My Cultural Life - 63

What's Up?

Gammons, eh? Always wanting some idyllic past where every day was the summer of 1976 and everything was less than 5p to buy. It goes wider than that - Nostalgia Gammons tend to forget all about the shit things from the 1970s, or the fact that if we were back in the 1970s there would be so many things we didn't have which we have now - shingles, four channels of TV, paedophiles having the choice of whoever they want while the establishment turn a blind eye, footballers in shorts that would be a crime against decency 50 years later; there many more horrible things they've managed to forget in their desire for the world to be a simpler, happier place...

However, there is one thing I miss about a pre-digital, pre-mobile phone world - relative safety from opportunistic scammers, actually scammers makes it sound like they're some opportunistic wanker, when these people are just slightly lower than scum. This morning (Good Friday; I'm writing this section later than most of the rest of this blog), I heard about two scams that would never have happened had we never heard the word App. The first was a 'banking app' that works as a proper thing that pretends to pay money to people, goes through all the motions that a real banking app would but doesn't really pay any money into your bank account; it just says it has happened, all on an authentic screen. I mean, how often did external banking fraud happen before mobile devices and the digital age? How difficult was it to even get a penny out of someone's accounts without having to go through at least one human being with the resources at hand to tell you whether something is genuine or not? We are encouraged to switch to online banking almost daily, yet it doesn't matter how secure you're told it is - it simply isn't. End of. 

The other 'digital' scam was on Rip Off Britain and featured a man pretending to be a lawyer trying to scam £12,000 from two vulnerable pensioners. Everything about his approach and subsequent Skype call would have seemed totally legit to any older people who find the internet daunting or even frightening. If a bell hadn't run inside the head of the wife of these targeted people they could have been cleared out and the gurning man, in his 50s, who was smoothly explaining to them why they were responsible for a debt on an old time share they once owned, really was the kind of person who you wished the worst kind of karma on. The thing is, this wouldn't have happened without the internet, without Face Time apps. This would not have happened in a pre-internet/phone apps time. If it was possible to disconnect from the internet, I'd seriously consider it, but modern life has made that almost impossible to do. As a resource it has immeasurable wealth, but as a way for individuals to connect it is the beginning of the end of yet another thing in links towards the next extinction event.

On a lighter note... [An aside: 'On a lighter note' was the name of the very first column I ever wrote for a comics fanzine in 1977.] Actually, there's a relevance there. That was the start of the journey which has led me to where I am today and today - if you are reading this on the 19th - is my 63rd birthday. I hope to spend the evening in the newly opened pub, with friends (some in spirit) and some actual quality beverages. Then the day the next blog drops I'm bringing back my pub quiz to the place where it all started (I did do a couple for my mate in Northampton and got the bug for it). In April 2018, I was doing the Craft's second pub quiz. On the same date seven years later I will be doing my first at the Wigtown Ploughman, it will be my 30th in that building.

[Ahem] Doctor Poo

There was one great scene in the new series of Doctor Who. That was when new assistant Belinda Chandra basically calls the Doctor out for a number of really uncool things, such as stealing her DNA and thinking she's just going to roll over and become his sidekick without question... And, frankly, who wouldn't? It took just under ten minutes for Old Leaky Eyes to have his first cry as a woman he'd singled out to be a future companion is fried - almost Dalek style - by marauding robots on a planet that has got turned inside out by a rift in time, meaning that things that happened only happened because other things happened which would not have happened - it's paradox city baby and, of course, Russell T Davies doesn't give a hoot about the mechanics of time travel if he's making a TV show about a time traveller. 

The problem is the entire reason for the episode, the huge number of deaths and various other things was down to the fact if Belinda had not been abducted by robot aliens, she wouldn't have told them to search out the person who gave her the thing that makes this entire episode possible which results in her being abducted by alien robots. So many people die in the wake of this Doctor who doesn't even give his surname away so is hiding something immediately. Such a waste of [fictional] lives just so that the Doctor could team up with his nurse or so he can do whatever he wants. I don't know if the moral and ethical part of this episode will ever be fully examined, but at least someone is questioning just what the Doctor is doing and the cost of it for innocent bystanders. 

