My Cultural Life - A Little Bit of Everything

What's Up

Do you remember 1999? With the exception of the Y2K virus (whether it existed or was just the start of the 21st century's project fear) the world was a relatively optimistic place. The UK was doing okay, many Tories were quite happy with how Nu Labour was running things and there seemed to be a sense of social justice; we weren't pointing the finger in an accusatory fashion at anyone.

I don't think 9/11 was the start of the downfall of optimism, but it certainly gave those in power more options. Just at a time when the world seemed safer and the future was bright, some people (probably influenced by Dick Cheney) saw it as an opportunity to begin to make people scared about everything; to paint the world as a dangerous place and to take away all those glimmers of hope that many had when the calendar changed to 2000.

I've been thinking about this for a while; how we lost the optimism of the future and it was turned into hate, division, disinformation, lies and where truth was what you believed rather than what was factual. Maybe happiness doesn't make people as much money as fear? I don't know really, but inside 10 years the world was no longer a place with hope, it's largely about surviving and avoidance. Maybe that's why Severance proved to be such a popular TV show despite much of it being disjointed and sort of alien. Wouldn't it be good if we could just go and do what we needed to do without ever knowing what it is we do? It certainly has its appeal.

Maybe that's why The Traitors is popular. I'm going to struggle with this analogy because I've never seen a single second of the show, as it appeals to me about as much as giving Donald Trump an anal scrub, but maybe the chance to be a cunt for money appeals to people? That is what it's essentially about, isn't it? One thing I have noticed and to be fair it's probably been that way for centuries is the way the poorer you are the more likely you are to selflessly help those in trouble. It's one of the few things that humanity is good at - the poor helping the unfortunate or vice versa. 

I'd like to know how a few people managed to divide and conquer the world, but I think I already know the answer - there are an awful lot of stupid people out there and we should never ever underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

One last thing from me about stuff; there seems to be a mass exodus away from platforms such as Twatter (X) and Facebook. This is down to a growing number of people growing disillusioned with the antics of billionaire tech bros Mark (Wanker) Zuckerberg and Elon (Nazi) Musk. Most of these people are heading over to BlueSky. So what we actually have is people boycotting two billionaires to join a platform created by a multimillionaire. Funny that. 

Bombs Away

Why does Blitz have such a poor rating on IMDB? That's the first question I have about this rather extraordinary film by Steve McQueen. How can people who watched it have rated it as low as 6.2 when it's clearly an absolutely stupendous historical drama about some of the darkest days of the Second World War. The action takes place over 48 hours just after the start of the Blitz, as Saoirse Ronan's Rita must send her mixed race son George - Elliot Heffernan - to the country, to be evacuated away from the constant bombing of the capital. The thing is he doesn't want to go and he jumps off the train about an hour out of London and spends the next 48 hours trying to find his way back to his mum and granddad - played by Paul Weller. The movie tells the story, in flashbacks, about how Rita met George's father, the racism they both faced; the loving relationship George has with both his mum and his granddad, the racism he faced on a daily basis in a London that was febrile and a bit feral.

As George travels back to Stepney, dodging the police, ARP wardens and the military, he meets people who are kind to him and people out to exploit him; he sees all kinds of life and many dangers. The special effects are fantastic; the sets and actors - including Stephen Graham, Kathy Burke, Harris Dickson, Benjamin Clementine and Hayley Squires - are amazing and I'm just puzzled what people didn't like about it (or maybe they're all racists?). I'd give this a blitzkrieg of an 8/10.

An Aside: I couldn't understand why this was so poorly rated on internet sites and then I started to understand when I read some of the bad reviews. People simply don't understand history any more; there was one reviewer who didn't understand why George simply didn't phone his mother (and if I need to explain why to you then you're part of the problem); another reviewer thought it too melodramatic, like the violence, death and destruction was exaggerated and naturally there were reviewers who couldn't understand why the film had to be about race and that it would have been better if it had been about a little white boy, who they could identify with.

Last week, I eviscerated the BBC's Morning Live as being scare TV and this week I could embellish that by saying that not only does it emphasise what we need to be scared of, it also acts as a guide to living - simplifying and explaining things that once upon a time people almost instinctively understood. It's almost an ABC of your 24 hours either awake or asleep and this is being transposed into peoples' views on history and historical events. It is like people can't comprehend a world without the internet, or chat forums or social media. It's like the world simply didn't really exist before the mid-1990s when mobiles become cheaper and popular; before Friends Reunited, My Space and the now ubiquitous Facebook, Twitter and Tik Tok. 

