My Cultural Life - Great Films, Bad TV

What's Up? 

Many things bug me and it's not because I'm now almost officially an old bastard. Many of the things that bugged me when I was younger, still get up my nose now. One of those things is people posting pictures of (or simply talking about) snow drops in the middle of January and equating this appearance of the winter flower as the first signs of spring.

It isn't. It's a winter flower that will be long gone by March 1st, when winter officially ends, but as we all know it doesn't really end then. The only real positives in January are the nights drawing out. Even now (January 23) there's light in the sky after 5pm and by the end of the month it will be there at 5.30. By the middle of February, the sun will be high enough in the sky, during the day, to start warming up the conservatory, which is starved of sunshine for three months of the year and subsequently leaves the downstairs of the house feeling cold and unwelcoming.

We're a little over 6 weeks into winter, which means we're just under six weeks until the start of spring. The interesting fact about March is there's more chance of it snowing as the daffodils come out than there is when fireworks are allowed to be used and kids dress up as ghosts and ghouls. This is because of a combination of the sea, land and air temperatures. By March the area around the UK is at its temperate minimum. It might not get dark until 7pm and the sun is much higher in the sky, but if we get hit by arctic winds then all bets are off. I find I get almost as pissed off with March as I do with November and that's a psychological reason - the higher the sun gets the more our bodies think that warm weather is on the way and, of course, a warm March in Scotland is as likely as sabretooth dodos invading the USA and eating President Shitler alive (which isn't going to happen regardless of how much he says it will)...

A Real Diamond

I'm not really a fan of Neil Diamond, although I'll be the first to admit he's written some great songs. I am a bit of a fan of Huge Ackman and Kate Hudson, so when Song Sung Blue came out I found myself in the strange position of wanting to watch it (although I'm not sure the wife felt the same way). 20 minutes into this film and I was wondering if it was the right thing for me, but then it started to get slightly weird and not always in a good way. 

This is a biopic about a Minnesota (topical) Neil Diamond tribute act called Lightning and Thunder, of which Ackman and Hudson play the husband and wife team leading it. With support from Michael Imperioli, Fisher Stevens and James Belushi it feels just like a straightforward biopic and then it takes some strange turns, some funny, some tragic and always interesting. The movie has a strange chronology, because in real life they existed for over 15 years and became legends of the club scene in their part of the States, opening for a famous rock band (I won't say who, but it will blow you away) and selling out venues that only famous rock bands normally would; however, the film seems to have been shrunk down and encapsulated into a three year period - probably for artistic license. It is absolutely riveting - believe it or not - and whether you like the music or not you are glued to the screen waiting for the next WTF moment to happen. You should watch it, Huge and Hudson are great, and so is the movie, if sometimes a wee bit harrowing. 9/10

Iran and Ran

It's been over a decade since we watched Argo - a very topical movie considering what's been happening in Iran recently. This Ben Affleck directed, produced and starred in biopic about the covert evacuation of six Americans from Tehran in 1980 is a brilliant film because it's true. Affleck plays a CIA 'fixer' who comes up with a clever idea to get six Americans in the Canadian embassy out of Iran and past the Revolutionary Guard, all he needs to do is come up with a suitable cover story and background to make it work, which he does. His boss, played by Bryan Cranston, thinks it's a good idea, so Affleck's Tony Mendes recruits Alan Arkin and John Goodman - playing Hollywood producers - into his scheme and the fake film Argo is created. Despite this being a well documented true story it doesn't stop it from being one hell of a tight thriller that oozes jeopardy. A simply stunning bit of filmmaking. 9/10

One Man Army

I never expected to watch this film. In fact, it never fell onto my radar, at all. Its sequel has but despite the good reviews I figured it was a Finnish movie, it would need subtitles and I probably would struggle to enjoy it. Then an old friend, someone I see far too rarely now, suggested I watch it and given I have the ability to watch films that have subtitles now that maybe I'd give it a go, see what all the fuss is about. That movie is Sisu and it's a film about an almost impossible to kill former soldier who takes on what's left of a platoon of German soldiers at the end of WW2. It also didn't have many subtitles and those it did have were built in.

What an extraordinary thing it is. If Tom Cruise made this people would call it a load of far-fetched nonsense, but here we are and it absolutely rocks. Jorma Tommila, last seen in Rare Exports, plays Aatami - a one man army. He finds a shit load of gold and runs into a bunch of Germans, what follows is essentially utterly bonkers. The most visceral and bloodthirsty comedy I have seen in years. It is so fucked up you suspend belief after about 20 minutes as Tommila ploughs through 90 minutes of film saying six words and all of them at the very end. Some of the things he does are so ridiculous that he rewrites the meaning of the acronym FUBAR. It's blood-splattered brilliance in Northern Lapland. 8/10

A Knight's Tale

Everywhere I look there's a lot of love (and good reviews) for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the latest Game of Thrones offshoot from that notoriously crap writer George RR Martin - a man so crap he even changed his name to bear witness to his general plagiarism. Yes, I'm not really a fan of a writer who fails to deliver what people want and regularly delivers other things that he believes will appease his critics... but what about this new series?

