Film Culture - America Unhinged

This is jam-packed with real spoilers, so if you want to watch any of these films you might want to skip this week's film-fest...

Disappointing Things

Extraordinary film, utterly sumptuous set designs, quite phenomenal acting and a truly wrong thing that does nothing but fantasise about the exploitation of women. It's been a long time since I watched a film that simultaneously repulsed and impressed me at the same time, but Poor Things manages it with consummate ease.

Don't get me wrong, there was much to like about this film and Emma Stone's performance was, at times, unbelievably brilliant, but there was so much that was wrong about this movie that I couldn't enjoy it. It was morally questionable, it was at worse misogynistic and at best chauvinistic and the only character that came out of it with any dignity... actually none of the characters did although Hannah Schygulla probably deserves a mention for being the least offensive. I literally wanted the film to end after about 30 minutes and I don't think it has anything to do with how prudish I have become in later life. I can get the idea that some kind of Frankenstein's monster creates his own monster and I get that that monster as she grows and matures will discover sex, but one would hope that as the character of Bella Baxter becomes more... human, her animalistic desires would become a little less frantic. This is a sexual horror story and if, like I've heard, Yorgos Lanthimos was trying to tell a story about the emancipation of a woman wronged by monsters of science then he missed the part where he shouldn't try to fill every scene with Emma Stones boobs or her vulva.

I think it deserves to win awards but probably for set design (I actually wrote 'sex' design in the first draught which must have been Freudian or just because the film was overloaded with it), camerawork, special effects, maybe some of the acting - Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef were both very good (but culpable) - but Mark Ruffalo was fucking awful, a really dislikeable character badly acted with an accent that wandered all over the shop. Was this because his Duncan Wedderburn was a fraud or was it because Ruffalo isn't good at holding an accent for more than half a dozen words? I can't say. I just thought it was about two hours too long. Yes, the females in the film might have found their own emancipation by the end of it, but they had to endure enough rough and male dominated sex to get there and that made the whole thing feel tawdry, cheap and soiled. 

Fists of Fake Steel

I'm in a quandary, mainly because of spoilers. You see to tell you much about The Iron Claw is to pretty much give it away; however, if you're a fan of wrestling, know anything about the family, or are familiar with the fact this is a biopic (with a character cut from the adaptation for reasons I will presume later) then it won't spoil anything for you. 

This is a testosterone-fuelled example of what actors can do if they work out enough for a specific part, because Zac Efron, as well as Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson - all average size and shaped men - really went over the top to muscle up as three of the 'cursed' Von Erich family - a famous Texas-based wrestling family from the 80s and 90s. They helped turn wrestling into a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry from its roots of, you know, actual proper wrestling and were some of the pioneers who helped form the WWF and make it the spectacle it became, especially in the 1990s. Efron especially must have worked his balls off to get into the kind of shape - that would usually have him shoehorned into a superhero film - as the musclebound Kevin Von Erich - the surviving oldest brother who never really got the breaks his brothers got, but, in the end, probably was the best thing that could happen to him.

This is the story of a group of boys who were driven to extremes by their father, Felix - Holt McCallany, a determined and obsessed former wrestler whose hatred of the sport's governing body made him lose sight of everything else in his desire to see one of his boys crowned World Champion. This is a man who didn't understand what 'family' meant in his relentless pursuit of something he felt was withheld from him when he was a semi-famous wrestler in the 1960s. In the real world the Von Erichs - or the Adkisson family - was a name associated with tragedy and disaster; of Felix's six children only Kevin is still alive; three died by suicide and one from a freak electrocution, while the first world champ died from a ruptured colon in a Japanese hotel room. This might well be a huge spoiler, but it's also the entire film and doesn't really spoil it, at last not until the first death, because the rest follow pretty quickly and you can see them all coming.

Is it a good film? Well, it has the brilliant Jeremy Allen White in it, but it's really Zac Efron's film and despite looking utterly silly - musclebound with a girl's haircut - he just about pulls it off as Kevin, a man depicted as being either very naïve or maybe a little stupid. It's actually a pretty straightforward biopic, which has had a Von Erich son omitted from it - Chris - because they probably figured if you didn't know the story losing so many members of a wrestling dynasty over the space of five years might seem a bit careless; although he did blow his own brains out and that might have been the difference between a 12 and a 15 or 18 certificate. It wasn't a bad film, but equally it wasn't something I can imagine will win awards, despite its current high rating on IMDB. I'm glad I watched it, but I also feel as though it's just over 2 hours of my life that could have been spent doing something less overwrought.

Mistaken Identity

One thing about The Hunt is very clear; it's a film that doesn't try to make its audience think it's anything but a satire. There's a feeling of 'what you see is what you get' going on and it does come across as one of those cheap low budget films that has little or no redeeming factors, but actually it's quite a strange movie that actually does get you wondering at times just what you're watching.

Betty Gilpin - the star - doesn't actually make an appearance until about the 15 minute mark; I'm sure she's there in the background of the opening scenes, but the camera is focusing on two others, who you immediately think are going to be the people this film follows. They are two of 12 people who are gagged and dumped in a field with a large box full of weapons; once the gags are all off someone starts opening fire on them, killing almost half of them in that opening ten minutes. Three get away and over a fence and find their way to a gas station where they essentially walk into a trap and then Betty arrives and from that point on the film takes an altogether different direction. You see the 12 people picked to die have all been identified as right wing conspiracy theorists who said some mean things about some rich woke people - based on a flippant joke made by one of them. The rich bitch running this slaughterhouse - Hilary Swank - makes a joke about hunting right wing wankers at the weekend at her mansion in Vermont and people start to actually believe that is exactly what she and her friends are doing, so they decide to rent part of Croatia and actually hunt these 12 people into extinction.

The problem is Gilpin's Crystal isn't the right Crystal; instead of kidnapping some ignorant red neck, they mistakenly kidnap a former US special forces operative who is very good with her hands and guns and that's when this short but entertaining satire really takes off. Apparently Donald Trump didn't like this film, but I think that was just a Blumhouse marketing ploy - or maybe he didn't like the fact that left and right wing Americans are depicted as complete and utter wankers who all deserve the die? It was co-written by Damon Lindelof - usually a good mark of quality IMHO and while I think the wife couldn't quite get into it, I thought it was actually a clever little piss take on culture wars, the internet and people who use social media as a platform to spout their individualistic bullshit.

Not A Fast Dog

I suppose the most accurate thing to say about this week's Tom Hanks film [have you noticed that since I changed the format of these there's been a Tom Hanks film every column?] is that it's a film about naval warfare. Greyhound is set in 1942, in the mid-Atlantic, just after the USA had been dragged into WW2. Hanks plays a newly promoted naval captain in charge of the eponymous Greyhound - a small warship charged with looking after a convoy of supply ships from Nazi U-boats.

Also starring Stephen Graham, as Hanks's #2, this really is just a war film and it's not really about anything else. You see back in the war, there was an area in the mid-Atlantic called the Pit, which was essentially too far out for the US Air Force to give protection and not close enough to the British Isles to get any from this side either - a kind of black hole where the supply convoys and the ships deemed to protect them were on their own. Hanks's captain has his first command, he's in charge of a crew made up mainly of very young men and he has had no sleep and not eaten anything for 72 hours, yet he has to think on his feet and try and protect his crew and everyone else in the convoy and that is the film. It's set over the space of 48 hours - the time the convoy is in this red zone - and it's split into sections where they engage the enemy. If it wasn't set on a ship in the ocean you'd almost think it was a play, but that is maybe the thing about it; the fact they're sitting in a huge ocean in extreme weather, but they could just as well be in a small box. It's a very procedural drama; probably extremely similar to what this would have been like in real life. If you like war films then I'd highly recommend it; if you like Tom Hanks it's a bit of a completists film, but in general at a tad over 90 minutes it isn't a bad way to spend an hour and a half.

