What's Up?
I wonder who really runs the world?
I also wonder if the dumbing down of the human race - through poor education and subtle propaganda - means that dodgy people get away with dodgy things because the people in governmental power think they can get away with it.
Look at Jimmy Savile. He did heinous things and got away with it for years because, above all else, the police failed to treat his accusers seriously until it was far too late. This Peter Mandelson business is no different, although I feel he's being used as a sacrificial lamb to a certain extent.
That's as far as I will give the man any benefit of the doubt, because even as early as the 1990s, before New Labour swept to victory, there were people who felt the then chief SPAD to Tony Blair was as dodgy as fuck. A pit bull dressed up as a benign gay man. I was never a fan of Blair, ever since seeing him squirm and seem oleaginous in a TV phone in during the 1992 General Election campaign (on the Robert Kilroy-Silk show) and by extension, his mate, who was pulling all of his political strings was even more dislikeable. The fact Gordon Brown put him in his cabinet and then Starmer made him US ambassador made it feel like we were never going to see the back of this bad penny.
However, he is being used as a scapegoat. The coverage in the press is warranted, but if you want to look at a bigger picture - something we're no longer encouraged to do - then Mandy, Andrew Mountbatten and the wanker in the Norwegian Royal family seem to be easy targets to deflect the attention away from certain other people. We know that these people were not the only co-conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein, but the press appear to not want us to look at other people involved, or more pertinently, the current administration in the USA wants us to focus on these non-Americans rather than wonder who in the USA is also involved.
I know people, some I class as friends, who believe that there's a secret cabal of paedophiles who run the world and have been saying this for a long time. I've always reached for the tin foil hat whenever one of them has started proclaiming all manner of ridiculous stuff, but... you know... what if they were on the right track? What if the people who run the world are just power hungry sickos? I don't think it's that crazy an idea any more.
We see evidence of rich and powerful people up to their necks in scandal almost every year. Only the extremely wealthy and powerful manage to remain untainted by it. Take the world's very own Orange Shitler; he's admitted stuff (grabbing pussies or making lewd comments about his own daughter) and been found guilty of other stuff (rape and fraud), but has managed to manipulate (read: own) the press enough for there never to be that much scrutiny. Shitler is seen in a very public video cosying up to Epstein in a room full of women (among other things) and we're seeing the DoJ in the USA redact so many things, claiming it's in the interest of National Security, and still not releasing the rest of the Epstein Files, that you have to wonder, even if you like Shitler, if there's something a bit fishy about all of this...
The Gruesome Twosome
With two thespians of the calibre of Jason Mamoa and Dave Bautista it's no wonder that
The Wrecking Crew turned out to be so good... I'm sorry, did I just write that? Here's the thing, it's a surprisingly entertaining movie, if a little ... extreme and totally ridiculous. Mamoa and Bautista play half brothers whose father is a Hawaiian private detective, who's discovered a huge conspiracy taking place on one of the islands, which is owned by the indigenous people - unfortunately, he's killed because of what he knows. Mamoa is a rogue cop from Oklahoma, while Bautista is a commander in the marines - both men are one man armies, so together they're like a tactical nuclear weapon. This is incredibly violent and the swathe of destruction across Hawaii is amazing, not only for its extremism and death but because there never seems to be any consequences. Enjoyable isn't quite the right word, but you get my drift. 7/10
Dead Like Harris?
Richard Harris was only 72 when the Grim Reaper paid him a visit shortly after making
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. John Lithgow is 80 and has just embarked on assuming the role of the latest incarnation of Albus Dumbledore. Will he make it to season three? This is a ten-year project and while there are a couple of books where the headmaster of Hogwarts doesn't feature prominently, the veteran actor, who probably was first noticed by British audiences for his role in
Third Rock From the Sun and has popped up in countless TV shows and movies, is going to be needed right up until he's knocking 90. I don't wish to seem cruel or blunt, but once a human being reaches 80 (unless you are David Attenborough) all bets are off. The difference between a healthy 80-year-old and one who's 90 is pretty marked. I would never wish ill of anyone, but I think it's a little like tempting fate.
The Twat Guys
A day after we watched a comedy buddy action thriller, we decided to watch another one. It was not deliberately planned that way, it just happened. Now, let's park that sentence for a second and explore this: Shane Black is a fucking awful filmmaker and
The Nice Guys is his joint highest rated movie and I'm pretty convinced he paid his friends to up-tick this film because anyone with half a brain would have realised it was a pile of shit. Tonally this is a film that purports to be a comedy but isn't funny and tries hard not to be a serious film and fails that test too. Now, we watched
The Fall Guy a couple of years ago, with Ryan Gosling and it was execrable - this is worse. Someone needs to tell Gosling that whacky comedies with him playing idiots in the lead role doesn't work. Russell Crowe, who co-stars, seems to be in a different movie. This is dreadful and to be honest every time Gosling is on screen you kind of want him to get shot... This is because as well as being incompetent, he's also an arsehole and a shyster.