Peter Claffey (no, me neither - apparently an ex-rugby player) is sir Dunc the Tall, a hedge knight (meaning he's pretty low in the ranks) with aspirations even if he's as thick as pig shit. Everyone was banging on about how funny the opening episode was; how it was a brighter and lighter side of the GoT universe, but all I thought was it was a bit boring and nothing much happened, apart from a graphic scene of Dunc taking a shit. How people can rate this 8.6 on IMDB based on that opening episode is almost as much a mystery as why people thought this was a great season opener. Fuck all happened and there's only five more half hour episodes to go...

Contra to Beliefs

I discovered a Tom Cruise movie I'd never heard of, from 2017. American Made is the true story of airline pilot Barry Seal who was recruited, covertly, by the CIA to initially take aerial photographs of the US's enemies in Central America but which spiralled into something completely huge, ending up as a drug runner for Pablo Escobar and working for Ronald Reagan. The crazy thing about this is the fact it's a true story and is based on Seal's own account of what he did and how he got away with it. This, at times, is a funny comedy, but at others is a scary thriller; tonally the film is all over the place, but actually it works very well. I don't know why it never fell on my radar and ordinarily it would be a candidate for film of the week, but in a seven-day period where the movies I've watched have been above excellent, this only really gets an 8/10.

How Did That Happen?

I saw a film last year called Friendship with Paul Rudd and some guy called Tim Robinson. It was a bit cringeworthy and Tim Robinson got on my nerves faster than a nun with the runs. What a complete tool he was in this movie... So, there was this article in the [ahem] Guardian on January 21 about TV shows that were either impenetrable or impossible to understand and one of the series listed was The Chair Company, which, from the premise, sounded like it might be my kind of thing. I can safely say it wasn't.

That man Tim Robinson was in it and he essentially played the same character he played in Friendship but with a different name and job. The idea was simple, a man sits on a chair, it collapses, sending the man - already seemingly under some pressure - into a full blown psychotic episode and going down a rabbit hole of inability and frustration. We watched the first episode and felt that we needed to watch the second just to see if we could understand not so much what was going on but whether there was a clear and obvious narrative. The lead character is trying to contact the company that makes the chair that collapsed and is finding it impossible to track them down and speak to someone and it spirals out of control and logic from that point on. We turned it off seven minutes into episode two and will never go back to it...

Fail Out

Yeah, we watched episode six of Fallout and we'll watch seven and eight as well. If you watch this show and like it then there's no point in you reading on. If you don't watch it and are tempted to then trust me when I say - don't. This week there was an imaginary musical number and a mutant saves the Ghoul's life. Woo.

The End Is Nigh...

And so, season four of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel has been watched and as I alluded to last week, the lead character is the least funny person in the show. In many ways this is a hugely disappointing season, but I think, as the closing scenes of it were unfolding, that it was purposeful. The problem is sometimes successful TV shows need to do more and I think this one felt a little like a copout. In fact, it was, at times, quite annoying. Midge Maisel's insistence about doing things her way became a kind of millstone, but it was her repeated propensity for screwing up her own future that rankled me more. She turns down so many opportunities in this season; so much money... You start to wonder if she really wants to be a comedy star or just likes talking to rough audiences who don't care about her lack of ambition and love of the word 'fuck'. Watching this show is a little like supporting Tottenham Hotspur, like the football team there's always some things to make you smile and occasionally, when you least expect it, they do something really good, but most of the time you feel let down by them. The final season awaits and the first half of it is reviewed below...

I suppose The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is the perfect example of sticking with something despite no longer really liking it. It's a really good, stylish and well-made show, but as we head towards the final four episodes I'll be glad to see the back of it. I figure it's a deliberate intention of the series for clothes-horse Midge Maisel to become this reviled, annoying and actually anything but astute central character who is essentially so stubborn and selfish she's lucky to still be alive or maybe that's just how I read it. One thing is clear, everyone else is far more interesting and funny, especially Tony Shalhoub as Abe Wiseman, Midge's slightly eccentric father. Season five has flash forwards, mainly to the 1980s where Maisel is super famous and America's favourite female comedienne. The thing is she's even more annoying in the 80s than she was in the 60s and you don't really want her to be successful. Or maybe it's just me?

I find I really couldn't give a flying fuck what Midge Maisel does any longer. I am still intrigued by Susy Myerson, her manager, who has seemingly remained almost the same character for five seasons; has seen no character development and clues we were given in the opening episode about her sexuality are only now being explored as the series heads to its conclusion. Superficial is a good word and it perfectly describes this show. It looks sumptuous and like it could almost have been filmed in the 1960s (there are some anachronisms, but we haven't got all day), but in the end nothing much has happened. The story it's telling just isn't that interesting and Midge is fucking annoying. Four episodes to go...

Humour Me

Two things. The first: someone asked me why I didn't review The Traitors. The answer is simple - I'm too fucking old to indulge in shite television. The more it gets plastered over the media the less I want to watch it. It doesn't interest me and it never will. I feel desperately sorry and pitiful for people who watch and enjoy this soulless load of stinky shit, but it's not for me.

Secondly: The Guardian. Why do I seem obsessed with this newspaper's reviews? I don't really know. I suppose it's because the Guardian is bookmarked; I've read it for 30 years and it's usually my go to place for breaking news and its culture section gives me the heads up for things that are coming out. However, as I've pointed out on numerous occasions over the last few years, it appears to have a policy of reviewing bad things positively and vice versa...

