At about 9.40pm on Saturday night, I switched off BT and BBC Sport and sat here in my office and did nothing for almost two hours. My team had effectively lost the cup final they were playing in and I didn't really want to see what was said and done about it, so I switched the computer and mobile phone off and went to bed.
I got up about 8.45 Sunday morning. Fed the boys (the girls only get one meal a day now), read The Guide from Saturday's Guardian. Drank some coffee. Switched the computer on; opened Word; wrote 50% of June's quiz, carefully only using Goggle as my on-line presence and for what it was originally designed for. I didn't open Facebook. Didn't look on Twitter. Avoided the news sites. Avoided all human interaction on a computer and have done for the last 48 hours. It has been strangely enlightening and oddly peaceful. What has also been cool is that I've also avoided any watching of the news; I have switched the TV off or over if the news has so much as been near being seen. I have wanted to be inside my own personal bubble.
As a result the number of words out of my mouth has decreased by at least 50%. I don't think I've talked about anything much in the last two days. General chit chat, some small talk, much commenting on the dog's arse. Stress levels are ridiculously low and the dogs are behaving themselves, but partly because they know their dad is feeling a bit low.
I've been tinkering with an idea for the last couple of months; nothing I want to talk about, but it's a possible way of motivating me to look at The Imagination Station again, especially as I have had some ideas how to improve parts of it, but still find myself locked out of the box - mentally. So this new idea, which fizzles and pops every now and then, is up to 21,000 words and is a bit different for me in that I'm writing it in bits and then filling in the gaps when I want to write, but feel more workmanlike than creative. I probably got down 4,000 of those words in the last day. I can't say I've been particularly productive, but a lot of that is down to the fact most of what needs to be done is a bit beyond my scope unless accompanied by an adult.
I haven't seen a meme in two days. I haven't been asked to share something. I've not used a hashtag. I've not spent pointless time writing pointless statements or even pointless time writing meaningful statements. I'm finding it surprisingly liberating not knowing what my friends have done or are doing or are planning to do. I've discovered somewhere new to take the dogs for a walk and get a decent bit of exercise without killing myself or coming home with half a beach or pine forest. I also have a list of things that I need to investigate and a social calendar that's consistent. I could probably do without frivolous communication with the outside world quite easily. I've certainly not missed the news or views of or from said news.
I do know the Ginger ManFat Splash is over and what better reason than to avoid watching TV? Sometimes or a lot of times for some people, media, especially the social kind, becomes the ... centre of existence and it's easy to forget about the world next to you. We need to make sure we can function without it for periods of time, because I think that makes things... calmer.
I think me and social media needed a well-earned break from each other. I'm going to see how long I can resist. It's easier than stopping smoking.
Monday, June 03, 2019
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Pop Culture is Dead to Me: The Umpire Strikes Back Again For the Second Time
Several months ago, I wrote an appraisal of the first bunch of Marvel Cinematic Universe films. I stopped my progress at Captain America: Civil War - essentially an Avengers film with a story wrapped around it. This has spoilers but I reckon I'm a fair way behind the rest of the people who are likely to read this, so please, no spoiling it for me in any comments.
Next up was Doctor Strange (recently shown on TV). I stated in the last blog I couldn't understand why they put Cumberpatch into an ill-fitting New York accent. My understanding was Strange was a Bostonian but would have been better suited to a Niles Crane kind of Mid-Atlantic accent. His squeaky Bronx-like lilt kind of allowed the pathos to die a little.
I thought it was me, but several people I've spoken to thought Doctor Strange was longer than its just under 2 hours. It certainly felt like it the first time round - not in a bad way. Watching it again it felt short, abridged in places and nowhere near as sophisticated as it felt originally. In fact, in many ways, it is a slight film based on a similar premise to Iron Fist without fists (although it does predate it by a decade or so). The casting of the ubiquitous weird looking androgynous female actor to play the Ancient One felt like it was done deliberately and the Time Stone being in the possession of a bunch of mystics, hidden in a cloak seemed to suit the rapidly advancing MAJOR plot running through all the films. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun film and fits in nicely; it just felt contrived and unoriginal - oddly. I'm not sure Doc Strange has ever been anything other than a good part player - his comic struggled for many years to sustain decent sales; it was all a bit weird for mainstream comic fans and probably not weird enough for its target audience - the film sat between that.
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is in my opinion much better than the first film and also a load of shite. It was a story because of a story tale which felt like a lot of jolly wheezes strung together with a flimsy story draped over it. It managed to introduce, subtly, what's around the corner for the MCU while not really moving things along. The Guardians are like those blokes you sometimes see down the pub; at times they are the best company, but at others you just want to sit on your own or with some less exuberant people.
Second watch was better than the first - as it was with the first film - I just struggled a little with the team and found Ego to be both puzzling and nowhere near as menacing as he was originally portrayed in the comics. It also upsets my sense of original Marvel continuity when characters and things are introduced in 'comics' they didn't originally appear in... if you know what I mean? They do things to appease the likes of me, but it sometimes feels as though Marvel is addressing issues they know old fans will question or are different from comics continuity - this feels especially true of Guardians. I suppose when you have a wise-cracking raccoon and his sentient tree sidekick, you need to wrap a few other characters around them to try and squeeze a film sub-franchise out of it.
Spider-Man: Homecoming is in need of a explanation. Like Batman, I find Spider-Man just a little too much. The MCU without him (or the X-Men) was easy to live with (not so much not having the FF for reasons mentioned in the above paragraph). The first bunch of five movies were... okay. A couple were bearable, I never saw the last one - I caught ten minutes of it on TV a few weeks ago, it didn't make me want to go and watch it. For any comic fan growing up in the 1970s Spider-Man was everywhere. Batman in the 80s. Wolverine in the 90s; you kind of feel happier without them...
Homecoming is a film I enjoyed immensely and also found reminiscent of the first Iron Man film in that it almost felt like an anti-climax - in hindsight. The first Iron Man film is pretty lo-tech compared to what followed; a deliberate low key beginning because the sequels always have to be bigger and better. Despite this being technically the 6th Spider-Man film, it felt underwhelming in its action scenes and that actually helped the film. What I didn't like was how the period after the origin was handled or the fact that Aunt May was now some hotty rather than a wizened old woman. But I did like how Iron Man shoe-horned Spider-Man into the MCU and the development of their relationship. This film was too long by ½ an hour.
Thor: Ragnarok is a bit of a puzzle; it is both brilliant and utterly crass. Ridiculously funny and devastatingly brutal. History may well look back on it and declare it to be the best Marvel film ever; personally I think it's a load of fun with lots of problems and is one of the most disjointed, badly plotted, Marvel films so far. The tone of this film is wrong. It throws up villains capable of destroying a realm which has never looked as grand or impervious as it did in the first Thor film and tried to be a mix of Game of Thrones and Spinal Tap. Comedy gladiators meets Auschwitz with a big demon thrown in for good measure. Ultimately it is just a scene setter - a set up for the final Easter egg - the positioning of players in a bigger game. Was it me or did this film seem just a tad ... convenient?
Black Panther did wonders for multi-culturalism, the use of BAME actors and crew and is about as dull a film as I've ever seen come out of Marvel's studios. For all the brilliance of Wakanda it simply stank of privilege, power and isolationism and as for an action adventure film? Yawn... T'Challa makes Steve Rogers seem like a Vaudeville showman and his back-up crew of jazzy hiphop scientist sister, Walking Dead reject with shaved head and girlfriend who can kick butt against tattooed villain with a power trip was considerably less exciting than watching a Groot grow. There's going to be a second one. I can wait.
And then there was The Avengers: Infinity War where lots of things happened most of the time and then half the population of the universe were gone... It's an intense, full-on film jam-packed with plot holes, which I'm sure will be addressed in Endgame. Other than that, I need to watch it again (probably in the next few weeks) because so much happens.
Ant-Man and the Wasp was all about the post credit scene really. I understand why these films are made. It is amusing and some of the effects tickle the 6 year-old inside me, but they're like the comedy episode in your favourite TV drama - there's one every season to lighten the mood before a big revelation at the end. This film ticked all those boxes. Snap!
And that brings us to Captain Marvel and me as up-to-date as I can be, living in isolation. I won't see Endgame before the end of July at the earliest, so seeing this gave me the chance to see what the preamble to the big show was going to be like. I'd seen reviews expressed about the film, but I had been careful to avoid the main spoilers - not that there were any - so my enjoyment wasn't really impacted on that way.
It's rare I will sit through an entire Marvel movie without some conscious nod of approval, burst of laughter or exclamation of some kind of amaze or amusement. I think it happened with Black Panther (although I did bemoan the fact that Klaw was really poorly used and would have been a much 'better' villain) and when the main credits of Captain Marvel began I realised my only reaction was 'meh'.
Meh? It was a huge hit. Fans loved it.
My Guardians of the Galaxy wasn't the team you see in the cinema; mine was Charlie 27, Vance Astro, Yondo and the other crystal guy - they were the intergalactic heroes of Marvel's late 1960s...
Carol Danvers is Ms Marvel - a maligned and short-lived superhero series in the 1970s by Chris (X-Men) Claremont and John Buscema. It was ace and one of the last comics series I got rid of. It was a vitally important cog in the wheel of Marvel and so much was introduced in it that had bearing on the future of Marvel's comics universe.
Captain Marvel or Mar-Vell was a noble Cree warrior and rebel against his own race, who was also instrumental in the events of the future, but would eventually die of cancer in one of Marvel's best graphic novels - Jim Starlin's Death of Captain Marvel; seek it out; it's stunning (and Thanos is in it). Captain Marvel was also inextricably linked to, among others, the Incredible Hulk, although no Rick Jones exists in the current MCU. And I'm just scratching the surface, I can be really nerdy about this specific corner of the Marvel comics universe.
So, while there are elements of comics history in Captain Marvel, I thought it was an awful film. I mean really dreadful.
Let's start with that epilogue in Infinity War, the one where Nick Fury presses the pager. That's fine. I liked that idea. The one problem I had with it was if I'd been writing this or at least 'show running' it, Captain Marvel would have come out before Doctor Strange. I just find the idea of introducing a major character on the eve of the defining film in the series smacks of deus ex machina and a lack of imagination - so obviously Captain Marvel is not going to have the desired effect in Endgame or be as important as she is being made out to be, otherwise, you know... god in a machine.
As for the film... Brie Larsen wasn't awful, but I'm not sure she's a superhero actor. I found her glib, flippant and almost devoid of any character apart from slightly wise-ass. Nothing happened in that 2 hours that made me want to like Carol Danvers (the film version) and not since Black Panther did a Marvel film feel as staged and as deliberate. The mid-90s were rammed down your throat - look how primitive we were!
Let's get on with the plot/story... there was a story, I'm sure of it. Ace, never-give-up, wannabe fighter pilot Carol 'Avenger' Danvers can't fly combat missions in the late 1980s because she's a girl, so she can only fly top secret light speed missions with a scientist - natch! - until one day an alien craft blows them out of the sky. Carol then destroys the light speed engine and is imbued with the power of the Tesseract which makes her a super-powered bad ass. So the Cree kidnap her, wipe her memories away, turn her into one of their own elite fighting squad - because that always works out for the best - and set her against the evil, nasty, shapeshifting Skrulls, who are bad and evil and need wiping out. Stranded on her home planet and teaming up with a young Nick Fury, Carol discovers her true origins, defeats the bad guys she thought were good guys and returns the good guy who she thought were bad guys to a safer place. The end.
It's shit. Everything from the Blockbuster video store to Fury's eye felt so stage-managed it was unreal. The post credit scenes were both excellent, the first one felt really rushed though and pretty much blows a lot of theories out of the window as to when Captain Marvel will turn up in Endgame.
I have managed to avoid most Endgame spoilers; I am aware that some characters won't be coming back from this next film; although I'm not totally sure who they'll be. I have some nagging feelings about Endgame that I'll share on the understanding that I don't know and don't want to know until I see it.
The strongest feeling I have is that Spider-Man isn't going to be in it. I do know that time travel is involved; you don't have to be a genius to work that one out and I think Tony Stark is going to prevent Parker from following the path he does in Infinity War - maybe putting something in the suit that prevents him from reaching that floating disc. With the next film being a Spidey film, I don't think the MCU are allowed to overkill him that much.
I also expect the Hulk is going to be considerably different from the last time we saw him because he has been conspicuous by his absence in trailers. I expect they're going to get their arses kicked in the first half an hour or so, leading to 2 hours of time travel shenanigans around past Marvel films, altering the time line or preventing whatever happened from happening, before a final showdown with Thanos where people die and the world mourns its heroes.
I think Marvel has been clever in their use of the Hulk since the failures of the first (second) film, but I think they've missed an opportunity by not scheduling another film.
But all of that is to come in the months ahead. I have to avoid all the trailers for the new Spidey film now...
So, 22 films across 11 years and by and large the majority have been great fun - a worthy franchise in many ways. My biggest worry however is the disappearance of my sense of wonder. I accept I'm not the age range the people at Disney are aiming at, but I am the silver generation of comics; I represent the new grandfathers who can introduce their bunch of kids to the delights of comics and comicbook films. I'm not even sure I've got that excited about many of them; possibly the reason I was so disappointed by Captain Marvel was my sense of expectation was destroyed inside ten minutes. I'm trying to wrack my brains for the last Marvel film I genuinely got excited about? I don't feel a nerdy sense of ownership; I can live with the necessary changes to stories and history, in general I've been more than happy with how characters I was never fond of have become integral to everything and have excellent actors making them believable - it's why Captain America, Iron Man and Black Widow have been so powerful and important to theirs and others' stories. It's how they fit into a world of Thunder Gods, rampaging gamma monsters and universe-bending Titans.
The problem I'm having is I'm not even sure I'm enjoying them as much any more. Part of the reason I fell out of love with comicbooks was over exposure mixed with the realisation that I'd subscribed to a never ending story; like a drug I was hooked on reduced to a decreasingly lower quality, massively diluted. I go into each film hoping for something that blows me away and it doesn't really happen any more. Have I reached peak blockbuster movie? Is there just too much superheroness everywhere and not enough on the page, where it started?
To be fair, for me, the next Spider-Man film holds slightly more interest than the next Star Wars film. I just hope that the Marvel films success doesn't end up making them as meaningless to me as other film franchises I can't fathom.
***
Game of Thrones? Meh again. It was all right. Not everyone I disliked died and some I liked did. It was a reasonably satisfying conclusion if not a bit rushed. Like Brexit, not everybody was going to be happy with the conclusion.
Lucifer returned to Netflix with a 10-part series and yet another cliffhanger ending - ish. It kind of crossed the Moonlighting line in the penultimate scene of what was an entertaining, if a little rushed, series and one wonders if another series will happen. If so, I'm betting this season's hellish ending is soon brushed over and we return to crap murder of the week. It's great fun for all its faults.
Doom Patrol - watch it; just watch it. Series of the year.
Shameless US - Fiona left. I said she'd be better off gone and she finally went. It should have been the ending of the series because in a way it felt like the logical conclusion - pretty much back to how it originally started but totally different.
Next up - expectations to be dashed by Godzilla: King of Monsters. Or possibly Stranger Things crossed with a kaiju version of Strictly. I never knew Millie Bobby Brown was British; that rather blew me away (more than Captain Marvel, anyhow...)
