TV Culture - A Range of Emotions

There's some spoilers here and there, but old stuff not so much...

Angry, Upset and Disgusted

Fuck. Fucking hell. Mr Bates versus The Post Office is without a doubt the most emotive television programme/series I think I've ever watched. It made me want to scream at the TV; it made me want to scream at politicians, at the Post Office and at the general injustice of it all - British Justice: what a fucking joke; what an absolute load of horse shit.

Honestly, by the end of it I had tears in my eyes and I know the wife did and I think we were both so fucking angry, because for over 20 years peoples lives have been systematically destroyed by a Post Office - owned by the government; Conservative and Labour - that lied, cheated and knowingly fucked up the lives of sub-postmasters every week, wilfully and with a degree of evil that is just utterly wrong. A corporation that went out of its way to obfuscate and prevent the truth from coming out; a corporation that treated those seeking the truth like imbeciles and felt it was above the law to the point of making the law an absolute mockery. This was undeniably the most damning thing and greatest miscarriage of justice in the history of the United Kingdom. This was a fucking sick joke dished out by a group of people who should, if there's any justice face criminal proceedings and Paula fucking Vennels, handing back her CBE after it, she should be put inside for a long time. The woman is a Christian - allegedly and apparently - it just confirms my longstanding belief that Christianity is the worst fucking religion on the planet, a religion inhabited by people who wouldn't know the true meaning of Christianity if it was spelt out to them on a big fuck off white board. 

Do I need to tell you what this four-part series was about? I expect anyone who doesn't has been either hiding away for years or is one of those atrociously awful right wing wankers who thinks British law is fabulous and all of these people were secretly criminals - don't think that hasn't already been said on numerous pages because I've seen it. This is about a 20+ year fight to clear the name of people who were essentially framed by the Post Office as criminals; many of whom have died, committed suicide, been financially ruined, lost everything, suffered mental health issues - have been victimised and demonised by a business that knew - it fucking knew - what it was doing. 

God, I'm so fucking angry, disgusted and upset and so should you and most of this happened on the Tories watch and ironically if it hadn't been for a back bench Tory MP it might still be raging on, claiming more people's lives. Cunts the lot of them, every single fucking last one of the cunts who knew about this and tried to hide it. CUNTS!

All Star Brilliance

And breathe...

I've said this before but it's worth saying again - dump Netflix, dump Disney+, dump Amazon, Hulu and whatever other streaming services are out there and get Apple TV+. You won't regret it and pound for pound you will not be disappointed with your return. This is a streaming network that might have brought us that borderline awful Monarch series, but also knocks the ball out of the park with shows such as Ted Lasso, Lessons in Chemistry, For All Mankind, Shrinking, Silo and now The Morning Show.

Okay, the Morning Show started in 2019 but I didn't know it was an Apple TV series and the moment I discovered it was I was on my torrents search engine looking for it and to kick the week off we started with the first episode. Man, what an all-star cast, I mean who hasn't been on this show? It's wall to wall A list celebs, padded out with B list celebs and has people in it you haven't seen for years and others who will go onto bigger things. What you have to start with is Jennifer Aniston as the co-anchor of the eponymous Morning Show, who for 15 years has co-hosted with Steve Carell, but he's suddenly fired for a 'Me Too' moment and lives are thrown into complete turmoil - history has been made and cancelled.

Also involved in this is Reece Witherspoon (about to become Aniston's new co-host), Mark Duplass, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Brett Butler, Billy Crudup, Nestor Carbonell, Jack Davenport and that's just the first episode, there's a whole host of others lined up for one, two or three episode guest appearances and this first season is going to be about the fallout from Carell's character's departure and how the USA's one time favourite morning show maintains its audience and gets bigger. It sounds a bit trite, possibly even boring, but trust me on this, This is TV that kicks you in the balls and then gives them a gentle massage, but you know there's another kick coming, maybe two. We needed a new series to get into and instead of trying one of the things we have already, we've dived into something I hadn't even considered 24 hours ago. I don't think there's been anything since the heyday of Aaron Sorkin that has been this compelling and riveting about US television.

Crudup is superb as the almost psychotic deputy head of the network who seems to believe in chaos over order and it is absolutely brilliant to see him cast as someone other than the villain of the piece - that's not to say he won't end up being the villain, but at the moment he's absolutely fucking excellent as the 'shoot first and ask questions if we feel like it' exec. Mark Duplass, who like Jake Johnson in last week's film blog, is a Safety Not Guaranteed alumni is also pretty good as the bewildered executive producer of the Morning Show and someone who is in charge, but seemingly in name only. I can't believe it has taken us so long to find this utterly fabulous TV show.

Amazing Misadventures

Regular readers of my culture blogs will know that while I have a soft spot for George Clarke's programmes, I also find him irritating and his shows incredibly formulaic. Most Christmases George (and usually Will Hardy, his mate) go somewhere to look at fancy houses and amazing structures, usually somewhere cold and snowy. This time around George is on his own, in a complete series and he's travelling the USA, not only to look at the architecture but also in search of Americana and have a bit of a travelogue at the same time. Regular readers will also know that over the last year my opinion of Americans has dipped to an all-time low...

George Clarke's Adventures in America hasn't done anything to change that opinion, especially as it seems to be more about oddball characters than the thing we associate him with more than anything else - amazing spaces.

George tries his hand at historical commentary and social opinion here and he should stick to knocking down walls. He doesn't do a very good job of looking or sounding sincere about the horrors of slavery - although I'm sure he was - and he looked like a crawfish out of water with the Cajuns in Louisiana. However, it was when he got to Texas that I wondered if Channel 4 had made a monumental fubar as he spent more time getting a Stetson made, going to a rodeo and spending a huge amount of time in the country's biggest man cave stuffed to the gills with Americana that just smacked of privilege and money and oddly enough he seemed more at home there than anywhere else. The congenial Geordie just isn't, say. Simon Reeve, he's not even in Robson Green's league; he's just a big bloke who says 'amazing' a lot and gets by with his winning smile and his lack of personality. At least there wasn't people going over budget here, not that that would happen in such a diametrically disparate country as the USA; a place where 80% of the people who get made bankrupt do so because of unpaid medical bills. He looks like he has a great time, I no longer understand how anyone can go to that country and enjoy a place that is just fascism hidden behind a lie and if things go the way they're going these fuckwits are going to elect Trump again. The Yellowstone Caldera can't erupt soon enough... 

A Horror Show

The second episode of True Detective: Night Country has a real wtf opening, one which leaves you wondering if you've just wandered into a detective version of The Thing. It is full on horror and one of the most disturbing things I've seen on telly for months.

However, as the episode progressed with Jodie Foster's Danvers continuing to piss off almost everyone she comes into contact with I started to get an idea about what I was watching and what happened in this puzzling mystery. In fact my theory could spoil it for you so you might want to skip the rest of this review...

First off, this links back to the first season by virtue of a tattoo and secondly, you might remember I reviewed a film last autumn called Wind River, with Elisabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner, about the death(s) of a (two) Native American girl(s)? In that, the (second) girl in question died of the cold after running away from something over two miles from where she was found; she had been raped and badly beaten but had actually died from exposure. The FBI cop - Olsen - and tracker who was also a friend of the girl - Renner - trace the killing back to an oil refinery station where it soon became obvious that the remaining people there were responsible for the girl's death and her boyfriend who was killed to keep him quiet about the horrible event. In Night Country there might be a lot of mystic mumbo jumbo but the missing research centre person - the one who seems to have gone mad - was the boyfriend of the woman killed five years prior to this spate of horrendous deaths; he has a tattoo like the dead woman and I think he's led these other men to their deaths because they're responsible for the original murder and he's getting his revenge. if I'm right, this is not only a cop out, but is also lazy TV making dressed up as something fabulous - which it is, if it isn't what I've just theorised. Time will tell...

Next Week... 

Our schedule is pretty much going to be devoted to The Morning Show, the rest of season one and maybe the start of season two. Night Country is going to feature, especially as I try to work out if this is just a re-tread of an old film and I might review the next stage of George Clarke's embarrassing USA journey. Of course, something new might pop up, but one thing is unlikely to change, we won't be watching (IMHO) shite like The Traitors or Gladiators, because we're funny like that...

Besides, having shorter, pithier blogs might be the way forward at the moment; you don't have to feel like you're wading through tons of stuff to see if I'm reviewing anything you'd watch. 

TV Culture - Desperate Measures

Spoilers, potentially 

Ice Ages

We gave up with True Detective about halfway through season two, mainly because it wasn't a patch on the brilliant first series and we never watched the third series probably because it slipped under the radar. However, there has been so much written about season four, subtitled Night Country that we decided to give it a go. One of the places that was raving about it was our old friend The Guardian that managed to give it a 5 star rating based on just one episode.

