Pop Culture - Jewels in the Shite

There will be spoilers in this because a lot of things discussed will have been watched by the many or will have been out there in TV land for long enough for people to say 'Elvis is dead' without spoiling it.

At the End of the Universe

When Russell T Davies said he'd never written or seen an episode of Doctor Who quite like the second special - Wild Blue Yonder - he really wasn't kidding. This was strange, disturbing and apart from a really unnecessary and crap joke involving a mixed race Isaac Newton at the beginning, you get the feeling that this might have been an even better bunch of specials had they kept David Tennant around for an entire series and made the reason for his re-regeneration the main theme of the entire series. That's not to suggest Ncuti Gatwa's not going to be a great Doctor with excellent stories, but this again felt like a piece in a much larger jigsaw puzzle.

This time DW and Donna find themselves on a deserted space ship in what appears to be a void, but turns out to be on the other side of the end of the known universe and the Tardis has buggered off in need of repairing itself after coffee was spilled into the main consul, leaving the Doctor without his sonic screwdriver (inspired) and in a place where even he doesn't understand the language. Then things start to get really weird as they try to solve the mystery in front of them only to be confronted by versions of themselves but with problems... Problems isn't the right word, malfunctions might be better except these alien villains are not robots, in fact we're never quite sure what they are except that they adapt themselves and become whatever they adapt themselves with. It's a creepy episode that is almost guaranteed to spook younger audience members and freak out others. It's one of those episodes that offers up snippets you maybe aren't supposed to know about our hero and wanders into nightmare country. It was, again, an above average fair.

I've read a lot of dissenting opinions about this already on line and frankly these people need to get  fucking lives. I think the problem with these dysfunctional Whovians is they want Doctor Who to be what they want it to be and they'd probably moan if the Doctor jumped out of the screen and gave them a blowjob halfway through an episode. Sad, pathetic wankers who don't seem to understand that television is made for the masses and not for them.

X Marks the Spot? Not Really

ITV went to great lengths to advertise how good ITVX is. They employed celebrity B listers to tell us how good it was and almost everything ITV does now is advertised as also being on ITVX. As regular readers of this column will know, I've developed a soft spot for Wrexham AFC and their FA Cup 2nd Round tie against Yeovil was being shown live... on ITVX, so I put the telly on and summoned the streaming guide on my (allegedly) smart TV. 

It too over 5 minutes to load ITVX into my streaming options (BBC iPlayer takes about 7 seconds); when it finally loaded I couldn't find the football match anywhere. I looked through the menu, checked the sports section and did a search for it and all of this took about 12 minutes (by which time I'd missed the first goal). In fact despite it being 'on' ITVX it wasn't actually on ITVX, it was on-line ITVX - a subsection of the station I wasn't aware existed. It's like the BBC's Red Button except it isn't because you can access the BBC's Red Button on your telly. Not only was this a fucking disaster, but you can't rewind, pause or do anything else with ITVX; you either start it from the beginning or watch it from where it is, even if you're watching something that isn't on live. It has all the adverts - you have to pay a premium to have the adverts removed, and on-line there's a huge fuck off Pizza Express banner that takes up almost ¼ of the page - unlike iPlayer, it really is a massive load of rancid shit, a bit like ITV has always been since I was a kid. I watched the game on my PC; they showed the two goals at half time and I saw the third go in relatively live - because it had been on the BBC Football page for two minutes before it 'caught up' on the live stream. What an absolute load of wank... Actually wanks are fulfilling and have an end product that's not as messy or as stinky. 

More Horse Play

Do you know why Apple TV's Slow Horses has such a good rating on IMDB and is so highly regarded by the critics? Because it's bloody excellent and it simply doesn't hang about. This MI5 series can't really be called a true spy thriller because we're not really talking about espionage and John Le Carre stuff, we're talking anti-terrorist and intelligence work undergone by people who should be too good to be policemen. It's a series about clever people trying to outwit proper bad guys or in this case trying to fuck each other over to get the best political advantage from it.

The first season - as I touched on last week - was about far right wing terror cells and how far they stretch into the Establishment, but it's a little more complex than that because the ambitious Diana (Kristin Scott-Thomas) - 2nd in charge of MI5 - had this great idea to stage a right wing act of terror and then thwart it before it reaches completion only for it to go absolutely tits up. This required her covering her arse and she decided that Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his team of MI5 fuck-ups should take the fall for it only to realise she was not up against a team of fuckwits at all. The team members of Lamb's Slough House (or Slow Horses) are actually clever, resourceful and damaged because of MI5 not born that way. They might have all screwed up at some point in their pasts, but that doesn't make them any less capable.

