Modern Culture - God, Monsters and Mobsters

The usual warnings apply, but mostly as an advisory more than a proper spoilery thing...

Oh My God!

Who would have thought that a movie about picking a new pope could be so riveting? Except that's exactly what Conclave is, and not just that it was sumptuous to look at, relied on a clever script and the power of assumption to get across a very taut and intellectual thriller. I always talk about trying not to spoil anything for you, but sometimes - usually with a shit film - I almost feel obligated, yet that turns to desperately trying not to give anything away when something astounding and quite brilliant comes along and this film certainly falls into that category. With a fine cast including John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, Sergio Castellitto and Isabella Rossellini, this feature is held together by the fantastic Ralph Fiennes. It's about the sudden death of the Pope and the rigamorale of having to elect a new pontiff; except it's also about corruption, deceit, secrets and lies; it's about conspiracies and power struggles, men behaving badly when they want the highest job in religion - it is simply one of the films of the year. Oh and the end of the film delivers something of a triple whammy in terms of shock, unexpected endings. You will not guess what one of them is, let alone the handful of things that will leave you aghast and amazed. Highly recommended.

Monster High

This was the New Captain America and Deadpool's girlfriend versus the monsters! I suppose the best thing you can say about Elevation is that it's okay; it's all right; it's not that bad. I did a little bit of general logistics before I started writing this review; this was a 91 minute film; there was one death, a total of 6 monsters that were on screen for about 35 seconds and considering these 'beasties' wiped out 95% of the world's population in weeks there didn't appear to be that many of them knocking about. Anthony Mackie - playing Anthony Mackie, because that appears to be the only character he plays - and Morena Baccarin are the stars of this flea market monster movie that felt more like a TV movie than anything that might have been on at a cinema. It gets its title from the fact that mankind needs to live above 8,000 feet because the monsters - reapers - don't go above that height. They're almost impossible to kill, no one knows where they come from and Baccarin is an obsessed 'mad cat lady type' who has spent the three years since the world ended trying to come up with a way of stopping them or she gets drunk, because there's a lack of many things in post-apocalyptic Colorado, but not booze or bullets. There's a lot borrowed from A Quiet Place and there's stuff people seem to know despite 95%+ of the population being wiped out - like how they monsters are attracted to carbon dioxide - not from all mammals but only from humans.

It was just all right; it doesn't feel like a film I'll be thinking about watching again in a few years, nor does it really inspire me to recommend it to anyone; it's worth 90 minutes of your time more than some of the other tripe I've subjected myself to. It has a poor - 5.7 - rating on IMDB, but that's maybe a bit harsh, but there are more holes in the plot than a slab of Swiss cheese. There is an explanation as to why the monsters are almost impervious to attack, oh and there's actually a mid-credits scene suggesting that they might be from another planet and whatever sent them in now on its way. I somehow don't think there's going to be a sequel, but you never can tell...

Some Bridges Too Far

I've been trying to work out why we never watched 21 Bridges when it came out in 2019. Was it because by the time it made it to a streaming platform or DVD that its star Chadwick Boseman was dead and we just didn't get around to it. I can't say I'd ever heard of him before Black Panther and I dare say if he hadn't have made the big MCU breakthrough then he might not have made this; it could have ended up a Jamie Foxx vehicle or maybe even a Denzel film? The thing is Boseman is good in this taut little thriller about a couple of dodgy criminals who are hired to knock off 30 kilos of cocaine, but discover there's 300 kilos and the job is crawling with police - there is something fishy about the job, the guy protecting the coke and the speed and interest the cops have almost before the heist takes place...

The robbery goes massively tits up; seven cops are dead and the perps are on the run with most of the NYPD on their arses. Step forward Andre Davis - Boseman - son of a decorated police officer, who died on the job. Has he been picked to handle this because he's killed eight suspects in nine years or because he's a damned fine cop? What this movie does is take a fine cast, including JK Simmons, a surprisingly good Siena Miller, Stephan James and Taylor Kitsch and use them extremely well. The only complaint is I think it was over too quickly and maybe could have got away with a little more of the conspiracy theory that maybe wasn't a theory after all... Good film, worth a watch. 

The Last... Existential Crisis

The Resort did not fail to impress. The second and final part of the series (eps 5-8) took us in an altogether weird direction with subjects like love, loss, death, idiot brothers, red herrings and a couple of other things which might spoil it for you if I mention them. This was a fabulous little series, absolutely right up my street; a mixture of oddball, weird and quirky without being that quirky. Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper were fantastic as husband and wife Emma and Noah, navigating their way through not just a mystery but also their disintegrating marriage. Special mention to Luis Gerardo Mendez as Balthazar Frias, the former head of security at the titular Resort, also a fabulous tailor who belongs to a family that are the Mexican mafia in most ways apart from crime. Balthazar was an unbelievably tactless character, who asked inappropriate questions and missed his friend Alex so very much. He kept the eight parts together purely by being a bit of a dick, but one with a heart. It really is a show that if I tell you anything will ultimately ruin the strangeness and beauty of it; suffice it to say, it's only eight parts, each part is about 35 minutes long and if you stick with it the ending will fill you with joy and completely confuse you. It's a late entry into one of the best things I've seen this year, even if it was made in 2022. 

The End of the Grimm Line

What the fuck are we going to watch now? Where are we going to get our fix of crap police procedurals with added monsters? The final 13 episodes of Grimm were evenly split between 'plot' episodes and Wesen killing of the week; except, to focus on the latter first, we saw a different approach to the Wesen stories in this final season. For a start, the story lines were far more complicated, with the appearance that some real thought finally went into the world building aspect of having 'monsters' living among us. Take the standalone where Wesen have someone pay you a visit and quietly kill you if you start to get dementia and put yourself and other Wesen at risk. Or the one where a Wesen comes back every seven years to steal a really fat woman, who he then feeds on for the next seven years - that was weird and slightly gory enough without a giant hippo Wesen chomping his head off and then introducing herself to Nick. There was a massive element of dark comedy over the last couple of seasons, but none more so than this final series.

As for the series' Big Bad, well Zerstörer (basically the Devil) was something of a different foe for the Grimm and his 'Scooby Gang'. For starters it was all about prophecy and overthrowing the planet with evil, but also because unlike Wesen, this guy wasn't really phased by anything, to a point at least. Like its spiritual predecessor Buffy, and, successor, Lucifer, this ended on a final note, with an epilogue.

What I will say about Grimm is that it filled a gap; after 123 episodes, many of which were actually cringe-inducing, it leaves a hexenbiest sized hole. I'm amazed that I feel such affection for it. David Giuntoli was the closest thing to a real actor on show. Russell Hornsby - as Hank - has had a long a relatively successful career in television, but he wandered around this show like a slightly lost lamb at a barbecue; like he got the short straw and was the going-through-the-motions sidekick. Sasha Roiz, as Captain Sean Renard was never a convincing 'villain' nor was he a convincing 'hero', in fact apart from being a fine example of a polyglot, he was a pretty bad actor surrounded by many of his level of quality; no more so than Elizabeth 'Bitsie' Tulloch, who went onto have an even more successful career, this time as Lois Lane. She, like Claire Coffee (Adalind Schade) were afflicted by the ability to seem like they'd been hired from a bad amateur dramatics workshop. Even Reggie Lee - Drew Wu - who became a member of the team wasn't a good actor; he minced around a lot but had some of the best lines, which could easily have been directed at the fourth wall.

