What's Up?
I expect the next General Election will be a straight referendum with one question being asked: Are you a racist? I know some Reform supporters would argue that and say they are not racist at all; just look at the number of brown people they have as candidates and members. I've developed man boobs as I've got older, I don't think of myself as a woman.
It might be time for Plaid, the SNP, Green and even the Libdems to stand up and offer something different. It might be time for people to throw Labour and Conservative away and look to something new for the future of the country. Reform has a strong number of former right wing Tories in their ranks; if people are so stupid and ignorant to remember what these 'people' did to the country between 2010 and 2024 then they deserve to lose their NHS, their benefits, their human rights, because when fascist authoritarianism comes to this country it won't discriminate.
Worst Day of the Year
This blog goes live on Saturday 25th. The worst day of the year. It is the day before the clocks go back to GMT from BST. There are lots of arguments for and against the changing of the clocks and I, personally, would like to see us adopt BST as a year round thing, even if it means people in the far north end up being in the dark until about 10am in December.
To be fair, I suffer from SADS and have done for most of my life and as a result the week leading up to the clocks going back I'm usually as miserable as sin (which is a strange expression given how some sins give so much pleasure...). This week has been no exception. It started right at the start with an arsehole on the roads who seemed to want to play a game of if you overtake me I'll overtake you back and then slow right down until you try to overtake me again. I mean, I drive a speed restricted small white van, I'm not going to be challenging boy racers any time soon, but the wanker I overtook was going about 30mph on the road to the beach. When he re-overtook me he was doing about 70mph and then he slowed down to about 25mph. Once upon a time I would have been incensed by such a twat, but this time I simply slowed down to 20mph and made it clear to him I was not going to play his game.
That seemed to set the tone for the week. As I slowly recovered from a virus I caught last week - it is October and I pretty much catch something every October - I just wandered around the house feeling miserable, especially with 6 months of often cold, wet and windy weather stretching ahead of us. Yes, there will be nice days; it will be mild and it will be sunny, but it's going to be March before we see the trees spring into life again - that's nearly SIX months - and while the winter does offer some colour, in the form of snow drops, scarlet elf cups and early spring flowers, the next couple of months, for me, are fucking awful...
The Deeper the Hole
Last week I was wondering if
Chad Powers had staying power. The fourth episode felt a little like they'd run out of relevant ideas and there was almost the feeling of meandering around the edges of the story because the main story - in the show - is ripe for blowing up in the faces of those perpetrating it. Russ Holliday (Glen Powell) is a totem for bad luck; he literally only has to walk in a room and you know something is going to happen that he's going to regret; but his alter-ego Chad is now becoming a college football star and people want to talk to him; interview him on TV and find out all about this hick and naïve young redneck. This is where the problems obviously start and Russ and Danny (Frankie Rodriguez) don't seem to be addressing this massive elephant in the room - the need for a Chad back story that isn't going to be debunked in five minutes.
This week as Russ tries to think of a way where he can make Chad the dominant of his two personalities (not in a mental way), his ability to fuck up astronomically delivers his best fuck up yet. After a conversation with the coach's daughter Ricky, Russ decides he needs to dump Russ Holliday and become Chad Powers, but first he goes to a bar to have a beer and relax... Once he does what he does, he returns to Danny to tell him that Chad needs to be the person he has to be otherwise he can't succeed; so he goes off to do a television interview. Meanwhile, the coach (Steve Zahn) is still wrestling with his wife situation, who has been conspicuously absent since the start of the series and people are beginning to ask questions. She agrees to be part of the big TV interview thing and arrives at the family home just as the TV crew are about to start filming. Here is where she meets Chad Powers for the first time; unfortunately for Russ, he's meeting her for the second time and what had already been a really funny episode gets funnier. This really is a better show than perhaps you'd think and apart from the second episode, the emphasis on American football has been small.
