My Cultural Life - A Week of Extremes

What's Up?

Let's talk about the weather. This last week has seen the settled and predominately dry weather of the last 6 weeks or so replaced with something a little more... usual. There's nothing we can do about the weather. What I do find interesting is watching the Met Office's Tube of You channel at their 10 day forecasts. They are done with a painstakingly huge amount of disclaimers and probability reminders, but they prove to me that this dream of being able to do actual long range weather forecasting is like some ridiculous mythical quest, like discovering the fountain of youth [oh, they'll see what you did there!].

As the dry, sunny, warm and not very humid weather slipped away, the Met Office and their affiliates, who they compare conclusions with, said this period of unsettled, Atlantic-driven, weather would be replaced with high pressure again and a return to what we're already thinking might have been summer. Every one said 'a week of wet and windy back to warm and sunny' and they continued to say that until they stopped and replaced it with 'continuing wet and windy, maybe the odd nice day' which is predominately what a British summer has felt like over the last few years.

The thing is, the forecasters were so wrong on this that you have to wonder if there's ever a successful 10-day forecast whenever there's a low pressure area on the chart? Low Pressure = chaos, while High pressure = order. A meteorologist might say that's simplifying it but forecasters really don't know what a large percentage of low pressure areas are going to do and more importantly how they will change the forecast based on how far away they are from the predicted course or how much deeper or flabbier they are. We can't tell that, therefore small things change the weather, as the recent one about returning high pressure has proven. 

So as a result, the weather has been and will continue to be average early Scottish summer. But after last year, which I think many of us have forgotten just how fucking awful it was, that sun wave we had will have whetted our appetites for more actual British summer time. It would be nice. The nice days outweighing the nasty ones. Jumpers for goalposts. Isn't it.

Fountain of Shite

Sometimes, The Guardian and I agree wholeheartedly and this was one of those occasions. The new guy Ritchie film - Fountain of Youth - is really awful. I mean, there are very few, if any, redeeming features. It feels like an amalgam of a number of Indiana Jones rip-offs ranging from that thing Nick Cage did in the noughties to things with The Rock and other things with a young Michael Douglas and a younger Kathleen Turner. It however possesses zero amount of charm; there is never a sense of peril, the apparent dynamic between alleged siblings John Krasinski and a truly abysmal Natalie Portman feels like some bad comedy double act of the 1970s and the few special effects it has look like they were created by the guys who brought us Babylon 5 in the 1990s. It should also be pointed out that Krasinski's smug, slightly narcissistic lead character is not and does not convey a feeling of devil-may-care adventurer and artefact returner. He just comes across as a twat. 

Anyhow, some artefacts bloke persuades his sister to get fired and join him on the quest to find the Fountain of Youth with his billionaire mate, who is obviously a baddie. The church (?) send mercenaries to dissuade these people from continuing their quest, quite a few times, in pointless action set ups and, of course, the ages old puzzle is solved by a child who decides to go all musical youth on our arses with some funky synth-drums built by the ancient Egyptians. This really is a pile of dog shit. A truly awful film, badly made with the wrong choice of actors in the roles. Don't be tempted, because if you happen to let slip you've watched this after I warned people not to then I will mercilessly take the piss out of you for being stupid. 2/10

In A Scottish Basement

New TV series from Netflix. Knew nothing about it. Gave it a try. Dept. Q is a cold case TV series with a difference. Quite what that difference is I'm not sure, but it is entertaining so far. Matthew Goode is Carl Morck, a Detective Chief Inspector who was seriously wounded in an ambush that killed another officer and left his partner paralysed and depressed. He's returning to the force, but appears to have pissed someone off, so he's been given this new department to run, which is in the basement, he has no staff - unless you can count the Syrian refugee he's been given to help him - and it's clear that he's being marginalised and hopefully forgotten about. Morck is a miserable bastard, no one seems to like him and he's not very happy. There's a lot of clichés floating around but they're handled in such a perfunctory way you don't mind them. Goode is very good as Morck, looking for some kind of redemption while trying to find out who ambushed him and his partner. So far, so reasonable. We'll see how this one grows... 

In a Scandi Wonderland

What was it I said last week? That it's like autumn in terms of the great TV that's suddenly dropped in the week before summer starts. Back this time is the fantastic Simon Reeve and his look at Scandinavia, which started last week and was possibly one of the best stand alone Reeve episodes I've ever seen. His documentaries are often eye-opening, but this shone a light on the Nordic countries that was both fascinating and frightening. He started in Svalbard, which is considerably further north than I ever thought and sits on a political knife edge, given that Norway is basically its lease holder, but other countries are allowed to be there, in their own settlements. This includes the Russians who no one likes at the moment and they're quite happy with that. Svalbard could be rich in minerals and rare earth elements and that's why Russia has a military presence there, one which is enough to scare the shit out of any discerning Norwegian.

He later travelled south to the snowy wastelands of Lapland - an area that covers Norway, Sweden, Finland and parts of Northern Russia. Here we saw how the Sami live, how they're struggling to deal with modernity and how making the world a greener place is actually bad for them as a people. Then it was on to northern Sweden where pre-school children are chucked out of their houses and into -18 degrees of cold and told to enjoy themselves. It sounds cruel, unusual and nasty, but nothing could be further from the truth. The 'bloody hell' count for this first episode? Two (and I went for one and the wife for none).

The second episode was almost as good as the first. Basically Norway is this fucking fantastic country with so much going for it and it's probably the most beautiful country on the planet. it is also unbelievably wealthy but the weather isn't a patch on Scotland and that isn't a patch on England and Wales. Iceland on the other hand is almost the antithesis of Norway despite the similarities in the people. This has been a great little mini-series so far and it's just a shame they didn't have an entire series in Norway alone. No 'bloody hells' at all in part two.

The Last For Us

14 episodes, one of which was action packed, two were reasonably good and the other 11 were dog shit. That isn't a good return and if I paid for HBO I'd be asking for a refund. The Last of Us has been a thundering disappointment. It has proved that Bella Ramsey can't act. That Pedro Pascal isn't the fucking messiah and I will accept, grudgingly, that Kaitlin Dever is a great actor and will probably add to this series. But it's too little too late. This season finale continues with the baffling subplot regarding Dever's Wolves and the religious nutters with the scars on their faces. This has been bubbling away in the background and will probably be the focus of season three, except that will be a season that we will not be bothering with. Ellie actually meets these religious nutters and is about to be killed by them when a deus ex machina moment saves her life, in a really very contrived finale that was full of what I call bullshit. I know I've said this before about series and then slipped back into them, but the wife was reluctant to watch this series and I persuaded her on the basis that something must happen and it ended up a little like being told you've won the lottery and then discovering it was £2.48. I have seen enough and I've had enough. If you stick with it I hope it pays you back for your loyalty.