It's reflected in today's quiz shows where younger people simply don't know easy general knowledge questions because they can't go on a show without their mobile devices; they have no Google. I remember a young person saying to me when I did quizzes that why should he have to remember information when he can simply look it up on his phone. I have been saying for a long time now that the internet and the interactive social media side is going to be the downfall of humanity and with the rise of the far right, repeating mistakes older generations did without any self awareness, it's like we're sleepwalking into a situation that will eventually start a war and I wonder, will people will be able to function if another war struck Western Europe? 

The world is so much different than the 1940s when wars were largely about ideologies and freedom. Now you effectively have this scenario: China has a dictator; Russia has a dictator, the USA has a dictator; some of the remaining largest democracies have kingmakers in charge; the likes of India, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Brazil, Argentina and the Indonesian countries have or did have far right wing leaders. With the current exception of Brazil, which is a distorted mirror image of Europe, divided but still reasonably sane, there are either alliances with each other or with the bigger boys. Dictators are never happy; we know this from history because whenever they get what they think they need they need more and all of these superpowers are not going to rest on what they have, they're going to want to liberate regions of the world that are autonomous or independent and that's going to mean arguments over disputed land leading to escalations and eventually a world war, because the population has become numb towards other peoples' wars and in 2025 too many people would be overthrown without realising it and unable to do anything. That was what Blitz was trying to convey; it didn't matter how difficult it was, we had to stop the world from becoming the plaything of the powerful and their rich friends.

However, I believe we're now well on the way to a 6th extinction event...

Bloodthirsty

It would be safe to say we're not fans of Robert Eggers. In fact three of his previous four feature films have left us slightly bewildered and wondering why the fuck we even bothered. Therefore going into Nosferatu was full of expectation and not the good kind. What we watched was a hybrid of Dracula and the original Nosferatu, which, of course, was a rip-off of Dracula. This movie, filmed in the Czech Republic and Romania, is evocative, beautifully shot and about an hour too long. Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok is a weirdly contemporary take on the archetypal Nosferatu vampyr, sporting a Cossack-like moustache and looking like a half-rotten corpse. Nicholas Hoult plays the estate agent sent to Transylvania to get the Count to sign the papers to his new ruin in Wisburg, Germany and Lily-Rose Depp is Hoult's new bride, someone who has suffered from being haunted by the count all her life. Willem Dafoe plays the Van Helsing character, full of mystic mumbo-jumbo and another Eggers regular Ralph Ineson is the rather bewildered doctor who is prescribing corsets and blood-letting because this is 1838 and he doesn't really do medicine despite being a 'doctor'. It was a bit boring; in places slightly impenetrable and all very earnest and overwrought. Like I said, it was a tad overlong and I can't see myself watching it ever again. 6/10 for the sets and atmosphere and 3/10 for it being a bit crap.

Love, Death and Frogs

Magnolia is one of those films we have never gotten around to watching, so as our Saturday night movie we decided to remedy that. Paul T Anderson's three hour marathon is the interwoven story of a number of people in the San Fernando valley, all of whom have some link to each other, either by family or more tenuous means. It is a difficult movie to like because the characters - the main ones at least - are all either unpleasant or annoying, but as the film progresses each of them goes through a traumatic experience of some nature that changes their position in the film. Oh and 82. 

Why is it called Magnolia? Is it some paint reference (no) or something to do with the fact that magnolias are one of the oldest and also most primitive forms of flowering tree (probably not). How did Anderson attract so many big names? There was Tom Cruise, Jason Robards, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, John C Reilly, William H Macy, Alfred Molina, Philip Baker Hall, Melinda Dillon, Henry Gibson and a bunch more and quite a few of them put in performances that probably deserved awards, but it wasn't brilliant; lots of it bordered on boring without ever being dull - if you can understand that? The interlinked theme was clever, such as the game show and its host - the show was produced by the dying man, who was Tom Cruise's misogynist's father, while the host was estranged from his daughter who was going to date John C Reilly's cop who became connected to Macy's former kid genius who was the first star of the quiz show that Baker Hall was the host of and you start to see the way everything was interconnected. It was clever, but it was also difficult and weird. Ultimately I can only give it a 6/10 even if it probably deserved more. You might think it's a classic; I might had I seen it 25 years ago.