Flabtastic Four

In anticipation of 2025's Fantastic Four (Hah!), I decided to watch Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's Fantastic Four and the weird thing is I remember the actual film being made because I was news editor at Comics International at the time and was in San Diego in 1993 when we were hearing all kinds of awful things about it.

The documentary of the making of the film is almost as trashy as the actual film because the people involved in the movie had been brought back (in 2015) to talk about it and some of them were sanguine, some of them were self-deprecating and some of them were absolute fucking bonkers, specifically Alex Hyde-White and Joseph Culp (both sons of actual famous actors), although Hyde-White takes the biscuit because he's transmitting from la-la-land with a tin foil hat on. The thing about some of the people interviewed here is that they are clearly in absolute denial despite the fact that by the time it was finished it was more like a badly made fan-made adaptation. Then there's the bone of contention - was this film ever made for a release or was it made for some other reason? Was it essentially a contractual obligation to try and get the film rights retained or maybe sold to someone else, which considering Roger Corman received a cheque for a million dollars for pulling it is probably exactly why it was never going to be an actual film. If you listen to Hyde-White you'd think he was talking about a multi-million dollar Steven Spielberg film mixed with the plot of a Mission: Impossible about how 'barnstormers in blue suits were trying to steal the project'. Culp, who sometimes liked the film and sometimes hated it, depending on what part of the interview you watched, really comes out of this as some kind of 'Do you know who I am?' kind of guy, because, his dad, Robert Culp was somebody.

One thing is sure, there were some pretty enthusiastic people on this film who really wanted the movie to be a success and sound genuinely sad that it never came out. The point here is if you've never seen it, there are clips in the documentary and it was more amateurish than a bad episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers; it's a truly awful film that a bunch of people who have never been in a decent film in their lives try desperately to tell us that despite what we might see this really was a brilliant and underrated movie. The film's director Oley Sassone takes the prize for being the most deluded because he really thinks he did a good job and people are being deprived for not being able to watch it. But hey, all these people wanted to be famous actors or filmmakers and none of them did because none of them were any fucking good at what they did. 

Dazed...

The film Monolith got a really good write up in that paper I dislike. They claimed it was on a similar level to Arrival, which I absolutely loved. However, it was clearly a film made during lockdown; it was a single hander, with every other actor other than the lead on the telephone or in videos. It was about a mysterious black brick or monolith that turns up in people's lives and the woman who has a podcast that begins to look into this odd phenomena.

It become quite clear from out outset that this would be a cheaply made movie with virtually all the action taking place in the journalist's studio; to cut up the monotony, there are shots of her equipment, the outside and assorted stuff floating [not literally] around the house. The journalist receives an anonymous email telling her to contact a woman about her 'brick' and it lurches forward from there until she and us begin to realise there's something odd going on and the journalist has more to do with this than she suspected. In many ways this is more like Annihilation than anything else, but without the inherent oddness and in the end we finished the film and wondered what the actual fuck we'd just wasted 90 minutes of our lives on. There might be a neat little twist in this - it might be aliens (it probably is), but frankly by the time you find out what it is you don't give a flying fuck. Pretentious Wank would have been a much better title.

... And Confused

Considering Monolith has an IMDB rating of 6.1 (now) and the film we watched straight after it has a rating of 4.8 (now) - it was 8 when we watched it and then plummeted like a stone - it makes me wonder if I should take any notice whatsoever of what other people think. I became aware of this movie - Lovely, Dark and Deep from my mate Chris, who doesn't have a good batting average with his recommendations. He posted a trailer up and I was intrigued, so we watched it...

A couple of immediate observations: it isn't a good film, but it also doesn't deserve a 4.8 rating. Movies that get under 5 are usually badly made amateurish rubbish with little or no redeeming qualities; this is a well made film but is painfully slow - and for a 90 minute feature that's not a good thing - and it's not really that scary despite being a horror set in the woods with a sense of eeriness. 

Georgina Campbell plays Lennon, a newly appointed park ranger who is carrying a troubled and guilty past because her sister went missing in the same woods she's now working in 20 years earlier. It's never made clear, but you get the feeling Lennon is looking for answers and the first 40 minutes of the film pan out more like a natural history documentary, but then things get slightly weird; a girl goes missing, her partner alerts Lennon who then informs HQ, who despatch other rangers and a helicopter. It is here that the first strange thing happens; she's told by Jackson (Nick Blood), the guy co-ordinating the search that she has to stay put at the mobile ground HQ. Lennon doesn't like this so ignores her instructions and goes off on her own to find the girl, which she does - huzzah. 

Cue the second bit of weirdness; none of the rangers are happy this has happened, they seemed pissed off that the girl was found. The head ranger makes it clear that Lennon's ranger career is finished and she was going home. Lennon asks Jackson what she did wrong because she found the girl and Jackson tells her it's because she found the girl. This is where and when it starts to try and get scary.

The more I thought about the movie, the more I realised that these two bits of dialogue explain everything that is going on and going to happen and how her fellow rangers are more than aware that Lennon has already experienced tragedy in that forest, so when Lennon gets swept into a nightmare that doesn't appear to make any sense, the viewer is completely non-plussed, mainly because there's very little that's scary or creepy in a supposedly scary and creepy horror movie. But the next 25 minutes is odd but in a quite boring way until, at the end of her tether, she meets the head ranger and asks 'are you real?' She says she is and the next thing is Lennon emerging out of the middle of the lake, gasping for breath and is rescued by Jackson.

The following year, she's back as a ranger again. Jackson is now in charge and the head ranger's missing poster is prominent around the HQ. A week or so into her three month stint there's news of a missing hiker; they all mobilise to find him and Lennon literally stumbles upon him. "Are you real?" He asks and she pauses and then says "No." and walks away. End of film. I can see why people disliked it because it wasn't a horror film and it wasn't scary, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that the opening scene with a sheet of paper with 'The forest demands a body' written on it is what the entire film is about - whatever malevolent spirit lives there demands a sacrifice and if you save the chosen sacrifice you become it and the head ranger saved Lennon by removing the curse from her and Lennon faced with the same choice again chose not to. I'm telling you all of this - spoiling it - because you really don't want to watch it; it's a fucking awfully written film with no pacing and no scares. It's boring, but it does have a clever story that is almost hidden away and lost because of the nonsense around it. Read this review, don't watch the film. This has been a public service announcement. 

Little Things

It dawned on us recently that of all the films in the MCI - prior to 2022 - there was one we'd only seen once, so we remedied that this week. Some fun entertainment to make up for the fact that both the wife and I have suffered badly from the norovirus and needed something as frivolous as an Ant-Man.

I cannot remember my original review of this, there may never have been one and when I did my entire MCU review a few years ago we omitted this because... well probably because we weren't terribly impressed. I don't really understand why to be honest, it's a slight but extremely fun film and considerably better than anything Disney/Marvel have done after Infinity War. It has the right balance of humour over villainy and it sets up Scott Lang well and does a neat trick of tying up Hank Pym's Yellowjacket persona without destroying the 1960s revamp of Ant/Giant-Man too much or badly. There's stuff in it I take issue with but that's more to do with the movie rather than riding roughshod over Marvel history. Paul Rudd makes a half decent Ant-Man and while I've never been a huge fan of Evangeline Lily - I seem to recall having the biggest issue with her first time around, but then again I ... ahem ... lost so much of my life watching Lost I can understand that - she isn't too bad in this. It's a fun film with a simple message and a bit of a switch in direction for the average MCU movie. Yellowjacket reminded me a lot of the new looked Blue Beetle film from DC, which was a dreadful film compared to this and probably explains why new superhero films are destined to all be shit.

