My Cultural Life - Quackers & Cheese

 What's Up?

On the 14th January - a Tuesday, not that that matters - I had to run an errand. Nothing extraordinary about that, apart from the fact that the thermometer in the car read 14° - 14° on the 14th. 14° is pretty mild for January; when you consider that we had days in June and July that were actually much colder than this, it makes you wonder how people can truly believe that 'climate change' is just the weather.

Over in the USA, two thirds of the country is under snow and suffering freezing conditions, while California burns. The USA is probably one of the worst offenders regarding the destruction of the planet via the shit that it pumps into the atmosphere, yet it has a newish President who is both stupid and stubborn. For many people the USA is far more dangerous than Russia or China and those people would not be wrong...

Anyhow 14° and it wasn't raining, the winds were nothing more than a breeze and in contrast the week before saw temperatures struggle to get about 0° - which, amazingly, was treated by the media like it was some kind of polar disaster. This is the media now, catastrophising normal winter weather. The Met Office doesn't help, it issues yellow weather warnings at the drop of a hat - 2cm of snow gets a yellow warning; what would they do if we really did have a weather event like 1963 again? The problem is we need weather warnings, we just probably don't need them making every change in the weather something to be scared of.

But that's the thing now, isn't it. The media's job is to scare people, that or to lie to us about things. The removal of fact checkers from Facebook (not that they did much) and the promotion of hate speech on that massive twat Musk's pointless X platform is essentially allowing the rise of fascism to spread and we all know how that's going to end. The thing is war, hatred and unrest makes money for big corporations and that isn't me just being 'woke' it's kind of actually the truth.

The UK media also seems to have not changed its tune despite us having a government that isn't the Tories. One of my bug bears at the moment is the way the BBC is literally scrutinising EVERY. SINGLE. THING. the Labour government is doing. Maybe people wouldn't accuse the corporation of being a right wing mouthpiece if it had shown half as much scrutiny of the Tory government and the rampant corruption that followed them everywhere. The Tories did some truly horrendous things over 14 years, yet the media is attacking Labour - of which I am no supporter of - like they are deliberately fucking up the country. We've had right wing newspapers attacking ministers because of what they wear, while wankers like Robert Jenrick or Kemi Bad Enoch spread racist bullshit around like a farmer spreads muck and it's treated like they're some kind of political Jesuses. No wonder people are a) fed up with politics and b) we're likely headed for a Reform or Reform/Tory alliance in four and a half years. And if that happens, the country will be well and truly fucked and there will still be arseholes out there who think living in a North Korea styled country will be good for us...

Anyhow... on with what we're here for:

Ever Decreasing Circles

I touched on this last week, so here's what I really thought of the second season of Shrinking... Last year, I did a top ten TV shows thing in the blog and creeping in at #9 was this. I gave it a small paragraph basically explaining that Jason Segel and Harrison Ford play psychiatrists in a California practice with Jessica Williams as the third partner. It was a great series looking at the life of Jimmy (Segel) as he navigates his way through life after struggling to get over the sudden death of his wife in a drink/driving accident and Paul (Ford) who has just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. It sounds like it wouldn't have been very good, maybe even maudlin, but it was excellent. It introduced us to an ensemble cast that included a number of patients, friends, family and neighbours - all of who came into the show as rounded, fully-developed characters that we got to know as the season progressed. It was surprising and the fact it got into my top ten was pretty good, especially if you look at some of the competition it had. Anyhow, we just finished season two, which introduced us to very few new characters - except for Brett Goldstein's Louis; the guy who killed Jimmy's wife - and spent more time developing and focusing on people in Jimmy's life...

If I was to do a top ten for 2024 (when this series came out and finished in) then Shrinking might be #1. It is a fantastic programme; a comedy that is both funny and, like all good comedies, dramatic, tragic and full of pathos. In fact, there's an episode halfway through season two that is about as far removed from a comedy as you can imagine and it's brilliant. There are some truly unreal episodes in this season and the penultimate is probably the one that stands out the most. in any other world it would have been the season finale, but with this surprising show it still had a trick up its sleeve. I remember when the great Buffy the Vampire Slayer had the episode where Buffy's mother Joyce died. It was an awful, awful episode; the kind of thing where you'd question why you watch the show when it could vomit up such a dreadful part... And then there was the ending. An ending so shocking that the previous 40 minutes were instantly forgotten about. If you've never seen it, then I would recommend the following episode - The Body - but you'd need to watch the one before this, because... the ending...

