia and is estranged from his dodgy father - JK Simmons - and they're having a massive Christmas party during the final of the 2021 World Cup final (I was told - ordered - not to pick holes in the plot by the wife) when a load of soldiers from 2051 appear out of nowhere on the pitch and tell everyone if they don't send people into the future to help humanity fight nasty aliens or the world will end in 30 years time. Eventually Pratt's character is 'drafted' and turns up in the future where he's co-opted by someone from his past to help come up with a serum to kill the queen of the aliens and take it back to the past to ensure that humanity has something to fight the alien baddies with something other than machine guns and bombs, which are effective but there are so many of these bloodthirsty ETs that it's like trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of tea.

The fight is then brought back to the present as the man known as Star Lord and his fellow survivors of their week in the future head to Siberia to find the spaceship that has been lying dormant under the ice for centuries. It's like The Thing meets Aliens meets The Day After Tomorrow meets any other humans versus almost unkillable aliens film. It has lots of schmaltz, quite a bit of unnecessary comedy, lots of violence and pathos, some quite earnest and overwrought characters and it's on for a little over two hours and I've seen a lot worse...

In fact, the film we switched off to watch this instead was also about a monster terrorising the world and we watched it on the recommendation of my old pal Kelvin, who seemed to think I would enjoy it and, to be honest, I might have had the subtitles been on screen long enough for me to read them and half the dialogue wasn't lost because the subtitles seemed more focused on telling me where every single scene was set and who was speaking rather than the actual dialogue. I am talking about the rather odd comedy monster movie Shin Godzilla - a 2016 Japanese film that is more like The Thick of It than an actual Godzilla film. We lasted 27 minutes before realising it was on for another 93 minutes and frankly I didn't think either of us had the stamina to endure that and the wife was especially happy when I switched it off. The idea was quite good as it focused more on what the Japanese government would do in the event of a giant monster attacking Tokyo - for instance they spent the first half an hour moving from one room to another and changing into different uniforms rather than actually doing anything and while this was happening the comical sea monster destroying Tokyo was slowly evolving into Godzilla. It was quite surreal and I never knew the Japanese could make comedy films because I never considered they'd even have a 'normal' sense of humour... You learn something new every day. I also learned that I didn't want to watch any more of this film, so I didn't. The power of positivity, eh?

Coup-y Coo 

Do you know what was wrong with Freelance, the new John Cena movie? Too much slapstick and base humour. Had it played slightly more serious and actually had a proper villain rather than a bunch of nasty South Africans working for an unnamed corporate 'sponsor' it might have worked better. Being a comedy wasn't a bad thing; Cena is good at comedy and he's okay at action adventures, but there was so much about this film that the director failed to capitalise on and far too many... misjudged scenes.

Cena plays an ex-Delta Force special ops soldier who after an ill-fated mission to the fictional country of Paldonia is retired out of the army and returns to his original trade of learning to be a lawyer and he's not happy with his new life and his wife isn't too pleased either. So when an old army buddy, played by an aging Christian Slater, offers him £20k to be a bodyguard for a journalist whose career is on the wane and it's going to be around the President of Paldonia - the man his ill-fated mission was sent to kill eight years earlier - he jumps at the chance. Said President is a bit of a twat and within an hour of the journo and Cena arriving there's an attempted coup and the rest of the film is really about keeping the journalist and El Presidente alive.

Obviously as the film goes on we learn a lot more about what is really going on in the country and we discover that the twat isn't such a twat and that outside forces - namely corporate USA - wants the country for its precious metals and needs its own 'head' in charge because the existing 'dictator' isn't really what the west think he is. You expect a twist in the tail that doesn't materialise and you expect the real villain to be someone who isn't at all. It was an enjoyable 100 minutes, but it could have been so much better had it actually treated the politics with more seriousness and less slapstick. I expect as the weeks pass from the release it's IMDB rating will drop very low indeed and that's probably unfair to John Cena at least.

The Latest Load of Shite

After four episodes of A Murder at the End of the World, I think we're both running out of patience. There is a great TV show here, told for about 10% of each episode, the bits set in the past when Darby and Bill were uncovering a serial killer with just the internet and a lot of good will.

Unfortunately, we have to suffer the interminable Icelandic murder mystery which dominates this series and not only is it a load of bollocks, but the actors trapped in this icy prison are really fucking awful. I said last week that Britt Marling isn't a good actor, well apart from Emma Corrin as Darby Hart, no one in this lifeless heap of shite is any good at all and the feeling of menace and jeopardy is rather washed away by the fact that it might be best for everyone if they all died. This week Alice Braga - the spacewoman doctor, Sian - decides to take Darby on a trip to the northern Icelandic coast just as a super storm is about to hit them, to find out what the guy who died last week was up to and what connection he had to Bill. Then after their snow bike breaks down, she finds a Volvo and then drives it like a maniac in a blizzard, almost killing Darby and then discovering her all-weather spacesuit has been hacked and she's running out of oxygen and will die in front of everyone. Jesus wept, this is an absolutely appalling load of shite - my review might sound like 'then this happened and then this and then this' but it's literally written like that, like it was scripted by a 14 year old. I have to say that while I put too much credence in IMDB ratings, this was an 8.5, then an 8.1 and is now a 7.5; it's dropping exponentially week on week and you don't need to be a TV critic to understand why. Don't get sucked into this; it's dross. Oh and even its Wikipedia page hasn't been updated since the second week, like the people who do that just went, 'can't be arsed.'