I'm actually at a stage where a bad Guardian review means a must watch and a good review is something to avoid like the plague. Even the wife has started to notice and has also seen that the paper often disagrees with itself. A four star rave review for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms became a three star review from someone else, a day later. Lucy Mangan famously reviewed Clarkson's Farm without watching it, just opting to remind everyone what a massive cunt Clarkson was. She gave it one star. Two weeks later, Stuart Heritage reviewed it and gave it four stars, saying it possibly does more for the plight of British farming than any other TV show and it was funny and poignant.

Mangan recently gave Ryan Murphy's latest heap of shite, The Beauty, a four star rating, while IMDB had it at 5.0 until fans of Murphy rallied and brought it up to a still not respectable 5.5 by Friday morning. It makes me think that Mangan either has no idea what a good TV show is or is paid by producers to hype their latest crap TV. I'm almost convinced that the Guardian is deliberately contrary to all other reviewers because of backhanders and dirty money. I suppose this is why I'm seemingly obsessed with the paper, this and the fact it used to be a centre left newspaper that could be read by everyone left of a Liberal. Now, not so much. 

Oh My Word...

Oh Jeez... In a week full of great movies... My love of time loop films is common knowledge. I adore Groundhog Day, I thought Omni Loop was a fabulous film, despite what others thought. I think Palm Springs is utterly brilliant. I know the writer/creator of Happy Death Day. In fact, even shit time loop films have a place in my heart. So imagine my surprise when I discovered there was another time loop film, one I didn't know existed. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the loveliest, most poignant and moving things I have ever watched... The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is a delight. At the end of it, I was simultaneously blown away, deeply moved and really happy. It is one of the best movies I have seen in a long long time (and frankly, this week has had some absolute stonking films, as you've no doubt realised). Dare I even suggest it was nigh on perfect...

Kathryn Newton (Cassie in the most recent Ant-Man film) and Kyle Allen are two teenagers stuck in a 16 hour time loop. We don't know for how long, because it starts with Mark (Allen) perfectly going through a morning routine like he's been practicing it for centuries (and he might have). His day is very much what he wants it to be; he does all the kind of things Bill Murray does in Groundhog Day, he even tells his best friend, quite regularly, that he's living in a version of that film. Then one day, as he waits for something to happen - as it always does - a girl wanders across his carefully rehearsed set up and she is Margaret (Newton) and his life changes. The thing is she's enigmatic; there are things about her life she's not sharing and Mark, because he's besotted with her, doesn't really pry. Margaret is his friend for about 12 of those 16 hour days. This is a really beautiful love story, but like all good time loop films there's always a catch and the trick is how to deal with that problem. I was transfixed by this 93 minute film. Heck, I know I'm a sucker for a good time loop movie - hey, I've already admitted I'm a sucker for bad time travel movies, but this was wonderful, uplifting and utterly beguiling. 10/10
* I also need to tell you that when the film finished and the credits had played out, it should have auto stopped and defaulted back to the menu screen, but instead it started playing all over again and this was a stroke of absolute genius even if I don't know how they managed it...

Poles Apart

Will Smith does a Michael Palin mixed with a David Attenborough and goes on a National Geographic TV show that takes him from the South Pole to the North Pole in seven parts. The first part - on the South Pole - is 45 minutes long and is very white. The second part is in the Amazon Rain Forest and is 29 minutes long and continues into the third part, which is still in the Amazon. I'm not sure what the point of this is, unless it's just a way of rejuvenating Smith's career and put him in awkward situations that someone might find interesting or entertaining. Don't get me wrong, it was okay and will fill voids over the next week or so when we can't be arsed to watch anything else.

What's Up Next?

Shrinking is back. That's enough, really. It's the final season. It will be great while it's on and will be missed when it's gone.

We might start with The Night Manager and the jury is out on whether we're going to watch Steal, it depends on two things; how low it's IMDB score goes and whether we feel we can stomach Sophie Turner for six episodes.

I'll finish The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and the penultimate episode of Fallout will be suffered. There will also be films, but whether they will be as good as this week is very doubtful. Stay tuned, it's not likely to change that much...

My Cultural Life - Hop To It

What's Up?

Tedium and tedious. Does anyone else feel the same? You switch on the news and everywhere you look that grinning psychopathic rapist is there. Dominating the news and if it's a quiet news day making sure he says something to get himself back on the news. Donald Trump is an attention-seeking narcissist and is more than likely going to fuck the world up over the next three years, in what he'll see as an act of revenge against all the people who refused to take him seriously, first time around.

The thing is, I'm fed up to the back teeth with the press's obsession with the orange Shitler (and his British counterpart, the rich and extremely posh 'man of the people' Farage or frog-faced cunt as I like to think of him). Trump operates like a gold-plated narcissist and yet he's given all the air time he craves and more. And there lies the problem; because the press bow to his whims, the old orange cunt only has to fart loudly and he gets front page news. 

Just stop pandering to this narcissist's ego and ignore him. Yes, he might shit, stamp in it and nuke Iran but all that does is make him look even more like a tin of unwanted paint or one of those suits they put criminals in while in US prisons.

