Modern Culture - Magical Mystery Tour

Spoilers here, spoilers there, but not spoilers everywhere...

Big Cat Hunt

If ever an actor was typecast it's Elijah Wood. I mean, once a hobbit always a hobbit, right? Forget the fact he starred in the rather cool late-90s sci-fi movie The Faculty or that he plays a weird nerd in Yellowjackets or a role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and even the fabulous Wilfred, where he was the only person to see his neighbour's dog as a man in a dog suit; Wood will always be Frodo Baggins and that's a real shame. He's 43 now and his entire career is summed up by the bloody Lord of the Rings films and that seems unfair... However, he does play Strawn Wise - a magician who could have been a huge star once upon a time but missed out because his best ideas were stolen by David Blaine - in the truly wonderful load of nonsense called Bookworm, and while he is excellent in this film, he plays second fiddle to someone else - just like he did in so many of his most famous roles and that seems unfair as well...

First fiddle in Bookworm is the outstanding Nell Fisher who plays Mildred. She is his 11-year-old daughter who he has never met before when he turns up to look after her, after her mother is electrocuted by a faulty toaster. He has flown all the way from the States to New Zealand to babysit while his former [brief] girlfriend recovers from her electrification and she absolutely takes advantage of this, the way any hyper-intelligent kid would. What follows is a voyage of discovery for both father and daughter as they go in search of the mythical Canterbury Panther - a big cat believed to live in the outback of south Island. It is a magical film in many ways; it's funny, touching, gentle, silly and not really what you'd think it was if you just acted on the description alone. Fisher is truly brilliant and has a huge future ahead of her, (the New Zealand accent is fake, she's from London) and Wood, yet again, proves he will do anything to ensure people stop thinking of him as Frodo. There's a slightly bizarre section in the middle with Michael Smiley that ordinarily would feel out of place, but it kind of works here. This is a real treat and you should watch it.

Precursor

The idea of Billy Crystal in a psychological horror drama series sounds a little like Al Pacino in an erotic thriller [see last week], yet unlike that Pacino film this works like butter on toast. Before is strange, disturbing, unsettling and intriguing; if that isn't a good reason to give it a try then I don't really know what is. Crystal plays Eli Adler, a celebrated child psychologist who is still recovering from the suicide of his wife of many years. He thinks he's losing his mind as the ghost of his wife haunts his dreams and some of his waking life; she has conversations with him and makes observations about the way he is living. He's on the verge of giving up his work and retiring. Then one morning he finds a small boy scratching something on the panel next to his front door, but before he can find out what the child is doing he runs away, leaving Eli slightly perplexed. The next night the boy crawls through Eli's dog flap and wakes him up before running home.

He is then contacted by child services asking if he would be interested in taking on the case of a troubled boy who has been through four foster homes and is having trouble adjusting to life in general and, guess what? The boy only turns out to be the one who has been visiting him. So far so weird. Except that isn't just it, the boy called Noah is violent and mute, rarely speaking and is obviously having some kind of psychotic episodes. He sees water acting in strange ways and when he does speak it's in a 17th century Dutch dialect, which sometimes he reacts to and sometimes he looks bewildered when Eli speaks it to him. Crystal retains some of his trademark humour, but this time it's more a defence mechanism than anything else and the story in general is, as I said, unsettling and most definitely creepy. The opening two parts successfully drew us in and the third part moved the story along really well. There's some hints about things in the latest instalment, such as what really happened to Eli's dead wife. Hopefully it remains at this level as it continues through to its outcome.

Who's Waddling Now?

Many questions are answered in this week's thrilling instalment of The Penguin, as Oz (Colin Farrell) asserts his influences all over Gotham with the distribution of the mushroom juice called Bliss. The story has moved on a few months and the overarching thing is how Oz is modelling himself as a modern Robin Hood; creating wealth and paying the locals good money for their loyalty. The thing is, for all of his narcissistic tendencies, Oz Cobb seems to be a loyal man who looks after the people he cares about; this is one of the things that makes this series so good - the juxtaposition of the lead character, is he a nasty villain or a man of principles? Meanwhile, Sofia and Salvatore Maroni have teamed up but they're nothing now that Cobb has destroyed both families; they have little or no influence, so the Penguin is moving into and taking over turf that used to be theirs. All they can do is put the frighteners on the new guys in town, but Oz has built up something very loyal in the neighbourhood, so breaking his business or flushing him out into the public is almost impossible. This game of back and forth is not winning for either side. Vic does something he never thought he would do and Oz's mother slowly sinks into a dementia that is quick and debilitating. Watching how good this series is makes you wonder if Marvel wishes they could do TV shows as well as this. We get Agatha All Along with its camp feel and comicbook witches, while DC has allowed a comicbook Sopranos to be created - this could be the one of the TV highlights of the year.

Idiot's Savant

What happens when you have a cleaning woman with an incredibly high IQ that makes her think on the same level as Sherlock Holmes? She becomes a consultant detective for the police department, of course. That's the premise for Kaitlin Olson's new TV show High Potential about a genius who accidentally solves a puzzling crime.