Half as Nice

We've been crying out for a great new TV show and one landed this week. Starring the excellent Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson and James Marsden, Paradise is the kind of thriller that you sense is going to be excellent after just a few minutes. Brown plays Xavier Collins, POTUS's personal bodyguard and lead protection agent; he's serious about his job and therefore is extremely good at it. Marsden plays President Cal Bradford - part Jeb Bartlett, part Bill Clinton and possibly part Donald Trump and he's overseeing a United States that is on the brink of some major, but unspoken, catastrophe. Nicholson plays Samantha Redmond aka Sinatra; she's the female equivalent of an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos; she's the richest woman on the planet and she's also very close to Bradford.

Much of the first three episodes of this thriller are told in flashback, but essentially the President has been murdered and there doesn't appear to be any witnesses, motive or clues to who did it. Xavier was the last person to see him alive and the first person to find his corpse, but he's not really under suspicion and there appears to be some kind of mammoth conspiracy theory going on, except theory is the wrong word. There are some major twists and turns and one massive thing which we discover at the end of the opening episode when a notice board declares that 'Dawn will be two hours late' - this is a drama and also a science fiction series, although outside of the massive thing is really more about what might happen in the future if we lived in specially designed cities. It's pretty impressive; it feels big, it has a cinematic qualities and we thought the opening three episodes did more than enough to hook us into it completely. I just hope that it's a mini-series or a couple of series at best; this is the kind of thing that would suffer if allowed to meander across multiple seasons.

Worlds' Finest

I grew up a Marvel Comics fan. It took me until the 1990s to start to like DC superheroes (not their comics, I collected Swamp Thing from 1972 on) and I've never been a fan of Batman - too much angst and anger. When the MCU arrived, it was all about Marvel and this fabulous world it was building and while all of that was happening Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice arrived and a lot of people hated it. They didn't like Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne; they didn't like Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor and they didn't like the ending; and at the time there were great MCU films coming out adding to this tapestry that everyone was falling for. BvS:DoJ kind of got lost; this Zach Snyder film seemed to either get slagged off or ignored, yet it is one of the greatest superhero films of all time. it is bombastic, full on in yer face and doesn't stop. It's well constructed and keeps you guessing. It is quite simply an astonishing movie with very little wrong with it; maybe a couple of slightly contrived plot points such as, why would Clark refer to his mother as Martha instead of mom? Or why did Lois chuck the spear in the water only to return for it and place herself in danger?

We watched the Ultimate Edition, this weighs in at three hours and has added Wonder Woman and a little more of Lex and his machinations. We'd watched it before and liked it, but on this most recent viewing you see why it is such a monumental feature. It's essentially how Luthor uses Batman's distrust of the Kryptonian to enable a plan to pit the two of them together using some Kryptonite he found at the bottom of the ocean. It wasn't just getting these two icons to fight, it was also about having a back-up plan that would not fail - the creation of Doomsday from the lifeless body of General Zod. We get hints of the Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg (also added to this edition) and the future Batman will now never see. It is sexy, dark, brooding and almost the perfect superhero film. There are, arguably, better MCU films but I wonder if that's the case. I wonder if Snyder's DC Universe was a really misplaced step by Warner Brothers - not to have done it, but to have not let him finish what he started and then carry on with it. It might be time to get his version of the Justice League out again, all four hours of it. This was an almost perfect way to spend an evening and I rate this an almost perfect 9/10.

Surveillance? 

Have you ever wondered how spam sometimes mirrors real life? You do a google search for Donald Duck Y Fronts and suddenly there's stuff in your spam folder for Disney underwear or an advert in Facebook that looks as though it read your mind? Most of us know that this is because of a number of things that trigger in social media and internet searches - there's no real mystery, we have become conditioned to the fact that a bot somewhere has noted we've done a search on buying something and voila there's a targeted advert... But just how much are we 'monitored'? Is 'privacy' simply a bollocks word, bandied about by the people who now run the internet and probably the world? I ask this because there were a number of 'coincidences' in my browser this past week.

I have been suffering from a raging toothache since Sunday; it has now subsided because I - amazingly - managed to get a emergency dentist appointment and was given weapon's grade antibiotics and the infection seems to have abated. I did not do any searches that were tooth or teeth related, I didn't mentioned this on Bluesky or Facebook; in fact the only place I mentioned it was in Messenger, when I DM'd my mate to ask her if she had any spare Tramadol because I needed proper painkillers because over the counter ones were not working. 'Raging toothache' was mentioned just once and in a supposedly encrypted message, yet by Thursday I had received five spam emails relating to toothache and tooth decay. I don't get adverts on Facebook (because of a number of adblockers in place), but I do get an advert sitting on my Messenger list on my phone, and today it was a targeted tooth decay advert...

