My Cultural Life - This Year's Model

What's Out?

I had a dentist's appointment in May 2024, but it coincided with the day of my good friend George's funeral, so I cancelled it and it was subsequently rearranged for December 4th. On that day, my dentist examined my teeth, took some x-rays and announced that I needed a root canal on my first pre-molar and this would be done at my next appointment on June 23, 2025...

However, during January, I started to have some serious problems with the tooth and so began three months of dental hell. I managed to get an emergency appointment by lying, except I wasn't. I made out the pain was worse than it was but by the time the emergency appointment arrived - 9 hours later - I really was in some discomfort. I was given antibiotics and told my name would go on the emergency list - in bright red.

I ended up needing two courses of penicillin before another emergency appointment at the end of February saw me undergo my first ever root canal. Because there had been some damage to the root, the dentist stuck a temporary filling in and intended to replace it with a metal one at the end of June. I was relatively pain free for the first time in months. However, that wasn't to last. Over the next five weeks, I had problems with the area around the tooth; it was sensitive (but not painful), itchy and weird. While I did everything that I was told - rinsing with warm salty water after meals and regular flossing - on Monday 24th March both temporary filling fell out almost simultaneously. I managed to get an emergency appointment for the 26th and within five minutes of sitting in the chair, the dentist told me that the tooth had become compromised and it was allowing foreign material to get into the root canal, causing infection and the tooth was no longer salvageable. It had to come out.

It was the fifth ever extraction of my near on 63 years and - touch wood - it's been the easiest and least painful. that might be because it had the nerves removed in February, or it might be because it came out with little or no fuss and left no serious damage around the socket. I actually wish it had been taken out in December, but at that point I doubt anyone - apart from the wife - thought it was going to be lost. The thing is a gap of over six months between identifying a small crack in the tooth and the start of decay to when the root canal was supposed to have been done is far too long, especially as it was sensitive in December and it was likely to become a problem sooner rather than later. But this is the problem with dentists in the UK in 2025; pretty much the same problem as anything else - not enough people, not enough money, not enough care. Just another example of how the UK is pretty much broken and there isn't a single political party who care about fixing it. Us plebs have just got to be grateful we have MPs looking after their own interests for us...

To Love and Obey 

What I knew about Companion you could write in big letters on the back of a postage stamp. I had an inkling about its star - Sophie Thatcher - by virtue of the film's poster, but other than that nada, nothing, zip. So, because I had this preconception, I completely second guessed the movie's premise and got that wrong - by a country mile - and therefore postponed watching it until this Saturday night, when it seemed the best of a bad bunch of films on the Flash Drive of Doom (FDoD). Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be an absolutely splendid - if slightly contrived - 'horror' satire. The really clever thing about this film is even when you find out the twist - which happens about 20 minutes into the movie - it in no way spoils the fun; in fact, if anything it makes it more enjoyable. Yet even that didn't go the way you thought it was going to go. For a 90 minute feature, this has a surprising amount of cliché busting going on.

Jack Quaid stars as Thatcher's boyfriend, who has an elaborate plan to make a lot of money at the expense of a friend who is having an affair with a Russian millionaire. This plan involves Iris (Thatcher) but despite it going according to plan something goes wrong in the aftermath leaving Quaid, his friend and their two gay companions having to clean up a mess that wasn't supposed to happen. This is a movie full of deprecating humour; it's like the film knows it's a sci-fi story but if shit like this happens in the real world then real shit happens. It's very funny; totally crazy and a bit weird. Thatcher is excellent, as is Quaid and the rest of the cast play their parts. It was, or at least started out as, a Saturday night piece of filler, but ended up being a quality piece of filmmaking that I recommend and give it a solid 7.5/10.  

Binge Watch

You know it's going to be a light week when two of the opening three days of the week have been... [ahem] ... punishing. Started last week, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night have been The Punisher nights, as we binge watched something we spent eight years avoiding. This is a series with a really high score on IMDB and I now understand why. This isn't really Marvel's Frank Castle, this is an army vet who avenges the deaths of his family, in what he originally thought to be a mob hit, but now appears to have been done by or at least authorised by a CIA agent that Frank and his team first met in Kandahar, Afghanistan. This very dodgy man who is now high up in the CIA wants to erase every trace of Castle and anyone associated with him. This isn't a Marvel vigilante show, this is just a grim, violent and relentless story of subterfuge and double crossing; of bad spies and soldiers just following orders. Castle doesn't even get his trademark skull top out until two thirds of the way through. 

