My Cultural Life - Monsters Munched

What's Up?

It's the middle of March already. How did that happen? 2026 has been an eventful year so far, not helped by the weather, which, the further north you are, is not very spring like and when we do get a taster of something warmer and sunnier it's gone by the next day.

I often wonder if time accelerates for everyone? I mean, the longer you're on the planet, the shorter the years become, but I'm noticing younger people complaining about time flying and while the physics suggests this is all subjective, it's the bloody middle of March already and before you know it it'll be much further into the year. 

... Yeah, I know. Hardly the opening you expected. Where's all the serious guff? Or even something remotely funny? Well, for once I can't be arsed to make serious about current affairs; my football team is in self-destruct mode and as you'll find out by the end of this entire blog, I'm not watching a lot of TV. I think I'm at that March Moment - when the nights are drawing out, but the skies are full of cold and there's more chance of snow than short sleeved shirts. The time of the year when our minds are saying 'why the fuck can't I feel my toes?' Or, 'When the sun shines it's too bloody cold to appreciate it!'

March has always been a month where the light doesn't correspond to the temperature and if, like me, you hate the winter, March brings shit loads of false optimism. Obviously, optimism is in short supply what with WW3 taking shape around us and profiteering rampant. It makes me wonder what those 'in charge' think the world will be like once an apple costs £50 and you heat your homes by rubbing two of your pets together?

It's Saturday morning and the sun is out, the skies are blue and so are my fingers...

Ai Ai Moosey

It's March and the first 'big' film of the year has arrived on streaming platforms and probably DVDs. I have to admit to being a little interested in seeing this movie, because it seemed like a good idea from the few trailers I'd seen. However, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die was a bit of a massive let down. First, though, I want to have a strange moan; apart from Sam Rockwell, Michael Pena, Haley Lu Richardson (who I thought was one of the Richardson dynasty of actors, but obviously isn't) and possibly Zazie Beetz, no one else in this movie has any link to the USA at all. All the other actors in this were either British, South African or German - this was filmed in South Africa - and many of the characters didn't even try to cover up their accents, despite this being set in the USA...

It's essentially: man comes from the future to persuade a group of people to join him on a mission to prevent an all-conquering AI from being created that will change mankind forever. He's done this 171 times and failed every time, but this time it might be different. There are some highly telegraphed twists in this; some things with don't really make any sense and ultimately none of it happens - at least that's what I'm taking from it, because it all seems to be happening in an AI environment... or is it? This is the biggest problem I have with this - is it real, is it a simulation and why don't I give a fuck? Not even the special effects seemed that good. This was a solid disappointment. 5/10

Fungus & the Bogeymen

Is Joe Keery becoming typecast? For those who don't know who Joe Keery is, he was Steve Harrington in Stranger Things and Cold Storage is a film that: a) was more enjoyable than that and b) he played a similar character, except a little less clever and a bit more dodgy. Think Night of the Exploding Dead or The Last of Us played for laughs and you'll be in the right ballpark. Keery plays Travis - aka Teacake - who works the night shift at a storage facility that used to be a government 'storage' facility. Georgina Campbell is Naomi, his new co-worker, and wanna be vet. They investigate a strange beeping sound and before you know it Liam Neeson is there with a small suitcase nuclear device. This is surprisingly well made and while it smacks of B movie, it's actually a bit of solid Saturday night entertainment. I enjoyed it, even if it reminded me of just about everything I've ever watched in my life. 7/10

Legacy of Wankers

The wife is going to be right. This is a load of shite. This week's Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ended on a cliffhanger, except the two people involved in the perilous ending are both still alive 70 years later, so there was no real jeopardy at all. Oh and the special effects on this are atrocious. I don't know who did them but I think someone using an Amiga 500 might have done better. The dialogue is corny; the back story is fucking hopeless and while there does seem to be more monsters in this, it needs a lot more than that to make this even half good.

I caught up with the series, on my own. The third episode of season two arrived on Friday (yesterday, as I write this) and I put the wife out of her misery and watched it alone. I figured I had a decision to make... Here's the thing - this series has weird pacing, unfathomable time shifts, people who are younger than they're supposed to be - and I'm not talking about Keiko's 70 years in the 'other world' but her son, who should be in his 70s - at least - but seems to be in his 50s. The flashbacks to 1957, which seem redundant given that season one ended with Keiko disappearing shortly after this, appear to be building some melodramatic three-way between her, Bill and Lee, all just feels pointless and irrelevant. That said, Hiro's daughter Cate doesn't really have much of a story either apart from tortured lesbian with guilt and daddy issues. I think I'm done with this. I really wanted it to be ... well, not exactly good, but at least interesting or, heaven forbid, exciting/entertaining. It's just dull and absolutely chock full of disappointment...

It Almost Lost Me

Right... Perpetual Grace Ltd is a series from 2019 by Steven Conrad, who brought us Patriot, which we've still yet to watch the second series of. The reason for this is we wanted to recover from that sufficiently before venturing back into the world of depression and espionage tinged with weird Luxembourgian strangeness. This other series is about a man who is persuaded to help initiate a massive con that would see an old married couple swindled out of $4million, except there's not just a can of worms involved, there's a truckload of cans of worms...