A Period Piece

I want to call The Holdovers an extraordinary movie because if you started watching it from the beginning and knew nothing about it at all you would believe, without a doubt, you were watching a movie made in 1970. Everything from the grainy, late 60s soundtrack to the way it was filmed and the look of the film stock; even the colour felt like something out of time, from over 50 years ago - it is an achievement that deserves attention in that director Alexander Payne has achieved such a period piece. The problem though is it isn't an extraordinary story, it is a very sad story about tragic people.

The tale it tells is typically an American one and one that I think we've seen a number of times through the years, of alienation, of loneliness and of people being left behind and forgotten at times of the year when families should be together. It starts with Paul Hunman (Paul Giamatti) - a misanthropic teacher at an exclusive prep school in New England - being asked to stay at the school over the two week Christmas break to supervise the five kids who aren't going anywhere, because of whatever reasons their parents' gave. Hunman is a massive twat; he's not liked by the pupils and liked even less by the faculty members; he's pompous, a snob and seriously hard work.

Also remaining at the school is Mary - DaVine Joy Randolph - the head of the school canteen and a woman who has just recently lost her only son in Viet Nam; she is a kind but heavily cynical woman who doesn't mince her words. Of the five pupils who remain, four of them get a reprieve four days before Christmas when one of the boys' parents takes them all skiing, but Angus Tully's parents could not be reached, so he has to stay at the school with Hunman and Mary. Tully has problems, he has been expelled from three schools already but has been turning his life around, the problem is he's older than most of the other kids, he's also a wee bit pompous and he's also extremely lonely. These three begin to form a bond and more importantly Paul Hunman starts to thaw a little. It was something you could see coming.

Then it starts to get very sad; secrets begin to come out; truths are revealed and it seems that the young man and his older teacher are not exactly what you think they are and an off-the-cuff trip to Boston after Christmas leads to some more tragedy and the cementing of an unlikely friendship that in itself leads to even more tragedy. It's a gentle film, with a lot of humour, but in the end it is tinged with a deep unhappiness and is a really emotionally sad film that, yet again, shows what a fucking god awful place the USA has probably always been. This is a film about discarding human beings because they're not able to slot into an allotted space; about deeply selfish people dumping on the helpless and then blaming them for their own ineptitude. It is a film that will leave you glad you watched it, but absolutely gutted that justice, in some way, hasn't won. I want to tell you that it's a brilliant film because technically it is, but the utter sadness - borderline despair - it generates makes me want to tell you that while it is a Christmas film it won't fill you with festive goodwill and you will probably wish you hadn't watched it in the end. It's a great movie which deserves to win awards and I never want to watch it again...

An iPlayer Recommendation

If you're stuck for nothing to watch for half an hour, search out Landward episode 23 on the iPlayer and see why we love Scotland so much. It's just under 30 minutes of looking around the Ardnamurchan peninsula - the furthest westerly point on the mainland and one of the most beautiful places in the United Kingdom. Filmed at the end of the summer, beginning of the autumn it is simply stunning and is one of the best adverts for this bonny wee country I live in.

Very Disturbing

We've watched some strange things over the years, but Swiss Army Man is possibly one of the most disturbing, offensive and downright psychotic things we've ever seen and it started off so funny... In fact it starts off with Paul Dano's Hank attempting to kill himself as a result of him being stranded on a desert island for who knows how long but he's dissuaded from doing it by a dead body washing up on his beach. The body belonged to Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe.

I know that Radcliffe has tried repeatedly to distance himself from his wizardly background in a brave attempt not to be typecast, but this really was something else. All credit to him and Dano for starring in something in such bad taste, but really once you get over the farting jokes in the opening five minutes this becomes a very disturbing essay on mental health, mental breakdowns and loneliness. However, unlike The Holdovers which also uses these themes, this was a film that pushed the boundaries of bad taste as far as it could possibly go and not in a good way. I think many of the laughs you get from this film are the same kind of laughs you get when you're in an uncomfortable position or watching an actual scary movie - they are nervous laughs as you wonder just how low the film will go. I'm not even going to give you a breakdown of what happens because it's just nasty and not in a nasty way, but in a let's trivialise loneliness, masturbation, necrophilia, invasion of personal space and death to make something crass and pointless with it. I suppose Radcliffe deserves some kudos for playing a dead man for 97 minutes and I know Dano has made some strange things in the past but really, both of these actors should have known better. Avoid.

I Spy

This is going to be one of those weird series reviews in that there are currently two series floating about and the third has just started. We came to Slow Horses because it's yet another Apple TV+ series that has exemplary reviews, but we started it at the wrong time of the week - a Thursday. Why is this wrong? Well, Fridays have the two shows that will follow this review, so we might get a second episode in tomorrow, but the likelihood is we won't finish season one (6 parts) until the middle of next week, so you're going to get this as if it's an episodic watch rather than something we can do in one go.

