Pop Culture - It's Just a Fantasy

The usual spoilers apply and I think there might be a few here so tread carefully young padawans...

One Episode Problem

If you're going to have a high profile, big budget Sci-Fi thriller from the people who brought you Game of Thrones, you'd best make sure that you don't have one absolutely spanking episode and seven quite dull ones, because that's what we had with 3 Body Problem.

I don't know if the reason for this series is to watch 'primitive' man have set back after set back, but that's pretty much what we got as the San-Ti looked down on us and saw that they don't really have to worry that much because we're great at failure. So much of this series appeared to have some kind of internal logic driving it forward; the things that linked the six characters introduced towards the start of it; but by the end three of them had died, all in vain, one had given up, one felt like everything she'd done had been wasted and the usually wasted one found himself elevated to one of the three most important people on the planet and in immediate risk of imminent death.

Whatever logic there appeared to be was a red herring. In the end it was like the last three episodes were simply treading water; three episodes dedicated to the creation of a spaceship that could reach 1/10th the speed of light to intercept the San-Ti in 200 years that failed because of piss poor manufacturing (and quite dodgy special effects). Everything about this felt... slightly pointless. Like one of the three most important people in the world said to someone who would die accidentally because of a fluke of nature, "It's all happening in 400 years and none of us will be alive then and I don't intend to have any children so it doesn't matter to me..." Or words to that effect.

3 Body Problem is an epic story; I'm told there are ideas and concepts being explored in future seasons that are quite mind-blowing, yet one of its problems is it's just a bit too boring. It needs a bit more action; it needs to be less cryptic; it needs to explain how and why the San-Ti managed to create a cult of nutters on Earth prepared to do their bidding; it needs something to fucking happen. It all just a bit too wordy and some of the dialogue is annoying. Why wasn't Saul told that once he became - once it was announced that he was - one of the three most important people in the world that that was his life fucked; he couldn't refuse it, he was it and he had to suck it up and see what happens? Why didn't they give him a bullet proof helmet, especially when there was an attempt on his life pretty quickly after the announcement? No, he wasn't shot in the head but the would be assassin pretty much said what we were all thinking - if he was that important, why aim for his heart when a headshot would have been more efficient? If you're fighting an omnipotent opponent and they're bothered by certain individuals, wrap them in cotton wool and hide them away, don't let them wander around where all manner of people who might have been got at can kill or maim? I know, they have to make a TV show, but if they're going to make a TV show about an alien invasion where the aliens are so advanced that they use other dimensions to get their information, at least write it like you understand what that means.

My biggest problem with 3 Body Problem is more to do with the fact the actual 3 body problem isn't what we're dealing with now; that seemed to be a gateway to finding clever people who somehow were going to help the San-Ti when they arrived here (even though it's in 400 years); what was the point of all of that; the point of the VR creations; the point of why the San-Ti have left their world. My problem is it doesn't seem to have a point; it's just a deathly slow alien invasion story with random characters who might, but probably don't, have something to do with the outcome. Obviously I'll watch season two. 

Trailer Trash

Kong X Godzilla: The New Empire is something that comes out before this blog goes live, yet I almost feel as though I've seen most of it. Literally something like 11 minutes of the film has been released in trailers and while the film is obviously not 11 minutes some films are ruined by 30 second trailers.

The sad thing about this over-over-hyped stinker, which I am waiting patiently to watch, is that at this point in the calendar there is no worldwide streaming date for Godzilla: Minus One, a film that actually won a friggin' Oscar. Lauded as the best Godzilla film EVER, it had a good cinema run but no one has bought it up for a streaming service, while GxK:TNE will probably hit streaming sites by May...

Back to the new film, it's about Kong and Godzilla teaming up to beat a giant Orangutan, a giant spider and another giant lizard, while some accomplished actors look on while counting the wads of cash they were given to star in this shite. I can't wait. 

Metal Heads

So... Twisted Metal then? I think the best way to sum it up is we gave it an entire episode but by the end of that we decided perhaps it wasn't the kind of thing we liked. I know we seem to do this a lot now, we gave it a chance, but I kind of think that the opening five minutes did it.

The thing is neither of us have ever really been Mad Max fans and while I was a bit of a fan of Carmageddon in the 1990s, I was in my 30s rather than my 60s. We both quite like Anthony Mackie, but he needs to be in something that is a complete package, not just him and a lot of nonsense surrounding him. I wasn't convinced that there would be enough in the story to keep me interested and the idea of car chases, gun fights, big explosions and dialogue that was clearly written for and aimed at people 40 years younger than me has made me realise that things like this are going to happen to me a lot more as I crawl towards my ultimate end. I mean, we gave up on Domino Day because it just wasn't our thing and it felt like it had been plotted and scripted by someone who's big on TikTok or something; this was in the same arena. It simply wasn't the kind of thing that we like, so we're not watching any more of it. You can have a go at persuading me that I've made a fundamental error, but I suspect no one will...

Blind Man's Not Bluffing

So Fede Alvarez - the director who is responsible for the new Alien reboot and the Evil Dead reboot started out by directing a short - 88 minutes - crime thriller with a dash of horror called Don't Breathe which starred Stephen Lang, best known for appearing in crap low budget films you may never want to watch (again). He's in the same league as Neal McDonough and possibly even Eric Roberts, although maybe not that low down the list of has-beens.

This is a film about a trio of burglars who break into peoples' houses because one of the burglars' father works for a security company and house keys or alarm codes or something. They get a tip off that an old blind man who has inherited a shedload of money from a settlement after his daughter was killed might be their best way of hitting the big time and getting away from Detroit. All they have to do is get into the house, steal the money and get away. However, the old blind man is an Iraq war veteran, he has a big fuck off Rottweiler dog and his house is locked up tighter than Fort Knox. This doesn't deter our three intrepid burglars, unfortunately when things don't go the way they plan, two of them find themselves in a fight for their lives and survival. They also discover a woman, tied up in the basement, who is the prisoner of the blind man ... what the actual fuck have these guys wandered into?

It becomes pretty much a straightforward survival horror film from that moment on and if you want to be analytical you also start to wonder how a blind man has achieved so much, such as being able to kidnap and keep the woman who accidentally killed his daughter locked in a dungeon, in a sophisticated series of straightjackets and wires and pullies. His abilities are touched on, but really it's just a bad taste nasty torture porn wannabe with a lot of cheap thrills and some extra nastiness thrown in for good measure. I can see why the director is destined for better things; there's was a real sense of claustrophobia about the film and the way it was made, but as a horror/slash/thriller it was... I dunno, average at best. As usual there's a sequel/prequel out that has a much lower rating on the film sites and wasn't made by Alvarez and we won't be dipping our toes into that particular cesspool. 

Lancashire Hot and Cold Pot

Chronologically, Passenger is absolutely fucked up - how is it that it starts on a snowy night and the very next day it's the middle of summer, then it's the winter again, then the summer, then maybe the spring or possibly the autumn? What about the vehicles? You have the local coppers driving around in a Metro - something we haven't seen for probably 30 years; a detective in an old Volvo, but also in a 4x4 with spotlights and very modern. The décor in most of the shops and pub feels like it's in the 1980s, even the police station is odd, yet everyone has smart phones. Even computer games look like they're from the age of Atari ST and yet it seems to be contemporary...

Someone described it as Happy Valley meets The League of Gentlemen, whereas the Guardian - my 'favourite' newspaper for making up reviews based on someone's synopsis - gave this four stars and suggested it was, yet again, something it clearly isn't. Passenger is possibly the weirdest thing to appear on ITV in a long time. Is it a supernatural thriller? Is there something paranormal going on? Why does everyone seem to hate each other and shout a lot? Why is there a fracking site run by one - posh - man and who are the people protesting outside it? There's even a suggestion that people who live in Chadder Vale in Lancashire (but actually filmed in West Yorkshire) can never escape the place, that there's a curse on it. Oh and what the fuck got out of the van at the beginning of the first episode and why are people disappearing?

Wunmi Mosaku - last seen in the brilliant Loki - is the former Met police detective who is bored and would like some real police work to do but has a CO who seems oblivious to everything and wants her to investigate missing wheelie bins and coughing cats. This is a strangely comical series that tonally isn't a comedy at all, it's more surreal than anything else. It has myriad plot lines, with larger than life characters, stereotypical characters and chronologically misplaced ones as well - everything about this series feels slightly wrong and then there's the seasons. Surely people who make TV series must realise that people will notice that in one scene it's freezing cold and there's no leaves on the trees and the next scene it's obviously July. The opening episode did have a local DJ suggesting that the snow was a bit of a fluke, but that, IMHO, was just lazy scriptwriting because it was obviously filmed across a six month period to the point where even the sunlight varied from scene to scene. Or maybe it's just like that up in the high peak regions of Lancashire? Oh and David 'Frank Gallagher' Threlfall's in it, playing the posh bloke who owns the fracking site and lives in a caravan, was the victim of the town's most hated resident who has just out of prison and doesn't appear to remember anything he's ever done...

We got halfway through; watched the first three episodes in one sitting and figured we'd watch the other three the following night. Then I saw its rating on IMDB had dropped to 5.7 and decided to do something I usually avoid; I read some of the IMDB reviews and a couple of them with spoilers and it appears that all six episodes are like the first three, there's little or no explanation and it appears to set things up for second series. So, this is going the same way as Twisted Metal, it's consigned to the rubbish heap of time; there will be no reprieves, we waste too much time on unfulfilling garbage. It's just a shame because I like Wunmi Mosaku, I think she's a good actor. Anyhow, there is literally Nothing To See Here!

