My Cultural Life - Disappointed

What's Up?

Nothing. I have nothing to talk about.

Why I Hate America Part 214

If there's one thing Americans are great at it's making films to highlight why Americans are a fucking awful bunch of people, especially white male people. The truly excellent The Banker tells the story of Bernard Garrett, a black man from Texas who just happens to be very good with numbers and wants to become a self-made man. Played by Anthony Mackie, Bernard has one thing barring him from being successful - he's black; but this doesn't stop him and eventually he breaks into the real estate business, thanks to Colm Meaney, before teaming up with Samuel L Jackson's Joe Morris to become two of the wealthiest black men in the USA. The thing is this is the 1950s and 1960s and if there's one thing that the white male ruling class despises it's black men making good...

So Joe and Bernard recruit Nicholas Hoult to be their white front man and the three men buy properties and eventually the building that houses lots of banks, allowing them to get credit where they wouldn't otherwise have gotten it. However, Bernard wants to make an impression in his home town in Texas - a place where segregation is still prevalent. Eventually the white male people decided that there was no place at their table for black men doing white men's business. This is a great film, but it just compounds what is so wrong about the USA and why 60 years after the events depicted, black (or any other colour than white) men still struggle to make it good, despite the likes of Barrack Obama. 8/10

Born To Die

We finished the rest of The Boroughs in one go - a binge watch of five episodes and almost three and a half hours of largely meh television. In the end it was a little maudlin and soppy, with the geriatric heroes each doing what they needed to do to ensure the end of the show happened and to leave you wondering whether there's enough life left in these actors for possibly a sequel (let's hope not). Naturally, everything we thought was upended and the monsters turned out to be less monstrous than the people running The Boroughs - which you'll understand if you ever decide to throw six hours of your life away on watching this. There was something slightly tonally wrong with this show; possibly it was the fact that almost every episode (of the eight) was written by someone different; yes, there was a showrunner(s) who held it all together, but I got the impression whoever it was wasn't paying that much attention. It was all right, but it's the kind of thing that if I'd read a review like this before watching it I might not have bothered. 

Road to Bollocks

Six months after we watched Sisu we watched the sequel Sisu: Road to Revenge. Whereas the first film was a relentless ballet of ludicrous violence, this was a load of shite interspersed with some general uninventive methods of killing Soviet soldiers. Stephen Lang might have starred in a few of the best selling movies of all time, but he also makes some shite. This was nothing like the first film; anything original was lost and it went on for far too long (and was only 89 minutes minus the credits). 3/10

Widow's Peaked?

So, we had a guest this week and knowing this person was interested in different TV I thought it would be an interesting idea to simply introduce him to Widow's Bay without giving anything away. Obviously, this week's unexpected double bill was always going to be far more 'normal' than the preview five parts. The first was a short explanation of the dark history of the island, while the second part was all about how to kill a 350 year old man. Neither episode was a classic and despite guest turns from Betty Gilpin and Hamish Linklater everything fell a bit flat...

Corn-Fed Spider

I'm kind of torn. The Wednesday night superhero slot - recently held by The Boys - now has a new superhero in the form of Nicholas Cage's Spider-Noir, essentially 'What If Spider-Man was an aging detective in 1930s New York?' Let's get the bad things out of the way to start with. Nicholas Cage is 62, he looks older. He was channelling Richard Nixon in this and everything was just a little too corny for its own good. The good parts include the fabulous look of it - 1930s NYC has probably not looked as 1930s for almost 100 years. At the moment there's not much more to recommend this. I felt it did a great job reimagining Spidey as Ben Reilly (comics fans will get this name), a 1930s hero with superpowers; I just didn't feel any love for it. It's too melodramatic, too clever for its own sake and Cage is, now, just a bad actor.

Pain No Gain

Jack Quaid's Novocaine has been sitting on the FDoD for almost a year now. It's a film I just never get around to watching, but the wife picked it so it finally got an airing. The movie is essentially about a guy who is the assistant manager of a bank who falls in love with one of the new girls. The thing is Nate has a rare genetic disease which means he is incapable of feeling any pain and when he thinks his new girlfriend - Amber Midthunder - has been kidnapped, he turns this unique ability into a weapon. It was all right; Quaid plays a similar character to his Hughie in The Boys and there's a twist you don't see coming. 6/10

Hanks' War

World War Two with Tom Hanks sounds like some kind of variety show, but it's just a history programme. It's about the start of WWII and how it unfolded. To be honest there's not much more to it than that.

What's Up Next?

Whatever happens, that's what.