From the Archives

As mentioned above, this week has been all about sickness and poo, except to call it poo would be a stretch, but we don't have to go there, although I'm sure many of you have been there yourselves... So, trapped in the lounge while the kitchen is rebuilt, I decided to watch a couple of old films that I hadn't seen for a long time. These films were: Journey to the Centre of the Earth made in 1958 and starring James Mason and Pat Boone. And The Towering Inferno made in 1974 with more famous actors than you can vomit out in 60 seconds, but primarily Newman and McQueen.

Journey pretended to be a Scottish film with Mason and Boone both putting on relatively slight Scottish accents and pretending they were scholars from Edinburgh. It was an unbelievably unbelievable tale that simply made little or no sense and displayed a tonal nature that makes some recent MCU films seem positively sensitive. Add to this the iguanas with fins pasted to their backs, the salamanders made giant by macro camera work and the giant (papier machete) macrolepiota procera (Parasol mushrooms) and you have something that was probably state of the art in 1959 but now looks like a 1970s episode of Dr Who with less care and attention. The denouement is still one of the most extraordinary things ever - four people are saved from the dyed red porridge masquerading as lava by a giant asbestos disc that they ride out of a volcano and land without even a burn in the Mediterranean. The only injury was caused by Boone falling out of a tree in Italy - which is even more surprising as he seemed fine when he picked up a lamb to cover his modesty from a group of nuns and then ran off... To call it bollocks would be wasting eight letters. 

The Towering Inferno is a classic, although a classic of what I'm not sure. It had profoundly poor special effects, pantomime wankers dressed up as villains, stereotypes, OJ Simpson, sexism and inventive ways to die that didn't involve flames or smoke inhalation. Steve McQueen looks like he phones in his role as the fire chief - who literally does EVERYTHING - and Paul Newman is the architect who does everything else, the rest of the cast is just window dressing and one wonders why the hell Robert Wagner was even in it as he did nothing but die. It's on for two hours and 46 minutes and goes nowhere really slowly and considering the fire starts in the first five minutes, it's the Jaws-esque refusal to accept lives might be in danger that is the most remarkable - "we're on the top floor, the fire can't possibly reach us!" It was at this point McQueen and Newman should have just left these people to be barbecued and gone and sat in a bar. There was also the slap-dash and haphazard way orders are given and were be carried out - untrained people risking their lives trying to rescue people while actual firefighters stand around and let these people enter into hell. It's enormous fun if you're a 12 year old Phil, but the 61 year old me just wanted it to end. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, isn't it.

Next Time...

Who cares? The best thing I've watched over the last ten days was a nine year old MCU film and a rather dull WW2 movie. No wonder we struggle to watch things on the Flash Drive of Doom if new films leave me cold and old films are pretty much a waste of my time, again. I'm not sure who claimed that 2024 could be the greatest year in film history, but I think they were paid a lot of money by someone to say this. I've seen one film released/been made available in 2024 that I think is good - American Fiction and even that had a bit of a disappointing ending. When I did my film and TV blogs there was always the chance that something from either genre would shine through the utter disappointment I feel sometimes about the state of the entertainment industry. I truly believe that peoples standards have just dropped to a level where adequate is the new fantastic...

TV Culture - General Poor Quality or Major Wank

Spoilers

The Slapstick Years

The thing about Resident Alien that bugs me was almost answered in one of Harry's closing monologues - yet another thing about this load of wank that grates on me. He was theorising how pretending to be human has made him less smart and that's certainly the impression anyone who watches this must get from Alan Tudyk's performance. He's become stupidly moronic while the rest of the cast seem to now exist in a world where being either an arsehole or a fuckwit is the norm...

The Grey hybrid story was wrapped up quicker than liquidising an idiot in a large blender; in fact it made you wonder what the fucking point was of having it there in the first place was. Enver Gjokaj's fleeting guest appearance ended in an imaginary fight scene where both aliens imagined how their fight would be like, which in a way was almost amusing, apart from the fact they're supposed to be highly intelligent beings able to travel to earth from their planets but instead come across as morons in a twat contest.

The little Muslim girl has quit the show; I don't know if this was a parental decision but she's been replaced by two of Max's school friends and the sexually weird Judy seems to have become a major character in the show; which suggests to me that the writers are still struggling to come up with anything that resembles a coherent story or plot line. Anyhow, the wife told me to turn it off after five minutes, but I refused, I feel that in a week that has yielded such low quality TV, I have to have something that I can really sink my teeth into and Resident Alien is very much that mouldy burger. Next week there's a new subplot, which is likely to be as lame as the current ones. I only watch this because Asta has the largest backside in television and her friend D'Arcy is one of the least attractive red heads I've ever laid my eyes on and God that sounds so sexist, possibly even misogynistic, but no one in this TV show comes away with anything like any praise; it's like an ugly actors convention with poor scripts and no budget. Still, mercifully, only six more episodes to go. 

Love & Marriage

My mate Chris will be pleased to know that we watched Mr & Mrs Smith this week; he will also be delighted to know that we didn't give up on it, despite having reservations. In fact, there was enough in the opening episode to keep us watching until the end. It was a little cold and like my other friend Kelvin suggested, also something a little ... icky... but it wasn't too offensive and it was quite enjoyable.

It stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as two 'agents' recruited by a 'company' to pose as man and wife while undertaking specific jobs for them; these jobs are an assortment, but mainly involving the loss of life with a proviso that the posing couple can get away from the scene of the carnage fast enough and with as little damage as possible; maybe some spying and general espionage. at least that's what the first few episodes ended up being like, as we were introduced to and then slowly got to know John and Jane Smith. He's quite affable, while she's a little bit of a cold fish. [Ahem] The Guardian praises the couple's chemistry and ranks it so highly you can hear jizzum pumping from their collective throbbing gristle. Their chemistry is the kind you'd expect from two lead actors playing people in a forced relationship. 

My mate Kelvin described this show as "...Nothing overtly offensive about it, but it felt sticky and nasty for reasons I can't identify." And I totally get that because there is something slightly... tonally wrong about this; like both these characters have a nasty and secretive stain on them that they don't really want anyone else to know about but they kind of also want to brag about it. I'm finding Maya Erskine's character the colder of the two at the moment, because Glover's John seems almost too nice to be doing the job he is, whereas she's got that 'I could easily be a serial killer' vibe going on. The weird thing is as the two spend more time with each other they become more attracted to each other, which is strange because... you know... I don't know if I would be. As the series moves on towards the finale, there is a distinct surreality about it, especially when they meet another Mr & Mrs Smith, or when Ron Perlman turns up as, essentially, a giant man baby. 

The theme of it is actually the perceived cycle of a marriage/relationship - from the first meeting, through the loved up period, to the doubts and then the therapy before the inevitable split; conceptually it's a clever idea, but I recently described this show as 'not wanting to have anyone associated with it in my house unless I've got an armed guard,' because there is something definitely wrong about it all and not in a good or fun way and that isn't how most relationships are, even in the USA. One thing is pretty much certain, I doubt there will be a second season.  

Friendless in the Cold of Night

The 'thing' that led to the scientists dying in True Detective: Night Country was fucking inspired; I don't think anyone watching this would have seen it coming. Quite how it happened is a different point entirely, because this was a mini-series that made me want to swear a lot, shout and generally find out which cunt I could sue to try and get six hours of my fucking life back...

