Pop Culture - Robots and Sex Crimes

 The spoilers are somewhere but not everywhere.

The Really Wild Show

Kids films, eh? Who watches them apart from kids and their parents? Getting the wife to watch a children's film is like trying to convince half of America that Donald Trump is a massive cunt - it's not easily done. So I put it on and didn't tell her about it until it started and fortunately the disparaging remarks were few and far between (actually one in the opening two minutes then she settled back down to her knitting and didn't say anything again until the end when she admitted to enjoying it). I'll take that as a win. The film in question is The Wild Robot and if you can get past the talking animals (there's a good explanation for that) and the slightly silly premise, then you'd have to be one cold hearted bastard not to enjoy this movie.

Based on the book of the same name by Peter Brown, this adaptation stars Lupita Nyong'o as Roz, a robot that was one of six lost when a container ship sank. Roz is a helper, tasked with fulfilling objectives she is given, but when she finds herself on an uninhabited island with only the wildlife for company she has to either learn to speak animal or have no purpose. The need for this is sped up when she inadvertently kills a family of geese, leaving just an egg, which hatches and the chick bonds with the robot, thinking it is his mother. It's a relatively simple story of a robot who becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned goose, who is also the runt of his 'litter' and is tasked with three things - to feed it, teach it to swim and then to fly before the winter comes. Aided by a sly fox called Fink - voiced by Pedro Pascal - this is a schmaltzy feel good film until the last 20 minutes when it gets very dark and possibly quite scary for younger viewers. There really is a lot to unpack in this movie and there's a lot more subtlety involved than I can convey in a short review. It's helped along with added voices from Bill Nighy, Matt Berry, Mark Hamill and Ving Rhames. It's a great kids' film and anyone who watches it will want Stephanie Hsu's Vontra to die a thousand horrible deaths, if that is even possible for an evil squid-like robot. Good fun with a few belly laughs.

Downward Spiral

With Sofia Falcone alive and well and having just eliminated her family, things are looking up for her, while Oz spends most of the episode thinking he's getting his streets paved with gold; so which one will come out of this on the up? The Penguin just keeps getting better and this week is all about moving - whether it's up or down. Oz thinks he's got everything sown up; Sofia's war with her family is taking her out of his hair and his attention turns to the Maroni family and their mushroom juice production; the problem he has is getting the necessary leverage to get things going his way and for a while it looks like all his plans are coming together. Meanwhile, Vic is charged with looking after Oz's mother, who is not happy with having to be moved to one of the shittiest parts of Gotham, for her own safety. Sofia opts to change the family name and teams up with an unexpected new partner, all in the name of getting rid of the Penguin. Oz shows Vic an old Gotham secret, which might make a great HQ for his own crime empire. It's setting itself up for an interesting final three parts.

Witchy Women

Another B+ episode largely down to the fact that Agatha takes very much a back seat in this again. This time its really all about Lilia (Patti LuPone), the 450 year old divination witch and the part she has to play in the grand scheme of this thing. It's very much a time-bending episode as we flash back and forth between Lilia's past and the last six episodes when some of Lilia's actions seemed a bit weird. Once you get a grasp of what is happening here you understand what is going on - at least for this particular witch and her ability to live moments of her life out of sequence. The team are in a castle full of falling swords and there's a tarot reading that needs to be done, but just who is the reader and who is the person the reading is about? There's a few more revelations and some unexpectedly easy (and slightly disappointing) endings. The few moments where Agatha is in it are yet again the most tortuous even if she's dressed up as the wicked witch from Wicked. I know it's unlikely to be the case, but it almost feels as though by the time they got to these last few episodes the people behind the making of it realised that Kathryn Hahn is a one note actress who does annoying far better than anything else. Still, only two episodes to go and there's at least one member of the coven we haven't focused on, so with a bit of luck we'll be reduced to just having Agatha take the main stage in the final part.