Ain't Gonna Work on Jezza's Farm No More

It's back! The programme with more belly laughs per episode than anything else I can think of and it's educational as well. Despite the criticism and hate that's poured onto it, Clarkson's Farm is proper good and while it is probably as scripted as Top Gear, it is, in this house, must see TV. This season starts in the winter of 23/24. Caleb Cooper is off with his one man show (which we saw some of on TV and switched it off because it made us cringe), so Jeremy's on his own and struggling. He gets Charlie - his farm manager - to hire a temp and Harriet from Derbyshire quickly arrives with her TikTok following and her youthful exuberance (and her almost automatic disdain for her new boss) and away we went on another farming adventure. While she is doing an even better job than Caleb, Jeremy is thinking of buying a pub so he can wind down the Diddly Squat farm shop that has caused him so many headaches with West Oxfordshire Council.

By episode three, Caleb is back and one wonders if his sulky, spoilt brat demeanour is an act for the cameras or if he really is just an ill-educated prat. Fortunately for Clarkson, he soon finds common ground with Harriet and things go smoothly until she leaves to return home. Jeremy's search for a pub - now bear in mind pubs are going out of business almost daily - ends with him finding a place that came with its own historic dogging site, which is protected by the same council that continues to make his life a bureaucratical nightmare... This show really does a good job of showing people just how fucked up the country is towards any one wanting to do something different.

Groundhog Slasher

Apparently, Until Dawn is based on a video game and given the backlash about the woeful The Last of Us TV show, watching this was probably a bad idea. The wife wanted to stop after 20 minutes, "This is just a shit slasher movie!" She said, but was actually wrong. It most definitely is a horror movie, but it felt more like a Resident Evil or Silent Hill type film than a Halloween or Friday the 13th. Considering it was on for over 100 minutes there didn't seem to be a lot of character or plot building and I think the viewer was supposed to work out a lot of shit for themselves. It had some curious special effects, not bad at all and very odd at times and while it wasn't really scary and didn't feel unnecessarily violent it did try to convey a sense of strangeness and horror. Was it any good? Well... it felt like it could have done with some logical explanation but given the subject matter then maybe a reason for us to understand why it happens or even how it happens. I know Groundhog Day didn't have any explanation at all, but this tried to go all psychological mumbo-jumbo on us and it sounded more like mumbo-jumbo bollocks - monsters created through massive populational trauma? Bollocks, more like. Still, I'm giving this a 5/10 because it didn't stink the room out.

What's Up Next?

This has been a shortened week, having been busy on Monday and Friday, meaning that the finale of Your Friends & Neighbors [sic] will have to wait, as will Murderbot and two more episodes of Clarkson's Farm. I expect we'll watch a few more Dept. Q and there are a few other things that occasionally get mentioned drawing to a close. I've also started to scrape the bottom of the barrel for films to add to the FDoD, so I have some right tripe lined up. I can't wait...

 

My Cultural Life - Homecomings

What's Up?

Green energy. That's what's up. I write this on Monday morning. The house is overrun with workmen. At the last count there were 10 of them. They are deconstructing my hoose and putting in a air source heat pump, solar panels and extra insulation. It is organised chaos. literally. They're going to be here for about a week; four days of installation and then a couple of days of making good - putting it back the way it was before they started (after a fashion, I suspect).

The cost? Pretty much nothing. It will cost us, but this is thousands of pounds worth of work compared to the couple of hundred it will end up costing us. We're losing a brand new radiator, about a fifth of a tank of oil and our electric heaters are now obsolete; there's always a cost for everything though, isn't there?  

Why are we doing it? I've been noticing the cold in this house for the last couple of years and we know people who have had it done; we looked into it and by the end of the first phone call we'd signed up for it. Two days later the house had a cavity wall insulation and we noticed that the difference almost immediately, so that pretty much made us realise we were doing the right thing. this disruption is going to be a bagful of stress though... [and it was!]

Welcome Back

When the documentary series Welcome to Wrexham started four years ago there were 18 episodes in the first series and it won over so many people with its frank look at a struggling town/city in North Wales that had just been given hope because Hollywood stars had just bought the football club. Season two was 15 episodes as we watched the football team get promotion from non-league back into the big leagues. It was still a cracking TV show full of human interest stories and Hollywood banter. Then series three came along, a very important football season - which saw Wrexham back in the EFL and aiming for promotion from League Two to League One - was only eight parts and felt rushed and a little superficial. It was like the interest had disappeared - when it clearly hadn't - and it had wrapped itself up before it felt like it had started. It wasn't as good as the first two series and it seemed that as the club grew the TV interest waned. Season four has just dropped with the opening two parts. The worrying thing is, yet again, it is only eight parts and this time League One is going to be a really tough ride. League One is a graveyard for former top teams. It look Man City three years to get out of, the same for Leeds and former Premier League teams - 8 of them - were wallowing in a division that is possibly one of the most difficult to upwardly get out of...

For those of you who don't follow football, the season which was focused on in the opening two episodes of series four, has just concluded with Wrexham finishing 2nd and winning back-to-back-to-back promotions. That's a spoiler only if you've lived under a rock for the last year or are not interested in football, in which case you're probably not watching this show. However, it felt like the original Welcome to Wrexham was back with a great mix of the people, the players and the Hollywood A and B listers. Last year I found series three a bit of a slog despite its seriously curtailed number of episodes; I get the impression that this year, despite knowing all the spoilers, this is going to feel too short. Even if you don't like football, I'd recommend this because it's funny, poignant and real.

Silly Nonsense

Why on earth did we decide to watch Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story when we could have watched something else? Probably because we're getting to the stage where anything we haven't seen is going to get elevated into the realms of 'must see.' The thing about this movie is it's quite amusing, very silly and very cringe-inducing. It has an absolutely brilliant cameo by Jason Bateman playing a Dodgeball pundit called Pepper Brooks, in what is one of his zaniest roles (and given he has made some reasonable comedies is a compliment - or maybe an insult - I dunno...). Vince Vaughn plays the owner of a crap gym that's in danger of being sold off because he hasn't bothered to do any paperwork for about 20 years. Ben Stiller plays his nemesis, the owner of a swanky gym across the road and Christine Taylor (of Brady Bunch Movie fame) as the lawyer who is charged with sorting out Vaughn's problems and facilitating its sale to Stiller. So far so relatively normal. Vaughn needs to raise $50,000 in a month or he will lose everything. One of his customers says they should enter a Dodgeball tournament to win $50K and Taylor joins their underdog team when it's discovered she has a great right arm throw.

It's clear from the outset how it's going to end and the journey is full of unexpected belly laughs, cringe-making moments and ridiculously stupid set pieces. I'm sure it was a great success back in 2004 but feels tonally all over the place 21 years later. However, it wasn't that bad and I've seen much worse films. That said, I can only really give it a 6/10 and that feels generous...