It also features Ebon Moss-Bacharach (soon to be Ben Grimm - the Thing) as the former CIA analyst who 'recruits' Frank to help them both clear their names. There's some dodgy acting in this - specifically from Amber Rose Revah as Home Security officer Madani, Ben Barnes as Billy Russo (with his wandering accent) and a number of other supporting characters, but Jon Bernthal, Moss-Bacharach, Deborah Ann Woll (as Karen Page) and Daniel Wilson as Lewis more than make up for this. If you've never been tempted by The Punisher this isn't what you might expect, so it's worth a look. 8/10

By the end of the week, we'd started season two. The opening episode sees Frank in a bar in Michigan, he's travelling. This appears to involve Russians, some possible call girls and even more violence, plus there's a spectre of his past lying in a heavily guarded hospital bed, who we'll probably get to know as Jigsaw. It just doesn't feel like the Punisher, who, to be fair, was always a really incongruous addition to Marvel comics pantheon. He debuted as a villain of Spider-Man and caught a zeitgeist in the mid to late 80s that spawned umpteen comics, with the occasional dance with a proper superhero to remind people he belonged in the same universe as Galactus and Thor. 

Primate

I've seen a few slightly negative reviews of The Monkey, but I think they all missed the point. I don't think they got it. This would have been called in the old days a black comedy, probably the blackest with a bit of slapstick and a lot of inventiveness and for the second time this week I sat down to watch something I thought I'd dislike and ended up laughing like a drain for much of it. With Severance having ended, I didn't expect to see Adam Scott (Mark S) again so soon, but he pops up right at the beginning of this, looking frazzled, in a pilot's suit, trying to give the 'toy' monkey he purchased back to the owner of the shop. This results in the owner being disembowelled in the most unlikely way. And that is this film from start to finish - how to kill people in the most inventive ways imaginable while sticking with a narrative which is simple - the monkey kills indiscriminate amount of people but probably not the one who activates it. Yet, to say the monkey kills them is a stretch because the monkey just watches and plays his drum, the rest is up to everything else.

Theo James plays twin brothers Hal and Billy whose lives are plagued and haunted by the 'toy' monkey their father brought them and they've never truly been able to rid themselves of - chopping it up, chucking it down a well - every way you try to destroy the monkey it just comes back more malevolent than ever. This is a peculiar movie which doesn't take itself too seriously (and I think the reviews didn't get this; I think they believe the humour - of which there's a lot - is misplaced for a 'horror' film) and it's all the better for it. It was made by Osgood Perkins, the guy who made Longlegs last year and that was the best horror film I've seen in a long time. This wasn't as good, but it was still quite excellent. 7/10

Double Dare

On the day that Marvel announced the cast list for Avengers Doomsday, they also released two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again. The latter was far more entertaining than the former (which we will get to later) because the Matt Murdock show has been the best thing from the MCU since the last Avengers film. In the first of the two parts, we get a strange standalone episode which features Kamala (Ms Marvel) Khan's father as a bank employee who turns Matt down for a loan to improve his law firm. It was extremely weird to have Ms Marvel's father in a TV show that has so many fucks in it. The entire episode is about a bank heist that Matt gets involved in; it's set during the St Patrick's Day parades in NYC and none of the other supporting cast feature. It might possibly have been one of the episodes that was shot before the entire series revamp, who can say?

The second part of the double bill was more like we've come to expect, with Matt and Fisk's lives mirrored on screen from the two of them having their own interesting breakfast conversations to the conclusion with both of them involved in things we associate these characters with - violence. While Matt struggles with his identity, Fisk is establishing a vigilante task force, made up of dirty cops. The main characters' conundrums are set in motion by The Muse, who is more than just a graffiti artist - a lot more... Muse is suspected to be a serial killer due to the fact that his murals are painted on walls with a mixture of epoxy and blood; lots of blood and from different victims - at least 60. We're heading towards the last three parts of the series first half so we need the characters we've tuned in for to come out fighting and that is exactly what happens. as Matt wrestles with bringing DD out of retirement, Fisk discovers the people who truly own (and run) the city and this just makes him angrier.

SHOUTY

What's not to like? A TV show about what happens behind the scenes in Hollywood. A show that deals the dirt on how stuff gets made. Jam-packed with famous guest stars; a top quality production team and fabulous reviews (at least there was one, in The Guardian). So it really seemed like a no-brainer when The Studio finally dropped, on Apple TV+ no less. There was really only one problem - it was a huge pile of steaming shite. I mean truly awful, filled to the brim with dislikeable characters who didn't so much act as just chew their way round the sets SHOUTING AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. I really thought Seth Rogen had a winner here, but even he was shite. This thing had Kathryn Hahn in it and she was the worst thing in her own TV series. Rogen plays a Hollywood exec who gets the top job at his studio when the new owner - Bryan Cranston - fires Rogen's old boss and gives him the job on the condition that he makes profitable blockbuster movies, not auteur films (which is what he wants to make). To say this was unfunny, facile, unrealistic and a bag of shit is almost a compliment. We had the opening two episodes to watch, barely got through the first part and both had exactly the same thoughts about it - independently. Part two will never see the light of day in this house and that's a shame because I had hopes, but the first episode was so bad I don't want to subject myself to that shit again.