I'm not really familiar with this Olson's work, but on the recommendation (I think) of a friend, I gave this a watch... Now, I think it was recommended because the person who told me about it wondered if I would have the same feelings about it as he did; that, of course, might be the antithesis of a recommendation; he might have hated it, but I suspect he wouldn't have mentioned it if that was the case... Anyhow, it was like so many of these genius-helps-the-police shows it paints cops as precious idiots and the protagonist has to be quirky or have secrets in her past that need exploring. It's formulaic and reminds me of TV shows before a point in the past, where they all were 22 or 23 episodes in a season and it felt like it was filmed in a cheap format that made it look especially for TV. The pilot is reasonable, but despite plausible reasons why someone so clever as Olson's character - Morgan Gillory - is as she is, it just feels a bit contrived. What is also quite staggering is the fact that Olson is 50 next year; she's obviously not playing someone batting half a century, but if you look closely, she's done up to the nines (meow). We're probably not going to give it another episode. Oddly enough, it turns out my mate (the fabulous Martin Shipp in case anyone was wondering) wasn't recommending it, he was telling me that it was so bad he was enjoying it. I'm not going to see enough of it to enjoy not liking it. This is one you can chalk off to being Very Low Potential...

Bob and Paul Again

The reason I'm returning to Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing is because in the 6th part - Perch fishing on the Great Ouse in Bedford - 1) This was one of the best episodes of this now long running show and 2) I discovered something about it which I had an inkling about a few weeks back - it's filmed well over a year in advance. This 2024 series was actually filmed during the late spring and summer of 2023. This only came to light when Bob, in a butchers in Bedford was buying some tripe for his and Paul's dinner (that didn't go down well) and on the label it said it had a best before date of September 12, 2023. Anyhow, this was the third time they've been searching for perch - a fish I often caught when I used to fish - and the third time they didn't get a big one (oo-er, missus). It was, however, very funny, poignant and the weather and scenery was glorious. They were in Turvey and the surrounding area - a place I knew very well once; it was nice seeing it in all its glory on a wonderful early September day when temperatures were very high; I sometimes miss the countryside of Northants and Beds, not the weather so much now; too hot and humid.

WTAF?

It's not often I watch something and am completely baffled by it. It's the first thing I've watched of Ryan Murphy's since the first season of American Horror Story and before that Nip/Tuck. I'm not as enthused by his stuff as others and wouldn't call myself knowledgeable about his style or substance, but whatever of his I have seen I've never seen anything quite like Grotesquerie. 

It starts horrifically, with a crime scene that is so horrible that many police officers at the scene are throwing their guts up and ratchets up the gore from that point on. We're talking a serial killer who is using his crimes as a canvas, painting dreadful pictures. By the time we get to the end of the second part the death toll is borderline extraordinary, with a scene depicting the last supper but with murdered homeless people. In the centre of this is Niecy Nash-Betts as Detective Lois Tryon, an alcoholic with a husband in hospital in a coma that he looks unlikely to wake up from. She also has a daughter as home, played by Raven Goodwin, who is morbidly obese and is a compulsive eater - she is massive and is proud of her weight and size. There's also something else going on with her, it involves the nurse responsible for her husband's care - played by Leslie Manville, this is an entirely different level of weird and fucked up and something I feel would drag into an essay if I tried to even start explaining. Suffice it to say, the nurse is infatuated with Lois's comatose husband and clearly has a serious problem with his wife...

Add to the Sister Megan Duval, played by Micaela Diamond. Remember Carol Kane in Taxi? Latka's wife, the one with the weird voice? Well Sister Duval looks like her and sounds like a bible-thumping psychologist. She turns up at the police station seeking Lois to try and get the scoop on the killings for the Catholic paper she writes for - this in itself is weird enough, but when Louis starts to confide in her and then pulls her into the actual case it gets even stranger. Admittedly, there's more than a fleeting suggestion that the murders might be religious in theme, possibly even Satanic, so getting the sister involved is maybe not a silly idea and by the end of the second episode there's a good case for having someone of the cloth involved because it is taking its toll on all the police officers. 

Then episodes three and four come along and I'm not sure if the wheels have fallen off or we're watching it from inside someone's nightmare. What was a relatively bonkers first two parts, gets absolutely insane with these two - we're introduced to Sister Duval's boss, a hip and trendy local priest who flagellates himself and talks in a way you've never heard a Catholic priest talk. Lois meets a hunky young hospital nurse, who helps her out and obviously, like the priest, goes on our list of potential suspects. While this is happening a fifth murder scene is uncovered and this in many ways is the worst one - body parts sewn together with the head of a goat; this series pulls no punches. One thing that does feel like padding is the amount of flashbacks to when Lois's husband was not in a coma; I'm wondering if this has some bearing on the story rather than just fleshing out Lois's character, but is it? I'm formulating a theory about this and the husband is key to that. 

Then episode five happens and - in line with my theory - you really get the sense that this is Lois's nightmare and we're living it. There's a burning sink hole, a geologist, a motel from hell - complete with unexplained brazen madness - and a sixth murder is uncovered and seriously, whoever thought up this series has some issues because the murders are getting more vile and nasty. This is just a really strange show; the wife described it as 'A Twin Peaks for the 21st century' and she might be right, except Twin peaks was never this fucked up and nasty. There's more to like in this than dislike. I have some reservations, but in general, we whizzed through the first half in a couple of evenings. There'll be a conclusion of this review (and series) next week!