It makes me wonder why so many British people are pointing their fingers at Keir Starmer as being evil and/or despised. I accept the guy isn't exactly good at his job, but he's not invading countries or threatening to take away your human rights or doing shit just to take up all the air on prime time TV. But then again, people seem to have short memories - both sides of the pond - over here we had 14 years of Conservative corruption and shithousery and over there, in the land of the [HAH!] free they had the same orange wanker suggesting people inject bleach into their bodies to get rid of Covid...

And some people still don't believe that humans, as a breed of mammal, are doomed.

Leon the Fantasy Horror Film

I don't expect to see a weirder movie in 2026 (and it's only two weeks old). Bryan Fuller is a name I'm familiar with, but not as familiar as I thought. He was the guy behind Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies (which we never watched but we might give it a try), he's a Star Trek geek and has worked on a number of recent series and he also developed American Gods. He worked on Heroes and was responsible for Hannibal, which starred Mads Mikkelsen, who is the main star of Dust Bunny, the aforementioned weird movie. This is an extraordinarily strange film. It looks fantastic with it's vivid colours and sumptuous sets; it's fabulous architecture and wonderful costumes, yet it's a horror film about a young girl who thinks there's a giant carnivorous rabbit living under her floorboards that keeps eating her foster parents.  

This is essentially Leon the Professional on acid. A young girl enlists the aid of a tough guy to save her from the thing under her bed and if you park your common sense at the door this is a movie that will blow your mind. Sigourney Weaver and David Dastmalchian are also in this and it fairly whizzes past in a blur of colour and fantastic set pieces. It's the film of the week by a country mile; in fact, it's the best thing I've watched since the last great thing I've watched. Go and see it or find out how you can stream it - it's bloody brilliant. 9/10

It's Magic, Innit

I try to be as original as I can with my reviews. I know I use 'the problem with this' and 'style over substance' a lot, especially recently, but the problem with this is it's all style over substance. There you go, that's your review of Now You See Me Now You Don't, the third film (but probably not the last) in this magical franchise about four, or five or seven, or nine magicians who do extravagant tricks usually to expose a bad guy or steal a load of money, which they then give away because they're not crooks.

This time the four (or is it five, or six or eight) Horseman are recruited to pull off the ultimate heist and steal the world's biggest diamond from the world's nastiest and cockiest bitch, played by Rosamund Pike. As usual Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco are joined by Lizzy Caplan, Morgan Freeman, a hologram of Mark Ruffalo and three young magicians to pull of a spectacular trick (or three). It was all right, but equally it wasn't a patch on either of the first two and as it's been ten years since the second film, you would have thought there would have been more substance to this style. 5/10

Reacher Round

We've avoided the Tom Cruise Jack Reacher films mainly because when they both came out we weren't really into that kind of thing. As the years have passed and we'd gradually ticked off most of Cruise's movies it was always going to happen, yet after watching the Reacher TV show - or at least the first few episodes of it - the likelihood of us actually watching this (or its sequel) grew less likely. It's not that the TV series wasn't any good, it just felt like a comedy masquerading as a drama. The thing is one-man army films tend to get a bit samey after a while, whether it's Tom Cruise, Jaysun Stayfum or even Bob Odenkirk.

This was almost understated. Cruise, obviously, isn't the stature that people familiar with Reacher would expect but he carried off the hard man act quite well and obviously did all his own stunts. The thing was it felt like the director or person who wrote the screenplay did a lot to build up Jack as a character but little to pad out the stories of the villains, who, in the end, felt like slightly pointless cyphers enabling Jack to do his job. We got a rough idea of who the villains were, but if you asked me about them I'd struggle to tell you anything apart from they had their hands in dodgy real estate or something like that. It was entertaining but felt half finished (or badly edited, or both). 6/10

Devil's in the Details

In 1997, Keanu Reeves proved he can act. It begs the question: why doesn't he bother to act any more? The Devil's Advocate does put him opposite Al Pacino - who tends to chew up scenery in most things - so this might have spurred Keanu into upping his game. The thing is regardless of Keanu's performance, the film is really dated now and actually feels like it could have been made 10 years earlier. It's the story of a successful Florida lawyer who is offered the chance to go and work for a big New York law firm, that may or may not be run by the devil. Keanu and his naïve wife Charlize Theron move to the Big Apple and quickly settle into the life there, but something is wrong and while Keanu can't see it, his wife does almost immediately. This isn't a bad movie and one wonders if it could be made in 2026 - not that it needs to be. 6/10

Reacher Round 2

Oddly enough, despite a much lower rating on IMDB, I found Tom Cruise's second Jack Reacher movie, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back far more enjoyable than the first one and it made a lot more sense, with proper villains with a logical motive and a reason for it happening. This time Jack is teamed up with Coby Smulders as they try to uncover why two soldiers were executed in Afghanistan and what the link to a dodgy private security firm is. Along for the ride is a 15 year old girl who may or may not be Jack's daughter and a bad guy who is almost as good as the hero he's trying to kill. I can see why there was never a third Reacher film, but these two were at least well made. 7/10

Trailer Trash

Since the last TT, we've had a few Avengers: Doomsday trailers and they gave little or nothing away. I covered the Captain America trail, but I didn't bother mentioning the Thor one, which was little more than the God of Thunder kneeling and praying to his dead father. Then there was last week's X-Men promo, which features (Fox's) Xavier, Magneto and Cyclops in an explosive but potentially pointless 60 seconds. Now we have the fourth and that might just be the only one so far that gives us a clue about what to expect...

