My Cultural Life - Monster Mash

What's Up?

In the short life of this new look blog, "What's Up?" has pretty much written itself; there has always been some fuckwittery going on that warranted commentary from me. I've pointed out many things and I don't want to repeat myself. The problem is it's difficult not to. I mean, I review things I've seen and reviewed before - the first entry this week is something I watched about two years ago...

I can't keep banging on about things that annoy me because there's nothing I can do about these things and the same applies to anything any of you have problems with. It's why I have a mixture of respect and ridicule for climate change campaigners. People don't want to be the first to go without or be forced to have to convert to technology that might make life more difficult - for a while. Climate change deniers and the anti-green revolution simply don't want to go without what they already have. They like the world the way they've grown accustomed to it and if they have to change it's going to cost them time, money, health, wealth and their general happiness, because most people really don't give a flying fuck what is happening to people down their street, let alone people in another country where the inhabitants have a different coloured skin, worship a different deity or have customs or a culture we can't (and don't want to) understand.

We're not going to save the planet. The future of Earth is dependent on young people coming up with science to solve the problem, or there's the unthinkable, where the countries of the world become so isolationist and uncaring that entire countries of humans will die because no one wants to help them. Obviously, there will be countries who will help save the day, but all that will happen there will be xenophobia and something I call 'immigrant envy' will set in. 'Immigrant envy' is where a person who is struggling to make ends meet will view an immigrant and believe that this person who has lost everything is going to be given much more than the person struggling and won't have to pay anything for it. It's really quite prevalent at the moment; those riots (orchestrated by far right groups and the Reform Party) back in the late summer of 2024 were essentially telling struggling people that the asylum seekers living in hotels and hostels were being given more than them; that these foreigners were entitled to more free stuff than the indigenous and the Dunning-Krueger effect comes into play because while there might never been evidence to back up this allegation, it fits perfectly into the mindset of people who aren't intelligent enough to point the finger of blame at the true problem.

What I find more depressing is that humanity seems to almost enjoy flirting with and then becoming cruel fascists; dog whistling hatemongers and intolerant arseholes; in fact many wear it like a badge. You simply have to look at social media and see how people (are now allowed to) talk to each other without fear of sanction. Don't, whatever you do, think this is isolated, because it's everywhere now and it's only going to get worse.

Little Things

Do you know what's really wrong with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania? Not that much when compared to other MCU films of recent years. Yes, it has an unbelievably contrived and bollocks heavy story; yes, it is literally an eye-bleedingly effects heavy movie. Yes, it felt like a bad Star Wars film and yes, Ant-Man, with a little help, should not have beaten the guy who was being lined up as the next MCU Big Bad, because, let's be honest, if Ant-Man can beat Kang the Conqueror then no one was going to lose to him... Then there's the not so subtle, "Oh Cassie's a scientist now, Scott, but you never knew," moments, followed by the "How come you're only telling us now, Janet" scenes, which, given how long she'd been back from the Quantum Realm would, maybe, have been a good idea. Couple all of this with the freedom fighters with almost zero character development; the token Bill Murray appearance, the laughable Modok character, with his strangely pointless redemption arc, the existence of water at a subatomic level and the weedy comical bookends and you can pretty much understand why it only sits with a 6 on the IMDB scale (which still means there's three other MCU films that are rated worse). The thing is, on second watch it felt a little better than the first time around. Only a little, mind.

This is a movie that feels as though there should be a Director's Cut, because perhaps some of the bare bones subplots would make more sense. This is essentially a movie made by committee; it was one of the symptoms of the MCU losing its way, but most of the damage had been done in 2021 and 2022 with a string of largely shite films. At a time when Marvel/Disney needed a hit, they came up with the third Ant-Man film; one which sort of jumped the shark. I just didn't hate it as much as I did first time around. There were lots of bits that made zero or little sense; stuff seemed to be crowbarred into the story that seemed less than superfluous and it needed more cohesive bang for its buck. The upshot is it's better than Thor: Love & Thunder, The Marvels, and a couple of other MCU films that have taken much more money - I'm looking at Deadwolve and Pooverine, or whatever it was called. I'm going to stick my neck out and give this a 5/10.

Love and Monsters

This isn't the first film I've seen in recent weeks that felt like two movies stitched together. The Gorge is something of a Curate's Egg in that the good bits are good but the bad bits are woeful. When Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy are blowing monsters to pieces it rattles along at an impressive pace, but when acting is required or more than two people are on screen at any one time it kind of falls to pieces. The script felt like it was written by a 13 year-old, possibly Japanese or South Korean given how twee some of it was and how half-arsed other bits were. Sigourney Weaver actually looks and sounds like she's phoned in her role as the bad ass CEO of a private company charged with guarding what appears to be the entrance to hell. There are two guardians of the gorge - one on the eastern side and one on the west. They mustn't communicate with each other; they aren't allowed into the gorge and apart from an emergency button they have no real way of contacting the outside world. Trust me when I say that the set up will fall to pieces if you start to think about it from a logistics POV. It's on for about two hours and frankly it isn't as bad as one would expect from a film that sets itself up as two people falling in love over a gorge filled with monsters. That said, I can only really bring myself to award it a 5/10.

Death Race

I've never seen Smokin' Aces, a 2006 movie about a man with a price on his head. Jeremy Piven plays a guy who it seems is wanted dead by 50% of the people and alive by the other 50%. The FBI, various undercover policemen and a number of interested parties want Buddy 'Aces' Israel alive, but the mob wants him dead and they've set a number of hired killers to do the job. Some of the best contract killers in the business have been employed to make Israel dead. The thing is he has a protection order on him; but that is about to expire and when it does all hell breaks loose. Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta are the two good guys trying to beat the bad guys to Buddy's door; other good guys include Ben Affleck and Martin Henderson. The bad guys include Kevin Durand, Nestor Carbonell, Joel Edgerton and Alicia Keys. It's frenetic and at times a little difficult to follow, but it does get very twisty and unexpected as it approaches the conclusion - a simple little tale gets very WTF towards the end. It was entertaining and probably deserves a 6/10.

The Die Hard Strategy

Hans Gruber is the underlying subplot in the latest episode of Paradise, which did exactly what I forecast last week, but we'll get to that. In a flashback scene, the now dead President is bewildered that Xavier Collins, his #1 bodyguard, has never seen Die Hard and gives him a Presidential order to watch the film. In the 'present', Xavier uses a Gruber play to achieve what he wants to, which is to give the impression that something is happening when it isn't at all. He traps Sinatra into a situation where she and all her rich and privileged billionaire friends are seen to be 'better' than all the other people remaining inside the mountain, pretending the world hasn't ended. Fortunately for Julianne Nicholson, she has a therapist who also has an idea what Xavier was playing and there is the first signs that this might be a finite series (which is really just wishful thinking by me). In the end Sinatra admits to killing Billy, but has no idea who killed Cal Bradford (I'm thinking more and more that it's going to be his senile father over something unrelated but causes this schism in the fabric of those that remain). The cliffhanger is one of those that is going to work in the now but once it is scrutinised it all starts to fall apart a little, so it will be interesting to see how they get around it.