The Boys which could be the nail in the superhero series coffin or take it somewhere new.
And catch up on the ½ dozen things we've procrastinated about over the last year: season 3 of Mr Robot and Daredevil and eventually Agents of SHIELD when I'm sure it won't spoil Endgame. That Good Omens looks like it should be great, so I expect it'll be awful - that kicks off on Friday.
The most important TV of the century so far is on BT Sport on Saturday night. I expect it will define the rest of my life or shatter it for the summer, at least...
Next up was Doctor Strange (recently shown on TV). I stated in the last blog I couldn't understand why they put Cumberpatch into an ill-fitting New York accent. My understanding was Strange was a Bostonian but would have been better suited to a Niles Crane kind of Mid-Atlantic accent. His squeaky Bronx-like lilt kind of allowed the pathos to die a little.
I thought it was me, but several people I've spoken to thought Doctor Strange was longer than its just under 2 hours. It certainly felt like it the first time round - not in a bad way. Watching it again it felt short, abridged in places and nowhere near as sophisticated as it felt originally. In fact, in many ways, it is a slight film based on a similar premise to Iron Fist without fists (although it does predate it by a decade or so). The casting of the ubiquitous weird looking androgynous female actor to play the Ancient One felt like it was done deliberately and the Time Stone being in the possession of a bunch of mystics, hidden in a cloak seemed to suit the rapidly advancing MAJOR plot running through all the films. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun film and fits in nicely; it just felt contrived and unoriginal - oddly. I'm not sure Doc Strange has ever been anything other than a good part player - his comic struggled for many years to sustain decent sales; it was all a bit weird for mainstream comic fans and probably not weird enough for its target audience - the film sat between that.
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is in my opinion much better than the first film and also a load of shite. It was a story because of a story tale which felt like a lot of jolly wheezes strung together with a flimsy story draped over it. It managed to introduce, subtly, what's around the corner for the MCU while not really moving things along. The Guardians are like those blokes you sometimes see down the pub; at times they are the best company, but at others you just want to sit on your own or with some less exuberant people.
Second watch was better than the first - as it was with the first film - I just struggled a little with the team and found Ego to be both puzzling and nowhere near as menacing as he was originally portrayed in the comics. It also upsets my sense of original Marvel continuity when characters and things are introduced in 'comics' they didn't originally appear in... if you know what I mean? They do things to appease the likes of me, but it sometimes feels as though Marvel is addressing issues they know old fans will question or are different from comics continuity - this feels especially true of Guardians. I suppose when you have a wise-cracking raccoon and his sentient tree sidekick, you need to wrap a few other characters around them to try and squeeze a film sub-franchise out of it.
Spider-Man: Homecoming is in need of a explanation. Like Batman, I find Spider-Man just a little too much. The MCU without him (or the X-Men) was easy to live with (not so much not having the FF for reasons mentioned in the above paragraph). The first bunch of five movies were... okay. A couple were bearable, I never saw the last one - I caught ten minutes of it on TV a few weeks ago, it didn't make me want to go and watch it. For any comic fan growing up in the 1970s Spider-Man was everywhere. Batman in the 80s. Wolverine in the 90s; you kind of feel happier without them...
Homecoming is a film I enjoyed immensely and also found reminiscent of the first Iron Man film in that it almost felt like an anti-climax - in hindsight. The first Iron Man film is pretty lo-tech compared to what followed; a deliberate low key beginning because the sequels always have to be bigger and better. Despite this being technically the 6th Spider-Man film, it felt underwhelming in its action scenes and that actually helped the film. What I didn't like was how the period after the origin was handled or the fact that Aunt May was now some hotty rather than a wizened old woman. But I did like how Iron Man shoe-horned Spider-Man into the MCU and the development of their relationship. This film was too long by ½ an hour.
Thor: Ragnarok is a bit of a puzzle; it is both brilliant and utterly crass. Ridiculously funny and devastatingly brutal. History may well look back on it and declare it to be the best Marvel film ever; personally I think it's a load of fun with lots of problems and is one of the most disjointed, badly plotted, Marvel films so far. The tone of this film is wrong. It throws up villains capable of destroying a realm which has never looked as grand or impervious as it did in the first Thor film and tried to be a mix of Game of Thrones and Spinal Tap. Comedy gladiators meets Auschwitz with a big demon thrown in for good measure. Ultimately it is just a scene setter - a set up for the final Easter egg - the positioning of players in a bigger game. Was it me or did this film seem just a tad ... convenient?
Black Panther did wonders for multi-culturalism, the use of BAME actors and crew and is about as dull a film as I've ever seen come out of Marvel's studios. For all the brilliance of Wakanda it simply stank of privilege, power and isolationism and as for an action adventure film? Yawn... T'Challa makes Steve Rogers seem like a Vaudeville showman and his back-up crew of jazzy hiphop scientist sister, Walking Dead reject with shaved head and girlfriend who can kick butt against tattooed villain with a power trip was considerably less exciting than watching a Groot grow. There's going to be a second one. I can wait.
And then there was The Avengers: Infinity War where lots of things happened most of the time and then half the population of the universe were gone... It's an intense, full-on film jam-packed with plot holes, which I'm sure will be addressed in Endgame. Other than that, I need to watch it again (probably in the next few weeks) because so much happens.
Ant-Man and the Wasp was all about the post credit scene really. I understand why these films are made. It is amusing and some of the effects tickle the 6 year-old inside me, but they're like the comedy episode in your favourite TV drama - there's one every season to lighten the mood before a big revelation at the end. This film ticked all those boxes. Snap!
And that brings us to Captain Marvel and me as up-to-date as I can be, living in isolation. I won't see Endgame before the end of July at the earliest, so seeing this gave me the chance to see what the preamble to the big show was going to be like. I'd seen reviews expressed about the film, but I had been careful to avoid the main spoilers - not that there were any - so my enjoyment wasn't really impacted on that way.
It's rare I will sit through an entire Marvel movie without some conscious nod of approval, burst of laughter or exclamation of some kind of amaze or amusement. I think it happened with Black Panther (although I did bemoan the fact that Klaw was really poorly used and would have been a much 'better' villain) and when the main credits of Captain Marvel began I realised my only reaction was 'meh'.
Meh? It was a huge hit. Fans loved it.
My Guardians of the Galaxy wasn't the team you see in the cinema; mine was Charlie 27, Vance Astro, Yondo and the other crystal guy - they were the intergalactic heroes of Marvel's late 1960s...
Carol Danvers is Ms Marvel - a maligned and short-lived superhero series in the 1970s by Chris (X-Men) Claremont and John Buscema. It was ace and one of the last comics series I got rid of. It was a vitally important cog in the wheel of Marvel and so much was introduced in it that had bearing on the future of Marvel's comics universe.
Captain Marvel or Mar-Vell was a noble Cree warrior and rebel against his own race, who was also instrumental in the events of the future, but would eventually die of cancer in one of Marvel's best graphic novels - Jim Starlin's Death of Captain Marvel; seek it out; it's stunning (and Thanos is in it). Captain Marvel was also inextricably linked to, among others, the Incredible Hulk, although no Rick Jones exists in the current MCU. And I'm just scratching the surface, I can be really nerdy about this specific corner of the Marvel comics universe.
So, while there are elements of comics history in Captain Marvel, I thought it was an awful film. I mean really dreadful.
Let's start with that epilogue in Infinity War, the one where Nick Fury presses the pager. That's fine. I liked that idea. The one problem I had with it was if I'd been writing this or at least 'show running' it, Captain Marvel would have come out before Doctor Strange. I just find the idea of introducing a major character on the eve of the defining film in the series smacks of deus ex machina and a lack of imagination - so obviously Captain Marvel is not going to have the desired effect in Endgame or be as important as she is being made out to be, otherwise, you know... god in a machine.
As for the film... Brie Larsen wasn't awful, but I'm not sure she's a superhero actor. I found her glib, flippant and almost devoid of any character apart from slightly wise-ass. Nothing happened in that 2 hours that made me want to like Carol Danvers (the film version) and not since Black Panther did a Marvel film feel as staged and as deliberate. The mid-90s were rammed down your throat - look how primitive we were!
Let's get on with the plot/story... there was a story, I'm sure of it. Ace, never-give-up, wannabe fighter pilot Carol 'Avenger' Danvers can't fly combat missions in the late 1980s because she's a girl, so she can only fly top secret light speed missions with a scientist - natch! - until one day an alien craft blows them out of the sky. Carol then destroys the light speed engine and is imbued with the power of the Tesseract which makes her a super-powered bad ass. So the Cree kidnap her, wipe her memories away, turn her into one of their own elite fighting squad - because that always works out for the best - and set her against the evil, nasty, shapeshifting Skrulls, who are bad and evil and need wiping out. Stranded on her home planet and teaming up with a young Nick Fury, Carol discovers her true origins, defeats the bad guys she thought were good guys and returns the good guy who she thought were bad guys to a safer place. The end.
It's shit. Everything from the Blockbuster video store to Fury's eye felt so stage-managed it was unreal. The post credit scenes were both excellent, the first one felt really rushed though and pretty much blows a lot of theories out of the window as to when Captain Marvel will turn up in Endgame.
I have managed to avoid most Endgame spoilers; I am aware that some characters won't be coming back from this next film; although I'm not totally sure who they'll be. I have some nagging feelings about Endgame that I'll share on the understanding that I don't know and don't want to know until I see it.
The strongest feeling I have is that Spider-Man isn't going to be in it. I do know that time travel is involved; you don't have to be a genius to work that one out and I think Tony Stark is going to prevent Parker from following the path he does in Infinity War - maybe putting something in the suit that prevents him from reaching that floating disc. With the next film being a Spidey film, I don't think the MCU are allowed to overkill him that much.
I also expect the Hulk is going to be considerably different from the last time we saw him because he has been conspicuous by his absence in trailers. I expect they're going to get their arses kicked in the first half an hour or so, leading to 2 hours of time travel shenanigans around past Marvel films, altering the time line or preventing whatever happened from happening, before a final showdown with Thanos where people die and the world mourns its heroes.
I think Marvel has been clever in their use of the Hulk since the failures of the first (second) film, but I think they've missed an opportunity by not scheduling another film.
But all of that is to come in the months ahead. I have to avoid all the trailers for the new Spidey film now...
So, 22 films across 11 years and by and large the majority have been great fun - a worthy franchise in many ways. My biggest worry however is the disappearance of my sense of wonder. I accept I'm not the age range the people at Disney are aiming at, but I am the silver generation of comics; I represent the new grandfathers who can introduce their bunch of kids to the delights of comics and comicbook films. I'm not even sure I've got that excited about many of them; possibly the reason I was so disappointed by Captain Marvel was my sense of expectation was destroyed inside ten minutes. I'm trying to wrack my brains for the last Marvel film I genuinely got excited about? I don't feel a nerdy sense of ownership; I can live with the necessary changes to stories and history, in general I've been more than happy with how characters I was never fond of have become integral to everything and have excellent actors making them believable - it's why Captain America, Iron Man and Black Widow have been so powerful and important to theirs and others' stories. It's how they fit into a world of Thunder Gods, rampaging gamma monsters and universe-bending Titans.
The problem I'm having is I'm not even sure I'm enjoying them as much any more. Part of the reason I fell out of love with comicbooks was over exposure mixed with the realisation that I'd subscribed to a never ending story; like a drug I was hooked on reduced to a decreasingly lower quality, massively diluted. I go into each film hoping for something that blows me away and it doesn't really happen any more. Have I reached peak blockbuster movie? Is there just too much superheroness everywhere and not enough on the page, where it started?
To be fair, for me, the next Spider-Man film holds slightly more interest than the next Star Wars film. I just hope that the Marvel films success doesn't end up making them as meaningless to me as other film franchises I can't fathom.
***
Game of Thrones? Meh again. It was all right. Not everyone I disliked died and some I liked did. It was a reasonably satisfying conclusion if not a bit rushed. Like Brexit, not everybody was going to be happy with the conclusion.
Lucifer returned to Netflix with a 10-part series and yet another cliffhanger ending - ish. It kind of crossed the Moonlighting line in the penultimate scene of what was an entertaining, if a little rushed, series and one wonders if another series will happen. If so, I'm betting this season's hellish ending is soon brushed over and we return to crap murder of the week. It's great fun for all its faults.
Doom Patrol - watch it; just watch it. Series of the year.
Shameless US - Fiona left. I said she'd be better off gone and she finally went. It should have been the ending of the series because in a way it felt like the logical conclusion - pretty much back to how it originally started but totally different.
Next up - expectations to be dashed by Godzilla: King of Monsters. Or possibly Stranger Things crossed with a kaiju version of Strictly. I never knew Millie Bobby Brown was British; that rather blew me away (more than Captain Marvel, anyhow...)
The Boys which could be the nail in the superhero series coffin or take it somewhere new.
And catch up on the ½ dozen things we've procrastinated about over the last year: season 3 of Mr Robot and Daredevil and eventually Agents of SHIELD when I'm sure it won't spoil Endgame. That Good Omens looks like it should be great, so I expect it'll be awful - that kicks off on Friday.
The most important TV of the century so far is on BT Sport on Saturday night. I expect it will define the rest of my life or shatter it for the summer, at least...
Monday, May 13, 2019
Pop Culture is Dead to Me 5: Some Things and another Thing
It's time to wander through the trichome-lined walls of my brain once again as I open my occasional bag of opinions on current televisual and cinematic wassnames...
Indulge me. Sometimes I simply need to kick back and do something I used to do for a living - speculate about trivial bollocks. It doesn't happen very often - I fancy playing golf more often but I don't do that either - and I wondered if I still had it in me and if I haven't it might be fun to speculate...
Now the Disney/Marvel/Fox 'merger' has been finalised it means the return of certain properties into the MCU or Marvel Cinematic Universe. This means that (Disney) Marvel can now use the X-Men and all related characters and The Fantastic Four and (I believe) most of the related characters; this would include Dr Doom, Galactus, Silver Surfer, but probably not She-Hulk (I don't know why, I might be wrong, I watch so much shit on You Tube).
Historically, the FF were the start of the Marvel Universe, so in an attempt to introduce them into an extant MCU would possibly be a bit of stretch (if you'll pardon the pun); also the X-Men's existing (but soon to be defunct) universe is most definitely not part of the same universe that houses the Avengers; the X-characters are fundamental elements of their reality.
To confuse purists, the MCU has The Inhumans yet the FF was the comic the Inhumans were introduced in and the one I used to associate them with the most. The MCU can use the Peter Parker Spider-Man and related characters, but other characters belong to Sony (Venom, Black Cat, certain villains). The waters are already muddy without really adding to it by introducing new elements that simply can't be... new.
I expect at some point - it might have already been hinted at in Avengers: Endgame (but I haven't seen it so no spoilers) - where all these different realities will merge into one and it won't only change things, it'll allow back stories to be told, new origin films and return any heroes no longer in the films to return, as new-look.
This would have been longer but I wrote it before Captain Marvel came out and I figured several months later I should be as superficial as any good click bait...
