My Cultural Life - Waving & Drowning

What's Up?

You'd think, after 18 months of doing sweet FA (apart from upset people), the Labour government would just rip up its senseless programme notes and start being a Labour government again. The problem is there are very few actual Labour Party MPs left; they're all either Starmer or Reeves clones or closet Tories who thought joining Labour would give them a chance to be MPs again now that the Tory Party is in its last days before complete extinction.

If Labour was to do Labour things it might not stop the rot, but what have they got to lose? They are currently handing control of the country to a racist who works for billionaires; a man who can do literally anything he likes and then deny it and receives no scrutiny at all. One thing I'm absolutely positive about is that a year into Reform's first government there will be more people than ever crying 'I didn't vote for this.' Reform might only get one crack at power, but you can bet your life that it will change so much in those five years that whoever becomes the party in power in 2034 will have a thankless task with no hope of reversing policies designed to fuck us over.

This is why Labour needs to do some radical things. They have to stop pandering to the far right media because the far right media doesn't give a shit about how far right they seem to be, they're never going to support Labour. Why does no one in the Labour Party realise this? Are we really governed by a bunch of people with almost less awareness than the last Tory administration? So, if Labour does some radical things - taxing the rich, super taxing the super rich, borrowing money to pay for infrastructure, which will create jobs, which will create spending, which will create more tax revenues... They can worry about immigration only if people refuse to see how their lives are improving.

You see this is the crux of the matter. Idiots can't see the real problem* despite it sitting in front of them, they want to think it's down to foreigners, to black and brown people, to the disabled, the unemployed and especially to asylum seekers (which they don't trust) and the right wing press isn't offering an alternative narrative. * Incidentally, the biggest reason for everyone being unhappy is actually the cost of living and the fact that shareholders are holding the rest of the country to ransom. However, the right wing press won't suggest this because if the people started to realise that they're paying more because of profiteering businesses who want to pay their shareholders more and more every year that would create problems they can't solve.

Labour is doomed. They are about to go the same way as the Tories. By 2030 the political landscape of this country will see the Labour and Conservatives only achieving 20% of the total vote; the other 80% will be thrown at Reform, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cyrmu, the SNP, the Green Party and even independents who will win seats by campaigning on local issues. It might be that the only way to stop Reform from destroying what's left of the country will be by having a rainbow coalition, one where the Labour Party, ironically, holds the balance of power. However, they can stop this. They can be more like the party people voted for and then spend a lot of money educating people that foreigners aren't the reason lives are shit. 

I'd like to see Labour MPs standing up for themselves and their party by challenging the right wing biased media. Saying things like, "Laura, tell me, why are you so focused on a mistake made by the chancellor or the wrongful release of a few prisoners? I don't seem to recall you scrutinising the Tories who tried to defraud the tax office, or who gave billions away to their mates during Covid, or those that partied while the rest of the country was in lockdown or even the 800+ prisoners wrongly released in just the last year of their government. It's like you have an agenda; do you have an agenda, Laura?" I'd fucking cheer at the TV if an MP actually challenged these so called 'journalists'.

Juno Temple's Nipple

One of the surprise box office hits of the summer was Roofman, a film that tells the true story of Jeffrey Manchester, a criminal with a good heart, but a criminal all the same. Channing Tatum plays the eponymous Roofman, a man who breaks into places through the roof and robs them, but is very nice to victims. Manchester is a ex-serviceman with an almost genius mind, but he couldn't hold a job down so he turned to crime and eventually got himself caught. He then escaped from prison and started a new life as John Zorn, met a woman, fell in love and lived a normal life, while living in a vacant space inside a Toys R Us store, where his girlfriend Leigh (Kirsten Dunst) worked.