Essentially it's about the daughter of a bigwig in the Justice Department discovering her mother is on the take from car manufacturers in Detroit and who plans to not do her job properly, this leads to several deaths, of which the LAPD don't seem to even be in this film. The best thing in this is Angourie Rice as Gosling's daughter, who has more detective skills than the two detectives and pretty much solves most of the case while the two adults fuck about destroying things and watching people die. Shane Black should not be allowed near another movie; he's a massive cunt. 3/10
Just Say Uncle
Despite a good rating on IMDB (7.2), Guy Ritchie's
The Man From Uncle didn't really feel like an homage to the 1960s espionage series; more like a musclebound attempt at making a superhero film without superheroes. Had it simply been an action spy thriller it might not have sat so awkwardly, but Henry Cavill has never made a good American and isn't Robert Vaughn, Armie Hammer (before all the controversy) isn't David McCallum and why was Alicia Vikander in this unless it was to supply extra sex appeal. Elizabeth Debicki is actually a good villain, but in general this was a bit hammy and not as enjoyable as I thought it would be. However, we did watch this film 10 years ago and the only thing I remembered about it was feeling slightly underwhelmed by it all. 6/10
Bewildered
Both the wife and I had a peculiar sense of Déjà vu when we watched the pilot episode of
Patriot. Certain bits of it seemed so familiar, at one specific point she said to me, "Doesn't [####] push [xxxx] under a [***]?" and exactly that happened. Later, there was a kind of follow up scene and I remembered it totally. The strange thing is neither of us remember watching
Patriot when it came out in 2015 and if we did we probably only watched the pilot, or maybe we didn't and we were having some kind of freaky moment.
This highly rated series follows the complicated life of intelligence officer John Tavner, whose latest assignment - to strangely help Iran go nuclear while preventing it at the same time - requires him to forgo all safety nets and assume a perilous, non-official cover. Or at least that's how it's generally described on IMDB; from an opening episode standpoint it felt like watching a psychopath deal with depression problems while writing folk songs about his trauma. Either way it was a great start and if we did watch this pilot 10 years ago then let's hope we missed the rest of the two series because of an afterthought or an oversight.
There's 18 episodes in total and it gets even much weirder than the opener. It's essentially just a bonkers comedy about a depressed borderline psychopathic (oh, I said that already) CIA agent who literally will do anything to achieve his objective - there are so many LOL moments you wonder why it isn't a comedy. Watching Kirkwood Smith stand and deliver a speech about nonsense pipe manufacturing is worth the admission alone. However, if much of the dialogue is just surreal, there are subplots that leave you bewildered, yet engrossed. Honestly, track this down, it's utterly crazy.
The Wonder [Man] of You
There is something better about
Wonder Man than I expected. The opening two episodes (reviewed last week) were quite weak and left me wondering if the series could claw its way back from such a mediocre start. But the third episode, where Simon returns to the familial home, with Trevor Slattery in tow, is touching and full of promise. This is followed up by the fourth episode which is in black and white and tells the story of Doorman, a man bestowed with amazing powers who becomes an actor, something goes wrong and we discover why super powered individuals aren't allowed to be actors. I think the most annoying thing about this series is how it gets progressively shorter with every episode, but that is offset by - and I can't believe I'm going to say this, but - how well Williams and Slattery work together on screen. I had serious reservations about Ben Kingsley reprising his role but the series has not been shy about his connection to the Mandarin and how it has followed him around as both a positive and negative.
In conclusion, all of my reservations were unfounded. I even think it might have made a half decent two hour film if they'd edited it properly and given it some extra oomph. I really enjoyed it and many of my own personal quibbles were addressed. What puzzles me is why Disney waited so long to release it and why they released it all at once. Yes, it was as thin on material as a Cher outfit at times but it was satisfying, if quite strange that it sits inside the MCU yet somehow is a standalone. Check it out, it's the best MCU series for a long time.
Dead Can Dance
There's this feeling you're watching an emo zombie film, or maybe a existential walking dead episode.