Whoever wrote this heap of shite should never work in film or TV again because there was an hour long play here that was stretched out across six parts with so much padding and hinted at bullshit that by the time revelations happened no one in this house had the fucking will to live. Just what did we just watch? I ask that because SO MUCH of it was just there; no explanation; no reason; no history; no fucking nothing - 'oh let's put these bits in now' kind of plotting. If you're going to have major revelations about a primary character's life or history, at least treat the viewer with enough fucking respect to actually mention the revelation or put some groundwork down - don't just take it for granted that the viewer will be able to extrapolate some oblique fucking flashback with something that is both simultaneously important and unimportant. Just why was any of the shite thrown in about Danvers or Evangeline even there? It's not like it added to the story; it just obfuscated and confused. 

There was even a subplot that we didn't even know was a thing; something that had been so obliquely hinted at that when it was revealed we looked at each other and went 'what the fuck?' There was all kinds of Alaskan mumbo-fucking-jumbo going on that you needed a scorecard to understand what was happening and in the end they all lived happily ever after apart from the ones that didn't. This was fucking awful; it was a truly woeful bit of TV making and there was little or no redeeming features - apart from how the scientists died, which I wasn't a million miles away from (I was actually 100% right about them, I was just a touch wrong about who killed them), but even if you'd watched the first five episodes a dozen times you would have been hard pressed to even guess it correctly. If you haven't already wasted your life on this vomit of a TV show then don't be tempted. This is preposterous bollocks and shouldn't spoil television for anyone, ever. Don't watch it, you'll be very angry.

Ghost Writer

Mark Gatiss has carved a particular niche out for himself since being in League of Gentleman, he's either writing stories for TV or he's appearing in programmes like M R James: Ghost Writer, a documentary about the celebrated writer of ghostly fiction; a man who seemed to have a real knack at scaring the shit out of people long before so-called horror-meisters came along claiming or being heralded as masters of terror. James's Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad is probably one of the creepiest and scariest things I've read or seen and this hour-long special was an examination of this, his other fiction and his life.

The thing about Monty James is he wasn't at all a spectacular man; a closet homosexual (or non-practicing as he was described) and a professional schools person, he started writing ghost stories as a form of entertainment for the club he belonged to at Eton and it took off from there, but his first love was essentially being a teacher or a provost.

The documentary looked at his life as the son of a vicar, growing up in rural East Anglia and his (presumably) platonic relationships with various men in his life. How he went to Eton, then Oxford and then back to Eton in an employed way, where he stayed until his death in his 70s. He was an affable chap with a great fondness for people and he liked to scare the shit out of them, which he was very good at doing. The thing is, James was as dull as dishwater. His idea of a thrilling time was going cycling in remote parts of France or ... well... not a lot else really. Whereas I'm sure if they did a documentary on Stephen King there would be an entire section on his addictions, James was fond on boys and therefore this was touched on peripherally and then largely ignored. It was TV that educated but it was also TV that was simply there; sitting on BBC4 waiting for someone with an hour on their hands for something that wasn't going to exactly tax them.

The Lure of Essex

The Essex Serpent continued on its glacial path and it really was a strange beast. When we reached the halfway mark, I still had the impression that nothing was going to happen, except for maybe something even more tragic than we have already witnessed. What was clear was the attraction between Cora  (Clare Danes) and Will (Tom Hiddleston), even though Cora had a suitor - one she seemed to get on well with but acted like it was nothing but a platonic relationship (in 1898... Yeah... right?) and Will has a wife and children, but with his wife now with TB she might not be on the scene for much longer.

The heathen Christians in the village are even more believing of this serpent, which I doubt actually exists outside of the imaginations of easily-led people, while the general mass hysteria that was there before Cora and her entourage arrived is now, seemingly, being laid at her door because of strange events at the school rooms. The Curate gets more bonkers every episode and to paraphrase Cora from an earlier episode, just why did Will Ransome go there when he could have had a much easier life and still been a vicar. The Essex people here are as thick as mince and superstitious with it, but this was a series that needed to be more than just an illicit love story, yet that's all you got - an allegory at best. 

After being driven away from Essex, Cora falls into a deep depression because she can't have the man she wants; in fact, Cora isn't a particularly nice woman. You mistake her for a victim because of the way her husband treated her, but you start to wonder if she brought a lot of his behaviour on herself. She's selfish, deceiving and manipulative and doesn't really seem to care about anyone but herself and you wonder if the loopy curate might be right when he accused her of bringing the 'evil' to Essex;  Although maybe not in a literal sense. Meanwhile Martha (Cora's communist buddy) is trying to bring change about in the slums of Limehouse but only by her would-be suitor being rich - actually that's a little unfair of the character as she is one of the few people to come out of this with anything like self-respect. 

In the end we were a little stumped by what even the point was of the thing. Was the 'serpent' an allegory of Cora - the temptation in the garden of Eden, perhaps? Why was there emphasis on things that had no actual link to the story? Why do Essex people think whales are serpents? Or even why was there a story in the first place? How come every time I looked at Clare Danes with her strawberry blond wig on I kept thinking she was the spitting image of Harpo Marx? This was dull, unfulfilling and largely a waste of your time. The wife reckons the book might be better; she's welcome to it.

A Soulless Mess

Regular readers (and I know there are some) will know that I have two specific pet peeves - The Guardian newspaper, specifically its reviews section (but absolutely not exclusively) and the station once called BBC News24. 

What was once a slick and professional news station is now this identity-less stream of poor quality presenters who literally seem like they've been dragged out of the canteen and told it's their turn to read the news today. In what, I now know, was a huge cost cutting exercise - terminating 90% of all contracted presenting and reporting employees and replacing them with new, inexperienced workers on much lower contracts - they have sold out and now give us what can only be described as 'amateur hours'. It is essentially now an extension of BBC World Service with the emphasis on 'world' and any semblance it once had to a UK news station has been reduced to little segments of 'From Around the UK' stories that you'd struggle to include on a regional news programme. It is dreadful and isn't even worth putting on when there's fuck all else on telly. Take the guy in the picture - Nicky Schiller - this is a man who I firmly believe is actually Nosferatu in a wig; with his filed to points teeth and haircut that reminds me of trousers that have had an argument with ankles (like the PM but creepier, if such a thing was possible). This is a man who exudes bon homme but you wouldn't want in a crowded room at a children's party because... you know... creepy and far too cheery.

This morning at 9.26am, at a point when the bulletin ends and you get the weather, one of the cleaners doubling up as presenters concluded her half hour and there was some graphics then instead of the weather you had another news presenter giving you the 'Top of the Hour' headlines, clearly from a couple of days ago. This presenter, who reads off the autocue like it's threatening her with her life, is seen quite often and one wonders if she's ticking a specific box. Talking about weather forecasts; at the weekend they tend to have a forecast in the morning, maybe one at lunchtime and subsequent slots are just repeats of earlier ones. It's dreadful and I don't think anyone talks about it so the BBC probably think everything is fine. It isn't. 

Just a Load of Shit

I read quite a few reviews of Joe Lycett Versus Sewage and the general consensus was it shouldn't be down to him to make a programme like this, highlighting the plight of Britain's bottom waste disposal. I say, it shouldn't be down to him to make what ended up as essentially a quite pointless programme that could have done so much more than just trivialise shit.

Lycett has form at this kind of thing and it's usually a good thing when a celebrity takes on a key issue, especially one about the amount of poo that is channelled into our waterways on a daily basis because there is no body with the power or inclination to fine or sanction water companies. The amount of shit in our rivers and off our coast should be a National disgrace; it should be on the agenda of any political party that wants to be elected; it should disgust and anger everybody in this country regardless of their political persuasion. I mean, even if you vote Conservative you want clean rivers and seas, don't you? How does having the country swimming in its own shit benefit anyone apart from people with shares in one of the ten water companies and really, are dividends more important than safety and a place where people and indigenous animals can exist without the fear of dysentery or cholera or just general sickness from poo poisoning?