For almost six months, Jeffrey/John lived a 'normal' life, but a dishonest one while still on the run. He joined a church, did family things and eventually fell in love, so when he decided he needed to escape or be caught, he planned one last heist and that's all I'm saying. It's a really good film, considerably better than I expected, which is why it was a big success in cinemas, in a summer that yielded few massive hits. So, why the heading? What about Juno Temple's nipple? Well, the British actress plays the girlfriend of Manchester's buddy Steve, who is helping the convict do a flit to Venezuela and there's one scene where her nipple pops out of the top of her dress. I couldn't really understand why it was even in the film; yes, there was a scene with Channing Tatum's arse as he ran naked through Toys R Us, but Juno's nipple felt almost exploitative. It didn't need to be there and while it didn't ruin an entertaining movie, it really could have been avoided. That's how prudish I've become in my old age. 7/10

Eye Eye

After last week's first 'treading water' episode, this week It - Welcome to Derry moved the story along by going back into the distant past to explain what lives under Derry. In many ways, it was an important part to the story, but equally it also felt like more filler. Is this a show about proving the black cinema owner (would that even be a thing in 1962?) isn't a child killer? Or is it about the US Army trying to find whatever lives under Derry so it can be used as a weapon against the country's enemies? Even if it is the latter, no one is sure what they're looking for or if it's even a viable idea. One thing is sure, some people know about the 27 year cycle of horrors including some adults. Something else that bothers me about this show - I mentioned the prejudice porn a couple of weeks ago - is the playing fast and loose with the degrees of tolerance and racism in 1962. One week every single black character is acting like it's Jim Crow time and this week Hanlon's wife is talking to racist policemen like it's 2025 and she thinks they'll take notice of her. Tonally, this is all over the place.

That's not to detract from the general okayness. This isn't a bad series, it's just written by a man - Andy Muschietti - who wasn't born until 1972, his formative years will have been the 1980s, so it feels anachronistic at times because the cultural difference was vast. This, however, is a small gripe (but one that grates at times), because if I had a big gripe it's how over four episodes we're not really much further on than we were in the opening minutes of episode one. I'm not sure any of the three interwoven subplots are good enough to hold this together, plus Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) still hasn't appeared and I'm not sure that's a good thing. I think this isn't proving to be as excellent as the opening two parts suggested it was going to be; there doesn't seem to be a real direction and this week a creepy fishing trip and some crazy eye hallucinations felt like the horror is gradually being ramped down.

Gone Fishing

And so another series of Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing draws to a close. We watched the final two episodes this week and it might surprise the casual viewer or people who don't watch but are aware of this programme that they seem to catch fewer fish every year (and it's always expertly edited so you never see a hook - or the damage it does - when a fish is landed). The emphasis this series has been on Ted's age (and his absence from the final episode), the accommodation that Bob sources and scenery - it really is screensaver TV with a hint of gentle comedy. There's going to be a Christmas Special and I expect there will be a ninth series, but as our two hosts will be a couple of years shy of 70 next year I wouldn't be surprised if they call it a day, especially when the old dog is too weak to be dragged around the country.

Deliberately Contrary

Apologies if I bang on about something I consistently bang on about, but The Guardian's reviews are so obviously 'paid for content' now that it's as clear as a nose on a face. Just recently they have raved incessantly about the new David Duchovny series Malice, giving it four stars, while IMDB has it at 5.6 - which for a TV series that's less than a week old is pretty shit. Then there's the BBC thriller The Ridge which it claimed was a 'superb thriller' and 'sure to keep you watching until the end...' That's currently at 5.3 on IMDB. 

So when it was raving about the 2024 movie Bone Lake and gave it a four star rating I was immediately drawn to IMDB to see what 'real' people thought of it. It's been out a year has several thousand reviews and currently is 5.7, which I suppose is just below average, but also a rating to be avoided. It also claimed Playdate was a lot of fun with its three star review and if you tuned in last week you'll know exactly how well that pile of shite performed both with me and IMDB. The Guardian seems to be drawn to crap films that are rated in the 5s, which suggests to me that either their reviewers are just idiots or there's this deal where crap films' producers pay the Guardian to give extremely positive reviews that fly in the face of actual real peoples' opinions. The paper has, so far, in the last couple of months got one review right, the extremely entertaining All Her Fault, which was as good as the paper claimed it to be, but there's also the review of Pluribus, which it also raved about, but was clear from almost the opening paragraph that the reviewer hadn't actually watched the opening two episodes or if they had they didn't take any fucking notice of them...

The thing is me moaning about The Guardian is a little like me recommending Apple TV+ shows to you. Most of you either a) Don't read the Guardian or b) don't subscribe to Apple TV+, so it's just me doing the equivalent of shouting into the abyss. I want that once excellent newspaper to have more comments sections available, especially for its reviews, but they patently avoid doing that, which just further confirms my belief that most of the paper's reviews are paid for content. The other reason for me believing this are the number of crap reviews it gives for big studio pictures, because these big studio pictures don't wave a wad of cash at Katherine Viner's reviews editor and beg them to be kind. It was once a proud and worthy newspaper, it's now run by a bunch of neo-liberal cunts!