Quite Exasperating 

QI [XL] is back for its 22nd series and as you would imagine very little has changed. When the last series started, I was of the opinion that it felt like it was getting a bit stale, that the end of the alphabet couldn't come soon enough and with this new season we reach the letter V and I very much haven't changed my mind on this. It's still thoroughly entertaining TV, but the belly laughs are few and far between now and this was no exception; Joe Lycett, Lou Sanders and the very funny Nabil Abdulrashid joined Alan Davies and Sandy Toksvig for this first week and with a line up as surreal and abstract as these comedians can be you would have expected more, but it was just Abdulrashid who was on the ball and even he felt a little restrained. With the U series, there were a couple of exceptions that really stood out and hopefully the V series will have a better strike rate, but this just fell a little short.

Drowning in the Pee of Love

It had been almost 35 years since we watched the Al Pacino erotic thriller Sea of Love... What a strange sentence - Al Pacino erotic thriller... sounds like a Jack Nicholson slapstick comedy or a Robert De Niro superhero film; it just doesn't sound right and guess what? It didn't and doesn't really work. Pacino plays Frank Keller, a cop in his late 40s who is eligible for retirement, is borderline alcoholic and has had a messy divorce where his ex-wife is now married to a fellow police officer, possibly even his own ex-partner - it's difficult to say because it isn't made particularly clear. He gets involved in a murder case, one which might be the work of a serial killer, as men who advertise in lonely hearts sections of magazines are murdered in their beds with a shot to the back of the head. The police think it might be a female serial killer and when John Goodman, a cop from Queens comes to Manhattan with a death that has the same MO, the investigation ramps up a gear as they go all out to find the woman doing the killings.

Enter Ellen Barkin, an attractive blonde woman who might be the killer, the problem is Pacino is attracted to her and before you know it they're making the beast with two backs and he's thrown caution to the wind. What follows is a psychological thriller that is neither psychological or thrilling, perpetuates this 1980s vibe of misogyny, female exploitation and bad hair styles. There are a bunch of actors in this who we know from stuff 20 years down the line and look extremely young - cameos from Samuel L Jackson (being Samuel L Jackson), John Spencer (Leo from the West Wing), Richard Jenkins (from Six Feet Under and many other things) and Michael Rooker (Guardians of the Galaxy and The Walking Dead). Pacino just overacts his way through a stodgy story that probably wouldn't be considered for a film in 2024, probably due to advanced police procedures and dating apps. I remembered this being a good film in 1989; 35 years later it's below average at best.

It's Grimm in Portland

We really enjoy Grimm; it's a good laugh and fills a void left by a number of supernatural themed shows. However, it's also a really awful show, where whoever writes it has more knowledge of pidgin German than police procedures, in a major city that seems to have just one police station, where no one really follows any kind of procedure. One thing that is clear though, with season four it was obvious NBC was having something of a success with the show, so the special effects budget got severely ramped up - it's just a shame about the quality of the scripts or the depth of ideas in the plots. It also seems to be following a similar path as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with the formation of a 'team' to battle bigger problems; the [brief] introduction of another, less sophisticated Grimm and subplots that, on the face of it, seem better than the ones we already have. I will say one thing totally in its favour, as season four winds on the story really starts to get very good and if it wasn't so poorly put together you'd be hard pressed to compare it with anything else; stuff happens that leaves you hoping that the show writers don't wimp out on us. Less than 50 to go. 

Trailer Trash

Several years ago, I discovered Simon Stålenhag via his website https://www.simonstalenhag.se/ - which if you haven't seen you should check it out. He's an artist who specialises in the future and his paintings are a mixture of mind-blowing, disturbing and extraordinary. He's probably best known for the adaptation of one of his graphic novels Tales From the Loop, which was on Channel four about five years ago and, frankly, didn't live up to the hype (although it still has a very high rating on IMDB).

I'd pretty much forgotten about Stålenhag until the trailer for the new Netflix film The Electric State dropped and I was filled with a mixture of anticipation and dread... Anticipation because it looks absolutely fantastic - the Russo Brothers knocking the look out of the park - and the dread because it stars Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt. The latter isn't really the problem, it's Brown, who I've mentioned in blogs passim, I have the problems with. She doesn't do bad films, but equally they're not good films either. They sort of inhabit the grey area in between. The other problem is the original graphic novel was sombre, disturbing and not at all an action-packed blockbuster that this appears to be. Also Stålenhag's name isn't attached so that could be because he's disowned the project...  The Electric State is out next March and I imagine the money that's been spent on it, Netflix will want it to be a massive hit and I'm sure it will be. It appears to be the story of a young woman who doesn't want to be detached from the world like her peers and wants to go and find her missing brother. The backdrop of this is a world that once embraced robots, but now despises them. She teams up with Pratt to find the missing sibling but appears to get involved in a war between the controlling humans and the remaining robots - who appear to be far more benign than they're depicted as. I want this film to be good. 