Pee-cup

The makers of Teacup can fuck right off and then when they've fucked off, they can fuck the fuck off some more. What a bunch of worthless shits they all are and what an absolute massive heap of shit this series was. I have wasted four fucking hours on this stinking bag of tripe. Teacup? Copout more like. It was clear after a while that this was going to end up as an ongoing series, but we had persevered with the final two parts because you never know, something might have fucking happened or even concluded. Some explanation might have been forthcoming. Some fucking sense might have been made of this bag of putrid rats intestines. But no, instead we had another hour of nothing; another hour of character development; another hour of wishing to fuck I'd watched something I knew was going to be a load of shit rather than sticking with this vomit. What happened, I don't hear you ask? Well absolutely fuck all really. They killed off the two characters who were having an affair with each other; thus proving that philanderers are going to die horribly. The rest of the wankers inhabiting this area of Georgia drank the psychedelic kool aid and wandered away from the farm only to meet more alien assassins and then some cool dudes in a souped-up car who basically did what Doc Brown did at the end of Back to the Future and said 'We have more to do!' This was as stinky as the worst arseholes in the world; arseholes encrusted with the stinkiest shit imaginable. I hope the makers of this dog wank die horrible deaths. Cunts.

Agatha All Rubbish No Class

My Thursday night consisted of the final parts of Teacup (see previous review) and the final two parts of Agatha All Along. I feel I could have taken a razorblade to my privates and had a more enjoyable evening. If this is the future of television then someone stuff a bomb up my arse with a short fuse...

Actually, at least Agatha All Along had some semblance of a story and really did tie in with WandaVision and the Doctor Strange film (after a fashion). As my friend Kelvin said, Kathryn Hahn was essentially channelling Missy from Doctor Who and really was a horrid character, going through time massacring witches to keep herself going. The Green Witch or Death (Aubrey Plaza) wanted Agatha to do the dirty on Billy so that she could claim him and stop this unauthorised bollocks, but Agatha doesn't play by the rules, especially when she had a bit of revenge to get from her old lover, in the form of only giving her son Nicky a short life before claiming him. The final two parts started with a conclusion to the first seven episodes and the ninth part was an epilogue with a twist - we got Agatha's origin and just how powerful Billy really was. Agatha died, but has so much power she's now a ghost... yes, I know, I'm spoiling it, but trust me I'm not spoiling anything because this was a load of crap and you'll have been saved from wasting about five hours of your life watching it. Oh and it ends not with a conclusion but with ghostly Agatha and her new mate Billy going in search of Tommy, the missing imaginary brother. Honestly, I would have had more fun covering my testicles in the liquid contents of a toilet duck bottle while looking at them in a mirror...

The MCU Trailer Trash

I don't want you to think I have a problem with race, because I so obviously don't, but the line-up for Marvel's TV shows in 2025 makes me think the demographic has changed and there's a conscious decision to make more superheroes black. Take Ironheart as an example. I don't have a problem with Riri Williams, the main character who first came onto the scene in the second Black Panther movie, yet from what I can gather from the forthcoming series of the same name is that it's going to be a very black culture TV show and I wonder if that possibly alienates a large percentage of the potential audience? However, more than that, is it really needed? Do we need this specific 'black Iron Man' when we've got Don Cheadle's War Machine? The MCU is missing Tony Stark, it needs the Iron Man part of their universe reinstated even if Robert Downey Jr is going to be Doctor Doom (One from an alternate reality that apparently is Tony Stark and not Victor Von Doom). Stark Industries was such a key player in the MCU that even if we can't have Tony Stark his company should be at the forefront of the universe. Ironheart looks like a poor man's rip off and if recent MCU TV shows are anything to go by it will probably end up being a load of shite. But probably not as shite as...

Wonderman... Now this is where I become my curmudgeonly old self and complain that Simon Williams, the template for the Vision in the original Marvel comics, and an atomically powered superhero who is also a B-list film star, is not a man of colour and should never have fucking Trevor Slattery as his wing man. As much as I respect Ben Kingsley, his Slattery character, the 'original' Mandarin in... ahem... Iron Man 3 and then that Shang-Chi bollocks, is annoying and should never have been seen after the post credit scene in the aforementioned film, let alone keep reoccurring. Little can be deduced from the Wonderman snippet/trailer apart from the fact it looks like it might be a comedy, a little like that She-Hulk abomination was. That fills me not so much with dread as a growing determination to give up on MCU TV because, ultimately, it disappoints.

The other snippets teased by Marvel/Disney include a Spider-Man animated TV series that looks bang average; a new series of What If?! which will suffer the same fate as the first two series and not be watched in this household and a four-part Marvel Zombies series, which feels a little like a fucking pointless waste of time and money, I mean zombies were old hat 10 years ago. The comics were dreadful and there's no reason to think an animated TV show is going to be any better... Then there's a Wakanda animated TV show - Eyes of Wakanda (???), which looks as exciting as all the other MCU animated shows; full of piss poor animation and cretinous stories. I suppose Disney has this streaming service so they have to fill it up with something...