Shine On

I finished the Stephen King novel Doctor Sleep on Sunday. It's the sequel to The Shining (the book not Kubrick's film) and while it's been over ten years since I last read it, I was surprised at how much I had forgotten and that was mainly because of the film, which takes so many liberties I'm amazed King even allowed it to happen. The one thing about the book that I'd really forgotten about was just how good it was and how different from Mike Flanagan's film. The interesting thing for me is I really didn't like Kubrick's film, but that might have been because I didn't really enjoy King's original novel. It was the third novel of his I read, after Salem's Lot and Carrie. But here's the main point; I don't think I've read the thing more than once; as a 17 year old it hadn't grabbed me by the balls, not like his book about the telekinetic teenager or the town full of vampires; this haunted hotel thing with the annoying cast of ghosts simply didn't have the same effect on me that it had on others. Maybe it's a story I should return to now I've read the sequel twice? I think of myself as a proper King aficionado and while there are a few of his stories I have yet to read (the Mr Mercedes Trilogy; Billy Summers and some of his short story collections) and about half a dozen I've yet to reread, my lack of interest in The Shining is probably something that would confound other King fans. 

In Doctor Sleep we rejoin Dan Torrance as an alcoholic adult following in his father's footsteps and we stick with him until he reaches what he feels is his rock bottom; it's at this point in his life where the only directions are death or redemption, so Dan chooses the latter and that brings him to a small town that's close to a young girl with powers that make Dan's look like parlour tricks. It also brings him in contact with one of King's group of villains - the True Knot - travelling vampire-like creatures who essentially hunt kids with the shining, so they can feed on them and live forever. The opening third of the book takes place over 13 years; jumping in and out of Dan and (the new kid with the shining) Abra Stone and then the rest is pretty much a rollercoaster that takes place over the space of a few days and it really is one of those stories that you don't want to put down. I'd forgotten many things about this story, crucial things that were completely ignored in the recent film. If you're a lapsed King reader, this is something I'd recommend dipping your toes into; it's a little like King at his peak and it will send a shiver down your spine and put a smile on your face.

The Zzzzzs of Us

Joel is back! He didn't really die and now he got better! Actually, this is a flashback episode that fills in the blanks about why Joel and Ellie weren't really talking. The problem with it, like most weeks, was that fuck all happened and even the one moment of potential fungal mayhem was muted and full of betrayal. It was more balanced with Pedro Pascal back in it; there was a sense of two different characters interacting and driving a narrative forward rather than the rather putrid and faux romance of two girlfriends out on a revenge spree. The problem I had with it was that this is the penultimate episode of the season - a season, incidentally, that has been about one episode with lots of flowery padding around the edges - and it dwelt on the past rather than setting us up for a bonza finale. Of course there isn't going to be one. It's going to end on some kind of a cliffhanger, because there's going to be a season three and this is going to be an extension of the computer game rather than following its lead. I think the general reaction of both the wife and myself suggests that season three might not be playing in this house.

Bookkeeping 

Well... that made a tremendous change. What a cracking film The Accountant is. Starring Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, John Lithgow, Anna Kendrick and JK Simmons, it really was so much better than I expected, especially for a one-man-army-action-flick. Affleck plays a man - let's call him Chris - who is autistic but has managed to manage it to the point where he simply comes across as antisocial and a bit boring. He is also a maths savant and doesn't care who he works for because he doesn't get personally involved, whether that's a good company, a bad one or a dodgy organised crime one. You get his backstory through a series of flashbacks and to be honest with you, it deals quite truthfully with autism and yet manages to mesh it with one of the best action thrillers I've seen in ages, jam-packed full of unexpected twists, turns and even a little cliché busting - because the chief protagonist is autistic and people with autism might have routines but they're often not cliched. 

To go into details would give away what ends up being one hell of a 'I didn't see that coming' moment, but it's safe to say that if you haven't seen this film before and you stumble upon it, you probably wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone else. This is an excellent film and deserves an 8/10 at least.

Benvenuto a Casa

It feels a little like the autumn... Obviously I'm not talking about the weather, which is due to break by the time you read this, but by the better than average fayre we've been watching so far this week. After weeks of mediocrity and having to sit through fucking The Last of Us, there are some things, this week, that have been great; none more so than on a warm Tuesday evening, watching the above Ben Affleck feature and then following it with something I didn't know existed until Tuesday morning. Tucci in Italy is a companion to Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, the TV series I raved about a few years ago. Well, Stan the Man is back in his favourite country, sampling his favourite cuisine in some of Italy's most wondrous settings. It was a joy to behold, even if the opening episode seemed to feature foods you would be hard pressed feeding your dog...

Tucci in Italy is a love letter to Stanley's best loved places and it kicks off in Tuscany, specifically Florence, where he eats among other things diced tripe, swordfish marrow and cured lard. He seems to love them all, even if many of the 'food' stuffs actually made the wife turn away while pulling that if-I-have-to-watch-this-I-will-be-sick face. It's just a shame it's only five episodes, because I could watch Tucci wander round Italy every day. We loved Stan's first foray into the home of his ancestors and while the food in this, so far, hasn't been that palatable (apart from fake tripe - yes, you heard that correctly - which is a vegetarian dish), it makes us both want to go to Italy before I die...

A Complete Twister

Oddly enough I remember State of Play the TV show from the noughties, but knew little about the US feature film from 2009. Updated and written to fit into US expectations and understanding, this is a meandering great mystery that will fragment the way we think government works. This time it's Russell Crowe playing a high-profile Pittsburgh-born political journo, Rachel McAdams as a 'junior' reporter and Ben Affleck as a Republican Congressman mixed up in mysterious deaths and dead end paper trails. It starts with a thief's death, which is quickly followed by a cyclist's demise, then it's person after person targeted for death by what appears to be a well-oiled number of deliberate hits. After the beginning of this story, it appears that there is nothing untoward, but when the death of a Congressman's aid, in an apparent suicide becomes linked with the first two deaths things start to get murky. A private company of mercenaries is implicated in this, especially as this is a company Affleck's character is after; but appearances can be deceiving... 7/10

Men Behaving Badly

With Coop out on bail, despite everyone thinking he's a murderer, things get a little fractious in this suburbia-is-really-hell series. First off, ex-wife Amanda Peet has an actual fight with Olivia Munn in a coffee shop, which ends up being caught on video and goes viral. Coop's introvert son, Hunter, gets an older more forward girlfriend, while his daughter Tori finally realises that the boyfriend her father thinks is a dick is actually a dick. Meanwhile, sister Alison, whose back story is basically that she was mentally fucked up by an ex-boyfriend who shat on her, is now getting mentally fucked up because the same ex, now married, has been screwing around with her and just for his own jollies, it seems...

So, what's Coop been up to? Well, he's blackmailed his lawyer into representing him; everyone thinks he's guilty (apart from us, because we know he didn't do it) or is leaving him like rats from a sinking ship; so he does what is best for everyone and goes partying with his ex's new boyfriend, Nick and Barney, his injured business manager and this is what most of the episode was centred on. Considering next week is the season finale and I don't think Coop will spend it in a prison, I expect there will either be some revelation in the works or an absolute I-didn't-see-that-coming cliffhanger. Whatever happens, Your Friends & Neighbors [sic] has really been a grower.