I don't want to come across as all 'woke' but essentially Doctor Who is about an emotionally unstable alien with a personality disorder who is borderline psychopathic with a smattering of narcissist - I'm surprised it's popular, while somewhat unsurprised at the same time. He shouldn't be the good guy. Oddly enough I think that is exactly why Anita Dobson is back as 'the neighbour' - this time to the new 'assistant' - smart money is she's going to be Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, and is pissed off that he left her stranded on earth so many years ago.

Yes, but was it any good though? No. Not really. 

Oh Mickey, You're So Erm...

"That was strange. It was a bit like a Terry Gilliam film," said the wife at the end of Mickey 17. I couldn't disagree although part of me thinks if Gilliam had made it there would have been a sense of giving a shit about the characters. I found myself sitting through the film waiting for a flash of inspiration, of empathy, something to make me go 'woo' but I found it all a bit too overly satirical without any humour. Robert Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, better known as Mickey 1, 2, 3 up to 15, 16 and the ubiquitous 17; he's also 18 who is a little weird and not like his previous incarnations - which might be because when he was recreated his predecessor wasn't dead. You see Mickey is an expendable, which means he dies regularly on the 4½ year mission to Niflheim only to be brought back to continue doing all the jobs that cause death.

This is all played to a backdrop of what society might be like in 30 years time, with a Trump-like would-be messiah - Mark Ruffalo, his obnoxious wife - Toni Collette - and a spaceship full of thoroughly dislikeable and facile characters, including Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie and Thomas Turgoose. Once they arrive on the new planet they are 'greeted' by the indigenous species and what follows is a play on just what wankers the human race are. The special effects were okay, but nowhere near what you'd expect from a film of this one's supposed quality; much of it just felt a little like going through the motions and ultimately I just felt like it offers much more than it delivers. Therefore I struggle to give it anything other than a 6/10.

Ubiquitous

What do you mean you don't know who Pedro Pascal is? Apart from reviewing a show he's in later this evening, he's in almost everything, unless you haven't noticed. He appears so often, in so many TV shows and films that you could wonder if he's actually two people, or that he drinks the juice of freshly crushed undescended testicles twice a day to give him the energy to be in everything all at once. I have no problem with Pedro Pascal, he seems like a nice chap, but Pedro Pascal, whatever role he's playing, is Pedro Pascal. Never clean shaven, his own hairstyle and sporting that rugged but with a heart of candyfloss in a if-I'd-been-born-40-years-ago-I-would-have-been-a-big-Hollywood-heartthrob kind of way. He's in The Last of Us, the Fantastic Four, some other thing, some movie that's being described as a comedy western - which sounds like it needs to be avoided - and I expect as well as the other Marvel films he's signed up to do after the FF he'll be able to squeeze a couple more projects in and some cameos at weekends. I wish I understood why. 

Fart Eyes

Monday night proved to be an eventful one in many ways. We began it by watching Heart Eyes, a film that dropped on some streaming platform on Valentine's Day - a slasher romance? A violent love story? I don't really know because we managed 20 minutes before turning it off. It started off badly and seemed to get worse; the weird thing was I really thought the opening ten minutes was some kind of melodramatic pastiche of old slasher films and we were going to settle into something a little more post-modern, but after the opening it just seemed to go downhill, with ludicrous deaths, parody news reports and loud millennials just asking to be murdered in the most horrid ways possible. It was a load of shite, or at least what we saw of it was.