There have been some standout TV shows this year, so far, many with a superhero tinge and rammed full of humour done in a way that works. The Umbrella Academy was unknown to me and it didn't do anything I thought it would. It's an exasperating series - without giving any spoilers away - that delivers more than enough to keep you hooked, but leaves just a little too much for a sequel which I'm not sure has been green lit yet. It's bloody awesome, but it leaves you with a shit load of questions.
The Tick opened his wings again and became more grand. The almost theatrical (as in stage) feel to the first series was replaced by something much bigger and bolder. There was the return of familiar jokes and it meandered its way through 10 episodes like a bull on acid in a cushion shop while introducing an entire Tick universe to ogle at. It is brilliantly absurd and I highly recommend it, but you need to see season #1 or #2 will make no sense at all.
Old favourites in our house are having a hard time in many ways; the latest season of The Walking Dead really feels rudderless and could soon become the 21st century's version of V. Remember that? By the time they got to the end, extras had stepped up to play lead characters, the main cast were like rats from a sinking ship. The series needs to die and in many ways so does the franchise. Fear the Walking Dead was better than its parent last season, but that's because it unshackled itself from the angst and got a bit black comedy. There is literally no future for these shows.
Game of Thrones is coming thundering to a conclusion and while I thoroughly enjoyed the later seasons for the spectacle alone. As a fan of the books, I know I'm never going to read them because it isn't going to finish, so this has been fun - after a fashion.
I'm puzzled by it and I don't think there will be resolution. I'm still none the wiser as to the motives of the Ice King or even who he was, really. The mystical side seems to have been underplayed to the point of it being a tedious side story that needed completion. The dragons do not appear to be much of an asset unless it's frying innocents and so many good characters have had their stories curtailed by the need for completion. This final season so far - I have one to watch - seems... convenient, almost an unjust finale. I have no idea what will happen, I don't think I care, I do think Jon Snow (err nerr, Jon Snerr) will go back to the North and that's as far as I'm going with my predictions. It's been too quick, shoddily written and kind of jumped the shark in odd ways.
Lucifer is back and looking far more lavish, with a bigger budget and the same cheap, tackiness I've grown to love about this utterly dreadful series. All ten fell last week on Netflix and reaction is positive. As for resolutions, part of me wants this to be it, even if they could really go for it and do something really weird. I also want someone, at some point, to point out that Lucifer might be the angel of death, but he was once simply an angel and a very important one at that. There's a great scene in the second episode of the new season where Chloe asks him how he could be who he was and he replies, 'It was my job.' The thing that makes Lucifer possibly one of the best crap TV shows for yonks is Tom Ellis; he is simply brilliant and this new series seems to have remembered the charm he had in the very first season, which gave the show its character.
As usual there are a stack of things we haven't got around to watching and things we're finally getting through now it's the summer. I sometimes wonder what my fellow TV nerd friends must think when they learn that I don't watch one of my all time favourite TV series as soon as I can - hey, I haven't seen Captain Marvel or Endgame yet and I'm avoiding most spoilers; I have ideas based on snatched headlines and if I can keep it that way... In many respects, we've embraced the box-set culture and as a result we have everything from Fleabag to last year's second season of Flowers to catch up on. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been working our way through season #9 of Shameless US. It has consistently been one of my favourite series since its second season and I know that it's been renewed for a tenth season. It has become a grower in the US and now has a huge following thanks to syndication.
This ninth series has felt like it's time to stop and the first cracks in the cast are showing. Every season, the character Lip has pretty much had the best stories; he has been one of the most likeable rogues TV has ever created and in the US version he sticks around and as a result he has really become the central character - flawed, brutally human, alcoholic at 20 and an absolute pillar of decency and he's driven this latest season. It has been good to see the two youngest finally get interesting stories, far more enjoyable has been Liam's travails than his whiny sister Debby. But the main reason for the decline has been the two main reasons for its success. Fiona and Frank Gallagher played by Emmy Rossum and William H Macy have dominated this show from the start, but as the years have gone on, the devilishly brilliant Chicago Frank Gallagher has slowly been morphing into his UK equivalent. He has had more and more outlandish stories in a series that seemed to only have one every year - one slightly inexplicable unlikely event - but now has him lurching from one comedy set-up to another. He has had his moments this year, oddly enough mainly with his daughter Fiona, two actors who are rarely seen in the same scene for the last few years. The best line in the series for years was when he told her at the bar, "The difference between us is simple, I'm a happy drunk, you're a mean drunk. You're just looking for a fight." As he watched his daughter finally descend down the path he chose many years before.
However, all of this is just a preamble...
I watched the 13th (of 15) episode of a new TV show on Saturday and for the following fifteen minutes or so I considered that it was possibly my favourite show on at the moment. It shouldn't be; in many ways it's slightly more ludicrous than the Umbrella Academy; it's definitely not The Tick, even if it out-weirds the Tick by a country mile; it is something of an enigma, especially for me and I think it might be one of the best things to hit the screens for a long time. It has problems, but I don't know if they are problems or just part of the journey...
I'm not a fan of DC TV series. I don't watch Gotham. I'm not into Arrow or Flash. I stopped watching DC-related shows with Smallville. Nothing I saw from the few episodes I've watched held any interest. So when Titans came along I simply ignored it and probably would anything else that came along. DC TV for me = meh.
You ever get that feeling? It's happened with music and books; where I've judged it by its cover or title or simply because... When I saw that DC was releasing a Doom Patrol series my initial reaction was meh. But when it was released, I was quick to get hold of it. I'd had a feeling that it was probably going to use the Grant Morrison template rather than the Arnold Drake one and while I'd never read an issue of that, despite being right in the middle of my comics period, the idea of it being weirder than average appealed to me.
Before I continue; people who watch Titans will have been introduced to the Doom Patrol in the fourth episode of that series. Forget that ever happened because this is not the group of individuals who appeared in that (and I can't understand why they did it that way and then changed it so much unless it's another Doom Patrol and this one exists in a reality where Titans don't...).
Doom Patrol loosely is:
Cliff Steele's brain encased in a robotic body. Cliff Steele was a boorish NASCAR driver and minor celebrity. He's voiced by Brendan Frazer, who, in the flashback scenes he's in is looking fat and oafish. Robotman is loud, tactless, bombastic and a little bit mad. His story is dealt with in an very interesting way, partly involving a rat gaining revenge.
Rita Farr - former B list Hollywood actress who was a bitch of a bitch is like the team's Margot Leadbetter. During the filming of a blockbuster, an accident means she has no control over her body and can simply turn into a puddle of ... well, her. She now has a degree of control, but is haunted by her past. She is Elastic Girl.
Larry Trainor is a closeted gay test pilot who has an accident that should have killed him but he walks away badly disfigured and connected to a negative energy being. Larry is also riddled with guilt about his own past and having to accept that the energy being is actually part of him.
Crazy Jane has 64 multiple personalities and it seems that every single one of them has a superpower, although that isn't clear and we've only seen a few on the surface. She's a blindingly brilliant character played by an actress who takes on each personality extremely well. Jane is possibly very, very powerful.
Then there's Dr Niles Caulder, their mentor - of sorts - and reason all of them were together. Caulder is really a man of mystery who appears to have several sides and has as many enemies as friends. He plays a big part in the series but is only in it for a few episodes because he's abducted by...
Mr Nobody is the chief antagonist, a devious, scheming manipulator with a fragmented body and mind who is also extremely powerful. He has been pulling the strings, in more ways than one, since the opening episode.
He was also the reason that a character who isn't on the Doom Patrol roster in comics was brought in (or was he?). Cyborg, from the Justice League feels like the only character that has been shoehorned into this series. From his debut in episode #2 to his complete ineffectiveness throughout the series, despite putting himself up as some paragon of virtue, may well have been a manipulation by Mr Nobody - but I think he's unwanted extras.
There are other characters: Willoughby Kipling - a chaos magician; Cyborg's dad Silas Stone, who has been made deliberately obtuse and potentially nasty, Flex Mentallo, the original Doom Patrol, The Bureau of Normalcy, Danny the Street, a donkey that vomits other dimensions, King Ezekiel of the cockroaches (literally), Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, the Beardhunter and enough weirdness to make you know with all your heart you aint in Kansas no more.
It is just totally wrong for a superhero series. It's definitely 18 rated in places; deals with issues you would never expect to see and it's hammed up to the eyeballs, yet it's quite brilliant. By the time you get to the 13th episode you will have become hooked or given up. My wife gave it one episode and decided it wasn't for her. I was almost ready to join her after the second because Cyborg was such a jarringly wrong presence (which might be key to why Mr Nobody doesn't want him there), but I stuck with it and it just got under my skin. It's like no other superhero series I know; especially one where the baddie essentially ignores the fourth wall.
Long may it stick around if it's as odd as it has been.
Anything else wasn't worth mentioning or I haven't seen it.
Indulge me. Sometimes I simply need to kick back and do something I used to do for a living - speculate about trivial bollocks. It doesn't happen very often - I fancy playing golf more often but I don't do that either - and I wondered if I still had it in me and if I haven't it might be fun to speculate...
Now the Disney/Marvel/Fox 'merger' has been finalised it means the return of certain properties into the MCU or Marvel Cinematic Universe. This means that (Disney) Marvel can now use the X-Men and all related characters and The Fantastic Four and (I believe) most of the related characters; this would include Dr Doom, Galactus, Silver Surfer, but probably not She-Hulk (I don't know why, I might be wrong, I watch so much shit on You Tube).
Historically, the FF were the start of the Marvel Universe, so in an attempt to introduce them into an extant MCU would possibly be a bit of stretch (if you'll pardon the pun); also the X-Men's existing (but soon to be defunct) universe is most definitely not part of the same universe that houses the Avengers; the X-characters are fundamental elements of their reality.
To confuse purists, the MCU has The Inhumans yet the FF was the comic the Inhumans were introduced in and the one I used to associate them with the most. The MCU can use the Peter Parker Spider-Man and related characters, but other characters belong to Sony (Venom, Black Cat, certain villains). The waters are already muddy without really adding to it by introducing new elements that simply can't be... new.
I expect at some point - it might have already been hinted at in Avengers: Endgame (but I haven't seen it so no spoilers) - where all these different realities will merge into one and it won't only change things, it'll allow back stories to be told, new origin films and return any heroes no longer in the films to return, as new-look.
This would have been longer but I wrote it before Captain Marvel came out and I figured several months later I should be as superficial as any good click bait...
There have been some standout TV shows this year, so far, many with a superhero tinge and rammed full of humour done in a way that works. The Umbrella Academy was unknown to me and it didn't do anything I thought it would. It's an exasperating series - without giving any spoilers away - that delivers more than enough to keep you hooked, but leaves just a little too much for a sequel which I'm not sure has been green lit yet. It's bloody awesome, but it leaves you with a shit load of questions.
The Tick opened his wings again and became more grand. The almost theatrical (as in stage) feel to the first series was replaced by something much bigger and bolder. There was the return of familiar jokes and it meandered its way through 10 episodes like a bull on acid in a cushion shop while introducing an entire Tick universe to ogle at. It is brilliantly absurd and I highly recommend it, but you need to see season #1 or #2 will make no sense at all.
Old favourites in our house are having a hard time in many ways; the latest season of The Walking Dead really feels rudderless and could soon become the 21st century's version of V. Remember that? By the time they got to the end, extras had stepped up to play lead characters, the main cast were like rats from a sinking ship. The series needs to die and in many ways so does the franchise. Fear the Walking Dead was better than its parent last season, but that's because it unshackled itself from the angst and got a bit black comedy. There is literally no future for these shows.
Game of Thrones is coming thundering to a conclusion and while I thoroughly enjoyed the later seasons for the spectacle alone. As a fan of the books, I know I'm never going to read them because it isn't going to finish, so this has been fun - after a fashion.
I'm puzzled by it and I don't think there will be resolution. I'm still none the wiser as to the motives of the Ice King or even who he was, really. The mystical side seems to have been underplayed to the point of it being a tedious side story that needed completion. The dragons do not appear to be much of an asset unless it's frying innocents and so many good characters have had their stories curtailed by the need for completion. This final season so far - I have one to watch - seems... convenient, almost an unjust finale. I have no idea what will happen, I don't think I care, I do think Jon Snow (err nerr, Jon Snerr) will go back to the North and that's as far as I'm going with my predictions. It's been too quick, shoddily written and kind of jumped the shark in odd ways.
Lucifer is back and looking far more lavish, with a bigger budget and the same cheap, tackiness I've grown to love about this utterly dreadful series. All ten fell last week on Netflix and reaction is positive. As for resolutions, part of me wants this to be it, even if they could really go for it and do something really weird. I also want someone, at some point, to point out that Lucifer might be the angel of death, but he was once simply an angel and a very important one at that. There's a great scene in the second episode of the new season where Chloe asks him how he could be who he was and he replies, 'It was my job.' The thing that makes Lucifer possibly one of the best crap TV shows for yonks is Tom Ellis; he is simply brilliant and this new series seems to have remembered the charm he had in the very first season, which gave the show its character.
As usual there are a stack of things we haven't got around to watching and things we're finally getting through now it's the summer. I sometimes wonder what my fellow TV nerd friends must think when they learn that I don't watch one of my all time favourite TV series as soon as I can - hey, I haven't seen Captain Marvel or Endgame yet and I'm avoiding most spoilers; I have ideas based on snatched headlines and if I can keep it that way... In many respects, we've embraced the box-set culture and as a result we have everything from Fleabag to last year's second season of Flowers to catch up on. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been working our way through season #9 of Shameless US. It has consistently been one of my favourite series since its second season and I know that it's been renewed for a tenth season. It has become a grower in the US and now has a huge following thanks to syndication.
This ninth series has felt like it's time to stop and the first cracks in the cast are showing. Every season, the character Lip has pretty much had the best stories; he has been one of the most likeable rogues TV has ever created and in the US version he sticks around and as a result he has really become the central character - flawed, brutally human, alcoholic at 20 and an absolute pillar of decency and he's driven this latest season. It has been good to see the two youngest finally get interesting stories, far more enjoyable has been Liam's travails than his whiny sister Debby. But the main reason for the decline has been the two main reasons for its success. Fiona and Frank Gallagher played by Emmy Rossum and William H Macy have dominated this show from the start, but as the years have gone on, the devilishly brilliant Chicago Frank Gallagher has slowly been morphing into his UK equivalent. He has had more and more outlandish stories in a series that seemed to only have one every year - one slightly inexplicable unlikely event - but now has him lurching from one comedy set-up to another. He has had his moments this year, oddly enough mainly with his daughter Fiona, two actors who are rarely seen in the same scene for the last few years. The best line in the series for years was when he told her at the bar, "The difference between us is simple, I'm a happy drunk, you're a mean drunk. You're just looking for a fight." As he watched his daughter finally descend down the path he chose many years before.
However, all of this is just a preamble...
I watched the 13th (of 15) episode of a new TV show on Saturday and for the following fifteen minutes or so I considered that it was possibly my favourite show on at the moment. It shouldn't be; in many ways it's slightly more ludicrous than the Umbrella Academy; it's definitely not The Tick, even if it out-weirds the Tick by a country mile; it is something of an enigma, especially for me and I think it might be one of the best things to hit the screens for a long time. It has problems, but I don't know if they are problems or just part of the journey...