Blink and You'll Miss It

The third episode of Murderbot was yet again so short you could have popped out to get a drink and it would have finished. There's an interesting idea here, but what I can't get my head around is while there are some funny moments, this is clearly not really a comedy led show; there's a sinister backstory that's trying to come to the surface. So why are the episodes literally 20 minutes long? This week, Murderbot and four of the scientists are travelling to the other side of the planet to speak to the other scientific camp about the strange creatures and what the hell they're doing. Of course, we already know what they're going to find so Murderbot sends the scientists away and goes into the other camp, armed but with little idea what he's going to face. I like this, but I get Sunny vibes from it. Remember Sunny? The Apple TV+ show about the robot who is Rashida Jones's dead husband's gift which got very tedious extremely quickly. Well, I'm hoping this doesn't go the same way because I want to like this, even if Alexander Skarsgård really isn't the right actor to be playing this role. He's playing a synthetic robot with organic elements, the problem is those organic elements are human-based, but he plays this like they're wood. 

What's Up Next?

I should be buzzing. My football team won a European trophy, but for reasons I don't want to talk about and you're not interested in, let's just say it might be a victory with an unhappy outcome... Other than that most of the football season will be over so people can enjoy a football free world for a couple of months - except for the internationals, the World Club Cup and the start of the Scottish season by the time July gets here, so a few football-free days might be more accurate...

There's a new series of Clarkson's Farm and we have FIVE parts of it to watch next week. There's the season finales of the dreadful The Last of Us and the very good Your Friends & Neighbors [sic], more Welcome to Wrexham and there's even a couple of new movies to watch. The thing is summer used to be a graveyard for television, but not any longer, it seems! 

My Cultural Life - Impostor Syndrome

What's Up?

There is nothing up. It has been a sunny and warm week and I've been reading a book in the garden and avoiding wankers like Trump, Farage, Starmer and anyone else that deserves our scorn. Next week might be the same as we have almost another week of summer before it all comes crashing down and we get our winter coats out...

No Time Like the Present

I suppose, in many ways, X-Men: Days of Future Past is probably the best film in the long and laborious franchise, but the reason is probably because it should have ended the franchise on a high. However, we ended up with three more, really shitty, sequels and the strong desire to go back in time and prevent Sophie Turner from taking up acting. Thankfully, she wasn't in this and it's all the better for that. This is the melding of the two generations of X-Men stories, getting the old guard - Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McEllen - with the new - James McAvoy and Michael Fassbinder and tied together by Huge Ackman's Wolverine, who gets sent from the future to 1973 to try and prevent Mystique - Jennifer Lawrence - from killing Tyrian Lannister or Bolivar Trask as Peter Dinklage was called in this film. There's a few stuttery bits of continuity and dodgy outcomes, but it tries very hard to wrap everything up so that another soft reboot could be started. It still doesn't really show us why X-Men should work as a visual concept or even be considered as possible future film franchise, but the overall impression I got from this movie was how Richard Nixon looked like an Italian Mafia hitman. 7/10

Palooka Face

Well, one thing I can safely say is Poker Face isn't going to fill that gap in our TV schedules. That is because, after four episodes, we decided it literally was just Columbo reimagined for the 21st century. This was confirmed in the third part when Natasha Lyonne grabbed a cigar from her pocket and lit it up. I mean, how long before she gets a dirty grey raincoat and starts knocking on Robert Culp's door? [Sorry, old joke anyone under 60 won't get and most over 60 won't find that funny] The problem I had with this is it's a bit zany [it's not] and her schtick is based around picking up on one tiny little lie which she then picks at like a scab until she works out what happens, but because she can't prove it, she manages to set the culprit up so that they still get caught. The other problem I have is wherever this woman goes someone dies... For fuck's sake don't let her go to the Caribbean or to Midsummer because if she does there's going to be carnage and more dead bodies than an apocalypse. I also don't really like Lyonne. I think she's essentially a one trick pony. She was basically this same character in Russian Doll and I'd bet at least 50p she was the same character in Orange is the New Black. I really wanted to like this but it soon became obvious that like Columbo it's formulaic bollocks. Next?

Trash Trailer?

Not really a trailer - which begs the question - why? This is one of those MCU featurettes, this time for Ironheart, which streams on June 24. It's basically a mini-interview with Ryan Coogler, of Black Panther fame, about developing the character for the small screen using clips from the forthcoming series as the main backdrop. However, this precedes any trailer for it and therefore acts as a de facto trailer, plus Coogler is just the executive producer, so doesn't really have much input. There is usually a problem about now (if this blog had a common theme among anything I write) and that is the commonly known 'fact' about this show is that it's been in the can for over two years largely because it's a pile of shite. There is a distinct backlash against the Marvel Multicultural Universe - the one that now exists inside the MCU - and there is this opinion that while the USA isn't the biggest box office return on the planet, without it success is never going to be guaranteed - it's a tail of the dog thing and the tail wags the dog.

Ironheart is apparently not Marvel's Iron Man replacement despite her being clearly Iron Man's replacement. The armour is helmed by Riri Williams, first introduced in the yawn-inducing second Black Panther film, who is a hybrid of Tony Stark, MacGyver and Richard Pryor. She can basically create a nuclear fusion generator out of the stuff you'd find on an old Blue Peter episode and sticky back plastic. She's obviously not safe because she's just a college kid and goes to MIT and hasn't got an armed guard given she's one of the cleverest humans on the planet. So this is what I think will end up being the premise for the series, that and enough excuses to have nu Iron Man go through a series of special effects, to try and tweak the hearts of all those Iron Man fans.

There is clearly little appetite for this show and it comes at a decisive time. Thunderbolts* has been getting some increasingly good reviews and still sits in the high 7s on IMDB (and it might be reflected in the box office), which is just what the entire franchise needs and there has been a buzz about superhero films again. Will the release of this add to that buzz? Not in a million years; it's being dumped with little or no fanfare... 

Incidentally, turn away now if you think this could be a spoiler, but I've heard that Fantastic Four: First Steps has an ace up its sleeve, which might work. The trailers for the film so far have given us an idea of what to expect, but apparently all the footage used is from the first hour of the film, because the second half of it is going to get really weird and isn't likely going to end the way anyone expects.

But, enough of the digression, Ironheart looks like it will be competent as far as the action sequences are concerned, but it's the rest of it that needs to achieve something and right wing USA, where the life blood of Disney+ live, are making it clear that they're fed up with their superheroes not being predominantly white with the odd - Black Panther - aberration. Kang was never going to work and that makes you go down all kinds of conspiracy theory rabbit holes... What I think the MCU is doing is showing that superheroes exist all over the world and are not just limited to the USA, but in Marvel Comics history foreign superheroes were few and far between, almost a novelty item and the right wing is using this to bash Disney over the head. I'll watch Ironheart and I will judge it on its merits. I can't say that this featurette has made me anything but still ambivalent erring on the side of zero expectations. 