The problem with this documentary is it was a little like when you think, "Oh boy, I've got to have a massive shit!" You rush to the loo, pull your pants down and out comes a massive fart with no lumps. Even the stunt to try and make people angry about the poo in our rivers was pretty much seen as a stunt which, in the grand scheme of things, saw very few people react to it. This documentary wasn't a load of shit, but it did highlight the apathy suffered by people regarding the issue and the fact that the shit in your rivers is low priority for everyone from politicians to the Archbishop of Canterbury (because the Church of England invests heavily in water companies as part of its pensions portfolio). It was a pathetic plop rather than a thunderous dump and people need to start caring more about the excessive poo in our lives.

Next Time... 

And thus concludes another week of weak TV. Yes, some of it was mildly okay but in general I do get the impression that I'm drawn to the rubbish because it makes better review material. There will be more of the same next weekend, I have no doubt and it now seems highly unlikely that stuff I've started watching in previous weeks will be returned to, so if you wanted to know what I thought of certain things... tough, it ain't going to happen.

What I can tell you is Constellation will be on the list of things to watch, while some other stuff mentioned last week will be delved into now that Mr & Mrs Smith has been removed from the Flash Drive of Doom. It says something when a show I didn't want to watch and can't say I was that enamoured with was the best thing I saw on telly all week. That bastion of right wing gaslighting The Guardian ran an article a couple of weeks ago suggesting that 2024 could be the greatest year for television ever - if that doesn't explain quite succinctly why I despise this rag of a newspaper then I must try harder...

Film Culture - Fantasy Rules but Reality Bites

Here's a spoiler warning, but I don't really think there are that many... GODDAMMIT ALL TO HELL!

Aqua-twat 2

We were warned. A friend got 10 minutes into this film and gave up, saying he could not watch such an awful film with such bad CGI without wanting to put bleach in his eyes. It couldn't be that bad, surely? Oh, but it was. From almost the opening scene to the point where we stopped it - 17 minutes and 45 seconds - I was watching the final nails being driven into the coffin of superhero films. The genre is dead and Aquatwat and the Lousy Condom (or whatever they deemed to call it) has fucked its lifeless stinking corpse.

I don't really know what to say and anyone who reads these will know that's a rare, almost unheard of, thing. But this was a joke... Wasn't it? I mean from the giant CGI sea horse to the baby pissing in Jason Mamoa's mouth, it was just a fucking huge [ahem] piss take? I cannot believe that Warner's dumped an entire Batgirl film and kept this massive dollop of shark shit on the schedules and then released it! That Batgirl film must have been utter bat shit... I mean, they want James Gunn's reboot to work, don't they? They want the new line of DC superhero films to have a fighting chance? So why inflict this on a suspecting public in the knowledge that another pile of unsavoury wank is more likely to turn people off of ever going to see a superhero film ever again? The wife said after six minutes and 10 seconds, 'This is a load of shit.' She has never been more correct in her life.

Love, Death and Robot

This could equally have been called A Man, His Dog and their Robot. It's a 2021 film starring Tom Hanks, a dog called Goodyear (known mainly as 'dog') and their robot, Jeff. It's a post apocalyptic story of a computer scientist who has managed to survive the end of the world, who is eking out a living with his dog and his robots on the inside of a wind turbine. The planet has been devastated by a solar flare that has punched holes in the atmosphere, exposed the planet to temperatures as high as 150f and has high levels of solar radiation. Finch is slowly dying and he's facing oblivion either from starvation or from the effects of the radiation.

He's building a proper robot, not one of his motorised mini dumpsters that help him collect anything that might be useful. This proper robot will have, essentially, one directive - to look after the dog when Finch dies. The three of them go on a road trip when a massive storm is heading their way; projected to last 40 days and Finch has enough food for about five. It's been ten years since the apocalypse and his chances of any kind of survival are slim to nothing, but the dog is young and has to be protected and this is my kind of movie, because as long as the dog lives I'm a happy man.

Considering it's just Hanks, a humorous robot - voiced by Callum Landrey-Jones and a dog that barks, now and then, it's a surprisingly engaging film and proves that some CGI works very well; the scenes of devastation and decay are very good and while there are elements of stretching the bounds of belief it is set in the future so you can excuse that. It's a sad film but also one full of hope and optimism. Jeff is a likeable 'child' learning every moment he exists and getting into the role he's been made for. It's an Apple film and that alone should be enough to guarantee it's got some quality. I'd recommend it. 

A Captive Audience

I only heard about the 'horror' film Barbarian the other day, so we decided to give it a whirl because we'd gotten 17 minutes and 45 seconds into another film and had lost the will to live... So we gave up on that and decided to watch this instead. It was one of the stranger films we've ever seen' it wasn't bad, but equally it wasn't that good either. Strangely enough, this is a film that was set in Detroit but filmed mainly in Bulgaria...

A young girl hires an AirBnB, turns up at night and discovers a man is already there. They've been double booked. There's a lot of tension but essentially they agree to share the place and start to become friends. She goes off to do her thing the next morning and when she gets back she inadvertently locks herself in the cellar, discovers a hidden room and things start to get weird from there on in. The thing is they don't get weird the way you think they should. The very strange takes over and 50 minutes into the film with the two in grave danger, it cuts to sunny California and an actor is being accused of raping his co-star. He's been cancelled and needs to raise funds for lawyers, so he flies to Detroit to sell one of his properties and guess what house it is?

It's probably a cult classic and young people more than likely find it one of those post-modern horror tales that appeals to the TikTok generation; it was quite interesting in the way it cut back and forth from the past to the present and told two completely different stories that converged on the same house, which we had the origin of spelled out in the flashback. However, I really don't see why it was called Barbarian, unless it was simply a play on the definition of the word (and that didn't work). There was just something a bit too comedic about it; a little too convenient and a little too trying to mimic an era of filmmaking that probably doesn't warrant homage. It also told me one thing about Detroit, if you're a black kidnap victim who has escaped your captor, your chances of convincing the police of this are just below zero.

Trailer Trash

It's called Deadpool & Wolverine now; none of this Deadpool 3 nonsense. This has to have a new beginning and being the third film in a trilogy isn't going to hack it for Wade Wilson's MCU debut. 

So they've fiddled with the title because that is going to fool everybody and they released a trailer that is essentially all about Wade but gives you a hint of Logan at the very end; but that's because they don't want to ... spoil... the surprise for you even though his fucking name is in the title... Do I sound cynical? That's because this 'change' smacks of sales cynicism. The trailer itself is fine, apart from the bits I was bothered about, such as the TVA... actually mainly the TVA and the fact that Marvel/Disney didn't feel as though Deadpool could carry an entire movie on his own without also introducing Wolverine into the proceedings. I think this is a bad move, but I also thought changing the name of the latest (and very delayed) Captain America film because the original title might have upset someone in Israel was also a dick move.

Do you know something? I don't really care about this film. I'll watch it when it becomes available to download, but I was more intrigued by Wicked because it has the lovely Cynthia Erivo in it and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. The MCU could do gay goat porn now and I wouldn't care.   

However, that's not all - the latest Kong x Godzilla: The New Empire trailer dropped. Bearing in mind that this film hits the cinemas in less than a month, it seemed almost like an act of desperation to have this new 150 second hint, featuring more teasers from the film, more shots of Godzilla actually running; Kong with his arm brace and the killer orang-utan who is going to fuck up the world until the two baddest monsters can sort their shit out and fight for each other. It actually looks like they might be bordering on comedy here. Kong seems to get cuddlier, while Godzilla is going decidedly pink and the humans in this have obviously been paid shit loads of cash because I can't see why any of them - especially Dan Stevens - would want to destroy their careers for two monsters who are not going to do much for them apart from - as I said - raise their bank accounts. Of course I'll watch it when I can, but I can't imagine there's going to be much comparison to some of the actual good films I've seen this year so far...