I get prompted for my 6 digit Pin to access my Messenger chat history almost perpetually now; it tells me that my "Messenger upgraded the security of this chat. New messages and calls are secured with end-to-end encryption." But are they? How come dentistry is suddenly in my life on line? How come I've had SIX tooth targeted pieces of spam? Is Messenger really private? Do we agree to accepting lies because we're told something isn't going to happen, but it does anyhow? I ran a thorough scan of my system to see if there were any trojans or anything that might be stealing key words or phrases, but the scan came back empty. Just what is going on with our internet privacy?

One last thing, spam: I run two email accounts and to be honest I get about 1000 bits of spam, to both accounts combined, in a year. There are days when I get some and days when I get nothing. In the last week, I'm getting in excess of 50 per day. It's like something has happened that has allowed the flood gates to open, again..

Not Grim Up North

Our Friday night film was going to be You're Cordially Invited, but two things meant this film got binned; first was the 5.5 rating on IMDB within 6 hours of its release and the other was The Guardian giving it 3 stars. The same newspaper recently gave Saturday Night, the story of the very first SNL show a 1 star review despite it having a 7 rating on IMDB and being quite good, if not particularly exceptional, it didn't deserve 1 star. The 'newspaper' is just deliberately contrary to other people's opinions. If it has a good review in the paper (I Saw the Television Glow) but a lousy IMDB rating (I Saw the Television Glow) you can bet your life it's not worth watching. So we opted for The Bank of Dave, starring Rory Kinnear, Joel Fry and a bunch of Northern actors. It was great. Proper Friday night entertainment. A bit too working class for The Guardian and its detached house owning neoliberal wankerati. 

Dave Fishwick owns a minibus sales warehouse; he lends people money and wants the best for Burnley, his home town. He's a lovely bloke and loves a bit of karaoke. He despises bankers (who doesn't?) and wants to start his own bank, except the powers that be don't want him to, specifically because they don't want their 'boys club' infiltrated and their monopoly spoiled. Enter Joel Fry as a London lawyer charged with trying to get Dave's proposal heard. Except Dave doesn't expect he'll get what he wants and is doing it to expose the bank community for what it truly is. This is about as good a feel good movie as you will ever see. It's got fist pumping moments in it just about every 20 minutes and yes it's a fictionalised version of the true story, but it's a bloody good one and you won't be disappointed. It's on Netflix and there's a sequel just been released. It's worth you time - 8/10.

Who Knows?

The third episode of season two of Severance is the weirdest and wildest yet. This 'comedy' horror series takes us down some new garden paths while simultaneously getting deeper into the entire conspiracy aspect of it. Adam Scott's Mark S is extremely important to Lumon's future; he's needed for their 'Cold Harbour' project, which we know nothing of and while he and the [now] suspicious Helly R go in search of the missing wellness person - who is also Mark Scout's dead wife - Irving is discovering things that might benefit the quartet and Dylan is being manipulated to ensure he ends up a double agent. Miss Wong is back - she looks about 12 and freaks everyone out and Seth Milchick's job might be at threat, but it might not matter because the new floor manager is starting to look like he's as fed up as anyone can be at Lumon's bullshit. There's also some goats and a room with very strange, slightly mad severed people in charge of said goats. 

I still firmly believe that we're in a shaggy dog story, but equally the strangeness is being ramped up almost every episode now. It is heading towards something and possibly the decision of Mark Scout to be joined with his Mark S persona might see this show go places no one expects. I mean, there's seven episodes to go and while I think there'll be a third season... what if there isn't?

What's Up Next?

As TV starts to reappear there might be more to talk about and less editorialising from me - levering in subjects in or at the end of reviews in a sledgehammer to crack a peanut kind of way. I'm glad the night's are drawing out because January - which ended yesterday - felt like 31 days of doom and gloom, with some bright spots, like carrots in vomit...

As usual, what you see is what you get and I just hope that I have another week as good as this has been in terms of entertainment value; when the worst thing was Nosferatu but almost everything else was well worth watching, then I think I'm doing something right. Let's see what tomorrow might bring...