The finale of Shrinking season two is schmaltzy and very American. It's unusually needy and everything about it is a great reason to dislike Americans. Then two things happen and you are left with wet eyes and a bit of a tickly cough. It's got an ending that will have a profound effect on anyone who has become invested in this utterly fucking wonderful show. There's only going to be one more series apparently, that's a fact that's heartbreaking - but not as much as the end of season two. Cancel your streaming platform and get Apple TV+; Shrinking is just one of many great shows on it, but in many ways it's all you need it for. It's a show that deserves a 15/10 rating. I cannot recommend it enough.

When I'm 64

The documentary Beatles 64 is a fantastic snapshot of a world that will never exist again (or will it?). The United States post JFK, a country riven with racial tensions, conservative values and a real anti-youth feel to it. I mean, in many ways the USA hates the young because they represent change, but this isn't so much about the USA as it is about the furore caused by four young men from Liverpool who were already superstars in the UK and were about to become the same on the other side of the Atlantic. This entire film is largely the work of two brothers Albert and David Maysles, who shot two weeks worth of footage for a documentary which was called What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA, their footage was interwoven with footage from US television and other sources. I don't really understand how David Tedeschi gets credited with director on this because at best it's the work of an film editor, and there's also a number of producers, yet again the person really responsible was Mariah Rehmet, the film's editor; she's the reason this film is what it is...

Anyhow, it's a fascinating look at the Beatles at the start of their journey to becoming icons and superstars. Four guys in their early twenties in a strange country that they looked upon with general amusement and bemusement. There's some good interviews with people who were there and people who were deeply affected by the Fab Four, but the one thing I took from it was by the end of their fortnight in the States, Paul McCartney was beginning to look really pissed off. The footage from Florida and then the plane journey home, he looked like he was totally fucked off, whether by his mates or the merry-go-round of press and having to be these nice guys from Liverpool. I've been a huge fan of the Beatles all my life and while this was so much better than the three part borefest that was The Beatles: Get Back it was still just okay. What I want to see is a proper documentary that charts their entire career, or one that focuses on the period from Revolver to the split up. This was still entertaining and John Lennon really was a wickedly acerbic and funny man when he was young. 7/10

Bromance

As is often the case, after we've watched something we enjoyed, we look for something one of the actors has been in previously. The thing with Jason Segel is he doesn't seem to have been in much that appeals. I know friends who find him annoying and talentless and when he first appeared in Shrinking I was hard pressed to name anything I'd ever seen him in before. So when I saw the film I Love You, Man, with Segel and Paul Rudd, I wasn't immediately drawn to it. However, after toing and froing about it, I thought, "Ah fuck it, why not." I can honestly say that I'm glad I opted to watch it and I'm surprised that 15 years after the event I hadn't been tempted to watch it sooner. I mean, for no other reason there's a cameo from Rush in it and while the Canadian rock band are something I don't really listen to much anymore, they're still a very big part of my past.

Paul Rudd plays a man who has very few male friends; he's a lady's man both sexually and platonically. He gets on with all women, but struggles with his own gender. In an ironic twist, his brother - played by a youthful Andy Samberg - is gay and gets on with almost everybody - straight or gay. Rudd is a real estate agent and has Lou 'The Hulk' Ferrigno's house on his portfolio, which, if sold, would earn him enough commission to be able to do the deal of his dreams, but he's struggling to sell the multi-million dollar house and is coming under pressure to do the deal. He's also just proposed to his girlfriend - Rashida Jones [who has really gone downhill in the last 15 years if you compare 2009 Jones to the one who appeared in that woeful show Sunny] - but doesn't have a best man. So he goes in search of a new male pal. The set up is a little contrived and the period between this decision and meeting Jason Segel's Sydney is basically a series of awkward and borderline homosexual encounters.

At an open house event, Rudd meets Segel, who admits he's not interested in buying the house, he's just there for the free food, and there seems to be a spark there; the two guys seem to genuinely like each other. They hook up for a beer and gradually bond over their love of Rush, until several months later Rudd asks Segel to be his best man. Then, like in all the best romcoms, something happens to jeopardise the friendship and the rest of the film happens. It is a genuinely funny movie, with plenty of LOL moments, from both male leads, and it's really unusual seeing Jon - Happy Hogan - Favreau playing a total arsehole. I am really glad we took the time to watch this and I'm going to give it a firm 8/10.