The one interesting thing to come from this teaser trailer package is Daredevil: Born Again, which is going to be a nine-episode season with the first part directed by the rather excellent duo of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, the guys behind Loki and countless weird and wonderful time travel and alternate reality films. Now, I don't know if we're going to find out if this is actually the Netflix DD or an alternate reality MCU one, mainly because he's back in the classic costume he was last seen in for a couple of episodes of that dreadful She-Hulk series. My gut feeling is this is going to be a slightly homogenised version, with less grit and violence and more... MCU bollocks, probably. The reason I say this is because in the blurb to promote it earlier this year, this was said, "[the showrunners] gave the series an episodic structure and lighter tone than the Netflix series." The Kingpin looks slimmer and less menacing, but I suspect that will just be his new exterior now that he's about to become mayor of New York and while I'd like to think this is going to be good, I can't help shake the feeling that the MCU TV universe is a busted flush, chasing viewers instead of building followers. After almost a year off, it seems that Disney has decided to flood the market with six TV shows and three feature films between now and the end of 2025, and I'm wondering if this is going to be a material dump or do they think that superhero fatigue is going to wear off and everyone is going to be sporting new hard-ons about their product? I know which one I'd be betting on...

Nerd Quest Alpha

I've discovered a US sitcom that I quite like, the problem is I'm probably going to have to find time to watch it on my own because the wife thought it was 'all right, but a bit too American' which is code for 'I've seen enough!' To be honest with you, it's a bit too nerdy for me, but not like The Big Bang Theory that I've watched a few episodes of and never managed to utter a laugh at. Mythic Quest is much better than that show even if what is being parodied isn't really my thing. As a mate said, it's the perfect nerd show and I get it completely. This is Rob McElhenney's baby, made by Apple TV+ and full of nerds, sexy women and bad language. It pretty much ticks all the boxes for computer game or comic book fans and after watching the first two episodes I really wanted to watch some more, but as I said, the wife put paid to that. It basically follows the story of the people who put out the world's most popular on-line game, a sword and sorcery first person adventure with the focus on the guy who inspired it, his chief programmer, the company's money man, the CEO (who is shit at his job), two  female games testers (who have the hots for each other but don't realise it) and a psychopathic PA who by the end of episode two had just about destroyed the company for trolling one of the most important influencers in the business. It's great fun and if you like this kind of thing I expect you'll be trolling me in a few weeks/months to tell me all the excellent episodes I've missed...

America Decides

Having lost my ability to view the USA as anything other than a fascist state already, Tuesday's Presidential election - which I will watch for a while - really is more than just electing a new President. Let's be clear about this, Trump is probably going to win and if he loses he's still going to claim he won and either way the USA is going to burn because of it. The world is run by right wing borderline fascists - not politicians but media moguls, tech bros and corporate heads are the real power and most of these people are bad for the average person. Take what's happening in the UK at the moment; as most of my friends know, I no longer support the Labour Party, yet I'm starting to feel very sorry for them because they're damned. The recent budget, which is arguably the best budget for the country in nearly 20 years, has been elevated to being worse than Liz and Kwasi's mini budget of a few years ago. You remember, the one that was going to borrow huge amounts of money to ensure rich people made more money, while simultaneously increasing mortgage payments by ridiculous amounts in the middle of a cost of living crisis. These two jokers destroyed the economy, yet Rachel Reeves's attempts to fix the public sector, ensure people have more money and penalise (to a degree) the richest is being heralded as the worst thing ever. This is because politicians - in hock to wealthiest and most powerful - should be punishing the average person. Did Labour not read the memo? The less wealthy are used to being financially raped by the state, if you don't carry on this tradition they start to get altruistic ideas, such as being able to fix things...

In the USA, if Trump wins - and I think he will, because more than 50% of that country's citizens are morons and cretins - the first thing he's going to do is go for his political opponents, you know, the kind of thing Hitler would have done. The second thing will be to pardon all of his friends that are in prison for trying to overthrow the government in January 2021. After this it will be attacks on women, non-white people, migrants and then this abominable wanker will show his true colours and all of the countries that have mocked him will become targets. NATO will cease to exist. The Ukraine will fall. Israel will destroy the Middle East. Mexico will be targeted as a 'bad country' and will suffer and the UK will no longer have a 'special relationship'. Then after three years of fucking up the world he will, at almost 80, declare the end of Presidential elections. He will remain President until he dies and name a successor; the USA will finally become a fascist dictatorship and US States will begin ceding from the Union. Alex Garland's Civil War will become prophetic but by this time the rest of the world will be burning or drowning. I'm not being melodramatic; if Trump wins (and I said, I think he will), every one on the planet will be fucked...

Next Time...

Top of my agenda is to finish Grotesquerie, because it's one of the most fucked up TV shows I've seen in a long time. Before is intriguing and enjoyable and The Penguin is one of the best things on TV, these alone are worth staying in for. We have Shrinking to start and catch up on and we've also got The After Party, The Old Man season two and The Resort (with Cristin Milioti) to watch. There's also going to be something new starting this week - there always is - and therefore films could well take a back seat again. I expected to watch more films this week, but it turned out to be the first thing we watched last Saturday and we haven't seen a film since. We have a shit load of films to watch, but autumns and winters are long and the good TV will dry up in December and not return until January, so I'm not too concerned; three months ago it was all films and hardly any TV.