This week we got Shiri (the current Black Panther) and M'baku walking across a desert where they meet Ben Grimm and shake hands (plus a snippet of Namor). Yeah, I know, it's beyond exciting, isn't it? It begs the question: are they going to produce 48 more one minute mini teaser trailers before the movie is released and if they do will that be 52 minutes we'll have seen - out of context - of the movie that comes out next December (on the same day, at the moment, as the earlier-than-expected third Dune film). Or maybe all these trailers will be stuck together and act as a bonus feature? One thing is clear, they're not doing much at all in terms of building suspense up (at least not for me). Just a reminder that the Black Panther made his debut in Fantastic Four issue #52, so there's history here, even if this earth with all the heroes no longer has a living king T'Challa.

Jeez, I'm bored already. 

Technophobe

Anyone who knows me (or has seen the occasional reference here) and has heard me talk about my 'smart TV' will know that I've been unimpressed. In fact, just the other day I got so fed up with my smart TV being dumb that I was seriously considering selling it and buying something a little more analogue. Then on Wednesday, I discovered it could do something that I wasn't aware of...

I have been finding it increasingly difficult to download films that need subtitles. It has been a case of downloading a film in a format my set-top box won't recognise and then converting it into a format it does recognise with added subtitles. It's a pain in the arse and has made me selective about things to download [the conversion process is long and resource sapping, meaning I can't do much else with my PC while it's converting files]. Then I discovered my smart TV will accept the Flash Drive of Doom and will play formats my set-top box baulks at. This is a game changer because not only will it make it easier for me to watch stuff, the smart TV is a UHD TV which means not only can I download top quality formats, but the picture quality is phenomenal. It's only taken me just over two years to find this out. 

Luddite? Me? Nah...

Nuclear Winter

Has it been a week already? It only felt like mere seconds had passed since the last episode of Fallout bumbled across my screen... We've reached something of an impasse with this show; I don't think either of us are enjoying it and as there's absolutely no chance of it concluding in three weeks, there's very little chance we'll watch season three... So do we persevere with the last three episodes of season two or just cut our losses and watch repeats of Antiques Roadshow instead? Or maybe just sit in the dark and punch each other in the face. Tune in next week to find out...

The Rip Off

A good way to end the week is by watching an intelligent action-packed movie starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, so we did. The Rip is a taut, fast-paced thriller about crooked cops, a lot of money and not knowing who's the bad guy and who are the good guys. This is a film that is relentless and therefore never gives you a second to work out which one of a close-knit 'family' of cops might be responsible for the death of their own captain, killed in the line of duty.

I don't think I've seen a bad film these two have starred in together and this time around they are joined by Steven Yuen, Kyle Chandler and Teyana Taylor in a thriller that is full of twists and turns. It literally got released on Netflix on today (Friday), so if you have a subscription to the service and read this on Saturday morning, then that's your Saturday night entertainment accounted for. 8/10

What's Up Next?

I'm zeroing in on the end of season four of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which I can pretty much sum up as being the series where everyone is funnier than the comedienne - but I'm beginning to think that's deliberate. I've been wracking my brain all day trying to remember the series - which I'm sure I've written about, here - where everyone in the show was more interesting than the lead/eponymous character. I'll probably hit 'publish' and then remember...

Next week is still January, apparently a dumping ground for shit films, so if this week is anything to go by, there'll be at least two absolute gems available to watch. TV is all Fallout at the moment, so if I decide to stop watching that then all I have is a TV series that finished three years ago (which I mentioned in the paragraph above). TV really struggles to inspire at the moment although I do have The Night Manager to look forward to...

I could talk about Qi, but it's not exactly the kind of thing that changes much on a week-to-week basis and if anything else comes out this week it's either going to be pants or we won't watch more than an episode before giving up on it. I'm thinking of changing this blog into a weekly diary of bowel movements and interesting vegetarian recipes - or maybe that statement should be the other way around?

Whatever.

My Cultural Life - Positive Vibes

What's Up?

I've had the flu. Probably not the full blown one that's floating about, but obviously something similar that has fucked me up since New Year's Day; either that or my vaccine has beaten the worst of it off. Whatever it has been has been fucking awful. 

It's also been snowing this week; it's so fucking cold and my house with it's new air source heat pump doesn't seem to be as hot as my old boiler; in fact my kitchen is about 3 degrees colder - on average - than it used to be. I'm not happy about that, especially as the company that installed it were as helpful as the most helpful thing in the world until they finished and washed their hands of us. Now trying to get them to even talk to me is like getting ghosts of dead baseball players to come and play ball in my back garden...

Donald Trump is proving once and for all what an incredibly dangerous thing it is to have a narcissistic psychopath nonce as the most powerful man in the world. This past week has proved to me more than anything else that the only countries allowed to have governments anything left of centre are the ones with nothing he wants. 

Who would have thought 2026 could be our final year?

Field of Tears

I don't think I've seen one of my favourite films of all time in the 21st century. However, that did not stop me from remembering all the classic lines - "Is this heaven?" "No, it's Iowa." Field Of Dreams is a ludicrous load of nonsense. The story of a reluctant farmer who starts hearing a disembodied voice in his fields of corn and decides that he needs to build a baseball diamond because he thinks the ghosts of disgraced baseball players will come and play there...