I did however have soft spots for Bree Turner - Rosalee - and the splendid Silas Weir Mitchell as Monroe - a man we saw in every single episode but never discovered what his surname was, even though he married Rosalee (but she kept her own surname). The two of them, despite being Wesen, often seemed like two characters from a rom-com who stumbled into the wrong show but hung around because they were having a good time. Like virtually all of the cast, they never really had major careers after Grimm, which seems a bit of a shame. I look forward to finding some other fun load of wank to dedicate over 100 hours of my life to in the future. It's been anything but grim...

Dune Poopacy

This is going to be a tough one because I kept falling asleep during it. The second episode of Dune: Prophecy essentially morphed into Game of Thrones in Space very quickly, lots of sex and boobs, some deaths, ghosts of the past and Travis Fimmel just stinking the set out with his lo rent acting and piss poor presence. I think there's a plot afoot to prevent the Benny Degenerates from becoming queens of the galaxy as Desmond Hart burns up the place in his quest to be enigmatic and help Mark Strong's emperor keep his shit together. Back on Degenerates home world, favourites are being poisoned for the benefit of history and there's some cod philosophy about sacrifices and learning the true nature of bollocks. Like I said, I fell asleep and when I wasn't falling asleep I was struggling to stay awake. I think I might not manage to make it all the way through this and I expect given we've got nearly 11,000 years to cover before the arrival of Paul Atreides then we might end up with hundreds of seasons and I don't have the will to watch one... 

A Man For Old Seasons

76 year old Ted Danson's latest TV show, A Man on the Inside is very nice, but coming from the team that brought us The Good Place that's not surprising. What I found about the first episode of this eight-part Netflix series is how the actual premise seemed so weak... Let me explain; Danson's Charles is a bored man who is over 75; his wife has recently died, his daughter wants him to get a hobby and Charles doesn't appear to be a man who runs away from challenges. So he applies for a job at a private investigators. They want a man on the inside at a care home for the elderly when the person hiring the PI firm goes to them about a very expensive necklace of his mother's that has gone missing. So Charles - over the next seven parts - will infiltrate, befriend and discover what has happened to the necklace. 

To get a bit 'in-depth': the average cost of a PI in the USA is about $800 per day; some are as low as $500 others in excess of $1000 - PER DAY! This guy whose mother's necklace is stolen looks like a rich guy - his mother is, after all in an exclusive care home - but is the necklace worth more than $30,000 plus expenses? The PI agency has hired Charles to inveigle his way into the staff and residents of the care home for at least 30 days; this includes state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, creating a new identity plus they're presumably going to be paying him? I expect the overall bill will be something like $50K - nice work if you can get it! 

I liked the first part; I laughed at a few things; it's poignant and believable even if the premise feels as contrived as a contrived thing (it is based on a novel/true story). It just makes me dislike the USA in a new and different way than the ways I usually dislike it. We're not going to watch any more, but you should if it's your kind of schmaltz...

Bore

The last time Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and director Robert Zemeckis got together it was to make Forest Gump and win lots of Oscars; so nearly 30 years later they got together again to make Here, a massively boring, static camera movie of the history of a house and its foundations. It was jam-packed with fucking atrocious special effects, making sections of the film look like the bits of back story you get on old video games, the kind that make it try to look like a film. The de-aging technique that helped with making Robert Downey Jr young again in Iron Man 3 has been redeployed and considering there is so much reference material for both Hanks and Wright they make them both look a bit plastic. In fact, Robin Wright simply looks fake and everyone is just too far away to put any detail on things. It needed a story but it doesn't really have one; there is a narrative but it isn't very good; there's a lack of interesting and the lives of most of the people who have lived in this 'Here' were... uninspiring, dull and really boring. It is an extraordinary film and I don't know if anything like this has ever been made, but that uniqueness doesn't save it from being about as interesting and tolerable as thrush. 

It's a FarGo

It's been four years since we watched the first Noah Hawley Fargo and it's been nine years since the second Noah Hawley Fargo was released. It is the longest staying item on the FDoD; it is something that we seem to have never got around to watching, but as we were still suffering from Cristin Milioti withdrawal it was the only place left to go... This story is set in 1979 and like the original Fargo it begins with a triple homicide, coming as a result of someone needing to find a lot of cash quickly to reimburse some dodgy men - this would be Keiron Culkin. He approaches a judge to get her to change her mind about something and it all goes horribly wrong with said judge, a waitress and short order cook all dying. It's from this point on that it gets very weird...

This second series is full of famous actors - Kirstin Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Ted Danson, Patrick Wilson, Jean Smart, Nick Offerman, the aforementioned Milioti, plus Bokeem Woodbine and characters from season one who are going to appear in this even though it's set about 15 years earlier. The opening episodes leave you wondering how these disparate sub plots are all going to segue together, but this being Fargo you know it will. We should really have watched this straight after season one.

Crystal Clear as Mud

We appear to be getting somewhere in Before. I was saying to the wife before we started watching the latest episode that something needed to happen; we've had six episodes of weirdness and no forward movement to speak of. So this week, in what was the shortest so far - 22 minutes including the opening sequence - was about Eli taking Noah to the home of Eli's wife's former lover Ben, who Eli failed to save after an OD. It does appear that we're entering into either a soul reborn territory or a form of possession, because Noah obviously is having some of Benjamin's memories, or at least is feeling the same anguish he felt before he died. With just three parts to go one would hope this gets a wiggle on. It's not that it hasn't been good, but you can only go so far on breadcrumbs alone...

Sweet as a Nut

A couple of months ago, I obtained Sweetpea, the SkyTV series starring Ella Purnell. It was very much a case of never judge a TV series by its initial IMDB rating. It looked good, sounded interesting and we were in the market for something different. Then I saw it had a 5.8 rating inside 24 hours of watching it. It disappeared off my watching schedule and I figured I'd dodged a bullet by not watching a couple of episodes first. Then the other day I was looking at some of the production details of The Resort when on the suggested section it had Sweetpea and it now had a 7.2 rating - the same show just a couple of months down the line, which had obviously been enjoyed by a greater number than those who hated it. So I added it to our list of 'to watch' and instead of continuing on with Fargo season two, as we should have, we watched the first three episodes of six of this instead... 

