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.