Pop Culture - I Wish it Could be Christmas Every 100 Years

It's Christmas and this will spoil some of your fun...

Martian Mayhem

In what was the shortest episode in the four seasons of For All Mankind - just 41 minutes - a lot happened. Margo returned to Houston much to the chagrin of just about everyone, while Ed and the Helios employees took the strike to the limit.

There was a reunion as Kelly and her son arrive on Mars, but Ed's grandson clearly doesn't like his grandfather, who struggles with kids. Dev goes from Zero to potential hero when he teams up with Ed to save the future of the Mars colony and Aleida's joy at seeing Margo alive has been completely replaced by a raging contempt for the defector because it's clear that a lot of her personal issues - PTSD etc - are probably as a direct result of believing her friend and mentor to be dead for nearly a decade. This might have been a short episode but it packed plenty of punches.

Not Rockin' Around the Monster-less Tree

The wife has reached the point where she's not bothered if we continue watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. The reason is simple seven episodes in and there's about a 50% success rate. This week's only got a 5.7 rating on IMDB and that was because it focussed on Mae or Cora (her real name). Her involvement in this and the company she screwed over might have bearing on the series but frankly I don't care.

The writers also need to sit down with each other and give the two main female characters some continuity because Cate flipflops between brave and fearless and paranoid and frightened depending on who writes her and Mae is just a car crash of a character who shouldn't have even been included in this; they make a nonsense of the narrative. Oh and Tim, the Monarch agent is also inconsistently written; he goes from sinister to friendly between scenes. I'll stick with this but it really needs monsters in it because when they're not in it it's a lifeless heap of shit.

Not Rhetorical

I know I said last week I wouldn't bother reviewing this as I'd pretty much done it, but it's not a review, as such. Watching The Outsider again was a real treat. It's a great little series with an excellent cast and it's based on one of Stephen King's best novels of the last 25 years. However, one thing bothered me about it and that thing is this: "Hey Steve, we at HBO love your book The Outsider. We'd like to make this critically-acclaimed, best selling novel of yours into a 10-part TV series and here's a list of things that we think might improve on your story..."

The thing is, that must be how the conversation went because like I said the book is awesome and yet the adaptation seems to cover the first quarter of the book inside an hour - the first episode and the opening ten minutes of the second. It then essentially neglects loads of vital information - either ignores it completely or makes up new stuff that wasn't in the book. This is the pattern for most of the rest of the series; it's still bloody good TV but it literally changes everything to some degree or another. It creates characters who weren't in the book, omits characters that were, and changes characters so that they do almost the same job as they did in the book but are different characters with different dynamism. It also pads the story out - it didn't need it - by extending the role of Holly Gibney, giving her a different backstory (which I can understand why as she is also a character in Mr Mercedes), introducing a love interest and most annoying, changing her character the further into the episodes we go. She literally starts off as an autistic savant talking about building heights and makes of car while following all kinds of OCD patterns and ends it being almost human with a sense of humour who hugs people. The fact that the conclusion was so little like that of the book was staggering. The book would have worked as a screenplay for a TV series, why there had to be so many changes even down to little things was, in my eyes, disrespectful.

I have seen a number of King adaptations, as well as other books I've read and I really struggle to understand the logic of the production companies and what really established writers must think when their stories are changed - the plots stays the same (essentially) but the production company decides to change every fucking thing about the story apart from the bare bones. I'd probably never have had anything I'd written adapted because I'd refuse to have my work bastardised in such a way - not that that is ever going to happen, I know, but principles and all that... I wonder if it has something to do with control? 

The Family Flop?

Sometimes films are like football matches - games of two halves. With The Family Plan it was very much the case. The first half of the film, although slightly silly was entertaining and cleverly done, however the second half of the film drifted into the region I like to call total bollocks.

I suppose a film starring Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan isn't really going to be an A list movie and I don't mean that in any disparaging way, it's just that Monaghan had her moments about 15 years ago and Wahlberg is the poor man's Matt Damon. This film about a former contract killer who has spent nearly 18 years living a normal life with a wife and three kids who suddenly, through some arseholes at a fair, has his life turned upside down by social media; this is because the people he escaped have spent the last 18 years waiting for him to resurface and are now out to kill him and anyone who's with him. This is the part that works, albeit in a not brilliant way that needed more things happening.