Each season is a rollercoaster ride - just six parts - that resolves problems and conundrums quickly but like all puzzles of this kind there's always a can of worms attached to get opened and make matters worse. It's the kind of series someone like me - a person who gets slightly perturbed by how some TV series (and seasons) like to tread water for half their allotted runs when all I want is a start, a middle and an ending with the occasional epilogue thrown in. Slow Horses does that in spades; no pfaffing about, just BAM BAM BAM. Chalk this one down as yet another Apple TV+ success story; a TV network that currently reminds me of what Channel 4 used to be like with dramas.

In fact, we were so impressed with the conclusion and entire series, we watched season two straight away. We do like it when we discover good television, it makes up for all the shit. Season two is about Russian spies, whether a 'fictitious' spymaster existed and whether or not there were sleeper agents placed throughout the UK. It also is how the Slow Horses team continue to prove, despite their foibles, how good they are at their jobs, or at least some of them. One thing from season two was obvious, the brilliant Gary Oldman, as Jackson Lamb, actually quite likes River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), even if he dumps him in potentially life-threatening situations. The interesting thing about the second season is it's more like a spy thriller with twists and turns and red herrings all over the place. This is quality TV. 

 Awfully Bad Boys

Michael Bay - check. Jerry Bruckheimer - check. Explosions - check. Slow motion close ups - check. Fucking awful film - check. Jesus wept vomit have you ever watched Bad Boys? Did you think it was anything but an absolute load of rancid horse ejaculate? My god, what an execrable pile of ... Jeez, I've run out of insults. There is nothing more I can say...

Well, obviously there is. Bad Boys was made in 1995 and while that's almost 30 years ago it feels like it could have been 50. Absolutely everything about this film was shite. The expletive drenched dialogue; the lack of a coherent script; the unbelievable amount of shouting... sorry SHOUTING!!! The overwrought performances; the contrived set-ups and plot; the fact that Martin Lawrence gets top billing over Will Smith, who, quite unbelievably, was by a country mile the best thing in this utter heap of human excrement. The 1990s was a fantastic decade for many things, especially music, but it clearly wasn't good for Michael Bay directed action 'thrillers' because this film is, allegedly, very popular and has spawned two sequels and there's a fourth film planned for next year. I actually had Bad Boys 2 lined up to watch but I'm just going to punch myself in the face repeatedly because I'm sure that will be more fun and fulfilling. This film doesn't have a coherent story; it makes no sense; it has a comedy premise that doesn't need to be one; it is driven by literally a witness to a murder refusing to speak to anyone but an absent Will Smith, so Martin 'Why the fuck was I famous' Lawrence has to pretend for most of the film that he's Smith. Tea Leoni is in this film; she can't act, she's not pretty, she does things completely out of character and her actions are ludicrous. Joe Pantoliano plays a police captain, all he does is shout, sorry SHOUT, like everyone else in this film. It's just awful; pathetically, stupidly, woefully awful. If you like this film you are a moron.

And Then More Shit

"We do like it when we discover good television, it makes up for all the shit." Is a quote I lifted from the review about Slow Horses and how appropriate it was when we watched SurrealEstate a series from the usually awful SyFy Channel and this was about par for the station's course. It was ... how did I describe it? An unsatisfying bland wank with no orgasm.

I'm going out on a limb here but I think this was one of the most heinous crimes against television I've ever seen and yet it manages a 7.1 rating on IMDB. All I can think is the people who rated this series have all got some kind of brain disease or they wouldn't know a good TV show if it bit them on the arse and offered them something more than an unsatisfying bland wank. I mean, this shite was renewed for a second season, which suggests to me that people actually watched it, probably enjoyed it and that simply can't be right...

We gave the first episode a watch; figuring that as a 'pilot' it would skimp on the waffle and filler and would go straight for the thing that first episodes go for, yet somehow it managed to do nothing for 44 minutes. It promised much and delivered lots of mumbling and not much else. The newest recruit appears to have a history of telekinesis - fire starting to be precise, and the first mention of this was when she realised the teenage protagonist was the cause of the poltergeist activity, at almost the end of the episode. There's also a comedy defrocked priest, a man who quotes things and is bald, an office manager with an attitude and Tim Rozon as the heartthrob head of the estate agency that deals with strange events, Luke Roman - who mumbles a lot, has a Michael Buble feel and really can't act - in fact he's a bit like a real estate agent. What we had was the aforementioned 'poltergeist' (was actually a teenage girl with latent telekinesis) and a woman - studying to be a doctor, who looked like she was in her late 30s - with a house that had a portal to hell. Both were tied up and solved so quickly I thought maybe I'd missed something and then I realised what was missing - a decent writer, some actors and its imminent cancellation, none of which are forthcoming. Rest assured there won't be a return to SurrealEstate. 