So... the day after I wrote the above, the first proper trailer for Ironheart dropped and while I might have been relatively correct on my presumption of what this is going to be about, the general impression from the trailer is 'My God this looks like it's a pile of shit!" I mean, proper dodgy.  It's available on the Marvel Entertainment Tube of You page - I think you should look so you can put yourself off watching it before it arrives...

Better Chimp

Our Wednesday night started with a decision. We need to watch some of the stuff we have otherwise what's the point in having it. So, the wife made the decision and she put Anora on - you know, the film that won lots of Oscars about the pole dancing prostitute who marries a Russian mobster's son. We managed 30 minutes before we gave up on it. Perhaps I'm simply miles apart with what people watch and class as Academy Award winning fayre, but I found it exploitative, dull and uninspiring. On the decision to turn it off, I said we needed to watch something else and the wife immediately put Better Man on. This is the biography of Robbie Williams as a chimpanzee and I found it entertaining, slightly strange with a few too many musical numbers. The strange part is probably explained away by Williams' early noughties album Escapology, which has always felt like some kind of autobiographical concept album and this pretty much adapts it without using all the tracks. It's a movie about redemption and how to recover your career after being labelled a massive drug addled twat. I'm not sure it was as good as some reviews suggest, but it certainly wasn't a heap of shite like others also suggested, Personally, I quite like Williams, so I'd give it a 7/10.

Trailer Trash!

And then there was a proper trailer for the new Superman film and I'm really a bit worried. This looks like it might be absolutely fucking awesome and we now know what the plot is essentially going to be - Superman prevents a war between two countries, saves a lot of people and is considered a traitor and a war criminal for getting involved - even if people were going to die. So it's clear that this Superman film is going to be about the Man of Steel becoming Public Enemy #1 and this new Justice League team has been charged with bringing him to justice and it's all being manipulated by Lex Luthor. The 180 second trailer is just brimming with quality special effects, dialogue and things that give you that shiver up the spine; like this is a film that's really going to matter. Obviously the bar has been raised and there will be two camps - those wanting this to be a huge success and those who think we've probably seen the best of what this movie is offering. Whatever it ends up being this has been the trailer of 2025 so far, by a country mile (sorry MCU, not sorry). 

No Budget X-Men?

I have been banging on for a couple of years now how I don't think the X-Men will work in a revamped MCU. I simply think the preposterousness of the X-Men wouldn't work unless they developed it from almost the very beginning of the rise of homo superior and, of course, the problem with that is if it doesn't strike gold immediately the chances of a slow and legitimate introduction to the idea of a mutant race ends up being rushed and loses the aging process that it needs to succeed. There have been a few films in recent years that have explored this idea of humans born with superpowers, most recently watched was the extremely excellent Fast Color [sic] which starred Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the second generation of people with fantastic abilities and her need to protect her daughter from men who would do them all harm...

Then there's this, a film I wasn't even aware existed 24 hours prior to writing this review. Freaks (not the classic Todd Browning banned movie from 1932) stars Emile Hirsch and Bruce Dern and is about people with super powers living in a world where the authorities hunt them down and eliminate them with barely a skip of a beat. Hirsch plays Henry Lewis, a man with - among other things - the power to slow down time and create time bubbles where he and his daughter Chloe essentially live. They have been in one for about three months - on the outside - but seven years on the inside. Henry is teaching his daughter to lie about her situation and create a new identity for herself for reasons you discover later in the movie. Both the father and daughter think Chloe's mother is dead, but the appearance of Bruce Dern seems to suggest the mother isn't dead but is held prisoner in a place that is really bad for these 'freaks'. 

This is a film made on almost zero budget, with a small ensemble cast and a massive sense of paranoia and fear. It feels... off... almost from the beginning; there's this sense that what we're watching might not actually be true or even real. There is also a distinctly dodgy vibe coming off of it to start, just to add to the tension. This is a future where everyone is scared of the possibility that a freak might be living next door or is going to kill everyone who is normal; a world where anti-freak propaganda has worked as well as Nigel Farage's message about Making England Great Again. There are some elements that don't work as well and the lack of any noticeable budget means that some scenes are underplayed or are 'transferred' into settings that accommodate the story as well as possible. Yet it's a cracking little film and conveys exactly what Marvel/Disney needs to do if they want to properly introduce mutants to the MCU. That introduction (and first couple of films) need to paint the kind of picture that Freaks does extremely well. I'm giving this film a 7/10.

Dacia Duster?

So J.J. Abrams has a new TV series out. At least that's the impression I got, but it turns out he's one of about 20 executive producers and he came up with the idea (along with someone else). Duster isn't about a crappy 4x4 from a Romanian car company, it's about a small time criminal who acts as a 'gopher' for a crime syndicate. That crim is Josh Holloway of Lost fame and he's now 56 years old and boy does he look it. No end of 'work' can detract from the fact he's almost an old man playing a hip and trendy 1973 dude. The series is also about a black FBI agent, overcoming her colour and her gender in an Arizona office that is full of racist, sexist wankers. It was not the most enjoyable opening episode I've ever seen and I'd decided after about 15 minutes that I wasn't going to be an avid fan, nor was I going to watch any more episodes. I use the expression style over substance a lot, but this was the epitome of that definition. 

I Almost Completely Forgot...

So I'm editing the blog getting it ready for publishing and I notice I haven't reviewed this week's The Last of Us... Do you know why? Because it's a load of shite. Very little happened this week despite the story advancing and the girls arriving in Seattle and getting one of the Wolves who killed Joel. We almost had another musical number, but thankfully they stopped as the strumming began and I'm beginning to think that with two more episodes to go, it might be two more episodes and then I bail out. I've never understood the love for the TV show. I get that gamers loved the game, but on TV it has been masses of fuck all with the occasional action-packed episode. It maybe wouldn't be so bad if Bella Ramsey could act or was interesting to look at and the gay abandon the two girls have for the supposed dangers out there in their world make it difficult to swallow...

Neighbourhood Watch

Did I wibble on about the quality bar being lowered last week? I mean, when a show that I didn't even like to start with has become one of the TV highlights of the week, I'm beginning to think that TV in 2025 isn't as breathtakingly awesome as some TV critics seem to think it is. Your Friends and Neighbors [sic] has really turned into an ensemble piece rather than a show about a Raffles type American rich guy who steal from the rich to feed his paucity of funds. The thing is John Hamm's TV show has become compelling viewing, even if hardly any of it involves him stealing stuff. It's all about the rest of the cast, from Amanda Peet as his ex wife to Olivia Munn, the woman whose husband has been murdered, who is having casual sex with Coop (Hamm), who has now been arrested for Paul's (her ex-husband) murder. There are some quirks about this that feel more contrived than actually real - such as the detective who seems to think Coop is guilty of anything based on an argument he had with the deceased and nothing else. The thing is it's fun, it's interesting and it's now become quite entangled with more to it than meets the eyes. I'm going to stick my neck out and recommend it.

