My Cultural Life - Double Catastrophe Bubble

What's Up?

It's clear that the lunatics are taking over this asylum we call Earth, but the amount of humans blindly following the dangerous clowns running the planet is far worse. Not that I necessarily subscribe to this, but until February 28th - ish - Russia was the bad guy in this movie. Whatever the Orange Shitler in charge of the USA is doing, we suddenly find ourselves in a world where very many Americans, who have always viewed Russians as a) the enemy and b) communists, now view them as a decent and honest place and the Ukraine as some dodgy country that instigated a war with its bigger, stronger, nicer neighbour to beg and con money from the 'western world', taunt us with the idea of World War 3 and ruin the decorum of state visits by not wearing a suit...

The thing is, it's not just Americans. There are loads of gammony twats in this country allowing this echo chamber of lies and nastiness to grow louder and gain more traction. We are well and truly fucked if we allow politics to continue on this dangerous path. All the things people think they're fighting for will stop and a world that is run by authoritarian fascists will become a reality, moderate countries with 'democracies' will be weak and the last to sit at the important tables of 'politics'. We are fucking doomed and it's going to happen far quicker than you would guess. Next up is a Reform government; one which shuts the UK's doors; gets rid of our basic human rights; strips women of their independence, as well as stuff like maternity leave and equality and the NHS will be sold off to the USA inside three months. The gammons will be cheering from the rooftops until the changes start to affect them or their loved ones. However, by then it will be too late and you'll just have enough time to slather on some Vaseline before your butt is fucked harder than a comet hitting the Earth...

Gemma's Story

Slightly ahead of the schedule I believed Severance was going to take, we get a look at the past, at Lumon before Mark Scout joined them, as a recovery aid after the death of his wife, Gemma. Obviously, at the end of the first season we discovered Gemma was not dead, but was in fact working as a severed individual on the same floor as Mark S. This extremely disjointed and chronologically weird episode looks at how Mark and Gemma got together, some of the trials and tribulations they went through and how Lumon played a huge part in creating a nasty and indeed horrible situation for their own benefit - a benefit we still have absolutely no idea about. However, we did get some hints about what is going on behind the scenes. To be fair, those hints make zero sense out of any form of context and in a strange way this episode felt like treading water a little, despite also feeling as though we were being given a huge number of clues about everything. You will come to one conclusion at the end of this seventh part; a conclusion I'm not about to spoil for you... [More on Friday] 

Breaking Coach Bad

Looking back on this blog from April 2023, I confirmed my suspicion that I'd, indeed, given up on Yellowjackets and wasn't going watch any more episodes. I wonder if the people who make it also realised that many people were going to walk away, so they did a deal that held over the third series for 24 months, in the hope that most people will have forgotten that it's actually just a total load of old wank? This fourth instalment of season three tried its best to seem like it was really going places, but the truth is this is a pile of shit masquerading as a semi-serious TV show. The utterly ludicrous events in the past just get crazier and more like Lost every week, while the really slightly zany and boring events in the present seem to flip flop between mystical mumbo-jumbo and bat-shit stupid.

In the past, the remaining girls (of which there appears to be varying numbers week on week) with their huts, Indian Runner ducks, their pet rabbits and stuff that they either managed to salvage from the burnt down cabin or the remains of the plane - are holding a court to determine whether or not Coach Ben burned down their cabin. Shauna in the past is a fucking cyclopean psychopath, while it's now like everyone there has flipped roles, with Misty seemingly now sensible. It's just utter cock. Seriously, they have a trial for poor old Ben, who just wants to be left alone, and it was always going to end the way Shauna wanted it. The am-dram feel to the past events coupled with the underlying lesbian tensions floating around the entire camp have made it a little on the distasteful side. While the present is just treading water with no real direction, lots of extended mumbo-jumbo and the attempts to make it seem like there's a genuine mystery to be solved when all it does is remind everyone that the adult versions of the kids are either really boring or just as annoying as their younger selves.

We have officially given up on Yellowjackets, it's about an hour a week that neither of us enjoys. I mean, the wife isn't a fan of Severance, but she hasn't given up on it. When I said I didn't want to watch Yellowjackets any more, the wife gave up without a fight. Goodbye pile of turds; the first series was fun.