Ben Kingsley plays the preacher who is actually a psychopath and owns the town where he lives. Jimmi Simpson plays a grifter called James who organises Kingsley's Pa and his wife, Ma, to go to Mexico to retrieve the body of their estranged son, but he isn't there and they're going to be imprisoned for two weeks to allow James to become their son Paul and have power of attorney over their estate, allowing him to have away with said $4million. Of course, this all seems easy until we find out about Pa's psychopathic tendencies, so what follows is interesting. What's also interesting is James, now posing as Paul, discovers that the man he's pretending to be is wanted for questioning in regards the murder of a young girl. This is a ten-part series and that was just the first part... And after three episodes we decided this was just too glacial and dull to persevere with it.

Denzel's Back

We decided that Sunday night should be The Equalizer 2 night and while this sequel was not as good as the first, it was still a far more entertaining movie than we expected. Denzel Washington is back as the OCD ex Special Ops agent righting wrongs and ensuring good people have a happy ending. It is quite remarkable just what a great guy his Robert McCall is (but I seem to recall that Ewar Woowar was also a decent guy in the original TV series) and how he knows a decent person from a piece of shit so quickly.

What is different, therefore less good, about this sequel is it's really about McCall's past rather than his present and when someone close to him dies unexpectedly, he has to come out of his isolation - where people think he's dead - and go up against some people from his old life. There's a fair bit of vigilantism but the main story is a revenge mission. Like I said, it's good but not a patch on the first film, but that might be because there were no nail guns in this. 7/10

Lives and Deaths

Sometimes I can't fathom why certain films have such poor ratings on IMDB. Most movies with lower ratings tend to be accurate, but occasionally I think it's about a lack of understanding from the reviewers and In The Blink of An Eye is probably one of them. It's a bit of a curate's egg really - a portmanteau like tale of three lives in different time periods of the universe. A Neanderthal family, an archaeologist in the present and a space traveller from the future - why are they all linked? Rashida Jones plays the 21st century scholar who finds an acorn in the palm of the hand of a Neanderthal man from 40,000 years in the past. Kate McKinnon plays an enhanced human, capable of living for hundreds of years, who is charged with populating a new planet light years from Earth and both of these stories are linked and link back to the Neanderthal family.

I thought it was a charming and allegorical movie about how everything is ultimately entwined and how, quite literally, one thing leads to another. It was gentle, unspectacular and poignant, yet totally encapsulating and enjoyable - snapshots of different lives throughout their own lives and the people and things that characterise those lives. I really liked this. 8/10

Up and Down

After the first episode of the second season of Paradise and the promise that brought, there has been a feeling that it's been slipping back into rather dull and tedious 'inside the compound' series. Then, like that opening episode, this one came along and we had the story of how Xavier's wife survived the apocalypse and it was an interesting look at how much of the USA didn't slip into anarchy and become feral. It followed the seven people inside 'The Mailman' bunker - a Post Office capable of withstanding whatever is thrown at it and focused on the guy that Xavier met at the conclusion of last week's fourth part. It felt like a totally feasible scenario until it wandered in The Walking Dead without the zombies territory and then it delivered a number of twists and turns. This show is so much better when it isn't in Colorado, but I think I said that last week.

Cock-a-Doodle-Doo

Steve Carell's new comedy series, Rooster, is about a popular fiction writer who is invited to his daughter's college - where she teaches - to give a talk about his (populist) fiction and also trying to deal with his daughter coping with her impending divorce. It is being advertised as a kind of collegiate Ted Lasso and a bit like Shrinking, but it's neither of these and we don't really know where it's going after the opener, except Carell's character has been offered a job as the writer in residence at Ludlow college and he hasn't made up his mind about it yet, given his reservations about having never gone to college. The problem I had was I didn't find it funny, nor did I imagine myself becoming engrossed with it...

Three Piece Suite

So, it was the wife who chose for us to watch the third instalment of Anton Fuqua's series of movies about former special op Robert McCall. As she said, "Let's watch something we won't feel disappointed about when it ends." And, the thing is, she wasn't wrong. The Equalizer 3 is much better than 2 but obviously not as good as the first. This is a stripped down film, shorter than the previous two with a much older Denzel Washington (he was 68 when he made it - he's 72 now) relocated to the Amalfi coast after travelling to Napoli to do a bit of business that is revealed in almost the last scene.