Keep on Shitting

I decided that it was time to give Venom a second viewing. Don't ask me why, given how bad Sony Marvel films are, but obviously this was the exception to the rule. That rule being that all Sony films are dribbly shit, but Venom isn't quite as bad. Except, it really is. It maybe has one or two redeeming features but I'm hard pressed to tell you what they are. Tom Hardy is okay as the disgraced journalist Eddie Brock; Vanessa Williams looks bored and like she'd rather be somewhere else as his ex-girlfriend and Riz Ahmed is just fucking awful.

You know things are problematic when the Venom from Spider-Man 3 isn't the Venom in this film. Instead, it's obviously set in an alternate Spider-Man universe (the one that doesn't have a Spider-Man in it) and the symbiote is one of many that has been found in space by super-billionaire psychopath Ahmed. There is no real explanation why Venom is called Venom, why Eddie's physiology works better than other humans or, more crucially, why this film was ever made in the first place. It's got some half reasonable special effects some of the time, but Venom and his abilities are largely rubbish; Hardy's version of Brock is a bit too comical and this is essentially a 'comic book movie' rather than a superhero film. It's quite violent and nasty at times and Kevin Feige and the people at Disney must really loathe Sony and the rubbish they spew out of their festered arses that use the Marvel logo. There's even a set up for the sequel that is both lame and without any real point unless you know the comics - but why would you want to watch a film like this unless you were familiar with the comics and/or had some brain function problems?

Life Afterlife

Regular readers of these blogs will know (or remember) that I don't think Ghostbusters is a very good film; it is essentially a Bill Murray vehicle that had a catchy tune and caught a wave of goodwill that turned it into a huge blockbuster movie. watching it many years later and it has many, many faults. 

I know there are a lot of people who hated the reboot in 2016 with the all girl Ghostbusters, but that was a considerably better film on just about all levels and in 2021 there was Ghostbusters: Afterlife which rebooted the original franchise and divided the critics. Some hated it, others thought it should never have left New York (that would be the Guardian) and some thought it was a touching and excellent homage to Harold Ramos who died a few years before this was made. It is, in my never humble opinion, the best Ghostbusters film of the lot. It has flaws, but in general it is a film that respects the originals, fleshes them out, pays tribute to the original actors and brings an entirely new feel to the 'franchise'. Ghostbusters is thought of as an excellent kids film (and really, the original was anything but) and this does a great job of making it a creepy kids film that also works on a number of levels.

Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd are excellent; Finn Wolfhard has a role that in many ways is befitting an actor with his lack of talent; Logan Kim is quite excellent as Podcast, but the film is McKenna Grace's; she is the real star, the real keeper of Harold Ramis and Egon Spengler's flame. She is quite brilliant as the 12-year-old granddaughter of the dead Ghostbuster (who is brought back by the powers of CGI). This movie might transplant the action from NY to Oklahoma, but it also explains so much about the first film while simultaneously tying it into this new one that you have to admire the writers of this; it deserves an A+ just for being able to do that. It was also great seeing Dan Ackroyd, Ernie Hudson and even Bill Murray reprise their roles and even Sigourney Weaver (looking fantastic for a 71 year old) manages to get in on the act in the post credit scene. This is not a rubbish unnecessary sequel that wasn't needed; it is an emotional and thoroughly enjoyable romp that actually could have done with being a little longer with more ghost action. It's Wednesday night and it's been the best thing I've watched this week so far...

*Please be aware that we were unaware that this film was the Good Friday BBC film. Had we known that we would have watched it on TV rather than watching it off the Flash Drive of Doom. Thank you. 

From My Archives

In January, of this year, something popped up in my Facebook memories. It was a 13-year-old blog I had written, similar to these blogs wot I now write and it was praising a new US TV series called Shameless (US). As you can imagine, this was a US version of the hit Channel 4 comedy drama from the turn of the millennium, written by Paul Abbott about a dysfunctional family - transplanted from Manchester to Chicago for this revamp. Shameless (US) became one of our favourite TV shows for almost a decade. It made the UK version pale into insignificance; it was for eight of its 11 seasons one of the best things to ever appear on any television and I used to bang on about it in every single incarnation of this blog.

It starred William H. Macy (as Frank Gallagher), Emmy Rossum (as Fiona) and an unknown young actor called Jeremy Allen White (as Phillip 'Lip' Gallagher), except he was quite low down in the cast list despite having a crucial role to play in the entire series. He was quite brilliant as the errant but brilliant eldest son of the feckless Frank; a boy genius with the world at his feet but possessing a Gallagher gene that meant that every time he was on the verge of becoming something he'd fuck it up. In my original review of Shameless (US) it focused on what a great adaptation it was, but pointed out what a unique and talented actor White was. I was very clear that he was the real star of this show and he was going to go on to great things as an actor. With all modesty, I have to say, am I a fucking prophet or what? His latest TV show The Bear is one of the three best TV shows currently being made anywhere in the world (it's so good, he's finished filming season 3 and is already shooting season 4); he's appeared in a couple of films over the last 18 months and is about to play Bruce Springsteen in a biopic. That last bit doesn't fill me with a lot of anticipation because I'm not a fan of 'The Boss' at all, especially as I've said for the last 13 years that the biopic he should be in is one that focuses on the Hollywood great Robert Mitchum. However, this is one case of 'I told you so' that I'm really proud of.

The Last But One...

There was a couple of moments in the penultimate episode of Resident Alien where it forgot it was a comedy and remembered that originally there was also an element of drama in this series. There was also a lot of tying up subplots that you'd completely forgotten about and all of them had to do with parenthood. D'Arcy's lousy relationship with her mother and revelation from her father. Asta discovering her birth mother is an absolute bag of shit and coming to an understanding with her own estranged adopted daughter. The mayor and his wife realising that something is very wrong regarding alien abductions and Harry reconnecting with his son, who wants to kill him. Out of all of these it was the mayor's wife who stole the show and Harry did an abnormally human thing at the end of it. The problem, of course, was all of that was not enough to save it from the usual dross we've become accustomed to. The finale promises very little.

From the Actual Archives

It's funny how films from your past; from your youth, that have such an impact on you can feel like a different planet when you watch them 30 years or so later. The wife once said this was one of the scariest films she'd ever seen, but tonight she looked at me like I'd imagined her saying that. I've always thought The Haunting was a classic and in many ways it is, it's just... well, much of the drama is just badly written overwrought nonsense.

Made by Robert Wise in 1963, it is regarded by many to be a great horror film, but in reality it's a psychological thriller that might be a ghost story or it might be the manifestation of the some psychic abilities that the main character - Eleanor Lance - had. I can understand why Stephen King was so taken by this film and why his own book Carrie borrows so heavily from themes in the original Shirley Jackson novel. Hill House might be a cursed and haunted house, but is what happens over the three days to the group of investigators really ghosts or the conjuring of things from the deranged mind of someone with a short but effective history of telekinetic/poltergeist exposure? Is this a proto-Carrie?

The film does a good job of setting up the house as the bad guy; unexplained deaths, curmudgeonly owner who forced his daughter to live in a house with no straight lines, barely any natural light and corridors like mazes. So when Richard Johnson (as Professor Markway, the lead psychic investigator) turns up with Eleanor (Nell), Theodora (Theo) and Luke Sanderson - who expects to inherit the house one day - it's more about the strange and unusual relationships that will be formed between the four people. Nell is there as she's been invited because of a strange phenomena that took place when she was 11 - the house where she lived with her mother and sister had stones rain down on it for three solid days. Theo is there because she's got telepathic abilities and the two women are opposites of a coin - Nell is meek, weak and timid, while Theo is sexually charged, confident and aggressive. Markway doesn't do a very good job of vetting his team of investigators and it soon becomes clear that Nell is damaged goods and Theo is a wind-up merchant, but the first night they are beset by a ghostly presence that only seems to affect the women, from this point on tensions increase and relationships fracture as the house does its best to create divisions and mistrust.

However, while it was probably quite a brilliantly scary film in the 1960s and even beyond; it has dated terribly and feels overwrought, overacted and badly scripted, with Markway, especially, suffering from such poor scripting that one wonders if he's an investigator in anything, given his lack of seeming experience, especially dealing with individuals. Much of what makes the film creepy is the use of camera angles, the filming techniques and the soundscape. The use of stark black and white - therefore just grey tones - make everything seem ambiguous and it is an example of brilliant filmmaking, it just no longer feels as though it has been executed well. Julie Harris is excellent as the troubled Nell, Clare Bloom oozes bi-sexuality as Theo and Russ Tamblyn, in probably his most serious role, makes up the numbers. There is a good cameo from Lois Maxwell as Markway's wife and Rosalie Crutchley is the most sinister thing in it as the housekeeper Mrs Dudley, with deadpan delivery and a complete lack of any kind of emotion. It is still a very good film, it's just no longer scary and is of an age.

The Real Deal?

It seems that almost every week now I end up watching more shite than good programmes and this week was no real exception. From average TV blockbusters, to things I didn't even bother finishing to crap comicbook films to one-time classic cinema that has dated like year-old bread, so what a way to finish off a largely crap week of telly; with a 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger film that was so bad it makes one wonder how he became anything more than a one-hit wonder after Terminator. 

