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.