My Cultural Life - Short and Curly

What's Up?

Controversy time... If you know me you know I'm very much pro feminism. In fact... actually don't get me started or I could fill pages with reasons why I think that women (the biological ones) are treated as second class in a still largely male dominated world. That said, if a woman does something that I find questionable or wrong then I'm not afraid to call it out, exactly like I would if a man did the same thing. It's called balance of opinion and I'm not scared to be completely gender inclusive.

I am not a fan of women's football. To be clear, as I've got older I've kind of stopped being a devotee of football in general. I'll watch matches (club football) but this season (for obvious reasons being a Spurs supporter) I have been doing more interesting things instead. The problem I have with women's football is quite simple, with my interest in the men's game waning it doesn't really get a look in. I'm not going to talk about quality or comparisons because they're not relevant. However, there is one ex-woman footballer turned pundit who I never cease to have a problem with... Eni Aluko. 

This week she criticised Ian Wright about his role in women's football punditry along with generally criticising football coverage as being too male with not enough women involved - which if you've watched any football coverage over the last few years is absolute bollocks. As for her dig at Wrighty - a man I'm not a big fan of because of his Arsenal connection - is just bang out of order; you'd need a complete detachment from football not to realise he's been one of the greatest advocates of the women's game. The thing is Aluko has form when it comes to criticising men, almost to the point where you wonder if she's just a man hater. She had former England boss Mark Sampson sacked for alleged racist remarks, which many of her teammates disputed, so she criticised her teammates for supporting the then popular England manager. Then she came out as a supporter of the Tory party at a time when they were increasingly unpopular, but then criticised the political party, specifically Rishi Sunak, for funding the furlough scheme, suggesting that it was a waste of money and people should simply go to work despite the risk of Covid and then she backtracked on these comments as well.

Now she's looking at losing her job as a pundit because ITV, who employ her, were really unhappy with her comments about Ian Wright. It seems this woman is a tactless attention seeker who might have finally been found out. I get it she's a black woman in a difficult world, but her lack of self awareness and ability to create controversy because of her marginal opinions and accusations makes her a good reason to avoid women's football coverage on ITV.

Surprisingly Entertaining

Despite the considerably low score it has on IMDB and the fact it's essentially a slapstick and silly comedy (with bad language and hammy acting), Death of a Unicorn is actually quite a fun film, even if some of the special effects are a bit shoddy and it's yet another entitled billionaires story. The thing is the movie is actually saved primarily by the fantastic Jenna Ortega, playing Paul Rudd's teenage daughter - in many ways it feels as though she knew she was starring in something a bit shonky so dialled her performance in and that actually made her character seem... relevant. Oh and the ever reliable Anthony Carrigan as Griff, the Man Friday/Butler and GDB of the rich family who see nothing but money, even in the face of death. Ortega and Rudd are en route to his boss's Canadian retreat to finalise the details of his ascension into the family's business upper echelons, but on the way accidentally run a young unicorn over. There are stretches to this film, one of them being the fact they loaded the dead unicorn into the back of their Volvo when dumping it in the woods would have saved a lot of trouble. Once at the retreat of his boss - played by Richard E Grant - things start to get gruesome.

The supporting cast includes Tea Leone, Will Poulter and Jessica Hynes in a movie that was made almost entirely in Hungary and basically is a satire on greed and vast riches. Once the rich scum realise what Rudd has in his car the place is overrun by employees dissecting the unicorn, processing its blood, looking at its horn [oo-er, missus] and assessing what the magical properties can do and how that equates to huge amounts of money. I think this was deliberately made as a comical satire of wealth and desire because it is rather silly at times, while very very violent and gory. The weird thing is despite it's 6.2 on IMDB, I actually really enjoyed it because it really wasn't trying to be anything other than just a fun filled blood splattered excess. I'm giving this film a 7/10.

Ever Increasing Madness

The combined 12 episodes of Llamas With Hats last a fraction over 18 minutes. It's essentially two llamas - Carl and Paul - who stand in the centre of the screen and talk to each other, usually because Paul is worried about something usually in the backdrop. This is because Carl is a crazy psychopath with a fetish for baby hands and Paul doesn't like this very much. The stories start with Paul finding a dead man with his hands missing, who it turns out was knifed 37 times by Carl before he chopped the guy's hands off, cooked and ate them. By the fifth part, Carl was ripping holes in the fabric of time and space and watching thousands of baby hands fall through it, in a way even he doesn't quite understand... It is funny, if you like that kind of thing (I did) and it's also gross, sick and extremely childish in a 'THAT CHILD IS A PSYCHOPATH WITH A CHAINSAW' way. It was a recommendation to me by someone called Phil, who is from Wales and he probably won't read this, which is useful because I can say horrible things about him and he'll never know...

Bye Bye Who

The stupid thing about the ongoing subplot in the new Doctor Who series is the cry baby (Doctor Boo Who?) has promised his reluctant sidekick that he'll get her back to Earth on the day in May she left, but they can't get there for some unexplained reason. So why don't they try to go to the day after? Belinda's a big girl, she can lose a day without anything big happening, surely? That's essentially the crux of this ongoing Anita Dobson filled storyline. I watched seven minutes of this and decided that my long running relationship with Doctor Who is finally over*. I'm done with it because it's basically a load of shite. 