History Ennit

I'm not suggesting this series is worth watching, in fact I only mention it because we watched one episode that was relatively close to home. Villages By the Sea season four, episode two, with Ben Robinson, was in the hamlet of Port Carlisle, a place on the coast of the Solway Firth; about 60 miles from where I live (as the crow flies) and 11 miles from the city of Carlisle. It was fascinating because Port Carlisle, for a short period in the 1830s, looked as though it might become one of the UK's most important shipping ports. It had its own canal, which was soon replaced by a railway line and then just as it was about to be catapulted into the big time, some investor decided to throw a lot of money at the village of Silloth, 15 miles down the coast, and Port Carlisle began to die. Now it's about 40 houses - many of them Georgian manses - some unusual geographical oddities and almost a stone's throw from Scotland. It's actually one of the most isolated parts of Cumbria, despite being close to both Carlisle and the oddly-named (for me at least) Wigton. It's also the kind of programme that if its on and there's nothing else worth bothering about, then you have 30 minutes of interesting history to learn from.

Wanchorman 2

See? I told you so. I just didn't expect to watch the sequel the following night... The thing about Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is that it's actually a better film than the first one. I mean, it's still a load of silly crap, but there was a semblance of a story, there were some funny jokes - again mainly courtesy of Steve Carell, who they obviously realised was the funniest thing in the first film so they gave him more air time - and there were actually genuine bits of satire in this one. This time around it was about the advent of 24 hour news and suggests that Ron Burgundy was solely responsible for the phenomena that is rolling news coverage - with added speculation - of current, real time events. Again it was jampacked with A listers - including this time Harrison Ford, Will Smith and numerous others not credited and even Will Ferrell had a few more funny lines; but it was essentially typical shite American humour and was nearly 30 minutes longer than the original. Thank fuck that's over. 5/10.

Incroyables Deux

If you put me on the spot and asked me what I think is the best superhero film ever made I would probably say Brad Bird's The Incredibles. It pushes every single button the comics fan in me needed pushing. Watching again it before Christmas all it did was confirm to me what an absolutely brilliant movie it was. However, the 2004 film suffered slightly from some slightly shoddy CGI - which sounds strange because it's a CGI thing, but if you look closely you can see that CGI films have advanced a lot since then. In printers' terms The Incredibles was 180dpi, whereas The Incredibles 2 is 360dpi - the changes are subtle, but apparent. It's not so much the main characters but the backgrounds, the things going on that are not in sharp focus. If you put the two side by side you would understand what I mean.

The other difference is that before Christmas I thought one thing and after it I thought another. Now I saw The Incredibles 2 six years ago or so when it came out, so therefore watching it again was like watching it for the first time. The thing that sticks out is while it's not hugely better than the first, it is better, so therefore it is now the best superhero film I have ever seen. There are some Marvel films I adore, I even dedicated an entire blog to my favourites, but none of them are ever going to be as good as this. The sequel, which literally continues from the moment the original ends - despite a 14 year IRL gap - is clever, funny and… ahem... super. It's different from the first; it keeps you guessing for well over an hour and the baby again steals the show. Jack-Jack is the best; the scene with the racoon is awesome; the scenes with Edna hilarious and everything else is bloody brilliant as well. Guess what? 10/10, I don't think any Marvel film has ever got better than a 9. 

'News' Papers

Long time readers of this blog will know my thoughts on The Guardian, but my disdain for the neoliberal mouthpiece is quite restrained when it comes to the actual right wing rags out there who seem to have forgotten the last 14 years of Tory rule like they've never happened. I get it that Starmer is as effective as an ice teapot in an oven, but the scrutiny has been ramped up to 11 after just six months, while we were lucky if anything Johnson, Truss or Sunak did got more than a mention - even when they were doing truly horrendous things...

However, that's not why I'm here. I have noticed recently that newspapers and their on-line versions seem to think their demographic is 18-35 year olds, when in reality most 'newspaper' readers tend to be over 50 now. The generation who grew up with the internet and mobile devices would be hard pressed to be seen even with a free paper and a little bit of research on my part over the last few weeks has given me an almost definitive - young people don't look at newspapers, even on line. Many of them don't even look at BBC news pages. This has led to some strange belief that young people now seem to favour dictators over democracy, because they don't engage with politics. I mean, this might be down to the fact that politics doesn't exactly appeal to your average young person and those who are interested in it usually end up as career politicians (and have been brainwashed either left or right by the time they get there).

The one thing, politics aside, that amuses me is certain on-line (and print) papers' clickbait and youth focused articles. They just seem bewildering and some of the feedback you see - especially on papers' Facebook pages - seems to be more WTF than actual engagement. It seems to me that the people who commission articles don't know the bulk of their readers. Now, this might just be me and the vocal minority, but I get the impression that some newspapers will publish any old shit just so that half a dozen ambivalent young people might deem it worthy of their time... I am an old man...

Vomit Inducing?