We Bury the Dead is odd. It starts with the news that the USA has 'accidentally' exploded a new prototype bomb off the east coast of Tasmania and has killed 500,000 people. Daisy Ridley is an American woman who is flying to Australia because her husband was on Tasmania when the bomb went off and she wants to recover his body. But, there's now a twist, some of the corpses are coming back. Here's the thing, that isn't the only twist in this, there's a couple more - one that is gradually revealed as the movie winds its way to the conclusion and another you really don't see coming. I say one, because it's actually two but they're both along the same lines. It's more like an indie road movie at times and some of the creepiest bits are enacted by humans not the dead. It wasn't bad, but I wanted it to be more, in the end it's a slight tale and should not have a sequel, because it works well as a standalone. 7/10
Over and Fallout
The season finale of Fallout tied up enough things for me to never watch it again.
Closure
I like Brett Goldstein; he's a good writer and in
Ted Lasso his Roy Kent was perfect. The problem he has outside of this is he can't act for peanuts. He's a dreadful actor who sounds like a man out of his depth trying to be a professional actor. That said, his role in
Shrinking as the man who killed Jimmy's wife in a drunk driving incident has been pivotal to many of the important things that have transpired over the first two seasons. The fact that Jimmy and his daughter have befriended the man who took something valuable away from them has been one of the strange yet wonderful things about this joyous comedy series. While everyone else has accepted Louis (Goldstein's character), Gaby hasn't and this comes to a head in this second episode. I wonder if Jimmy will discover what happened in his kitchen between the two - these things rarely happen without a reason and Gaby's mouth often goes charging in when her brain doesn't want it to. Lots of other stuff happens, including lots of bare men's arses and Paul is still hallucinating.
Dodgy Geezas
So...
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a film we last saw in the 20th century and while it hasn't really dated - apart from the mobile phones - it did feel as though Guy Ritchie has remade this several times under different titles. It's your customary cross/double cross and then triple cross story balanced with incompetence, misunderstanding and mistaken identities. It's classed as a proper cinema classic now, but it feels incredibly slight for such a complicated tale. Obviously it's made as easy to follow as possible, but I found myself struggling to keep up with it after less than half an hour. I managed to get myself committed to watching again, but like last week's
Snatch I struggled to see what all the fuss is about. It's essentially about four wide boys who enter a poker game that's rigged and end up owing half a million quid and how they go about finding that money from dodgy geezas they live and work around. Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Vinny Jones, Sting, and a bunch of others star in a film that I think has a bigger reputation than anything else. 6/10
The Doctor is In
This week's old MCU movie was
Doctor Strange, which was an absolute cgi-fest of weird, wonderful and seamless effects. This is a great film and a moderately good adaptation of Stephen Strange's metamorphosis from arrogant surgical wanker to Master of the Mystic Arts. I have some gripes about the film, mainly to do with the Ancient One - and those gripes have nothing to do with Tilda Swinton. This was as much her film as it was Buffalo Custardbath's, but there was a reluctance (or refusal) to explore the Ancient One's life, despite some tantalising hints. I also had a problem with Mordo - Strange's bette noir in the comics, but in a watered down role in the film and the second post credit scene ended up going nowhere. Like other earlier MCU movies that we haven't watched for a while, I found lots of stuff that breezed over me in the first two times and Mads Mikkelsen's villain was more lightweight than I remembered and Dormammu's role could have been bigger. This felt like a Sorcerer Supreme film, whereas the sequel felt like a load of bollocks. 7/10
A Knight's Tale?
I actually watched episode three of
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms on Monday night and while I'm warming to it I also completely forgot to write a review about it - which isn't an auspicious sign. However, with the Superb Owl or whatever it's called on this coming Sunday it was double Westeros bubble this week and the fourth instalment has won me over. At last something is happening and Sir Dunc the Tall appears to have a moral backbone that makes him are far more honourable knight than say the arsehole Targaryen who he punched and kicked in the face in episode three. The fourth part is all about knights and honour and fighting for what you believe in and it was head and shoulders the best so far and actually has me wanting to watch the next part, which, if I'm calculated correctly won't be reviewed until the week after next.
What's Up Next?
Death... Seriously, I've taken up exercise classes, every Friday, and my second one was this week and the work out was more intense than the first week. I thought I'd handled it well; thinking that maybe after last week my body was growing accustomed to parts I haven't used in decades being given an airing. However, as I write this I feel like I've been run over by a bus and I've developed another cough. Actually, it's the same cough, it just has peaks and troughs over the last six weeks.
Elsewhere... we suddenly have a lot of stuff to watch - TV and films, so I expect next week's blog will be full of interesting reviews and cutting remarks or it might just be the same old same old. We might get around to the Night Manager, there will be a new Shrinking, more Patriot and other stuff. I also expect there will be a Trailer Trash on account of this Superb Owl thing happening and that's a customary time for film trailers to fall.
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