To say it's annoying would be accurate, but not in a bad way. it's annoying because Purnell's Rhiannon is a meek and mild wallflower, who lives for her dad and her dog and is suffering from the scars of adolescence when she was constantly bullied at school, especially by a certain girl and her entourage. I think we all know someone a little like Rhiannon or some of us have suffered what she did. The big difference is we didn't end up killing people as a result. The thing is Sweetpea - which is Rhiannon's nickname at the newspaper she works at - has horrible people in her sights; there's a unfettered vigilantism about her, even if she's just a little bit bonkers. It's like Dexter with a hormonally-challenged female lead! It's both entertaining and fascinating to watch Purnell's character slowly blossom into an attractive and assertive young woman, all through the medium of mass murder. The second three episodes will be reviewed next week!

Next Time...

Lots of stuff. It's piling up for the dark winter months ahead when all that's on TV is festive excrement, repeats and fuck all until some point in January when TV networks put us out of our misery and release some new stuff.

 

Pop Culture - Do You Ocelot

Again, spoilers will be kept to a minimum...

Prophets of Dune

HBO's latest big budget TV series has arrived and it was marginally better than I expected. The biggest problem I had with Dune (parts one and two) - as someone who has never read Frank Herbert's books - was trying to fill in the blanks and understand the politics behind what was going on. There was obviously much more in the Dune Universe than we were witnessing, but time constraints and the need to make a film that put over a story was more important than world building. So, I expected Dune: Prophecy to fill in the blanks and do the necessary world building while telling a story that, while a prequel, would still be interesting and worth my time. It doesn't - or didn't - do that in the opening episode, nor did it feel particularly interesting. The Bene Gesserit are very much the cornerstone of Herbert's books, therefore having their 'origin' story seems like the logical way forward; the problem I have is I don't find them very interesting. I want to know about other families other than Atreides and Harkonnen, but the impression I got was that this is such a muddled story that even if I did it would make it no more clearer than it is.  

This is a big budget series and while it has a strong [ahem] cast including Emily Watson, Olivia Williams and Mark Strong, it also has Travis Fimmel in it, who I find fancies himself as a poor man's Heath Ledger and is always so fucking annoying whatever he's in. It also has a young, energetic cast and is trying to be both a series laying foundations but also something contemporary to interest less old viewers. It's essentially about the Benny Degenerates (as I like to call them) and their quest to put a woman on the throne of emperor who is one of them, to give them the power they need to make a better universe. Everything else in this series, I suspect, will be window dressing and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. I didn't expect to enjoy the opener as much as I did, so I'll be tuning in again next week.

One Chance and You're Out - Twice

Here's a two-in-one review for you...

I'm a big fan of Mark Duplass - from Safety Not Guaranteed to The Morning Show, most things I've seen him in have been excellent and he's not only a great actor but his Duplass Brothers production company (with his brother... duh) has done some unusual stuff. The latest in that line of unusual stuff is The Creep Tapes, a comedy/horror series for Shudder consisting of six 25 minute tales of a serial killer (Duplass) who gets his victims to film their own deaths. In episode one, he offers a young film maker called Mike the chance to earn $1000 by helping him make a show reel to try and get into a renowned acting academy, but it eventually goes very wrong and ends up with Duplass killing Mike with an axe. We (because the wife watched with me) also had the second episode to watch, but given it is essentially the same idea every episode we didn't bother. It was just not that ... compelling and while Duplass is good, the 'found footage' aspect and the one note idea just didn't push any buttons for either of us.

Because we weren't going to watch any more of the above, I decided we should check out another recommendation from a friend, so we plunged straight into season one of The Afterparty, an Apple TV+ series about the death of a celebrity during a party celebrating the 15 year reunion of high school friends. Tiffany Haddish plays an LA detective who is clearly either incompetent or is a genius who just appears to be a sort of modern day Columbo/Clouseau. She's told by her superior that she is not going to be on this case and she just needs to go through the procedures until a better, more qualified detective comes in, but she ignores her boss and dives right in. The series looks at the death from the perspectives of different guests, some might have motives, some might be hiding motives, but someone (most probably) was responsible for the death of Xavier Duckworth, a singer and actor. It's unusual for us to give up on shows after just one episode... well, it always used to be but maybe not so much now. We just found it loud and very American; none of the characters were particularly interesting and it didn't grab either of us. I was slightly intrigued as to who was responsible for the death, but not anywhere near enough to wade through all the episodes and the knowledge there was a second season (albeit about a different death) didn't fill me with anything other than the feeling I could be spending my time watching something else... So that was Sunday night wasted.

Murder Holiday

After the two failures above, on Monday night we decided to try something else I'd downloaded on the hope it might fill a gap. This time the Cristin Milioti gap left by The Penguin having finished. What better way of doing that than with a Cristin Milioti series from 2022 called The Resort, a kind of existential mini-series about love mixed with a true crime scenario... Emma and Noah go to Mexico for their 10th wedding anniversary; their marriage seems to have fizzled out and there's definitely some tension there, especially with Emma who looks bored and like she doesn't really want to be on holiday. However, when a freak quad bike accident throws her down a hillside in the jungle, she happens across a very old mobile phone, rusty and very much out of place. This sets her interest off, so she buys an old phone, puts the sim card into it and uncovers a mystery that was never solved, when it happened in 2007 - 15 years earlier.

What happens is that while the two bored spouses begin to rekindle their love, you also get the story of the mobile phone and its owner - a boy who disappeared and died at a destroyed old resort, the girl he met on holiday, his actual girlfriend who was having an affair with her college professor, and a sort of Mexican Mafia family - who are also expert tailors - who might be involved. It's a punchy ride and Milioti again proves that she's a fantastic actor who is likely to be a big star for the next few years at least. We're only half way through this and I expect the 'reveal' during episode four is likely to not be the end of this story.

There have been a lot of series over the last few years that have either never turned out to be much or have passed us by, but from what we've seen of The Resort we might have stumbled on something that is worth putting the time and effort into.

The Bare Bones of It

[Did you see what I did there?] The film adaptation of any Stephen King novel is likely to be one of two things - exceptionally well made and excellent or leaving a lot to be desired (in other words, they're usually dire). However, Hearts in Atlantis is something of a strange exception. The novel, which was the longest of five novellas in a book of the same name spawned this movie, but it's actually based on Low Men in Yellow Coats, a story that ties directly into the Dark Tower novels as well as the book King wrote with Peter Straub, the sequel to The Talisman called Black House [which I think is one of the best books King has been involved with even if it reads in an altogether strange way].

Low Men in Yellow Coats - and therefore this film - is about Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins), a strange man who comes to live in the rooms above Elizabeth Garfield and her pre-teen son Robert or Bobby; he seems to have an ability to know things and quickly becomes friendly with the boy even though Bobby's mother is highly suspicious of him. The thing is Bobby needs a friend, his father died when he was five and his mother is a used play thing for a group of despicable estate agents. Among Bobby's friends are Sully and Carol and the three of them are inseparable when they're young. Ted is being hunted by people who want him for his abilities and enlists Bobby to keep an eye open for strange men and odd posters around town - specifically looking for an old dog or cat.