Trailer Trash-ette

Marvel/Disney spent over FIVE hours releasing the names of the confirmed cast members for Avengers Doomsday on the 26th March. It started with a 'directors chair' for Chris Hemsworth and then literally unveiled lots and lots of chairs with names on the back. They wheeled out the cast members of Thunderbolts (suggesting that no one dies in that film, not even the villain), the new Black Panther plus a supporting character from those films and Namor. The four - forthcoming - members of the Fantastic Four, the New Captain America and Falcon, Ant-Man, Shang-Chi, the interesting announcement that Tom Hiddleston would be back as Loki and then it ended with the big reveal of Robert Downey Jr. Except that wasn't the only 'big' thing; that was The X-Men and actors such as Patrick Stewart, Ian McLellan, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden and Channing Tatum interspersed with all the others... Seriously you could feel people's will to live disappearing as more and more names of people who left this superhero lark ages ago were being confirmed in a film that looks as though it will have as many stars in it as minutes on screen. It wouldn't have been so bad had they announced a Jackman, a Berry, a Janssen, even a Reynolds, maybe a Ruffalo, or an Evans, a Holland or even a Renner. The movie is in production and is directed by the Russo Brothers. Underwhelmed is a thing, isn't it? 

The thing is I'm hearing rumours that RDjr isn't playing Victor Von Doom, he's Tony Stark from one of the other levels of the multiverse. That sort of sucks because it's fucking around with one of the sacred characters of the Marvel Universe. He was the ruler of a country, in Eastern Europe. He was the first true 'supervillain.' It's comics heritage... Plus, if this is going to be a cosmic epic with earths shattering consequences, where's Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine, Colossus, Rogue, Jean Grey, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, the younger versions of Professor X and Magneto, at least there's a better chance of both still being alive at the end of filming? There's a lot of setting up to do in Thunderbolts* (which I now believe is going to be a scene setter movie because of Sentry's involvement) and Fantastic Four: First Steps unless they're sneaking another film out between the FF and Avengers: Doomsday in May 2026?

Comic Genius?

Here's a few things ... We don't like Jim Carrey, with a couple of exceptions he is an actor who we avoid like the plague. We used to really like Andy Kaufman, but our exposure to him was essentially Latka in Taxi; he wasn't really big in pre-cable/satellite TV in the UK. We're big fans of REM, we think the song Man on the Moon is great, yet we have never seen the movie Man on the Moon. As 2025 so far has been about us watching things from the 1990s that we never bothered with, it seemed logical that at some point we'd park our prejudices towards Carrey and watch the film. The reason for this change of heart is the Andy Kaufman documentary that's coming out next month; I thought Man on the Moon would be a good place to really see if he was actually a funny man or if it was simply just a case of Latka was a funny character (with lines he didn't write).

The thing is Milos Forman's biopic is apparently really accurate - although it was weird watching a film about a comic actor who rose to fame in Taxi with Danny DeVito playing his real life manager when everyone who watched Taxi remembers DeVito as Louie, the cab rank manager. I expect it was even weirder for DeVito, who said in an interview years ago how he was great friends with Kaufman in real life, yet Louie is the only cast member of Taxi not seen in the sections of this film that featured the classic NYC comedy. 

If this film is anything to go by, Andy Kaufman was not a particularly funny guy; he was not some kind of comic genius, he was just good at tickling the surreal funny bones of many Americans. He didn't tell jokes; he wasn't very funny out of character - in fact, he was fucking annoying - and even his best loved character was only funny because of the lines that were put in his mouth and, allegedly, he didn't even want the job, he just used it as a stepping stone to further his own career. He did like pushing the borders of comedy, the problem was most people didn't get the 'jokes'. Carrey is great as the 'comic' and while the two of them didn't really look alike there is a similarity and Carrey is a great mimic so he got characters like Latka and Tony Clifton down pat. The thing is Kaufman just wasn't that funny, not under the microscope of a biopic. Following his short life (he died of a rare kind of lung cancer at 35) from wanting to be an entertainer when he was a child in the 1950s to his final days was actually really difficult; the fact he was a genius at setting up situations where the audience didn't know if something was real or part of his surreal shows was probably one of his only real abilities - the problem was they could be construed as in-jokes, designed by him to entertain the few not the many.

Carrey, when he acts, is brilliant; this is a part that was designed for him. Courtney Love as his love interest puts in a solid performance, as does Paul Giamatti as his writing partner Bob Zmuda (who doubled up as Tony Clifton at times). DeVito is excellent as George Shapiro, Kaufman's friend and manager and the real people who played themselves 15 years on were all much older. It's a good film, but it's also quite cold and oddly enough like Bob Dylan's recent biopic where the least likeable person was the star of the film, Andy Kaufman might have shone brightly for a while, but he was actually a bit of an arsehole at times, while being something of a saint at others - the problem is these were very rarely seen on screen. This is a good film but I can't really give it more than a 6.5/10.

A Semblance of Reality

It is Friday night as I write this. We have just spent the last few hours in our reopened community-owned town pub. It's been four years since we had a proper night out at the pub that is 110 paces from front door to front door and we've been missing it. All we had was two pints, but we saw old friends, made new friends and just basked in the fantastic feeling of having our pub back. It beat staying in and watching some shite film...

What's Up Next?

Double bubble Dope Thief and Daredevil Bjorn Again goes Abba. Probably some films. What you see is what I get.