I checked their review of this and came to the conclusion that they did indeed base their five stars on one single episode, which, while very good, probably didn't warrant top marks - thus making me wonder (yet again) if they get paid to praise things. This is about a small town in northern Alaska that is  just entering a period where the sun never comes up - think 30 Days of Night, except in reality it's about two weeks. A delivery driver arrives at a research facility manned, usually, by six men but the place is empty and has a Marie Celeste vibe going on, apart from a severed woman's tongue on the floor. Enter the chief of police, played by Jodie Foster and pretty much the rest of the episode was spent introducing us to the complicated relationships and characters that make up the town of Ennis. In fact, so much time is spent on the people connected to chief Liz Danvers and her former detective, now a State Trooper, Evangeline Navarro - played by Kali Reis - that you almost forget about the six missing men until a dead man shows a woman where their bodies are at the end of the first episode.

This is very much feeling like a supernatural murder mystery rather than a crime that needs solving from the first hour and there is going to be so many important peripheral characters and stories it's going to probably need a score card to keep up, but it is intriguing, especially as Navarro is hurting about the death of an Inuit woman from five years earlier that has never been solved and believes that what has happened at the research station might be related to it - why isn't explained, yet, but it certainly seems that the woman's tongue is a link to this unsolved mothballed case. One thing this new story does do well is paint a picture of how dysfunctional and potentially awful it is living inside the Arctic Circle in Alaska during a bleak winter. I expect this will become must see viewing over the coming weeks and a welcome addition to the empty schedules.

More Detective Shenanigans

It seems that the theme for new TV in January 2024 is detectives - perhaps the trend over the last couple of years for true crime podcasts and the like has given people the idea that detective TV is in vogue again, when really it's never ever gone away. This time around is Death and Other Details, which I thought started intriguingly, but it appears the wife found it tough going and almost fell asleep. Maybe I need to watch things on my own at times...

To be fair, I didn't really know what to make of it. it's set in contemporary times but on board a cruise liner with a pre-1950s feel. Mandy Patinkin plays a world famous (English?) detective who has been on the slide and Violett Beane as the girl who he failed to help 18 years earlier but is now, seemingly, back in her life not only to solve a murder on the ship but also to find out who blew her mother to bits. This has the feel of a kind of Agatha Christie mystery, but with much more sex and swearing than you'd ever imagine; in fact within ten minutes there's a cunnilingus scene that I expect no one saw, erm, coming, which firmly placed the series on a different footing than maybe it looked like it was heading. I was quite impressed with the premise and the fact that there doesn't appear to be anyone on this ship without some kind of a mystery or a skeleton in their closet - but then again, none of these things ever have 'innocents' in them, they're always packed to the rafters with potential victims and villains. The wife said she'd give the second episode a try, I suppose it's the most I can expect...

So... we watched the second episode and we both agreed when it had finished that we wouldn't bother with a third. It's not often I agree with IMDB on things, but this was an 8.5 when I downloaded it and was 6.8 when we started watching it and I think that's a fair estimation and I expect it will sink lower. It's another one of those 'I don't give a shit about any of the characters and their rich privileged lifestyles'. I disagree with the critics opinion of Mandy Patinkin's English accent; it does sound very English, it just doesn't have an accent; it's just how you'd imagine a Englishman to speak if you didn't come from England. 

The thing about this series is there just seems to be too much padding, too much trying to be clever and too much unnecessary sex in it - I used to like shows with too much unnecessary sex in them, but now it just feels like a way to get people watching; I find it exploitative. The main problem with the story is like all detective stories everyone either has a motive or a reason for the murder of Imogene's mother and the murder of the man on the boat and I'd like some twists on old stereotypes, this doesn't have it. I don't think it has any staying power which is why we're not staying with it...

First Time Out

For a bit of added nostalgia we watched the very first episode of QI, from 22 years ago, it had Danny Baker (now disgraced), John Sessions (dead), Hugh Laurie (massively huge in a famous kind of way) and a very youthful and squeaky Allan Davies, all overseen by a thin and equally youthful Stephen Fry. It was all very mannered with no screens and a distinctly Ask the Family vibe, oh and you understood the scoring. Baker was annoyingly clever; Sessions knew far too much and should have won, Laurie was surprisingly reticent and Davies was... well, Davies but squeakier. It probably took a few years to forge the madness that made it such a popular series for so long. It was fun watching it though and we're going to watch the rest of the A series because it's been so long since we saw it we cant remember anything at all.

Sheer Heart Attack

Our dip into the BBC archives continues with the fabulous 1994 series Cardiac Arrest, which while a wee bit dated still packs a punch and makes you realise that not a lot has changed in the NHS in 30 years, 18 of them under Tory rule. We polished off the first series in two sittings.

Starring - among others - Andrew Lancel, Helen Baxendale and Ace Bhatti, it essentially follows the misadventures of various doctors from junior to consultant and the various stages of arsehole they become. It is hard-hitting, funny and extremely realistic - a kind of Carry On Doctor for the age. It was TV-meister Jed Mercurio's first TV series and if you didn't know he was a doctor before becoming a TV script writer you do now. This is a rude and no holds barred TV show that shocked a lot of people back in the 1990s but also attracted a large following, making it one of the most respected medical dramas the Corporation ever did. I expect things haven't changed for many doctors in 2024 and you quickly decide who you like, who you hate and who you'd like to see get punched by the poor bastards on the end of their arseholery. Classic stuff.

Bloody Hell

He's back! The nicest man on TV is travelling the world again for our entertainment. Wilderness with Simon Reeve is a new four-part documentary series with the fantastic Reeve venturing into some of the remotest parts of the planet in search of stories that no one else bothers with. 

This first episode he's in the Congo Basin, the vast, second largest rain forest on the planet and a place that, oddly enough, I was only thinking a few weeks ago appears to be one of those places that no one visits and good old Simon pops up there. However, instead of his usual cutting edge reporting, this was more about crossing one of the most inhospitable jungles on the planet and meeting some indigenous tribes that frankly deserve to live on earth a lot more than probably anyone else and, of course, Simon is just so bloody nice that everyone wants to mother him.

If I've never told you this before, the wife and I have a competition with Reeve's programmes, it's called The Bloody Hell Count, because Simon says 'bloody hell' an awful lot, so each new episode we watch, we both have a guess to how many bloody hells he'll say with whoever gets it right winning and getting to guess first next week; if neither of us get it right then whoever guessed first guesses second next. Don't tell me no one else does this? I just won't believe you. This week: I guessed One bloody hell, the wife guessed two bloody hells and there was a total of three bloody hells (not including any bloody hells that are said in the preamble before each episode starts, because there's one in that). We both know that next week's episode, in the Andes, already has one bloody hell in it, so I'm guessing first and I'm stuck with thinking that might be the only one or could there be more. I mean, if there was three this week there's a good chance he won't want to use up his quota of bloody hells or equally if everyone does the Bloody Hell game he might try to equal his record of four or even go for five or more... Honestly, his shows are bloody brilliant and if you don't watch them you bloody well should!

Next Time...

You can probably work most of it out for yourself - what we are carrying on watching plus whatever happens along to fill the voids, which, as I said last week, isn't looking too full a schedule. I'm sure many of you would have no problem with a streamlined TV review blog for a few weeks/months, especially how bloated they became at times last year. 

Film Culture - A Mixed Bag

As most of the films reviewed are old then bollocks to your spoilers. If a new film is reviewed then I won't spoil it for you unless it's shite, therefore saving you from having to watch it.

Being Rimmed

What I find really hypocritical is that people can slag off Rebel Moon like it's this uniquely awful film (which it isn't, but I can see why certain people would think that) and yet somehow Pacific Rim gets a free pass from major criticism. I mean, yes, it's not exactly something that has been done before; there is a uniqueness about it in terms of films made anywhere other than Japan, but it is an absolute load of  testosterone fuelled bollocks.

The special effects are awesome. The idea of a giant robot beating a giant monster with a ship is brilliant, but other than that... people complain about Marvel films? This is a Guillermo Del Toro movie; he's a fucking fantasy auteur; his films are usually viewed with wonder and awe even if they're complete manky testicles. This film was also the first to spotlight Charlie Hunnam's complete and utter inability to do accents; his USA accent in this wavers about and sounds vaguely Geordie sometimes and even the Northern Irish he so badly mastered in Rebel Moon. He is also not a very good actor, which begs the question of how he's become such a busy actor. The crazy thing about Pacific Rim is it's actually a comedy; despite untold destruction, loss of life, bonkers violence and the Chinese Kaiju Mafia. I don't think it was intended to be a comedy, mainly because it's absolutely and utterly unfunny, but the double act of Burn Gorman and Charlie Day was so bad, in a comedic kind of way, that no one in their right mind would take it seriously. I mean, if you're going to have a serious sci-fi film, you don't have Laurel and fucking Hardy as your two key scientists...