Existentially A Woody Allen Film

The choice this Saturday night was not to watch Severance or Yellowjackets, but something that would be entertaining to our houseguest who was not familiar with these TV shows. Over on ITV2 they were playing Godzilla: King of the Monsters and as this was no temptation - and understandably so given what a load of shit the bits in between the monster fights are - we decided to watch Jesse Eisenberg's film A Real Pain, which starred the writer and director with (now Academy Award winner) Keiran Culkin as his cousin, as they navigate Poland to revisit the places their recently dead grandmother lived before she ended up in a concentration camp... Yeah, I know, what an exciting idea for a Saturday night film when you have a guest. Billed as a comedy, it was fortuitously short (under 85 minutes). Eisenberg played the Woody Allen type character; shy, slightly neurotic, a bit paranoid and self-conscious, while Culkin was just an absolute raging arsehole, who started off charming everyone on the Holocaust trip on the first day and had pissed everyone off by the third day. It's clear that Culkin's character has some serious issues, but he could just be an entitled arsehole from the USA (or a MAGA twat), it's difficult to differentiate. There wasn't much comedy in this and it was really quite boring. If I had to be objective and give it a mark it would struggle to get a 4/10.

Goodbye Boring Hotels

The thing is you've got to watch things that you enjoy otherwise there's no point in watching anything. So we say goodbye to The White Lotus and this third season of fuck all happening. Yes, there's a mass shooting at the resort that will undoubtedly happen in the eighth episode and several characters are being set up to tip over the edge and Aimee Lou Wood is entertaining as the Mancunian girlfriend of miserable Walton Goggins, but I simply don't give a flying fuck enough. We sat through another hour of absolutely fuck all happening and that was enough for us. This show simply doesn't do enough to keep us watching. I can't understand why it's so popular and frankly, I don't want to understand. My life isn't going to be ruined if I never watch another episode, therefore I'm never watching another episode. 

Like Diarrhoea 

This could have been better. It could have at least started better rather than feeling like a 1980s let's take the piss out of the Irish show you might see on ITV. To say Small Town Big Story was a load of shite would be accurate. Paddy Considine and Christina Hendricks both get paid for starring in this six-part story about something happening in a small Irish town that involves a US production company making a film or something there. Hendricks plays an executive who used to live in one of the places vying for the contract; so she goes back to scope out the possible venues and reacquaint herself with people she once grew up with. One of those appears to be Considine, who is now a doctor. It's woeful. I mean really badly acted with a story that might involve a flying saucer and a load of stereotypical Oirish characters, begorah. It was fucking awful - don't go there.

Poisonous

This has some spoilers - not a lot because it's an historical thing and it's all over Wiki...

I think you will all agree that this week's televisual entertainment hasn't been Grade A stuff. In fact, it's been more like D-. Even the stuff I like hasn't been up to the level I'd expect and two things have been dumped as a result. However, speaking of dumped, you'd be well advised to try and watch the Flix of Net's Toxic Town, with Jodie Whitaker, Rory Kinnear and Aimee Lou Wood. I recommend it for a number of reasons, primarily because it's good, old fashioned, excellent TV, but also because it's about Corby and Northants and the entire period when this show covered (for artistic licence from 1995, but in reality since the mid 1980s), I worked in and around Corby and this was something that was always going on in the background, haunting people who lived there and some of the families I worked with.

Let's get the cons out of the way first. The accents of all the cast (with a couple of obvious exceptions - Robert Carlyle for one) wavered all over the place. You would have thought that Corby was oop north and not actually dubbed Little Scotland and sits in the north east of Northants - closer to Leicestershire and Rutland than anywhere else. Jodie Whitaker's Susan had an accent that wandered all over the shop - at times she sounded very Irish, at others a bit like her native Yorkshire; of the supporting cast only the aforementioned Carlyle and a former employee of Corby Borough Council - Ted Jenkins - sounded like they'd been anywhere near Scotland, yet the town and the surrounding area has kind of allowed Scotland to ingrain itself; it's the local dialect; everyone has a hint of Scots...