I'm not a fan of DC TV series. I don't watch Gotham. I'm not into Arrow or Flash. I stopped watching DC-related shows with Smallville. Nothing I saw from the few episodes I've watched held any interest. So when Titans came along I simply ignored it and probably would anything else that came along. DC TV for me = meh.
You ever get that feeling? It's happened with music and books; where I've judged it by its cover or title or simply because... When I saw that DC was releasing a Doom Patrol series my initial reaction was meh. But when it was released, I was quick to get hold of it. I'd had a feeling that it was probably going to use the Grant Morrison template rather than the Arnold Drake one and while I'd never read an issue of that, despite being right in the middle of my comics period, the idea of it being weirder than average appealed to me.
Before I continue; people who watch Titans will have been introduced to the Doom Patrol in the fourth episode of that series. Forget that ever happened because this is not the group of individuals who appeared in that (and I can't understand why they did it that way and then changed it so much unless it's another Doom Patrol and this one exists in a reality where Titans don't...).
Doom Patrol loosely is:
Cliff Steele's brain encased in a robotic body. Cliff Steele was a boorish NASCAR driver and minor celebrity. He's voiced by Brendan Frazer, who, in the flashback scenes he's in is looking fat and oafish. Robotman is loud, tactless, bombastic and a little bit mad. His story is dealt with in an very interesting way, partly involving a rat gaining revenge.
Rita Farr - former B list Hollywood actress who was a bitch of a bitch is like the team's Margot Leadbetter. During the filming of a blockbuster, an accident means she has no control over her body and can simply turn into a puddle of ... well, her. She now has a degree of control, but is haunted by her past. She is Elastic Girl.
Larry Trainor is a closeted gay test pilot who has an accident that should have killed him but he walks away badly disfigured and connected to a negative energy being. Larry is also riddled with guilt about his own past and having to accept that the energy being is actually part of him.
Crazy Jane has 64 multiple personalities and it seems that every single one of them has a superpower, although that isn't clear and we've only seen a few on the surface. She's a blindingly brilliant character played by an actress who takes on each personality extremely well. Jane is possibly very, very powerful.
Then there's Dr Niles Caulder, their mentor - of sorts - and reason all of them were together. Caulder is really a man of mystery who appears to have several sides and has as many enemies as friends. He plays a big part in the series but is only in it for a few episodes because he's abducted by...
Mr Nobody is the chief antagonist, a devious, scheming manipulator with a fragmented body and mind who is also extremely powerful. He has been pulling the strings, in more ways than one, since the opening episode.
He was also the reason that a character who isn't on the Doom Patrol roster in comics was brought in (or was he?). Cyborg, from the Justice League feels like the only character that has been shoehorned into this series. From his debut in episode #2 to his complete ineffectiveness throughout the series, despite putting himself up as some paragon of virtue, may well have been a manipulation by Mr Nobody - but I think he's unwanted extras.
There are other characters: Willoughby Kipling - a chaos magician; Cyborg's dad Silas Stone, who has been made deliberately obtuse and potentially nasty, Flex Mentallo, the original Doom Patrol, The Bureau of Normalcy, Danny the Street, a donkey that vomits other dimensions, King Ezekiel of the cockroaches (literally), Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, the Beardhunter and enough weirdness to make you know with all your heart you aint in Kansas no more.
It is just totally wrong for a superhero series. It's definitely 18 rated in places; deals with issues you would never expect to see and it's hammed up to the eyeballs, yet it's quite brilliant. By the time you get to the 13th episode you will have become hooked or given up. My wife gave it one episode and decided it wasn't for her. I was almost ready to join her after the second because Cyborg was such a jarringly wrong presence (which might be key to why Mr Nobody doesn't want him there), but I stuck with it and it just got under my skin. It's like no other superhero series I know; especially one where the baddie essentially ignores the fourth wall.
Long may it stick around if it's as odd as it has been.
Anything else wasn't worth mentioning or I haven't seen it.
Monday, March 18, 2019
Vegetarians versus Vegans - the Final Battle
Give or take a couple of months, I've been a vegetarian 25 years this year. It's one of the few things I've consistently succeeded at.
By some strange coincidence, it is also over 25 years since I started eating cheese. Apparently I had no problem with it when I was very young - a time I have no memory of - but the closest I'd ever got since then was mozzarella. My aversion to cheese could have been caused by discovering I didn't like yoghurt when I was 5 and then discovering both cheese and yoghurt were made from 'off milk'. The 'cheese epiphany' started at a rare breeds farm just outside St David's, on an absolute shitty day. We were on holiday with our great friends Roger and Barbara, in a remote part of south-west Wales, and they opted to sit in the car rather than brave the usual holiday weather looking at cow shit and sheep's arses.
For 50p you could buy a bag of animal feed, which you could then give to whatever animal you fancied slurping out of your hand. I like animals, so when this tiny ickle baby lamb [said like you are 5] took a shine to me I revelled in him tickling my hand eating out of it; he was so good he consumed all the treats and I needed more. I went in search of the wife, who also had a bag of feed, and was followed by the tiny ickle baby lamb. I introduced her to my new friend and she said, "That's your favourite meat, that is." Having been a vegetarian for at least 5 years she was very passionate about that kind of thing. It would be fair to say that I never purchased meat to be consumed by me again. Whatever was in the freezer was quickly consumed and within a year I'd decided on being a fully-fledged veggie.
On the same holiday as this, the wife and friend Barbara went to a cheese making factory and came home with locally-produced Welsh cheese. I sampled a cheddar with chives and was pleasantly surprised; Roger who wouldn't eat cheese for another 23 years wasn't even going there. Obviously the discovery that mature cheddar is an entirely different world to some of the bland Edam-esque slabs of fat I'd grown to dislike, was a great thing, especially with my impending vegetarianism and despite being in my 30s when I discovered its joys, it is the equal-single-most reason I could never be a vegan (the other being duck eggs). Vegan 'cheese' isn't cheese, the same was Californian sparkling wine isn't champagne or Crawley town isn't capital of Ireland. Vegan 'cheese' is some form of spread masquerading as cheese by virtue of some enormous environmental footprint. [This pivotal holiday also introduced me to the delights of red wine - something I'd resisted until then.]
This is pretty much the 2nd (and 3rd) reason(s) I'm not a vegan. I can't see myself giving up dairy and in an enormous amount of ways they are as bad as meat eaters in terms of environmental footprint and damage; a large portion of vegan food is now processed because veganism is a new cult for burger-loving 30-somethings who probably wouldn't know how to make a brilliant vegetable stew or a spicy dhal or a wicked 5 bean chilli if their lives depended on it.
Let's also get another thing straight; you are not going to convert the world to not eating meat; the best you can hope for is a shift in beliefs, eventually leading to a huge downturn in consumption - there are too many meat eaters; it's a weaning off process only. So what vegetarianism needs to do is come up with ways of lessening their environmental footprint and given that my own consumption of processed food is minimal and I do not eat imported fruit or vegetables, sticking largely to seasonal produce unless left with no option; it is probably my cheese, milk, eggs and processed material that travels the most distance. The vegetable basket of Scotland is Ayrshire so most of our vegetables have travelled less than 50 miles, only our pulses and spices are really imported... I pretty much feel like a post-Brexit Britain citizen already.
The reason all this vegan food is as expensive or worse for the environment is the amount of work going into making it 'as good as' a meat dish. I understand the logic behind burger and sausage shapes and pies; they're all convenient shapes for wrapping or being self-contained; I don't understand the desire for 'bleeding' burgers unless it's to con a meat eater into eating a beetroot. I don't think a homemade veggie burger eaten on a bun is me hankering for a cow; this new vegan burger is almost like an advert by the meat industry for the meat industry and it costs five times as much and has about as much environmental impact as that cow in that field you want stopping because of the children's futures...
Take the infamous cauliflower steak - an enormously expensive slice of vegetable, marinated in more spices, for longer, with an unknown amount of waste. You pay for someone else's pfaffing about because most people haven't got the imagination to work out how to do it themselves.
I don't eat meat because I like animals. My wife doesn't eat meat because she actually doesn't like it. I'm the more radical of the two. I've stayed a veggie probably because I've never said I'm never going to eat meat again because my intention, at some point in the future, is to have the one meal I've hankered after in 25 years - seaside fish and chips (oh and people who claim fish are vegetables are twats).
Over the last month I have made a conscious effort to map out my environmental footprint. I add to it because of the amount of lentils, pulses and beans I have in my larder, as well as spice mixes from India and I have cassava in my freezer - the thing is a bag of lentils will last me months; as will the spices, so the cost per meal is spread out thinly. The worst footprint is probably the small amount of Quorn we consume and the bean burgers or other 'processed' food we have in the freezer when I don't feel like being Fanny Craddock and inventing something glorious to eat.
No meat or fish cuts down the carbon footprint enormously; what dairy we consume is all locally sourced or produced; in fact my preferred tipple here is from a microbrewery 15 miles to the south of me and, a major point is if I did eat meat or fish I could get 100% of it within 15 miles of my house and have a history of what the animal is likely to have lived like. The weird thing is people up here think of venison the way people down south think of pork chops - easily and widely available (but more local).
I kept ducks for years. I know people who keep chickens - ex-battery hens or rare breeds - is giving these animals a healthy, stress free life and reaping the rewards that you would otherwise dispose of sensible?
Veganism is something I have always thought as a bit extreme; a bit swivel-eyed and slightly mad-bag-lady with a dusting of masochism. As a vegetarian for nearly half of my life, I think I have a valid opinion here. If being vegan means your environmental footprint means you're not really an eco-warrior just a weekend warrior then you either need cooking lessons or are too bloody lazy. If you can survive on just about everything inside a 20 mile radius then you can eat live pigs just so long as they don't mind and you have their written permission. Just remember what you eat, or rather where it comes from and how it was produced is far more important to the environment than whether it 'bleeds' or has a 'beefy' flavour, or even simulates 'real sweaty fat' or the 'screams of dying animals' when you bite into it. If you take £10 of your weekly shop to local producers, local markets and shops then you're contributing towards the general regeneration of your own high street and the local food industry. That must be worth it more than a packet of Egyptian fine beans or Peruvian asparagus?
By some strange coincidence, it is also over 25 years since I started eating cheese. Apparently I had no problem with it when I was very young - a time I have no memory of - but the closest I'd ever got since then was mozzarella. My aversion to cheese could have been caused by discovering I didn't like yoghurt when I was 5 and then discovering both cheese and yoghurt were made from 'off milk'. The 'cheese epiphany' started at a rare breeds farm just outside St David's, on an absolute shitty day. We were on holiday with our great friends Roger and Barbara, in a remote part of south-west Wales, and they opted to sit in the car rather than brave the usual holiday weather looking at cow shit and sheep's arses.
For 50p you could buy a bag of animal feed, which you could then give to whatever animal you fancied slurping out of your hand. I like animals, so when this tiny ickle baby lamb [said like you are 5] took a shine to me I revelled in him tickling my hand eating out of it; he was so good he consumed all the treats and I needed more. I went in search of the wife, who also had a bag of feed, and was followed by the tiny ickle baby lamb. I introduced her to my new friend and she said, "That's your favourite meat, that is." Having been a vegetarian for at least 5 years she was very passionate about that kind of thing. It would be fair to say that I never purchased meat to be consumed by me again. Whatever was in the freezer was quickly consumed and within a year I'd decided on being a fully-fledged veggie.
On the same holiday as this, the wife and friend Barbara went to a cheese making factory and came home with locally-produced Welsh cheese. I sampled a cheddar with chives and was pleasantly surprised; Roger who wouldn't eat cheese for another 23 years wasn't even going there. Obviously the discovery that mature cheddar is an entirely different world to some of the bland Edam-esque slabs of fat I'd grown to dislike, was a great thing, especially with my impending vegetarianism and despite being in my 30s when I discovered its joys, it is the equal-single-most reason I could never be a vegan (the other being duck eggs). Vegan 'cheese' isn't cheese, the same was Californian sparkling wine isn't champagne or Crawley town isn't capital of Ireland. Vegan 'cheese' is some form of spread masquerading as cheese by virtue of some enormous environmental footprint. [This pivotal holiday also introduced me to the delights of red wine - something I'd resisted until then.]
This is pretty much the 2nd (and 3rd) reason(s) I'm not a vegan. I can't see myself giving up dairy and in an enormous amount of ways they are as bad as meat eaters in terms of environmental footprint and damage; a large portion of vegan food is now processed because veganism is a new cult for burger-loving 30-somethings who probably wouldn't know how to make a brilliant vegetable stew or a spicy dhal or a wicked 5 bean chilli if their lives depended on it.
Let's also get another thing straight; you are not going to convert the world to not eating meat; the best you can hope for is a shift in beliefs, eventually leading to a huge downturn in consumption - there are too many meat eaters; it's a weaning off process only. So what vegetarianism needs to do is come up with ways of lessening their environmental footprint and given that my own consumption of processed food is minimal and I do not eat imported fruit or vegetables, sticking largely to seasonal produce unless left with no option; it is probably my cheese, milk, eggs and processed material that travels the most distance. The vegetable basket of Scotland is Ayrshire so most of our vegetables have travelled less than 50 miles, only our pulses and spices are really imported... I pretty much feel like a post-Brexit Britain citizen already.
The reason all this vegan food is as expensive or worse for the environment is the amount of work going into making it 'as good as' a meat dish. I understand the logic behind burger and sausage shapes and pies; they're all convenient shapes for wrapping or being self-contained; I don't understand the desire for 'bleeding' burgers unless it's to con a meat eater into eating a beetroot. I don't think a homemade veggie burger eaten on a bun is me hankering for a cow; this new vegan burger is almost like an advert by the meat industry for the meat industry and it costs five times as much and has about as much environmental impact as that cow in that field you want stopping because of the children's futures...
Take the infamous cauliflower steak - an enormously expensive slice of vegetable, marinated in more spices, for longer, with an unknown amount of waste. You pay for someone else's pfaffing about because most people haven't got the imagination to work out how to do it themselves.
I don't eat meat because I like animals. My wife doesn't eat meat because she actually doesn't like it. I'm the more radical of the two. I've stayed a veggie probably because I've never said I'm never going to eat meat again because my intention, at some point in the future, is to have the one meal I've hankered after in 25 years - seaside fish and chips (oh and people who claim fish are vegetables are twats).
Over the last month I have made a conscious effort to map out my environmental footprint. I add to it because of the amount of lentils, pulses and beans I have in my larder, as well as spice mixes from India and I have cassava in my freezer - the thing is a bag of lentils will last me months; as will the spices, so the cost per meal is spread out thinly. The worst footprint is probably the small amount of Quorn we consume and the bean burgers or other 'processed' food we have in the freezer when I don't feel like being Fanny Craddock and inventing something glorious to eat.
No meat or fish cuts down the carbon footprint enormously; what dairy we consume is all locally sourced or produced; in fact my preferred tipple here is from a microbrewery 15 miles to the south of me and, a major point is if I did eat meat or fish I could get 100% of it within 15 miles of my house and have a history of what the animal is likely to have lived like. The weird thing is people up here think of venison the way people down south think of pork chops - easily and widely available (but more local).
I kept ducks for years. I know people who keep chickens - ex-battery hens or rare breeds - is giving these animals a healthy, stress free life and reaping the rewards that you would otherwise dispose of sensible?