It's just a long fight scene with some exposition and back story thrown in to pad it out and as I said to the wife; we had Cloverfield in 2008, Godzilla in 2014 and this in 2013, despite big fuck off monsters, giant robots and other stuff I can't be arsed to think about, giant monster movies didn't really take off; even the Godzilla/Kong franchises have largely had a cult following and can't be called box office gold. Big monster films pretty much don't have much going for them after you've had them fight each other or fight giant robots - they're essentially boxing films crossed with Mexican wrestling on acid. Pacific Rim does have Idris Elba delivering his 'Today we're cancelling the apocalypse' speech, which is not Shakespeare and sounds like something someone would say in South London, but other than that it's just a giant robot beating the shit out of a monster with a ship and nowt else.

Connexion Française Un

Classed as one of the all-time classic films, the seminal 1971 movie The French Connection hasn't dated well, although as a snapshot of New York in 1970 it's probably quite accurate. Filmed in an almost documentary style, this is a feature that is stark and grainy with a relatively simple story that unfolds over one hour and forty five minutes.

One of the first things you notice is just how young Gene Hackman looks and just what a callous, racist bigot his character 'Popeye' Doyle is. His partner in the film is Roy Scheider - he of Jaws fame - as 'Cloudy' Russo, who also acts as Popeye's conscious. This isn't a loveable film; filmed throughout the harsh New York winter of 1969/70 it does nothing at all to glamorise police work and instead focuses on just how mundane and boring the job can be and how a lot of police work was done on hunches and gut feelings. Fernando Rey plays 'the French connection' - a Marseilles-based heroin dealer trying to break into the US market, which has had a drought for months. Tony Lo Bianco plays the chameleon like Boca negotiating the deal and it's all directed in a distant, almost uninterested way by the brilliant William Friedkin, which is probably why it feels like a documentary at times. There is no real back story; we don't learn about the characters lives or loves, especially the cops, and the lines are blurred between good and bad guys - such as when the two French dealers are fine dining in a top class French restaurant, while Doyle and Russo are freezing their arses off over the street and grabbing pizza slices and lukewarm coffee.

There is a lot to admire about the film, but ultimately it doesn't deliver a fulfilling ending; for all the meticulous planning, the denouement is half-arsed and the main antagonist escapes and it's probably extremely indicative of what really used to happen in the drug squads of major US cities all the time. It might be a classic, but it no longer feel compelling viewing and from a personal observation, the wife struggled to stay interested in it or awake.

Calling Occupants... 

It's been a while since we watched Contact. I asked the wife to buy me the book for Christmas as I used to have it, read it way back when it was released and wanted to read it again. The film won't spoil it because the book is a bit different from the film, which considering it was a late 90s Robert Zemeckis film seemed to struggle a little with the special effects and did another excellent job of showing us all what a monumental fuck up it would be if aliens came to earth and the Yanks were allowed to deal with it. There's this amazing thing about alien contact films that suggests the 'hoisted by their own petard' Americans would seriously consider anyone able to travel here from billions of miles away some how inferior to us or would be scared of their bullets and bombs. I think only Close Encounters of the Third Kind is probably the only big budget 'alien contact' film that hasn't had some American trying to kill an alien, blow up their ship or sabotage events - it's enlightening that filmmakers not only understand this but include it in their films, but if we really aren't alone, we're going to be stone age man compared to visitors and we should probably be a little more humble and less hot headed - James Woods character - Michael Kitz, chief security advisor to the President - in this was the epitome of shoot first and ask questions if we can be arsed.

Jodie Foster plays the astrophysicist who discovers the signal from an alien race while scanning the stars for signs of life and then becomes a bystander as far more 'important' people take over. There's a whole bunch of famous co-stars including James Woods, Matthew McConaughey, John Hurt, Angela Bassett, David Morse, Rob Lowe and Tom Skerritt (reuniting Hurt and Skerritt from Alien) and it's a good film, yet somehow manages to be less warm than the book, which was the brilliant super-astronomer Carl Sagan's only fiction novel. I often wonder what possible directors would make of this if it was made again in the 2020s, because this was obviously hampered by technology both in a studio and in the real world. The way of journeying to the stars was innovative and the scepticism was handled well, but... it needed to be like Independence Day and have fictional politicians and not be set in a world that existed where this didn't happen.

I have to say that however brilliant Jodie Foster is as an actor, she does have this coldness about her that I think didn't lend to her performance as Ellie Arroway, who needed to be warmer and more passionate than she was depicted.

Comedy Balls

Taika Waititi makes comedy films; some are successful, some are hit and miss and some bomb. He became popular with Marvel for his Thor films - one which was excellent and another that was shit. He is the epitome of up and down and his latest film - for Amazon - Next Goal Wins is a heavily fictionalised version of a true story about the American Samoa football team's attempts at... well scoring a goal, let alone winning a football match.

If you know the story of Thomas Rongen - played here by Michael Fassbinder - you'd know that much of the story of this film has been tampered with to make it 'better' and to be fair to Waititi, he literally tells us this right at the beginning of the movie. However, it only sticks to some of the facts, even if it embellishes most of them and makes up  a load of others. Yet it managed to give me more LOL moments than a lot of things over the last few weeks and it certainly is a proper feelgood film that doesn't so much have a happy ending as a fitting one. Fassbinder sort of phones in his performance and as a Dutch American he sounds very Irish at times; I expect most of the Samoan actors were amateurs but they were great and the entire idea of a team of misfits kind of doing this football thing for the pride of their island really works, even if American Samoa had to take on a slight comedy island persona to help make the film flow - which they apparently were not happy about. It isn't a masterpiece, but it is a film that should leave you happy you've watched it. As a football fan there are many liberties taken, but I can live with that because at the end of the film I was glad I watched it. 

Total Relentlessness

Remember Arnie's Total Recall? Well, the 2012 remake with Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel is a much better film, despite what the IMDB rating suggests. This version is an absolutely relentless action sci-fi thriller that really doesn't hang around and whizzes through its near two hour run time like an express train. It's full of dead ends, red herrings and characters you think are important that turn out to be expendable or not as relevant as you might think and unlike the original you get a much more coherent story and a 'wife' who isn't killed off promptly. In this, "Quaid's" wife - Beckinsale - is a relentless killing machine who isn't playing by her orders because she is somehow pissed off with her assignment and then with her boss for giving her this assignment.

There is a slight amount of corniness and it's got a very British feel to it, but the special effects are excellent, the film has a real Bladerunner feel to it and there are a lot more twists and turns than the original, which really did have awful corny moments. Whether Farrell makes a decent action/adventure hero is a difficult one, especially as he's now too old for that kind of role, but he isn't bad in this. In fact, the only actor who I felt struggled was Beckinsale, who you would have thought might have learned something about film acting from her Underpants films... Oh yeah... How silly of me? Some parts I had problems with, but I expect this stayed closer to the book than the 1990 Arnie film; I just wonder why it was made at all. The movie also has cameos from Bill Nighy, Bryan Cranston, John Cho and Bokeem Woodbine, who might have been a bit of a drag... [I thenk ewe, I'm here all the time...]

Self-Importance

Every time I see Jake Johnson I think he's Oscar Isaac's long lost brother and while he's never been in anything I can say I've truly hated, he's also not been in much I really like - apart from Safety Not Guaranteed, which I think is a cracking film and he's really good in that, even if he's playing a self-obsessed arsehole.

Self Reliance is a film written, directed and starring Johnson and while it's not a bad movie, it also doesn't feel like a fully thought out concept and the predictable bits were very and the other bits were weird but didn't feel weird enough. It's a bit of a curate's egg type of thing... Johnson plays Tommy, a man fast approaching 40 who seems to have a pretty dull life that has a routine that he's happy sticking with. He's two years out of a long time relationship, his family are worried about him and out of the blue US comedian Andy Samberg turns up - playing himself - offering Tommy the chance to change his life by getting involved in a reality TV show that's shown on the Dark Web. All he has to do is survive 30 days without one of the show's hired assassins killing him and he wins a cool million dollars. He even has a loop hole, he has to be alone when he will be killed, so if he can spend all of that time with someone he can't be touched.

The problem is everyone thinks he's lost it; no one wants to spend every waking moment with him and he grows increasingly more paranoid every day as he closes in on 30 days. Are the people stalking him just in his mind; has he imagined everything? Was Andy Samberg really there? Is he really being filmed 24/7 with micro cameras? Is he actually going slowly mad because of his life which seems to be a massive failure? Even the denouement could all be in his head and while there is a final scene that seems to confirm he went through everything by the time we reach it the joke has worn thin and maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all. 

Anna Kendrick plays Maddy, a desperately lonely woman who poses as another person in the game, but she finally gets cold feet when they meet an alleged other game player who essentially scares the shit out of her because she thought Tommy was just a needy man who was falling for her and not really on the run from assassins. There's also a number of 'ninjas' in it, people in fancy dress who may or may not be killers and heaps of paranoia and deranged shit. But considering it weighs in at just under 90 minutes you're kind of wishing it ended quicker and not necessarily for a conclusion, more... to just have it end. It actually gets a little boring and a little too needy; like Tommy's problems have transferred into the film and it needs to be liked as much as he does. It kind of fizzles out like a can of coke left open all night; there's little effervescence left when it all concludes.