Anyone who remembers Northants and Corby from the 1980s will remember Wonderworld - the slightly ludicrous idea to build a Disney-styled theme park on the site of the old steel works. It came and went in the news for 15 years before it was buried after a fire in 2001. The idea was to clean the site and build a park on it - Corby would be rolling in it. Except it never happened and Corby Borough Council used dodgy contractors, cut corners and allowed waste with heavy metals to be transported across the town, infecting pregnant women the length and breadth of this relatively nondescript Northamptonshire town. When Whitaker's character meets Wood's mum in the maternity ward it sets off a relationship that ends up being a little like the recent Mr Bates versus the Post Office TV show and the entire PO scandal. It takes 13 years to bring the people responsible to some kind of admission of guilt. Rory Kinnear is fantastic in it, but he now seems to do fantastic all the time (his dad would be proud) and Aimee Lou Wood is an absolute star of the future - the best thing in the woeful third season of The White Lotus and equally brilliant in this. There are some blurred lines; a few tweaks with the truth and no mention at all that Corby Borough Council tried to tie an appeal up in the High Courts for years to avoid paying out. It is well worth watching and as a mini-series I give it a 9/10.

Endgame?

Do you know what's wrong with Paradise? The middle of it. Episodes one to three were pretty excellent; then four through six felt like we were just treading water and nothing was really happening. Then the final two parts ... episode seven was without a doubt the head and shoulders winner of the best episode of the series, but the finale does something that I approved of. It left it open for a sequel, but closed enough doors for it to be a one-off series. Yes, there's a few loose ends, but... there is in life. This finale has Xavier Collins racing against time to find the real killer of Cal Bradford with his daughter's life at stake. In the end it turned out to be quite easy to solve, but it did take a fortuitous break to crack the case and we at least had been privy to the killer's identity since the opening episode (in more ways than one). In the end it was a taut and impressive thriller - which you would expect with Sterling K Brown and James Marsters in it. Julianne Nicholson really does play an evil cold hearted bitch so well that every moment she's on screen you want her to die as horribly as possible. I might even be tempted to watch the second series as it has been renewed.

Every Little Hurts

Tesco, the supermarket of the masses, is basically a load of old shite. The quality of the produce they sell has been a constant bane for me for the last 20 odd years (probably longer, but I used to like the shop back in the 20th century). Our closest branch is in Stranraer - a 25 mile journey for what is essentially a Tesco Express - and we use it for paneer (Indian cheese), washing powder liquid, vegetarian Thai crackers and not a lot else. About a year or so ago I did a consumer watch article about decaffeinated 'coffee' and concluded that all decaf is shit but Tesco's decaf is the shittiest. 

We had to go to Castle Douglas last week. It's the shopping centre of Galloway unless you want to go to Dumfries (or Ayr). It has a brand new Aldi, a super-sized Co-op, and it has a proper Tesco 'superstore'. It's the biggest supermarket in Galloway and it sells a larger variety of whatever the local shit Tesco sells. We checked out the new Aldi and it's a bigger, cleaner version of the one in Newton Stewart, before hitting Tesco. When we left, we were both quite impressed. Not only did they have most of what we wanted, they seemed to have a wider range of things that interested us. We hadn't been in any other Tesco apart from Stranraer for over a year and we both felt positive... However, the two cases of Tesco dog food caused a massive stomach upset in the boys, resulting in a £100 vet's bill for super-twat Doug, who had a really severe, almost allergic reaction and five days of Neep pumping out noxious gas and they only had it for two days before we stopped and switched back to their usual food. Then, we saw a range of vegetarian burgers that were being phased out and were there for 50p a packet (instead of £1.95); so we bought two packs and had then for dinner on the wife's birthday, in buns with some salad. They were fucking atrocious. Flavourless discs of soggy gunge with crispy edges (I checked on line and found the reason it was discontinued - it had a rating of 1.7 (out of 5) and some horrendous reviews. Then, this morning I opened the carton of milk (pictured above), which won't have hit its expiry date for days after this blog goes live. Taken out of a fridge that is less than 9 months old, it curdled in our hot beverages and when the wife sniffed it, her face said it all - the milk had gone bad. The moral of this story is we were right about Tesco and we shouldn't have thought they'd improved. In terms of quality, they make Aldi look like fucking Fortnum and Mason's...

Old Hackers

I suppose if you saw a film 33 years ago there's a good chance, if it didn't make that much of an impression on you, that you would not remember anything about it. I mean, that's a third of a century and there have been loads of sleeps since then. Watching the star-studded Sneakers again was a bit like watching a low budget Mission Impossible pilot, except Tom Cruise is Robert Redford, Ving Rhames is Sidney Poitier, Simon Pegg is Dan Ackroyd and whoever the female member of the team is then you have an incredibly youthful Mary McDonnell. Throw in some youth in the form of River Phoenix and - the wild card - David Strathairn in one of his first roles as a blind hacker. Sneakers really feels like a prototype for what was to come a few years later. The weird thing about it is considering it's 33 years old and in 1992 the computer industry was literally just finding its feet, this is an almost prescient movie, with the ability to hack into any government agency and do anything you want from shut down lights to crash planes and it's the job of Redford's team to firstly steal said box and then steal the box again when they discover they've been hoodwinked. 

