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.