The Mystery

I am, of course, talking about the great mystery that is - why does The Guardian love The White Lotus so much? In reality, I could write a book on why the Guardian likes anything it raves about. It had the same thing with Mad Men over a decade ago; it raved about the advertising show but it seems that no one else really got it the same way the G did. The paper's latest TV orgasm is the show about a hotel chain - the eponymous White Lotus - and snap shots of a week in Hawaii and Italy (first two series) and now Thailand. Each series tells the stories of various guests and staff, there's usually an unexplained death, lots of red herrings and a bunch of really privileged wankers having a bad week rather than the week in paradise they booked for. I suppose if the Guardian loved Succession and revelled in the way it made very rich people desperately sad and missing things in life, this is the logical successor (if you'll excuse the almost pun). The thing is rich wankers having bad days happens and is it really exciting watching someone with more than you also having a bad day?

Season three episode one focuses in on the Ratliff family - an extremely wealthy family from North Carolina - who it appears have come to Thailand so the daughter can interview a Buddhist holy man (who she hasn't arranged to see). The Ratliffs are horrendous people, apart from the daughter, who seems to want to have a family holiday and the youngest son who has a bewildered look about him. Also here are three life long friends, one of which is a famous actor, another is a business woman of some esteem and their friend who we know little about (Carrie Coon) who actually looks like she doesn't want to be there. Meanwhile miserable Walton Goggins is there with his Mancunian girlfriend Aimee Lou Wood and wanted to meet one of the owners of the hotel - my guess is the guy is his father, but doesn't know this.

There is also the return of Natasha Rothwell from the first season - she was the spa manager who got conned by Jennifer Coolidge's Tanya McQuoid and just to add to the strange synchronicity writer, director Mike White likes to introduce, a local resident who uses the hotel for drinks and food is John Gries, who played Greg in the first two seasons, who was married to Tanya - I expect he will have some prominence, especially when he bumps into Rothwell's Belinda. Now, here's the thing - the wife groaned, audibly, when she saw The White Lotus was back. I think we have enjoyed the series but not raved about it. There's stuff about it that doesn't float our boats, but might float someone else's. It's good to have it back as something else to watch, but this will be the first time we haven't had the entire series to sit down and watch over a week or so; a weekly story might prove to be a struggle.

Mid-February Festivities

On the 18th February, we watched a Christmas Special. There are reasons for this; mainly because our second viewing of Guardians of the Galaxy; Volume 3 is going to happen in the next month and there might be something worth watching in the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. However, there wasn't really anything we needed to watch (apart from Mantis being Peter's half sister), but it was a relatively fun-packed 40 minutes with Kevin Bacon coming out of it with huge kudos for playing himself in what was essentially a kidnapping with blow up elves. There is nothing special about this except it's fun, cheap, throwaway and manages to shoehorn all the Guardians (apart from Gamorra) into a nice little story about restoring the joy of Christmas for Peter Quill. We should have watched it two months ago.

Orange Rapist - The Early Years

Possibly one of the scariest movies you will ever watch is the 2024 'biopic' of a young Donald Trump called, unironically, The Apprentice, which looked at the current President's early life from around 1972 to the mid 1980s. Sebastian Stan (he of Winter Soldier fame) is absolutely fucking knocking it out of the park as the USA's proto wanker in chief, as he portrays Trump as a narcissistic waste of time who without the help of a lecherous lawyer would never have amounted to very much at all; so we very much have New York lawyer and predatory homosexual Roy Cohn to blame for most of our current predicaments. This tells the story of Donald's dysfunctional upbringing - his monstrous father (and his mother who was Scottish but sounded very German in this film); his alcoholic airplane pilot brother and his propensity for Eastern European glamour models. The question you need to ask is whether this is an accurate historical depiction or has it been heavily influenced by what this horrible human being became. One thing is sure, The Don goes from being a naïve young kid, frightened of even drinking, to the monster he became, before he went into politics. The debris he left in his wake, especially when he pulled away from his relationship with Cohn and started being a cunt on his own. It's a really entertaining film, that pulls no punches, but because of the subject matter I can only bring myself to give it a 7/10 (and even that feels grubby).

Spoilers

Don't be fooled by the title; there are no real spoilers here... If you spend any time on the Tube of You you will have noticed that people are getting AI to change classic films, or 'ruin them' as they like to claim. I got sucker punched the other day when I saw 'Harry Potter but ruined by AI' and watched about 45 seconds of it. If this is what AI can do then we have no reason to be afraid, at all. I don't know how they do it but all I can presume is the person feeding the AI with information is either a puerile child or a complete wanker, because the one I saw a bit of had vomit 'jokes', Hagrid beating people up, a bizarre King's Cross Station scene that literally had nothing in it apart from Potter running around and then Hermione transforms Harry's face - as you can see from the attached photo. Avoid these things like the plague, they're just woeful attempts at video clickbait. You have been warned. 

The Spirit of Buffy

About ten years ago, my niece recommended a film, we watched it and ten years later we found ourselves watching it again. Odd Thomas, based on the books by Dean Koontz, starred the late Anton Yelchin as the eponymous hero - a man who can see dead people and has supernatural powers that allow him to be a cross between Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and Buffy Summers (but with a penis). He lives in a Southern Californian town, has the police chief eating out of his hand and has a gorgeous girlfriend and a lot of admirers. This is a film that while supernatural in nature also has dollops of black comedy mixed with twee hometown goodness. The thing is Odd (because that is his name) senses something terrible is about to happen in his hometown, mainly because of the number of 'Bodachs' he sees - creatures that only people like Odd can see, which feed on death, especially nasty deaths.

It's a really entertaining film with the likes of Willem Dafoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw in support, but equally there's elements of bad acting, plot fuck-ups and cheese here as well. Odd's girlfriend Stormy - Addison Timlin - can't act her way out of a wet paper bag (but she looked hot) and Nico Tortorella as the main villain could easily have been trapped in the same wet paper bag. I expect it didn't do that well at the box office because it doesn't have a particularly happy ending, but it was set up nicely to continue to adapt the books, but Yelchin died a couple of years later, so that put the kibosh on that. It reminded me of RIPD and other 'comedy' horror films, but this specific movie wasn't so much comedy as just tonally weird. It was enjoyable and unlike Americans unhappy endings don't ruin things for me. It's the kind of thing that could end up as a TV series with so much novel material available. It's worth a 6.5/10.

The After (Wild) Life

As life in the present day seems to be normalising (and all the shit that was following the woman in the first two seasons has been conveniently forgotten about), life in the past for the survivors in the Canadian outback is getting more like Twin Peaks every week. Yellowjackets has upped the weirdness ante and while I've spent a long time trying to suggest it's some kind of 2020s Lost, the Twin Peaks analogy works far better, because, frankly, it just gets really bat shit for the football team, with strange happenings in a cave, more focus on 'new' cast members who you wouldn't have thought existed in the first two series (because, if you looked for them you wouldn't find them). Back in the present, Shauna has the balls to tell Misty what everyone thinks about her; while her daughter becomes more and more infatuated with Lottie. There's a welcome cameo from Ella Purnell as Jacky in one of the strange dream sequences and maybe, just maybe, the creators and writers are realising that modern day characters don't have that much mileage in them so maybe more focus has to be on the past. this of course creates a conundrum because while the past has the most interesting characters, whatever is happening in the wilderness is bullshit.