Pop Culture - Robots and Sex Crimes

 The spoilers are somewhere but not everywhere.

The Really Wild Show

Kids films, eh? Who watches them apart from kids and their parents? Getting the wife to watch a children's film is like trying to convince half of America that Donald Trump is a massive cunt - it's not easily done. So I put it on and didn't tell her about it until it started and fortunately the disparaging remarks were few and far between (actually one in the opening two minutes then she settled back down to her knitting and didn't say anything again until the end when she admitted to enjoying it). I'll take that as a win. The film in question is The Wild Robot and if you can get past the talking animals (there's a good explanation for that) and the slightly silly premise, then you'd have to be one cold hearted bastard not to enjoy this movie.

Based on the book of the same name by Peter Brown, this adaptation stars Lupita Nyong'o as Roz, a robot that was one of six lost when a container ship sank. Roz is a helper, tasked with fulfilling objectives she is given, but when she finds herself on an uninhabited island with only the wildlife for company she has to either learn to speak animal or have no purpose. The need for this is sped up when she inadvertently kills a family of geese, leaving just an egg, which hatches and the chick bonds with the robot, thinking it is his mother. It's a relatively simple story of a robot who becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned goose, who is also the runt of his 'litter' and is tasked with three things - to feed it, teach it to swim and then to fly before the winter comes. Aided by a sly fox called Fink - voiced by Pedro Pascal - this is a schmaltzy feel good film until the last 20 minutes when it gets very dark and possibly quite scary for younger viewers. There really is a lot to unpack in this movie and there's a lot more subtlety involved than I can convey in a short review. It's helped along with added voices from Bill Nighy, Matt Berry, Mark Hamill and Ving Rhames. It's a great kids' film and anyone who watches it will want Stephanie Hsu's Vontra to die a thousand horrible deaths, if that is even possible for an evil squid-like robot. Good fun with a few belly laughs.

Downward Spiral

With Sofia Falcone alive and well and having just eliminated her family, things are looking up for her, while Oz spends most of the episode thinking he's getting his streets paved with gold; so which one will come out of this on the up? The Penguin just keeps getting better and this week is all about moving - whether it's up or down. Oz thinks he's got everything sown up; Sofia's war with her family is taking her out of his hair and his attention turns to the Maroni family and their mushroom juice production; the problem he has is getting the necessary leverage to get things going his way and for a while it looks like all his plans are coming together. Meanwhile, Vic is charged with looking after Oz's mother, who is not happy with having to be moved to one of the shittiest parts of Gotham, for her own safety. Sofia opts to change the family name and teams up with an unexpected new partner, all in the name of getting rid of the Penguin. Oz shows Vic an old Gotham secret, which might make a great HQ for his own crime empire. It's setting itself up for an interesting final three parts.

Witchy Women

Another B+ episode largely down to the fact that Agatha takes very much a back seat in this again. This time its really all about Lilia (Patti LuPone), the 450 year old divination witch and the part she has to play in the grand scheme of this thing. It's very much a time-bending episode as we flash back and forth between Lilia's past and the last six episodes when some of Lilia's actions seemed a bit weird. Once you get a grasp of what is happening here you understand what is going on - at least for this particular witch and her ability to live moments of her life out of sequence. The team are in a castle full of falling swords and there's a tarot reading that needs to be done, but just who is the reader and who is the person the reading is about? There's a few more revelations and some unexpectedly easy (and slightly disappointing) endings. The few moments where Agatha is in it are yet again the most tortuous even if she's dressed up as the wicked witch from Wicked. I know it's unlikely to be the case, but it almost feels as though by the time they got to these last few episodes the people behind the making of it realised that Kathryn Hahn is a one note actress who does annoying far better than anything else. Still, only two episodes to go and there's at least one member of the coven we haven't focused on, so with a bit of luck we'll be reduced to just having Agatha take the main stage in the final part.

Quite Exasperating 

QI [XL] is back for its 22nd series and as you would imagine very little has changed. When the last series started, I was of the opinion that it felt like it was getting a bit stale, that the end of the alphabet couldn't come soon enough and with this new season we reach the letter V and I very much haven't changed my mind on this. It's still thoroughly entertaining TV, but the belly laughs are few and far between now and this was no exception; Joe Lycett, Lou Sanders and the very funny Nabil Abdulrashid joined Alan Davies and Sandy Toksvig for this first week and with a line up as surreal and abstract as these comedians can be you would have expected more, but it was just Abdulrashid who was on the ball and even he felt a little restrained. With the U series, there were a couple of exceptions that really stood out and hopefully the V series will have a better strike rate, but this just fell a little short.

Drowning in the Pee of Love

It had been almost 35 years since we watched the Al Pacino erotic thriller Sea of Love... What a strange sentence - Al Pacino erotic thriller... sounds like a Jack Nicholson slapstick comedy or a Robert De Niro superhero film; it just doesn't sound right and guess what? It didn't and doesn't really work. Pacino plays Frank Keller, a cop in his late 40s who is eligible for retirement, is borderline alcoholic and has had a messy divorce where his ex-wife is now married to a fellow police officer, possibly even his own ex-partner - it's difficult to say because it isn't made particularly clear. He gets involved in a murder case, one which might be the work of a serial killer, as men who advertise in lonely hearts sections of magazines are murdered in their beds with a shot to the back of the head. The police think it might be a female serial killer and when John Goodman, a cop from Queens comes to Manhattan with a death that has the same MO, the investigation ramps up a gear as they go all out to find the woman doing the killings.