Veganism is something I have always thought as a bit extreme; a bit swivel-eyed and slightly mad-bag-lady with a dusting of masochism. As a vegetarian for nearly half of my life, I think I have a valid opinion here. If being vegan means your environmental footprint means you're not really an eco-warrior just a weekend warrior then you either need cooking lessons or are too bloody lazy. If you can survive on just about everything inside a 20 mile radius then you can eat live pigs just so long as they don't mind and you have their written permission. Just remember what you eat, or rather where it comes from and how it was produced is far more important to the environment than whether it 'bleeds' or has a 'beefy' flavour, or even simulates 'real sweaty fat' or the 'screams of dying animals' when you bite into it. If you take £10 of your weekly shop to local producers, local markets and shops then you're contributing towards the general regeneration of your own high street and the local food industry. That must be worth it more than a packet of Egyptian fine beans or Peruvian asparagus?
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
A Spirit in Eden
Like any great love of your life, this one for me had an inauspicious start. In fact, I'm pretty sure that influenza played a huge part in the music that changed my life.
I'm fairly sure that I remember seeing Talk Talk perform either Today or their eponymous first hit on Top of the Pops. I'm also fairly sure that I was not moved to go and buy whatever one it was. The reason I believe this is because when I went to Milton Keynes Bowl in 1982 to see Six of the Best (Genesis and Peter Gabriel raising money for the failed WOMAD festival), I had heard of this woefully misplaced bunch of young men, even if I really can't tell you anything about their set; apart from the fact they didn't complete it and I was one of the people booing.
37 years later, I still feel as though some of the most important gigs I've been to I've missed essential things. Talk Talk stopped doing live gigs after they toured The Colour of Spring and I didn't get to see them on that tour, so my only experience wasn't a good one.
Talk Talk existed and I was largely unaware of them. However, a measure of how important this band have been to me is the fact I can tell you, in great detail, what I was doing, where I was and who I was with when I had the penny drop moment and realised they were something special.
I had influenza. So did my housemate Rob. Proper flu not man-flu. I'd been going out with my then girlfriend (who would become my wife) for about three months and she offered to cook us dinner because neither of us were in a fit enough state to do much but crash out on the sofas. She made spaghetti bolognaise, based on my recipe, and it was utterly horrid and only the third thing she had ever cooked me from scratch in 36 years.
The house had recently had the new 'cable TV' fitted and we now had a dozen or so extra channels to get bored with. One of these stations was called Music Box, a Dutch produced MTV copy with VeeJays and about 60 videos. While we struggled to eat an unpalatable mess, Talk Talk's Such a Shame came on and it freaked us both out. It was a decidedly weird video, using all kinds of then modern trickery and I would later discover that the song was loosely based on Luke Reinhart's The Dice Man, which I'd read just a few months earlier and had been impressed by.
I didn't know if I liked the song. It was weird and didn't really sound like your average pop song, but I wanted to see the video again; there was something really 'wrong' about it. Over the space of a week, I saw it again about six times and by the time I was well again I'd gone down to my local WH Smith's and bought the 12" single. This alone was something of a revelation as I thought the B-side (Again, A Game, Again) was also astounding.
As a serious collector in the 1980s, I immediately bought everything by Talk Talk as humanly possible. Both albums, umpteen singles, back catalogue stuff from record fairs or mail order. I already knew that I'd found my band. Not a band or artist that I'd been influenced into liking by peers, family or popularity; this was something I heard, I liked and I obsessed about.
It's My Life, the second album, was on constant rotation. It was an unusual album in that while it was full of commercial records, the band's sound made them almost feel as though they were by alternative dimension. Lead singer Mark Hollis had a distinctive, velvet voice, unlike anything since the crooners of the 1940s and 1950s but with a contemporary edge and distinctively uncommercial. Of course, back then I had no idea that what I was listening to was the embryonic first footsteps of the invention of a rock genre and the metamorphosis of a pop band into something uncategorisable by the time their final album was released. This bunch of Essex lads who came into music for a laugh were about to have a profound effect on some of the greatest musicians of the last 30 years...
The Colour of Spring was preceded by Life's What You Make It - the single that was more anticipated by music fans than it was by pop fans. The respect the band was developing was clear to see when almost every DJ in the country spun a song that didn't even make the top 10 and while it was clearly Talk Talk it felt like a departure from the wall-of-sound Euro-pop jauntiness of the first album or the off-beat quirkiness of the second. This felt like a song performed by three men who had just been awakened.
People bang on about The Spirit of Eden, but it was prefaced by The Colour of Spring; an album with some pop songs that weren't poppy and some other songs that had already begun to confuse, astound and puzzle. Spring is a tale of two halves - the end of one era and the beginning of another; you could almost rearrange the running order into two distinct periods, separated by vinyl and flow. If an example was needed from the album it's Time, It's Time, a song which lays the foundations of what was to come by flushing away the pop in a track that must have had prog rock fans scratching their heads, but tapping their feet. It wasn't the real indicators - April 5th, Chameleon Day and B-sides of singles suggested - forewarned - fans what to expect in the future. No one noticed.
The Spirit of Eden was something profound, yet it took me considerably more time to get than I expected. I bought it the day it came out, rushed home, put it on and sat in silence for two sides. What had I just listened to? Where were the tunes? What was it all about? But, you see, Talk Talk had become the most important band to me. I had already declared that Such a Shame was my favourite single of all time and that the video - directed by Tim Pope - was the best video I'd ever seen. It's My Life was vying for favourite album; they could do no wrong.
I persevered with it; playing it three more times before putting it away and wondering what I was going to do. The next day, I played Spring again and then Spirit and for the second time the penny dropped. I got it. I really really got it. It was about texture and movement; it was about fluidity of music and word; it was something extraordinary for its time and the people who got it realised that almost immediately. People talk about important albums; this was pretty much one of them and largely because of what people remembered them for as a pop band and not for the album tracks that hid the future so beautifully.
I'm probably wrong, but I can't remember a bad review for it. I do remember a lot of bewilderment and even some people who weren't even sure it was Talk Talk, but it also largely disappeared.
This was pre-internet days and a time when the music press was still your main source of news. A friend who worked in a record shop told me about Laughing Stock coming out and this time I approached it expecting it to be like Spirit and not like what went before; and this didn't bother me because Spirit was still something otherworldly and emotional.
I remember laughing after I played it. Oh it was most definitely Talk Talk but where Spirit of Eden felt as though it was a puzzle you needed to crack to reveal its hidden beauty, Laughing Stock felt like an impenetrable anti-record (and it was now well known that Hollis had massive problems with the record company and pretty much did the album as a complete opposite of what they requested). Yet, it wasn't at all. It was the next layer down in Hollis and Friese-Greene's journey into the heart of a musician's soul. Essentially 19 hours of improvised jazz-infused post rock, edited down into what essentially is a single piece, it's the kind of thing you can imagine people in 200 years pouring over like music historians do something by Mozart or Beethoven.
Laughing Stock is a dark, disturbing album littered with moments of hope. It infuriated the record company, confounded the critics and like the album before it would have won more awards than it could hold in a big bag had it been released in the 21st century. And that, my friends, is the thing. The Colour of Spring only feels dated because of the production, but large parts of it wouldn't feel out of place in 2019; the same but more so has to be said of The Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock - they're not timeless in that classic sense; they're timeless in that if you played someone who had never heard of Talk Talk either album and told them it was a new release they would never question you or think you were lying. In many ways it is impossible that a band could release two amazingly unsuccessful and uncommercial albums which are now regarded as two of the greatest albums of the 20th century.
In 1998, Mark Hollis released a solo album. It was minimalist again. It felt less produced than the last two Talk Talk albums and there was a sense of maturity about him. It seems it may well have been a contractual obligation album, but even so it exudes everything that changed Talk Talk fans into Talk Talk fans (and only Talk Talk fans can really understand that). In many ways it feels like a sad throwaway album, which is both lovely to listen to but of little substance. Even if Hollis wanted to do the album, maybe it was the fact he knew himself that he couldn't regain the heights he achieved in the late 1980s.
I play most of the albums at least once a year now; sometimes I'll have a binge on Spirit and Laughing Stock with some of the extra tracks thrown in and then the next time I might do the period that started it for me.
A few years ago, a piano piece Hollis wrote was used in the closing sequence of a Kelsey Grammar series called Boss, it was pretty much the first sighting of Hollis in the 21st century and started a flurry of rumours, which as usual proved to be wishful thinking and hope; but the wonder if Hollis would ever do anything again was never too far away from the surface.
Then the news of his death broke and I have felt the way you do when you find out a childhood friend, who you haven't seen for 30 odd years, has died and you're transported back to the days when you were the friends. That nostalgic melancholy that sinks in sometimes and hurts because while you've always known you can never go back there again, you kind of wish you can.
I can't think of a single musician's death that has effected me as much as Mark Hollis. He belonged to me. I got it. I got it a long time before anyone else did. They were a special band and he was a very special front man; a rare thing in music, a man of his word with integrity and determination. He wasn't a trained musician, he picked it up as he went along; that makes him even better in my eyes and he was always the best anyhow.
You never knew me but I was your friend x
I'm fairly sure that I remember seeing Talk Talk perform either Today or their eponymous first hit on Top of the Pops. I'm also fairly sure that I was not moved to go and buy whatever one it was. The reason I believe this is because when I went to Milton Keynes Bowl in 1982 to see Six of the Best (Genesis and Peter Gabriel raising money for the failed WOMAD festival), I had heard of this woefully misplaced bunch of young men, even if I really can't tell you anything about their set; apart from the fact they didn't complete it and I was one of the people booing.
37 years later, I still feel as though some of the most important gigs I've been to I've missed essential things. Talk Talk stopped doing live gigs after they toured The Colour of Spring and I didn't get to see them on that tour, so my only experience wasn't a good one.
Talk Talk existed and I was largely unaware of them. However, a measure of how important this band have been to me is the fact I can tell you, in great detail, what I was doing, where I was and who I was with when I had the penny drop moment and realised they were something special.
I had influenza. So did my housemate Rob. Proper flu not man-flu. I'd been going out with my then girlfriend (who would become my wife) for about three months and she offered to cook us dinner because neither of us were in a fit enough state to do much but crash out on the sofas. She made spaghetti bolognaise, based on my recipe, and it was utterly horrid and only the third thing she had ever cooked me from scratch in 36 years.
The house had recently had the new 'cable TV' fitted and we now had a dozen or so extra channels to get bored with. One of these stations was called Music Box, a Dutch produced MTV copy with VeeJays and about 60 videos. While we struggled to eat an unpalatable mess, Talk Talk's Such a Shame came on and it freaked us both out. It was a decidedly weird video, using all kinds of then modern trickery and I would later discover that the song was loosely based on Luke Reinhart's The Dice Man, which I'd read just a few months earlier and had been impressed by.
I didn't know if I liked the song. It was weird and didn't really sound like your average pop song, but I wanted to see the video again; there was something really 'wrong' about it. Over the space of a week, I saw it again about six times and by the time I was well again I'd gone down to my local WH Smith's and bought the 12" single. This alone was something of a revelation as I thought the B-side (Again, A Game, Again) was also astounding.
As a serious collector in the 1980s, I immediately bought everything by Talk Talk as humanly possible. Both albums, umpteen singles, back catalogue stuff from record fairs or mail order. I already knew that I'd found my band. Not a band or artist that I'd been influenced into liking by peers, family or popularity; this was something I heard, I liked and I obsessed about.
It's My Life, the second album, was on constant rotation. It was an unusual album in that while it was full of commercial records, the band's sound made them almost feel as though they were by alternative dimension. Lead singer Mark Hollis had a distinctive, velvet voice, unlike anything since the crooners of the 1940s and 1950s but with a contemporary edge and distinctively uncommercial. Of course, back then I had no idea that what I was listening to was the embryonic first footsteps of the invention of a rock genre and the metamorphosis of a pop band into something uncategorisable by the time their final album was released. This bunch of Essex lads who came into music for a laugh were about to have a profound effect on some of the greatest musicians of the last 30 years...
The Colour of Spring was preceded by Life's What You Make It - the single that was more anticipated by music fans than it was by pop fans. The respect the band was developing was clear to see when almost every DJ in the country spun a song that didn't even make the top 10 and while it was clearly Talk Talk it felt like a departure from the wall-of-sound Euro-pop jauntiness of the first album or the off-beat quirkiness of the second. This felt like a song performed by three men who had just been awakened.
People bang on about The Spirit of Eden, but it was prefaced by The Colour of Spring; an album with some pop songs that weren't poppy and some other songs that had already begun to confuse, astound and puzzle. Spring is a tale of two halves - the end of one era and the beginning of another; you could almost rearrange the running order into two distinct periods, separated by vinyl and flow. If an example was needed from the album it's Time, It's Time, a song which lays the foundations of what was to come by flushing away the pop in a track that must have had prog rock fans scratching their heads, but tapping their feet. It wasn't the real indicators - April 5th, Chameleon Day and B-sides of singles suggested - forewarned - fans what to expect in the future. No one noticed.
The Spirit of Eden was something profound, yet it took me considerably more time to get than I expected. I bought it the day it came out, rushed home, put it on and sat in silence for two sides. What had I just listened to? Where were the tunes? What was it all about? But, you see, Talk Talk had become the most important band to me. I had already declared that Such a Shame was my favourite single of all time and that the video - directed by Tim Pope - was the best video I'd ever seen. It's My Life was vying for favourite album; they could do no wrong.
I persevered with it; playing it three more times before putting it away and wondering what I was going to do. The next day, I played Spring again and then Spirit and for the second time the penny dropped. I got it. I really really got it. It was about texture and movement; it was about fluidity of music and word; it was something extraordinary for its time and the people who got it realised that almost immediately. People talk about important albums; this was pretty much one of them and largely because of what people remembered them for as a pop band and not for the album tracks that hid the future so beautifully.
I'm probably wrong, but I can't remember a bad review for it. I do remember a lot of bewilderment and even some people who weren't even sure it was Talk Talk, but it also largely disappeared.
This was pre-internet days and a time when the music press was still your main source of news. A friend who worked in a record shop told me about Laughing Stock coming out and this time I approached it expecting it to be like Spirit and not like what went before; and this didn't bother me because Spirit was still something otherworldly and emotional.
I remember laughing after I played it. Oh it was most definitely Talk Talk but where Spirit of Eden felt as though it was a puzzle you needed to crack to reveal its hidden beauty, Laughing Stock felt like an impenetrable anti-record (and it was now well known that Hollis had massive problems with the record company and pretty much did the album as a complete opposite of what they requested). Yet, it wasn't at all. It was the next layer down in Hollis and Friese-Greene's journey into the heart of a musician's soul. Essentially 19 hours of improvised jazz-infused post rock, edited down into what essentially is a single piece, it's the kind of thing you can imagine people in 200 years pouring over like music historians do something by Mozart or Beethoven.