Gary Oldman plays Lamb, the man in charge of MI5's shit house - the place where agents who have fucked up go to work in the hope they'll either redeem themselves or quit saving everyone a lot of hassle. They do shit jobs, aren't real spies and are generally abused by Oldman's Jackson Lamb. His team all have problems and none of them want to be there and he's not just abusive, he's also a massive cunt (or is he?).

His latest fuck up is River Cartwright, the grandson of a well-respected former MI5 agent who has possibly caused a terribly faux pas in what turned out to be an exercise, but it was enough for him to be shuttled off to 'Slough House' where he's sifting through the bins of a right wing journalist with connections to serious fascist paramilitary groups. In fact, most of the team are looking into Hobden - the journo - because obviously someone upstairs (probably Kristin Scott Thomas) thinks there's the chance of a major incident happening. Cartwright, who feels he's been stitched up by a fellow agent and has ended up bored shitless in Slough House is doing his own private spy work - not a terribly sensible thing to do, but we wouldn't have a TV series if he didn't. The first episode spends time introducing us to the key players and ends with the kidnapping of a Muslim who just happens to write comedy for a controversial stand up comedian in Leeds.

The second part really stirs the pot as River goes very rogue and also discovers something that is either a huge worry or a possible bonus; Lamb continues to be an arsehole; Diana seems to suggest all MI5 heads of departments have to be complete cunts to get ahead and more of the Slough House's team's lives are exposed. It ends on a proper cliffhanger and has already cemented itself among the pantheon of brilliant Apple TV shows. I expect the rest of season one will be watched over the weekend. Top drawer stuff.

Bailey's Bollocks

Bill Bailey's Australian Adventure has really gone off the boil. After a really interesting opening part, the last two weeks have been dull and don't really paint a picture of a particularly wonderful place, nor do they do anything to make you think Bailey is good at travelogues. In fact, I thought last week's episode was lightweight and dull, but this week lowered the bar even more. He's lost his edge as a comic and whoever produced this show obviously made some dodgy decisions in the things he had to do, which included a slightly boring tale about Stanley Kubrick, a very dodgy Australian prog metal band who all looked like a bunch of boring nerds and some tall trees.

Mystical Monarch

Well, after three episodes of above average shenanigans, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters kind of loses its way big time with part four.  Our four protagonists are stuck in the frozen wastelands of Alaska having avoided the attention of this (and last) week's big monster, but two of them are in a bad way and there doesn't appear to be any help or heat in sight.

There's a lot of flashbacks to Kentaro's life as an artist - about a year before the current events - and we discover this series is taking place in 2015. The rest of the episode is essentially more bickering and a lot of mystic mumbo jumbo involving 'psychic' hallucinations, atomic monsters with an energy signature akin to Godzilla's big San Francisco debut and more time at Monarch's HQ where their status as potential bad guys is slightly eroded and suggestions are that they probably care more than our four protagonists think. Overall though this felt like a filler episode where nothing really happened of consequence.

Meanwhile, Back in the USSR

This week on For All Mankind it was a Russian-centric episode with pro and anti revolutionaries on Mars falling out; the new regime in the USSR acting more like the Russians from series two and a lot of emphasis on Margo's position in Star City and Ed's anger and frustration at events that are beyond his control.

It kicks off with Sveta almost killing a Russian grunt from below decks, who just happens to be related to one of the new regime's KGB heads, this creates a potential international incident in Happy Valley as the new Soviets distance themselves from the rest of the M7 nations. The USSR wants her back in Russia to face trial for almost killing someone and that means she's going to be executed and Ed isn't going to let that happen. Diplomacy doesn't seem to be working and ironically it's Margo who saves the day without even realising it because of the job she's been given by the new head at Star City. It appears that Grigory's death in episode one might have been the fault of lazy Soviet engineers and the new regime can't really afford for the USA to know this even if they might find out themselves and when Danielle comes up with a solution they have no other option than to agree with it, although they treat it like a victory all the same. Miles fucks up and almost kills himself because of his greed and because he won't listen, especially when he's told that Mars wants to kill anyone on its surface. 

Next Time

Well, this week didn't turn out to be the beginnings of a desert in TV land as I thought it would be, but that's not to suggest it isn't going to happen eventually, as we zero in on the festive season and all we get is Christmas Specials that no one in their right minds want to watch...

On the schedule - the rest of Slow Horses, the next episodes of For All Mankind, Monarch and that fucking awful Icelandic murder bollocks. The finale of the Bill Bailey borefest and the second Doctor Who special. We might even give SurrealEstate a try as it seems to be getting reasonable reviews.

In terms of films... well, on the Flash Drive of Doom, we might watch Leo which is a new film, but everything else is likely to be old and with a heap of TV to watch we might skip watching a film this week. Whatever happens I just hope that it's a better week than this which seemed to be filled with ennui and despair and not too much enjoyable fun.