Lacking in Dungeons not Dragons

I suppose the most memorable thing about last year's Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves was the fact it was such an enjoyable romp; probably the most entertaining fantasy comedy since The Princess Bride (which, I have to admit, I've never had much time for). But as the subhead says, it didn't have many dungeons - none, really. It did have at least two dragons...

Chris Pine, who has never really been any good as anyone other than Captain Kirk (mkII) still felt like his role as Ed could have been done by anyone else, but he was all right. Michelle Rodriguez was also okay as Holga, Ed's right hand woman, with a penchant for small men, but neither lead characters felt like they were the first people approached for their respective roles, I might be wrong, but they did seem like strange bits of casting. However, the film was very good; it went along at a cracking pace, had some genuinely funny bits in it and Hugh Grant is always a good value for money villain, even if he was really just a stooge for Daisy Head's Sofina - a red witch hell bent on revenge for her ancestors.

Essentially it's a film about a band of thieves who try one job that was too big for them and Pine and Rodriguez get caught and slapped into prison, which they escape from and go in search of Pine's daughter and the other members of their band only to discover that Grant's character has become the head of a large kingdom and the daughter has been brainwashed into thinking her father is a shit dad. From this point on it's about retrieving stuff to help them get their revenge on Grant, running across assassins, ghosts of ancestors and a fat dragon in the underworld, which added extra comedy. I have to admit it was enjoyable in a throwaway kind of way, the special effects weren't bad, but some of them weren't brilliant and at just over two hours it might have been a teensy bit too long, but I laughed a few times and didn't feel as though I'd wasted my time at the end, which I count as a win at the moment.

Coming Up...

A slightly pointless subhead because I have no idea what might be released this coming week or so, nor do I know what I'm likely to watch on either the Flash Drive of Doom or the magic TV recorder box thingy. Unlike TV - which you wont be seeing a blog about this week - films tend to be random and very much depend on what we fancy, what we've got and whether things I want to see are out yet. For instance, I'd love to see Godzilla Minus One, it has great reviews, a high IMDB rating and looks really good, but there's absolutely no date for a stream to surface and even if one does I want it to have proper subtitles. Oh and we won't be watching Wonka because modern 'musicals' tend to be a load of shit, even if this film has been rated by 'some' critics (and we all know who that 'some' is...).

We do have last year's animated Spider-Man film to watch, but I get the impression the wife isn't keen, especially as I've had it for six months and she's never said, 'Ooh let's watch that.' There's Napoleon, but frankly I'm in the undecided court about that and Killers of the Flower Moon needs three and a half fucking hours and needs to be riveting. There is a grand total of 39 unwatched films not counting the 15 or so on the TV recorder thing, so it's going to be pot luck between now and the next time this appears (which is likely to be in about two weeks). 

 

Pop Culture - MCU Film Review: The Marvels

I am going to spoil this for you if you haven't seen it... 

The Marvels

Starring: Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Lewis, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Park Seo-Joon & others
Directed by Nia DaCosta
Runtime: 105 minutes
IMDB Rating (at time of writing) 5.8 - the lowest rated MCU film of them all. A full 0.5 points lower than Eternals (6.3) and an even lower rating than Quantumania (6.1). 

Here it is - the film that essentially has probably killed it off the MCU as a viable franchise in the future. A film that has grossed just over $200million, effectively costing Disney money to make it, somewhere in the region of the same again and a bit more. Anyhow, moving on... 

I'm genuinely puzzled about this film because there have been worse Marvel films; to be fair, not that many that have been worse, but this is by no means the worst despite its rating. Yes, there's definitely a tonal problem with the film as many critics have pointed out and there's a couple of things I couldn't get my head around, there should never have been the musical number, which in many ways was the turning point in the film because up to that point it was working for me, but other than this it could have been a whole lot worse.

There was a shortage of plot and not enough back story. Dar-Benn should have been fleshed out a bit more; maybe some context as to who she actually was and why she was doing what she did rather than us find out about it almost by accident about halfway through the film. Also Zawe Ashton exudes about as much menace as Joe Lycett in a dress; she's not a good enough actor or has enough gravitas to carry the role of 'world destroyer' - she was a disappointment.

However, despite a patchy beginning, it was rolling along at a cracking pace with some lively interaction and what seemed like a half decent story, even if it made little or no sense and it has to be said that Iman Vellani is quite brilliant as Ms Marvel, at least until the end of the film when there was one of the many problems that crept into the movie. There was excellent chemistry between the three main heroes, well maybe not exactly but it worked better than I expected. I kind of struggled with Teyonah Parris's character but probably because she felt almost shoehorned into the film and even her 'origin' garnered a subtle sense of WTF from Carol Danvers when it was explained to her; in fact getting her light powers from walking through a hex created by a 'mutant' witch is probably the lamest origin for a hero (apart from maybe a deaf, dumb, one-legged vigilante getting her powers from a line of Native American ancestors - but let's not go there).

I was impressed at the amount of Brie Larson on show - and that isn't meant to sound sexist, just that she obviously went on a crash diet for her role as Elizabeth Zott in Lessons in Chemistry, because she looked like a twig with the wood shaved off in that TV series and here she's more like an actual woman. But the show really belongs to Vellani's Ms Marvel who is the comedy, the drama and the heart of a film that was probably too short and focused on the wrong things when it should have focused on the actual story.

There were some things I didn't understand, such as why Valkyrie was in it and how she was going to integrate a bunch of Skrulls into the corner of Norway that New Asgard now lives and how come she's buddies with Carol Danvers when a lot of the tension between Danvers and Monica Rambeau was about Carol not reconnecting with Monica after the blip was reversed. This was probably one of the first plot problems. Another thing was how Dar-Benn could be beaten inside three minutes in the final battle, especially given how difficult it had been earlier and where were all of her henchmen? How come Dar-Benn's reason for saving Hala was based around places that Captain Marvel was connected with - how did she even know this? What happened to the second wristband after Kamala and Carol pumped Monica full of energy to close the rift in dimensional space, which wasn't really explained as to how it happened and why didn't they just reverse it if Kamala could use the two wristbands without destroying herself? What significance the penultimate scene was - have the Khans moved into the old Rambeau house or is Carol setting up home there herself and if so why were the Khans even there? What was the point of Goose in the film and why wasn't all of 'her' eggs explained and why were they there in the first place conveniently producing enough flerkins (or whatever they're called) to help evacuate the space station, which we didn't really get any explanation as to why it suddenly was in so much danger. Then there was Kamala using her powers even though she didn't have her wristband; creating a giant hand to catch Carol after she fought Dar-Benn to the finish. This was either a really awful bit of plotting/filmmaking or she doesn't need her bangle so it doesn't matter what happened to the second one she had been wearing prior to her return to earth...

The main problem with the film was it had three (well, two and a half) characters who had great chemistry, some promising ideas but all were surrounded by pointless episodic moments, a villain with zero menace and no sense of impending jeopardy. it had a musical number that completely ruined the tone of the film and speaking again of tone - on one hand you have a woman wielding massive amounts of power, destroying planets and being fucking deadly serious and you have three heroes who spend a lot of time farting about, being girls and generally not seeming to take the threat before them very seriously. This is a film that is a mass of contradictions that I cannot believe Marvel and Disney execs didn't see prior to release. How could they allow this film to be released in the form it was without questioning things that even crap critics like me could see from the other side of the fucking universe? Yet... I still didn't think it was as bad as Eternals and was probably more enjoyable than Quantumania or the other unbelievably bad tonal film Thor: Love & Thunder, which is the only superhero film that had cancer as a major subplot and trivialised it to the point of bad taste.

The problem is this could have been so much better and it felt like someone high up decided to let it be released like this to help facilitate the end of either Kevin Feige or the MCU in general. It does, however, help speed up the end of the superhero film genre for the foreseeable future. Marvel does have Deadpool 3 coming out this year - their only cinematic release - and that, if it replicates the first two, won't really be an MCU film; so what we're seeing is no actual MCU films until the summer of 2025 when (and if) the Captain America film comes out. 

Finally, regardless of that last paragraph there is the two finale scenes to deal with. The first 'epilogue' features Kamala recruiting Hailee Steinfeld into her new team - in a kind of nod to Nick Fury recruiting Tony Stark; but it doesn't really work because the new 'Hawkeye' is also another character who simply isn't good enough to carry a feature film... and then there's Monica Rambeau's conclusion as she wakes up in a futuristic hospital room in the presence of her mother, except she's called Binary and if you know your comics you'll know that Binary was who Ms Marvel eventually became and Ms Marvel in Marvel Comics was originally... Carol Danvers. But, of course, that isn't the kicker, it wasn't the real point of the post credit scene, that was Kelsey Grammar's Beast (now fully CGI) who references 'Charles' and we're clearly in a universe where the X-Men (and the Star Jammers) exist. This surely was there for two reasons - one to get the fans really excited and to hopefully get them to forget the mess they'd just watched. The fact the X-Men have been introduced might have been a gambit they thought might sell the film via word of mouth - that clearly hasn't worked; so we're left with a universe that Monica is stuck in that has mutants in it; they're either going to find a way into our/the MCU universe or this is a subplot that has nowhere else to go - exit Monica Rambeau, thanks for your half-hearted contribution. The Marvels - a film that didn't promise much, failed to deliver but somehow with all its faults isn't the worst thing Marvel/Disney has done in the last two years.