Raw Deal really is a load of shit. Arnie plays a small town sheriff, who used to be in the FBI but lost his job because he was a little too handy with his fists and guns. He gets approached by Darren McGavin, an ex-FBI colleague who offers him the unlikely proposition of going rogue and helping bring down the Chicago mob by pretending to be a crook, infiltrating said mob and bringing them down from the inside, but in a Alias Smith & Jones twist, Arnie has to fake his own death and then has to become a mob enforcer without any back-up or safety net with only a vague promise that he might get his old job back. Obviously this sounds too good to be true and Arnie fakes his own death and becomes a mobster, in what can only be called the most PG rated mob movie ever made - almost in homage to the aforementioned 1970s TV show, Arnie works his way up in the mob by literally killing nobody, that is until the end when he kills everybody. Things you need to understand about this film as it is currently featuring as a late night Film4 thing is that Arnie couldn't act in those early films and he really couldn't. This film has Sam Wannamaker in it - as the mob boss - this is a serious actor with serious awards and film roles in his past and even he can't make it rise above piss poor at best. The aforementioned McGavin - you know, Night Stalker - dials in his role and is as convincing as someone trying to sell you London Bridge and the action sequences... I don't really know what to say about them apart from there isn't much action, even when guns are involved. This is a woefully inadequate action film that I hadn't seen for 37 years and will never see again.

Why did I watch it? I'm kind of stumped about that. I see movies on Film4 and ITV4, films from my youth, most of which are an enormous disappointment, but I think 'I'll have some nostalgia and relive great films from when I was in my 20s or 30s,' but what I actually get is a reminder that film and TV even a little as 20 years ago could be utter bull's tits. Obviously, that's not to say that film and TV isn't still but even modern shit films and TV isn't as bad as this.

Next Time...

Who really cares? You'll get what I watch and have to suffer/enjoy it or you won't bother. I think I only do this now to see how inventive I can get with my reviews.

Modern Culture - Salvation or Soiled Pants?

The usual spoiler warnings apply...

Bad Acting and Boredom Problem

Christ, where do I start? This review is going to end up being done in two chunks over two weeks because I won't finish this series before the deadline of this blog passes. I will try to keep this as linear as possible and therefore easier for you to follow it... This is the 3 Body Problem.

It's just eight parts (to start with), so you'd have expected the opening episodes to have explained things a little better, because by the end of episode two you know pretty much one thing - the Chinese contacted an alien race in 1977 and knew from the offset that they were not friendly; this didn't stop the disgruntled hater of the communist regime from inviting them to destroy our world. That's about all you need to understand from the opening two parts, despite a shedload of other stuff happening which might be bollocks but could possibly be a solution to the 3 Body Problem...

Now, I'm going to review episodes 3 & 4 tomorrow night and this blog will go live, as usual, on Saturday morning. The review of 3 & 4 will follow the extrapolation I'm about to make, so I may well spend some time tomorrow night rewriting this, or I might leave it as is because it works equally as well. The thing is in the near two hours of the opening two parts we learned that the Chinese girl saved from slave labour by communist scientists is also the mother of another scientist - based in Oxford - who has just killed herself in a research lab [that doesn't actually exist] in Oxford. This Chinese girl is the person who works out how to contact aliens quicker and is the person who goes against the commanding officer's wishes and does exactly that. The Chinese scenes are harrowing at times and quite authentic looking.

Add to this the scientists, from all over the world, who seem to be killing themselves off because they're either seeing a countdown clock in their vision or they no longer believe the laws of physics apply and have given up their research. One of the scientists gets to stop her clock by giving up on her research about nanotechnology; other scientists not so lucking were also working on largely experimental ideas. This was the first thing that gave me a theory. Along with these scientists is a man who is working for some unnamed British intelligence agency - Benedict Wong - who is beginning to cotton on to what is happening but doesn't know why. He's obviously important to the story because the mysterious woman who paid a visit to the scientist who gave up her research also pays Wong a visit. Also in this mix is Jonathan Pryce's multi-billionaire Mike Evans, who may or may not be the father of the daughter of the Chinese girl who has recently killed herself. He's mysterious and might know stuff but we haven't seen anything of him apart from a brief appearance at the dead scientist's funeral.

There's also a really high tech VR headset that plunges [invited] scientists into a video game that seems to be challenging them to solve a problem - presumably the 3 Body Problem of the title. How to predict the solar cycles on a world where one sun makes it too cold, one sun makes it too hot and the other just right - very Goldilocks. Samwell Tarley's in it as a scientist who gave up science to make Jack's Snacks, the third most popular crisp maker in the UK; his mate who gave up science to become a teacher and has now been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; a scientist fellow who worked with the newly dead scientist who is apparently a genius but likes his recreational drugs too much; a young American who has come up with a fantastic nanotechnology advancement and a Chinese scientist who grew up in New Zealand and appears to be the main focus as she is invited to be part of something mysterious....

I think it would not be unfair of me to say that the acting is fucking atrocious; the story is so convoluted that I wouldn't be at all surprised if half the people watching it had fallen asleep half way through the second episode through lack of fucking interest. This is a series by Benioff and Weiss, the people who brought us Game of Thrones and there are some GoT alumni in this, some token nudity, no sex and not a lot of violence but it's still early doors and I'd really like this to be good, but what I think is it's akin to V from the 1980s, which had an alien race invade the planet but had a Fifth Column trying to prevent it. The Chinese girl's first message from the aliens is and I paraphrase 'Don't reply to this because I'm a pacifist and if my bosses find out you've contacted us we're going to come and shit on your planet.' But she's so pissed off with communist China she decides the world doesn't need saving.

There is also a mysterious girl who seems to have superpowers, the VR headsets that propel the user into such a realistic reality they could actually be there and there's Mike Evans - are these all working for the 'good' aliens, trying to come up with a solution to their Three Body Problem before Earth is invaded in about 400 years time - solve the problem of their planet and maybe the nasty aliens won't take over Earth? 

The review of episodes 3 & 4 will continue after the short review for the other alien invasion TV series I wasted my life on...

Too Much Going On

It was time for a second outing for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a film we watched less than two years ago yet remembered so little. At times it felt like we'd been given a brief outline of the film verbally, with some pictures to help and like so many MCU films the second viewing was considerably better than the first. That's not to say there are/were some big problems with this movie, but most of these were when Namor and his undersea warriors were involved...

The first thing you realise is that while original reviews suggested that it was respectful but not too fixated on Chadwick Boseman's death, they were completely wrong; this was a film with the dead actor writ large all over it; his character haunted almost everything and when he wasn't being talked about, he was being referenced or alluded to because how do you have a Black Panther film when your panther is dead?

The second thing is if this had been a Wakanda versus the world film it would have worked so much better; forget your amphibious nonsense and concentrate on the world's 'leading' powers trying to bully and intimidate Wakanda out of the resource that makes it the most powerful and rich nation on the planet and you would have had an excellent film, but by introducing an entirely new race and one that had never even been hinted at prior to this film Disney lost something that it's never regained. The MCU has too many new deities and gods without introducing a 600 year old mutant and the race of undersea dwellers he commands. It added an extra half an hour and far too much shite it didn't need. Had Wakanda faced a threat from nations throwing their own superpowered government vigilantes then this might have worked so much better. If you're going to have the Countess as a foil in it have her as an adversary that's worth more than just a token subplot - get her leading a group of anti-heroes bankrolled by the CIA that could have threatened the Wakandans without adding to a mythos that really didn't need adding to (a bit like what she's been suggested as doing in numerous post credit scenes). This film gets flabby and bloated the moment we go underwater; it was actually a really intriguing premise and then the Mexican with winged feet came along and it got a bit silly. It didn't have to, but the MCU presumably needed to add a 'super' to a film that was actually doing okay without it. Namor ruined it on a number of different levels, but fortunately he didn't ruin it enough, as this wasn't as bad as I remembered it and while it gets a wee bit contrived at times, it does kind of feel like a sequel even if the main protagonist is dead before the opening credits. 

There is also the thorny issue of the 'Power Ranger' in the room. Riri Williams' Ironheart was a character that didn't need to be anywhere near this film, arguably anywhere near the MCU. The Iron Man clone felt like she was written by committee; she changed personality when the plot demanded it and her presence was like a product placement rather than a plotting necessity. The MCU doesn't need an ethnic Iron Man, it just needs an Iron Man, whether that's a Tony Stark from the multiverse or someone taking on the mantle - like Scott Lang's Ant Man. The other weird thing about this is that Letitia Wright, who plays Shuri (the new Panther) looks younger than Dominique Thorne - who plays the 19-year-old college girl Riri. 

I can't see this character leading her own TV series, whether it's a proper MCU show or something aimed at younger audiences. This for me perfectly highlights where the MCU is going wrong. It's like the 1970s all over again... 50 plus years ago, a dominant Marvel Comics decided to expand its compact and bijou universe and introduce a raft of new heroes and comicbooks. It felt like you simply needed to throw some shit at Stan Lee's wall and it would be a comic inside six months. Literally nothing stuck for very long and while many of these failed attempts still exist today. they crashed and burned in the 1970s. The only successful comics Marvel launched in that decade was a spin-off Spider-Man title and a revamped X-Men - nothing new here to see. This is now also the MCU's biggest problem and to be fair and give Feige and co some credit, you can't just stick with what you've got because of ... actors (their age and contracts always get in the way). You need new blood to shake things up, but one would have thought there would have been some circumspect thinking done rather than literally having such a shit and seeing how much sweetcorn was in it approach to creating a universe.