Expletive Not Deleted

... And the film of the year so far goes to - American Fiction. What a glorious, gentle and lovely comedy about love, death, secrets, being black in the USA and snobbery. It is an absolute joy to watch; almost two hours of quite excellent filmmaking in which a number of Academy Award nominations are forthcoming and it deserves it immensely.

Geoffrey Wright plays Monk, an academic and a highly regarded writer who simply doesn't sell books. He's excellent at writing thoughtful, erudite stuff that often gets put in the wrong areas of bookshops or is thought of as a bit high brow. He is also a massive snob, someone who doesn't really see being black as a hindrance or a problem, even when things happen to him because he is black. He comes from a close, but slightly emotionally dysfunctional family, where everyone is a doctor apart from him - "I'm a doctor of words." is how he describes himself. His sister works in a family planning centre, his brother is a recently outed cosmetic surgeon, his father was a philandering bastard who blew his own brains out in their Martha's Vineyard seafront house and his mother is suffering from the early stages of dementia; oh and his job at a university wants him to take a break because he offends too many white students by his analytical use of black language - the film starts with a very white student taking serious offense at Monk's use of the N word and his refusal to not stop using it in an English class about black fiction.

However, his life takes a series of unexpected turns over the space of the first 45 minutes of the film and leaves himself in a position where, initially for a joke, he writes a 'black' book, at first called My Pafology, but changes it to Fuck when things begin to get out of control. Monk's problem is it doesn't matter how good a writer he is he's becoming broke very fast; for various reasons other members of his family can't help - despite all being doctors - and yet he's having money thrown at him for the joke book he's written but doesn't really want. The problem is, as mentioned, he's a massive snob and it simply doesn't sit well with him that he has to pretend to be everything he hates about the way black people are depicted in USA life.

To add to the utter splendour of this movie, there's a love interest; also a housekeeper who is family in every sense of the word and another black author who has done what Monk has done but in complete seriousness for commercial reasons - allowing an excellent juxtaposition in a number of ways. This is a cracking film; it will make you laugh, it will make you think and it portrays a certain element of black society - presumably the Republican, slightly right wing element - in a way that you never see entire films dedicated to. It's also a really gentle film, something else very few black films ever seem to be. We're only into February, but I'd hazard a guess and say this will be in my top films of the year come next December. This is a highly recommended movie - don't miss out on it.

Dammit All to Hell

[All the following dialogue is SHOUTED in a theatrical way]

Dammit Peter.
John?
Dammit four times round the car park and back in for another dammit.
Do I get the feeling that something's on your mind, John?
Come on, Peter, you know what the hell I'm talking about.
At a guess I'd say that this had something to do with the DDL Enterprises takeover bid?
You know it's funny, Peter. Four years. Four hard years I've put into building up this Health Club. And now I'm supposed to stand by and let a bunch of wet-arsed college kids take it all away from me.
I know, John.
If only Marjorie hadn't left us the way she did ...

Do you remember this? Maybe if I put it all in capital letters with emphasis on the SHOUTING and the OVERWROUGHT you might remember it's the first of the 'Dammit' sketches from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, the one where they want to put Uttoxeter BACK on the MAP!!!

I should point out now that I haven't been watching old episodes of their sketch show, I just couldn't get this and the other Dammit sketches out of my head when the wife and I took a Tardis-like trip into the past and watched the 1972 British TV movie (it was originally broadcast as a play) written by Nigel Kneale called The Stone Tape... Or maybe it was called THE STONE TAPE!!!

Michael Bryant and Iain Cuthbertson could have been Peter and John from those Fry and Laurie sketches, because the first thing you realise about this 'ghost' story is HOW MUCH THEY SHOUT THEIR LINES AT EACH OTHER; LIKE SHOUTING AT EACH OTHER SIGNIFIES THAT THIS IS AN IMPORTANT THING AND THEY ARE VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE!!! 

I have to say that this was something that I believe scared the shit out of the 10-year-old me and watching it 51 years later it has left me with this feeling that Michael Bryant - who was one of my favourite actors in that era - was just a shouty man. HIS CHARACTER, BROCK was awful as well as a misogynistic audio scientist who decides on a whim to turn his research into ghost hunting apparatus. Don't get me wrong, the idea was BLOODY ORIGINAL, that ghosts don't exist, they're just audio or visual imprints in stored in stones - like a kind of ancient VHS attuned to individuals, but the execution was BLOODY AWFUL. Jane Asher plays, one of, Bryant's many dalliances, a shit hot computer programmer who was one of many individuals - including Michael Bates and James Cosmo - who talked in 'science' throughout the duration. None of it made an IOTA OF SENSE and they spent ages LOUDLY PUNCHING COMPUTER KEYS on the LOUDEST KEYBOARD IN EXISTENCE while the printer spewed out stuff that only A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER would UNDERSTAND, so there was NO point in discussing it. Then there was the noise experiments, which at times sounded like an impromptu concert by the Radiophonic Workshop and the ghosts, which did more than just make sounds or appear but got deep into the minds of the more sensitive members of Bryant's team.

It was DAMNED AWFUL, IT WAS HELL AND SO WAS THE FUTURISTIC WASHING MACHINE, GODDAMMIT ALL TO HELL!!! The thing is it really was unbelievably dreadful, with so much shouting I had to turn the volume down and a script that literally didn't make any sense at all - it was like they invented some gobbledegook science language to simply confuse the people watching. Half the cast was so wired I thought they might explode and the other half just looked worried and confused, like they didn't really know what they'd signed up for. It appears that the stones have had things stored in them from 7000 years ago and they're not really stored sounds or visuals, they're real and they're capable of causing death by falling and people having breakdowns. Then there was the spam, not the computer kind, but the chopped pork and ham kind and as I mentioned before THE FUTURISTIC WASHING MACHINES being made by CJ, Reginald Perrin's boss. I had to watch it, I really wish I could go back in time and warn myself NOT TO WATCH IT AGAIN, GODDAMMIT... 

Next Time...

I don't know and I'm thinking you don't care...

 

TV Culture - Blowing Hot & Cold

The spoilers are thick in this one!

The Equaliser

With ten minutes left of the entire series and the wife opting for two bloody hells and me for just the single solitary one, Simon Reeve uttered his final bloody hell of this series and allowed me to draw this series 1-1. It means next time I get to go first, but knowing my luck instead of it being called something like Wilderness with Simon Reeve it will be called Simon Reeve's Oh Bloody Hell. Getting that equaliser was a high point in what was essentially one of the most dull episodes...

It seems strange to suggest that an episode with elephants, lions, aardwolves, kudus, giraffes, hyenas, hippos and many other fabulous wild animals should be a little on the boring side, but sadly it was. We got the message; wildernesses are in danger, there's a real threat to the ones that are left and if it isn't from climate change it's from man just fucking things up, but this time round we spent 35 minutes of the hour wandering around the Kalahari with members of an indigenous tribe hunting a bison that eventually eluded them. it was hot and sunny, but Reeve didn't wear a hat and while he's a terrifically affable bloke who seems to bond with everyone he meets, this second African excursion felt almost like a bit of a barrel scraping exercise. A series that promised much but somehow fell well short and felt a little more like a reward for years of unwavering service than anything else. Hopefully next time he'll go back to the style that has made him such essential and infectious viewing.