I don't even like baseball, yet this movie just rips my heart out of my chest. It reminds me of all the things in my life I miss, that I've lost, that I want to be true. Field of Dreams is a stupid film that makes my eyes leak almost constantly. It is a stupid film that also is something I could watch again next week. It was the film that made Kevin Costner a star; it was the film that made people realise that James Earl Jones was more than just the voice of Darth Vader and it's the last film Burt Lancaster ever made and I fucking loved Burt Lancaster, especially in his later life films - Burt Lancaster reminds me of my dad. At this moment in time, I think Field of Dreams is my favourite movie of all time. 10/10

Kinky Shoesville

I lived most of my life in Northampton, yet I have never seen Kinky Boots, which seems, to me, to have been a bit of an oversight. On the same day as I watched Kevin Costner build a baseball stadium on his farm, I resolved the issue of never having seen this movie, by watching it on Channel 5 around midday on a Sunday after New Year, which seemed a strange time to put a film on about cross dressing drag queens and their footwear. Joel Egerton (who I never realised was an Aussie) does a passable Northampton accent as the owner of a failing shoe business; Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a stunningly brilliant drag queen called Lola and the two of them somehow come up with an idea to save the family business.

It's based on a true story, although the actual shoe firm was in the (large) village of Earls Barton, between Northampton and Wellingborough (incidentally Earls Barton is a village with over 5000 residents, my closest town - Newton Stewart - has a population of a little over 4000...) and doesn't really have any connection to Northampton other than they used the old Tricker's factory on St Michael's Mount to film it. There were some scenes filmed in places I have walked in and this is why I can't believe I haven't watched it before. It's a great feel good movie that feels a little dated now, but it's still worth watching if you have or haven't seen it before. 8/10

Friends, Androids, Predator

For most of the day before watching Predator: Badlands I was trying to come up with a pun on the 'Badlands' part of it, expecting to call this review 'Predator: Bad Film' or something like that. Unfortunately that crap play on words ended up not applying because Predator: Badlands is actually a very entertaining and enjoyable comedy monster film. Yes, you read that correctly, it is a monster film... 😂

This is the story of Dek, the rather wanky predator who isn't very good at hunting and his father wants him dead. However, against the predator playbook, Dek's brother defends him and ends up regretting it, while Dek - the predator with the bad hair cut - decides to avenge his brother by killing the most unkillable creature in the galaxy and ends up walking into an Aliens movie sans aliens. This has Weyland-Yutani writ large all over it, as the organisation responsible for the capturing of xenomorphs is after the most unkillable creature in the galaxy as well. Dek teams up with Thia, a synthetic humanoid - Elle Fanning - who might have had some of her wiring go a bit wonky and a semi-cute little alien creature she's christened Bud. What follows is a pretty good tale of multiple revenge with added excellent special effects and clever creatures. It really is a movie where you root for the predator (and manage to have a few laughs, even if you didn't think you would). 8/10

Scary

It felt almost like destiny that brought us to watch Unthinkable, a film I'd never heard of until yesterday and we watched on the day that the USA decided to 'liberate' Venezuela from left wing 'tyranny'. This movie, with Samuel L Jackson, Carrie Ann Moss and Michael Sheen, came out a year before the Claire Danes and Damian Lewis series Homeland and both deal with similar premises. Michael Sheen plays an American who has converted to Islam and has decided to wage a personal Jihad on the USA. He claims to have planted three nuclear devices across the USA and will detonate them if his demands are not met. Enter Jackson as ... well, all we really know is he's about a black ops as humanly possible. He's so extreme even the most devout Americans, who love their country, feel uncomfortable in the same room as him.

This is a tight, race against time thriller that has a reasonable rating on IMDB, that possibly could have scored higher had some of the scenes not felt almost staged - which they aren't - but it's that kind of thriller that plays with your mind. This is a scary film with a couple of real twists, one you see coming and the other you simply don't believe. This is an excellent film. 8/10

Monster Mash

One thing I will say about Fallout is the episodes this season seem to whiz past. Usually that's because you're engrossed in them, because they're excellent and you become engaged, but, with this, I think it's more to do with waiting for them to end. The only really interesting story line is the one with The Ghoul and his young friend, unfortunately a lot of time is spent on other stories that aren't very interesting or have poor actors. Perhaps I needed to have played the game, but I don't do computer games, so I don't get any of the references I've been assured exist...

Laughter Lines

We reached the end of the second season of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel and in many ways it felt like it hadn't moved on much since the finale of season one. I mean, it does, but in a meandering way that feels like this entire show is based on a late 1950s Doris Day comedy with the F word and a co-star who defies logic. I'm enjoying this show - which is clearly based on the early career of Joan Rivers - but there is something very theatrical about it; like living in 1959 New York is more like living in an MGM musical rather than real life.

Almost a week later and we're at the end of season three, which sees Midge break into the bigger time by supporting a top pop star on his US tour. Much of this series is 'on the road' and there's an emphasis on BIG musical numbers and lavish sets - it works, largely, but my biggest problem with this - extremely popular - series is the style over substance; the lack of any really riveting stories and the fact that while it's very entertaining it's also quite facile and feels overblown and slightly pointless. Plus, I'm beginning to think that Midge is actually the least amusing woman in the show.