The only reason a Shang-Chi film was even made was so that Disney could exploit the Chinese market. Kevin Feige can claim it was something he wanted to do for years, but it was a balance sheet decision and nothing else. Arguably the Black Panther could have the same accusation levelled at it, but at least the character was one grounded in the 1960s, with a solid history of being among that group of Marvel heroes that helped create and make the MCU such a brilliant concept in the first place.

Numbers Up

There have been some extraordinary animated films over the years and I'd say that 99% of them were aimed at a younger than adult audience, so it was honestly a real treat to watch a CGI film that would have scared the bejesus out of any kid under the age of 15. 9 is an absolutely wonderful film with a story that probably wouldn't have been out of place had it been made by the legendary Czech animator Jan Svankmajer.

It tells the story of a small cloth figure who awakens in a post-apocalyptic world not knowing who he is or where he comes from. He quickly meets someone who looks very similar to him who helps him by fitting a speaker inside his chest so he can speak. The two cloth men then meet a scary skeletal robot dog who captures being #2 - who helped the new figure - the titular #9. What happens after this is #9 meets others similar to him, all of them hiding inside an old church. This is where 9 meets 1, who tells him of those who have died and how 9 now has to stay with them and avoid meeting with the scary skeletal robot again. 

We discover quite quickly that man built machines that eventually turned on them and eventually everything was destroyed and all that was left was the little cloth men (and woman) and the machine. What then starts out as a rescue mission becomes a fight for the future as the past is unveiled and the cloth men have to make decisions that will affect the future. It's a creepy, atmospheric and relatively short film that we've had on the Flash Drive of Doom for nearly two years but the wife has never fancied watching; however because of time constraints it was the best option to watch and as with many things that one puts off it turned out to be a very satisfying thing. If you ever get the chance it's worth watching - far more than many CGI films. It's a cracking wee movie even if it does have a very unusual ending.

Casualty 90s Style

We delved back into the archives again to watch the second series of the 1990s medical drama Cardiac Arrest. It had moved on over a year since the first series and while many of the doctors and nurses were the same it had new arrivals and ramped up the tensions, many of which are still prevalent in the NHS 30 years later. It's amazing how this drama could easily have been made last week and most of the issues would be contemporary.

Dr Collin is back, now as a senior Houseman along with the usual suspects and some new faces - including a posh new junior doctor who has the ear of the scumbag consultant Mr Turner - not that that helps him in the long run. This season is all about Dr Claire Maitland - Helen Baxendale - rebelling against her position and kicking up a stink despite the threats of her superiors. The new hospital manager and the levels of shittyness he goes to in order to piss off almost everyone in the hospital is another recurring theme in this 8 part season. Anaesthetist James's AIDS diagnosis as his secret gay life is finally revealed, Raj's search for a partner and Andrew Collin's failing marriage as well as his equally failing faith in god and religion. Yes, it's got a lot of 1990s trademark problems; some of the acting is straight out of am dram and it looks so dated, yet as I said earlier it could also have been made last week and 95% of the issues raised would still be pertinent. That's how much the NHS has changed... or rather hasn't. 

The third and final season was extended to 13 episodes, almost as if Jed Mercurio and co wanted to drive home the point even further; to make the viewer in 1996 realise that the NHS was on its knees and middle managers and consultants, with lucrative private contracts, were the fault. Even the emphasis on nurses being part of the problem disappeared as the final act takes on an us and them mentality. The extra episodes allowed extra focus on specific doctors and the constant throughout is Andrew Lancel's Dr Collin; one of the best doctors the NHS has created slowly drowning in a sea of inadequacy and management incompetence.

Of course, while the third season carries on almost straight after the second one finished, there are subtle differences and more new characters. There's also a greater degree of confidence, my only reservation is I remember how it ends because the end was and still is one of the most memorable to ever grace a TV screen.

Multiverse of Mindlessness 

It was also time for a second outing for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and given that the Black Panther sequel was actually a better film second time around I expected this to fair better than it did first time around. I was wrong; I shouldn't have expected anything...

This is woefully poor film. It has an inadequate story, it's as contrived as hell, and the use of the Multiverse was truly bad; it was an excuse to play with a computer and introduce us to characters from other realities that were supposed to impress but ultimately were in for so little time they just felt like afterthoughts and footnotes. This is an awful movie almost from start to finish. The thing is the first Doctor Strange film does a really good job of putting the 'strange' into Doctor Strange, this just threw everything and the kitchen sink at the idea of weird and it failed on almost every count. Bad plotting; unbelievably poor dialogue; piss poor script editing - surely someone in the production team must have seen the atrocious errors from the Illuminati's crass speeches to the flaws in everything from the logic to the execution. It was like someone wrote a lot of bullet points down on a piece of paper and they made the film from that. There was no real explanation as to why things happened; America Chavez came out of nowhere, had little explanation and the entire film ended up being about her, yet we knew as much about her at the end as we did at the beginning. The thing that tipped evil Wanda into realisation was something that two different characters had pointed out to her already, oh and why would a bunch of magicians need to rebuild their home when they could just magic repairs out of thin air? I mean, they can change white wine into red, so why not rebuild a roof?

The thin and weak subplot about Stephen Strange's personal happiness was also odd, like it was the driving force behind the entire film but it was only really to drive home a pointless analogy that his character is destined never to have the woman he loves - played by Rachel McAdam, someone who appears in superhero films like some people go to the toilet. So much of this film either didn't make sense or was simply there to enable the next scene to happen. How come Stephen needed to be protected from the souls of the damned - when he was dream walking - but Wanda didn't? How come there was a bunch of helpful monsters in Wundagore? Why was Wanda pruning apple trees and smelling the blossom if it was really just a burning hellscape? This was style over substance in overdrive and while there were many redeeming factors about Wakanda Forever as a sequel, this had nothing. It did introduce the Multiverse in a much bigger way, but in reality it did so little with it, apart from kill off some fleeting glimpses of alternate heroes. Even the post credit scene stunk; Charlize Theron as Clea is like casting Bella Emberg as Sue Storm. This was just a huge load of bollocks - the kind that Sam Raimi absolutely specialises in; he is one go to director if you want a shit film.

Crimes of the Future

It's been 22 years since we last watched Minority Report. Tom Cruise was still in his 30s (just) and Samantha Morton was at the start of a pretty diverse and successful career. This Steven Spielberg sci-fi thriller has remarkably not dated all that much; some of the tech used is a wee bit clunky and chunky, but in all, it's quite a prescient movie with some slightly absurd ideas but also some very good suggestions of what life in 2054 might be like.

It's the story of the Precrime department; a bunch of specialist cops who arrest people just before they're about to commit a murder; these people are prevented from committing their crimes but still face a harsh and stiff penalty for [not] doing it. As usual Cruise plays the hero who seems to get framed for something which he is unlikely to commit and it's a race against time for him to save himself. Let's be clear about this film, it's a really great idea until you start to seriously unpack its timeline. The FBI send a man to investigate whether the Precrime Division are all above board and operating within safe parameters and within a few hours Cruise's character is being set up, just because one of the precogs - the three telepathic people used to determine future crimes - decides to start talking to him about a murder that happened many years before. There's nothing wrong with the actual story, it's the speed and effectiveness of the set-up that feels totally wrong. This was the problem that followed me all the way through the movie - how come this happened so fast and how come something as elaborate was put into motion so quickly?

It's not like me to dissect Spielberg films in such a way, but the pace of the movie is one thing, whether or not the pace of it was true to the story is another. The film's actual villain - like in so many other films and stories, a close associate of the hero - either had the set-up [ahem] set up just waiting for something to go wrong or he managed to put everything in place in less than 24 hours, which suggests that there would have been problems any detective worth their salt would have spotted and to be fair Colin Farrell, as the FBI agent, did seem to work out that there was something fishy very quickly, what he didn't work out was who had been doing the setting up, so why he was despatched very quickly by the actual antagonist seemed yet again to be a poor bit of plotting, especially for a film by Spielberg. Anyhow, all this suggests I think the film wasn't as good as it was, which isn't the case, it's a very good, slightly queasy thriller with a truly unique feel about it, even down to the camera work and the way the set is designed. It's way ahead of it time in terms of everything but the story; the story had more holes in it than a Swiss cheese. 

Billy Liar?

The 2003 Tim Burton fantasy film Big Fish has an extremely high rating on IMDB. For a film that is 21 years old it currently has a rating of 8.0 and this is the main reason why I downloaded it to watch. When pickings on the Flash Drive of Doom got slim, I decided to look at the list of films rated 8.0 and higher on IMDB to see how many I a) hadn't seen and b) would like to see and Big Fish was really an a) rather than a b). I'd never heard of it - which is odd considering it's Tim Burton - and it didn't look like it would be my cup of tea, despite it being a fantasy. It wasn't my cup of tea at all...