Laughing Stock is a dark, disturbing album littered with moments of hope. It infuriated the record company, confounded the critics and like the album before it would have won more awards than it could hold in a big bag had it been released in the 21st century. And that, my friends, is the thing. The Colour of Spring only feels dated because of the production, but large parts of it wouldn't feel out of place in 2019; the same but more so has to be said of The Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock - they're not timeless in that classic sense; they're timeless in that if you played someone who had never heard of Talk Talk either album and told them it was a new release they would never question you or think you were lying. In many ways it is impossible that a band could release two amazingly unsuccessful and uncommercial albums which are now regarded as two of the greatest albums of the 20th century.
In 1998, Mark Hollis released a solo album. It was minimalist again. It felt less produced than the last two Talk Talk albums and there was a sense of maturity about him. It seems it may well have been a contractual obligation album, but even so it exudes everything that changed Talk Talk fans into Talk Talk fans (and only Talk Talk fans can really understand that). In many ways it feels like a sad throwaway album, which is both lovely to listen to but of little substance. Even if Hollis wanted to do the album, maybe it was the fact he knew himself that he couldn't regain the heights he achieved in the late 1980s.
I play most of the albums at least once a year now; sometimes I'll have a binge on Spirit and Laughing Stock with some of the extra tracks thrown in and then the next time I might do the period that started it for me.
A few years ago, a piano piece Hollis wrote was used in the closing sequence of a Kelsey Grammar series called Boss, it was pretty much the first sighting of Hollis in the 21st century and started a flurry of rumours, which as usual proved to be wishful thinking and hope; but the wonder if Hollis would ever do anything again was never too far away from the surface.
Then the news of his death broke and I have felt the way you do when you find out a childhood friend, who you haven't seen for 30 odd years, has died and you're transported back to the days when you were the friends. That nostalgic melancholy that sinks in sometimes and hurts because while you've always known you can never go back there again, you kind of wish you can.
I can't think of a single musician's death that has effected me as much as Mark Hollis. He belonged to me. I got it. I got it a long time before anyone else did. They were a special band and he was a very special front man; a rare thing in music, a man of his word with integrity and determination. He wasn't a trained musician, he picked it up as he went along; that makes him even better in my eyes and he was always the best anyhow.
You never knew me but I was your friend x
Tuesday, January 08, 2019
Pop Culture is Dead to Me 4: The Umpire Strikes Back
Corny titles aside, I was walking up the stairs, thinking, "Ooh, I can write something about
..."
A bit like when you go upstairs for something and can't remember what it was.
It might have been about the Marvel Cinematic Universe films we've been slowly reworking our way through over the festive season or how Doctor Who shoved off all the pretence and became a full-fledged, badly-scripted, kids TV show.
I might have been considering admitting to all the apparently cracking telly we haven't watched. While all my erudite friends watched The Handmaid's Tale, I was torn between grief and elation at the renewal/salvation of Lucifer. Trying to persuade my wife to watch the second season of The Good Place has not been successful and because I'm forced to play second fiddle behind cheap quiz shows and BBC4 we pretty much need a major sporting event to catch up on things we've missed. Also, she's just not much into it, which I can understand, unlike people who now claim it's the greatest thing on TV since that little cat ornament your nan had on her Rediffusion set...
The problem I have is TV doesn't really mean that much to me. I sit in front of the computer as long as I sit in front of the TV and, frankly, despite what the wife thinks, there's more choice and diversity here than there is with our limited Freeview choice...
Shall we begin? Yes, let's...
About a month before Christmas, because we haven't already got a year's worth of TV to watch but couldn't be arsed, we watched Iron Man. We realised it had been a while since we last saw it, because so much of it had been forgotten. It had been inspired by us watching Iron Man 3 a few weeks earlier and forgetting what a lousy film that was - possibly the worst of the MCU... Except, it isn't that. Like The Predator, the new Shane Black film; there are some great ideas, it's just executed with the finesse of a herd of incontinent goats force-fed vindaloo. Shane Black makes Guy Ritchie look positively Spielbergian. Iron Man 3 is one of those episodes like the one before The Body in Buffy, where you think you've just watched the worst episode ever and then something so important happens at the end you realise that it is both shocking (metaphorically as well as literally) and essential at the same time. Well, Iron Man 3 has moments in it that are essential (but nothing to compare with the comparison I cited) but the rest of the film is pants. So when we saw Iron Man on the telly, we thought, shall we see if all the older Marvel films have aged well?
Iron Man is probably not as action-packed as you remember. Compared to something like X-Men from 2000, Iron Man is like a rollercoaster gone insane, but for Marvel films, it wisely set the bar quite low to start things off. I mean, there's no point in Tony Stark meeting a Thanos-level villain straight away; is there? The good thing about this film, which set the tone for what was to come, was it felt fantastic but grounded at the same time. Tony Stark as a kind of brainy Elon Musk figure but with all the add-ons and that probably resonates more with the general public than a billionaire misanthrope in a Bat suit or a super-human alien.
The Incredible Hulk still feels like bits of it were tacked onto an independent project to make it seem more MCU and less Ang Lee. Like its predecessor it's a pretty dull film, helped slightly by being more 'Marvel'. This is the worst film in the MCU, but that might be because it was almost wasn't in the MCU.
Iron Man 2 was one of those films I remembered being good, was surprised at how good it still was and how Mickey Rourke doesn't spoil the film at all. We get Black Widow, lots of Nick Fury, a clever and relevant story and it worked on so many levels the rest of Marvel's cinematic universe was probably never in doubt. It's up there as one of the top 3 Marvel films.
Thor is great fun and does a very good job of not seeming at all like a Kenneth Branagh film. My biggest problems with this film was the poor use of the Destroyer and Natalie Portman. My only problem after this film was Asgard was never portrayed as this magical again.
Captain America: The First Avenger is possibly my favourite so far and this alone is weird because I have never been even remotely a fan of Steve Rogers in whatever guise he's opted for over the years. Captain Amateur (or Stinky) is what I usually call him, but the Star-Spangled Avenger's first appearance was like the return of an old friend; like a new - good - Indiana Jones film or anything with a dollop of nostalgia well made.
Avengers Assemble is odd. All the pieces were in place, but some of them could have done with being fleshed out a bit. Having seen this film 3 times now, I'm still bothered by some of its ambiguity (Loki's general appearance and demeanour for the first half of the film and the lack of a plausible reason how he aligned himself to these aliens in league with Thanos), it also bothers me that some of the scripting is naff or how much is shoehorned into the plot. It felt rushed.
Iron Man 3 has been covered, probably in shit. This is a great Tony Stark film; not so good everywhere else.
Thor: Dark World was recently described as 'If the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just a TV series, Dark World would be the non-plot episode', except I think maybe, considering two of the film's writers are the guys behind the Russo Brothers and all of the current movies story arc, this has more clues in it than you can imagine. Everything from the Aether to the blackboard behind Erik Selvig in the asylum are clues to what was the come and what is yet to. I think this film has an Infinity War/Endgame deus ex machina hidden in it.
We watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier and pretty much couldn't remember anything apart from the run round the Washington monument with Sam Wilson and in many ways it's as good as the first Cap film but in a completely different way. The clear things to come out of it was how the superhero universe was expanding - and growing darker.
I still have problems with The Guardians of the Galaxy but that's more to do with my age and my history in Marvel Comics. The film is one of those rare things, a good space adventure without feeling too much like Star Wars or Trek or somewhere between the two. However, on watching it again recently, I don't actually think it's that good. The script was pretty awful; Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, John C Reilly and a host of other actors all hammed it up in a cringeworthy kind of way, that had it been filmed in a darker way would have just looked like bad acting. Don't get me wrong, it's very clever but it knows it's clever so it didn't seem to bother with anything else. I mean repeated "A-holes"? Really?
We got almost up to date so far with Avengers: Age of Ultron. It is essentially the continuation of Winter Soldier and how the events in the first Avengers film truly affected the person - Tony Stark - involved in it the deepest. It's kind of the end of the beginning and that's fine, but there are a couple of things about it that could have been done better. Ultron's malevolence should have been explained better; I'm still presuming it's because it is essentially the bi-product of an Infinity Stone, but it is confusing. Other than that, it's actually quite an odd film; part love story, part nightmare and very impersonal - there's a coldness about the interaction of all the characters. There is also a lack in the fluidity of the special effects; whereas the films all seem to have prided themselves with seamless, this film's SFX felt, jarringly, like SFX. It's also considerably better than I remembered it to be, which sounds like a contradiction but isn't. This is a film that probably needed to be 20 minutes longer even though it wasn't overstuffed to begin with.
I suppose Ant-Man is the levity after the angst and anger. To say it exists in its own little pocket of the MCU is a pun. It's a fun film without enough special effects (which in itself is a very unusual thing to write). It obviously is here for a reason; the comedy interlude, perhaps? It coincided really well with our viewing by being on TV. That was last week, I've forgotten loads about it already.
And the other night we watched Captain America: Civil War, which was really The Winter Soldier, part 2 (with a big superhero battle dropped into the middle) or maybe Avengers 2.5 and the amount of time the core earth-bound Avengers were in it you can see why. This is the thing (bearing in mind everything after this is too recent and only seen once); the more heroes in it, the less interesting it is. The battle of the two hero factions in this film felt so contrived it actually spoils it; in fact the Black Panther kind of spoiled it, even if he was a vital component. It is the oddest of movies; if you knew nothing of Marvel films you can just about watch everyone of them and get an idea of what has gone before or how it works; Civil War literally carries on from one end point and goes through to another beginning point. It's also far too much a soap opera considering the amount of action in it. It's also essential viewing - in places.
[An aside - I've always had more of a problem with Bucky Barnes than I have with Steve Rogers, so when he was brought back as the Winter Soldier I accepted it as inevitable. Comparisons are made between Barnes and Natasha Romanov, which must be the logical reason for Cap's determination to save his friend; the problem is, for me, this is a plot that needs concluding. There have been lots of dead ends and red herrings in the MCU so far, but this has been considerably less interesting. I expect, as well as the defeat of Thanos, other issues in the MCU to be concluded in Endgame, I hope this is one of them.]
The next on the list is Doctor Strange. I remember watching it first time around (and wondering why they'd given DS such a stereotypical American accent, when a New England or Mid-Atlantic one would have worked so better...) Maybe I need to give it a year before I return to the MCU?
***
While the next MCU film is less than 3 months away, it's going to be over a year before we dip into the world of Doctor Who again. This, given the last series, might be a good thing. We can all forget how dreadful it was until it is, again. The thing is, I want to go back in time, to the 1970s; some of you can do that...
Morecombe & Wise move to ITV. Les Dawson moves to ITV. Someone you like moves to ITV. Suddenly everything from production values to the way it's written is all wrong. In my house, moving to ITV was the kiss of death (and if you started on ITV and went to the BBC you were either something special or you knew the secret about Jimmy Savile).
Despite remaining on BBC, but moving to a Sunday for the first time ever, Doctor Who moved to ITV. It won't be the same again unless it moves back and as it is really already there I think we can safely say that the reboot in 2025 was always doomed to fail...
***
Is that it? Three bloody paragraphs on Doctor Who? Is that it?
No one really cares any more and I've never really cared. I seem to care more than you think because I'm of geek stock; why else do I write things like this?
OK. More then.
Jodie Whitaker's debut drew as many people watching as peak Tennant - which, I believe, is good numbers. By the end of the series no one was quite sure how many viewers there were and the BBC, usually quite bullish (until the Top Gear reboots) about viewing figures went all quiet and the Whovians retweeting DW viewing figures like coordinates to free treasure one day, were all at their mums on the last two Sundays the Doctor lectured her way through an hour sounding like a pissed off teaching assistant in a room full of pensioners on acid. [Oh if it was weird as that]
I bloody love the idea of a woman Doctor. I also love the idea of a dog Doctor. A truly alien Doctor or a board of Plywood covered in jam Doctor - I think DW embraces diversity like Ikea do weird names in fake Scandinavian. One of the weirdest things was the time it took them to fiddle around with its gender.
I have spent the last few months defending Jodie Whitaker like she was my sister and I realised earlier on - the way my weird head works - when I was talking about the Avengers that I've been lying to myself; I don't actually like Jodie Whitaker. I don't think she acts particularly well in this role with these scripts and directors and she's too... average. Normal. Human, if you will. There has been 'otherworldly' about a number of Doctors, with the least alien being Ecclestone and Tennant, who made up for it with mannerisms (and making John Hurt like a tooled up version of Ecclestone also worked). Whitaker has nothing to bring to the table - no quirk, no point of focus. She does seem like a female extension of Tennant and Smith but without any depth.
The last series of Doctor Who struck me as more Chris Chibnall re-imagining it as a post-modern Mr Benn without the costumes. Except that would be crediting Chibnall with an intelligence he clearly doesn't possess. Everything from his obsession with Sheffield to avoiding (most of) the old toys in the box; everything about the new Who and her showrunner has been largely negative even if there has been a vociferous call-to-arms in support of the female Doctor. The problem with this is it isn't about Whitaker (although she could have been improved on), it's about Chibnall's inability to write this kind of family TV and the production company's inability to make 50 minutes of anything half decent. The sad thing is the couple of almost reasonable episodes were themselves woeful examples of British SF TV making, but the bar had been lowered to snake shit levels by then.
The thing is, DW has a certain level and this season plumbed depths not seen since the days of polystyrene production sets. If someone had said, "We're doing Doctor Who for CBBC now" and then offered this series up you wouldn't have objected to the massive drop in standards; the fact it's something we actually see our license fee in makes people with time invested in it angry/happy/ambivalent. It is a bi-product of the growth in social media.
Love Beach was an album by ELP. However awful it was, the die-hard ELP fans were happy because it was a new ELP album. ELP aficionados quite rightly were justified in shitting on their copies before posting them to either Mr Emerson, Mr Lake or Mr Palmer. People who wouldn't know ELP from a hole in the ground wouldn't give a fig unless one of them bit them on the arse and then maybe not so much. Some DW fans are going to swallow as long as they have holes in their arses, but a lot of people - not just misogynists, idiots and cretins - are going to spit and just find everything a bit too unpalatable. The thing is it could be that like ELP, this DW is a step too far (too soon).
***
One thing that seems to have become a trend is the success of naff films. If anything is an indication of how bonkers the world is becoming, it's when truly woeful examples of film making become big hits. Three films in 2018 have defied logic and become blockbusters - Hugh Jackman's The Greatest Showman, the Venom film and Bohemian Rhapsody. As I type this I'm hearing that Aquaman might end up being a huge money-spinner for Warner/DC even if every critic on the planet thought it was dull and a wee bit damp. When the general public are no longer being guided by critics it is a reflection of society as a whole.
Over the last two years, we have seen the end of 'Facts' as a bonafide way of verifying the truth in something. It has been replaced by 'Belief' and therefore instead of looking at reviews of Aquaman and thinking, "Hmm, that looks like a big pile of wank." You're going to think, "If I believe it's as good as Citizen Kane, it will be." And then because you believed really hard, even though it was a pile of wank you can't possibly admit to yourself you were wrong, so you perpetuate the lie by telling all of your friends - specifically the ones who are governed by lowest common denominators - that Aquaman needs to be seen at a cinema.
The Greatest Showman is this decade's Mamma Mia or Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. The fact it came out before Mamma Mia 2 was a stroke of genius because all those old Mamma Mia fans needed something to get the juices flowing again... Plus, punters like the odd sing-a-long-a-musical - I'd never begrudge them it just so long as I never have to suffer watching one of them myself.