Organised Criminals

Another thing we've 'taped' off of Film4 in the last year was James Gandolfini's final movie The Drop, a tale about a Brooklyn bar that is used by Chechen organised crime as a money laundering joint. The star of The Sopranos plays second fiddle to Tom Hardy's Bob, his cousin who works for him. Bob has a heart of gold and only seems to look out for people and dogs. When their bar is robbed by some local thugs, their 'bosses' give them a limited amount of time to recover the stolen money and make good, meanwhile the local PD is sniffing around under the guise of hunting the robbers, but they're really trying to find out what they can about a cold case murder investigation. Noomi Rapace also stars in this as Bob's potential love interest and what seems like a sweet love story wrapped around an organised crime story actually has a slightly sinister feel about it and a last 15 minutes you probably wouldn't have seen coming. It's likely to show again on Film4 and is worth a solid 6.5/10.

Why I Love/Hate the USA

In a week that felt like it was fast becoming one of those weeks where everything is slightly worse than you expected, along comes something superb; something that almost brought a tear to my eye; something that perfectly illustrates my belief that the USA is the worst country in the world with some of the nicest people trapped living there. That something was Code 3. What a fantastic movie. No, really, it's phenomenal. It stars the excellent Rainn Wilson as Randy, a paramedic who is on his last day doing a job he's spent 18½ years doing, but he needs to get out.

This film follows the 24 hours of his final shift and frankly it's an hour and 40 minutes of sheer brilliance. You will laugh, you will want to cry, you will be astounded at how frank and real it is; how visceral it allows itself to be, yet you will still feel like you have watched something important, that will make no difference at all. I cannot recommend this enough; you will see few films better than this in 2025. This gets a rare and warranted 10/10.

Ho's Da Man

The wife finally decided it was time to watch the most recent series of the ever-dependable and quite brilliant Slow Horses and guess what? It is quite brilliant and always dependable. This series initially focuses on Roddy Ho, the wanker who monitors all the surveillance and is the IT wizard at Slough House, he is also a massive (mentally ill) cockwomble. He falls victim to a honeytrap that sets off a series of events beginning with a mass shooting in a suburb of London, a plot to destabilise the capital and the deaths of 22 penguins. Is this all to do with the upcoming mayoral election or is there something more sinister afoot and what have the Libyans got to do with it all? I know I bang on about Apple TV+ but this alone is worth the subscription price (or the 'risk' of downloading their shows illegally). This is one of the most enjoyable TV shows of the 21st century and Gary Oldman is just so good as the amazingly grubby Jackson Lamb.

Up Shit Hole Street

In many ways, Down Cemetery Road seems to be turning into an almost watchable show. I did manage to work out what it was that bugged me about it and that was the fact that all the characters in it are from a 1970s sitcom performing in a 2020s espionage and action thriller. There was less poor humour in this fifth part and more clues to ... well, not so much what is going on, because we know that, more about different parties staying ahead of other parties that mean them harm. It's the antithesis of Slow Horses, despite being written by the same man; whereas that is full of genuine humour from its slightly OTT characters, this feels like a try out for something that never got (or should never have been) made.

Tick, Tick, BOOM!

The worst thing about the finale of The Morning Show is that if there's going to be a fifth season it won't be for another two years. There have been times during this series where I've wondered just where it's going, but that's par for the course. There has been a paucity of certain characters and a feeling that everyone has moved on, but it's always felt like it was going somewhere and it did with a finale that was always going to happen, it just depended on who was going to light the blue touch paper and whether they were going to retire or go up with it. In this case, we won't find out until that fifth season even if this series completes its story.

There shall come a reckoning and this show always delivers that, if it's Mitch driving off a cliff or if Bradley is going to get out of Belarus alive, there are always shock departures and consequences because of that. There was more than one bad guy this time around and whether all of them will be around in the future just makes the anticipation for series five all the greater. This is one of the best TV shows being made - long may it run.

Miserable Old Bastard

The wife binge watches The Chase, usually during periods when she isn't working. What she does is record episodes from the TV and when she's off work - like she is until February - she will do some of her craft work with the quiz show on in the background. She's a huge quiz show fan and now she doesn't go to the pub quiz as a player it's taken on extra value for her. It keeps her mind sharp.