The film is told through flashbacks as Robert Garfield, now a famed photographer, returns to his old home for the funeral of Sully and remembers that summer in the early 1960s. Like some other King adaptations in the late 90s and early 00s much of the supernatural elements have been removed, but is still hinted at, especially Ted's telepathic and precognitive skills. It's a great period piece, as many US films are and playing opposite Hopkins is the sadly tragic figure of Anton Yelchin, who died in 2016, aged 27, after essentially running himself over in his own car. This was his first role and he was excellent in it. So much of the actual story - and other novellas in the book were ignored and the Hearts in Atlantis name was used and had a reason shoehorned into it, but as a standalone feature unrelated to the King story it's a good attempt at making a film such as this without having to reference The Dark Tower. I've always felt that my favourite King book, Insomnia, has never been adapted because it is very entwined with is dark fantasy epic, yet in many ways isn't at all. I realise that makes little sense, but a lot of King's best books had nods and winks in the direction of his dark fantasy epic, but that didn't detract from their power or impact; they acted like Easter Eggs. 

It's Game Over, Man!

It's been over 25 years years since we last watched James Cameron's Aliens and while we had seen it at least four times before we had never seen the Director's Cut. We made up for that for our Saturday Night Feature Film. I suppose the key takeaway from this quite awesome movie was that in the late 1980s it was absolute state of the art for a sci-fi action film and, of course, in many ways the antithesis of the original Ridley Scott sci-fi horror movie. Sigourney Weaver was back as Ellen Ripley and the xenomorphs were back in multiples, but other than this there was little that was similar, although Cameron made a point of paying homage to the original with little nods. However, while this is an amazingly paced and tight action film, it really stinks the place out at times because it didn't matter how much time and ideas went into making it look considerably more futuristic than the original, it's still a 1980s film and there's no escaping that.

Cameron does a good job of keeping computer and technical stuff to a minimum, but he couldn't do anything about hair styles nor the inordinate amount of smoking; but thankfully this was mainly crammed into the opening fifteen minutes, although you did get the idea that perhaps Marlboro was one of the major product placement sponsors given how almost everyone - apart from Newt and Bishop, the android, were seen with a fag dangling from their mouths at some point. What the film lacks in tension and jeopardy that the original had it more than makes up for it with the action and body count and the emphasis on just how adaptable and clever the aliens are. It is one of the classics of late 20th century film making and probably should have stopped there, especially given how poorly received the third in the franchise was (even with David Fincher at the helm). The Director's Cut added some background to Newt's story and made her eventual death - off camera - before the third film all the more puzzling and pointless.

Now Even Duller

This is what I think happened. The Discovery Channel approached James May and asked him if he had any ideas for a TV series. James suggested a series about inventing stuff that's useful and mentioned that there were loads of men all over the world that come up with innovative ideas but most of them were really dull so you wouldn't ordinarily want them on a TV show, Discovery thought they could do something with this, offered May a contract (after his one from Amazon expired) and they came up with James May and the Dull Men. Then they all sat down and came up with ideas of dull things they could make interesting. Unfortunately they only came up with four things and after the first episode was made they were stuck with what to do for the other three. Subsequently after a really dull second part, the barrel got properly scraped on episode three. 

How so? I hear you ask (possibly). Well, James, his rather weird and creepy mate Seb and a couple of other blokes came up with a plan to convert an old phone box into a compact and bijou two story house - possibly a very stupid idea that was obviously done purely as a silly stunt - May even suggested as much. It was really just a silly stunt, but his weird friend Seb probably would be better off in a phone box* because I wouldn't want him anywhere near any of my friends children. The other two ideas were how to devise something to tell you your houseplants need watering - which was quite useful - and the utterly pointless segment, which took up over a third of the programme, about how many baked beans there are in different brands' tins and what James May thinks is the perfect beans on toast combo. I expect next week's final part could well be the final final part; this has, my old man used to say, grown hairs on and gone bald very quickly...

* Oddly enough, while having a look around the Tube of You, I stumbled (not literally) across a 15 minute 'programme' produced by DriveTribe, which appears to have at least two of the former Top Gear presenters on their books. This was Richard Hammond visiting James May's pub - in Wiltshire - and it was clearly filmed at the arse end of September, maybe even early October. However, it wasn't this that I found quite interesting, it was the other video from DriveTribe where Richard Hammond's daughter - a presenter on DriveTribe and her friend go to the pub to review it for their Tube of You channel. Please notice the thing stuck in the corner of the car park - in the picture to your right. It's telephone box shaped and is draped in a blue tarpaulin. The reason I mention this is because I said it was a stunt, they said it was a stunt and a few months after it was filmed it's just taking up a small corner of May's pub car park hidden behind a tarp acting as an ex-stunt. I wouldn't mind if the 'stunt' had been a clever play or had some George Clarke genius attached, it was just a shit 15 minute part of what has really been a let down since the bright start. I will watch the final part though.

Fangs For the Mammary

The wife wanted to watch Bram Stoker's Dracula as we hadn't seen it in over 30 years. By the time it had ended I never wanted to see it again. It is a truly crap bit of film making and despite Francis Ford Coppola's name being attached outside of the Godfather movies he is a director who struggles to make really good stuff. This was full of bad special effects, pompous scripts, overwrought performances and any excuse for the female cast - Sadie Frost in particular - to get their tits out. It's an absolutely awful film that you seriously struggle to stay awake throughout. If you treat it like a comedy it's almost funny, but the best way to approach it is to not bother at all. It's one of those occasions when Gary Oldman is worth missing and Anthony Hopkins should be ignored. How Winona Ryder hams it up like crazy and Keanu Reeves proves that he can't act and he can't do a British accent. It is just a load of really boring old shite.

In the Past?

I'm still none the wiser about understanding Before but maybe we're getting closer in the series to working out something; at least that's what the closing scene suggests. This really has become the mystery of the week show as we try to work out what Noah's secret is and whether something supernatural is happening to Eli or is he perhaps showing signs of dementia that are manifesting in strange ways when it comes to the boy. There's a lot of obsessing in this show, that and reflecting on things that happened in the past. There is a definite indication that Noah's problems might be similar to ones experienced by Eli's ex-wife Lin's boyfriend before Eli came along. As for the 'shock' ending last week, that was dealt with in a way that you'd believe possible in the USA but highly unlikely if it happened in the UK. Oh and that strange birthmark you might have noticed also has something to do with whatever is going on.

Highly Recommended

Right, there's a programme on iPlayer at the moment (but possibly only for Scotland) called Roaming in the Wild. The first episode of the second series is now only available for a further 12 days and the most recent is there for another 26 days and then they will disappear again until they get another airing on BBC Scotland. It features Andrew O'Donnell and his pal Mark Taylor roaming around parts of Scotland using not always conventional methods of transport. But, it isn't only that; it's also a showcase for Andrew's excellent skills as a wildlife photographer and filmmaker as well as using music he supplies from his band Beluga Lagoon. The available episodes are about 27 minutes long, will make you chuckle at some of the observations and scrapes they get involved in. It will educate you about some things (like you need to take your jobbies home with you if you take a shit in the Cairngorms in the winter when it's snowed) and that Scotsmen are hardy men able to face all manner of problems and usually in shorts and short sleeves. I've watched all available episodes at least twice now; it's gentle, humorous and stunningly beautiful at times.