I haven't seen that or the Venom film, but I figure the latter's been successful primarily because of Tom Hardy and also because the trailers do a good job in piquing your interest; big monster crime fighter, comedy lines, eating people's heads - ticks all the boxes. Plus Ragnarok did wonders for the comedy superhero film, Infinity War killed a bunch of people and Venom does both - win win. The chances are people see the word 'Marvel' and blindly accept it must be part of this big MCU (because the average punter doesn't care that Marvel was divided like a spit roast party gone wrong back around the turn of the century and is only just making some sense of how its comics will eventually fit into its cinematic universe).
The thing is I've spent about 3000 words talking to you about stuff I like or don't. What I have written is essentially reviews, except I like to tart things up and make it more of an experience than just giving you an encapsulated review of something, even if what I did was give you encapsulated reviews of the MCU films. It's about presentation, innit?
Joe Bloggs already thinks The Guardian or Daily Mail film reviewer is a posh twat, so if he doesn't like something it's like being told that leaving the EU is a bad thing - you lost, get over it - so if this posh twat doesn't like it that means I might like it... It's not as wide a sociological step as you might think - imagined reverse psychology; it's the basest level to why we do not allow ourselves to accept our own culpability when we're fundamentally wrong about a belief - cognitive dissonance.
Take Hereditary as an example. Now this is a genuine exception to this rule. Most press rated it highly and most people who saw it agreed with the press - they believed the hype. This in itself is an example of how we can one day say, "Oh, I read it in the paper so it must be true." and the next day say, "Oh, I read it in a paper so it must be bollocks." The truth with Hereditary is probably simple; one of the earliest reviews influenced the way the future reviewers and potential audience would go and often with a film with a reasonable budget it's the choice of how the film is marketed that determines its success. Words such as 'unnerving', 'unsettling', 'otherworldly' and 'genuinely creepy' tend to be triggers.
Mark Kermode is often derided for suggesting The Exorcist is his favourite film of all time, because, you know, it's a horror film. The fact it's a clever, scary and unbelievably well-acted film is secondary to a genre prejudice. Lots of people don't like horror/scary movies so Hereditary was desperate to appeal to as many of its core audience as possible and maybe win over some sceptics. My mate thinks this film is the scariest film he's seen and he is a godsend to filmmakers because if enough of his friends know he thinks it's a fucked up movie and go see it or catch it on a streaming service then the word of mouth effect helps continue to make the film money in a world where DVDs are now a niche market.
Personally, I had all kinds of problems with Hereditary and thought it ended up being weird for weird's sake and was full of dislikable characters all waiting to die. But, you see, in my world, the best horror movie ever made is Alien. It's not a SF film; it is a haunted house; thing in the cellar/under the bed/in the closet film. It has more tension (= frights) than pretty much any other film, apart from maybe The Thing, which also isn't a SF film.
Also, I could have substituted Hereditary for Guardian of the Galaxy - both average films done slightly differently; marketed extremely well and grew off of and out of the initial reviews. Sit down and analyse the films and you'll be found wanting. [Guardians would have been a success whatever the reviews, but it was a phenomenal hit because it tapped into a demographic the other Marvel films couldn't or didn't.]
Apart from when a genuinely half decent film comes along that unites all sides of the process, the market is so crowded the film industry appears to be relying on an area that they've often forgotten about - the people who actually pay for their films at a cinema and that means making mainly half-baked vacuous 'entertainment' instead of groundbreaking intelligent story telling. You could argue that what makes money is what works and you would be right, but cinema is one of the arts and we're going into an entirely new can of worms just as I was trying to finish up. We'll maybe come back to that, one day.
I'm not about to suggest that the critics were wrong about the critical flops that were box office hits, but outside of the general obsolete nature of reviewers nowadays, a thing sells if the people want it and if it doesn't it's because they don't want it. This actually really isn't rocket science. A successful movie makes money by making money. A producer doesn't give a fuck what Joe Bloggs says about his film as long as he's getting a return on his investment. If he's making a cheesy 21st century disaster film remake with The Rock and it will have as much cultural impact as a donut, he's still probably going to be earning more and subsequently making more of this kind of film. You could argue that the feel-good films and fun adventure films are filling cinemas because they're a spectacle, an escape, a little like going to the cinema in the 1930s when it was the only entertainment most people could afford (and there were no boozers, in the USA); they offer something different from the dirge we all live through on a daily basis. Critics might hate this common denominator crap, but the punters - the average ones who make up the majority of people - lap it up.
I think many people are looking for a change, when that is the driving force behind an existence people do all kinds of strange and unusual things; there's nothing that says it can't be expressed in other ways other than politically.
That's your lot. Go and do something constructive.
..."
A bit like when you go upstairs for something and can't remember what it was.
It might have been about the Marvel Cinematic Universe films we've been slowly reworking our way through over the festive season or how Doctor Who shoved off all the pretence and became a full-fledged, badly-scripted, kids TV show.
I might have been considering admitting to all the apparently cracking telly we haven't watched. While all my erudite friends watched The Handmaid's Tale, I was torn between grief and elation at the renewal/salvation of Lucifer. Trying to persuade my wife to watch the second season of The Good Place has not been successful and because I'm forced to play second fiddle behind cheap quiz shows and BBC4 we pretty much need a major sporting event to catch up on things we've missed. Also, she's just not much into it, which I can understand, unlike people who now claim it's the greatest thing on TV since that little cat ornament your nan had on her Rediffusion set...
The problem I have is TV doesn't really mean that much to me. I sit in front of the computer as long as I sit in front of the TV and, frankly, despite what the wife thinks, there's more choice and diversity here than there is with our limited Freeview choice...
Shall we begin? Yes, let's...
About a month before Christmas, because we haven't already got a year's worth of TV to watch but couldn't be arsed, we watched Iron Man. We realised it had been a while since we last saw it, because so much of it had been forgotten. It had been inspired by us watching Iron Man 3 a few weeks earlier and forgetting what a lousy film that was - possibly the worst of the MCU... Except, it isn't that. Like The Predator, the new Shane Black film; there are some great ideas, it's just executed with the finesse of a herd of incontinent goats force-fed vindaloo. Shane Black makes Guy Ritchie look positively Spielbergian. Iron Man 3 is one of those episodes like the one before The Body in Buffy, where you think you've just watched the worst episode ever and then something so important happens at the end you realise that it is both shocking (metaphorically as well as literally) and essential at the same time. Well, Iron Man 3 has moments in it that are essential (but nothing to compare with the comparison I cited) but the rest of the film is pants. So when we saw Iron Man on the telly, we thought, shall we see if all the older Marvel films have aged well?
Iron Man is probably not as action-packed as you remember. Compared to something like X-Men from 2000, Iron Man is like a rollercoaster gone insane, but for Marvel films, it wisely set the bar quite low to start things off. I mean, there's no point in Tony Stark meeting a Thanos-level villain straight away; is there? The good thing about this film, which set the tone for what was to come, was it felt fantastic but grounded at the same time. Tony Stark as a kind of brainy Elon Musk figure but with all the add-ons and that probably resonates more with the general public than a billionaire misanthrope in a Bat suit or a super-human alien.
The Incredible Hulk still feels like bits of it were tacked onto an independent project to make it seem more MCU and less Ang Lee. Like its predecessor it's a pretty dull film, helped slightly by being more 'Marvel'. This is the worst film in the MCU, but that might be because it was almost wasn't in the MCU.
Iron Man 2 was one of those films I remembered being good, was surprised at how good it still was and how Mickey Rourke doesn't spoil the film at all. We get Black Widow, lots of Nick Fury, a clever and relevant story and it worked on so many levels the rest of Marvel's cinematic universe was probably never in doubt. It's up there as one of the top 3 Marvel films.
Thor is great fun and does a very good job of not seeming at all like a Kenneth Branagh film. My biggest problems with this film was the poor use of the Destroyer and Natalie Portman. My only problem after this film was Asgard was never portrayed as this magical again.
Captain America: The First Avenger is possibly my favourite so far and this alone is weird because I have never been even remotely a fan of Steve Rogers in whatever guise he's opted for over the years. Captain Amateur (or Stinky) is what I usually call him, but the Star-Spangled Avenger's first appearance was like the return of an old friend; like a new - good - Indiana Jones film or anything with a dollop of nostalgia well made.
Avengers Assemble is odd. All the pieces were in place, but some of them could have done with being fleshed out a bit. Having seen this film 3 times now, I'm still bothered by some of its ambiguity (Loki's general appearance and demeanour for the first half of the film and the lack of a plausible reason how he aligned himself to these aliens in league with Thanos), it also bothers me that some of the scripting is naff or how much is shoehorned into the plot. It felt rushed.
Iron Man 3 has been covered, probably in shit. This is a great Tony Stark film; not so good everywhere else.
Thor: Dark World was recently described as 'If the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just a TV series, Dark World would be the non-plot episode', except I think maybe, considering two of the film's writers are the guys behind the Russo Brothers and all of the current movies story arc, this has more clues in it than you can imagine. Everything from the Aether to the blackboard behind Erik Selvig in the asylum are clues to what was the come and what is yet to. I think this film has an Infinity War/Endgame deus ex machina hidden in it.
We watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier and pretty much couldn't remember anything apart from the run round the Washington monument with Sam Wilson and in many ways it's as good as the first Cap film but in a completely different way. The clear things to come out of it was how the superhero universe was expanding - and growing darker.
I still have problems with The Guardians of the Galaxy but that's more to do with my age and my history in Marvel Comics. The film is one of those rare things, a good space adventure without feeling too much like Star Wars or Trek or somewhere between the two. However, on watching it again recently, I don't actually think it's that good. The script was pretty awful; Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, John C Reilly and a host of other actors all hammed it up in a cringeworthy kind of way, that had it been filmed in a darker way would have just looked like bad acting. Don't get me wrong, it's very clever but it knows it's clever so it didn't seem to bother with anything else. I mean repeated "A-holes"? Really?
We got almost up to date so far with Avengers: Age of Ultron. It is essentially the continuation of Winter Soldier and how the events in the first Avengers film truly affected the person - Tony Stark - involved in it the deepest. It's kind of the end of the beginning and that's fine, but there are a couple of things about it that could have been done better. Ultron's malevolence should have been explained better; I'm still presuming it's because it is essentially the bi-product of an Infinity Stone, but it is confusing. Other than that, it's actually quite an odd film; part love story, part nightmare and very impersonal - there's a coldness about the interaction of all the characters. There is also a lack in the fluidity of the special effects; whereas the films all seem to have prided themselves with seamless, this film's SFX felt, jarringly, like SFX. It's also considerably better than I remembered it to be, which sounds like a contradiction but isn't. This is a film that probably needed to be 20 minutes longer even though it wasn't overstuffed to begin with.
I suppose Ant-Man is the levity after the angst and anger. To say it exists in its own little pocket of the MCU is a pun. It's a fun film without enough special effects (which in itself is a very unusual thing to write). It obviously is here for a reason; the comedy interlude, perhaps? It coincided really well with our viewing by being on TV. That was last week, I've forgotten loads about it already.
And the other night we watched Captain America: Civil War, which was really The Winter Soldier, part 2 (with a big superhero battle dropped into the middle) or maybe Avengers 2.5 and the amount of time the core earth-bound Avengers were in it you can see why. This is the thing (bearing in mind everything after this is too recent and only seen once); the more heroes in it, the less interesting it is. The battle of the two hero factions in this film felt so contrived it actually spoils it; in fact the Black Panther kind of spoiled it, even if he was a vital component. It is the oddest of movies; if you knew nothing of Marvel films you can just about watch everyone of them and get an idea of what has gone before or how it works; Civil War literally carries on from one end point and goes through to another beginning point. It's also far too much a soap opera considering the amount of action in it. It's also essential viewing - in places.
[An aside - I've always had more of a problem with Bucky Barnes than I have with Steve Rogers, so when he was brought back as the Winter Soldier I accepted it as inevitable. Comparisons are made between Barnes and Natasha Romanov, which must be the logical reason for Cap's determination to save his friend; the problem is, for me, this is a plot that needs concluding. There have been lots of dead ends and red herrings in the MCU so far, but this has been considerably less interesting. I expect, as well as the defeat of Thanos, other issues in the MCU to be concluded in Endgame, I hope this is one of them.]
The next on the list is Doctor Strange. I remember watching it first time around (and wondering why they'd given DS such a stereotypical American accent, when a New England or Mid-Atlantic one would have worked so better...) Maybe I need to give it a year before I return to the MCU?
***
While the next MCU film is less than 3 months away, it's going to be over a year before we dip into the world of Doctor Who again. This, given the last series, might be a good thing. We can all forget how dreadful it was until it is, again. The thing is, I want to go back in time, to the 1970s; some of you can do that...
Morecombe & Wise move to ITV. Les Dawson moves to ITV. Someone you like moves to ITV. Suddenly everything from production values to the way it's written is all wrong. In my house, moving to ITV was the kiss of death (and if you started on ITV and went to the BBC you were either something special or you knew the secret about Jimmy Savile).
Despite remaining on BBC, but moving to a Sunday for the first time ever, Doctor Who moved to ITV. It won't be the same again unless it moves back and as it is really already there I think we can safely say that the reboot in 2025 was always doomed to fail...
***
Is that it? Three bloody paragraphs on Doctor Who? Is that it?
No one really cares any more and I've never really cared. I seem to care more than you think because I'm of geek stock; why else do I write things like this?
OK. More then.
Jodie Whitaker's debut drew as many people watching as peak Tennant - which, I believe, is good numbers. By the end of the series no one was quite sure how many viewers there were and the BBC, usually quite bullish (until the Top Gear reboots) about viewing figures went all quiet and the Whovians retweeting DW viewing figures like coordinates to free treasure one day, were all at their mums on the last two Sundays the Doctor lectured her way through an hour sounding like a pissed off teaching assistant in a room full of pensioners on acid. [Oh if it was weird as that]
I bloody love the idea of a woman Doctor. I also love the idea of a dog Doctor. A truly alien Doctor or a board of Plywood covered in jam Doctor - I think DW embraces diversity like Ikea do weird names in fake Scandinavian. One of the weirdest things was the time it took them to fiddle around with its gender.
I have spent the last few months defending Jodie Whitaker like she was my sister and I realised earlier on - the way my weird head works - when I was talking about the Avengers that I've been lying to myself; I don't actually like Jodie Whitaker. I don't think she acts particularly well in this role with these scripts and directors and she's too... average. Normal. Human, if you will. There has been 'otherworldly' about a number of Doctors, with the least alien being Ecclestone and Tennant, who made up for it with mannerisms (and making John Hurt like a tooled up version of Ecclestone also worked). Whitaker has nothing to bring to the table - no quirk, no point of focus. She does seem like a female extension of Tennant and Smith but without any depth.
The last series of Doctor Who struck me as more Chris Chibnall re-imagining it as a post-modern Mr Benn without the costumes. Except that would be crediting Chibnall with an intelligence he clearly doesn't possess. Everything from his obsession with Sheffield to avoiding (most of) the old toys in the box; everything about the new Who and her showrunner has been largely negative even if there has been a vociferous call-to-arms in support of the female Doctor. The problem with this is it isn't about Whitaker (although she could have been improved on), it's about Chibnall's inability to write this kind of family TV and the production company's inability to make 50 minutes of anything half decent. The sad thing is the couple of almost reasonable episodes were themselves woeful examples of British SF TV making, but the bar had been lowered to snake shit levels by then.
