My Uncultured Life - Something Beginning With U

What's Up? 

Fucking search engines, that's what. Both Google and Bing have been 'improved' so that if you search for something now you get FIVE results and hundreds, maybe thousands of extra pages. I used to have my search results in batches of 100, but not anymore. Oh no. This can't be done any more. Which begs the question - why?

Apparently (and I'm badly paraphrasing here), it's to stop AI from 'scraping' results; has been done because the major search engine providers believe that limiting results means a better quality of answer; or something I didn't really understand because it was all bollocks... Search engines have increasingly gotten worse over the last 10 years and all I can surmise from this is we're witnessing a greater degree of enshittification...

Oddly enough, this doesn't affect picture searches. Presumably showing idiots pictures is better than showing them words? So, because I'm not going to let these tech companies dictate to me what I can search for and what results I get, I'm giving DuckDuckGo a trial - already I'm getting more results per page whenever I search.

Also Google. What an absolute cunt of a company. They are more intrusive than a predatory paedophile. It's difficult to avoid them. Take this blog, there's this little icon that has appeared just to the top right of the area where I write this blog. It's a little pencil with a star above it. This automatically inserts links to Google searches for whatever it bloody wants. If you accidentally hit this button - like I did - I had to spend ten minutes removing fucking Google search links to the 40 odd links it inserted. I didn't ask for it but I've fucking got it. Just another example of the enshittification of the internet.

Uncomfortable

The first thing that crosses your mind when you watch Léon (or Léon the Professional) 30 years after it was made is how they got away with it. This is a deeply uncomfortable and disturbing film about a 13 year old girl who develops an unhealthy crush on the hitman living next door. Natalie Portman plays Mathilda, the abused daughter of a drug dealer who seeks Léon's help when her family is massacred in their apartment. She wants to become a contract killer to gain revenge against the crooked cops who have done her wrong and Léon seems a little simple and very confused. The thing is it's still a good film even if it could never be made in 2025. 7/10

Unconvincing

There is currently one film on Channel Four's books that you can expect will get an airing on at least one of the channel's umpteen sub-channels every week and that is Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 climate change disaster feature starring Denis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal and some other people. It is a disaster movie (I should really just leave that sentence on it's own with nothing around it), but it isn't a total disaster. In fact, for the first hour it's a taut and zippy action thriller, it all goes a bit wrong when the pseudo-science employed by the director (who also wrote, produced, did the screenplay and probably wrote the theme tune) makes today's pseudo-scientists look quite bright in comparison. I'm not saying it was bollocks, but I think it was bollocks. Anyhow, the second half of the film has some very iffy things in it, from wolves attacking a group of people (they don't do that) to the catastrophic sudden drops in temperature that some of the people manage to outrun or hold at bay when others simply froze in their tracks. This was the first time I'd watched it all the way through in about 20 years; I did it so you don't have to. 5/10

Uncompromising

I haven't changed my mind about Task from last week or previous weeks. It's overlong and would have made a reasonable two hour film. However, it is what it is and this week we discover the secret of the mole; Mark Ruffalo finally meets Tom Pelphrey (the two main characters) and the net closes in around everyone. Maeve does something sensible but stupid and how they're going to stretch this out for two more episodes is a mystery given where we are on the cliffhanger ending.

Unctuous

I gave into... what I'm not sure, because temptation isn't it, but I gave in and watched the second episode of the new series of Brassic. This week it was all about Tommo going to Dusseldorf to hook up with his son, meet his ex and her parents and try to 'persuade' them to invest in his latest project. It was fucking horrendous; it clearly wasn't filmed in Dusseldorf, apart from some stock footage; all the Germans spoke English, including to each other and it made little or no sense at all. Even the brilliant Ryan Sampson seemed jaded and like he was waiting to die... Meanwhile back in Britain, Vinnie is trying to work out what is going on with Davey, while the new kids introduced last week are doing stuff. It really is crap, but at least there isn't the usual badly shot seasonal continuity that really pissed me off over the last few years. 

As I'm a week behind with these reviews, episode three came out and as we had nothing else to watch on Thursday night, we opted to catch up. What a pleasant surprise it was - apart from the seasonal continuity gaffs, which have returned. It's not a patch on earlier seasons' episodes but by far and away the best one of this, so far. It was about a school reunion that goes a bit wrong and there were a number of LOL moments - far more in this than there were in the opening two episodes. It's still old and worn out, but this was at least worth watching.

Underdog

The third episode of Chad Powers was all about a game of American football, which I don't really understand except it's like rugby but overcomplicated. We've also got into that US sitcom groove of this being just about 25 minutes long and as it was all set (bar the opening 'prologue') during the Catfish's first game of the season, it might have put some people off. The thing is it was again quite funny and you get the impression this could turn out to be a redemption arc type thing for Russ Holliday; but the longer he plays Chad Powers the more shit he gets himself into. Still worth sticking with.