The thing is back in the late 1970s, a band that I really like called Be Bop Deluxe had a song on their final album called Surreal Estate and I always thought the title was such a brilliant play on words. It was something that inspired me and I always thought it would be excellent if someone took that title and made a truly awe-inspiring book, film or TV series out of it. Imagine how fucking disappointed I was when this pile of rancid dog shit came along. The SyFy Channel should be shut down; it hasn't made anything half decent for 15 years.

Trailer Trash

This week's big trailer is Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and what a pile of hooey it looks. There's one scene in it where Kong and Godzilla are running, yes Godzilla is running. But this does look like a new look Godzilla with glowing pink rather than blue bits and a more streamlined look; how he got encased in ice is anyone's guess. There's a baby giant orangutan, a big scar-faced giant orangutan, other big apes, an ape hand with an exo-skeleton attached. Rebecca Hall sporting a new hair do, Dan Stevens - who I recently said we'd never seen anything in that was crap - and a few of the last film's characters. I'm presuming the New Empire bit means we're going to see an as yet unknown titan emerge who will be able to kick arse; if it's an orangutan then I'm slightly confused because they're never depicted as anything but the least aggressive and most friendly of primates. I guarantee you this will stink cinemas out in 2024.

A Pile of Shit at the Arse End of Iceland

If we hadn't invested a lot of time - about 70 minutes each episode - on A Murder at the End of the World we would have given it up by now. I think the only reasons we've stuck with it is a) to find out who the Silver Serial Killer was and b) to see if it gets any worse. One observation I have is that Clive Owen was good in Children of Men but everything else we've seen him in proves he's a lousy actor. Another observation is this Britt Marling scripted series is just dog shit. Moving on...

There's Some Shit in the Barn

As the credits began to roll, the wife turned to me and said, "So, what have you got to say about that then?" It appears that the quality threshold in the Hall house has disappeared completely and been replaced by a Portaloo. There is no hope for me, I seem to have become attracted to all forms of excrement and there's probably no way to stop it. It might be terminal...

There's Something in the Barn is a real nadir in this week's film and television viewing and frankly if you've got this far in the blog you will realise that for this to be the absolute worst then it really has to be bad. If I was to say 'imagine Gremlins with malevolent garden gnomes in Norway' you might actually think, 'Hmm, that sounds fucked up enough to be good,' and you would be so wrong it would make you limp - that's limp both sexually and ambulatory. It would make you impotent and fuck up one of your legs. It would make you want to claw your eyes out and shove them in your ears. It is possibly the worst thing we've seen this or any other year and I feel really sorry for Norway because while they're no Hollywood, they do make some good TV shows and films - not brilliant, but better than this will ever be considered. 

This 100 minutes of celluloid vomit has the following people in it - Martin Starr, Amrita Acharia, Townes Bunner, Zoe Winther-Hansen and it wastes Henriette Steenstrup (the mother of Thor and Loki in Ragnarok) and her ability to be a good comedic actor. Zoe Winther-Hansen plays an American girl,  she's actually from Finland (but I never knew Rebecca Ferguson was Swedish, so...) and she says 'fuck' a lot. The reason I give you this list of people is because, with the exception of Steenstrup, you should avoid anything with any of these people in it, even if it's just a swimming pool or a public toilet or even a supermarket; if you see them run away as fast as your legs will carry you. If you haven't got legs, throw yourself in the nearest river because death would be a blessed release. This is a film about a family of really annoying Americans who inherit a house in Norway with a barn elf who gets pissed off with them - easily done - and gets help from all the other barn elves in Norway to wreak havoc until it ends. I wanted the barn elves to win and as there was a kind of truce at the end I figured the man who made it got so fed up he decided to make it a kind of draw. The scenes of snowy Norway (although it might have been Sweden or Finland, given the number of Swedes and Fins who worked on the film) were pretty. Even the moose was bad CGI.

Continuity Errors

In a week largely dominated by shite, I really wanted the Cary Grant biopic series, Archie, to be quality TV and in some ways it was. Jason Isaacs as Grant was almost faultless, Laura Aikman as Dyan Cannon was almost as good, but unfortunately everything else about it felt very... ITV.

There was just this profound feeling of cheap and nasty about it and it was also extremely British despite Grant or Archie Leach as he was originally known being from Bristol. I'm not entirely sure any one in the series was American and I think much of it was shot on location in Europe, but really the worst thing about it, despite it being produced by Cannon and Grant's daughter Jennifer, was the glaring continuity errors and if you, like me, know anything about classic films you'd understand why... For starters, the first episode of the four part series suggests that Grant and Cannon first met at some point late 1961, maybe early 1962, however there's a scene in which Grant is talking to Alfred Hitchcock on the set of North By North West about having to get a divorce and that there was possibly someone new in his life - this film was made in 1958 and released in 1959, and that was a bit like the straw that broke my concentration and interest. I mean, I know it sounds trivial, but if the ex-wife in question and their daughter are going to executive produce a biopic you'd think they'd get the dates right and whoever was making it would, you know, check Wikipedia or IMDB or something to see they weren't getting it all a bit chronologically challenged.