The Am-Dram Lycanthrope

It's been 40 years since we went to the cinema to see an adaptation of Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf, rebranded as Silver Bullet. If ever a film was hammy, overwrought and as camp as Christmas it's this one. Tonally, this is almost objectionable and then there's this kind of Jaws feel to it with the town not trusting the sheriff and taking the law into their own hands. The body count seems to get ramped up just about every ten minutes and the special effects must have been pretty special at the time it was made. Corey Haim plays Marty, a kid who is paralysed - from what appears to be a mysterious illness rather than an accident - who has his own motorised wheelchair. Megan Follows plays Jane, his sister, who despite resenting her crippled brother loves him really. Then there's Gary Busey as uncle Red, who at first doesn't believe the kids when they spin a werewolf story at him but then helps out with the problem. Everett Gill plays the local reverend with a hairy dilemma and a young Terry O'Quinn plays the sheriff. It hasn't dated well and even if it hadn't I'd still struggle to give it anything higher than a 5/10.

Fungal Zombie Alert

So … the most talked about TV series about a post apocalyptic world over run by fungal zombies is back with good old Pedro Pascal and I begin another seven week cycle where I try and work out why the computer game was so popular given how fucking boring the TV show is because, apparently, the TV show is referencing the game quite a bit. Nothing fucking happens; what does happen is shrouded in mystery and when we do see some of mushroom zombies there's still zero jeopardy. My problem with this is it seems like an expensive version of The Walking Dead with more exotic zombies, but, most importantly, not as many of them. The characters are superficial, we're into the second season and Bella Ramsey's Ellie is five years older and still as fucking annoying as she was in the whole of season one. I'm sorry, but Ramsey isn't an attractive actor and she's not very good at the actual acting bit. She's got this massive dick shaped chip on her shoulder and something of a God-complex. Pascal's Joel seems to have done something in the interim five years that has pissed Ellie off, but presumably because this show needs its personal interactions to have been developed more than in the game, whatever it is he has done is going to be strung out over however many episodes Joel remains in, because **SPOILER** in the game he dies in the sequel or so I've been told by just about every person who has played the game and is now enjoying the TV series and dropping spoilers around like they're a teenage boy who has won the key for unlimited playing with a lady's sex parts. 

I feel we're going to watch all seven episodes of season two, but I can't imagine our general opinion of this is going to change. it's just a bit boring and hasn't got likeable characters or a story or any real reason to stick with it. What am I missing? Is it simply because people who play computer games are happy an adaptation feels like it's been treated seriously? Because this show so far has been lots of shit with the occasional sweetcorn nugget popping out...

Trailer Trash

I quite like Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova. I don't understand why there should be any backlash with the actor, she's done okay in what I've seen and more importantly isn't a carbon copy of her predecessor. That really should be how it is with any replacement. The problem with Black Widow is the fans want Natasha, the same way they want Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. That's a shame that people don't want originality in their superheroes while demanding that superhero movies are not just carbon copies of the last bunch. Of course, the other reason is once there were 20 odd Marvel films and that was a really manageable amount for any newcomer to the franchise. Now, we have so much bland mediocrity - very much like Marvel Comics had in the 1970s, which is abstractly where we stand in general MCU history. If I looked at a list of films since Endgame and all the new characters who have been introduced, Yelena's been around the longest, she actually has far more backstory than even new characters who had their own films, and she is different with a puzzling personality - which is what the latest 90 second teaser trailer for Thunderbolts* appears to be delving into. 

The more I see snippets of this film the more incongruous half of it is to the other. I don't expect this movie is going to be much more than 135 minutes and there is going to be a requirement for newcomers to at least know who this assembled group of 'heroes' is and then there's Bob or The Sentry, who was a hero created around the turn of the century by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee. As an addition to the Marvel Universe, when I finally got around to reading some of The Sentry/Void comics, I had generally ambivalent reactions. I really am not a fan of retconning something so huge as The Sentry's place in Marvel became and something in the back of my mind recalls the period when Marvel acquired Marvel/Miracleman and I think it was Joe Quesada's wish to find a way of integrating the character into Marvel's long and labyrinthine history. Then that idea went out of the window and then there was The Sentry, who, frankly, I have never understood why he's so powerful compared to a number of Marvel comics characters already knocking around?