TV Culture - Different Worlds

Spoiler warnings...

Goldilocks on Mars

There's been a very high bar set by the last two episodes of For All Mankind. The show that I believe has been the most consistently brilliant TV series for the best part of the last five years might have seemed to have run out of steam in the opening few parts of this fourth season, but it certainly did what it had to to re-establish itself as being pretty fucking awesome.

What may have seemed like a slight storyline for this season actually might have had the most profound effect on the entire show. The Goldilocks asteroid is worth so much money that it would have guaranteed the M7 nations riches beyond their dreams and would condemn Mars to being just a deserted outpost in an empty galaxy as the space race would effectively be over and the need for exploration and discovery would be gone. So as all the subplots somehow meshed together we saw how humanity can beat countries and corporations for the good of mankind. 

This conclusion had pretty much everything - apart from the discovery of life on Mars, in fact, Kelly Baldwin was pretty much reduced to being a supporting character probably only in it because she's Ed's adopted daughter. This was about her father's final battle, about Dani's last hurrah. This was about Dev fulfilling a dream and Aleida making up for something she didn't really do but feeling compelled to do it. And this was about a kind of redemption for Margo; maybe not the one she deserved, but equally the one she deserved and it spelled the end of the road for her wicked Soviet handler and a happy ending for everyone's favourite North Korean. In fact, the finale pretty much covered all the bases without being maudlin and without giving too much away about next season's 2012 story. One imagines that Ed and Dani will have either died or will be so old they're retired off; whether Margo will still be alive in whatever penitentiary she ends up is also up for debate, but I suspect as she was the last voice you heard she's not going to be around to see Happy Valley become one of the richest places in the galaxy. 

I have seen some quite brilliant TV over the last couple of years - The Bear, Lessons in Chemistry, the brilliant ending to Loki and the fabulous Slow Horses - it has been a couple of years of television that blew me away and I'm glad to include For All Mankind in that list - a TV show about the alternate history of the space race and a historical drama as well - it is intelligent science fiction and doesn't need fantasy fiction to make it work. I look forward to some point early in 2025 when season five arrives, any sooner than that and I will be a very happy man.

A Monstrous Mess

I really don't understand why this series existed in the way it did. why it had to have ludicrous stories with unbelievably dull (modern) characters when it could have told the same story without padding it out with bullshit and crap subplots. It could have been eight episodes of action, adventure and a simple story and it would have worked just as effectively, but instead we had dislikeable people, stupid stories, pointless back stories and sexuality, wanky organisations and some really bad acting.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters should maybe have been called Legacy of Wankers because apart from the monsters this really was a load of dreadful bollocks. We did, however, get some more Godzilla, who really mega-charged this pile of wank whenever he (or she) appeared and there was a cameo from Kong at the very end. There was a big fight with a dragon type creature and the revelation that in this 'underworld' one day is the equivalent of maybe one or two years on Earth, which, like I hinted at last time, doesn't seem to have reached the film makers of the Legendary Monsterverse just yet. This 'conclusion' - God, I hope there isn't another series - was about everyone pulling together - a sort of existential bukkake session - to get Cate, Mae, Keiko and Lee back from the other world and get someone else involved in the Monsterverse other than Monarch. Godzilla was good; Kong was fun to see, everything else, even the schmaltzy reunion just made me want to crawl into a corner and be quietly sick into a bag. this has been a really disappointing load of wank.

Italians 6 Indians 3 - Why?

We concluded the James May: Our Man in Italy series so we could move onto his latest travelogue. This wasn't as good as the Japanese road trip, but that might be down to the fact that May seemed no real stranger to Italy; he spoke the language better than you might imagine and he knew his pastas from his Ponte Vecchios.  

There was also the fact that Italy has just about been done to death over the last ten years or; if it hasn't been toured by chefs and art historians, it's been done by famous NY actors and bog standard TV pundits - Italy appears to be the go to place if you want to do a vibrant travelogue that's got a ready made audience. That said, James May is far better at this kind of thing than his detractors suggest he is and his constant banter with his film crew is far more entertaining than it should be. There was also quite a few things we learned about the place that other programmes have never touched on; such as the need for permits to film just about anything and the fact it costs an arm and a leg to film inside anything in Italy that is deemed a landmark or famous; for a show financed by Amazon it was quite telling the producers weren't going to pay the extortionate prices demanded to film inside the Coliseum or the Parthenon. There was also the fantastic place called Barga, which is essentially the Scottish capital of Italy. This archetypal Tuscany town is jampacked full of people with dual Scottish and Italian heritage and you're just as likely to find bagpipes, haggis and Tenants lager as you are pizza, pasta and Michelangelo - it's been added to my bucket list.

Next up is James May: Our Man in India which starts well with half an episode in Mumbai with James being roasted at a comedy club by local comedians and wandering around the slums discovering a peaceful and productive world despite the health and safety nightmares and filth. He's then off to somewhere I've never heard of for the Festival of Holi, which is a real highlight - something I would have loved to experience first hand. James seems to have a cracking time, even if he can't get rid of the paint and coloured powder he was covered in during a riotous amount of singing and dancing. 

I expect most of this puzzlingly 3-part series, which is May travelling across India from Mumbai to Kolkata rather than attempting to do the entire subcontinent, will be very enlightening - again, this is well trodden route for travelogues and Holi and Mumbai are both things that have been spotlighted elsewhere, but I expect there's going to be stuff that you simply would have expected, especially in India, such as meeting a man who hand paints Bollywood film posters - and bloody good he is - or entrepreneurs making a fortune out of ridding the Mumbai streets of waste plastic and turning it into recycled useful things. You also get the impression that over the last four years of making this show May has become quite good friends with director and executive producer Tom Whitter, who creeps onto the screen more often than just about everyone else apart from the host.

It so far has been the most entertaining of series, with the second episode being funny, poignant and very much full of surprises, especially Aggra and Varanasi - which, while covered before by others, was moving and makes you want to experience it - the incidental music was also really excellent. This is the best of May's travelogues so far and well worth watching, it's just a shame it's been so brief.

Hello, hello, hello, hello...

The weird thing about Echo, the new Marvel series is it doesn't feel like a Marvel series despite having the Kingpin, Hawkeye and Daredevil appearing in it. The thing is I'm not strictly sure what it falls under as it's so short and doesn't hang around with it's slight story.

Actually, there's a few weird things about it, such as Alaqua Cox's almost perfect inability to smile. It took us 68 minutes of show time before Maya cracked her first smile and I'm not sure it was a smile or if she simply let a very silent but satisfying fart out. I think it's extremely brave of anyone to do a series about a deaf Native American superhero with one leg who is possibly one of the most miserable people on the planet. She might not have much to smile about but you'd think she'd lighten up just a little bit, especially as she's back among the people who all seem to love her, but she's too wrapped up in her revenge bollocks to even notice. 

The opening twenty minutes of the first episode is basically a padded out refresher course in who Echo is and why she's the way she is; but we have added Native North American mythology bollocks thrown in to suggest she's really channelling some deity and is blessed with superpowers because of it. We also discover that Wilson Fisk didn't die at Maya's hands, she managed not to kill him with a bullet to the head from three feet and his men are gunning for the disabled hero with rage issues, or are they? There's some good fight scenes, more blood and oblique nudity than you'd imagine in a Marvel series and it has Chaske Spencer in it and we all know how good he is. Yet, there's this uncanny feeling that the recent Netflix action comedy The Family Plan used the same plot and arguably better...

However, after two very promising episodes, things start getting a bit underwhelming. The Kingpin makes a reappearance; there's lots of 'comedy' henchmen and we get a lot of Choctaw mumbo jumbo about deities and [ahem] echoes of the past. It gets very symbolic and adds yet another layer of 'gods' to an already weary MCU tapestry of confusing gods. This felt like a two and a half hour film split into sections and not a very good film at that and it actually peters out rather than builds to a thrilling climax; in fact the denouement is really poor and short - weighing in at about 30 minutes after you take out recaps, titles and end credits. The 'battle' between Echo and Fisk was pants, with Maya using her newfound powers to... do what exactly? She seemed to make Fisk a better person? Nah. It was just really lame and wasn't at all clear - perhaps you need to know the comic, which if that's the case, it's a huge cop out. 