Robo-Thing

Oh look, a new Apple TV+ series, there must be a Y in the day... This time it's Alexander Skarsgård in a new series about a robot, with humanoid features (except he doesn't have a penis) who has found a way to override his programming but ends up working for a bunch of space hippies on a mysterious planet with strange creatures and even more weird mysteries. Tonally, I'm not sure, Skarsgård has never been the best actor in the Skarsgård family and this feels like the wrong fit for him, but the opening two episodes weren't bad; the special effects were better than I would have expected and the premise; security robot might have killed a lot of humans after his programming override is now charged with protecting a bunch of largely stupid offworlders who aren't paying the 'Corporation' enough money to get the best of what's on offer. The episodes are less than 25 minutes and the jury is still out, but at least I'll be tuning in next week, unlike some other new TV shows that I've already stated I won't... 

What's Up Next?

The coming week is likely going to be all about football as my team - Spurs - play in the Europa Cup final, in Bilbao, against Manchester United. Football has been torture this season. Spurs, led by some fat Australian wanker, have been awful and will finish the league season one place above relegation. It has been so bad that it reminds me of Brexit. Half the fans are frothing at the mouth demanding the fat Australian wanker is sacked, while the other, far more deluded half, want him to remain as manager even though the team has been fucking atrocious. I expect my team will lose (again) and 2024/25 will just be remembered for how much my team upset die hard supporters by being so shite...

Welcome to Wrexham is back, which seems appropriate as the football season draws to a close. This is a very enjoyable documentary series that isn't just about football and has added Hollywood A listers; the first two parts of season four will be reviewed next week.

Some things head towards their finales, while others are just starting their journeys and I've added a few films to the FDoD in case I find more time to watch stuff this week. But the pub beckons tonight and as long as the summery weather continues TV will take a back seat (that's until Friday then...).

 

My Cultural Life - You Stupid Man

What's Up?

I know many of the people who stumble onto this blog (or come back regularly) are not really interested in foreign current affairs. Despite a very skewed coverage on television - Donald mad, Putin bad, Netanyahu ignored - what goes on in other countries should concern us. However, we're subjected to what we need to believe, even if we can see things that suggest something different.

I try to avoid looking in places that would make my blood boil (I don't do a bad job now, to be fair) because as I've said many times in the past, what we believe and what is true can sometimes be worlds apart. The weird thing is I don't really want to see more news on TV that paints an even grimmer picture of the world, but I get infuriated when our press lingers around 'human interest' or 'good news' stories too long. The real concept of a slow news day isn't how they can fill it, it's how can they avoid showing us the true story...

This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Here's something pretty much everyone knows - Israel are not interested in a ceasefire or getting their hostages back (in one piece), they are ironically committing genocide in Gaza. What we have here is this scenario being played out in the middle east: there are 500 known terrorists holed up in the town of Northampton (population 250,000) and the government in charge decides the best way to rid the world of those terrorists is to bomb the entire town out of existence, while carrying out extensive aggressive and deadly incursions to Kettering, Wellingborough and Corby. The government has also prevented all deliveries of everything into Northampton, they have cut off the power and the water and they have armed patrols roaming the streets picking off residents at will, because they might be terrorist sympathisers. If you need an metaphoric example of what is happening, just imagine any large town or city near you being obliterated because there were a handful of bad people in them. That is what Israel is doing to Gaza, they are wiping it off the face of the earth and every government of note in the western world is telling us that we should be celebrating the 80th anniversary of the end of the war by ignoring the horrors of war; because it's better to fixate on the President of the United States being bonkers or Nigel 'Ubiquitous' Farage or Marks and Spencer getting a data breach.

I mean, we should be worried about the way the country is switching over to being digital dependant with zero alternatives. If you want to make the isolated even more isolationist then carry on cutting off means of communication that isolated communities cannot do without, in the event of a power cut, which are all too common now. Apparently, like the phasing out of 3G, its to better use the bandwidth, which just goes over my head when people try to explain it to me and I wonder if it's deliberately like that? Basically they don't want our stinking analogue shite that still works clogging up their digital network that's as safe as a house built of paper. At times when things all around look a little bleak, surely keeping as many means of communication open for the many millions has an iota of common sense about it? Yet Capitalism wins again. People who have even less to try to live on face having more of that little taken away. 

Some of these 'innovators' 'moving the country forward' with 'technology' are also the kind of people who want to get rid of cash. The economy here, in my isolated corner of the UK, would collapse without cash, and the stupid thing? What few accessible banks we have here charge businesses for paying cash in to their accounts! How fucking stupid is that? How to isolate the isolated even more - it's like they don't give a shit... Oh yeah, they don't. How forgetful of me...

Do you know how many power cuts I experienced in the years we were in Northampton before we moved up north? Well, we can both remember one major event we had, and a couple of times the electric clocks had zeroed during the night, meaning the power was off for an indeterminate amount of time. Probably about six. We had six power cuts the first year we lived here! While they are fewer and further between now, localised ones often happen; we're more densely populated than other parts of Galloway, but there are communities in the Highlands and up to Caithness and Sutherland that will still get regular power cuts and at least with old technology without power you could still make a telephone call on an old fashioned phone (which I have, just for that reason). BT's Digital Voice is happening almost the same time as 3G is being switched off, the government should have been staggering this digital expansion over decades rather than in months. We become slaves to electricity and are forced into being dependent on having to have a better mobile device. It's like no one is really on our side, they just tell us they are and we fall for it.

Oh and one final non-sequitur: how sad is it that we live in a country where people will look at a lie and opt to believe it because the explanation of the facts takes too long to read. How fucked are we as a nation when we find the details behind facts just too long to be essential? It's how cognitive bias has become a modern human phenomena centuries after it last had its day in the spotlight.  

X Marks the Spot

There are a number of reasons why the X-Men don't really work on the big screen. The first is you need 20 odd years of history and character building and that was never originally achieved and now it isn't possible in the current MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). The second is there are far too many characters whose powers are shown by holding a hand to the temple, extending an arm and a flat hand or a mixture of both. You have mutants who are not particularly visual and you have others who are faintly ridiculous. This was first demonstrated in X-Men in 2000 and then again with the soft reboot in 2011, the film we decided to give another watch to. X-Men: First Class takes an [imaginary in the comics] elite team of proto-X-Men, gives them a sort of CIA back story and a flimsy reason for the world hating them. It works on some levels but rough casting (Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw?) and overwrought acting (Jennifer Lawrence in almost every scene) brings those levels down to pretty shonky overall. 