Then it dawned on me. We're not getting a standalone film here at all, you're getting the prologue to the Fantastic Four: First Steps and Avengers: Doomsday. The more I see Thunderbolts* sitting there in the MCU, the more I wonder if this is just a set-up movie; a reason for the other films to exist. This film is the end of Phase Five of the MCU and so far it's been a crock of shit (but so was Phase Four - these phases have not had a clear narrative since the climax of Phase Three). I was interested to hear that a couple of recent MCU (flops) films' teaser trailers often feature action from the first 20 minutes of the film and it got me thinking if everything we've seen from Thunderbolts* is inside the opening half of the film and we're going to have no idea what is going to happen but it's going to set about events that will be important and will probably not have a proper ending. This movie will have a cliffhanger ending, you mark my words. 

The big trailer of the week was The Fantastic Four: First Steps and this time it was spoiler heavy, context setting and strangely uninspiring. Everything I've seen so far has looked promising, but what we saw in this felt like it might struggle. You could argue that when Marvel sold off all of it's popular characters to other film companies they sold their soul, but oddly enough what they had left, to launch the MCU with, were the most plausible for what they ended up doing. No convoluted backstory involving mutants and no headaches trying to make mutant powers actually work on the big screen; no Spider-Man and no Fantastic Four, which also solved some problems - The FF's backstory is probably the second most convoluted after the mutants and as far as film making is concerned, visually it has problems. The Human Torch would be good on film, but the Invisible girl/woman would create... issues. Mr Fantastic has a good comedic ability but he was undoubtedly the least powerful of the quartet and the Thing is a strong guy made of rocks. It also hasn't been hugely successful in previous incarnations. The gemstones of the Marvel Universe helped the MCU become a feasible world (if you can park the gods nonsense) by not being in it. That time is ending. 

The two minute 40 second trailer literally fills in the blanks inside the opening 30 seconds - who, why what and where, the when is most definitely in a past. This isn't the MCU. Snippets involving the Silver Surfer and the reason why 'she' is there and then a montage of who our heroes are and what they can do and ends with a promise and what really felt like an homage to old Godzilla films. It was... okay. I've watched it three times and I'll call it - I think it's going to bomb. It's in direct competition with Superman and I don't think that will be as huge as people hope either. I think we're going to see whether there's an immediate future for superhero films playing out in front of us this summer.

The Return of Jay-Son Stay-Fum

A staggering work of complete ineptitude. A vehicle with no story and all logic removed to show us what a dude Jayson Stayfum is. I sat through nearly two hours of A Working Man and I think all of the actual plot ended up on the cutting room floor, along with the bits that made sense. Please believe me when I say the previous sentences are me being charitable. This was a movie of limitless inability; of incompetent filmmaking; it is a masterpiece of dung... Stayfum works in construction, for a nice guy - Michael Pena - but he has a history that no one talks about. So when Pena's lovely daughter is kidnapped for a reason we get little or no reason for, he asks Stayfum to help and is turned down. The following morning Stayfum changes his mind - no reason given, he slept on it and decided he was going to help. Picking up on loose ends that had no real bearing on the kidnapping, this plays out like a cross between a Jayson Stayfum film and a Liam Neeson in the Taken trilogy, but without any finesse or cohesion. The weird thing is it wasn't even very violent, it was just set piece after set piece where Jayson killed lots of people and had little damage done to himself. I think the film was shot in Europe masquerading as New York and it makes The Beekeeper, Stayfum's action movie from last year look like an Oscar-nominated Steven Spielberg film. 3/10.

The Heat Is On

How does one blind man stop the oncoming storm? By getting some help. This was a season finale, but it felt like a set up. In fact, the entire first season of Daredevil: Born Again has felt like a scene setter; a preamble to the proper game of chess. This starts with the aftermath of Matt taking a bullet for Fisk, but the mayor isn't grateful, he wants Murdock to die in his hospital bed. However, as Buck goes to do his boss's wish Matt is one step ahead. As Fisk tightens his grip on New York, Matt and Karen uncover the reason behind Foggy's assassination and then get some help from a likely source. However, the overall feel of this entire episode is that Fisk's iron fist is very much in charge of NY now and even the good guys are bowing to his wishes. This was a violent finale with a glimmer of hope at the end, but more importantly it has been without a doubt the most accomplished of all the MCU TV shows - but, being cynical, that isn't a very high bar. The shame is we have a year to wait before season two.