There is a post credit scene that sets Fisk up to be the next mayor of New York, echoing [ahem] events that happened in Daredevil's comic, so that's your Born Again reference/plot and Maya reunited with her family. I'd just like to point out that the Guardian newspaper claimed this was a great, if very bloody, TV show and yet again it seems they based their review on possibly the trailers or maybe the comic because it wasn't great and the review wasn't accurate, yet again. This was poor and I can totally see why it was released in one go, was reduced in episodes and why we won't see a second season. Yet another nail in the MCU's coffin.

Beefy

Much has been said about the Netflix series Beef so we decided to watch it. This comedy about two Asian Americans who are raging about their lives has garnered much praise, yet after one episode we both felt a bit meh about it. I'm not sure if it's us, but we kind of want new TV shows to grab us and drag us in; there's not enough time or inclination to watch four or five episodes in the hope we might start liking it.

Starring Steven Yuen and Ali Wong as two people on either side of a road rage incident that spirals into a tale of revenge and survival, this probably should be great TV - eight half hour episodes of pithy dramedy - but it wasn't funny and neither of us had any sympathy for any of the seemingly entitled characters. We might be wrong; this might be brilliant TV but it pushed no buttons for either of us.

I've been told that we should watch Succession, which like Beef has won a multitude of awards recently, but I get the impression there seems to be a spate of 'watching rich or entitled people suffer' programmes on at the moment and frankly if something doesn't grab me I'm very unlikely to watch it and I know the wife is even harder to please than me. I don't want to watch rich people having constructed first world problems, mainly because I don't really want to watch things about bloody rich people at all. They're pretty much the bane of society at the best of times and like people who get pleasure from having sex with animals or children they should be kept away from our screens so not to encourage them or anger us...

Next Time...

I'm slightly lost... We don't appear to have anything new on the horizon. Something might pop up on the schedules or get released that I forgot about, but terrestrial TV is all about shite like The Traitors or the 'new' Gladiators style over substance wank. We don't do shows like this, they're as appealing as taking a bath in someone's sick and I don't care how much critics or people we know say, 'BUT YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS!!!' because critics are usually wrong or have a vested interest and history suggests my friends have questionable taste in TV.

On the Flash Drive of Doom we still have three seasons of Legion and last year's Sci-Fi series Silo. There's Mr Bates Versus the Post Office if we want to watch something everyone else seems to have watched and we still have three seasons of Fargo. I'd like to watch a 1985 series called Mr Pye that I remember with fondness and spent decades trying to track down, ended up finding a DVD and about two weeks later it became available on All4...

I'm sure something will turn up, it always does and the wife has lots of stuff bookmarked on iPlayer that I might not be able to avoid; but if this doesn't appear next week you'll know why...

Film Culture - Cowboy Dreams and Futuristic Nightmares

New Year new look! I decided that I needed to split film and TV blogs up this year. I watch more TV than film, so an irregular movie column is quite easier to achieve. So while my TV ramblings will continue in the regular blog spot, this film one will probably be on an as and when schedule, especially if there's not a lot of new films to be reviewed and most of the reviews will be older films from the now legendary Flash Drive of Doom...

Legal Alien?

The wife was quite clear about this - the book is even better than the film and I think the film is a solid gold masterpiece and I can say that again now that Kevin Spacey has been exonerated from all the damaging accusations that almost destroyed his brilliant career.

K-PAX is one of those films that is simply superb and I can't believe it's been so long since I last watched it because it really is one of the best films I've ever seen. It makes me smile, it makes my eyes leak and I think the reason the wife thinks I should read the book is because it's even more ambiguous than the film, which does try to offer a logical explanation to at least part of the story. Kevin Spacey plays Prot, allegedly from the planet K-PAX, who is 'arrested' in Grand Central Station for helping a woman who was mugged but says the wrong things to the police who don't care he was just helping, they stick him in cuffs and ship him off to the looney bin, where he eventually ends up being treated by Jeff Bridge's psychiatrist Dr Mark Powell. From that point on it's about how Prot interacts with the mentally ill patients, how he astounds astrophysicists and leaves Bridges feeling there's more to the man in front of him that meets the eye, that is until he hypnotises him and starts to dig into who Prot might really be. 

I think everyone who watches this movie and enjoys it for what it is will always believe that the ending was put there because the film was a serious look at mental health and you couldn't really have an alien in a Manhattan mental health hospital, either that or the director wasn't going to make a sci-fi film, but the patients knew it and I think anyone who loves this kind of film knows it as well, even if the sly smile at the end suggests something else entirely. There's more to this than meets the eye and it will always be one of my favourite films of all time. Now, I must read the book(s). 

With Hindsight

An occasional entry on either blog that examines something already talked about...

The Guardian newspaper [which has become something of a target in my house for being a gaslighting centre right middle class rag] spent an entire The Week in Geek column after New Year raging about how 'successful' the Netflix/Zack Snyder Rebel Moon, Part One: A Child of Fire has been and essentially slagging off people who dared to claim they liked it. This newspaper has form with reviews, such as when Lucy Mangan reviewed Clarkson's Farm without seeing it and claimed it was so bad it should be cancelled before anyone got to see it. When it became clear she hadn't actually watched the series, the paper got Stuart Heritage to review it again - positively - given the backlash the newspaper received.

Then just four months or so ago, the paper reviewed the brilliant Lessons in Chemistry and made allegations about the series that were clearly based on the reviewer not having watched the show and taking the review from a synopsis of the book it was based on. Subsequently the eight-episode Apple TV+ show made the paper's Top 50 of the year (although not as high as it deserved). Then about four weeks before Christmas it reviewed There's Something in the Barn, gave it three stars and declared it "a fun festive film in the vein of Gremlins," when it actually was one of the worst films released in the 21st century. 

But anyhow, back to the Zack Snyder film which garnered enough agreement with the Guardian's opinion to allow the comments section to run riot with defamation and nastiness, allowing trolls who would usually have been banned by the paper to attack anyone who dared suggest it was a lot of fun and shouldn't be taken so seriously. I can't emphasise enough how people should a) not take any Guardian review seriously and b) if they still read the Guardian they should stop and either find a different paper to read or a different web site to get their biased news from. The latter should be a resolution for everybody - coupled with helping kill off this worthless newspaper and consign it to the same history as the News of the World (which at least was honest about how shit it was). Yet to dedicate an entire column to slagging off people who liked something its reviewer despised is really a low bar for a newspaper that, at times, does good investigative journalism. It makes you wonder if the newspaper's editorial staff are all about 15.

Old Western's Never Die

38 years after it came out and 37 years since we watched the VHS video release, we decided to give Silverado another spin. I remembered enjoying it, especially as it was unusual for a western to be made in the 1980s - an era for flash comedies, crass cop movies, big hair and seminal sci-fi. It was a western that tried to be cutting edge and a bit more modern and it was over two hours long, however while it was enjoyable in a 'you don't see things like this much anymore' kind of way and it had a bunch of famous actors in it who either disappeared from view or went onto become huge stars, it was also just a western. It also had John Cleese as a sort of bad ass sheriff and seemed to spend an awful lot of time getting to where it wanted to be and then not a lot of time when it got there. It was interesting to see a film with the likes of Scott Glen, Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner, Jeff Goldblum, Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Patricia Arquette (why she was in this is anybody's guess) and Linda Smith in it, but I seem to recall the man who made it, Lawrence Kasdan, saw it as a reboot of the classic western and as we've all probably noticed, that still hasn't happened. It offered much but kind of dribbled a climax. 

Nightmare Scenario

I finally bit the bullet and watched the latest Nicholas Cage film, despite my better judgement and the knowledge that I have been misled in the past by people telling me, 'No, this Nick Cage film is really good, he's stopped making shit films...' only to discover he hadn't and it wasn't. However, Dream Scenario is actually one of the best, if not the best Nick Cage film I have ever seen. It is quite superb, very tragic and ultimately one of the saddest things I have seen in a long time.

Paul Matthews is a mild-mannered, slightly boring college professor specialising in biology who, without explanation, starts popping up in peoples dreams, which ultimately turns him into an overnight sensation and one of the most interesting people on the planet. Everyone knows him and as a result he starts to attract attention he and his family don't want. He turns up in almost everyone's dreams but does very little apart from just being in them, almost like an innocent bystander. Then after a series of rather strange things, the dreams turn nasty and Paul becomes a kind of modern day Freddy Kreuger as he wanders through peoples dreams slashing and killing people indiscriminately and this has almost the opposite effect with people no longer wanting to know him and he starts to attract problems and bad luck. It's from this point in the story that you start to feel desperately unhappy and profound sadness for him because it doesn't matter what he does things just get worse for him and he can't even plead for pity without people thinking he's just making things worse. Cage is quite brilliant as a man driven to the brink of his own sanity by the events unfolding around him and unable to fathom how his life is systematically being destroyed by something that really has nothing to do with him. There is more to it than that but to delve too deeply would spoil what is essentially a very good film, albeit one that you can't help but feel great sadness about.

It's Still Not A Tumour!