There is much to dislike about this film from the disjointed narrative to the preachy and rather ridiculous conclusion; but in reality it just makes you realise that for the MCU to become the kind of place where the X-Men exist, it's going to have to start the story early and allow time for mutants and X-Men to develop a space in a shared universe; if, indeed, Disney are serious about bringing the X-Men to the fore after the 2028 Avengers film. This 2011 reboot, set in the early 1960s lacks charm, interesting characters and depth. It's not like it's a bad movie, Matthew Vaughn was probably the best guy for the job, it's just it perfectly shows me (and hopefully others) how the concept doesn't work on the big screen and probably won't anywhere else. This film gets a 6/10 but only just.

The Invited

Back in the spring of 1978, I saw my favourite film of all time for the first time. Since then I have seen the Special Edition, a Director's Cut, even a fan edit mashing all the version together. In total I have seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind at least ten times. I can recite vast swathes of dialogue. I can watch it without subtitles (during the French and Spanish bits) because I know what is being said and here's the strange thing; I haven't seen this movie this century! It might be 30 years since I last watched it (it was released 48 years ago in November and 48 years before it was released the Talkie had barely been invented) and while I remembered it like I saw it yesterday, I saw it tonight with relatively new eyes...

It really is a strange film because despite being made in 1977, it is full of hope and peaceful vibes, even if there are some vaguely sinister bits in it. This is a movie about obsession, about strangeness and even charm. Richard Dreyfus plays Roy Neary, who has a close encounter with an alien vessel and falls down a rabbit hole and into a unique madness that he can't understand and his family don't want to. At the same time Melinda Dillon - as Jillian Guiler - is trying to understand why her six year old son, Barry, has been abducted and Francois Truffaut is the French scientist with most of the Americans eating out of his hands - but is he even an expert? The film never really tells you what his 'job' is and he never really expresses any 'expertise.' It is very overwrought in places; it plays to the melodrama at times and breezes over the elements that make us wonder how all this started, why it's happening in the USA or just what EZ4 really is? If I want to be honest, it gets a bit flabby in the middle; considering this is a film that is only a little over two hours, it sometimes feels much longer and it's very much a movie of two halves.

The overarching thing though is how it isn't really a film about jeopardy or threat. It's a race against an unspecified time, a mystery that never feels mysterious and a desire to understand something everyone is struggling to understand. The aliens are coming and they've invited a lot of people to their party, while the people who think they're in charge are busy making their own agenda, yet this isn't what the aliens want. This is a movie that puts the viewer in Roy Neary's place - what would you do if you were Roy? There is also the fact there's a huge amount of naivety, yet a really well imagined procedure, even if we don't really get much explanation as to why and how it happened. This is a spectacle; it is an event film that allows style over substance but you don't really care because you are swept along by the event. I'd probably struggle to call it my favourite film of all time now, but equally, I can't think of anything I have seen as often or loved as much as this; I've always been able to fill in the blanks to make the narrative work better for me. I watched this Director's Cut for the first time and it has just enough of the Special Edition and the Theatrical release in it to make it possibly the ultimate version. Despite its age and the fact some of it has dated badly, it still probably deserves 8/10. 

That Told Me

My phone rang. I didn't recognise the number and realised it was probably spam.
"Hello?" long pause...
"Hello, is that Phillip Hall?" [always a spam call as no one really refers to me as Phillip any more]
"Uh-huh."
"This is Lisa Smith from [unintelligible]" [clearly her name wasn't Lisa Smith given the thick Asian accent] 
"I'm sorry, could you say who you're from again?"
"I am calling you from [unintelligible]."
"I still didn't hear that, sorry. So, what are you trying to sell me today?"
"I am not trying to sell you anything, you stupid stupid man!" Click! 
...

[An addendum to this: shortly before I pressed 'publish' I got a call on my mobile from someone who clearly wasn't trying to sell me something but wondered why I'd just called him. The thing is my phone has been plugged in recharging next to me all morning and I haven't even turned it on. The guy who rang me - who sounded like a proper geeza - was sort of apologising and wondering how it happened in the first place. It just confirms my suspicions that the digital network is fucked and we shouldn't be reliant on it...]

Memories

I had never seen Christopher Nolan's Memento, it was a film that never found its way to me and I was never that bothered about finding it. The wife had seen it, but I passed up on the chance. So, for our Sunday night film, we settled down to fill in a blank - which is pretty much what Memento is - a movie about filling in the blanks. It's a bit like Groundhog Day but in reverse with violence and without the humour. Guy Pearce plays Lenny, a man who suffers from a rare form of amnesia, meaning he cannot form any short term memories. He knows who he is and why he is doing what he does, but anything that has happened in the recent past disappears from his mind as quickly as it enters. What this film does is tells his story from the end to the point where, we the viewer, can go: "Oh, that's what this was about!" Except, it isn't quite as straightforward as that. It is a riveting watch, trying to work out what has been happening, except that's not quite how this works; this is about working out if what has happened is what you think has happened or if there's an unknown reason for it, or a reason that seemed like a good idea until Lenny forgot about it. it is confusing; it is so clearly a Christopher Nolan film. Is it worth the 8.2 rating on IMDB? Well, I'd only give it a 7/10 because I found a lot of it contrived and almost too simplistic. The film's major problem is you care about Lenny until you start to realise who he is by which point you simply don't care about him or anyone else.

A History of Monday Night

In last week's blog, I spoke about having limited stuff to watch due to it needing to be something both the wife and I fancy watching. This led me to scour IMDB and other sources (such as Wiki) for something to add to the list that the wife wouldn't mind watching. Now, it dawned on me that we hadn't seen Batman Forever (the one with Val Kilmer) for 30 years and we'd never seen Batman & Robin, so I downloaded these and unfortunately Batman Forever was out of synch and it was bad enough having to watch that shite without it feeling like a badly dubbed Kung fu film. Then I looked at IMDB and saw that it had a rating of 5.2, but worse was that Batman & Robin had a rating of 3.5 - I now totally get why we never bothered to watch it. So instead of trying to track down a copy where the words matched the lip movements, we deleted those movies and watched something I'd fancy watching for 20 years, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence with Viggo Mortenson, Ed Harris, William Hurt and Maria Bello. It was something I'd been interested in since I saw trailers for it on Barry Norman's BBC film review show, but somehow it simply escaped me. Now, compared to the two Batman movies, this is a masterpiece, with a 7.4 rating. However, like many Cronenberg films there was just something tonally wrong with it - such as the scene with the blatant truly unnecessary nudity. 