... Meanwhile, it looks 99.9% certain that the MCU's Blade film has been cancelled, or, at best, been indefinitely delayed. What was supposed to be part of the Phase 6 of the MCU is unlikely to be replaced with anything in the schedule and it now looks as though 2025 will feature just the three films: Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, and The Fantastic Four, with 2026 likely to be Avengers: Doomsday and maybe one other picture, possibly another sequel to an existing property. There is a rumour circulating that World War Hulk might be on the cards as well as a Young Avengers movie, while some are speculating it might be the third Doctor Strange film. If you want my, usually accurate, assessment, Doomsday will set up Avengers: Secret Wars (in 2027) and there will be no other films and while I'm confident about this, I will add the caveat that there might be another film taking place between the two, possibly a fourth Spider-Man film, but that depends on how long Tom Holland is involved with the new Christopher Nolan project and how it would fit into the new streamlined look for the MCU. Alternatively, there is a chance that in 2027 we might see an MCU X-Men film as I expect Disney will want to take the BIG film only route with the MCU now...

A Weak Cup of Tea

The malaise that set in last week didn't go away with this week's double bill of Teacup. The first part was a 45 minute episode that told the story about what happened at the other ranch and how the original guy in the mask and his mates got into alien hunting. This is a slightly ridiculous load of horse shit; I really didn't want it to be but by the end of that 45 minutes I'd torn the premise and the episode to shreds. This is truly dreadful television that rips off The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and really atrociously. It desperately needs to conclude with the two finale parts or I'm definitely not going to be tempted back for a second season. I simply can't believe how bad the pacing is; how stupid the people are and... actually, I need to give you an example of the people and their stupidity... They've worked out that both the bad alien and the good alien transfer themselves into a new host, so they realise that they should never be alone, so they promptly go out into the dark and almost every single one of them is alone at some point.

I had such hopes for this; my mate Mark sounded like he was looking forward to it and it originally had a really high score of IMDB. It's now at 6.8 there, my mate hasn't mentioned it - hopefully he's read these reviews over the last three weeks and decided it would be a waste of valuable time and I'm just disappointed that I've wasted nearly three hours of my life on something that has deteriorated profoundly over the last two weeks. I'm also sad that the excellent Chaske Spencer is involved; Yvonne Strahovski hopefully did good things with her pay cheque and Boris McGiver must have wondered why they killed him off in Evil even if he knew it was finishing. I will stick with it until the end of this season, but something astounding needs to happen to save this from being an appalling mess of a show.

Sham-Poo

Adverts are culture, aren't they? In that case, I was in the bath the other night and I spied upon one of the wife's hair products; Herbal Essence's Repair, a conditioner that claims to help revitalise and repair damaged hair. Now, I'm not quite sure how that works, but who am I to argue with hair product specialists, especially when they come up with groovy ingredients like Boswellox, which is a derivative of boswellic acid [no, me neither] or Argon oil, which I presume is the oil from argons (or a singular argon) ... However, I was looking at this hair conditioner and I noticed the legend across the front, which reads: "96% Natural Origin." Which begs the question, what are the other 4% made of? Would that be 4% unnatural origin or maybe even 4% supernatural origin? "Our new shampoo has essence of ghosts in it, to make your hair more ethereal!" Or maybe, "This new conditioner contains 4% Werewolf!" or "Our new hair product range contains 4% of things that are strange and slightly frightening!" The thing is Herbal Essence doesn't tell us what the other 4% is and that's scary...

Next Time...

Anything above that hasn't finished; we might get around to watching more than two films (a lot of this week has been taken up with watching half a season of Grimm) and with the clocks going back nothing will affect our usual TV watching, not even the advent of winter... Why is TV at the moment either outstanding or abysmal?