Bargain C*nts

Having been ill for most of 2026 so far, I found myself sat in front of the telly, in the afternoon. The BBC seems to love filling its schedules with antique programmes, especially ones designed at seeing how much money they can make. One show in particular, the one where two teams of two hunt for bargains and then sell them to make a profit - the highest of which wins the profit (woo and indeed hoo) - does very little other than make us realise (if we choose) that some antiques are extremely overpriced and most of their sellers are probably merchants of the rip off. It would be nice if the Beeb started repeating something else, because I'm positive I watched an episode of Flog It yesterday that I'd seen at least twice before and I don't go out of my way to watch any of this shite, normally. 

Ziggy Died, Sadly

For me personally, the most tragic thing about David Bowie's death is how little of his music I have played in the 10 years since he left us. I wasn't the most prolific of Bowie fans - yes, I was a huge fan, but like many artists that I have loved there were long periods of time when I never played (or bought) anything by him. My favourite Bowie albums tended to be albums others weren't keen on and after Scary Monsters my love for him waned to the point where I didn't listen to any of the albums he did in the late 1980s and all of the 1990s. In fact, the first time in almost 20 years I got into a new Bowie album was 2013's The Next Day.

Yet, here we are ten years after his untimely death and we sat down to watch Bowie: The Final Act, which wasn't really what it described, more of a retrospective that lurched back and forth to showcase how there were parallels in his career, with some emphasis on periods of it when he was mainly ignored by the rest of the world - Tin Machine and his 'drum 'n' bass' flirtation. As I sat next to the wife, who struggled to hold it together (she was arguably a far bigger Bowie fan than me), I realised that when Bowie died in the January of 2016 everything pretty much went to hell in a handbasket from that point on. The bastard knew what was coming; dumped a superb album on us and then fucked off from wherever this spaceman came from. The documentary felt a little like an afterthought, but if you were a fan then it scratched an itch and made you realise just what we don't have any longer...

Violently Stoned

Popcorn. That's what American Ultra is, simply violent popcorn. It was, however, much better than the 6.1 IMDB rating, even if it was silly. Jesse Eisenberg plays Mike, a CIA experiment gone wrong who is 'retired' to a small, backwater town in the midwest to see out his life as a shop clerk and general stoner; spending most of his time smashed out of his tree with his girlfriend Kristin Stewart. However, some twat in Langley - Topher Grace - decides he needs to be 'removed' and that's when the fun starts. To go into any more detail would spoil it even more, but imagine a Jayson Stayfum movie where the titular hero is mashed and spends more time smoking spliffs than doing anything practical and you have this movie. It was a fun way to end the week. 7/10

He and She

His and Hers looked interesting. A six part murder mystery starring Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson with an apparent twist in the tale. The problem was after one episode we both thought it was a bit boring and exceptionally dull. I mean, it shouldn't have been, but it was. Bernthal is a cop; Thompson a reporter, coming back to work after a year off, which no one seems to know why. They both know the victim and strangely are married to each other. We could have given it a couple more episodes, but life is too short.

What's Up Next?

As I write this I appear to be 99% free from the lurgies that have made the last couple of months a massive pain in the arse. Except, my arse has been the least affected by all the lurgies, which I suspect is something you all wanted to read.

We have a stack of films on the FDoD, but none of them are grabbing me and saying 'watch me' and it's January so I expect TV is going to be thin on the ground, especially as we're waiting for The Night Manager to complete before we box set it.

Que sera, sera as I often say but in a different language. 

My Cultural Life - Lang May Yer Lum Reek

What's Up?

It's Wednesday (as I write this). It feels like a Sunday. Every day since Christmas Eve has felt like Sunday and the week of Sundays will come to an end tomorrow, when we'll have another Sunday to get over it and then it will be the weekend. 

I don't do anything. I need a hobby.

My days consist of (in no particular order) cooking, playing on-line golf, watching TV in the evening after 7 and usually until about 10ish. Walking the dogs, surfing the internet, and then I start to have to think about what I do. There are days when I'll write a lot more than I do on other days and while a lot of what I write ends up being deleted or tucked away to maybe be looked at again, if I live long enough, I like writing, like some people like riding a bike. Writing is a mental exercise, not everything I write needs to be for an audience.

Oddly enough, I actually spend far too much time editing or writing pub quizzes. I have another at the end of the week, then four weeks before the next. I have completed - 98.5% approved - useable quizzes written until April, with folders in the pub quiz master folder for music rounds, including mp3 files, to be loaded onto my phone, which I use as a digital jukebox at the local pub. When I say 'digital jukebox' we are talking about my music taste so it might not be to everyone's taste, but I only use it on quiz nights and it's possibly better than listening to me.

Obviously writing plays a big part in my existence. I don't think I'd ever thought about it as a percentage of my waking existence but it is and a sizeable wad of what I do write is a diary of the shite I watch on television - a cultural chunk of life to anyone who stumbles across this blog in 30 years time just before deleting it to make room for more AI - which will assimilate this blog and all my thoughts, meaning I will live on forever, like an actual ghost...

Anyhow, writing blogs, making notes, from status updates to simply jotting something down on a pad, which is never more than a few feet away from me, that is what my life revolves around now without anything to show for it at the end. Well, I say nothing, but that isn't strictly true. Anything that gives us pleasure by whatever means is good and if it doesn't cost anything, even better. One of my friends will be thinking about wanking about now. That's not illegal, yet.