Almost from the opening scenes, I thought, 'this is going to be a bit boring' and that is exactly what I felt when it finished. A load of fantasy nonsense that felt more like a hyper-fantasy version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty or Billy Liar. The one good thing about it was Billy Crudup as the son of the main character - Ed Bloom. What I struggled with was Albert Finney, Ewan McGregor and Helena Bonham Carter - all British - playing people from Alabama. The film tells the story of a frustrated son who tries to distinguish fact from fiction in the life of his father, a teller of tall tales - was his father just a fantasist or did he really do some of the amazing things he claimed to do? This is kind of where I struggled with it almost from the off. Ed Bloom's favourite story - which was debunked as a complete lie - was about him catching the biggest fish in the local river when he should have been at the hospital waiting for the birth of his son. We found out towards the end of the film what actually happened, but we also find out that many of his stories might have happened, possibly not in the slightly embellished way that Ed told them, but maybe not too different.

The problem is, I want to say I wanted to like it, but I simply couldn't find much about it that I liked. The fantastic scenes weren't that fantastic and the over exaggeration felt like a load of bollocks. I wasn't convinced by McGregor or Finney and it all felt just a little too stupid, I get what the analogy was supposed to be and I understand the over all 'moral' of the story, I just don't think it worked.

This Week's Resident Alien...

... Was largely a load of shit. Two to go.

Is 3 A Magic Number?

So, the next three episodes of 3 Body Problem have been watched... Firstly, my hypothesis is probably completely wrong; but perhaps that's how this series was designed to be. Lull you into thinking one thing and then smashing you in the face with something else... We watched three episodes because we figured we'd get it out of the way as quick as possible as it seemed to be meandering around a bit aimlessly and still felt really boring. We felt committed to it because we'd spent four hours watching it and it's only eight parts - we don't have to watch season two, do we? There were some interesting things that happened in parts three and four, but part five is where this sci-fi series really starts. It was absolutely epic TV and probably should have been the episode to kick things off, then work backwards to fill in the blanks.

Leading up to part five we see the death of what we think is a major character, the exposing of another character as one of the leaders of what appears to be a death cult awaiting the arrival of the San-Ti (the name the aliens have in the TV show, they're called Trisolarans in the books) and the fact that the aliens scientific advancement means that much of the things in the series so far - the fabulous AI helmets, the stars flickering on and off and the ability to hide humans from CCTV or other surveillance cameras - seem fantastic, but logical for a race that is travelling four light years to conquer us. 

You spend four parts wandering if this series is going to wake up and show us why Netflix has been so bullish about it; there's a few twists and turns but generally the poor acting and dodgy script have let it down; but part five kind of butt fucks you really hard with no lube. During this episode there is one of the most horrendous mass killings you'll ever witness on TV, done in a really nasty way. You will also discover how the San-Ti intends to inhibit human development, because in the 400 years it will take them to reach earth, humans will be considerably more technologically advanced than their alien counterparts and able to wipe them out quite effortlessly, so for these aliens to successfully take over our world and make it their own they have to ensure that science is killed off and they do that via an ingenious way you also don't see coming. It's at this point in the story where we're finally in the world of true science fiction and boy is there a lot of science involved, yet it remains gripping and while it's going to be way above the heads of some people, it's also going to have enough sex and violence in it to keep most people happy. The slow start, while a bit unnecessary has a big payoff. I'm now a bit hooked on this and expect it to keep up this high standard into the last three parts of season one.

Next Time...

The last three parts of 3 Body Problem, we're going to dip into Twisted Metal as I've heard some good things about it and the - hopefully - penultimate Resident Alien (although to be fair you might get less of a review than this week). A whole bunch of films, including Don't Breathe which is by the director who is responsible for the latest Alien reboot and a second outing for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, there's also a few newish additions to the Flash Drive of Doom. I have more optimism about the week ahead than I have had for a while; hey, there might even be something I wasn't expecting to help pad out the blog. Stay tuned. 

I have to laugh though; I woke up this morning (Saturday) and saw that Dr Who was trending on social media. It turns out that because Disney now bankroll the series they're going to be showing the new series 24 hours ahead of British viewers (unless they're subscribed to Disney+). In the last 24 hours, the future queen of Britain has admitted she has cancer; there's been a mass killing in Moscow; 600,000 extra children have been added to the extreme poverty list and the two subjects that are fascinating and angering Brits the most are a redesigned George Cross flag and the fact that Americans will see Dr Who 24 hours earlier than British people unless they want to fork out money for something they'll see for free less than a day later. It's good to see we have our priorities right...

21st Century Culture - Social Media

Several weeks ago, when I was in the process of trying to sort my blogs out, I wrote this...

Engagement - it's something I believe most of us covet. The arrival of social media placed a magnifying glass over our lives and many of us liked the idea of having our own stage to stride about on - I know I did. For every wallflower there's a budding thespian and the Fear Of Missing Out was actually a human thing that social media very efficiently pounced on - if something that only exists in the virtual world can pounce on anything. The thing is we like to think our lives have some meaning, especially with fewer people believing in a god. Our existence must mean something, surely? That's probably just hubris talking; does a wood lice that lives in a quiet forest and never has contact with anything apart from other wood lice and wood have a meaning other than being part of the planet's ongoing ecology?

I have written blogs for over 20 years and while I tell myself that I do most of it for myself the truth is I have an audience and I want to entertain (or educate) that audience so that they come back and maybe bring someone else along. Once upon a time my blogs were read by a quite remarkable number of people (in my eyes) but over the years it dwindled from four figures to three and now, generally, between 50 and 80 people will read my blogs - sometimes it can be as low as in the 20s (other times it can get as many as 200 depending on the subject), and it sometimes makes me wonder if it's worth doing at all. However, it is a medium I enjoy because as someone who no longer considers himself a writer it allows me to practice and carry on doing something I have enjoyed doing since I was a kid - sitting down at a keyboard and bashing the keys. My blogs, to a certain extent, have relied on social media for them to be seen, but they're not beholden to it, not unless I want as many people to read them as possible - which, of course, is the reason for writing them... Before Facebook and Twitter I actually had more people read them than I do now, but that was more to do with people having to search for what they wanted to entertain them rather than having it spoon fed to them in a timeline or feed; that and subscriptions and bookmarks.

Like so many things involving social media the beginning doesn't always lead to the middle or even the end. I have a number of almost disparate thoughts about the entire world we call social media; for one I think it is a fantastic creation that could very well be used as a concept for good, but as a counter to this, I think it will be the downfall of humanity, will ultimately cause wars and has sown so much division across the world that it's abilities can never really be considered a positive thing. Social media is a horrid mirror that reflects everything that can be bad about humanity and then amplifies it. The world is a far nastier place now that social media is ubiquitous.

In my Culture blogs I've talked a lot about the Paramount+ TV show Evil, I came to it late and as a result, the wife and I binge watched the three available seasons across an entire month. It is very much a weekly TV show because if viewed continuously you unearth inconsistencies about the plot and story telling method that are not mirrored in real life. However, one of the show's myriad of subplots involves a company called DF - it is a 21st century operation dealing with a number of aspects and is probably a lynchpin in the entire show's raison d'être and one of the things DF specialises in is social media and probably one of the best aspects of this show is how it has managed to marry evil with social media. One of the departments of this Evil Corps is its Troll Section, which employs banks of people who spend their working days doing all the things we hate about social media - the people (we sometimes think of them as 'bots') who are deliberately provocative, whether subtly or forthright. 

Troll have existed in the on-line forums since the early days of the internet. Their function (if you want to give them an actual purpose) is to stir up and incite debate about emotive issues, or simply just start an argument. They rarely engage after their initial posts; they are the people who light the blue touch paper then get as far away as they can, then sit and watch how much they can burn down. A proper internet troll does just enough to sow a seed and will probably never been seen again on that forum or thread. As a result trolls create other trolls; people who see the amount of exposure a troll can get from posting something contentious or inflammatory and they want that attention, even if it's 100 people telling them what a wanker they are, because if people are concentrating on you they're not paying attention elsewhere. Think of a dog that is bad; most dogs are not bad, per se, they're seeking attention and even a backhanded slap for misbehaving is attention. Anyone who has had a dog will know that dogs crave your attention even if it's just you shouting at them, because you are shouting at them! This is what they want and in the case of most of 'unpaid' internet trolls, it's about inciting enough debate to take over a thread or a forum. The person who says the most outrageous and shitty thing is taking up your time, your anger and your thoughts, which means they're focused on what the troll has said and nothing else. It's like when you make a really valid point but someone mentions you spelled a word wrongly and the entire thread is taken up with people debating your validity because your spelling is bad.

As I said, these kind of people have existed since Usenet first become a thing. we're not really talking about people who are argumentative here, we're talking about people who are deliberately provocative with a thought or comment that either goes against the general opinion or divides those opinions. In the TV series Evil, the Troll Section exists to do just this - to divide the audience, to make the person looking at their products love the product but hate the other people using it because, if we want to be honest about this, social media would be no fun if it was all about people agreeing with each other - wouldn't it? The purpose of the troll isn't just to anger and upset, it is fundamentally about sowing division and making people take sides. The best thing to do is not feed the trolls, but human nature is to challenge beliefs or comments that go against our way of thinking about something. It goes against a lot of peoples moral conviction to allow an inflammatory statement go ignored. Part of us doesn't want other people to think or believe the same way, so we feel it is our moral obligation to challenge these comments, when really we're doing the work of the trolls for them and if like in Evil many of the trolls are working for corporations that are dependent on interaction whatever they pay a troll is peanuts compared to the actual interaction it causes in real time. Oh and of course, if people agree with the troll's comments, they tend to take up the chalice and do even more of their work for them. 