A HUGE Film
"Are you sure we've seen this before?" Asked the wife as we were reaching the denouement of
Solomon Kane (or: The We-Wanted-Huge-Ackman-But-He-Was-Too-Expensive Movie). The answer was yes, but we probably remembered little because it was an absolute load of shite. James Purefoy isn't Huge Ackman, but that is who the English actor must have been asked to channel because there were times you had to remind yourself that this wasn't the Wolverine actor putting on a bad West Country accent while wearing a prosthetic nose designed to make him look more like Huge Ackman. James Purefoy is okay at pretending to be Huge Ackman with a Cornish accent, but probably not okay as an actor. Sadly the film, its script and most of the acting was fucking abysmal and felt like chunks had been cut out to make it short enough to be a mild success - I mean Jason Flemyng was the villain and he was on screen for about five minutes. What few special effects were actually quite good, but this is the equivalent of a sticky tissue in the bottom of a bin in Huge Ackman's bedroom. 2/10
The Craic
Any movie that manages to have the general feel of
Local Hero is okay in my book; therefore
The Guard - a film with Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle - is worth a watch, especially as it's been on Film4 a couple of times recently. From almost the opening scene to the end, where you have an ambiguous outcome, it's a riot of hilarious nonsense, strange characters and a Father Ted-like humour that never leaves you wanting. Gleeson is a rogue Garda sergeant - rogue as in he does what the fuck he wants, including acid, prostitutes and robbing dead bodies - who ends up being part of a joint Garda/FBI operation to take down a drug smuggling deal worth £½billion. Cheadle plays the FBI agent assigned to be the liaison between the two institutions, who discovers that Ireland is a very strange place if you're not familiar with it. A thoroughly entertaining 100 minutes of blarney. 7/10
Trailer Trash
I spent some of Monday morning looking through the Tube of You at trailers for new movies and TV coming out in the next six months and had to stifle an enormous yawn. Predator: Badlands looks full of lunacy but the three minute trail probably gave most of the plot away and possibly spoiled some action scenes. There's some film with Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson called Mercy, which the premise alone doesn't lend itself to the trailer business let alone have a three minute clip that basically tells you everything that is going to happen until the last five minutes. I stopped watching it because I might end up watching it, but it didn't exactly make me priapic with anticipation.
The first look at Marvel's
Wonder Man filled me with some dread, to be honest. It's being called a 'meta-comedy' and remember the last 'meta-comedy'? The awful She Hulk series? This feels unnecessary and pointless and whatever happens at the end of it I don't expect this is something that will set the television world on fire. Most of the trailer is probably from the first episode, whereas there have been a number of promo pictures released of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in the costume (which isn't the costume
my Wonder Man ever wore) and the suggestion he's going to be very powerful.
For those of you that care, he was relatively powerful in the comics and was very often a sort of pointless addition to the Avengers during their periods when the team was made up largely of heroes who didn't have their own comics. Wonder Man had a rather dreary meta-comedy-styled comic in the 1990s, which had failure written all over it because his backstory had always been relatively dull and got retconned a number of times. The addition of Ben Kingsley's Trevor Slattery is more jarring than anything else; for all of the character's naïve charm and humour, he still aided an abetted a terrorist organisation that killed loads of people [Iron Man 3]. If this is the kind of lowest common denominator supporting character we can expect then I don't see this being well received.
Nudes
This might be the third time I've written some kind of review about this film, which is probably a first for anything that isn't a superhero or science fiction movie - although there is a loose sci-fi theme going on in this. I first watched
Cashback in about 2008, a couple of years after it came out and was blown away by it. I watched it again about ten years ago and still held the film in high regard, so as the wife had never seen it and I wanted to watch something I knew I'd enjoy (and prompted by hearing a song from the soundtrack), we put it on.
The thing about
Cashback is there is a lot of necessary nudity in it. Now, I've become something of a prude in my old age and I'm not a huge fan of nudity for the sake of it; it's belittling to women. However, this is a film that makes female nudity the centre of attention. Sean Biggerstaff plays Ben, who has just broken up with his rather stunning girlfriend and is finding it hard to get over her. He develops insomnia and ends up working in his local Sainsbury's, where he meets Emilia Fox's Sharon. While working there Sean discovers he can stop time and this leads to him spending a lot of time drawing naked women - women who are shopping. It sounds a bit pervy; it's most definitely a film which would have some serious questions asked about its content in 2025, but it all fits in with Ben's fascination with the female form and his desire to capture it at its most beautiful.
This is really just a snapshot of a period in the life of an art student; the people he works with, his friends, the women in his life and everything that comes with it. It is a truly delightful love story; a movie that screams out to have a happy ending. Biggerstaff is really good as Ben; you wonder why his career never took off. Fox is sublime as Sharon and the supporting cast are all fucking hilarious. It is a lovely, funny and sexy movie. 9/10
The Final Task
You would have thought that with most of the story concluding last week that the finale of
Task would have been more like an epilogue than anything else. Yet, there was the subject of the dodgy cop and the biker gang to conclude, but the fear that there was going to be the sense of an anti-climax, thankfully, never materialised. This turned out to be an excellent series with some nuanced performances - especially by Mark Ruffalo - and a quite action-packed ending that seemed fitting. It's a series I wouldn't have recommended five weeks ago, when we were thinking of dropping it, but if you get the chance it's worth your time.
Doesn't End Well
There was a degree of being very happy at the conclusion of
Gen V, this was generated by the fact I don't have to watch it again. There was also a degree of trepidation as the main cast members appear to have been recruited by the Resistance led by Starlight who obviously has had some work done (badly). The conclusion of this really rather tawdry series pretty much happened the way anyone would have guessed and hopefully it will fade into history forgotten and not missed.