It's the story of a mild mannered religious guy who kills two arseholes who are trying to rob his cafeteria, terrorise his staff and customers. He offs them in a very neat and efficient way and becomes an overnight celebrity, which also alerts some very bad men to his existence because Tom Stall might be former mob enforcer Joey Cusack and much of the next hour of the feature is whether he's a case of mistaken identity or the real deal. If this had been made in 2025 it would have starred Jayson Stayfum and had a body count in the hundreds, but this was not a long picture, just over 90 minutes, that felt like it was on for ever. However, it also felt like it needed more substance; maybe more of an in depth look at Tom's bullied son and his friendships; maybe more about Tom's wife and even their weird looking youngest daughter. It felt superficial and somewhat underplayed and when we get to the denouement, there was just something almost comical about it, especially William Hurt, who doesn't really do mob boss with any degree of believability. Obviously this was a metaphor for the fact that violence is everywhere and it even lurks inside a happy, normal home. It was just an okay film, not worth more than 6/10. 

Not Winning

I didn't realise that the 2010 action film The Losers was based on a revamped DC comic, so when I found out about it I thought I'd best watch it and see what I thought. I remember the original Losers comic, but this was a 21st century makeover and the film reflected this. Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Idris Elba and Zoe Saldana, The eponymous group of ex-soldiers, now jobbing mercenaries, were set up by a cruel and heartless arms dealer called Max (Jason Patric), so they spend the rest of the movie tracking him down to kill him for the nasty shit he did. It was filmed a bit like the director was imagining doing a real life comic, but the freezeframes and slow-mo action sequences felt more 1966 Batman than 21st century action adventure. It had some iffy comedic moments - Chris Evans taking the piss out of Captain America feels like it should have worked but somehow didn't - and most importantly no conclusion. It was like the people who made it thought it would be such a hit they left literally everything in the story unfinished. It also started to get a bit boring and repetitive and ran out of steam. This was a generally poor film - 4/10

An Almost Perfect Balance

By the time Ellie picked up and tuned a guitar to serenade Dina with an unplugged version of Aha's Take on Me, I was really starting to lose the will to live with The Last Of Us, once decent episode so far does not make a classic TV show and I avoided review sites after this episode because I didn't want to get angry. What this was encapsulates this kind of drama; fuck all is happening so you make enough noise to attract attention then you put yourself in a fucking stupid situation and barely escape by the skin of your teeth. Speaking of teeth, Dina sees a set of bite marks on Ellie and thinks she's been bitten, blows her head off and they decided to end the series early to put everyone out of their misery... Or at least that's probably what should have happened, because what we got instead was some lesbian grindcore and more inane and dull conversations between infatuated girlies. I do not understand why people think this is so good, it's like the LGBTQ Gilmore Girls with zombies. 

Guar-stly

Anyone who knows me won't be surprised to learn that I think the new look on-line Guardian is a fucking dog's dinner of style over substance. It is one of the worst page redesigns I have ever seen as the newspaper tries to represent its image of a newspaper on line and it fails so miserably I'm facing something of an existential crisis. I have grown to despise this once great newspaper, but it has been almost impossible to give it up. The reason for this is simple, I might not agree with the paper's political leanings, or I despair at its 'better than you' attitude and I absolutely hate the fact it spoils film and TV, but it had always been by far the easiest news web page to navigate. It did a good job of putting stuff where it belonged and it was easy to find things, most of the time. There were clear lines that separated Opinions from things in the Spotlight to Sport and Culture. That has gone in favour of garish headlines, huge pictures and literally three or four times the amount of strap line information than ever before. If I wanted to see what was happening in Sport, I'd quickly scroll down to the Sport section and look through the headlines. Now, when you eventually find the Sport section it's hiding behind this In-Your-Face design and has about 75% fewer stories. That's because further down the page, after News UK and a couple of new subheadings, there's More Sport, with a bunch of 'lesser' sporting stories, stuck somewhere else which seem more designed to catch you out than give you that all-encompassing coverage feel. It's fucking horrible and has left me with a serious dilemma - am I going to dump The Guardian completely? And if I do where else do I get my 'newspaper' fix? 

It's become like an abusive relationship in recent years. I hate the paper far more than I like it, but I just can't bring myself to walk away - to say goodbye to an old friend who has gone from being my ally to being something I struggle to be in the same room as at times. I stopped buying it five years ago, but it's a 'favourite' bookmark and I usually look at it a couple of times a day. I want something that does what the old Guardian web pages did. I don't need this new not-user-friendly layout and I'm not sure I can see myself getting used to it. I probably would if it had only just started to piss me off, but the newspaper I started reading in 1989 feels like it become my enemy about five years ago and I just keep an eye on it to see how far right it can shift without the ignorant realising it.

Princetown Road Trip

In a strange way, the seventh episode of Your Friends and Neighbors [sic] was probably the most enjoyable despite a lot of it being away from where the 'action' has been taking place. Coop, his ex-wife and their two kids are off to Princeton to look at the university as a place for their daughter to go, while the rest of their extremely rich and entitled neighbours deal with a police detective who seems to be extremely cynical about everything; thus making everyone a potential suspect in her eyes; especially Coop because he'd been seen a week earlier having a 'fight' with the dead body he woke up next to at the beginning of last week's episode. In many ways everything that happened between John Hamm and Amanda Peet this week was always going to happen, the surprising thing was it happened but not for the reasons we probably all suspected. Their daughter almost has sex with a Princeton student, gets very drunk and spends a lot of time throwing up and when they got back home the shit really hits the fan, but again in not the way you might have suspected. This shouldn't be as interesting and entertaining as it has turned out to be, but despite the rich and entitled arseholes inhabiting the screen it's taking on a life of its own and the knowledge it has already been renewed has now added to the intrigue. It has won me over.

Columbo With A Bad Wig

Oddly enough it was not The Guardian's recommendation that started me watching Poker Face, it was a friend who said I might enjoy it and he was right. Two episodes into the first season and it is extremely entertaining and not at all what I expected. Natasha Lyonne - last seen in the strange Russian Doll - plays Charlie Cale, a woman with a unique talent: she can tell when someone is lying to her. This proves to be very useful if you're a card player, but as we discover in the opening episode it also landed her in trouble and the way she avoided that trouble returning was by switching off her 'power' and just living life, nice and easy. However, greedy men will go to great lengths to increase their wealth and that goes tits up for everybody because of circumstances too long and complicated to go into (or spoil it).

Essentially, Lyonne's Cale is going to travel across the country solving murders while being pursued by the reason she got into trouble in the first place. That's all very good and slightly formulaic, but the thing is this is simply Peter Falk's Columbo reimagined for the 21st century with a female in the lead role, but all the same traits and foibles - but no cigar. That's not criticising it because it is a lot of fun and we quickly picked up on the things that Charlie would pick up on once the set up is complete. I kind of think Lyonne's gruff (maybe) New York accent and scruffy nomad looks might start to grate on me after a while, but at the moment it's filling a gap that last week I didn't think would be filled.

What's Up Next?

You may have noticed no Doctor Who for the second week on the trot? That's because I don't watch it any longer. I haven't even missed it a teensy-weensy bit...

There are a couple of new things coming out this week. Murderbot looks like it might be interesting and will be given a chance and I'm sure there will be something else to tickle my fancy. As usual what you see is what I see.