His relocation is due to the bullet put in him earlier in the film and he's about to bid the place farewell when he sees someone he likes get involved with the local Mafioso and that's really all you need to know. It's Bob versus the Mafia and we all know who is going to win. He also does a bit of CIA work for Dakota Fanning (all is revealed at the end also) and takes on a psychopath in his usual style and slightly OCD way. It's a good way to spend a couple of hours. 8/10

In Laws

This week's Shrinking was as usual full of far too many wholesome people all being nice to each other and generally being nothing like what Americans probably are like. It's Tia's birthday, the second one for all the family and friends since she died and Alice has a plan up her sleeve that bothers her dad but not when he realises the reason behind it. There's also more about Paul's decision to retire and Gabby is distracted by her inability to contact one of her patients. Brian continues to be inappropriate around his new baby and as always while all this unbelievably nice shit is going on something big and nasty is waiting in the wings to fuck everyone up. Candace Bergen (she's 80, you know) guest stars as Derek's mother, who has a problem with Liz (everyone should). This was maybe not the best episode of the series so far, but it still delivers a massive kick to the testicles when you needed it.

Space Filler

We checked out the first part of Netflix's The Dinosaurs, one of those natural history documentaries full of conjecture and cgi, but something that filled in blanks with our knowledge. The evolution and life of the dinosaurs and what was here before them right up until the point when they all got wiped out. It's narrated by Morgan Freeman and while there's an element of dodgy special effects, it's the actual timeline that I'm interested in and the evolution of our own planet. Not brilliant, but most definitely something to watch without it all getting too heavy or with in-depth barely penetrable plots. Freeman narrates this like he died a few years ago. 

A Greek Tragedy

Later on this year, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is released. It is expected to be over three hours long and there's a real buzz about it. Back in 2004, Wolfgang Peterson directed Brad Pitt in Troy and that was over three hours long and this particular film pretty much covered about a third of Homer's other great work The Iliad, albeit the final third. If I learned one thing new about this story - I obviously knew about Helen, the Trojan Horse, Paris, Hector, Agamemnon, Odysseus and Achilles, plus other aspects of this epic poem by Homer (not Simpson) - it was what a bunch of ruthless arseholes the Greeks were and what an honourable people the Trojans were. I always thought the Trojans were the bad guys. 

This is a modern epic full of swords, battles, naked bodies, blood and guts - you name it, this is a BIG film. It's also extremely overwrought, melodramatic and theatrical. It's got an all-star cast and a lot of actors who are no longer with us or no longer are seen as 'stars'. It's not bad, but equally it felt like it could have been at least an hour shorter. At least I got around to watching it as it might make Nolan's The Odyssey a little easier to understand, given it's about Odysseus and his long journey back from the Trojan War. 6/10

Presidential Hokum

Our viewing week finished with yet another film we were giving a second airing for without really remembering much about it at all. I think all I could really remember about White House Down was it came out at roughly the same time as Olympus Has Fallen and they are, essentially, the same movie with different quirks. This one has Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx doing a sort of double act while hundreds of people die horribly around them. Foxx plays the President, Tatum an ex-serviceman hoping to become part of his personal security team and together they do a Die Hard with a bunch of mercenaries led by James Woods, who is out for revenge by destroying the Middle East - all of it, in a series of nuclear attacks, after he gains control of the 'nuclear football'.

Apart from feeling tonally wrong and trying to have far too many quirky characters all vying for screen time, it's not a bad action adventure if you want some escapist nonsense for a weekend viewing - just don't watch the version that's been on Film 4 recently, because they seem to have to darkest, grainiest print available. If you like explosions, dodgy special effects superimposed over actual footage and Channing Tatum in a - I kid you not - singlet, then you'll be all over this like a rash. Was it any good? Does it matter? Well, not really and yes, so therefore just a 6/10.

What's Up Next?

I'll tell you what has been fun watching this week. Not worthy of a review and stretching to a tenuous joke, but I've been watching A New Life in the Sun on C4 for the last couple of days because I've been a little under the weather. The thing that got me chuckling (and then the wife joining me) was the couple who bought half a chateau in France to run their own B&B...

Paul and Melanie, were from New Zealand and South Africa and both well into their 60s (unless they've had hard lives). Paul only had to open his mouth and I was sniggering, because Paul could easily have been the voice of Korg in the Thor films - you know, the rock creature who becomes the God of Thunder's mate. All you had to do was shut your eyes and it was whoever Taika Waititi based Korg's voice on. Mel, his wife, hardly spoke, so whenever the two of them were on screen, for me it became Korg and Mick's French Adventure. Or misadventure, because it appears they bought a place that just wants to fall apart. Yet Korg took it all in his stride, facing everything with a sunny disposition and like no mountain was unclimbable. It was something you needed to see and get the reference to, but if you did then you'd get the joke...

Other than that, this week has really been about giving up. Three things above are not going to be revisited and it might even be four things because Paradise has been hovering around the should we/shouldn't we place and I know the wife wouldn't really miss it if we never watched it again. TV, on the whole, has been largely disappointing in 2026 and a lot of the shows we've tried from the past probably explain why we didn't watch them the first time around...

So, next week Shrinking is the only guarantee, that and a bunch of films. There are some returning TV shows due by the end of the month and there are a few things we should try and get around to watching - it just feels really difficult and like too much hard work to be arsed to persevere with so many of them. 

So, therefore, a Doris Day song...