Ubiquitous

Another film that has been on the Flash Drive of doom for a long time is Freaky Tales - a portmanteau movie of four different tales set in Oakland, LA during 1987. I've been reticent about watching it for a number of reasons, primarily Pedro Pascal, because, you know, the ubiquity of him. The other reasons include the 6.3 rating; the fact that modern portmanteau films often never amount to much or are flimsy at best with their connections. This was better than all the reasons I feared but was considerably worse than I imagined. As a snapshot of 1987, it was, as most American films are, very authentic (except for Pascal because he looks the same in everything he does), but the, dare I say it, freaky nature of the narrative made it a tough watch and it was difficult to take seriously. It had things happen in it which seemed to deliberately detract from the story and other things, involving actual real people, that didn't happen in real life and makes you wonder why they happened in this movie. In a nutshell, it involved punks, skinhead Nazis, hired thugs, cops, rappers and a transcendental Ninja basketball player. 4/10

Unpleasant

As Gen V begins to make some sense, the biggest problem I have is that most of the characters are just really unlikeable and it really feels as though this will have some bearing on the final season of The Boys - but so did the last series of Gen V and with the exception of a couple of characters from it appearing in one of the opening episodes, that was it. There continues to be something just a little bit half-arsed about this, like sending a strongman to deal with the escapees, despite Cipher knowing that Marie is as powerful as Homelander. The thing is Hamish Linklater's character is an improvement as the bad guy of the season, but for someone who always seems like he's one step ahead of the game, he don't half seem like he's a bit of a dick who suffers from a misplaced overconfidence. 

Unexpected

This was yet another example of The Morning Show being at its best and providing us with quality TV, even if by the end fans of Cory are wondering how he's going to untangle himself from two situations - one he seemed to regret the moment he did it and the other being something from his past that he isn't aware is about to come back and bite him on the arse. I really hope some of you who read this blog who might never have watched this before have found it and are enjoying this as much as we do. Yes, it's got Jennifer Aniston in it, but she's electric and nothing like how you remember her. This season has been as good as previous seasons so far, even if some of the characters have felt like they've had their pasts erased to allow the main plot lines to move forward. It's still the best thing we're watching at the moment (but we've not started watching Slow Horses yet).

Unrelenting

There's an all-star cast in Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest, a 2009 crime drama that follows a week in the life of three cops. Richard Gere is in his final week, he's about to retire and is so depressed he thinks about killing himself every morning; he's also a lazy, uninspiring cop. Ethan Hawke is a crooked cop but a devout Catholic, with a pregnant wife (Lili Taylor), who lives in a shitty house and is desperate to move her and his five, soon to be seven, kids out. While Don Cheadle is deep undercover working with some of the worst criminals in the city and desperate to get out of his dangerous life and do a boring desk job.

It is a grim, gritty and very sleazy look at Brooklyn in the Noughties, full of unpleasant characters, dangerous liaisons and death waits round almost every corner. It's a really good film, but it hasn't got any levity, no one is happy, no one laughs, it's just bleak and probably very realistic. 7/10

Unusually Creepy

Our journey through the Harry Potter universe so far has been underwhelming; I'd forgotten how ... not very good the first two films were, but I did remember that with the arrival of Alfonso Cuarón as director the films did at least feel a little more different, less childish. Wow, it seems I'd really forgotten just what the Mexican film maker brought to this. I remembered that Hogwarts and where it was set, became darker and more 'real' but I'd completely forgotten how Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was more like a horror film than a movie about a magic kid at a wizard's boarding school. This was dark, menacing and for the first time Potter seemed to have grown a pair of balls (but he is 13 now, so maybe they'd dropped?).

This was really enjoyable, even if, yet again, the film was let down by some rather cartoonish special effects. It's the tale of misplaced blame, werewolves, magical creatures, bullying and mischief and it worked so much better than the first couple of efforts. This had moments where the narrative served the purpose of the greater story - which, of course, the movie watcher might not have been aware of - but in general it is the best one so far, possibly even the best one of all. 8/10

Un-fucking-believable

You are having a fucking laugh, surely? Did I really just sit through 55 fucking minutes of bullshit just to find out it was all a badly paced and executed set up for a third series? The longer it went past the 35 minute point without looking like there was going to be a finale - a big fight to finish the series and, hopefully, the entire show - the more I was realising that I was just being set up for more eagle shit.

This [hah] final episode had lots of bad rock music, lots of characters talking to each other, lots of setting things up that ultimately was a waste of my fucking time and effort. Am I supposed to be happy that I ended up watching some shite that is going to conclude somewhere else... According to what I've managed to find, there is  going to be no third season of Peacemaker, because this storyline will be concluded in either one of the upcoming films or a spin-off series... For fuck's sake, isn't James Gunn an absolute cunt? This takes the piss more than Marvel; I hope he gets the sack and DC dies a horrible death.

What's Up Next?

Frankly, I don't care. I was told I was uncultured this week, so maybe I'll just review the field opposite my house, for seven days...