Heroes for Zero

We're two parts into the six of the new Netflix conspiracy thriller Zero Day and I don't think we really know what's going on and whether this is even happening the way it seems to be. Robert De Niro plays George Mullen, a former US President, who comes out of retirement to head a task force to find the truth about a Zero Day event that paralysed the USA, killing thousands and taking over all essential computer systems. Fingers are pointed at the Russians, but that's a red herring (I reckon), but also there are other groups who could be responsible for this which also seem like a garden path meander. It's just difficult to get a handle on it - is De Niro's character suffering from dementia; what is the weird relationship with his wife and just what does she do? What is a rather gaunt Jesse Plemens doing when he's not shagging De Niro's on screen daughter - Lizzy Caplan. What did the dog see in the garden and why is some of the acting phoned in? it's gripping stuff, but needs to shift a gear a little or its grip is going to loosen and other things will be watched instead...

Roll With It

My mate Phil (the short one who lives in Kent) and I love to have sparring sessions on Facebook. When I say 'sparring' we simply try to outdo each other with silliness, sometimes surreal and other times really weird. I was looking on the Tube of You for something wet T-shirt related (don't ask) and somehow found a series of skits called Rollin' in the Wild, which made me laugh harder than many of the erections I get in my 60s. It's a little like Creature Comforts but with no words, just an imagining of a world where all animals are round and how they cope with it (or not). You can find a compilation of them here: https://youtu.be/lhM9cft4tmQ?si=4xDdBL-TA68TjRgV and trust me if you need cheering up this is the thing you need to look at!

Sever Tomorrow

This might contain spoilers...

There were two key moments in the sixth episode of Severance; the first was Helly R wanting Mark S to do what he did on the Outside Orientation Program, so they did, in an empty office. While the second was Helena Eagan seemingly going out of her way to meet Mark Scout in a Chinese restaurant and then introducing herself to him - like she wanted to see what his reaction would be and whether he would know who she was. The other takeaway from this is it feels like the centre is no longer holding and therefore it's all starting to fall apart. Irving goes to dinner with Burt and (his real life partner) Fields at their house and we're left wondering if Burt is all he seems. Dylan's Innie has another meeting with his Outie wife and she seems far more attracted to the severed Dylan than the one she leaves at home every evening and Seth Milchick really looks like he's beginning to have some kind of breakdown.

Meanwhile, the mystery ex-Lumon employee Mark Scout is hiding in his basement has just about merged his two consciences, but with potentially catastrophic results and there's something else going on as Mr Drummond - the liaison between the management and the board - breaks into Irving's apartment and discovers he has lists of Lumon employees. If I had to stick my neck out, I reckon what is going to happen is we get to a point where almost everything is revealed but important information isn't and a third season is going to focus on Lumon, the start of the severed programme, how various different people fit into the picture - including Burt, Irving and maybe even Dylan. I think this because while we might be heading towards some kind of conclusion, there's this underlying feeling that we're only scratching the surface and the bigger picture has yet to be exposed. I'm probably over thinking this. 

What's Up Next?

The ongoing TV shows will be revisited and there's not likely to be anything new until March, when we know for sure that Marvel's Daredevil returns and first impressions seen favourable. 

On the film front... you see that tumbleweed? The stuff rolling down the street? Well, while nothing new is appearing (I firmly believe), I'm constantly finding old stuff to entertain us both. As always, you will get whatever I watch. 

 

My Cultural Life - Re-Animated

What's Up?

So, a few months ago, I deleted my Xitter (X formerly known as Twitter) account. I hardly used it and I didn't want to be seen supporting that miniscule cock Elon Musk in any way. The problem was, I run a Facebook page dedicated to the shit football team Tottenham Hotspur and I needed access to their Xitter page for boring stuff like team news, signings etc. It especially is important on match days and as the people behind @SpursOfficial always post on Xitter at least 45 minutes before anywhere else, I figured I needed to have access.

So, instead of creating a new one, I remembered that I created a second account a number of years ago, which had sat dormant for ages. A quick check of my password manager and I found my way back into this 'shell' account and have been using it, exactly for the reasons explained in the opening paragraph. However, midweek in Wigtown has been cold and dull and after getting home after dog walking I thought I'd open Xitter up and see if the rumour a Spurs player I'd heard about had anything on that platform. It was always the place to go for breaking news before the retarded South African narcissist got hold of it.

What I was greeted with was unfiltered Xitter. This 'shell' account has no followers and it follows no one either; it's just there for access, so therefore because I have declared no preferences, don't interact with anything (apart from a football page) and its almost incognito, I got so much unmitigated crap it was almost eyewatering. Video clips of fights, video clips of racism, video clips of borderline pornography. Tweets from the likes of Laurence Fox, being openly racist; not even a hint of subtlety, just being vile and hideous about people who aren't white. Trump supporters; people who hate 'woke' - or in other words dislike anyone who has any compassion for anyone else. It is an absolute cesspit of hatred, sexism and violence. This is where people get the idea they can just be hateful, misogynistic wankers and it's all allowed because of this, frankly laughable, thing called 'freedom of speech'. I can be a complete and utter cunt and I'm allowed to because... free speech.

I know this blog (or at least this opening section) has become a bit 'right on' but if you want to see what hatred, racism, sexism and people just being cunts looks like, get access to a neutral Xitter account for just an hour; by the end of it you will have given up on humanity and be praying for that 6th extinction event to happen right now...

Oh and there's one other thing. Trump and his opening weeks as Prez. You know that old internet saying, 'Don't Feed the Troll'? Well, because the orange Shitler is an attention seeking narcissist, what he wants more than anything over the next - guaranteed - four years is the focus to be on him. Just look at any newspaper or related website and you will see him everywhere and this is exactly what he wants. He's an old man who craves power, influence and to be the centre of attention; therefore he's making sure that everyone and everywhere is talking about him and the media is acquiescing to him. The dichotomy here is, like Nige Farridge, you want to ignore him, but like anyone with a smackable face you just can't resist it...

Son of a Gunn

There is so much wrong with this film/review... I'd never heard of Super before I saw an article about it in that newspaper I don't like. I wasn't particularly bothered about their review, I just felt that it was worth checking out the second ever feature film by James Gunn, given that, by and large, I've vaguely tolerated the things he's done (yes, he's made some good things, but he's a bit like Sam Raimi; he only seems to be able to do one thing). Super is one extremely fucked up movie that is so tonally wrong it feels a little like two movies stitched together, but that isn't just it... There's a distinctly amateurish feel to it in places, despite a reasonably good cast, including Rainn Wilson, Elliot (Then Ellen) Page, Kevin Bacon, Liv Tyler and some of the usual bods who turn up in Gunn films - his brother, Michael Rooker and Nathan Fillion. It's about a dull and boring short order cook - Wilson - who loses his drug addled wife (Tyler) to a local drug dealer (Bacon) and gets so fed up with his life he decides to become a superhero, inspired by some awful hero on the Bible Network (Fillion). It's a dorky comedy for the opening hour, but gradually descends into a mixture of psychotic, frenetic and slightly crazy as the violence gets ramped up to an 11 and there's lots of really questionable things happen, not least from his sidekick, played by Page, who was anything but a man trapped in a woman's body when this was made. In this, the then, Ms Page was psychotically sexy and part nutcase and nympho. This is a film that felt like it was made on a small budget, but probably wasn't and veered wildly from stupid, to silly to really dramatic to vicious. It ended up feeling like it didn't really know what it wanted to be. It also didn't feel like a James Gunn film. Despite some excellent parts, I'm struggling to give this a 6/10 - but Page was extremely hot in this, which now feels so totally wrong...