Enter Ellen Barkin, an attractive blonde woman who might be the killer, the problem is Pacino is attracted to her and before you know it they're making the beast with two backs and he's thrown caution to the wind. What follows is a psychological thriller that is neither psychological or thrilling, perpetuates this 1980s vibe of misogyny, female exploitation and bad hair styles. There are a bunch of actors in this who we know from stuff 20 years down the line and look extremely young - cameos from Samuel L Jackson (being Samuel L Jackson), John Spencer (Leo from the West Wing), Richard Jenkins (from Six Feet Under and many other things) and Michael Rooker (Guardians of the Galaxy and The Walking Dead). Pacino just overacts his way through a stodgy story that probably wouldn't be considered for a film in 2024, probably due to advanced police procedures and dating apps. I remembered this being a good film in 1989; 35 years later it's below average at best.

It's Grimm in Portland

We really enjoy Grimm; it's a good laugh and fills a void left by a number of supernatural themed shows. However, it's also a really awful show, where whoever writes it has more knowledge of pidgin German than police procedures, in a major city that seems to have just one police station, where no one really follows any kind of procedure. One thing that is clear though, with season four it was obvious NBC was having something of a success with the show, so the special effects budget got severely ramped up - it's just a shame about the quality of the scripts or the depth of ideas in the plots. It also seems to be following a similar path as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with the formation of a 'team' to battle bigger problems; the [brief] introduction of another, less sophisticated Grimm and subplots that, on the face of it, seem better than the ones we already have. I will say one thing totally in its favour, as season four winds on the story really starts to get very good and if it wasn't so poorly put together you'd be hard pressed to compare it with anything else; stuff happens that leaves you hoping that the show writers don't wimp out on us. Less than 50 to go. 

Trailer Trash

Several years ago, I discovered Simon Stålenhag via his website https://www.simonstalenhag.se/ - which if you haven't seen you should check it out. He's an artist who specialises in the future and his paintings are a mixture of mind-blowing, disturbing and extraordinary. He's probably best known for the adaptation of one of his graphic novels Tales From the Loop, which was on Channel four about five years ago and, frankly, didn't live up to the hype (although it still has a very high rating on IMDB).

I'd pretty much forgotten about Stålenhag until the trailer for the new Netflix film The Electric State dropped and I was filled with a mixture of anticipation and dread... Anticipation because it looks absolutely fantastic - the Russo Brothers knocking the look out of the park - and the dread because it stars Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt. The latter isn't really the problem, it's Brown, who I've mentioned in blogs passim, I have the problems with. She doesn't do bad films, but equally they're not good films either. They sort of inhabit the grey area in between. The other problem is the original graphic novel was sombre, disturbing and not at all an action-packed blockbuster that this appears to be. Also Stålenhag's name isn't attached so that could be because he's disowned the project...  The Electric State is out next March and I imagine the money that's been spent on it, Netflix will want it to be a massive hit and I'm sure it will be. It appears to be the story of a young woman who doesn't want to be detached from the world like her peers and wants to go and find her missing brother. The backdrop of this is a world that once embraced robots, but now despises them. She teams up with Pratt to find the missing sibling but appears to get involved in a war between the controlling humans and the remaining robots - who appear to be far more benign than they're depicted as. I want this film to be good. 

... Meanwhile, it looks 99.9% certain that the MCU's Blade film has been cancelled, or, at best, been indefinitely delayed. What was supposed to be part of the Phase 6 of the MCU is unlikely to be replaced with anything in the schedule and it now looks as though 2025 will feature just the three films: Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, and The Fantastic Four, with 2026 likely to be Avengers: Doomsday and maybe one other picture, possibly another sequel to an existing property. There is a rumour circulating that World War Hulk might be on the cards as well as a Young Avengers movie, while some are speculating it might be the third Doctor Strange film. If you want my, usually accurate, assessment, Doomsday will set up Avengers: Secret Wars (in 2027) and there will be no other films and while I'm confident about this, I will add the caveat that there might be another film taking place between the two, possibly a fourth Spider-Man film, but that depends on how long Tom Holland is involved with the new Christopher Nolan project and how it would fit into the new streamlined look for the MCU. Alternatively, there is a chance that in 2027 we might see an MCU X-Men film as I expect Disney will want to take the BIG film only route with the MCU now...

A Weak Cup of Tea

The malaise that set in last week didn't go away with this week's double bill of Teacup. The first part was a 45 minute episode that told the story about what happened at the other ranch and how the original guy in the mask and his mates got into alien hunting. This is a slightly ridiculous load of horse shit; I really didn't want it to be but by the end of that 45 minutes I'd torn the premise and the episode to shreds. This is truly dreadful television that rips off The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and really atrociously. It desperately needs to conclude with the two finale parts or I'm definitely not going to be tempted back for a second season. I simply can't believe how bad the pacing is; how stupid the people are and... actually, I need to give you an example of the people and their stupidity... They've worked out that both the bad alien and the good alien transfer themselves into a new host, so they realise that they should never be alone, so they promptly go out into the dark and almost every single one of them is alone at some point.