Exit Via AI
A rather lowkey episode of
The Morning Show after last week's fireworks, but that said even this managed to have a moment in it where I had to rewind to make sure I heard what I thought I'd heard. The people who run UBN are all having a crisis in one way or another and with the Olympics on the doorstep and Chris seemingly no longer part of those plans, it's up to Alex, Stella and their French overlord to come up with an alternative, the problem is events overtake all their planning and we're left with a real mess. Cory discovers something that could mend his relationship with Bradley, but will he use it?
Long Music
It's not often I actually spend money on music by complete unknowns. I like to get an idea of what I'm buying first and to a degree that's what I did with the Minneapolis-based ambient musician known as
The Intangible. As is often the case, I stumbled on his music by accident - I literally saw a link for a piece of music, clicked on it and then fell down a Tube of You rabbit hole. I've always had a real soft spot for ambient, space music, type stuff. It's been 10 years since I discovered the brilliant Stellardrone (Edgaras Žakevičius) and while I've often had recommendations from people about music similar to his, no one has really hooked me. However, while The Intangible (there is no other info about him anywhere on the Internet) isn't the same type of music, its laid back, chill out vibes and gentle passages of music are absolutely right up my street.
So, I bought the album called Cosmic: Part 1: The Long Music Mix, which is almost 12 hours of music (for just £15) - it's essentially a best of compilation from the first ten or so albums (there's about 25!) - and it has been on since Wednesday. I can't say it's been on heavy rotation because I'm only about half way through it, but I expect it will be played an awful lot, mainly because it pushes all my buttons. If you like ambient music and something that you can just sit and allow to wash over you, then this is an extremely Good Value For Money purchase. I'll be recommending this to anyone I know who likes this kind of thing!
Oh FFS
The penultimate to last ever Brassic was a tasteless load of shite.
Not Fargo
That was a strange experience. Emma Thompson's latest movie channels Fargo, but badly. That's not to suggest
Dead of Winter is a bad film, it's just a bit weird and was filmed entirely in Finland masquerading as Minnesota (where Fargo was set). Thompson does a passable Minnesotan accent as she plays a recently widowed women who runs a fishing tackle shop in the middle of nowhere. She is going on one last fishing trip to the lake where she first dated her deceased husband - to scatter his ashes - and she stumbles across a kidnapped girl running away from some guy she met earlier when looking for the road to the lake. What follows is a frankly bonkers story which I'll not go into because it would spoil the movie. I will say that it is quite violent in a strange way and is as bleak as fuck. It's not bad, but it is weird and not in a 'weird' way and the reason for the kidnapping is quite typical of what we like to think of as fucking stupid 'Mericans. 5/10
The Final Frontier
To finish our week off, we decided to watch a new show from Apple TV+. Good TV has been thin on the ground recently and I had hopes this would fill a gap.
The Last Frontier is a kind of Con Air meets Jason Bourne meets the CIA thriller set in Alaska. A plane full of dangerous criminals stops over at a secret airbase in Alaska to pick up an even more secret and dangerous prisoner - Dominic Cooper - and within a few minutes of taking off an explosion takes out half the plane and it crashes in the middle of nowhere, amazingly only killing a few people and not our villain. Enter Frank Remnick, a US Marshal stationed in Fairbanks charged with trying to track down the criminals who escaped...
However, Cooper's Havelock character is a super spy, capable of all manner of jiggery-pokery and is also a stereotypical super agent who can do all manner of super-duper stuff. He has secrets which could blow the CIA out of the water and destroy/kill many lives. So enter Haley Bennet as agent Sydney Schofield - an alcoholic, washed up agent who is given one last chance to get her guy or face prosecution and treason charges for being a suspect in his escape from justice. The opening episode was great, although there were a few slightly contrived elements. We ended up watching the first three parts and by the end of the third part we'd unanimously decided not to watch any more. So many stupid things happened to enable a quite flimsy plot to move forward. People did things you would not expect; things happened that were telegraphed long before they happened and you've got about 100 US Marshals and FBI agents being given the run around by an injured ex-university lecturer who is now more indestructible than James Bond. It ended up being very silly and I wouldn't recommend it. However, it does have one unique thing: it features both actors who have portrayed Howard Stark (Iron Man's dad) - John Slattery (old Howard) and Cooper (young Howard). This factoid isn't enough to make you watch it.
What's Up Next?
I've been largely disappointed with TV in 2025, there is still a way to go but we all know December is a graveyard of non-events. To try and counterbalance this we're watching Slow Horses over the next week...
There's also The Long Walk (tonight) and the new Buffalo Custardbath film The Roses. I expect a modicum of ambivalence about at least one of them.
You'll get what you get, but not before I rant and rave about the fucking clocks going back, plunging us into darkness for 4½ months...
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