Fast Equines

The opening episode of The Agency, a new spy thriller about CIA agents and starring Michael Fassbinder as a character called Martian, was slow, calculated and I had absolutely no idea what it was about and what was going on. That's not to say it wasn't interesting and quite riveting, although where the next eight episodes (we watched the first two) are going to go is anyone's guess - unless you've already watched it. Fassbinder has returned from Ethiopia after spending six years deep undercover; a job that has made him lose touch with his daughter and fall behind on what is happening elsewhere in the world. The main thing that is happening, in the opening episodes, is an agent has disappeared in Belarus and that means bad news for the CIA because of that country's links to Russia. The Cold War is very much alive and kicking and to complicate things Fassbinder is still in touch with the woman he had an affair with for a number of years while in Africa. She's probably not an agent, but this is about spies and part of their business is for others to not know what they want. 

The thing is, I know what was going on - fundamentally and a bit vaguely - and if you asked me to explain it to you I'd probably struggle; But I expected this will be a challenging series, especially as there appears to be at least three separate stories taking place, at once, which will, probably, all link in with each other. It looks like it might be worth sticking with even if I don't have that much interest in the underlying subject matter.

BOOM!

I really do appreciate that you tune into this blog to read about film and TV and having my thoughts and beliefs on certain real life things is probably not what you want with your reviews of the latest superhero disaster, but, we don't always get what we want... I just want to make a small point and then I'll move on. The 'war' between Israel and Gaza has been raging for almost 18 months, we're now in a transitional period with hopes that the ceasefire will last and life can get back to 'normal'. Despite Trump's idea that all Palestinians should be forcibly removed from what remains of their own land so that the USA can develop the Gaza strip and turn it into the Middle Eastern Riviera, you really need to just have a look at the picture - one of thousands you can find on the internet - above and once you've digested the destruction, I'd like you to ask yourself these questions. How many pictures of Israel lying in pieces have you seen? How many images of mass destruction inside Israel have you seen? How can something like this even be called a 'war'? This conflict has essentially been Israel pounding the shit out of a large group of people - bombing them back to the stone age (as general Curtis LeMay said) - and in retaliation there has been some weedy 'missiles' fired into Israel, dealt with by their state-of-the-art defence shield. This has never really been a war, this has been an act of complete destruction; obliterating everything in Gaza and making it impossible for anyone to live there again. The pathetically ironic thing about this is that all western media outlets still refer to Hamas as a terrorist organisation and the people held by Israelis as 'prisoners' and the Israelis held by Hamas as 'hostages'. I think people woke up to the truth a long time ago but the media has been relentless (a little like it was with Jeremy Corbyn) and now it is normalising the forcible removal of people from their homes so that the USA can profit from it. And we're told to fear Russia and China? Yeah... Right...

Kaiju Junior

... And now for something you wouldn't expect! Last year, Netflix released a joint American/ Japanese project called Ultraman Rising, while it was the 44th film in the Ultraman franchise, it was also essentially a reboot, as a contemporary idea. It's anime, but with higher production values and with an American twist; I'd had the movie for 8 months and couldn't get the wife interested in watching it. The thing is, I wasn't sure I wanted to watch it, but with the FDoD's content dwindling, I thought 'fuck it' and put this on, and nearly two hours later it finished. It was funny, the animation was largely fantastic and while it was a bit corny in places, a little cheesy in others and typically anime in between; it was a largely enjoyable bit of popcorn. It tells the story of Ultraman adopting a baby kaiju after its mother is believed to have been killed by the Kaiju Defence Force and having to deal with issues his alter-ego laughs in the face of. All the way through I was thinking 'this would be perfect for kids aged between 8 and 13' but it gets very dark and could be quite scary at times, so maybe not. It's a lot better than I thought and if you like a good animated teens film then this it's worth watching. 6.5/10

The Fun Guy Conspiracy

Continuing on from the experiment that was Ultraman Rising, we decided to watch a new ongoing animated series that has a very high score on IMDB. Common Side Effects is an Adult Swim conspiracy story about a man who discovers a mushroom that can heal all ailments and the powers behind governments and Big Pharma who want the man dead and any evidence of the mushroom removed. This is a clever little series that is spoiled by the awful animation, except... it's only the humans in the thing that are off; most everything else is reasonably well rendered and then you get these awful anime crossed with trademark Adult Swim cheap human animation*. I don't know what it is about cartoons in the 21st century, but mostly everything I've watched has been largely fucking awful and the stylised people in this made it difficult to watch; so after two quite interesting episodes, we didn't bother with the third part, nor shall we be bothering with any subsequent part. 

* The wife describes it as Beavis and Butthead but drawn by someone a little better at drawing.

The Full Bradford

After the shocking, but not unexpected, ending to last week's episode, this was a flashback heavy segment that focused a lot on Cal Bradford - James Marsters - from when he was a college graduate working at things his father wanted him to be doing to the last 24 hours of his life to when he had started to believe his life was in danger and that Sinatra was the likely source of his impending demise. In fact, this series is doing everything it can to make this whodunnit into a straight forward Julianne Nicholson's character did it, which suggests to me that we're being led down a garden path and the twist here is that she wasn't responsible for the President's death; in which case we've spent over half the first season pointing fingers at her and just wondering what she's hiding or protecting. Even that might have already been revealed, but without getting into the critique I had for this last week, it has to be said this week's instalment was considerably better, even if there are areas of this which are looking slightly implausible. This appears to be more a Whydunnit than a Whodunnit. However, it does also feel as though it's being made up as they go along. This week concluded with something weird happening in the skies that might have a huge bearing on events to come.

Existential Groundhog Day

Possibly one of the most surreal 'time' movies ever made. Palm Springs with Andy Samberg and the gorgeous Cristin Milioti is not unique, but does take the time loop concept to absolutely crazy lengths. It really is an existential Groundhog Day, with much of the film being about the absolute agony of living the same day over and over and over again. In many ways, this is the big sibling to last year's Omni Loop about a physicist stuck in an endless loop with no apparent way out. Samberg plays Nyles, who has been stuck in the loop for so long his will to live has been sapped away and Nyles has become nihilistic. He's at a wedding in... Palm Springs and he's the boyfriend of the bride's best friend. We don't discover he's been stuck in a loop, for almost ever, until he strikes up an unlikely friendship with the bride's sister Sarah and because of one of the more surreal moments in Nyles's loop , she accidentally becomes part of it. JK Simmons' Roy is the same, he's an aged uncle of the groom who strikes up a friendship with Nyles and also falls into the loop, because Nyles showed him when he was drunk, but didn't tell him what it did, which obviously pisses him off and he spends many of the loops coming up with horrible ways to kill Nyles.