* To the people who claim I've said this before, I have watched every episode of DW since the reboot, despite not enjoying many of them I persisted with every. single. episode. And have never given up on one or not watched one. Until now. It was how I broke that habit.

Porn Hub

Our attempt to watch all the 90s films we never watched in the 90s continued with another Paul Thomas Anderson movie - the controversial Boogie Nights with Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg and Julianne Moore, plus a host of PTA's regulars from Philip Seymour Hoffman to John C Reilly and Philip Baker Hall. It is a fictionalised story of the porn industry from the mid to late 1970s to the mid 1980s and follows the life and career of Dirk Diggler (Wahlberg) who rose to fame because of his 13" penis. I know that Anderson has a great reputation for making movies that reflect the quirkiness of real life, while sometimes having a surreal slant. There are also the complexities of interlinked relationships and synchronicity, but frankly I think his films are pretty dull, boring and up their own arses. I literally went through IMDB to look at his body of work to see if I could remember one of his movies that I've actually really enjoyed and I just don't get it. There's a lot of necessary nudity in this, because it's about the porn industry and the transition from film to video, but if the characters aren't hucksters they're idiots or dangerous. Also, remarkably, there is absolutely no mention of AIDS which decimated the porn industry during the same period. I just can't find anything particularly positive to say about it really. I didn't like or sympathise with any of the characters. I didn't care what happened to any of them and even the 'comedic' finales to the different stories felt contrived. 4/10

Back To Normal

In the aftermath of Joel's death, the township of Jackson decide that sending 16 fighters after his killers is an unnecessary and dangerous thing to do, so it's up to Ellie to do it (with the aid of Dina). They kit themselves up and head off to Seattle to track down the murderous Abby. This was The Last of Us reverting to type with an episode where absolutely fuck all happens; there's lots of 'character building,' the suggestion of a worse threat than the fungals and Washington Liberation Front. Frankly this was so slow and dull that you would have been excused thinking last week was a fever dream. I'd like to suggest this was just a lull before a storm, but this show has form with fuck all happening and my guess is we're going to get a lot more of this before Ellie decides not to kill Abby at the end of the season. I mean, if the TV show is going to remain absolutely faithful to the computer game then that is what will happen. I'm sorry if that spoils it for you but fans of the computer game seem to think it's okay to do. I don't know why they do it. The feeling of superiority, perhaps?

The Dull Theme Continues...

Let's be clear about this, Hell or High Water is a good idea executed in a dull and laborious way. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are brothers robbing provincial banks, but in a clever and relatively untraceable way. The money they're collecting is to ensure that their mother's farm stays in the family because there is a threat of foreclosure on it now she has passed away. Jeff Bridges is the Texas Ranger tracking them down and pretty much nothing happens for 90 minutes, then there's a 'courageous' sacrifice, a half-hearted confrontation and a conclusion. It's not a bad film, it just doesn't really do much, even during the bank robberies and while it has a high ranking on IMDB - 7.6 - I'm struggling to see why. My rating is a less charitable 5/10.

Monster Nuns

It now seems that the only thing I've enjoyed this week might be a film with dodgy CGI unicorns in it, because everything else seems to have been made for people who like watching glaciers move... I'd heard some promising things about the historical drama Small Things Like These, the story of the uncovering of the scandal involving Irish nuns and the girls they took in, who had fallen pregnant out of wedlock. There was no scandal taking the girls in, but the scandal was how the girls were brutalised and tortured; made to sleep in coal cellars and beaten for the slightest indiscretion. The problem with this Cillian Murphy vehicle is it's painstakingly slow, Murphy's character reminds me of Paul Whitehouse's Ted and like so many other films I've seen this week - fuck all happens, until the end when a bit more fuck all happens. Don't get me wrong, it's a good film, the wife really enjoyed it and prodded me a few times to stop me from falling asleep. 5/10

A Very British Story

Over on iPlayer, there's a two hour Martin Scorsese led documentary about two of the UK's greatest filmmakers; Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger tells the story of how film director Michael Powell met Hungarian refugee Emeric Pressburger and forged a near 20 year relationship that produced some of the most iconic movies of the war and post-war era and also some of the strangest. Scorsese does a great job of basically being a gushing fanboy about the pair's work, which ranged from epic to absolutely bonkers. For every classic film they made, they followed it with an envelope-pushing zeitgeist defying work of impenetrable weirdness - in fact, even some of their most famous films are tinged with a charming strangeness; take A Matter of Life and Death as an example - an epic movie shot in both colour and black and white, about the battle for an airman's soul between heaven (in monochrome) and Earth (in Technicolor). I'm not even going to suggest the pair were ahead of their time (although it would be interesting to see what madness they could produce now), but they were doing things that no other filmmakers were even trying. This is a fascinating documentary that does a marvellous job of showing us just what geniuses the pair were and how, through a quirk of fate, Scorsese became so close to them. If you like cinema, then you need to watch this.

