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!