If this was made today it would be nearly three hours long and be action-packed, full on, in your face with state of the art computer technology... Hang on a minute, what this film actually is might surprise you a little... It's essentially the most recent Mission Impossible film and then the final one in the franchise. This is about technology that enables whoever possesses it to control everything and it's up to a rogue bunch of people to stop it. Seriously, I'm not making this up. Only 6/10 because it was actually really a comedy that wasn't particularly funny. 

Double Dare Part One

It's been a long time since the Netflix Daredevil series. They were by far the most enjoyable of the Marvel 'Defenders' Universe that stuck around for about five years before the Disney takeover and everything (mostly) going in house. We've seen both Daredevil (in She-Hulk) and the Kingpin (in Echo and Hawkeye) and Fisk's excursions were touched upon in an electric scene between Matt Murdoch and his nemesis taking place in a cafeteria. The Man Without Fear's meeting with Jennifer Walters wasn't touched on, in fact I expect very little of that will ever get mentioned, but there are a total of 17 episodes in Daredevil: Born Again and after the opening episode an awful lot might happen over the next couple of years (the series will be split into two halves). This Daredevil is an incredibly visceral TV show; it's violent, sweary and very much 18-rated, so the idea of it being on Disney+ feels slightly incongruous, like having the Punisher spanking jay walkers or Thanos making half the universe's population of rabbits move to the Shetlands...

Originally this show had six episodes in the can when Marvel pulled the plug, got hold of the Loki creators Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and recruited Punisher writer Dario Scardapane to work up something new and far grittier than what had been made. The 'shelved' original series didn't even have Deborah Ann Woll or Elden Hensen (Karen and Foggy) in it; so they were brought back and very little of what was originally filmed was kept and this now followed the three Netflix series rather than start again... It opens I'd guess at around a year or so after DD's big punch up with Fisk, possibly longer. Events happen that fuck up everyone's lives and Matt gives up being Daredevil. A year later, now in a swanky law firm detached from those he loves for various reasons, he discovers that Wilson Fisk, back in public life after being shot in the face, is running for mayor and that's all you really need to know. I had an idea, from trailers, that this was going to break the Disney+ mould and within ten minutes there was the first 'fuck'. Several cringe-inducing bone fractures and extreme violence later and we were back in Netflix territory, except it was like Disney told Netflix to hold its beer while it beat the shit out of the streaming platform next to them. If this is a 17 episodes series (albeit in two chunks), then I just hope they keep the quality as high as the opener. Let's be straight about it - if it does manage to do that then this won't simply be the best TV thing Marvel/Disney has done - by several country miles - it might be the best thing they have ever done - full stop! 

Oscar Bollocks

Anora, the film which won five Academy Awards last week, spent £18m promoting the film to Academy members. The film cost just under £6m to make, so the production company spent three times the film's making budget trying to persuade people to vote for it... Just let that sink in for a minute. You see, it's possible that Anora (which we have lined up to watch in the coming days) won its Oscar not because it was the best film of the year, but because it was essentially bought. This bugs me because what we're being told is the actual best film of 2024 might not even have been nominated. And therein lies the biggest problem with awards ceremonies - if it's decided on the 'popular vote', ie: everybody votes; you end up with something ridiculous like Kong x Godzilla or Borderlands winning; so it's down to people who are given the vote and they can be bought, therefore do we ever truly know if the 'best film' is the best film or just the best patronised by its production company? Perhaps Academy members were treated to a night with a prostitute for their vote? Who can say? All it does do is make the Oscars a pointless excuse to get famous people to line up to have their photos taken and the rest of the world's press to fawn over it.

Double Dare Part Two 

After the cracking pace of the opening episode, this took a more leisurely approach to things and for most of it it was all above moving chess pieces and getting players into their future positions. At least that was what happened with Matt, Wilson and some of the other supporting characters. What we didn't see coming was the introduction of the White Tiger - a character that never appeared in Daredevil comics when I was into them. It was done in a clever way with the backdrop of a cop killing, Fisk's difficult situation with the NYPD and Matt taking on a case that no one wants him to. This wasn't as brilliant as the opener, but you can't expect that 10/10 quality for all this season's first nine parts. Oh and then there was the ending of this... It leaves you with one question: Where is this show going to go now?