Social media is, like I said, a fantastic thing, especially for keeping in touch with people, many of whom you might not even have remembered if it hadn't been for social media. The problem with it is that as a result of social media you actually lose touch with more people than you gain. This is mainly down to the algorithms that drive whatever social media app you're using. Have you ever noticed that sometimes you get adverts that you can't fathom why? This is probably down to your cursor or finger hovering over something for a split second longer than it does elsewhere; it might not even have anything to do with you; you might have gone for a wee, but your cursor or phone is on a certain post and the algorithm extrapolates this as something you're interested in. It also works in different ways; such as when you look at a post or something and then try to find it again. This is down, again, to the amount of time you spent and if you can't find it then you're likely to use the search to find it again and the search is the grail for algorithms and the task of finding how to target advertising to you specifically. Whether you ever find the post you're looking for is immaterial, because social media companies are hoping you simply fall down a rabbit hole and start looking at everything it suggests because eventually you might click on a suggestion and buy something. This is the holy grail for social media and a way of proving to potential advertisers that sites work for them.

Social media might keep all your friends and acquaintances in one place, but what you like, what you hover over the longest, what you type into searches and what you're seen as focusing your attention on is what dictates what you see. You've been friends with Joe Blow for years, but if Joe doesn't post much on Facebook and you haven't clicked like on what few posts he does put up, then the chances are he'll slip down your priority list, even if you have him or her in your 'favourites'. This is why you never see some people in your timeline; it has nothing to do with anything apart from your own viewing habits and the fact they don't post stuff you want to react with. It's also why when you snooze someone, when they un-snooze you appear to get everything you've missed all crammed in one place. This is because the algorithm doesn't realise you want to see less of this person, it's because you have spent time on this person so when the switch is turned back on it remembers that you have interacted with this person's account more than you have with someone you actually want to see the posts from. It's not supposed to make sense. In the world of social media algorithms, not wanting to see someone means you have to do more with their account than someone you do want to see and because we're talking about computer algorithms, it 'sees' this as you - the individual - actually wanting more of the person you want to see less of. Like I said, it isn't supposed to make sense, in fact, it's supposed to confuse and obfuscate you more.

Some people will argue with much of what I've said, possibly even suggesting I'm falling into the conspiracy theorists trap, because some people get fulfilment and joy from social media; they keep in touch with their friends, either by Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, WhatsApp or whatever is popular or the kids are using. These people might not give a shit about the advertising they're subjected to; they might not even realise that some of the people in their circles of friends are conspicuous by their absence. They might not realise the person they used to telephone or text with isn't in their lives as much as they once were, but life has a habit of dividing people through the demands of every day living. Social media has made us simultaneously aware and unaware of the people who mean the most to us and once where we weren't subjected to their every thought, we become influenced by them. "I didn't know so-and-so believed that?" Might not be something you consciously believe or think, but if you suddenly discover that a good friend is secretly a Nazi or is a fan of Cliff Richard when you thought they were punks, then these things influence you, whether you want to believe it or not. Social media allows you to know more about your closest friends without even asking them; however it also reveals things about people that prior to social media might have just sat in a darkened closet where no one else knew about it.

Social media is a multi-billion dollar thing where almost every aspect is taken seriously and before you scoff at this notion, it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar thing if it just depended on what you - personally - thought; would it? It's a place that encourages disagreement and divide because that gets people involved and social media wouldn't be social if that didn't happen; yet it deceives us into thinking it's about bringing everyone together when the algorithms and people who write them couldn't care less what altruistic effect it has on societies. The world is a massive capitalist experiment otherwise it would be doing something about climate change, about hate and about subversion and manipulation of all forms of media - the bottom line is it is about making corporations money, otherwise there would be some way to challenge or approach them; there would be a 'contact us' section on their webpages; there would be a human being able to deal with problems. Think of it this way, if Facebook alone had interaction with the general public, with it's alleged 6 billion users [read: accounts] then it would need to employ 100,000 people minimum just to deal with every complaint, challenge or issue, this is why you can forget about them actually doing anything. They ignore governments, so why should they care what you think?

Freedom of speech will always be the label that social media hides behind even if it's a cop out and offensive, because while the media manipulates what we think is offensive or not, social media doesn't care about causing offense because that creates more people looking, liking and interacting and that makes money for someone, somehow. Social media is the single biggest threat to the planet since the creation of the atom bomb because it not only creates division, it gives the dividers a platform, whether they're private or public and as long as there's no gratuitous nudity, blatant beheadings or the threat to kill anyone - rhetorical, real or as a joke - they don't care what you're planning as long as you use their planning calendar to do it. If the people who ran social media had a conscience they wouldn't be working in social media.

It's remarkable that in a little over 15 years the human race has become so dependent on social media. Facebook went down, worldwide, for five hours at the start of March and a reported 50 million people changed their passwords because they believed they had been hacked or that changing their password would miraculously bring it back. Social media essentially runs our lives and in the USA there's a problem with the Chinese owned TikTok, which the Senate wants to ban because it might be harvesting data for the Chinese government. There are over 2 million businesses in the USA alone that depends on the platform for its business, because it is the easiest app to use if you have a business. Trying to run a business on Facebook is akin to throwing money down the toilet, but we don't hear about the US government trying to shut that down, despite the clear fact that Meta - the parent company - operates like a rogue country, literally holding the rest of the world to ransom.

We're hearing about the imminent threat of AI - especially in a year that promises both a UK and US election - the problem is, because of social media, you don't need to create falsities to convince the public of what's right or wrong, what is a lie and what is the truth, because social media already does that for you. The Flat Earth Society has over 100,000 members on Facebook - that's a drop in the ocean compared to the Big Picture, but that's still the population of a town like Dagenham or Bedford and when you look at it like that, that's a lot of people believe the earth is flat. This is just an example, but if you have a platform for the hateful or the ridiculous then you will attract people. In the good old days, if you had right wing extremists, their groups were small, they relied on the telephone or leaflet campaigns to drum up interest - marches and demonstrations by fascist groups rarely were large enough to raise the interest of a journalist or a news reporter. In 2024, we might use social media to attract 100,000 people to a Pro-Palestine march, but we also attract 10,000 people to racist demos or English Defence League events. The presence of these things doesn't diminish over time because social media is there to help promote them and to help them push an agenda.

Are you aware that if you get hacked or cloned on Facebook, the company isn't interested. Approximately one in a one hundred thousand people get their issue resolved. Facebook might not have a company policy of supporting scammers, hackers and fake IDs, but they actively make more money from these criminals than they do from you, therefore they take minimal, if any, action. Social media might give you a platform, one to share things with your friends, family and people you don't see any more, but it isn't and never will be your friend and there is no alternative. It's like someone has got you hooked on a drug that only that someone can provide you with.

Pop Culture - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly Required

There are the usual spoilers or avoidance of them...

Across the Spider-Arse

The first question I have to ask is - and it will seem a bit strange given my own cynicism towards the writer - has Alan Moore considered suing Sony, Marvel and the writers of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse? Having finally gotten around to watching the film - in two parts, because the wife declared she'd been asleep for most of the opening 45 minutes, so I switched it off and decided to watch the rest of it while she was decorating the kitchen - all I could think of was Captain Britain - The Jasper's Warp. It's literally a huge rip off of that comic; or at least the filling in a sandwich was.

That aside, this is the best Marvel film I've seen in a while - maybe not as good as Guardians 3, but better than the live action Spider-Man films in the MCU. That isn't to say that I got it; it's been a long time since we watched the first film and I probably would have enjoyed this even more had I not been clueless to some of the references. There's also about 45 minutes of this film that feels like padding; the opening 25 minutes was a bit like an extended 'while you were away' recap with added, 'oh you should know this if you want to enjoy it better' and the 'end' couldn't have been more drawn out if they'd slowed the movie down by 50%. These elements aside, it's a rollicking good film, with some stunning animation - albeit a bit on the schizophrenic side at times - and the [comics reference coming up] Bill Sienkiewicz style of artwork, in places, really works, especially when it's used to its freakiest best. In fact the homages littered throughout this film tells me that while Sony make lousy - truly lousy - Marvel films, they make Spider-Man multiverse films better than anyone else by a country mile - there appears to be a genuine love for the character on display and more importantly his history. In fact, there are so many ideas here - including ripping off Captain Britain - it's going to make the MCU solution for their own multiverse problem a massive mountain to climb, because if they could use this scenario then they might pull it off, but you know they won't. Plus, The Spot is a really interesting and original villain, something else that has been missing from MCU films for a while now.

There were things about the movie that as a 61 year old man who has been away from comics for nearly a quarter of century I just didn't get. For starters, Spider-Man is Peter Parker, he isn't Miles Morales or Miguel O'Hara or a cartoon pig and however likeable Miles might be, this Ultimate Spider-Man incarnation passed me by 20 odd years ago and I'm not going to be drawn into it. I referenced the Guardian of the Galaxy in the opening paragraph - they are not my Guardians, my biggest problem with the first two Guardians films was the fact I was having imitations shovelled down my throat. Yes, maybe the original Guardians might not have made a decent movie, but it took me two films and umpteen guest appearances for me to finally accept them as Marvel characters in a team. This 'Spider-Man' is just a reboot that is now almost 25 years old; although that's 16 years older than the original Spider-Man was when I properly discovered him, so he's not exactly 'new' any more. 