Then an events happens that breaks Sarah and Nyles' friendship and leaves Roy in a place that leaves him in terrible agony, for days - because of reasons that become clear. Nyles realises that he actually has fallen in love with Sarah, (which is okay because his girlfriend is basically a cheating cow) leading to his own redemption arc, not that it means anything in this time loop... Seriously, I write this review and it just sounds a bit pants, but it's actually extremely funny, quite rude, very deep and in many ways much different than the film idea that spawned it. I'm giving this an 8/10.

Killer Video

Would you believe that we'd never seen The Ring? I don't know why, perhaps it was something to do with not watching horror films that everyone claimed were 'too scary' or 'the most frightening...'  because we knew they would never live up to their hype. The thing about this 2002 Gore Verbinski remake, of the Japanese horror 'classic' Ringu, which makes it feels like it comes from the 1980s - when VHS and videos were all the rage and more importantly, it's not very scary, it makes little sense when you apply some logic to it and it's almost two hours of fuck all happening. It's all very overwrought and serious with overtones of mystery and history, but it really just feels like a style over substance thing, with a neat little twist at the end, which I'm sure might have spawned entire horror franchises. Naomi Watts is okay in what would have been one of her earliest starring roles and the kid playing her son was almost as weird as the evil little girl who climbs out of your TV to scare the shit out of you (which, of course, has its own logic flaws). It was all right and gets a 5/10. I think people a quarter of a century ago were easily pleased...

Go With The...

There was me bemoaning the state of animation just a couple of blog entries ago and I didn't know about Flow. I only do because someone I follow recommended it and I thought, hey, we're into some experimentalism, let's give it a go! I really hoped that it would blow me away. I've been so suspicious of animated films because the animation sucks. The stills I'd seen of this hadn't made me want to see it and I don't know why, but a bunch of animals bonding together in the face of a catastrophe sounded like the kind of U rated family friendly Disney nonsense that will become as forgettable as any other bland anthropomorphised animal film. However, this Latvian film with its stunning graphics and slightly stylised animals was pure magic; I mean something surreally stunning; totally consuming, absolutely engrossing, funny, scary and possibly one of the best animated films I have ever seen. It really is just about a cat, a dog, a lemur - with an OCD, a capybara, an injured bird (and eventually four other idiots dogs) working together to save each other when a devastating flood reeks havoc on their world. 

This movie doesn't completely feel like it's set on our Earth even if it has earthly creatures; the landscapes are weird, the buildings odd and the mix of animals - dogs, cats, deer and rabbits mixed lemurs, capybaras, exotic birds and fish and a whale not of this planet seems improbable and otherworldly; also no humans. There is no dialogue at all; for 85 minutes you are simply watching extremely realistic portrayals of animals struggling for survival and overcoming their distrust of each other. The main dog - a Labrador - is obviously domesticated and the cat lives in a nice house, but there is no evidence that humans are there. It's prophetic and analogous - possibly warning us what will happen when global warming leaves just those able to adapt to the changes. It's the best film I've seen so far in 2025 and might even be one of the best I watch all year.  It's still in my mind 24 hours after watching it, therefore anything less than a 10/10 would be unjust.

Not Quite Right

The sad thing about the current season of Severance is that the wife has grown fed up with it; she doesn't really get it; she doesn't like it. What I find sad about this is that I believe it's one of the best things on TV; it's disturbing, alienated, dystopian, bleak, puzzling, strange, absorbing and weird - all things that usually tick our boxes. I get it that some people might find it slow or odd or even difficult to get into and in an attempt to try to prove them wrong I'll say this is what modern horror is all about. There's no bogeyman or monster in the closet; there are corporations that are prepared to do whatever they can to get whatever they want and Lumon wants what Mark S can give them, we just don't know what 'Cold Harbour' is or why it's important. Lumon employees are all either on the brink of rebellion or cold, calculated and menacing; there appears to be cracks showing all over the place; like there's a power struggle going on that no one knows about.

This week felt a little like running to stand still again, but that might have something to do with who directs each episode. Three of the five have been directed by Ben Stiller and they have been quintessential viewing; the other two have almost felt a little like fillers; yes, things happened, but not so much in a moving the story along kind of way. We saw Melchick's staff review, which I don't think he was too enamoured about. Miss Wong being creepy as well as looking 12. Irving declared 'dead' to help the other three innies to accept him no longer being there and Helly at odds with events; her innie is bewildered and doesn't seem to understand the hostility towards her and her outie - the daughter of the owner - looks very much like she's lost any control she might have and is now just another Lumon tool. We're halfway through this season and I do think we're not going to see an conclusion; I suppose it's what we're left with and what we're likely to get in a third season that matters.

Cannibal Holocaust

It's back; after something like two years, the third season of Yellowjackets is finally here and it returned with two episodes and the promise that it was back on track. Let's be honest about this, it needs to be, because the second season was a huge let down that meandered around with pointless subplots and situations that seemed difficult to believe, despite the other general lunacy going on. In fact, season two finished (March 2023) around the time I started to write this blog on a regular basis and I was quite clear that I really didn't think I was going to give it a third season (So maybe the long gap was a marketing ploy?). Nearly two years later and after some positive reviews, I'm back, hoping that something happens, because the schoolgirl footballers are now in June - we left them with their log cabin burning down in the middle of winter. Not only did they manage to survive a bleak Canadian winter, without looking like they ate any more of their crew, but they also seemed to be able to salvage lots of things and worked out how to make stuff like Chinese lanterns and candles since last time. No one looks very thin and there's an unlimited supply of animals, such as ducks, rabbits and deer for them to fill their larder up with. Plus there's a whole bunch of sexual tensions running rampant.

In the present, someone is stalking Shanna and we get an idea that we're going to be introduced to yet another of the cannibal crew; Melanie Lynskey's character is beginning to show some of the ... balls... she showed in the Canadian wilderness. Misty (Christina Ricci) seems to have lost her psycho bitchiness and is being portrayed as a lot more needy and complex. Death still seems to be following them all around and Lottie is back - after a spell in the nut house - and is still as batshit crazy as she's been portrayed both as a teenager and as a lifestyle guru. I don't know; there's a bit too much Lost-styled mumbo jumbo going on in the past; too much paranoia and self importance in the present and some subplots have just been forgotten about; swept under the carpet or buried like an outside poo. 

The wife has problems with Severance and I have problems with Yellowjackets - we're both going to have to put up with our viewing eccentricities for at least the next five weeks...

What's Up Next?

Anything above that hasn't finished and probably something else as well - such as Zero Day with Robert DeNiro, which joins a mixed bag of entertaining and televisual struggles. The White Lotus returns and this is a puzzle for me, we've watched the first two series (as any long time reader of this will confirm), but neither of us have ever found it to be as good as the press find it. The bloody Guardian pretty much spunks onto its own pages at how almost perfect the series is and I'm wondering if I somehow got hold of a different version? It'll be interesting to see what the wife's reaction is to this... 