I found myself watching Film4 and possibly the most unlikely film comedy of 1990 was being shown. Kindergarten Cop shouldn't be a classic movie, but somehow it manages to be, despite its best efforts. Arnie had discovered comedies by this point in his career and this seemed like the perfect vehicle to prove he could make people laugh. I don't know if it was rest of the cast that facilitated this or if he genuinely did come across as a funny guy.

He plays John Kimble, a cop trying to get a bad man put away for bad things and through some contrived reasoning, Kimble and his partner have to go to some obscure west coast community, where he has to pose as a kindergarten teacher when his partner gets a severe case of the shits; from this point on it's just a number of set pieces with under six year olds, interspersed with lots of footage that could have been used in that old TV show Kids Say the Funniest Things. The thing is the longer I watched it, the more I found myself ignoring the (remember this was filmed in 1989 but not released until 1990) bad hairstyles, questionable acting, lame action sequences and double entendres and just enjoying it for a bit of nostalgia. And Arnie looked so young (and Linda Hunt so old considering she was just 44) and no one knew he was going to be a Republican at this point, even if he was originally from Austria, like someone else from history...

In Elysium Fields

We finally got around to watching Neill Blomkamp's Elysium and one wonders why this director fell from grace so quickly after this and District 9 as his most recent films would have gone 'straight to video' in bygone times.

Elysium wasn't really the film I expected it to be from the promo posters and trailers I'd seen, over ten years ago now. I can also see why it flopped at the box office, despite being a taught sci-fi film with relatable heroes and a couple of proper piece of shit villains - namely Jodie Foster and Sharlto Copley, whose Kruger really was as mad as a box of rabid bats and seemingly kept coming back for more. He was the main antagonist opposing Matt Damon's Max, who just wants a normal life but gets butt-fucked by 2154 too often. The film is essentially about overthrowing the elite, who live on a space station, while Earth chokes to death in pollution and violence - policed by robots with zero tolerance - and where illness, injury and disease can be cured but the people in charge are happy to let the people [read: cattle] die as long as profits are maintained. It could be allegorical for the 2020s but with a little more compassion. 

The wife found it a bit too slow and struggled to stay awake in the opening scenes, but I thought it was considerably better than I expected - but, that said, you don't often see Matt Damon in anything that isn't at least half good. There's good support from Alice Braga, Diego Luna and William Fichtner, the sets were realistic and in many ways it fits in perfectly with Blomkamp's alien film - District 9 - with it's feeling of hopelessness and dystopia, however I'm still struggling to understand why Foster, who by this point was making fewer and fewer movies, would want to be in it. It's still worth a view if you get the chance. 

Next time...

This is a redundant component because I could list all the films on the Flash Drive of Doom, but there's no guarantee we'll watch them. The wife fancies having a Harry Potter marathon at some point; I still haven't watched Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse and we're looking for a window of opportunity to view Killers of the Flower Moon which at 3½ hours needs to be a good film or I'll feel cheated. We have stuff I want to watch but she doesn't and vice versa and that's before we even get onto what's stored on the Freeview set top box we've 'taped' from TV. Whatever we watch, you can guarantee I'll have an opinion about it...

 

TV Culture - Whatever You Want

New Year new look! I decided that I needed to split TV and films up this year. I watch more TV than film, so a weekly (or thereabouts) TV column is quite easy to achieve, but 'padding' it out with whatever movies we've watched almost seems a bit misplaced. So while my TV ramblings will continue in the regular blog spot, the film one will probably be on an as and when schedule, especially if there's not a lot of new films to be reviewed. It will also give me the chance to dig deeper into specific TV series rather than just a general review...

Rock the Ballet

The fact that Martin and Gary Kemp will allow themselves to be parodied - yet again - by the extremely talented Rhys Thomas says a lot about the two brothers. The Kemps: All Gold is the follow-up to the 2020 mockumentary The Kemps: All True where the two brothers and founder members of the 80s New Romantic/pop band Spandau Ballet sent themselves up and now three years later they're back to do it all again. 

This time it's all about making some money for Martin and returning to a life of being respected for Gary, but naturally this is never going to be the case. Martin is separated from his wives - Pepsi & Shirley and their 12 children - while Gary lives in a sprawling mansion in Norfolk that might be haunted. Along for the ride is their long lost brother Ross (not that one) and their manager, the brilliant Michael Kitchen playing John Farrow, who you might remember is also the manager of Thotch - another of Rhys Thomas's spoof subjects. He suggests to the boys that they make a biopic - with Adil Ray as Tony Hadley - which completely rewrites their history and bombs at the box office. They then team up with the last surviving member of Status Quo - Francis Rossi - to form Spandau Quo to perform at midnight on NYE for the BBC.

It's very funny for the first half, but struggles to sustain the laughs when Christopher Ecclestone - as their former producer - suggests they break into a warehouse to steal their own original recordings, which they allegedly sold. From this point on it descends into farce rather than surreal lunacy; it's like once the slightly bonkers set up is exhausted there is no real money shot and it struggles for a proper climax. I seem to recall the original mockumentary had a similar problem and this would have worked if it had just been a diary of one thing after another going wrong, without having to have set pieces that struggled to improve it. It still garnered lots of LOLs in the opening 30 minutes which more than made up for the lack of them in the later half. Perhaps it would be advisable not to have a third part for this.

Analysis of Evil

Now we're up to date with Evil, I thought it might be good to share some ideas with you, especially if you've been watching it. I touched on this last time out that perhaps the reason nothing seems to conclude is because they might all be in purgatory, but there was a sublime nod of the head towards this theory in the season finale of series three as there was a conclusion to one of the plot lines and something happened that will surely have repercussions when season four hits the screens later in 2024, because if it doesn't then the fans are going to think they're involved in some kind of a con.

Obviously, most regular viewers of this will have seen the return of Andy after his four daughters blew Leland's scheme wide open using a poke facility on a video game and will also have wondered how Sheryl will manage to avoid the coming split with her own daughter now Kristen knows that her mother is working for DF and is still associated to Leland; who is also the father of a surrogate child using the egg that Kristen has had stolen. The questions this throws up only further make me think that Evil either takes place in a purgatory or at some point the writers and show runners are going to have to admit that Leland Townsend, Kristen's mother and their associates need to be exposed in some way for doing the illegal things that never seem to come back and haunt them.

It is possible that because these modern day demons have influence all over the world they can avoid any form of real scrutiny, but surely their plan for one of the Bouchard children is going to be smashed to pieces now that Kristen knows not to allow her own mother any access to any of her children. I mean, Kristen's been possessed once so they're not likely to go down that route again and short of killing her - unlikely - the evil doers are going to have to either get pretty public or there's got to be some seismic shift in the next series, otherwise the viewers patience is going to be sorely tested. Plus, how come the kids' exposing Leland - yet again - didn't have more made of it? The amount of stuff Townsend has been involved in during the three seasons so far is remarkable, yet, like the snake he is, he manages to slither out of it in almost all the cases.

One of this show's biggest problems is the tendency to avoid moving forward with plots, especially ones that seem to have reached a natural conclusion only to be conveniently ignored until the show runners can be arsed to return to it; such as a few of Ben's subplots and the fact that the Bouchard family and what has happened to them over the last three years never seems to be addressed the way it would be if this was taking place in an actual real world setting - yet this programme has made a big deal about seemingly taking a real life approach to a fantastically grisly premise. We've reached a point where none of Father David Acosta's subplots hold any real interest because we're invested in the Bouchards and to a lesser extent Ben's life, because both of these are far more interesting than the trials and tribulations of a newly ordained priest or the highly morally questionable Roman Catholic church. It might be a largely anti-Catholic series, but I think the least interesting aspect of it is now the reason it exists in the first place. There has been far too much obfuscation and lack of common sense displayed by the priests and Catholic church in this series for them to even be taken seriously; in fact while Leland and his demons are almost a comedy side line, the church runs them a close second. 

Absolutely French

The BBC special Dawn French is a Huge Twat was an entertaining 75 minutes of comedy as one half of the funniest female double act on TV regaled us with stories of when she's been a massive twat. That was essentially the premise of this special - stories of Dawn French when she did things she was embarrassed about and as a concept it was quite funny; not riotously, but funny enough to illicit a few chuckles and LOL moments. The thing about French is that she comes across as the kind of person who would do something twattish but never in a deliberate way, probably because she does seem to be a very honest person, especially about her own shortcomings. This is, after all, a woman who has never shied away from her size or struggles with her weight. As a TV special at Christmas it was entertaining, but I can't help thinking I would have needed to have been a ... ahem... huge fan of hers to have paid money to see her doing this one-woman show live, because while it was fun it wasn't brilliant fun.

Um... Er... Nope...