Infinitely Marvellous 

So how did this happen? With a Flash Drive of Doom again overflowing with new and old films, why did we opt to watch Avengers: Infinity War? Well, after Daredevil Born Again resonating with us so much, we fancied watching something from the quality period of the MCU and what better than the film I've believed for a number of years to be the Marvel masterpiece - the Empire Strikes Back of the MCU. To be honest, if you don't know what this is about then it doesn't matter because you're not going to watch it, but it sizzles with snappy dialogue, lots of unrelenting action and, of course, the despair and tragedy from the death of an Asgardian at the start to the death of half of the universe at the end, this was (and is) a film that Marvel has never been able to match. The Russo Brothers knocked it out of the park with this and haven't made a film since that can even sniff this one's boots. 9/10

Don't Look Now

It's hard to believe that Bird Box is seven years old. It feels like only last week that it was being promoted as... well, I'm not sure, but it was being promoted. Netflix went big on it and, of course, Sandra Bullock was still reasonably big box office thanks to Gravity. The thing is it never appealed to me, so I never got hold of it and subsequently the years passed. Obviously I changed my mind otherwise we wouldn't be here now and despite the obvious flaws in the general plot this was a relatively gripping movie with, for me, a predictable ending. I say that because about two thirds of the way through I mentioned to the wife about a certain group of people that had been conveniently ignored for the majority of the movie; but if you haven't seen this film then I'm not going to say any more, because while it wouldn't spoil the film it would take away some of the impact of the finale.

Bullock plays a single, bordering middle aged, mum-to-be; an artist living alone being pestered by her sister. The two of them go to the obstetrician and while they're there they hear about something sweeping Eastern Europe, causing people to spontaneously kill themselves. By the time they've finished having the scan it has arrived in the USA and it's through more luck than judgement that Bullock survives and finds herself in a suburban house with a bunch of other survivors. This is all told in flashback, because in the 'present', she and her two children are travelling down river to find a sanctuary that is supposedly safe and essentially the two storylines catch up with each other towards the end of the movie. Is this the work of aliens, the work of demons or something that is just preposterous bollocks, given that insane people are not particularly affected by whatever the creatures that drive you mad and suicidal are? Despite the slightly preposterous idea, it isn't that bad a feature and it's worth a better than average 6.5/10.

Harmony's Story

This might contain some spoilers...

Patricia Arquette is the focus of this eighth episode of Severance. If you've been wondering where Harmony Kobel had gotten to then this - sort of - answers the question. She's back in Newfoundland, where she came from and where Lumon and the Egan family started their business. She's there to retrieve something from her sister - a pariah, apparently - and to make some discoveries. Let's be clear about something; Severance is weird and fucked up, but it's not as weird and fucked up as Harmony Kobel or this 'standalone' episode. There are some clues about what is going on and more importantly Kobel spends some time standing next to a 'cold harbour' where the first Lumon warehouse was situated. What I got from this is that Lumon and the Egan family is not a business but a fully-fledged cult, with people who enforce their will and ensure that 'outsiders' don't understand what is going on. Like I've said before Severance is a modern horror story, but it's also about faith, dedication and belief and Harmony doesn't believe she's been treated fairly so might now be Lumon's biggest problem, especially as she's now talking to Mark Scout. With two parts to go it's obvious we're in for season three, I just hope that it ends with that and gives us a plausible conclusion.

What's Up Next?

Avengers: Endgame is probably going to be Saturday night's film; I mean, why not? We watched Infinity War so we might as well close that circle. Obviously, my general disdain for Endgame is well known; there is much wrong with it, but it also still brings a tear to my eye and as a cinematic Marvel grand guignol it really was the jumping off point Disney probably could have done without...

We get more Daredevil Born Again and because we gave up on a couple of shows and others have finished it might be an interesting week of finding something else to watch. Part of me wants to give the two Netflix Punisher series a go, because we never bothered with them (I've always had a problem with the character, tbh) and they might be relevant to the new Daredevil series. The penultimate Severance will undoubtedly be back inside Lumon HQ, but you never know really; it might take place inside a wombat's arse.

As usual what I see is what you get!