There's a few movies that have arrived this week and the Saturday night film this week is The Gorge, which is still holding its own in the IMDB ratings - at 13.26pm on Saturday afternoon it was 6.8.

As usual the rest of what you see is what you get and I will no doubt have my soapbox out about something or other. Stay tuned and FOT!

 

My Cultural Life - We Can Be Heroes

What's Up?

Apparently, Nigel Farridge's Reform Party now lead Labour in opinion polls, with the Tories fighting the LibDems for the damp patch. I thought much of the country woke up and realised that leaving the EU was a fundamentally bad decision, where we actually penalised ourselves and allowed the Free Market, that one the Tories are always bragging about, to come and strip mine the UK for whatever was left and then increase our prices by an awful lot more than the supposedly in crisis EU is charging in a move that looks like squeezing the pips until they burst. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd be looking at the increasing hatred, blame and dog whistling going on and say the UK was being primed to become the next neo-Nazi-type of country.

It's quite distressing watching the world sink into this spiral of hatred and gloom. I'm actually seeing people advocate violence and discrimination now, especially if it's going to benefit them. But, to get back on track... Farridge in charge of the UK? Do you idiots know what will happen? I'm sure a lot of misogynistic, chauvinistic and most likely white English people will be frothing at the mouth at the idea of things like benefits being stripped away from the people they think of as scroungers; as they will be just as priapic about fewer foreigners, telling the EU to go fuck itself and selling the NHS to the Americans and watching the UK descend into a country where 50% of its inhabitants won't be able to afford healthcare, but the gammons will be happy about that as well because it thins the gene pool, makes sure less poor people survive, oh and can we increase funeral costs while we're at it, because people need to be made bankrupt for giving a loved one a decent funeral...

Farridge supporters, of which I'm worried I have a few as friends, won't see a right wing, authoritarian, libertarian, power-hungry, swivelled eyed fuckwit, like the rest of the country - a dwindling number by the sounds of things - when they vote for more self-punishment and fewer freedoms. Nige is one of us! Yes, yes he is, apart from all the things that make him just as bad as any Eton schooled former PM who has put his mates first and then the people of the country after some other right wing wanker junta running a once proud and democratic country. We appear to be sleepwalking into a similar scenario to WW2, but with added hubris, stupidity and relentlessness. Did you hear that Trump wants to forcibly remove an entire race and dump them on other Arab countries, so he can develop Gaza and then sell it to rich Israelis? There is a very realistic possibility if the world starts fighting back against Trump fuckwittery it will involve lots of death. Most of us won't want to see it and will quite happily almost welcome it when it arrives, in jackboots, and Nazi salutes and bonus Google points if you can give the authorities enough information about your neighbour to ensure they end of in concentration camps and their assets becoming that of the state.

Optimistic, eh?

Meanwhile, Obi WanKeir and his assemblage of spare pricks at a boring wedding, just annoy people. It's like they've been paid to fuck up. Have they all been promised untold riches to just carry on like the Tories had never left? Is this part of the plan to get Farridge in No.10? Make Labour seem like a cabal of incompetence, lumbering from one problem to another while uttering the largely pointless word, 'growth.' They might as well don a South Wales accent and start shouting 'Nurses' at passers by. 

Growl For One

I saw little or no promotional material for Blumhouse's new Wolf Man; a post modern look at the werewolf genre with Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner - who is about to defy expectations as a female Silver Surfer. This is about a guy, who now lives in the city, who gets confirmation that his father, having been missing for years, has been declared dead and his property now belongs to his son, Blake, who is now married to a reporter - Garner - and they have a daughter, who Blake has built a special relationship with, given that he's 'between jobs' - the underwritten problem between the spouses, it appears. In his youth, Blake was taken out by his father almost daily, hunting and learning survival skills and then one day they're attacked by something and narrowly get away.

Fast forward 30 years, Blake and family are heading to the backwoods of Oregon and are going to clear out his father's place. They pick up an old acquaintance of Blake's, who Garner has a serious problem with, because he's a redneck, presumably, but they give him a lift as he shows them how to get to daddy's place via a detour. That goes very tits up, very quickly as the van Blake is driving is forced off the road and goes careering down a slope, leaving them all in trouble. It all deteriorates from that point on, as Blake and his family struggle to stay alive against the wolf at their door. It's a little on the gory side and the wolves are not really very wolf-like, but the idea that they see and hear everything completely differently is well executed. However, it's kind of lacking in jeopardy, isn't very scary and feels a little rushed. It literally takes place over the space of a number of hours and everyone seems to cope with the craziness better than you'd think. It was all right and only just about scrapes in with a 5.5/10; it would have scored higher if the wolf men actually looked like wolves. 

All For One

Well, one thing led to another and that other was four hours (nearly) of Zach Snyder's Justice League, a magnificent example of how to make an epic movie, let down by an unnecessary 20 minute epilogue that should have been five. From almost the opening minutes of this extraordinary film it was just non-stop entertainment; from the attempted gathering of Earth's existing heroes to the final battle, which probably could have been a little longer and more complex, it was almost the perfect superhero movie - bombastic, brilliant, heroic, funny, sad and something different. The fact that it's almost two and a half hours before Superman comes back into it isn't an issue, because Bruce Wayne's preparation for the coming storm is intense and captivating. There are some slightly contrived elements, but this is a movie about comicbook heroes so that is to be expected. Wonder Woman is better than she is in her own films, Aquaman is considerably better and Cyborg - the least well known - is better the second time around; Victor Stone isn't exactly the most charismatic character. But it's Ezra Miller's Barry Allen - the Flash - who steals almost every scene he's in. I mean, he's not the Barry Allen from the comics, but in many ways he's so much better. His reactions to his surroundings and other heroes is exactly what you'd expect from a young man in awe of everything. I could wax lyrically about why Barry Allen ended up being the most tragic and heroic of all DC superheroes, but no one wants to read that; let's just say if you have to use Deus ex Machina as a plot device there's no better hero than the Flash to wield it...

However, this felt like it borrowed from the Lord of the Rings and the MCU's Infinity Saga at times and there were a number of plot devices - such as the time it took to bring Big Blue back to life, because he pretty much made mincemeat of the villain and had he been around from the beginning this would have been an eight-minute short. And then there was the epilogue, which frankly turned this film from a 9.5/10 to an 8/10. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the first six or seven minutes and when Clark ducked down an alley in Metropolis and started to rip his shirt off revealing the S on his chest, I should have stopped it right there and so should Snyder. He knew that this wasn't going to go anywhere; this was a version Warner Brothers allowed him to release because the cobbled together Joss Whedon original was largely a load of shite. The DCEU wasn't going to suddenly go back to Snyder and play with the other 12 minutes of epilogue. There should have been a sequel allowed, that way the team could have faced Darkseid and his hordes with some new heroes and maybe there could have been some tragedy to make it less like a two way battle; but the mumbo-jumbo with the Joker; the unnecessary Martian Manhunter cameos (both in the epilogue and mid way through the movie); the needless Lex Luthor bit. It was all done to set up the next few movies in the DC Snyderverse, which this film was permitted to wrap up. Still, had they never bothered with the epilogue after Clark then this would have got a deserved 9.5/10, but it ends up with an 8/10 because the last 12 minutes spoils it - as you can tell from the amount of time I'm spending being annoyed by it.