It's turning into a good week. No really it is. Yes I know we're on the cusp of Trump 2.0 and I'm banging on about politics, newspapers and other shit, but our viewing this week has been mainly brilliant and our Thursday night movie was no exception. It was yet another 'should I, shouldn't I' choice and like I Love You, Man, I just thought, 'ah fuck it, put it on and see.' So that's what I did, I put The Big Sick on, the semi-biographical story of how Kumail Nanjiani - the Pakistani comedian - met and fell in love with his white American wife Emily and it was delightful, funny and extremely human. And that is essentially it, except for one big thing, Emily, got very very ill and that's all I'm saying. It examines mixed relationships, what it's like to come from a Muslim family that lives in a country like the USA and what it's like for a Muslim living in post 9/11 USA. It's a cracking film and deserves a heart-filled 9/10.

Mysterious Ways

I want to tell you a short story. I'll make it relatively quick. In 1986, the wife and I watched a Channel 4 adaptation of an obscure Melvyn Peake novel. It was something I spent the last 30 years trying to track down. It had a profound effect on me but Channel 4 never repeated it; they never seemed to think it warranted another showing. It might have popped up on All4 but I've never really had access to that so I never knew. Then about five years ago I saw the DVD on sale on Amazon and immediately bought it, but by this time we didn't have a decent DVD player and my intention was I'd watch it on the computer. But I never got around to it and then about a year ago it popped up on one of torrents sites, I downloaded it and still managed to go 12 months without watching it. So this week, I asked the wife if she minded and we finally, after 39 years, watched Mr Pye again...

[This is a spoiler riddled review] Starring Derek Jacobi as Harold Pye and Judy Parfitt as Miss Dredger, it definitely hasn't aged well, plus the quality of the copy I got (which was pretty much the same quality as the DVD) was awful. It looked like it has been filmed on cheap video tape and the special effects were... from 1986.

The main thing I remembered was the fabulous soundtrack by Ken Howard, which played on the theme of the hymn Pull for the Shore, Sailor and was haunting and mesmerising, with its key changes and catchy tune; I remembered little about the series though. I remembered the scene where Tanty (Robin McCaffrey) was running around naked, but I thought that happened in the final episode not the second part and of course I remembered the wings and the horns, but the rest of it was largely unfamiliar. 

It is a strange story - Harold Pye, a retired bank manager (Jacobi was 46 when he made it) comes to Sark to spread love and teach the people there to love each other and everything else, at the command of the Great Pal (God), but as he succeeds in changing their lives, he begins to grow angel's wings and he can't deal with that, so he conspires to do evil to rid himself of the wings, but instead grows horns. He is torn and doesn't know what to do. So far so strange, especially the odd bunch of people he surrounds himself with, but at some point about 2/3rds of the way through it stops making sense and the story sort of turns into a shaggy dog story with the islanders turning against Pye and attempting to lynch him. There's lots of inexplicable nonsense that takes place prior to this - such as a decomposing whale, Patricia Hayes as an Albanian cook who everybody understand despite wittering on in a made up language, the island's resident artist who has a crush on the island's resident prostitute and the winching of a huge woman onto the beach and failing. It's full of incidental stuff that really doesn't add to the story because so little time was actually focused on it or no explanation as to why it's there. 

In the end, with his wings returned to their full and lustrous span he flees the islanders and drives the buggy he escaped from them with off the causeway, where he flies off into the sunset. The end. There's more to it than that; it might be allegorical, but if it is it's missed, mired by an uneven narrative with gaps that I presume the viewer is expected to fill in themselves.

With hindsight, I can't understand why the 24 year old me loved this so much; maybe my young self saw something that my older, more cynical self can't see, or maybe it was simply the soundtrack (which gets an 8). However, if I'd watched this today for the first time I'd say it was a lot of shite. If I was to give it a mark out of 10 now, it probably would struggle to get a 3.

What's Up Next...

Severance is back and I'd like to watch it weekly; the problem is I don't think the wife even wants to watch it. There are things, I believe, she simply puts up with and when they return she struggles to hide her true feelings from me - that's what being together over 40 years does. 

It's my intention to watch Cronos, the debut feature of Guillermo del Toro. I've had it for a long time, but the opening four minutes - the scene setting - has always been without subtitles. I could never understand why a film that has subtitles, doesn't have them for those opening few minutes. Well, I found the opening scene on the Tube of You and someone had included subtitles, so I downloaded that and we can finally watch it knowing what the premise was.

We also have the new Cameron Diaz film - her first for over a decade - but since acquiring it and writing this it has plummeted to 6.1 on IMDB and I'm not hopeful it will recover. I can't actually remember a January so devoid of anything new to watch. There was this suggestion recently that Netflix produce TV that can be watched while scrolling on your phone; if that's the case - welcome to the end of TV and film as we know it.

I suppose it's another case of wait until next week and be surprised if there's anything for me to talk about...