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...