We decided that the other three parts were not really worth watching; not because of this error, but because there was also something of a whitewash going on; none of Grant's less public areas of his life were going to be looked at. this means no real mention of the 12 years he lived with Randolph Scott - I mean, it will be mentioned but it will be a platonic set-up with two hunky heterosexual men living the bachelors' life. There also won't be a mention of Grant's extensive use of LSD, his right wing politics or the fact he was something of a pig to most of his wives. One episode was quite enough.

The Curse of the Walking Dead?

Imagine my disappointment; Friday nights are good TV nights, so after the disappointments of the last week it was a chance to kick back and enjoy two of my favourite programmes. Except Monarch: Legacy of Monsters took a dip last week and this week it didn't improve; in fact it was the second weak episode on the trot and I'm wondering if this show has run out of steam.

The reason I've given this such a derogatory sub-title is because our three young seekers of truth have been released by Monarch and are back in San Francisco breaking the news to Kate's mother about Hiroshi's double life. SF is a ruin that is heavily guarded by the army to prevent looters after the destruction caused by Godzilla in the 2014 film, but Kate's mom now works for the  federal government and is allowed into the fenced off area where her husband's office is, so she takes a risk and sticks the three kids in the back of a van and takes them there, warning about potentially being shot for being looters. 'They will shoot you! Don't be seen or THEY WILL SHOOT YOU!' She tells Kate, Kentaro and May, so off they trot and before you know it they're singing Japanese adverts - loudly - and almost getting caught, not once, but twice by the National Guard. They're running around with torches and singing songs while soldiers with guns are chasing anything that moves - there's your Walking Dead reference.

It also told us that Kate is a two-timing lesbian (that was new) who after countless scary situations running from Monarch, a giant frost monster and the possibility of dying in frozen Alaska suddenly is having panic attacks because she's near the school she worked at. Just to add (or is that subtract) it turns out that May has decided to double cross her pals and has sold out to Monarch. Oh and the only monsters this week were some flashbacks to Godzilla's last appearance; nothing new to see there either. All the great promise this show had in the opening three episodes has been blown to smithereens in the last two parts. There might not be any way back from this kind of shite plotting and scripts.

At Least We Still Have Mars

The latest episode of For All Mankind has finally revealed its hand. We knew this series would largely be about an asteroid worth more than the entire planet and it wasn't the one we saw briefly in episode one; this one is about to do a fly-by of Mars in about four months and as it's worth trillions and trillions of dollars, it needs to be snagged and mined.

Then there's the politics going on, especially when President Al Gore declares he's the guy who found the thing, when he clearly did not - but I don't need to tell you that - and this causes all kinds of friction between the M7 countries.

Dev decides he's bailing on the earth and leaving for Mars, with Kelly and Aleida left in charge of Helios, except he wants Kelly to go with him because she has to train the people who are going to use the life discovering rovers, while Aleida has to go to the Soviet Union for a conference of the M7 nations and we all know that means she's going to bump into Margo, who is presumed dead and also a known traitor.

Meanwhile on Mars, Miles has had his secret revealed unintentionally and that's going to cause grief with his Russian black market boss and Admiral Ed's potential Parkinson's has been revealed so Danielle has pulled him from both flight duty and as her XO. We're half way through the series and it's finally really kicking off; we were also treated to flashbacks to what really happened after the North Korean was found on Mars at the end of last season and if I had one quibble; if there's a ten year gap between series, how come Kelly's son is only 7?

Next Time...

We're not going to start watching season three of Slow Horses until Christmas, after we've got all six parts; after watching the first two series over the space of five days, waiting a week for each new part to come out will be too much waiting.

For All Mankind tends to ramp up everything in the second half of seasons, so I expect some interesting developments and shocks; this isn't a show that skimps on killing its stars. Monarch needs, desperately, to regain its mojo and I'm not sure it can. If you noticed there was no Bill Bailey this week, that's because we've given up on it; it only had one part to go and as its trajectory had been downward from the first part we figured we weren't missing anything. Oh and the penultimate part of the murder in Iceland bollocks, which in the intervening two days since we watched it is in danger of never being realised as well. I'm getting old, I might die missing things I want to watch in favour of things that are crap or annoying.

There's a couple of new feature films to watch; a few old ones and we're obviously getting closer to that time, so everything is going to be short on quality and high on shite...