Next Time...

Apart from current ongoing stuff and a few things we have yet to start (such as Shrinking because we want to watch it as a 'box set'), the outlook for the next six or seven weeks is dreadful because the schedules are filling up - earlier than usual - with nothing but Christmas shite. It seems that Hallmark, who had the monopoly on Christmas and festive movies is now in competition with everyone else as they vie to see who can win the most viewers with vomit that a large percentage of people do not want to see until at least the shortest day of the year. It's why I've been [ahem] stocking up with films that I'd ordinarily probably not watch just in case we're stuck for something to watch while there's nothing but jingling balls and out of tune bells cluttering up the [digital] airwaves.

Other than that it's going to be a 'play it by ear' kind of week/month/rest of year, I have no doubt. 

Modern Culture - Monsters

The usual spoiler warnings apply... But in my defence I try to avoid them where possible.

Which Mobster?

The finale of The Penguin proved one irrefutable thing - this was an absolutely awesome television series that is a must see for anyone who hasn't come across it yet. It's like a grim and grimy version of The Sopranos with comicbook characters (except there's nothing at all comic book about these characters). The final part was everything you would hope for in a conclusion and just a little bit more. Colin Farrell has been a revelation in this series, as has Cristin Milioti - both as friends and sworn enemies they held this together and drove it forward. The conclusion gave us the politics of being a mobster as something Oz said in an earlier episode came true. Vic was the guy who really saved the day, while the closing ten minutes of this outrageous final part was some of the most heartbreaking and scary you could possibly imagine. It will surely go down as one of the best TV shows of 2024.

Witch Monster?

The last time we sat down to watch a Mel Gibson film it was Boneyard, which on the face of it looked like a good movie, but we turned it off after ten minutes because it was awful with appalling acting and we were left wondering what happened to this once mega-successful box office superstar. The answer to this is simple, his stock has fallen since some ill-advised drunken ranting about Jewish people and it might never return. That doesn't mean that his career is finished and he's the main man in a very enjoyable teen movie called Monster Summer, where he plays a solitary retired police detective who helps a wannabe journalist uncover strange goings on at Martha's Vineyard in the late 1990s. Gibson plays Carruthers, a man who probably shouldn't get involved in the fantasies of 14 year old boys, but can't help it when a number of kids in his neighbourhood start exhibiting catatonic behaviour. Mason Thames, as Noah - the main boy involved - thinks it's the work of a witch and subsequently any chance of a serious investigation disappears, leaving the boy labelled as a liar and fantasist. Carruthers takes on the case from a police forensics point of view and eventually manages to piece things together. It is a little disjointed in places, but is also quite creepy and probably doesn't know if it's a teen flick or a PG rated horror. It is quite a good film and is the kind of thing that families should watch at Halloween (so it hit streaming a week after...).

Dull Men in Lab Coats

I unashamedly admit to being a fan of James May; his Our Man In... travelogue series was fantastic, but Amazon cancelled it; while his Oh Cook was possibly one of the best cookery shows ever to grace our screens - but there's not going to be any more of these either because the idea was to turn a novice into a chef and it pretty much achieved what it set out to be. So, May's new series is called James May and the Dull Men and it's about coming up with novel ways of doing things and solving problems. It was one of the funniest 45 minutes I have spent in ages as we discovered that there are literally hundreds of social media groups for so-called Dull Men, who come up with ideas and solutions to all the most important and unimportant things that bother people. In the opening episode we discovered how to crack a walnut shell with a sledge hammer, how to scare away pesky animals from your Wiltshire garden, how to get the most out of your pencils and by far and away the craziest idea ever - how to cook a three course meal in your washing machine - which was also extremely hilarious and has to be seen to be believed.  

However, episode two, which featured how to make glue with toenail clippings, filling potholes with shredded tyres, how to keep park benches dry and a couple of other slightly crazy ideas really failed to match the opening episode in innovation and humour. In fact, where the first episode had us laughing a lot at the general craziness, the second barely raised a snigger. It felt like during the eight or so episodes in this series there might be a lot of actually quite dull things...

Funny History

Saturday Night is the biopic for the massively successful Saturday Night Live, which will celebrate 50 years as a staple Saturday night show next October. It tells the story - probably a little dramatised - of the birth of the comedy sketch show by focusing on the hour before it went live for the first time. There are some famous faces involved in this and quite a few that you haven't seen before, all doing really fine impersonations of the likes of Jim Henson, Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Chevy Chase and the show's creator Lorne Michaels. The weird thing about it is it's really a drama and the fact it's about a immensely popular bunch of iconic comedians doesn't really apply here. It's another excellent time capsule and you get the impression there's probably a lot of facts here, it just felt a little soulless and like it was more important to get the renditions of these famous people more accurate than telling a compelling story. It's a fun movie, but, you know, it doesn't rock.

Needless Shits

Despite having something like 80 films to watch, I decided to download an old Stephen King film adaptation that we haven't seen for 30 years. Needful Things is, arguably, one of the 'better' adaptations of King's works, based on his early 1990s novel of the same name, subtitled The Last Castle Rock Story. The original cut of this film was about ten minutes longer, but some of the unnecessary stuff was cut from it so that it would 'flow' better and that was the version we watched. The novel was King at his finest 'let's destroy a small town' while the movie failed to match the book or even feel creepy. In fact, in places it almost felt like a poor attempt at a black comedy about greed and being easily led. Max Von Sydow plays Leland Gaunt, essentially a devil or a demon as he was in the novel. His brief is to go to places and cause unrest, death and destruction; he may have been around for all manner of tragedies and wars and he does this by giving people their heart's desire in exchange for little acts of betrayal. 

Ed Harris plays Sheriff Alan Pangborn, a mainstay of King's earlier novels and Bonnie Bedelia plays his fiancée Polly Chalmers, there's also supporting gigs from Amanda Plummer, JT Walsh and Don S Davis. The thing is, this 1993 movie feels more like a TV movie with a cheap budget and not a huge amount of confidence it would be anything other than just an also ran feature; the kind that would do a few weeks in cinemas and then go to video. A lot of the novel has been changed - but that's to be expected, King literally destroys an entire town in the book - and the conclusion is similar yet completely different, in that Leland Gaunt gets away with it (although I seem to recall in the book he meets his end in a very unexpected way in the epilogue, but I might be misremembering). I'm sure we could have spent our Saturday night watching something more contemporary; sometimes I should just tuck my nostalgia away in a dark place and only let it out when there's nothing else to watch...