I find the show tedious and heavily weighted in favour of the Chasers, most of which I think either the wife or I could beat in a general knowledge competition. I find Bradley Walsh to be somewhat disingenuous as a host who makes it look as though he's on the quiz contestants' side, but he's really just ensuring that the ratio of times the Chasers are beaten is kept to a minimum. I would not be welcome on this show, for a number of reasons, but the biggest is no doubt the contestants and my general disdain for many of them. Yes, sometimes there are people on this show who have fantastic general knowledge skills and have analytical minds to be able to work out some of the ridiculously difficult questions that are often thrown up - which doesn't help my general cynicism for the show - however, there are some thick-as-horse-shit people on this and I would probably insult them and abuse them if they did anything but allow themselves to be eliminated...

Why do people who have trouble finding their arses with a map and a compass want to go on TV just to be humiliated? It's not even 15 minutes of fame because the only people who are going to remember them are themselves. It's also probably the most difficult quiz show outside of University Challenge and Only Connect, which further puzzles me why idiots would want to go on it. They get fuck all in the cash builder, then take the low offer - usually intelligence insulting - and if they get through the first stage, are then useful for fuck all in the final chase where invariably they hit the button and say 'pass' before any of the clever people on their team get a chance to answer. What incentive is there for any half decent player to go for any large sum of money when they might end up sharing it with someone who doesn't know how to piss into a bowl?

Where's Portillo When Needed?

How can something so stunning be turned into such a boring TV documentary? New Zealand By Train was actually made a couple of years ago, by a New Zealand production company and it was as dry and uninspiring as you could possibly imagine. So when Channel 4 got hold of it the first thing they did was get Julie Walters to narrate it. The problem was they kept the original script and Walters could have been pissed as a fart and reading it naked with a massive dildo keeping her company and it still would have been dull. The scenery, especially in the south Island segment, is to die for, but the two 45 minute parts were just massive snoozefests. It was like they had all of these fantastic places to promote but they opted to make it sound like watching paint dry, maybe to put people off of going there.

I actually watched it to see if Dunedin featured - a place where an old friend of mine lives - unfortunately the railway track doesn't go that far south, ending in Christchurch and then going west over the Southern Alps. They still managed to shoehorn some of southernmost part of the country in, probably because other than fabulous scenery there isn't much to see in the south. That said, from the fleeting examples we had of the North island, there doesn't appear to be much of that worth seeing either. Honestly, if this was a promo video to get people fired up about visiting New Zealand they would have been better off filming some sheep having sex.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere

The guy in the picture is the man in Paraguay, the one the hivemind of humanity knows very little about. The opening 15 minutes of episode four of Pluribus featured him and what happened in the period around when Carol phoned him. He appears to be much more suspicious than Carol, who incidentally has been storyboarding a plan of action while finding out things she didn't really want to know. There were hints of an ongoing story emerging, because while the premise is great, it needs to have a forward moving story. While it is arguably the least engaging episode so far, you now know a lot more about the hivemind and it doesn't stop it from still feeling a wee bit sinister.

A Crime Caper

I've never seen Catch Me If You Can, the Steven Spielberg film about the teenage fraudster who became a lawyer, a doctor, and an airline pilot as he tricked his way to embezzling over $5million. Leonardo DiCaprio is Frank Abignole Jr, a man who posed as all manner of respected positions and exploited the banking system while staying one step ahead of the FBI agent on his trail, played by Tom Hanks. It's a pleasant enough feature and a regular favourite on the telly, but it's the story of a man who is very good at committing fraud largely down to people being too trusting and the easy number of ways you can defraud the US government. 6/10

What's Up Next?

Television is going to be taken up with the first part of the final season of Stranger Things. Between now and the end of the world, we will have the final 283 parts to enjoy until the day before the apocalypse the final FINAL finale will be shown to the 17 people remaining who have a TV set...

Other regular TV will be viewed and I will be dancing around IMDB to give myself an idea what to not watch or what I'm going to have to search carefully for to ensure there are subtitles attached.

I'm going to the pub for the first time in three weeks tonight; it's only the second time in six weeks (and the last time was to present a pub quiz while I felt like shit), so there's no Saturday night classic or any other denomination of film or TV to watch.

As usual...