Frosty Vibes

The penultimate episode of True Detective: Night Country was just as dull as the previous three - only that first episode had any real impact and the rest of them have meandered around being as dull as dishwater trying to tell different stories in such an oblique way that at one point about 55 minutes into this penultimate part, the wife asked me if I had any idea what was going on and what they were discussing had to do with the six dead bodies found out on the ice, so long ago...

The episode kicked off with Kali Reis's Evangeline collecting the ashes of her dead sister and just wandered around touching on the subjects that seem to have been put there to obfuscate the story - the indigenous Native Alaskans, the mining company, the newly introduced drug addict, Danvers' step daughter, who we've never really understood how and why there's even a relationship there because all we know is Danvers is a bit of a bike and has been involved with most of the men in Ennis.

Then there's the disparity of the bits filmed in Iceland and the bits filmed in Alaska, which once you notice them start to grate like nails down a blackboard and the only saving grace is that you know there's only one part left and this fifth episode arrived early because of the Superb Owl or whatever it's called. And then just as we're losing the will to live a couple of things happen; the cops find a link between the mining company and the research station; they then discover that where Annie was filmed - possibly killed - is on mining company land and then that Chris Ecclestone's chief of police and the mining CEO - Dervla Kirwan might be in cohorts with each other as the murder investigation is shelved and the mining CEO is allowed to question Jodie Foster like she's the DA or something. Kirwan then turns up with Prior's father basically ordering him to kill the drug addict at all costs.

Yet it's the final five minutes that has more things happen in it than the previous four episodes as Prior's dad follows Danvers home to do his job and everything goes to hell in the proverbial handbasket - there's an actual action scene, with guns and exploding brains and all kinds of mayhem and it happens just at the point when I wanted to say, "Do you know, I don't give a flying fuck who did what or why, I'm done with this." As it is, next Monday we'll have a conclusion, which I still believe will implicate the dead bodies from the first episode with the death of Annie and the bonkers surviving scientist who we haven't seen since the opening five minutes of the first part. This has been a truly dreadful detective series with few redeeming features.

TV Lives Matter

Halfway into the third series of The Morning Show and it feels as though the show has... not lost its way but has shifted its focus away from Alex and Bradley and onto other characters. That's not to say Alex and Bradley aren't in it, but this new series appears to be more about Corrie and Stella's attempts to save the network; new face Chris Hunter (Nicole Beharie - she off the once fab Sleepy Hollow) and John Hamm, as a kind of billionaire who appears to be a thoroughly decent chap rather than an uber-rich piece of shit... Or is he? 

This season has a more episodic feel and the main characters seem to be sitting on the edge looking in a lot of the time, although Alex Levy is never too far away from the centre of this. It starts with a trip into space - which Alex manages to avoid - because Corrie is serenading a billionaire to buy the network; it wanders into Black Lives Matter as Sybil the head of the board makes a racist joke at the expense of new co-anchor Chris; touches on the Ukraine war, while dealing with a hack that unleashes so much personal information that the entire production team are in danger of walking out. The thing is though, there doesn't appear to be a real firm focus - is it the billionaire? Is it the hack? Is it the financial crisis facing UBA? Is it something that hasn't even happened yet? We're two years on from the end of season two and a lot has happened, much of which has been hinted at, but little has been revealed...

It feels similar to season two, but that ratcheted up the stakes big time in its second half and there were always hints that would happen; this time around nothing particularly looks or sounds like it will have the same impact; not even the putting a freelancer's life at risk tease. Then we get an entire episode dedicated to filling in the blanks of the two year gap and an explanation to something that is exquisitely teased into making us think was about something more salacious - 'That thing that happened between us last year...' Is not what anyone watching thought it was - far from it. That flashback episode actually is the catalyst for the rest of the series; I just can't help thinking it should have arrived earlier in the schedule. 

The last few episodes though tie everything together - the events on January 6; the hack and why it happened, the little things that you thought inconsequential that suddenly looked very choreographed and done for nefarious reasons and Corrie takes centre stage as the takeover gets into full swing. The doubts thrown into the mix as truths are uncovered and conspiracies are revealed and we begin to realise that nothing is what it seems. It's a bit contrived in places; one of the big giveaways is really a stupid move especially by a character who wouldn't be where they are by making silly mistakes and there's the weird situation where one of the most desperate and loved-up characters does a very odd about face, based on an integrity they had never shown before. The finale is really the most cliffhanger-y ending so far without even feeling remotely like a cliffhanger. However when this series comes back you have no idea if it will even look the same, because those cliffhanger events are that important.

This series concluded less than four months ago and it will be at least 18 months before season four hits our screens. It has been such a fixture in this house for the last month and a bit, it's going to feel very strange not having The Morning Show to tune into, but this series seemed to have very little to do with TMS and a lot to do with UBA and everything taking place around it, one wonders if the title is the only thing that ties it to the original idea now... It's back in 2025; that seems like a long wait. Watch it if you can, it's dynamite TV.

What the Who?

I watched something today - quite out of I know not why - I haven't seen for over 50 years and did so purely out of ancient curiosity. While the wife was doing chores that didn't require my help, I watched the first four-part Jon Pertwee Doctor Who episodes - Spearhead from Space.

I couldn't believe how camp it felt or how ridiculous some of the exposition was, or even how silly it felt. Pertwee was my Doctor, the one I was introduced to - mainly because I lived in Canada during the first two - and while I must have seen this - because I remembered the Autons and the weird plastic meteorites - the rest of it seemed contrived and riddled with more conspiracies than you can shake a stick at. Pertwee looked very young (despite the grey hair); Liz Shaw, his assistant for this short series, was quite dreadful and Lethbridge-Stewart had the feel of a camp pantomime Brigadier about him. It was cutting edge stuff for 1970; in 2024 it felt ancient and like it was made by the local amateur dramatic society as an homage.

Q Hi

The funniest episode of the QI U series landed - the poor general quality was sure to end and it was with Ufology that it did. Guests Cally Beaton, Nish Kumar and Tom Ward joined Sandi and Alan to talk about UFOs and space, except UFOs were a bit on the light side as it skirted around the issue and dealt with space in general, but it didn't matter because it did something that hasn't happened much in this series so far - and we're seven episodes in all ready. It was funny; very funny, with a lot of LOL moments with both Beaton and Ward knocking the ball out of the universe. Kumar was his usual GVFM, even if he always sounds like a funny kid at the back of the class who is never quite sure if he's making people laugh or being laughed at.

Ward proved he's a good impersonator - I've seen him before, but I'm not sure where, but his humour was just the right side of observational surreal, while Beaton, making her third or fourth appearance, is very good at self-deprecating humour as well as being just the correct side of being filthy. One of the weirdest points of the show was Sandi Toksvig admitting that she found Bill Clinton surprisingly attractive because of his charisma and ability to seemingly charm his way into the pants of women. Her utterance of 'I would have' was probably the oddest thing she's said since publicly coming out of the closet 30 odd years ago. It was more like what you'd expect from this dinosaur of a quiz show and proves that with the right mix of guests and a subject that allows improvisation this show can still hit the heights. 

Residual Craplien

It dawned on me about an hour after watching the first episode in the third season of Resident Alien that I said I probably wasn't going to bother with watching it again. I suppose we watched it because we forgot how absolutely shit its season two turned out to be and how an excellent first season just jumped a dozen sharks and turned into a really fucking dull and unfunny series.