Over in the film blog, I spend a little bit of time berating the Guardian newspaper for spending an entire column shitting and stamping in it because people dared to like a film it slagged off with a passion - you can read that later when I publish it. I also spend some time pointing out that The Guardian has an absolutely shitty track record at reviewing things and I believe firmly that the people the paper employs to review films and TV (and possibly music and books) are probably wankers with no taste or hacks who cobble together reviews based on a few things they've read from people they like or follow. There is also my theory that the paper has been trying to appeal to a demographic that doesn't read it; this might be a webpage only thing, in the anticipation that younger middle class people will look at the Guardian web pages rather than whatever young middle class kids actually look at, but in reality it comes across like a middle aged pervert trying to impress teenagers at a family wedding.

One of the paper's 'TV Shows of the Year' was the BBC3 comedy Such Brave Girls, which it gave a four star review to and claimed was "properly brutal and properly funny". The reviewer was Lucy Mangan, who I mention in my film review piece as being the woman who reviewed a TV show based on her dislike of the main star and didn't bother watching it. Well all I can think is she wrote this review based on what someone said on TikTok because we sat through the entire first episode, where the characters mumbled, talked about suicide, mental health, sex and numerous other [tasteless] subjects and failed to say anything remotely funny. It was in my words, 'a stinky pile of unfunny bollocks' and it isn't big or clever to use emotive subjects for alleged humorous subjects. I'll just reiterate what I say in the film blog - don't watch anything The Guardian recommends and be curious about things it hates. 

More Non-Starters

2024 isn't getting off to the best of starts as far as TV is concerned. I revamp the TV blog and all I have to show for it is disappointment and disillusionment... So I noticed two new TV shows that debuted this week and thought, 'We'll give them a go.' ...

#1 - Sanctuary (A Witch's Tale) is a bit like Doctors, you know the afternoon BBC soap opera that's on after the news, at 1.45pm, most weekdays but is finishing soon. The reason I liken it to this is because it's badly acted, feels utterly scripted, is insincere and I'll be fucked if I watch any of it ever again. We managed 17 minutes and 33 seconds before I paused it and said to the wife that I didn't want to watch any more of it. It was awful, felt like something ITV would have done in the 1990s and I wasn't alone; the wife had the same feelings as me and was amazed I managed to get as far as I did without calling it to a halt... It's about a Cornish town called Sanctuary that is inhabited by witches and they all have brattish children and there's some mystery to solve and it was like watching an am-dram production of some play written by the local wannabe whose claim to fame was getting a blow job from an extra on Corrie while wearing a duck outfit - which sounds considerably more interesting...

#2 - The Brothers Sun was considerably better but failed to make us want to watch anything more than the opening episode. This eight-part Netflix series might be really good but I expect it will be eight episodes of people trying to kill the three main protagonists in various ways while the younger, inept, member of the trio learns how to defend himself with help from his older, wiser and deadlier brother. Essentially the leading Triad gang in Taiwan is being attacked by a mysterious assailant that leaves the top man in hospital and his son on a mission to protect his mother and brother, living in anonymity in LA. It has lots of martial arts in it, a lot of criminals, the usual slow motion fight scenes and not really enough comedy - for which it is supposed to be - to keep either of us amused or entertained. It might prove to be a great little series, but it failed to impress us, so we decided not to invest any more time on it.

Monster World Revisited

The most puzzling thing about this penultimate episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters was the fact that more things happened in it than in probably most of the previous eight episodes. Or at least it gave the impression of having more in it. We had the mystery of Leland Shaw's longevity solved and one of the longest lasting dangling subplots resolved, in what was likely to have been seen coming from several miles away on a foggy day...

The flashbacks kind of suggested we were going to see some kind of resolution as we time jumped back to 1962 and Bill Randa was now Hiroshi's adopted father and Leland was off on a mission that wouldn't see him return for 20 years, suggesting that if the situation with Cate, Mae and Leland isn't solved quickly then the same thing is going to happen all over again, but I'm erring towards that happening anyhow because I'm convinced this is a lead-in to the new Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire film which seems to be more focused on the Hollow Earth side of the titans universe than ever before. 

This wasn't a bad episode and oddly enough there were a few monsters on show and an actual followable story/explanation of the up-in-the-air bollocks we've had to suffer for the last few weeks. One thing about the Hollow Earth that is a spoiler but I'm going to spill - time passes at a different rate there and that wasn't even touched upon in the recent King Kong Vs Godzilla film, so in many ways this TV series is either adding to that cannon or it's just doing its own thing.

Our Pillock in Italy

One of the treats of 2020 was the James May series set in Japan. The former Top Gear presenter is, by far, the most entertaining of that 'classic' trio and his Our Man in Japan was an excellent travelogue with added 'man out of his comfort zone'. We had no idea there was a James May: Our Man in Italy until the third season set in India dropped this week. I surprise myself at how stuff sneaks under my radar and it's probably one of the reasons I do this blog because it gives me an opportunity to look back on older blogs to jolt my memory about things I'd forgotten we'd watched...

The second series, as mentioned, set in Italy kicked off in Sicily and focused most of its attention on Palermo, Mount Etna and May getting forced into doing things that were well out of his comfort zone. I know when the Guardian reviewed it - Lucy bloody Mangan again - she disliked the fact he had banter with his film crew all the way through, but it works with May because he's not your average TV presenter/TV Chef/TV travel journalist; he treats it like you'd expect a man entering his 60s would, with a little irreverence and a lot of cynicism when he's forced away from doing the things he wants and has to do the things the producer wants. Yes, it's the gimmick for the series, but May pulls it off with a certain aplomb that others probably wouldn't attempt. Plus, we found his six-part Japanese sojourn great fun because he approached it like someone who had never been there before; we're both big fans of Italy - not least because of Stanley Tucci's fabulous in Search of Italy - and it's still on our bucket list to go to one day (which is why we're also looking forward to season three and India because... that as well...). An entertaining programme without being too earnest or up itself.

General Ingorance

QIXL continues to be an entertaining show even if, like I said before, it feels like it is coming to the end of it usefulness. The format is growing stale, the jokes tend to be versions of the same jokes made for the last 18 years and there's not really a lot you can do to reinvigorate it because it is a formulaic quiz show. The U series continues with an Upside Down theme that naturally only really touches on the actual upside down for a couple of questions before artistic licence allows it to wander off in strange vaguely related directions. Aisling Bee won this week not because she knew the most but because she said the least wrong things, plus there was a montage of her when she did win - on the screens behind - and two of them didn't feature in the 45 minute extended edition, suggesting to me that maybe watching this get made live might be more fun than watching the actual TV show.

Things Fall Apart

One thing you can say for sure about For All Mankind is there's never a happy ending guaranteed; there's usually some unexpected death or tumultuous event that has a catastrophic effect on subsequent happenings and this penultimate episode not only delivered that it also set us up for possibly the most tragic finale in the history of this superb series.

It's tough to say anything without ruining it for people who watch or people who might watch but it really does look like everything everyone has been working towards is in danger of falling apart. Ed and Dev's decidedly risky plan has been uncovered, except it's been interpreted as a potential terrorist act. Margo's warning from Sergei takes on a tragic turn of events and the reason for North Korea's involvement in this series at all is finally revealed. This episode feels like one of those TV series where in the penultimate episode everything turns to shit and it looks like all bets are not only off but also going to go south faster than a rocket launch, which usually means the good guys will out and everyone will live happily ever after... Except this is For All Mankind and there's no such thing as a happy ending in this star-spanning epic TV show. My gut says what is trying to be achieved will succeed but it's going to cost far more than we invested viewers want, but my head and heart is saying 'fuck that, this show doesn't do things that way and it's not about to start.'

The important factor at play here is this season the Moon has literally been mentioned so briefly and is now just a thing so far in the background it's less than an afterthought, Gordo gets mentioned more than the moon does. If Dev and Ed's plan fails, Mars will become as redundant as the moon and the likelihood will be if Goldilocks is anchored outside the earth's atmosphere, the money it would create would put an end to space travel for longer than this series plans to carry on for. 

Whatever happens, I'm not frightened about a next season without Joel Kinnaman, Krys Marshall or Wren Schmidt in it, we have Coral Pena, Toby Kebble and Cynthi Wu to carry the torches and take the legacy even further. I want the treasures that Goldilocks gives to finance not only more asteroid mining and less poverty and inequality on the planet, I also want to see this series go to the next logical place in their quest for the stars - Jupiter and its moons. I want 2013 to be more like how we once dreamed 2050 would look; more Star Trek: Next Generation and less Planet of the Apes...

Next Time...

The finales of Monarch and For All Mankind. I might have a look at Silo which is also from Apple TV and seems to be much better than it appears on paper. We have stuff on iPlayer and the Flash Drive of Doom to dip into - this includes re-watching season one of Legion and the two series we didn't bother with (not because we didn't enjoy it, but because there was so much time between them). The wife is desperate for me to watch Guilt and there's usually something new that pops up on one network or another every week. Obviously there will be the usual stuff that I slag off in inventive ways.

The movie blog will follow this - maybe later today, maybe next week. We'll see how that all goes and whether this division of things works or not.