More Wank of Dave

Did you know that it's really called Burnley Savings and Loan? The only similarity to the title of the original film and the new sequel is the catchphrase, which was '[You can] Bank on Dave.' As I said last week, The Bank of Dave was a feelgood movie for the 21st century; however, the same cannot be said about the Bank of Dave: The Loan Ranger, the 2025 follow-up, which has Dave Fishwick taking on pay day loan companies. It's basically a ten bob sequel that is heavy on the [poor] comedy, tries to lever in a slightly preposterous love story (which I won't explain because it would be cruel of me, if I wanted to be honest about it) and add a bit of jeopardy as Dave goes toe-to-toe to a possible New Jersey crime boss (played by Rob Delaney). This is a movie that pretty much doesn't reach any of the heights the original did, was clearly made in the UK, despite 20 minutes of it supposedly being in New York and managed to crowbar Def Leppard in, again, for an encore. Rory Kinnear is great, he reminded me of my recently deceased good friend George, but in general this was a load of shite. 4/10

Universal

We, for some unfathomable reason, never watched Brian Cox's The Planets from 2019. So we decided to remedy this and we watched it - it started with the four rocky planets, closest to the sun, with an added bit of Titan, out there orbiting Saturn. Then we got the gas giants - of which I would have liked to have known more about rather than their influence on Earth and stuff. Yes, Brian Cox has far too many teeth and as an astrophysicist he fancies himself as a pop star, but I learned some stuff. It's good BBC documentary stuff. But you knew that already, didn't you?

Swords and Sandals

Do you remember Brett Ratner? He directed some stuff in the Noughties and was going to be the next big thing. He did X-Men: Last Stand; the third in the original series, which was a load of shite and in 2014, he made his last film as a director - Hercules - with Dwayne Johnson, Ian McShane, Rufus Sewel and John Hurt. It was essentially a Magnificent Seven film about the son of Zeus and his band of warriors saving the bacon of Lord Cortys (Hurt), except there's a few twists in the tale. It is largely an action adventure, with some hints of comedy and, in equal measure, hints of past angst. It's not a classic, by any stretch and Johnson looks odd with hair and a beard. Rebecca Ferguson also appears, but is low down on the credits. Ratner's career died after sexual assault allegations, by a number of actors, including Elliot Page, when the Umbrella Academy was still Elaine Page. I presume he used his power to do despicable things, rather than try to make good films; or maybe he was an arsehole because he couldn't make decent movies? This is, at best, a 4/10. 

Trailer Trash

We're coming up to the Superbowl, therefore there's a bunch of new trailers hitting the airwaves and the one with the most nostalgia, oozing from its pores, is Fantastic Four: First Steps. It looks sumptuous, even if I still have problems with at least half the casting. What we're allowed to see in this preview does rather excite the anticipation glands, even if Ebon Moss-Bacharach's Thing actually looks like a dubbed bit of CGI - but I'm sure that will be ironed out, because the look for Ben is the best so far. It's the Kirby/Sinnott FF, even if Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby are totally not right as the Richards' - both of them are far too old. The retro 1960s look - making this an MCU film not set on the MCU Earth - knocks it out of the park; I watched the trail three times because, despite my reservations about Pascal and Kirby, it looks retro, clever and totally awesome. There have been some rumours though; such as Joe Quinn's Johnny Storm being not hot-headed enough and not all jive and chutzpah; or Kirby not being Sue Storm enough. We'll just have to wait and see; it comes out the same week in July as Superman...

The other major Marvel preview has been snippets of Captain America: Brave New World, which, by all accounts, has Disney execs chewing their collective fingernails down to the wick. This is a movie that has had several rewrites, four - yes FOUR - banks of reshoots, a complete change of direction as far as the story goes (it was originally going to be a gateway into Thunderbolts* but the two were separated, presumably to give the latter a chance to stand on its own). This is a film that was in the can as early as May 2023, but was put on hold for reasons we can only speculate. The trailers look good, but let's be honest, the trailers for The Marvels and Thor: Love and Thunder suggested these might be a good films and how wrong they were.

The other problem, and I expect something during half time of the world's most uninteresting spectacle, is Thunderbolts* which needs to be something other than Marvel's Suicide Squad and while there's a lot of positivity floating around that this year will see the MCU reset and go forward in a direction that's better than almost everything since Endgame, there's so much trepidation inside Disney you can almost feel it. Die hard fans will point at the $billion+ returns of the Deadpool heap of bollocks, but that was an event film; the only real event film coming this year from Disney is The Fantastic Four: First Steps and that just happens to be going up against the biggest comicbook icon of them all - Superman, made by the guy who's made arguably one of the few decent MCU films since 2019, James Gunn. This DC reboot film also looks really good, although my worry is that it might end up being a touch anti-climatic and introduce too many new characters. 

Jurassic World Rebirth looks like a very bad Scarlett Johansson misstep. This is a franchise that presumably still makes enough money to allow even more films to be made. This 'reboot' - the second in the last ten years, looks and feels like a contrived load of bollocks and I reckon that's what it's going to be - this time giant dinosaur DNA could be used to create a cure for everything!!! I mean, how many dinosaur movies can be made where it won't eventually end up with two giant monsters fighting it out while the chief protagonists look on from their flimsy protection? This time around we have both Ed Skrein and Rupert Friend obviously vying for the role of chief nasty bastard (my money's on Friend because he looks like he's been stuck in an oven for half an hour before being perfectly coiffured) and Mahershala Ali as the tragic but heroic geezer who saves Scarlett and co-star Jonathan Bailey's lives. Obviously, it will be watched and it will be a load of velociraptor shit.

The Red Herring

There appears to be a proper conspiracy theory going on in Paradise. With the dead President not even in the ground and his psychiatrist trying to set up Xavier's #2 Billy Pace as a prime suspect, it's up to the 'on leave' former Presidential bodyguard - Sterling K Brown - to get to the bottom of his first red herring. Is his #2 the man who bludgeoned POTUS to death and just what is going on outside of the mountain hideaway, because it's not exactly what the bigwigs are saying. I've still got Silo to watch, despite it now being two series, but I get the impression that Paradise is a bells and whistles on version of that series, maybe a little less grimier and beautiful? The thing that doesn't sit well with me about this particular show is just how normal it looks and feels like it is, living in a giant version of the Truman Show. There's 25,000 people living here and we know that it's run by the world's billionaires, so it's going to be as perfect as they can make it, but my problem is it might look like paradise, but is it sustainable? Where is all the food grown? Where are all the processing plants? Who runs the machines that make Paradise? How come just 25,000 people were allowed to live there but as well as the richest, we also have people who run bars, or bake, or were criminals. 