Breathe

The puzzling thing about Last Breath is that it was already a Netflix documentary in 2019, so did it need to be a docudrama as well? The answer is probably no. This is the account of the diver who became detached from his life-giving umbilical line and then went nearly 30 minutes without oxygen and still survived was well documented when we first moved to Scotland - I remembered it well. It was a big story and this film with Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu, feels a little unnecessary; the two main stars are not actually doing that much. Harrelson sits in a pressure chamber for most of the film, fretting about the life of his colleague, while Liu does get to do more but he also seems like a big name employed to sit around and look worried. Mark Bonner is the man coordinating everything and yet he's low down on the credits and the whole movie felt cold, detached and far too long... This was 40 minutes of story crammed into 90 minutes. 5/10   

Full Circle

It's taken five episodes, but we're finally at the point in the story that we came in on at the start of episode one of Your Friends and Neighbors. The house Jon Hamm opens his eyes in at the start of the first episode? We now know that he was about to burgle the house owned by his occasional shag and neighbour. The load of blood Hamm is laying in is the from the body of her ex - the dull boring fat guy who left her for a younger woman. Yet, weirdly, this was one of the least important events in this mid-way point in the series. Coop steals a Lichtenstein because some serious money is needed, but the guy he's matched up with is a crazy coked up sex pest who dumps Coop in a really difficult situation. Plus there's his son who has been getting himself almost expelled from school and Coop's business manager who literally burns a million dollars because he hates his in-laws. There's still not a lot going on, lots of style over substance, but it's all I have left and it's better than Doctor Who... 

What's Up Next?

But seriously, the UK is sleepwalking into electing the UK's very own National Socialist Party. What is rarely talked about when discussing the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s was their actual politics. They didn't get elected because they stood on the campaign trail saying, "We're going to rule the world and you're all going to love a short man with a silly moustache who hates Jewish people!" They got elected because they said "We're going to take control of our country back! To hell with this 2nd class European citizen bullshit! We will build our way out of this slump and all the work will be done by our people!" I'm not making this up. This isn't Leftie rewriting history. The National Socialist Party is a fantastic name ruined by the Nazis. I mean what better political party for (mainly) the English. They're nationalists - they love [England] their country; don't like foreigners and think they're better than everyone else. Socialist - a word which we all believed was dead in politics, or at least dormant for a few generations. However, the policies they tout - renationalisation, fairness and a degree of protectionism are incongruous to the ideology, which is more quangos, less rights, authoritarian control and the return of the class system.

The problem the people of this country have is things have been so bad for so long now (and not just here) that 'fascism' always looks like a good 'short term fix'. It's almost like we want to self harm again. Brexit wasn't bad enough, now we want to see if we can inflict even more chaos into our lives. We have become nihilists - we live in a nihilist society; almost a social experiment to see how much collective damage you can do to a society before it cracks and despite Starmer being as effective as an aspirin for a broken leg, I think many of us thought, "Phew. The madness has finally ended, let's have some boring for a while." Instead, we have 2025 and now Farridge is looming large - again? I find it quite disturbing that in the short time Jeremy Corbyn was elevated into the spotlight the press managed to twist everything he ever did into some kind of EVIL thing, while Farridge has been around since the day he went from the Posh-Poster-Boy-for-the-National-Front unknown to celebrity, because of his plane crash in 2010, which seemed to be the moment the press fell hopelessly in love with him.

Nigel will be pushing 70 by the time of the next election, so his window of opportunity is narrowing quickly, given the amount of fags and pints he's consumed. I get the impression he's not a vegan... The thing is he's a canny populist and he will be PM in 2029. It doesn't matter then if Reform couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, it will always be someone else's fault and our lives will whither on the vine. Welcome to the future, there's nothing we can do about it...

What Else is Up?

Television, eh? It's the start of May and it feels like there's a desert in front of me with a screenshot of tumbleweed. I'm sure there will be some things to watch, the problem is we have stuff to watch sitting on this computer. I never mention my TV folder which currently has stuff ranging from The West Wing to Silo to Outlander (that last one is more an experiment than anything else as we've never been remotely interested in it, but we know so many people who love it to bits). I've got Legion, Let the Right One in, and every Marvel TV series from WandaVision to all the shit ones. Some of these we've seen before, others are new, but even this is shrinking and the problem is we both have to want to watch them (we're not yet at the stage of beggars can't be choosers).

As for films... I can't remember the last time I watched a contemporary - real life - movie that I felt like I'd treated myself to X number of minutes of enjoyment. I'm sure someone will say, "It was three weeks ago." But if I can't remember what it was already, then it might have just been slightly better than the current meh we're getting. It's like films don't seem to have a real originality any longer. It feels like the industry has run out of ideas. That said, there's also 20 films on the flash drive and another 25 on the TV hard drive - with the same problem husband/wife as with TV. It reduces your choice by more than you would think. The thing is, I can waffle on about this until the cows come home, but what you see will be what I got.