I had such hopes for this; my mate Mark sounded like he was looking forward to it and it originally had a really high score of IMDB. It's now at 6.8 there, my mate hasn't mentioned it - hopefully he's read these reviews over the last three weeks and decided it would be a waste of valuable time and I'm just disappointed that I've wasted nearly three hours of my life on something that has deteriorated profoundly over the last two weeks. I'm also sad that the excellent Chaske Spencer is involved; Yvonne Strahovski hopefully did good things with her pay cheque and Boris McGiver must have wondered why they killed him off in Evil even if he knew it was finishing. I will stick with it until the end of this season, but something astounding needs to happen to save this from being an appalling mess of a show.

Sham-Poo

Adverts are culture, aren't they? In that case, I was in the bath the other night and I spied upon one of the wife's hair products; Herbal Essence's Repair, a conditioner that claims to help revitalise and repair damaged hair. Now, I'm not quite sure how that works, but who am I to argue with hair product specialists, especially when they come up with groovy ingredients like Boswellox, which is a derivative of boswellic acid [no, me neither] or Argon oil, which I presume is the oil from argons (or a singular argon) ... However, I was looking at this hair conditioner and I noticed the legend across the front, which reads: "96% Natural Origin." Which begs the question, what are the other 4% made of? Would that be 4% unnatural origin or maybe even 4% supernatural origin? "Our new shampoo has essence of ghosts in it, to make your hair more ethereal!" Or maybe, "This new conditioner contains 4% Werewolf!" or "Our new hair product range contains 4% of things that are strange and slightly frightening!" The thing is Herbal Essence doesn't tell us what the other 4% is and that's scary...

Next Time...

Anything above that hasn't finished; we might get around to watching more than two films (a lot of this week has been taken up with watching half a season of Grimm) and with the clocks going back nothing will affect our usual TV watching, not even the advent of winter... Why is TV at the moment either outstanding or abysmal?

Modern Culture - The Joke's On You

This has some hinted at spoilers and some spoilers pertaining to source material, but frankly if my general vagueness gives anything away then you're a lot cleverer than wot I is...

No Uncle Remus

In the film world there's two kinds of Alien movies - good ones and shite ones. For most of Alien: Romulus you have to include it in the first category, even if most of the actors sound like they've walked off the set of Eastenders and there's a sense of inevitability about everything that happens.

However, something goes wrong with this movie in the final quarter, but we'll get to that. Cailee Spaeny, last seen in Civil War and an actor making a name for herself for playing teenagers, despite her 26 years, works on a mining colony planet, with her 'brother' - a simulant played by David Jonsson - and desperately wants to get off. The problem is the company she works for - Weyland-Yutani - likes to move goalposts and after she's worked the requisite amount of hours and files for departure, she's told she needs to work another five years before she's eligible, because of changes to company policy. This forces her to look for an alternate route away from the wet, cold hell hole she's likely to die on, so she teams up with a few friends and decides to salvage fuel from a deserted space station orbiting the planet they're on. The plan is to dock with the station, take the extra fuel that's stored there and leave the mining colony for the Varga system where they can live away from the Weyland-Yutani controlled company that treats them like slaves. Weyland, as you will remember was the name of the company first seen in the first  two Alien films and a recurring nightmare for anyone who has ever encountered them. Everything goes smoothly until the two men and the android get stuck in a chamber where extra fuel is stored. 

From this point on we enter familiar Alien territory - face huggers and many full grown xenomorphs running riot on the derelict station with our crew of young escapees trying to save their own lives. There are some neat twists that do more than nod at the original film, such as a CGI Ian Holm as a version of the character he played in Ridley Scott's original. Some of the dialogue is excellent, not because it's original but because it mimics both the first film and James Cameron's sequel. Then, with 20 minutes left on the clock and in need of an even bigger and better finale, the director Fede Alvarez borrows from the fourth Alien film - Alien: Resurrection - the one with Sigourney Weaver as a super-powered clone of her original self and this film kind of goes off the rails big time because of that. While the homage to the original films works, when it gets into the later stage movies and tries to tip the hat to these it really loses itself especially when there's even a wink towards Prometheus - a film that should be consigned to a hole in the ground. I see what the director was trying to do but I wish he'd simply kept it simple and just paid tribute to Scott and Cameron's films. The problem is, without giving too much away, I think they've used up every method to get rid of aliens, so it felt like they were re-treading old ideas and it didn't work for me.

Storm in a Teacup

If you read the reviews about the new Peacock series Teacup, you will see a pattern. There are those who liked the opening two episodes and those who disliked them and the majority of those who disliked it disliked it because it's on Peacock. That's the kind of logic that has Americans targeting weather forecasters because of hurricanes. I don't know if I've seen that many Peacock (it's a streaming station connected to NBC I believe) shows, but to condemn a series because of the network it's shown on seems a bit... childish. Anyhow, the majority of all the reviews suggest we're in the territory of other TV shows, such as Lost and the show From - which we watched a couple of episodes of a couple of years ago and gave up on it because it just wasn't terribly good (and it's now on its third season, so what do I know?). 