The clever, fast-paced, little story that plays out in this does go a long way to make me accept Miles as a Spider-Man mainly because he was never meant to be a Spider-Man. If it's been five years since you saw Into the Spider-Verse then I'd have a recap before delving into this, but as probably everyone who reads this blog will have seen this movie already that probably doesn't even matter. I'm glad I got around to seeing it, I just feel the wife has missed out, even if this is just the first part of the story. 

In Distress

The biggest problem with Netflix's latest fantasy movie Damsel is the lead actor; a person who, it seems, has become something of a Marmite girl since her breakout role in Stranger Things. Millie Bobby Brown wields a lot of power in Hollywood, apparently, and she has valuable contracts that allows her to have a free rein on the films she wants to make. As a result, even when she makes something that isn't bad it tends to get poor ratings; she really isn't to everyone's tastes.

In her latest offering, she plays the princess of a poor nation struggling through a harsh winter who has the chance to marry the prince of a faraway island kingdom and bring prosperity to her lands once again; the problem is it's all a bit too good to be true. So when her father sells her off for what is essentially more gold than he'll ever need, it soon becomes obvious that she's got herself into a situation that won't have her living happily ever after. It takes a while to get to this point; the film does a good job of painting the new kingdom she's marrying into as a warm and friendly place - initially - but we soon see it is riddled with snobbery and contempt, especially for 'lesser' people. When her father - Ray Winstone - loses his jolly 'father-of-the-bride exterior and her stepmother - Angela Bassett - suddenly starts worrying about Elodie it becomes obvious we're not in Fairy Tale Land. What follows is a little bit creepy and yet probably very expected - otherwise there wouldn't be much of a film.

Suffice it to say there's an ancient dragon involved and she has a deal with the royal family of Orea which involves... a certain sacrifice here and there. The thing is Elodie - Brown - has already been established as pretty good at handling herself so when the dragon meets more than she expects we get into the realms of the unexpected. This is a movie that doesn't deserve its 6.2 rating, but you read the reviews on film sites and you'll see what the problem is almost immediately; it's Ms Brown, who is now 20 and has gone from pre-pubescent child star to a young woman who wants you to... well... look at her fantastic body and not her acting range. Damsel isn't a bad film; I don't really have a problem with Brown, despite the fact she clearly loves herself, as she is a bit of a fan of fantasy genres and seems to be trying to make films that are fun with a dash of sci-fi or fantasy about them. Her main problem is she's not a very good actor and while she might be worth a shit load of money, I can't see any Oscar roles in her future. She might not want that, but my guess is she does.

...But Not As We Know It

The Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson and Ryan Reynolds sci-fi vehicle Life is essentially a post-modern take on Alien. A kind of 'what if Alien took place in the 21st century on board the ISS orbiting earth?' It does a good job and probably bombed at the box office because it has bleak ending. Oops, I gave that away, but the film is 7 years old and has been on TV three times in the last four months.

It's a thriller about some soil samples collected on Mars which are going to be examined on the space station and it soon becomes clear that these samples contain life - the first not from earth - and this is a big deal. The problem is this life is very dangerous, highly intelligent and as it starts to pick off the six crew members, the future starts to look very bleak for mankind - this organism must not be allowed to reach earth. The first to die is Reynolds, which, when we watched it the first time around, was quite shocking because he was quite a big star by 2017. From that point on it was about stopping it, but the Martian has one thing going for it - the haphazardness of human beings. It's a taut movie that rocks along without ever reaching the heights that Alien did. It's currently doing the rounds on ITV4 and Film4 so if you keep an eye on the schedules it'll probably pop up soon enough.

Playing Catch-Up

Since we got the Smart TV (which is a misnomer as far as I'm concerned as it doesn't appear to be very smart), we have access to the free streaming services and therefore do not use the set top box to record TV programmes very often; the box is basically used to record films and anything that we want to watch that's on a commercial channel because we can fast forward through the adverts - watch something like ITVX or All4 and you have to put up with adverts you can't fast forward through.

The reason I'm telling you this is because the wife was recording something off of ITV (which means we can't access the Flash Drive of Doom) so we watched something off iPlayer we saved at Christmas - Lot No.249 - A Christmas Ghost Story adapted by Mark Gatiss from the Arthur Conan Doyle short story. It starred Kit Harrington and (the awful) Freddy Fox and wasn't particularly Christmassy, which is a good thing for a cold March night, nor was it scary in the slightest. It did introduce a proto-Sherlock Holmes, for what good he was, and the 30 minute story was basically a waste of time and money. There was nothing remotely good about it; it was superficial, had a very weak plot with zero motive and left me wondering if this was the adaptation that made a hash of the story or it was simply a shit story. I can only deduce that Gatiss fucked up because Conan Doyle did, I recall, have a quite successful writing career.

McConaughey Rules

I commented a few months ago that I can't recall us ever watching anything with Matthew McConaughey in that we didn't enjoy. This is not a challenge; we are not watching his films hoping to be let down. we're just happy that we're batting a solid 100% average with the actor and we watched another of his films that we knew little of and we walked away with that 100% still intact.

The Lincoln Lawyer is about defence attorney Micky Haller, who operates out of the back of his Lincoln Continental and has a reputation for a) taking on scumbags no one else wants and b) being very, very successful. Haller isn't a Saul Goodman, he's a genuinely good lawyer who is driven by money and is the ex-partner of one of the LA District Attorneys (played by Marissa Tomei). He's entrenched in the law and while he's unorthodox, he's reasonably well respected. This is a movie with an all-star cast - William H Macy, Bryan Cranston, Ryan Phillippe, John Leguizamo, Frances Fisher, Michael Pena, Bob Gunton and Shea Wigham are just some of the excellent actors involved in this project. Haller is given the job of defending the son of a realtor who is accused of sexual assault; there's a lot of money to be made from this and everything seems to be going as planned when some discrepancies start to appear in his client's story. 

When it starts to become obvious to Haller that his client might be guilty, he realises that the man might also be the killer of a woman one of his former clients is in San Quentin serving life for; the problem is the further Haller digs the worse it starts to become for him as his client might be a psychopath, but he's also very clever and appears to be one step ahead of the lawyer all the time. This is a great film and what makes it especially good is that you know everything by about the hour mark yet it still remains a tight thriller where you don't know what is going to happen next. It's been on Film4 recently, which means it'll be on again in the not too distant future - you should check it out; it's a quality film.

Prelude to War

The second of the rebooted Planet of the Apes films is in many ways a better film than the first, not because it fleshes out the apes more, but because the special effects were better and it focuses on one specific story. Obviously the success of Rise led Matt Reeves to have a bigger budget for the second part Dawn (although I think that Dawn would have been a better title for the first part and Rise a better one for the second - but what do I know?). That said, I've always thought Cesar never looked like a proper chimp whereas the other chimps all look like apes, if you catch my meaning?

Dawn is set 10 years after the first film and it appears that about 90% of the human population of the planet has been wiped out and in a little corner of northern San Francisco, where it always seems to rain, the apes colony is thriving and for 10 years they have enjoyed life and for two of those years they've been free of human interaction, which is what they like the best. Unfortunately for everyone some humans turn up and immediately fuck things over by shooting one of the apes - not the best way to start when you realise that a kingdom of apes lives between you and your easiest way of restoring power to parts of the dead city you live in. These humans want to restore a hydro-electric dam but need to travel through ape country to get to it...

From this point on it's all about trust and while Cesar tries to do the correct thing, Koba - his right hand chimp - grows to despise his boss's way of thinking. The problem is the guy wanting to make things right between mankind and apes is the right hand man of someone who is all for starting a war against what he sees as a primitive species and obviously the looneys on both sides have enough followers to ensure that when the shit hits the fans it spreads far and wide. What seems to be a terrible waste here are some of the subplots, which given time to develop might have made a good movie in their own right, but became almost pointless little segments in the grand context - such as Cody Smit-McPhee's relationship with Maurice, the orangutan. 

A Modern Day Spaced?

I said last week that Extraordinary reminded me of Spaced and while we were concluding the series the wife said, "This reminds me of Spaced." And she doesn't read my blogs... There is nothing about this that is remotely like Spaced but the vibe is there; that feeling that you're watching it through a fever dream inside one of the character's brains.

It was clear from the start that Jen and Rob aka Jizz Lord's relationship would be the main thing in this series even if Jen's missing powers is the main plot that intrudes as often as possible. Carrie's indecisiveness and Kash's being an imbecile will always be guaranteed laugh makers, but it takes some slightly unexpected turns towards the end of the series. Jen's Powers Therapist (Julian Barrett) has more than just a key role to play in things and as she edges closer to finding out why she's powerless. There is a quality threshold that it sometimes fails to meet and sometimes the sets are remarkable (and expensive - like the trailer full of dildos) and other times the special effects are rubbish (like that's done on purpose), but for all the things you struggle with, there's an honesty and sense of fun permeating it all the time. It's silly and quite modern, but the wife made an observation; there's something a bit eighties about it at times and all the characters dress like they're trainee clowns. It also has a really poignant conclusion as well as a very interesting looking cliffhanger for season three.