Alan Tudyk is a great comedic actor, his Harry Vanderspeigle in season one was funny, sinister and very very alien, but by the time season two came around he had become something of a parody of himself and by the end of this first episode of season three he's just pathetic and actually more annoying than he got last year. Whoever writes this now obviously lost the plot. Also to be just a little more sexist than usual, Sarah Tomko's Asta is now a fucking man mountain of an arse - it's even bigger now than I thought it would ever get (and not in a good way) and Alice Wetterlund's D'Arcy Bloom just looks old, washed out and used. The kids have aged significantly given just a couple of weeks have past since the alleged end of season two and the once brilliant Corey Reynolds as Sheriff Mike Thompson is no longer funny, he's just really fucking stupid.

Harry is now working for the US government with their alien tracking division under Linda Hamilton's General McCallister and is helping them stop the Greys from destroying the planet, which Harry's race of aliens wanted to do but have now changed their minds. Harry's feelings for Asta are compromised when Enver Gjokaj's Joe Rainier - a Grey/Human hybrid - starts dating her and the only person in the show that seems to have any common sense is Elizabeth Bowen's Deputy Baker and even she seems to have lost it a little now. The mayor and his wife have both been abducted and probed, they've also got an owl problem which the Native Americans see as a sign of imminent death and honestly this is a load of shit that I wish I'd stuck to my guns and remembered that I wasn't going to watch it any more because, as I said earlier in this sentence, it's a load of shit. I hope this really isn't what my old mate Pete Hogan's comic book version was like and I also hope he collects a nice cheque and doesn't watch this load of shite because, you know, it might upset any writer worth his salt seeing your baby being dissected and probed by shit aliens. I have a week to try and persuade the wife that we shouldn't watch this any more, but you know, I need something to be horrible about...

Truth or Colloquial Bullshit?

We finally got around to starting to watch the 2022 Apple TV mini-series The Essex Serpent and it is as slow and meandering as reviews said it was; but that isn't to say its not an intriguing thing. With a cast including Clare Danes (doing a very good English accent), Tom Hiddleston, Clemence Poesy, Frank Dillane and Hayley Squires it's got some class stamped on it, but the opening two episodes were slower than a neap tide (look it up).

There is an intriguing idea going on here, even if it makes little or no real sense. Danes' Cora is a recent widow, the wife of who appears to be a cruel and nasty man who dies from some kind of suffocating illness that could have been cured by late 1890s medicine but he refused. Cora starts to have a kind of relationship with the family doctor who is also an innovative surgeon with new ideas that are pushing medicine forward, and she is also a budding woman of science, interested in archaeology and evolution. She reads about a mythical serpent that allegedly has appeared on the Essex coast and feels drawn to go and investigate it herself. This is where she meets local vicar and serpent denier Hiddleston - as Will Ransome - and then somehow upsets the applecart by helping to find the dead body of the daughter of a local fisherman who believed his daughter had travelled to Malden to sell some silk. 

This is a contemplation of religion over science, but is littered with local superstition and mass hysteria that is driving a wedge through the community with the deeply religious belief this is a punishment from the devil - the spiritual denying the existence and science wanting to see if it can be proved. Atmospherically it is wonderous to look at and the Essex landscapes are fabulous; it genuinely makes you feel as though this is 1898, but it creeps along like ivy on a wall and you get the feeling that this is not about a mythical serpent and more about the manipulation of a largely ignorant group of locals with a teacher who is rooted in fire and brimstone rather than logic. There is also an intriguing subplot involving Cora's doctor/surgeon friend, London slums and her assistant Martha, a socialist trying to improve the lives of migrant workers treated like slaves. Perhaps these things will come together, but at the moment it all feels a little disjointed and disparate.

The Bland Tour

I think I'm getting to the stage in my life where I'm finding well established things have pretty much run their course - imagine my oft used Genesis theory, where I essentially went off of the prog band around 1979 but continued to buy their albums for another 13 years under the misguided belief that they'd suddenly start producing great albums again. There were moments during that period of time, but largely I've listened to albums from Duke to whatever the last proper one was called for about five hours of the last 45 years. I feel very much the same about old favourite TV shows; I watch them in the hope that they'll rediscover that oomph that got me hooked as a fan the first time around. The Grand Tour is very much one of those things.

I enjoyed Top Gear when these three - Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond - presented it and while I know people thought them boorish and a bit right wing, it was all just an act most of the time. When they brought this current incarnation to Amazon about seven years ago, it was all right, but it wasn't a patch on some of the best Top Gears and only rarely did it really hit those heights again. Since then The Grand Tour has changed to a three/four specials a season format and there has been something a bit 'special' about them; but they do have a formula that has become a little like something that has become funny purely through repetition - the telegraphed joke/stunt that you know will happen, its just a matter of  timing.

This most recent instalment has Clarkson, May and Hammond crossing the Sahara from the Northern most part of Mauritania, driving due south until they reach Senegal to finish their tour in Dakar. There is some suspect geography taking place to start with that takes them into the disputed Western Sahara region, but essentially this is three elderly gentlemen in pimped expensive vehicles travelling across a desert for no other reason than because it is there. Mauritania has issued 58 filming permits since 1960 - it is pretty much an unknown quantity for just about everyone outside of the country - a former French colony, mainly Muslim and completely dry - literally and metaphorically; you cannot get an alcoholic drink there for love or money. It is also the toilet of Africa; it appears to be the place where all of the world's plastic, mainly bottles, end up. It is the waste plastic capital of the world and everywhere the three men drove it was littered with rubbish - the country is a tip with a lot of sand and is very, very hot - between 45 and 50 degrees centigrade every day.

We had the usual stunts - usually aimed at James May. We had the usual car trouble - usually happening to Hammond and we had the usual boorish Englander abroad spiel from Clarkson - who looks like he's carrying someone's baby (and for much longer than just nine months) and frankly it was two hours and 14 minutes of not fucking much - sand, some stunts, some rocks, dodgy roads and it wasn't even very pretty. In fact, when Clarkson and May find an actual oasis they spent so little time there all we got to see were Clarkson's budding varicose veins. It obviously had a number of LOL moments, most of their get togethers do, but they're also telling the same joke so often now that even familiarity is breeding a sort of contempt. They obviously had a good time because, as Clarkson says, it's the first proper Grand Tour they've had for four years, but it felt old and tired - a little like the presenters. James May's travelogues and cooking show are more entertaining; Hammond has found a niche with big buildings and how to fix things, while Clarkson's Farm is actually a lot of fun, despite what the Guardian says; the wife is one of many who watch Millionaire with him presenting it. It might be time, if rumours are to be believed, that Amazon pulls the plug on this and allows these old gits some dignity to waste the rest of their lives doing stuff that suits them and us. 

Next Week...

The last Night Country will answer all the questions I've raised or will it just be a load of shite? We'll watch some more Essex Serpent or maybe we'll just forget about it. Are we ever going back to Domino Day? Will we try some of the other Apple TV+ things I've obtained? Am I going to subject myself to more Resident Alien? Or am I going to dig into the archives and find something old to watch rather than new stuff? What about Mr & Mrs Smith? I've promised my mate I'll give it a go, but I'm seeing as many really poor reviews as I am really good ones and I can't persuade the wife to commit. We do seem to be leaving things half finished or just not bothering with any more episodes if we haven't been hooked by a couple. I'm tempted by Criminal Record, which concludes this coming week and which I will have all eight parts - it's highly rated, but what does that really mean now?

I could list all of the things that might be on the cards, but that's the equivalent of televisual cock teasing because I might not bother with any of them and just carry on reviewing the shite so I can try and make a comedy column out of insulting them. It might be because I'm living in a building site, at the moment, but even the good things feel as though I'm missing something. Our old friend The Guardian ran an article this week suggesting 2024 could be the greatest year for TV ever, but this is a neo-liberal rag that also dances to the tune of whatever their advertisers tell them to. If 2024 is the best TV year ever, I'm going to donate one of my five penises to science...

In the end, you'll just have to tune in to see...