Yes, there's plausible explanations for these things - his wife is a scientist; he was hired to do dirty jobs; there were teachers and cleaners - but 25K; that's not a huge amount when you start to take into account the billionaires, multi-millionaires and people like doctors, dentists, physicists, biologists, psychiatrists, nutritionists, etc etc etc ad nauseum... who aren't given salvation from the nuclear winter outside the front door, then the altruism of this place starts to feel ludicrous and unworkable. I mean, is a former President or a Royal family member or Taylor Swift going to be excluded for someone who makes the best imitation vegan cheese? There's not going to be 12,500 people with 12,500 servants, service providers and technicians, because something this big probably needs 25,000 people just to make it work on a weekly basis... I sometimes can't look past the plausibility of an idea, however good a story might be. This is a compelling idea that feels like a giant con - inside the story and outside the show for its viewers; that's a shame.

Who's to Blame?

I am aware that this new look blog has a lot of my opinions on other things, which some of you probably wonder what they have to do with Modern Culture; the thing is, shit like politics is cultural; it plays a part in our lives 24/7 whether we want to believe it or not...

That said, I don't try to be controversial, but in a recent blog I did mention that literally everyone is calling out for everything to have a public inquiry and now we have the relatives of the three murdered people in Nottingham demanding a public inquiry about, essentially, who can also be blamed other than Valdo Calocane (who sounds like a Bond villain). The thing about public inquiries is I think people are being conned; I'm not sure a lengthy re-examination of facts, figures and witness testimony does any good. For starters, we live in a country where money is short and we need to spend it wisely, so chucking millions of quids at an inquiry sounds slightly irresponsible, especially when we know everything that is to be known, or probably, more likely, what needs to be known, by the public.

The other problem I have with Public Inquiries is they never actually attribute the blame to the people who are responsible for the lapses that eventually cause a tragedy. Take the Post Office inquiry, it's been fun seeing the finger of guilt pointed at all the villains, but that finger has, by and large, been directed into other directions and away from the people really responsible - the government or governments who were in place and where the buck needed to stop. We saw it with the Tories over the last ten years; if something went wrong it was never their fault and always someone else, usually a person they appointed or supported. With the Calocane business, an inquiry will eventually point the finger of blame at Notts Mental Health services, despite that body having been stripped to the barest of bones by government cuts. Whose fault was it that three people died? The guy who killed them and the state for cutting the amount of money Notts' MHS need to be able to ensure potential risks are given the correct amount of support?

There is no one else to blame, but we as a country will always find someone. Immigration is the reason why people can't do X, Y and Z - but immigration isn't anyone's fault but the government's. Social Services failed Baby P, but it was the government du jour that ensured that Social Services had social workers with caseloads in the 50s, 60s and 70s - ensuring that they couldn't do their jobs properly because there were too few of them to do it. That isn't a council's fault; that's the government. NHS waiting lists aren't the NHS's fault, are they? You know they aren't, but no one wants to say, "Well, if the government had given the NHS more money when they needed it this wouldn't be an issue." And before you say, "But the government can't afford it!" In your best desperate voice with added hand-wringing; if the government hadn't given tax breaks to some of largest earning corporations in the world, if the government had taxed the rich 1p more; if the government had targeted tax avoidance rather than blaming the unemployed, if they hadn't done this, that and the other, we wouldn't be in this mess. Don't give me these worthless and mealy-mouthed excuses; governments are the principal reason for everything that happens, therefore why waste money on Public Inquiries when the only outcome that is worth anything is when the fingers are pointed at governments and the need for them to do more for the people who elected them.

And breathe...

Friends United

Feelgood movie time! It seems that the most enjoyment I get from modern films are the feelgood ones and this 2023 effort with Woody Harrelson is very special indeed. Champions is about an arsehole basketball coach who has gone from being the must-have coach in the sport to having to do 90 hours community service for driving under the influence and that service is to coach a special needs basketball team. It's set in Des Moines - which I always expected to look much nicer - and Harrelson is, as usual, good value for money. Also involved in this - double take - Bobby Farrelly (solo directorial debut) movie is Kaitlin Olsen as Woody's fuck buddy and sister of one of the team members, with support from Cheech Marin, Ernie Hudson and a lot of special needs adults, who pretty much steal the film. It's great fun, not too schmaltzy and has some unexpected twists, not usually associated with feelgood movies. 7/10.

The ABC of Terrorism

The terrorist act perpetrated by Palestinians on Israeli Olympic athletes inside the Athlete's Village at the 1972 Munich Olympics was given a Steven Spielberg biopic about a decade or so ago and where that was slightly subjective, this is a reconstruction of ABC's sports team's coverage of the actual events, on the ground, as they happened, rather than covering the sports for which they were primarily there for. It sticks to the facts and melds actual footage and commentary seamlessly into a 90 minute feature, in a way that a lot of current movies like to do. We saw something similar to this a few months back with the docudrama of the first time Saturday Night Live went on air and this, in many ways, is closer to that than it is to Spielberg's dramatization of those gruesome events. This film starts with a changeover of shifts which is close enough to the village to have heard the first shots and covers the hours between the first murder to events at Munich airport where all the hostages died. Ben Chaplin - he who originally came to our attention in the 1990s as the agoraphobic housemate in Game On is one of the leads in this, as a Jewish producer acting as the conscience of the network. It's an enthralling and quite riveting film and deserves an 8/10 for authenticity, even if it felt a little dumbed down.

Outside Innies

This review contains spoilers about Severance Season 2 Episode 4 - Woe's Hollow

At the end of last week's episode, Mark Scout was having his brain rewired so that he could be Mark S at the same time, yet this week, we switch on to discover an entire episode set in a snowy wilderness as the four Innies are given an Outside Orientation Occurrence and are invited to follow in Keir's footsteps. The problem here is Irving (John Turturro) has lost his shit much quicker than Mark S looked like he was and he's not playing ball. He knows that Helly R isn't the old Helly R but her Outie and he plays a dangerous game to expose this. While this is going on Mark S and Helly R make the beast with two backs and Seth Milchick struggles to play along with whatever this bullshit is. Dylan spends best part of the episode looking like he doesn't belong anywhere and there's lots of... dare I say it... weird stuff going on. It culminates with Irving doing something unspeakable and getting himself well and properly fired by Milchick, but, of course, we know that it's Mark that Lumon wants and if Mark wants Irving to remain, Milchick has fuck all real power. What we now also have is a situation where the Innie Helly R is back and she can tell the other two just who she is...

What's Up Next?

Yellowjackets is back next week. The interesting thing about this was after a blisteringly brilliant and creepy first season, the second was a pile of shite and there's now been nearly two years since that finished and there's been some stuff done to change it, apparently.

Severance is zeroing on the midway point and while stuff has indeed been happening, is enough going to be done to make a potential third season feel as though we're heading for an exit?

Paradise needs things to happen because at the moment it's suffering from logistic problems and if it doesn't make logical sense I'm going to go off of it and start picking holes in it. That would be a shame because it's well made. 

Films... We're running very thin on the ground for movies at the moment. The FDoD has 15 films on it and a few of them are almost included just in case of emergencies. There's a whole bunch of stuff on the set top box's hard drive, but it's not like anything we have at the moment is making anyone in the house priapic.

As usual, you will get what you are given and I'm always intrigued as to whether something unexpected and good will appear...