The thing is, DW has a certain level and this season plumbed depths not seen since the days of polystyrene production sets. If someone had said, "We're doing Doctor Who for CBBC now" and then offered this series up you wouldn't have objected to the massive drop in standards; the fact it's something we actually see our license fee in makes people with time invested in it angry/happy/ambivalent. It is a bi-product of the growth in social media.
Love Beach was an album by ELP. However awful it was, the die-hard ELP fans were happy because it was a new ELP album. ELP aficionados quite rightly were justified in shitting on their copies before posting them to either Mr Emerson, Mr Lake or Mr Palmer. People who wouldn't know ELP from a hole in the ground wouldn't give a fig unless one of them bit them on the arse and then maybe not so much. Some DW fans are going to swallow as long as they have holes in their arses, but a lot of people - not just misogynists, idiots and cretins - are going to spit and just find everything a bit too unpalatable. The thing is it could be that like ELP, this DW is a step too far (too soon).
***
One thing that seems to have become a trend is the success of naff films. If anything is an indication of how bonkers the world is becoming, it's when truly woeful examples of film making become big hits. Three films in 2018 have defied logic and become blockbusters - Hugh Jackman's The Greatest Showman, the Venom film and Bohemian Rhapsody. As I type this I'm hearing that Aquaman might end up being a huge money-spinner for Warner/DC even if every critic on the planet thought it was dull and a wee bit damp. When the general public are no longer being guided by critics it is a reflection of society as a whole.
Over the last two years, we have seen the end of 'Facts' as a bonafide way of verifying the truth in something. It has been replaced by 'Belief' and therefore instead of looking at reviews of Aquaman and thinking, "Hmm, that looks like a big pile of wank." You're going to think, "If I believe it's as good as Citizen Kane, it will be." And then because you believed really hard, even though it was a pile of wank you can't possibly admit to yourself you were wrong, so you perpetuate the lie by telling all of your friends - specifically the ones who are governed by lowest common denominators - that Aquaman needs to be seen at a cinema.
The Greatest Showman is this decade's Mamma Mia or Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. The fact it came out before Mamma Mia 2 was a stroke of genius because all those old Mamma Mia fans needed something to get the juices flowing again... Plus, punters like the odd sing-a-long-a-musical - I'd never begrudge them it just so long as I never have to suffer watching one of them myself.
I haven't seen that or the Venom film, but I figure the latter's been successful primarily because of Tom Hardy and also because the trailers do a good job in piquing your interest; big monster crime fighter, comedy lines, eating people's heads - ticks all the boxes. Plus Ragnarok did wonders for the comedy superhero film, Infinity War killed a bunch of people and Venom does both - win win. The chances are people see the word 'Marvel' and blindly accept it must be part of this big MCU (because the average punter doesn't care that Marvel was divided like a spit roast party gone wrong back around the turn of the century and is only just making some sense of how its comics will eventually fit into its cinematic universe).
The thing is I've spent about 3000 words talking to you about stuff I like or don't. What I have written is essentially reviews, except I like to tart things up and make it more of an experience than just giving you an encapsulated review of something, even if what I did was give you encapsulated reviews of the MCU films. It's about presentation, innit?
Joe Bloggs already thinks The Guardian or Daily Mail film reviewer is a posh twat, so if he doesn't like something it's like being told that leaving the EU is a bad thing - you lost, get over it - so if this posh twat doesn't like it that means I might like it... It's not as wide a sociological step as you might think - imagined reverse psychology; it's the basest level to why we do not allow ourselves to accept our own culpability when we're fundamentally wrong about a belief - cognitive dissonance.
Take Hereditary as an example. Now this is a genuine exception to this rule. Most press rated it highly and most people who saw it agreed with the press - they believed the hype. This in itself is an example of how we can one day say, "Oh, I read it in the paper so it must be true." and the next day say, "Oh, I read it in a paper so it must be bollocks." The truth with Hereditary is probably simple; one of the earliest reviews influenced the way the future reviewers and potential audience would go and often with a film with a reasonable budget it's the choice of how the film is marketed that determines its success. Words such as 'unnerving', 'unsettling', 'otherworldly' and 'genuinely creepy' tend to be triggers.
Mark Kermode is often derided for suggesting The Exorcist is his favourite film of all time, because, you know, it's a horror film. The fact it's a clever, scary and unbelievably well-acted film is secondary to a genre prejudice. Lots of people don't like horror/scary movies so Hereditary was desperate to appeal to as many of its core audience as possible and maybe win over some sceptics. My mate thinks this film is the scariest film he's seen and he is a godsend to filmmakers because if enough of his friends know he thinks it's a fucked up movie and go see it or catch it on a streaming service then the word of mouth effect helps continue to make the film money in a world where DVDs are now a niche market.
Personally, I had all kinds of problems with Hereditary and thought it ended up being weird for weird's sake and was full of dislikable characters all waiting to die. But, you see, in my world, the best horror movie ever made is Alien. It's not a SF film; it is a haunted house; thing in the cellar/under the bed/in the closet film. It has more tension (= frights) than pretty much any other film, apart from maybe The Thing, which also isn't a SF film.
Also, I could have substituted Hereditary for Guardian of the Galaxy - both average films done slightly differently; marketed extremely well and grew off of and out of the initial reviews. Sit down and analyse the films and you'll be found wanting. [Guardians would have been a success whatever the reviews, but it was a phenomenal hit because it tapped into a demographic the other Marvel films couldn't or didn't.]
Apart from when a genuinely half decent film comes along that unites all sides of the process, the market is so crowded the film industry appears to be relying on an area that they've often forgotten about - the people who actually pay for their films at a cinema and that means making mainly half-baked vacuous 'entertainment' instead of groundbreaking intelligent story telling. You could argue that what makes money is what works and you would be right, but cinema is one of the arts and we're going into an entirely new can of worms just as I was trying to finish up. We'll maybe come back to that, one day.
I'm not about to suggest that the critics were wrong about the critical flops that were box office hits, but outside of the general obsolete nature of reviewers nowadays, a thing sells if the people want it and if it doesn't it's because they don't want it. This actually really isn't rocket science. A successful movie makes money by making money. A producer doesn't give a fuck what Joe Bloggs says about his film as long as he's getting a return on his investment. If he's making a cheesy 21st century disaster film remake with The Rock and it will have as much cultural impact as a donut, he's still probably going to be earning more and subsequently making more of this kind of film. You could argue that the feel-good films and fun adventure films are filling cinemas because they're a spectacle, an escape, a little like going to the cinema in the 1930s when it was the only entertainment most people could afford (and there were no boozers, in the USA); they offer something different from the dirge we all live through on a daily basis. Critics might hate this common denominator crap, but the punters - the average ones who make up the majority of people - lap it up.
I think many people are looking for a change, when that is the driving force behind an existence people do all kinds of strange and unusual things; there's nothing that says it can't be expressed in other ways other than politically.
That's your lot. Go and do something constructive.
Monday, September 24, 2018
Album Review: North Atlantic Oscillation - Grind Show
North Atlantic Oscillation - Grind Show
Release Date: November 16, 2018 on Vineland Music
This, from the
official press release: “... a dramatic shift into more accessible territory:
pop, electronica, rock & even folk elements ...”
I’ve been honoured and able to
call Sam Healy my friend for a couple of years. This wasn’t the intention when
I calmly suggested his first solo project Sand
was the best album I’ve heard in the 21st century. When I finally met this
talented man at a low-key North Atlantic Oscillation gig in Birmingham 3½ years
ago, I soon learned that we had very similar senses of humour; he had an
inventive, playful mind that wasn’t scared to juxtapose an obvious position. Or...
he was quite mad.
I mention this, not because I
want to be seen as a namedropper, or to shoehorn in the fact I still rate the
first Sand album very highly, I mention it because Healy is a bit of a joker
and I’m really not sure why the press release is worded that way... You see, I
am a North Atlantic Oscillation champion and I believe they should have a far
bigger audience than they have. The thing is NAO to me are pop, rock, folk electronica – that’s pretty much how I ‘sell’
them to people (and probably 50% of the reason those people never follow my
advice). So reading a press release that suggests the band are moving into that
direction sat uncomfortably with me, because, on initial listens, Grind Show is quite possibly the least
accessible of their albums, so far.
North Atlantic Oscillation is now
Healy alone. That also bothered me. I was a firm believer that former bassist
Chris Howard grounded him and made him aware of real music. Sam once told me that Chris was the guy who introduced
him to a lot of his later musical influences; introduced him to the classic
rock and prog that I grew up with and hear in NAO’s work. I also believed Ben
Martin’s drumming was one of the reasons they had such a unique sound; often
described as sounding a bit like the Flaming Lips, I’d call that comparison
bullshit, apart from the way Ben smashed his drum kit like there was no
tomorrow. Armed with the knowledge that both had left the band to pursue other
dreams also filled me with an uncertain dread.
Let’s get this out there: I
thought the band would feel a little incomplete without the missing members –
yet their influences are there to be heard, even if they were not there in
recording. I listen to it and I’d argue with Sam until the coos come hame that Grind Show is actually a departure from more ‘accessible
territory’; to me it’s more like a post-modern post-rock album. I still see
those similar and familiar influences, but performed now in a more ‘personal’
way. It still has that ‘epic’ feel the last two albums particularly had, yet in
many ways it feels as stripped back as Grappling
Hooks, but now with the influence of age and experience. This really isn’t
a bad thing because the brilliance of individual musicians (or musician) tends
to be easier to detect.
My initial impression was it’s
more like a follow-up to Sand’s 2nd album A Sleeper Just Awake, probably down to the more electronic feel and
the use of effects to conjure up uncertain atmospherics. However, Healy employs
a lot of different vocal styles, testing his range, experimenting with new
sounds. He really hits his stride with Sequoia, the 9th track, it’s
the first track that truly allows Healy to stretch those brilliant vocals... he
has a brilliant voice – like a mix of Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Mark Hollis,
Art Garfunkle, Scott Walker and Jimmy Krankie – and this is the first time in
the album that he really gets to belt one out. That’s not to say he doesn’t
stretch his pipes sooner, it’s just the track that shows you how powerful his
voice can be.
Apparently, doing breakdowns or
track-by-track reviews is not du rigueur nowadays – which, just to digress for
a moment, seems like a ‘rule’ introduced by people who got criticised for only
reviewing the tracks off of albums they like. However, I feel that
track-by-track reviews are for retrospectives rather than immediate snapshots
of current stuff; and besides how boring is one man’s literary interpretation
of his feelings towards songs he’s not familiar with, but wants to convey an
illusion of knowledge? Yes, I’m aware I can usually make anything shine, but
even I have limitations and to breakdown the entire album into individual items
doesn’t necessarily lean itself to being good promotion and feels a little
anal...
Sam tells me in an interview he
did with me for The Progressive Aspect – music review site @ http://theprogressiveaspect.net/ - that
many of the songs from this album were like, ‘Pulling teeth out of a larger
tooth’ so it kind of makes writing mini reviews for each song almost trite and
disrespectful considering the time a reviewer spends on a track compared to the
relative time an artist can spend producing it for us. That said, the outstanding
tracks on the first listens are maybe no longer the go-to tracks, but most all
have one thing in common, they’re North Atlantic Oscillation songs. I have my
reservations about opening the track with Low Earth Orbit; but in my head the
track that sounds most like a leftover from the last Sand solo project could be
perfectly placed – this was then, this is now!
I’d urge you to listen carefully
to tracks like Weedkiller, Spinning Top, Sirens, Hymn and Fernweh – all showcase what is
best about this band’s ability to create mini-opuses and I don’t mean in a 15
minute prog rock form, but inside 6 minutes (there are only 3 tracks over this
mark and none by much). No band has the ability to create songs textured with
both light and dark without jarring the listener. The Third Day showed us what subtleties were capable of NAO; it was
an album shrouded in modern-prog rock songs you’d be hard pressed to categorise
so pejoratively (which made it so stunningly refreshing), there are elements at
work in this album, but reviewing this album [this review will appear in a much
edited form] for a prog rock oriented site seems almost like an insult; it goes
way beyond facile descriptions. But you have to give it time...
You know the expression, ‘It’s a
grower’? Well, Grind Show is exactly
that. It isn’t accessible; I believe it’s the least immediate album by the
‘band’ so far, but what it lacks in some areas it makes up in others by being
wildly inventive, unexpected and quite beautiful and this becomes crystal clear
as you grow more familiar with songs, leading me to wonder what my initial
reaction to the album was all about. Parts of tracks that I found jarring on
initial listens now make so much more sense; there’s a distinct Miles Davis jazziness
to the album that makes the sometimes in-yer-face electronic bits fit in with
the customary cushioned wall of sound you normally associate the band with.
When you produce music as complex
and intense as this, Talk Talk can never be too far from creative comparisons. NAO
might currently be just Sam, but he has had a lot of production help from Pete
Meighan, the Dublin-based producer who has worked with the band before and was
instrumental (literally) on Healy’s solo efforts. I hope their relationship
more than just resembles the one between
Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis and his producer friend Tim Freise-Greene – because
look what music those two geniuses went on to create?
In conclusion; I’m in an
unenviable position: what if I thought the album really was shit? I have a
preview because I’m a fan [who writes great reviews] and a friend; does that
put pressure on me to be kind? Would I be? Well, I did really think ‘WTF?’ the
first time I heard it, but as stated above, more because it wasn’t what I
expected and because I disagreed with the ‘accessible’ claim. Ask yourself
this; what does a fan truly expect from a new album anyhow? I often wonder if
aficionados and die-hard fans just want their favourite bands to do their favourite tracks – constantly
repackaged or reworked so they don’t have to think about new songs, directions
or ideas. I was the same; I approached this album with more dread than
anticipation because... What if I didn’t like it?
If anything, in my mind NAO have
become more uncategorisable than they were last week. If this album came out
under the Radiohead banner there would be priapic rock DJs poking each others’
eyes out trying to be the most enthused about it; but it’s by a little known
bloke in Edinburgh (originally from Ireland) who already has a back catalogue
with more brilliance and invention than most rock stars can muster in their
entire careers; so it’s probably never going to get the recognition it deserves
(at least, not yet).
Grind Show is sublime. If The
Third Day was velvet, this is felt – smooth but with a rougher edge. It’s
full of atmospherics, feeling, diversity and invention. In many ways it’s
haunting while being uplifting; happy while reflecting on sadness. And, I will
concede it feels more like a rock album, but I don’t quite know why. I hope it’s
going to attract many new fans, but if it doesn’t I feel sorry for all those
people who don’t get what I do.
The test of a great album is how
long it stays on your record player; The
Third Day was played just last week (not even in anticipation of this new
project); I don’t know if Grind Show
will be played in 2022 as much as The
Third Day has been since 2014, but at the moment I really hope so.
9/10
Pre-order
now on CD/MP3/WAV > http://bit.ly/GRINDSHOW and
receive Low Earth Orbit as an immediate download.
Low Earth Orbit video on You Tube - https://youtu.be/gHRiCjB3mB8
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