Trailer Trash

A big pair of MCU trailers fell at the weekend. The first was Captain America: Brave New World which does a good job of essentially telling you roughly what the plot is. To be honest, it does really look like a throwback to earlier Cap films which were as much espionage thrillers as superhero films. This looks like a plot to kill the new President - Thaddeus Ross - which dumps Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson in the middle of a conspiracy. In the trailer we see one of the 1950s Captain America copies, Thunderbolt Ross as Pres and turning into the Red Hulk and a lot of Cap flying around being the USA's #1 hero. It looks good, but arguably trailers make all films look good. I still have issues with this regarding the use of Sabra - the Israeli Mossad 'hero' - and none of the trailers have shown any of the alumni from the second Hulk film at all. I want this to be a good movie, if only because the previous three Cap films have all been excellent, but, you know, Marvel/Disney are not doing it at the moment.

The biggest reservation I have about Thunderbolts* is the fact Marvel has released a near three minute 30 second trailer for the July released movie. There's an extended scene at the start before a more conventional type of trailer. It doesn't really give much away apart from the fact the anti-heroes in question are all brought together and there's Bob - who, we know, is The Sentry, in one of the worst kept secrets in the MCU. The Sentry is a hero whose strength rivals, possibly is bigger, than the Hulk and his story is simple; he was a hero alongside all the other Marvel heroes but something happened that required him to be erased from the memories of all the people on Earth, possibly the galaxy. In the comics only the Hulk remembered him, but the MCU is now a different beast with characters and timelines completely different than the comics. Like the Cap trailer, this looks interesting and like it's going to be a good film, but if you haven't seen any of the TV shows, watched all the post credit scenes in most of the Phase Four films or even all of those films, you are going to be slightly confused by many of the characters, with Sebastian Stan's Winter Soldier probably being the most visible and well known. This is going to be a film about whether or not these disposable 'heroes' are any match for Bob. There is no hint as to whether there is a major villain in it, nor is there any suggestion that the Red Hulk will be in the movie like he was prominent in the comics, in fact you don't get much of an idea what it's going to be about. Again, I hope it's going to be good, but I suspect it will ultimately disappoint...

The End of Grimm is Nigh

I feel that I shouldn't spoil this for some people, but it's eight years old and if you haven't seen Grimm nothing I say is likely to make you want to rush out and find it (apparently it's available on Now TV). The thing is for all of the faults - and there are many - it's been an enjoyable ride for most of it. When it dispensed with the standalone episodes and went full scale ongoing stories it probably became the Buffy for a new generation, but now we only have one season and 13 episodes to go I kind of want everyone - or at least most of the characters - to die horrible deaths. In this fifth season we've seen Drew Wu turn into a werewolf; Diana - Adalind and Renard's daughter turn into the fastest growing psychotic child god ever; Hank essentially only having relationships with people who are either out to exploit his friendship with Nick or who want to kill him and weirdest of all Juliette's resurrection and transformation into the emotionless Eve - the good Hexenbiest who might still be harbouring a hidden love for her ex-beau. Hadrian's Wall - the secret organisation charged with ridding the world of bad wesen and the bad wesen known as the Black Claw are both about a believable as... well, nothing is believable really; the one clear thing about Grimm is how far fetched it is and how Portland really isn't a safe place to live because of all the monsters and the half a dozen police officers who work there. It's been a hoot, but it's also been an absolute load of shite and has this been released in 2024 we wouldn't have given it houseroom. Compare it to Evil and there's simply no comparison.

Preparatory

I have no real idea of what is going on in Before but as we reach the midway point of this intriguing series I have to wonder how they're going to continue forward after the shocking events of the final seconds. This is one very weird show so far and as I said last week I just hope there's some kind of resolution. This week the connection between Noah and Eli's dead wife Lin is becoming more apparent and there's a couple of very strange things happen on the ward. We learn that Eli's mother-in-law is still very much alive but suffers from dementia and is there some connection between Lin's former lover Benjamin and Noah? Billy Crystal remains a class act and the weird shit that's happening is beginning to be seen by some of the nursing staff, but is that enough to acquit Eli for what he does at the end? 

In Concert

In April 1982, I discovered Simple Minds. It was actually the B-side of their first hit record - I Promised You a Miracle - that hooked me. That instrumental was called Theme For Great Cities and I still believe it is one of, if not, the best instrumentals ever recorded. As a result, I became a huge fan of the band for the next five years, although, to be honest, I'd pretty much given up on the band by the time Once Upon a Time came out in 1985. However, I did get to see them live and for a couple of years albums like Sons and Fascinations, Sister Feelings Call and New Gold Dream 81, 82, 83, 84 made them one of my favourite bands of all time.

So when I saw there was a Radio 2 In Concert show on Friday night, I thought that maybe I should watch it, especially as there was a promise of songs from the earliest days and many of those songs during the period where I was a huge fan. The first thing I realised was it was a repeat from at least 2018 - mainly because Steve Harley appeared during the encore and he's been dead a couple of years, but also because Jim Kerr was talking about their 40th anniversary that was coming up - their first album was in 1979. So it wasn't anything new. The next thing I realised was that while I have a heap of respect for the very talented Charlie Burchill (lead guitarist and co-writer), I always thought Simple Minds were much better when Jim Kerr wasn't singing - I liked their instrumentals a lot more than songs with vocals; so much so I managed to find a version of New Gold Dream without Kerr singing. The final thing I realised was, these scaled back, acoustic driven songs were quite fucking awful. Kerr - pushing 60 when it was made doesn't have the power or range he used to have and Burchill is best with an electric guitar in his hands. They were also a band that needed Mick MacNeil - their original keyboardist - and Derek Forbes - the original bassist, maybe even Brian Magee, the original drummer, because the original line-up produced some fantastic songs with krautrock and European electronic influences and once this band started to get popular they ditched the rhythm section, the innovative keyboards and just wanted to be U2 from Scotland. The concert is on iPlayer, I'd give it a wide berth if I were you...

Next Time...

Whatever we watch in the coming week...

 

Pop Culture - Blood and Guts

This is full of spoilers for TV shows you SHOULD NOT WATCH! There are no spoilers for the things you should watch... Oh, hang on, there might be ickle spoilers but not enough to really ruin things!

Oh, For Fuck's Sake!

Don't fucking watch it. DO. NOT. BE. TEMPTED. Ignore everything I said about Grotesquerie. This was a heap of steaming shit and the second time in two days I have been left absolutely fucking fuming about a television series. I thought Teacup was an affront to my intelligence, this beats that into a hole.

The first five episodes - awesome TV, if completely bonkers. The second five episodes - fox shit of the stinkiest kind. Utter bollocks. Complete wank. I am so fucking annoyed that I fell for this. The people behind this are worse than cunts. It was like the worst kind of prick tease; you get set up with a heinous number of vicious crimes, albeit in a slightly surreal setting and then you get the rug pulled from under you and you get the next half that bears no resemblance to the first half apart from the actors. I remember people being baffled by David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, but that had two excuses: 1) David Lynch and 2) It still made some kind of bewildering sense. This was five nightmares followed by something you would imagine AI to write. I was angry about Teacup - I mean, really angry, but that was because I started to realise I was being conned from about the third episode on. I sensed that I was going to be tele-visually butt-fucked but I stuck with it and I shouldn't have. I should have cut my losses after three episodes and found something else to waste my time on. 