Boring Things

So, The Guardian hasn't reviewed the finale of Stranger Things (yet). The newspaper has been all over the Duffer brothers long and sprawling TV show for almost a decade, but the finale lands and in the newspaper - nada. Not a mention (yet). It's almost like they're hoping everyone forgets about it and talks about something else by the water cooler on Monday when this long and laborious Festive season finally ends... Perhaps the absence of a review is an admission by the newspaper - maybe by everyone - that Stranger Things ended up being an absolute load of whelk testicles.

It was on for almost two hours, but that included a 45 minute epilogue set 18 months after the end of the story, giving the cast the chance to look a little like they really do. Oh and wow, what an epilogue it was. Almost every sinew in my body was just wishing it would end, maybe end on a real downer, just to fuck everyone off. Instead, we got the token death, the almost complete void that was Wynona Ryder - who if nothing else overused an axe when everything was almost over. I have to admit by the time we got almost an hour into this I really couldn't remember anything about why or how we got here, only that I had the unshakeable feeling that I'd just had almost a decade of my life pissed on by a couple of hack filmmakers who will - I guarantee - have a string of failures before probably ending up directing the 9th reboot of the Toxic Avenger with Gaten Matarazzo as the eponymous Avenger, with little or no makeup or special effects.

Stranger Things is over. Rejoice. Rejoice. What an absolute load of whelk bollocks. 

Zombie Apocalypse

It's been a few years since I last watched World War Z, the big budget zombie thriller with an A list cast. The thing about walking dead films is do you go for creepy or do you go for frightening, because you either have weird or you have psychopathic you don't have anywhere in between. 28 Days Later was the film that took the 'virus sufferers' and made them relentlessly hostile and after that film we've had TV series and dozens of takes on the zombie apocalypse. What makes WWZ different isn't much; it ramps up the relentless and it's more vicious than I thought, but it is still just a zombie movie and will never be anything but a zombie movie, with Brad Pitt. 6/10

Goodbye Ted?

The Christmas special of Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing felt more like an epitaph for the aging dog called 'Ted' (which isn't his real name). I half expected to see a remembrance for the old dog given the number of Ted montages the show included. I expect Ted is going to retire, which would require the show to find 50% of its content all over again. The special was nothing special. It was clearly filmed in late summer, possibly September, but given how shite that month was everywhere, I suspect it was probably filmed in August. It looked very warm. Fish were caught. Laughs were had.

Modern Nostalgia

George Clooney doesn't appear to make many films now and when he does they tend to feel like George Clooney films. Jay Kelly is a George Clooney film. Some people have suggested this Noah Baumbach sort of fictional biopic of a Hollywood legend is Oscar material, but in reality this is far too boring for the Academy Awards and George Clooney is far too much like George Clooney. In this fictional world Baumbach has created Jay Kelly is the equivalent of George Clooney; maybe a little more meta and with some changes. He is the go to actor; the A list's A lister. He is an industry; his staff are a well-oiled machine and order is Jay Kelly's watch word. One day he realises that he's been a bit of a shit for a long time and has an existential crisis. The end. 5/10

Time Crap

We watched a film called Time Trap. It was made in 2017. A man finds a cave and inside the cave is a strange place where time goes at a much slower pace. Some of the man's friends go searching for him. They all get trapped in the time trap. The time outside the cave is travelling forward thousands of years while the people in the cave age by just seconds. Some cavemen appear. Then a giant alien. There's a space station. The earth is ruined. Something saves the day. None of it makes any sense. 2/10

Nobody's Fault Lines

I was suffering on New Year's Day. I had a hangover and sat and stared at the TV for most of the day. For nearly two hours I watched Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson in San Andreas, essentially a remake of Earthquake. It was unbelievable; The Rock flies helicopters down ravines; he flies them until they blow up; then he finds a plane to fly, but not before stealing some looters' hot wheels. After the plane is dumped into the Pacific, he finds a boat to attack a tsunami with and then finds a needle in a haystack, performs a miracle, wins his wife back and he probably would have found a cure for cancer had someone left some test tubes lying around. It was ideal for a hungover NYD. 3/10

More Bollocks

I think I'm beginning to see where this season of Fallout is going. The wife's problem is she can't. She doesn't think enough happens and that it's a bit too on the crazy side of Mad Max. I can see that, because it does have some zany humour and not a lot happens. I can't get over how Walton Goggins' career has taken off in the last couple of years; this was a supporting actor who played sleaze balls and crooks; he wasn't a good advert. Now here he is leading this show, turning up in stuff like The White Lotus; he's almost an A Lister. I want to like this show, but it's a tough ask, especially with Ella Purnell who, it seems, her character has learned nothing and is somehow still alive, or maybe that's the joke that keeps on giving but isn't very funny.

What's Up Next?

Blimey. Is that it? It's Friday 2nd January as I type this and if I didn't know for sure that it was Friday, I'd question it. Frankly, if I hadn't been hungover on NYD I probably wouldn't have watched The Rock film and this blog would have been even thinner on the content.

What can we all expect for next week? Well, we might start watching The Night Manager (but we might wait until we have them all in the can) and there will be more Fallout. Then it gets a wee bit pot luck. It's the first full week of January, you expect more, you get disappointed. Wait and see.