The second half of the film is where it all falls apart especially when we discover the relationship between Wahlberg's character and the people who want him dead. I think the biggest problem with this storyline was having a psychopath as the chief protagonist given who he was and what he was doing - it didn't stack up on any level and Ciarán Hinds was badly miscast, as was Maggie Q who was obviously something to do with the plot from the moment she appeared in some of the opening scenes and had this been even slightly realistic would have dealt with the 'problem' without letting it go across the USA. It was okay, but was a bit stinky and going a little green around the edges.  

Marvel News

Jonathan Majors has been fired by Marvel and it throws the entire Kang story into turmoil [So what?]. Rumours have it that John Boyega might replace him, other rumours have Dr Doom. The bottom line is no one really cares, especially as there will only be one Marvel film next year and that will be Deadpool 3 and that probably won't have much bearing on anything in the grand scheme of things. The MCU franchise is dead in the water; The Marvels has flopped badly at the box office and the belief is that Kevin Feige might be walking before he's kicked; again, no one really cares. I think Marvel/Disney will see how James Gunn does with his first couple of films at DC before making any firm commitment to anything in the future.

Extra Large

QI is back with a Christmas special and while Sandi Toksvig looked a little tired, rumours of her not being able to carry on after a severe case of pneumonia seem misplaced. This opener for the U series also managed to get a Jimmy Carr joke about Stephen Fry into it as the original presenter got a mention. Fry's National Treasure status may take something of a hammering over Christmas when he gives his Alternative King's Speech on the rise of Anti-Semitism, which given the borderline Nazi behaviour of the Israeli government and army at present in their act of zero tolerant revenge on anyone who might be remotely Palestinian, could see something of a backlash against a man who usually talks an awful lot of sense.

Anyhow, QI usually provides a lot of laughs and this week was no exception, but I wonder if it's beginning to grow a little stale. After this current series there's likely to be a maximum of five more series, that depends on whether they can get enough material for X, Y and Z, so we might only see three and maybe that might be a good thing. In terms of catching the panel out, every series that's on usually has an answer that is so contrary or science specific that it renders accepted answers wrong and this week we discovered that the word vegetables only exists in culinary (and everyday) use, but if you spoke to a botanist the word vegetable is just a generic term and doesn't mean anything. Obviously Alan Davies fell into this trap, like he usually does, but it proves that a lot of QI's quite interesting facts are tricksy answers depending on the semantics of science rather than accepted facts

Nasty TV

I know I said I wasn't going to review anything/everything I touched on last week and I'd just dip in and out. Well, having written a critique of The Outsider above, I find myself wanting to talk about an episode of Evil that I have to say was something of an epiphany. A truly outstanding episode of television with a disturbing twist.

If I want to be honest, the first three episodes of this CBS series were all right; nothing special but a clever idea with some neat ideas. What appealed to both of us was the fact that despite having a truly evil character in it - Leland Townsend - the stories had pretty much all had a rational explanation rooted firmly in reality. Then along came Rose390, the fourth episode in season one. This was a two-handed story; the first involving Kristen's four children being given VR headsets where one of the games appeared to be considerably nastier than it appeared on the box - this is something I think will be returned to in future episodes. It was the other story that pretty much blows you away because it really was ... evil.

There's a 12 year old boy who terrifies his parents to the point he is locked in his room, the rest of the family are all barricaded into the parents bedrooms and the boy is a nasty, vindictive little fucker who scares the shit out of his other family members. What is memorable about Eric McCrystal are his black as night eyes, his expressionless features and the fact he is a psychopath - whether that is through demonic possession or just mental health issues is never fully realised because the outcome of the story was genuinely disturbing; I mean, the kind of conclusion that has you look at whoever is sitting next to you and saying 'did that just end the way I think it did?' It was an excellent episode and one that will pretty much guarantee our continued watching of this show. A truly nasty but brilliant piece of TV that garners a reaction from the main cast that you would expect when something utterly fucking mind-blowing happens. Sadly the episode that followed it was... below par. 

At Least It Was Short...