Criminal Mid-Life Crisis

Is this another new TV show that examines the unhappy lives of the super wealthy? After a fashion. Is it full of dislikeable rich wankers? Assuredly. Is it likely to be a success? I expect Jon Hamm will be its saving grace, but whether he can carry the entire thing on his own - a series that doesn't really seem to have a direction at the moment - is the million dollar question. Your Friends and Neighbors [sic] is about recently divorced Andrew 'Coop' Cooper, a man who was once high up in an important hedge fund company but got butt fucked by his friend and boss (Corbin Bernsen) via a technicality involving a colleague called Liv Cross. It finished off a year where Coop lost his wife to his best friend, is drifting away from his children and is trying to help his bipolar sister remain in society. His life has turned to shit and only casual sex with one of his neighbours seems to be his only bright side.

There's also a subplot about whether his ex-wife, played by Amanda Peet, is really happy in her life with her ex-NBA ripped partner. His daughter is suffering from a crisis of confidence because everyone is expecting her to excel at everything and his youngest just wants to be left alone to get stoned. However, all these familial subplots are nothing compared to the realisation Coop makes at his friends and neighbours cost. He lives in a place where the people are so rich they could mislay a $250,000 watch and never know it's gone missing. So Coop decides he needs to supplement his life by ripping off his neighbours of whatever he can. My problem with it is while charming, it's first world rich person troubles and Coop isn't really any better than anyone else, except he's now on the verge of becoming broke and needs to make money in ways he's not usually making it. There are some hurdles in the way and my guess is he will become mired in the underworld he's hoping is going to pay for his lifestyle. I'm not sure there's enough actual story here to keep it going for a series and it's been announced that it has been renewed for a second season - which sort of removes some of jeopardy from the idea. My biggest problem with it is pacing - three episodes in and nothing really appears to have happened.

Hide and Seek

Dipping back into the TV hard drive for our midweek entertainment, we watched Ready or Not, which was on Film4 about four months ago (so it's due another small screen showing soon enough). This has a high 6s score on IMDB so I felt it was worth watching, but I couldn't quite make up my mind if it was a [ahem] dark comedy or a tonally wrong suspense thriller [actually, it's clear it's a comedy but there are many moments where the comedy is hiding or makes itself very small, so not to be seen]. Samara Weaving plays a young bride who has returned to her future husband's country pile to tie the knot and go through some silly games as a family inauguration thing. The 'game' is a little like Russian Roulette - there are many choice of games, but the one you don't want to get is the one Weaving picks. This is 'hide and seek' but with a difference; the rest of the family have to find her and when they do they have to kill her, to protect the family from some nefarious Satan-like spirit. It's not even an original idea, but the cast, who for the most part ham it up, have a good time and because this is the first hide and seek game for over 30 years there's an element of rustiness and incompetence (from both the hider and her seekers). It was all right. Nothing to write home about. Probably worth a 6/10, just.

When the Laughter Stops

It's been quite a while since the fake DEA bust gone wrong. Both Ray and Manny are in custody - Ray in hospital and Manny in prison and the latter is expecting to die every night. The DA is trying to get him to cut a deal by suggesting that Ray is going to turn on him and oddly enough Ray is being told similar things. Only DEA Special agent Mina seems to have worked out what is going on as she continuously tries to persuade her uncaring colleagues that the 'dope thieves' are not some kind of cartel on their own until she realises that they're deliberately being talked up as something big to lure the real problems out of the woodwork - Ray and Manny are expendable decoys. The Dope Thief started as a comedy with some serious overtones, as it has crept along to a conclusion it has got deadly serious and it's all coming home to Ray and Manny's houses. The shocking events of this penultimate episode suggest there might be a way out for Ray, but the window of opportunity is closing fast.

What's Up Next?

Stuff. Stuff is up next. You know how this works. It'll be stuff.