Grotesquerie was brilliant - those first five episodes had a dreamlike quality to them but they were absolutely like being punched in the face. Episode six was also quite good, but it arrived with four episodes to go, so something had to be wrong. I had this theory that Lois was dreaming it all; that it was her in a coma, but I didn't dare believe that this would probably be what was happening and I didn't need three episodes of re-world building, of trying to convince the viewer that everything you've seen is bollocks and we're actually in a drama about a woman whose life is fucked up beyond help. A TV series that was really all about everything that happened in the first five parts but without the murders and the nun, only to then have this reality to start bleeding into that reality. The thing is it was so badly done; so trying to be clever by half, that leaves you feeling like something nasty should happen to everyone involved... I had a warning though. After downloading the first nine episodes, I checked on IMDB and it had a rating of 7.0, by the time I'd downloaded episode 10 - which would have been about ten hours after it aired on US TV - it had dropped to 6.3; that's a huge drop in a short space of time. I thought maybe it was because the Americans who watched it weren't intellectual enough to understand something as cerebral as it appeared to be, but it was because these people who downgraded it saw what a heap of putrefying pig shit it really was. I'm fucking disgusted...

Psycho of the Hour

Arguably, the most confusing part of the new Anna Kendrick film is just who the woman is in the title Woman of the Hour? Was it Kendrick's Sheryl Bradshaw, who appeared on the Dating Game with serial killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) - of which most of this movie is centred around. Or was it Nicolette Robinson's Laura, who was in the audience of The Dating Game when Alcala appeared and it freaked her out so much she went to the police about it - and was completely ignored. Or was it - and I think this is the most likely - Autumn Best's Amy, who survived being beaten, raped and abused by Alcala and then managed to escape and finally get the police to arrest a man who killed at least half a dozen women, but might have killed as many as 130.

But was the film any good? It was Kendrick's directorial debut and it was a compact and tight 90 minute feature that really didn't dwell too much on anything. It opens with Alcala murdering one of his first victims in 1977 and when it isn't focused on the TV show it swaps back and forth between various girls who eventually are killed. It's in many ways a very PG rated serial killer film - not that this isn't a bad thing - but the lack of real jeopardy and the general feeling that this creep managed to kill so many people mainly because US police officers are utterly crap at their jobs, were the real overriding feelings you get. As with any period film set in the USA, we really could have been in the late 1970s and the leads are both good, but it felt slight and a little superficial for someone who might have been one of the USA's worst murderers.

The Big Blow Up

The penultimate episode of The Penguin opened with a flashback to when Oz was a kid and his two brothers were still alive. Doting on his mother, you could feel the animosity he had towards his siblings because his mother paid them as much attention as she did him and given the final scene in episode six, you get a clear idea of how much she means to him.

It's clear that Oz will do anything to protect his mother and that becomes clear as everything starts to fall apart. She's out of his reach and Vic has been badly beaten, so it really is crash or burn time in Gotham's criminal community as Sofia and Maroni play their last big gamble to win back what they feel Oz stole from them. Francis gets under Sofia's skin, but it's clear to the mobster's daughter that her captive is hovering between lucid and lost, but she's had all of her compassion beaten out of her in Arkham so Francis's fate is very much up in the air. The to-and-fro power struggle hits a crescendo as it becomes a personal vendetta and the drug business, in fact everything else becomes of no importance at all - this will be Oz versus Sofia in the end and I expect the finale will focus on these two grotesque but brilliant characters.

Family Ties

A film starring Peter Dinklage, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Brendan Fraser, M. Emmett Walsh (in his last film), with a cameo from Marisa Tomei and a blink and you'll miss it appearance by Aaron Taylor-Johnson sounds like a movie not to be missed...

However, I could have missed it and it wouldn't have changed anything. Brothers isn't a high point in the careers of the aforementioned, but it probably doesn't deserve the 5.4 rating, which I discovered it had half way through watching it. Dinklage and Brolin play twins - see not even that is original - and rubbish crooks. Actually Dinklage is the rubbish one, Brolin is just a kind of guy who would vote for Donald Trump; he's not the cleverest of people. One is a perennial convict, while the other is trying desperately to settle down with his wife and the baby they are expecting. The thing is 30 years ago, their mother stole a load of emeralds, which just happened to find their way into the stomach of her dying boyfriend. Instead of reconnecting with her sons, she spends 30 years on the run and avoiding them, until she decides that they are the two people to help her find the body of her ex and rummage around in his stomach for the missing emeralds and that is essentially the entire film. 

There are some additional bits, such as the prison guard who is blackmailing Dinklage for a cut of the emeralds; the new age hippy he met on-line (Tomei) who just happens to have a 400lb orangutan living with her and a private golf course that leads to possibly the reason why this film has such a poor rating on IMDB. The thing is, I've seen much worse (this week) and despite it being about a bunch of stupid people, there is something honest about it and while it will probably never be regarded as even a middling point in Dinklage, Brolin or Close's career, we watched it, laughed at a couple of scenes and agreed that it wasn't a bad way to spend 85 minutes. Don't go out of your way to see it, but if it's ever on a streaming platform or TV and you have fuck all else to do, it's probably worth a watch, if only to see Josh Brolin playing an imbecile with a knack for safe cracking.

Grimm-ly Fiendish

After ten days off, we returned to Portland for season five of Grimm, the monster show that's written by people who don't understand monsters, the police or German, which would be okay if it wasn't largely about monsters, police and badly translated German. That said, it's great fun even if it's also a load of crap. It reminds me more and more of a hybrid of the worst episodes of Buffy and that other brilliant crap police procedural supernatural series, Lucifer. This time around things couldn't be more different (well they could but I'm speaking figuratively); Nick and Adelind's baby boy has a girl's name and they've shacked up together in an impenetrable warehouse that can't be found by anyone, so it's no surprise that Truble finds them inside five episodes. Hank, Drew Wu and Sean Renard are now the Wesen Police, as more and more of Portland's finest (who all work out of one police station) are recruited into the ways of the weird and you spend much of the opening six episodes thinking that Juliette is still dead until things happen that contradict that assumption. My favourite part of this series so far is Nick wandering around complaining that some mystery group have kidnapped Truble, stolen Juliette's body and his mother's head from his old house and managed to clean it up as well - I added the last bit. Now the royal family subplot has died, we're focusing on a Wesen Supremacist story interspersed with the usual Wesen murder of the week, with the best one so far being the rat creatures who meld together to create a giant rat creature. The stories are getting freakier and funkier and only Drew Wu seems to get the joke...

That's a NO From Me

I was looking back at reviews from the last couple of years and saw that I swore I would not watch another episode of Jeff Bridges' The Old Man after watching all of season one and just as it was about to conclude they dropped a 'we're doing a second season' cliffhanger. This was a show that literally tied all the subplots up and quite neatly and then went, "Ah fuck it, let's do another one with the floor sweepings we have left..." I had downloaded the second series, but there was this nagging feeling, which is why I went in search of it in old blogs. To make matters worse, I've read a few reviews of season two, one or two with spoilers, and there's going to be a season three. Not for me there isn't.