Dreamer, Nothing But a Dreamer

Peter Dinklage doesn't make 'normal' films. I suppose if you're a vertically challenged man who has an uncanny knack for being an excellent actor then you're going to make unconventional films and his 2022 movie American Dreamer certainly doesn't fit into any category I can think of apart from gentle quirky comedy.

Dinklage stars as a college professor with more failures behind him than success, while Shirley MacLaine (she's nearly 90, you know) and Matt Dillon co-star. Dinklage's life has been, for better or worse, a series of unfulfilled dreams and now he's lecturing on Cultural Economics and obviously not liking it very much. He is looking for a property to buy, to get him on the ladder, but every house he's signed up to look at is far too expensive for him - he has about $200,000 to spend and the cheapest houses he looks at are always over $1million. He has an imaginary ex-wife and he's miserably delusional, he also wants to be the next great American novelist but doesn't appear to be able to actually write a book. Then one day he sees an advert in the classified for a house that is for sale at $5million or $240,000 if the owner can remain in it until she dies. Dinklage cashes in everything he's got to raise the money, he signs the papers and moves into an annex to the main house - a gorgeous sprawling mansion, on the beach, in New England and that's when he meets MacLaine and that's when the film gets a little weird. 

What starts out frosty becomes a good friendship, but there seems to be something not quite right; it appears that MacLaine, instead of being a childless widow actually has loads of children and one of them is a lawyer who tells Dinklage that he hasn't got a hope in hell of keeping the house when the old woman dies and everything seems to be on the verge of falling apart for him; that's when things start to get very odd indeed and you need to see it to fully understand the twists and turns that are going to both screw with our protagonist and also work out in his favour. What I seriously cannot understand about this film is it was delayed in its release for two years (this wouldn't be the first Dinklage vehicle this has happened to) and the day after its release it was sitting at 8.0 on IMDB - that was enough for me - however, when I was looking at IMDB during the writing of this review I noticed it was now down to 5.7 and I thought it was one of the better films I've seen this year and just confirms that IMDB ratings seem to very inaccurate nowadays - however, the biggest complaints seem to be the lack of 'dreaming', which simply explains to me the lack of intelligence of some of the reviewers and why some of them need post-it notes with Arse and Elbow written on them. 

The Great Esc-Apes

We concluded the POTA reboot with the third and final film in Matt Reeves' trilogy - War for the Planet of the Apes, set a couple of years after Dawn, is essentially a remake of The Great Escape with a little bit of Apocalypse Now thrown in for good measure. 

The thing that's most telling about this movie is how tragic it is. It is by far and away the saddest of the three and all the films have sadness running through them in some form or other. I think the underlying theme for the entire trilogy has been just how fucking awful humans can and are and this is the pinnacle in many ways with Woody Harrelson's The Colonel demonstrating how supremacy will be man's ultimate downfall. The intriguing thing about this film is how it actually sets up The Planet of the Apes - this rebooted franchise does something you don't often see, it takes an idea and does it much better. There was always this feeling in the original Charlton Heston POTA movie that mankind had caused its downfall by some nuclear war and not through a man made virus. With this film, we begin to understand that once it - the virus - had wiped out most of humanity, it mutated and came back in a variant form 15 years later to strip humans of their humanity and intelligence - as the apes grew cleverer man became the savage.

In many ways, the War depicted in this was never about the apes; they were caught in the middle of a war between two factions of humanity - the intolerant and the not so intolerant. It is, in many ways, the best of the trio of movies, but it's also the one with the least hope. I'm surprised it was such a hit at the box office because it doesn't really have a happy ending, as such. It does however set things up for the next trilogy beginning with Kingdom in the summer - this is a new film that will be much more like the original 1968 sci-fi classic. It made me think about watching Tim Burton's 2001 reboot, but I watched some clips on IMDB and saw it has a rating of 5.7, which in this instance I'll treat as a recommendation rather than a false rating.

Please Make It Stop

Stupid. It's the only word I have. Stupid. This is what Resident Alien has been reduced to. A pile of unfunny, uninspiring horse shit that has dispensed a story in favour of ludicrous antics and stupidity. It's truly an insult to everyone's intelligence.

It's difficult to even try and explain to you what is going on now. Harry has fallen in love with an Avian alien and all they're doing is shagging wherever and whenever they can. He's also insulting his friends and is no longer that fussed about saving the planet. D'Arcy makes an intervention to the mayor about his alien abductions, while his wife is even more convinced she's been abducted and had a child stolen from her. Sheriff Mike has an encounter with the hot female detective he dumped and other stuff happened and we didn't give a flying shit about any of it. The problem is we're invested in this turkey of a TV show and with an alleged three episodes left it feels like we need to continue subjecting our eyes and brain to this horror show for a resolution that isn't going to be fulfilling. The wrinkle in all of this is that SyFy has not confirmed or denied if there'll be a season 4, despite the first episode of season 3 being watched by only 285,000 people - according to figures I saw on the internet, which might not be true but have a ring of absolute truth about them. What is tragic about this is how it started off, it genuinely felt like a good idea and was executed well, but it quickly wandered away from what made it interesting and focused on too many characters - the makers made it an ensemble piece when it was fine as an Alan Tudyk vehicle with supporting characters. What is worse is that SyFy has cancelled some great shows over the last decade, shows that have been excellent and they replaced them with dollops of stinky shit that do not warrant anything but derision and scorn. People get paid to produce excrement like this and that is unbelievable. 

Madame Wank and More Underpants 

What a fucking awful way to end the week. I'm beginning to think that I'm either drawn to torturing myself or the quality of anything that reaches my Smart TV is so low it's on antidepressants. Friday night in the Hall house should be a great movie night or maybe a binge of brilliant TV, instead it was a very nice rice pudding and two of the most atrocious loads of vomit ever made...

I wasn't going to watch this. I thought, 'It won't be as bad as everyone says it is but I'm not going to take the chance. I won't watch it!' So I downloaded it and we watched it. Well, when I say we watched it, I mean I switched it off at the 30 minute mark. I'd given it ten more minutes than it deserved but I felt I needed to watch enough of it to be able to say why I switched off. I switched off because this was a movie with almost no redeeming features at all. It was badly acted, badly scripted and even by the 30 minute mark, Dakota Johnson's medic character seemed only able to administer CPR to all and any problem. "IBS? CPR!" "Sprained wrist? CPR!" "Headache? CPR!" "Inability to get an erection? CPR!" Then there was the acting, or in the case of the guy who stole the spider from Dakota's mother, his lack of acting ability and the fact that most of his lines were delivered with his mouth off camera, because it had obviously been dubbed with new words because, heaven forbid, the original words he spoke were obviously so much worse than the new ones.

We never got to the part where Dakota recruits the Spider-Gals and they battle the black spider; but we did meet Peter Parker's mother and his uncle Ben and Dakota's inability to interact with other human beings or the CPR she did... 3.7 on IMDB? That high?

So, because I chose to watch Madame Web (in case you were wondering what I was going on about), the wife, by default, got to choose the film we watched in its place. There might be less on the Flash Drive of Doom now, but I'd replenished it with seasons 2 and 3 of Fargo (because we need to catch up with that), there's Constellation and Silo to watch or at least give a chance to, but no, she decided that we should watch one of the two Underworld movies we hadn't watched, despite having lived through the first three and realising just how fucking awful they all were and that Awakening (or perhaps it should have been called Awankening) had a considerably lower rating than any of the previous three...

This was 88 (actually closer to 78) minutes of my life that I'm never going to see again and a grand total of 108 minutes of my Friday night obliterated by excrement - I might have had more fun sitting in a bath of shit. This 'movie' about Kate Beckinsale's vampire and the 'child' she managed to have - but didn't know it - with her hybrid boyfriend who wasn't in the film so they CGI'd his face onto someone else for the fun of it was literally as bad as Madame Fucking Web except it had no pretence at all; it knew it was shit, the special effects were like a cross between an Atari ST and Ray Harryhausen and the story was so poor that I'm fairly sure a child with brain death would have come up with something better. This was abysmal; it was the kind of film where you wonder why someone like Charles Dance would even have considered being in it despite someone waving a big fat cheque in his face. I mean, I can understand why Beckinsale did it; she's getting on; her tits are probably dangling round her knees; she hadn't had a decent role for a few years and the Total Recall remake flopped badly; she probably thought she could buy a new house or get a boob lift with the cash. Did she think 'Should I really be making this?' at any point? Was she not visited from the grave by her brilliant father who whispered in her ear that maybe prostitution was a more honourable and honest occupation to pursue? The wife wants to watch Underpants: Blood Wars, she can fucking watch it on her own...

Next Time...

Who gives a fuck? Why should I torment myself and you with promises of what might be when I finished the week watching mainly shit films and TV I wouldn't usually give houseroom to? There were some good films - in a week where we seemed to watch so many films - and so little TV. Speaking of which, TV had better get better soon or I'm giving up on it - 3 Body Problem is out next week, I'm desperately hoping its the quality we're lacking, but you can never be sure, especially now. We're told by so many that 2024 could be the best year ever for TV and I'm beginning to think this is a marketing line from an increasingly desperate executive who wants to keep his job... 

Films? I might run out of old films to watch soon enough and that will be terrible because very few recent films have been worth wasting my time on. It seems every time I watch a new film I want it to be excellent but it turns into a pile of dehydrated shit. I might as well have five wanks a week.