So, A Murder at the End of the World had lots of nonsense and red herrings, stupid actions and between the wife and I we worked out who the murderer was by the end of the first episode, so don't read my review of this from seven weeks ago or it will 'spoil' it for you (Ha ha ha ha ha ha). Utter bollocks from start to finish; the kind of thing that makes proper wannabe writers despair at how this kind of fucking vomit gets commissioned. Pointless, pathetic and a waste of 8 hours of mine and anyone else's life. You will get more enjoyment from putting your genitals in a blender. The final part was 39 minutes long - this was a six part series that had the final episode split into two.

The Cloverfield Bollocks

"Have we seen The Cloverfield Paradox?" Asked the wife. I nodded and said, "Yes, but over five years ago. I figured if we've watched the first two in the last year maybe we should watch the third one." "Stick it on," she said. So I did. Everything I remembered about it, I still pretty much remembered. The rest was not important.

I remembered that it felt like two separate movies that had been stitched together, or rather a film that had other bits stitched on to make it seem like the same film. I think this was a film about parallel universes and how an experiment on a space station caused one group of people to find themselves in another reality, not too dissimilar to the one they were in. What JJ Abrams team did was figure they could use this idea to try and make sense of the Cloverfield idea by suggesting the thing that swaps the realities opened up a dimension that allowed monsters out. This barely infringed on the space station idea; yes there was stuff that suggested the two films were the same one, but if you look closely you can see that none of the monstery bits before the monsters appeared happened when all the cast were on screen and the only time Gugu Mbatha-Raw appears with her 'husband' was in a scene at the beginning that could easily have been tagged on post production.

It's as dodgy as fuck, to be honest with you. I mean Chris O'Dowd is in it; he loses his arm and is jolly about it. There's no real explanation for all the weird shit that happens, such as O'Dowd's detached arm telling everyone - through the mode of handwriting - that the thing they need to escape wherever they are is inside the Russian who exploded earthworms everywhere. Considering how successful JJ Abrams was for about a decade, I'm surprised he kept his name attached to this pile of horseshit - a film with few, if any, redeeming qualities.

Saint Vinnie (or is it Greg?)

The unexpected but quite welcome A Very Brassic Christmas turned up and in many ways it was better than most of the last series, ironically it was set before the last series and humorously where most of the last series was allegedly set in the summer, but filmed in the winter, this was set at Christmas and filmed in the summer...

Imelda Staunton stole the show - literally and metaphorically - as Doctor Chris's aunt Edie, a thoroughly miserable curmudgeonly old woman who hates everyone and everything. Vinnie - Joe Gilgun - is asked by Chris to keep an eye on his aunt over Christmas because she had a fall at home and he was worried she wouldn't be able to cope and Vinnie, being essentially an angel with tattoos and a weed addiction ended up taking the old woman under his wing and yet again doing something that belied his status as a criminal. Edie didn't like the name Vincent, so she insists on calling him Greg, oddly enough Greg Davies was also a guest star in this playing the twattish Dick Dolphin (real name) or Mr Christmas and it was pretty much a story about Vinnie looking after an old lady while trying to salvage his son's Christmas nativity play. It might not have been as riotous and hilariously surreal as some episodes, but it was an extremely lovely Christmas special with a happy ending. It more than made up for the very hit or miss last series, which should have been the last series, but there is to be one more. Oh and one last thing - the episode was titled Last Christmas and I thought my so far successful avoidance of the Wham song was about to be destroyed less than four days before the finish line. However, it was Mistletoe and Wine that the predominant song, which in many ways is much worse...

From Out of the Archives

Because of guests, we finished the week on something completely different - an episode of Black Mirror with Jesse Plemens in an homage to Star Trek. It was overlong and was essentially a rehash of the Jake Gyllenhaal film Source Code. It was okay, but everything I've seen of Black Mirror has made me wonder if Charlie Brooker knows where the critics' secrets are hidden.

Next Time...

Given that I came down with a virus on the 23rd, I expect the Christmas period will be spent watching a lot of stuff - not necessarily off the TV though. However, just to compound issues I have a frozen shoulder - right arm - so typing, lifting and wanking are all out of the window for however long it takes to sort out. Given this is a day late, I expect the next one will go live in 2024 so I hope anyone who reads this has a Happy Christmas and a braw auld New Year - let's hope it's better than 2023!