The Time Killer

We've seen Kiernan Shipka in a couple of things this year and she's an actor with bags of potential both for comedy and drama work. I wasn't aware she was in Totally Killer when we decided to watch it. She was in the woeful Twisters and the above excellent Longlegs this year, as well as a bunch of TV shows; it would be fairly safe to say she's fast becoming one of the business's go to stars. Totally Killer is a time travel serial killer film; a kind of Back to the Future meets Michael Myers and while there's not a huge amount of originality in this movie, it is full of moments that make you want to hide behind the sofa - not because it's scary because it'll make you cringe with embarrassment. Let me clarify this, it's a reasonably good film - a lot of fun and a clever whodunnit (even if the murderer's raison d'être is a bit of a stretch); what makes it cringingly embarrassing are the obvious mistakes Shipka's Jamie makes because of her lack of knowledge about the USA in 1987 and just how cringeworthy the late 1908s actually were, which this film does a good job of highlighting. As I say almost twice a month, the yanks do a good job with US period stuff. This is violent and at times extremely bitchy, but the time travel stuff kind of works and the subsequent Butterfly Effect adds to the fun as Jamie alters things in the past and in the 'present' stuff changes subtly but not enough to change the entire idea. I could, if I so pleased, rip elements of it apart, but I think it was never meant to be treated that seriously - think Hot Tub Time Machine without the boobies. There's some funny references and an interesting supporting cast.

Don't Be Fooled (Again)

I discovered something interesting the other week about Facebook's memories section. I have been regularly checking my FB memories now for well over 18 months; it's just something new I added to my daily incursions into Zuckerberg's Platform of Hell. I also took the opportunity to delete certain things from it; nothing 'important' just stuff that is irrelevant now - such as posts about games I played when the thing started; stuff like Farkle or Texas Hold'em, links that I don't remember ever posting but are there anyhow. I also delete Network Blogs posts, mainly because like the aforementioned games these no longer exist on Facebook and invariably I also posted links to my actual blog, so the repetition isn't needed. Then, one day, Facebook kind of fucked up and wouldn't load back in, so I did the old Ctrl F5 trick to see if it worked and it did. I couldn't remember if I'd finished looking through my memories, so I scrolled back down through them again.

Now, I should point out that I began to suspect something a few months earlier when it appeared that things I'd painstakingly deleted appeared in the memories feed again. I thought, 'Why am I getting links to games that I'm sure I'd already deleted?' Well, through this Ctrl F5 moment I didn't so much discover why, just that your memories are as selective as what you see in your news feed. Scrolling down the page I noticed not only more links to things such as Farkle and Texas Hold'em but also posts I didn't see first time round. Not that many, but all of them older than 13 years ago. So almost every day since that happened I have been Ctrl F5ing it at the end of my nostalgia trip and 75% of the time 'new' old posts are appearing, leading me to pretty much confirm that your memories section shows you a selection rather than all of them or... maybe you think you're deleting them but all you're doing is hiding them until next year, when they will reappear leaving you confused and perplexed...

Crystal Clear As Mud

My biggest fear is that after a couple of massive let downs in the last two weeks, Before will end up finishing on a cliffhanger or will turn out to be a load of old shit. The reason for these fears is because so far this really is a quality TV show and who would have thought Billy Crystal was 76. This exceptional TV series about an aged child psychologist whose wife has committed suicide and finds himself working one last extremely difficult case is mind-bending and boggling at the same time. There are no clues so far, although I'm sure there are we just don't see them. This week's fourth instalment finds Eli losing Noah (Jacobi Jupe) in the children's section of the hospital and then later discovering his wife was corresponding with his best friend Jackson before she died. In between these things, Eli visits the Catholic church where Noah was abandoned and gets into an argument with the local priest about the existence of God. Noah seems to be regressing, even if he is talking now, while Eli's fragile state of mind seems to be deteriorating as he's now seeing things and all of this isn't helped by the discovery of his wife's hair blocking the bath tub - the one she committed suicide in. In many ways it's a good thing the episodes are only about 30 minutes long, because it can be harrowing. It's still very intriguing stuff, I just hope it either remains very supernatural or has a feasible conclusion. 

The Quest Continues

First off - here's why I can't see me watching too many more of Mythic Quest. It's not because it's no good; it is, in fact, really excellent. However, it has some flaws and those flaws are what spoils it for me. Episode four of season one actually does a good job of explaining this; it shines a light on a number of things - the lack of emancipated women working on the Mythic Quest game. Yes, the lead programmer is a girl/woman and the testers are both women and there's the psychopathic woman who is the CEO's PA and there's the woman in the basement. Yet, Poppy - the head programmer - is essentially like all the lead males in this show, not particularly likeable. The biggest problem I have with Mythic Quest is all of the main [ahem] players are stupid and while I don't think it would work as a comedy about gaming if all the characters were 'normal', after a while (quite quickly in all fairness), the characters become tedious and you know that each episode is going to be about Ian's (pronounced Iron, which is really annoying) megalomania; Poppy's insecurities; Jo's psychopathic personality; David's being a bit of a wanker; Brad's deviousness; Rachel's infatuation with Dana, Carl's aged perversions - it's essentially the same every episode and while the stories are inventive, it all boils down to the same thing all the time; it's like the Fast Show sketch where Arabella Weir comes up with great ideas and the men ignore her and think they've come up with the great idea. However good this show is, I can't escape the feeling that every episode (bar one) I've seen has been the same meat with different gravy.

That said, I would 100% recommend people to watch season one episode five, because it is a standalone and leaves you wondering why it was even made apart from to suggest the people who bankrolled Mythic Quest the game were no strangers to taking risks with new ideas. The episode is called Dark Quiet Death and features Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti as visionary computer game creators who create a revolutionary game in the 1990s but gradually sell out as the game becomes more and more popular. It's an outstanding solo part to the series and really shows the birth of the computer game industry from its shaky start and it was one of the best 33 minutes I've spent in a while. That might be because I really like Milioti and Johnson has been in some excellent films.

Next Time...

See what happens when I confidently predict new television? There is no new television. I am slightly intrigued by The Day of the Jackal adaptation, but I'll wait and see what reviews are like and whether I can download it in a format that I can watch. Other than that, I am wondering whether or not we will see any actual new TV with us only seven weeks before that winter holiday at the back end of December. 

Next week it's the finale of The Penguin, another episode of Before and you never know something might turn up that I wasn't expecting. We have some other TV series we can start, but we've been ploughing through the fifth season of Grimm and we've now watched 99 episodes (it really doesn't feel like it) and I expect we'll finish this season next week. 

I also think we have so many films to choose from now - the FDoD has nearly 30 films on it and the set top box hard drive has another 40 films we've 'taped' off the TV - the expression 'spoilt for choice' really applies here, but also the fact that some of the movies we have are maybe just taking up space rather than waiting in a queue to be watched...