This is based on Robert McCammon's mid-80s sci-fi horror novel called Stinger, which is about an alien, armed with fabulous technology, in pursuit of an escaped galactic criminal, and tracking him to an area of the USA, which he then encases in a kind of force field and everyone inside is potentially going to die. I have never read the book (I read a McCammon book in the 1970s and thought it so badly written I never bothered again) but this appears to be a loose adaptation with a few new twists. Whatever is trapped inside the blue painted line knows that its pursuer knows where it is, but we take a while to even get close to this deduction because most of the first two episodes is taken up with character development of the people who are obviously going to be the main protagonists, that is until a man in a gas mask turns up and draws the blue painted line and then tells the people inside that they must never cross that line. So naturally a dog and then the wife of the man the dog attacked both cross the line with gory and violence awaiting them. I dunno about it; the first two episodes don't do enough to make me want to commit to it, but it wasn't bad. I just hope we're having a mini-series and not an ongoing thing and that we get some explanations for the weird shit that takes place - like animals trying to commit suicide and all the lights, communication and vehicles stopping working. It has some promise, but I'll wait until episodes three and four - which will be reviewed about... now...

Here's the thing; sometimes I ponder rewriting entire reviews because first impressions are not always the best gauge of things. The last thing I expected was another two episodes to fall, but it seems to be a thing at the moment for stations and streaming platforms to drop two at a time for a few weeks before finishing with a weekly schedule. So by the time we finished episode four, we were halfway through the first season and I was thinking considering there's about two hours of this left, we're not going to see a conclusion because while we're starting to get a picture of what's happening, we're no closer to any kind of resolution or understanding of what is going on. Yes, we've worked out that this might be alien in origin and we discover that some people are not villains and others are. It might be a case that the alien being tracked is a good guy and that it seems there are far more people inside this series that know what's going on than the viewer or the two families trapped inside the blue line.

It's all a bit meh, to be honest. I feel bad about this admission especially if you reread the first paragraph of this review. I wanted it to prove to those who disliked it because of the streaming platform that they shouldn't be so prejudiced about the delivery method, but after four parts I'm not really feeling any love for this. Parts three and four introduce us to the antagonist and we discover that there's a kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing going on with both antagonist and protagonist being able to move from different bodies. There's also something going on at a neighbouring farm that looks as though it's a warning of what's going to happen to the crew we're supposed to be invested in. And all the while all of this alien weirdness, animal degloving and blood is going on, the two families back at the ranch appear to still be wrapped up in their own personal lives, despite all this weirdness and death going on. I'm not giving up on it, but equally I'm not holding much hope that in a few weeks time I'll have any inclination to watch a second season, if it happens.  

Cash Strapped

The second half of the sixth season of Brassic has that almost traditional dip in quality - for the last few series at least, the middle few episodes (#3-5), usually rely on slapstick comedy, unrealistic scenarios and are often Vinnie-lite. It's like each seven episode season should really be four 75 minute episodes to include the essential plot bits that are scattered around otherwise throwaway episodes. However, oddly enough, while obviously fillers as we await the usual grand finale and cliffhanger, the Naked Cult episode at least was quite amusing, even if it got a bit silly at the end, while the huge revelation about Carol and Cardy's marriage was a mixture of utterly stupid and quite brilliant, with Tom Hanson (Cardy), who has been in every single episode along with Joe Gilgun, finally being given an opportunity to act and be centre stage, even if it was in slightly tragic circumstances. 

After these came a colossal space filler, giving Aaron Effernan (Ash) the centre stage for the second time in this series. In the Naked cult episode he strutted round stark bollock naked for most of the episode and this time his masculinity and his homosexuality are put to the test, but it all felt like more treading water before the inevitable ending/finale. It is good to have Doctor Chris (Dominic West) back, even if it's obvious that he filmed his few scenes all at the same time and they were cut into later episodes. The finale was everything we've grown to expect from Brassic, except for one thing... I think it was actually the final episode. I think we've seen the last of Brassic. Why? Well, it ends on an actual cliffhanger - playing out a joke that has been long running across the previous five season finales. Vinnie's problems - outside of his own mental health - get sorted. Someone important dies and has two funerals and Vinnie walks out on Doctor Chris, declaring him not very useful. It was touching in places, was full of the usual daftness and all the gang were there, for the last time; even Dylan - after a fashion. Goodbye Brassic, it's been fun.

How To Send Someone Mad

Episode four of The Penguin was all about Sofia Falcone (the quite gorgeous Cristin Milioti) and how she came to be where she is today... It starts with the bits from the end of episode three we didn't see - a revelation that throws the rest of the series and Oz's safety into serious doubt. Then it flashes back to Sofia's work for a mental health charity and how, as the only straight member of the Falcone family she was a rising star in the right circles of Gotham's elite. However it goes wrong for her when she meets up with a journalist who wants to know how come a number of women who work in Falcone clubs have all ended up the same way as Sofia's mother. This leads the female Falcone to begin to realise that something is wrong about her family and her mother's apparent suicide. What follows is nearly an hour of the most fraught and disturbing episode by far, as we discover how Sofia became The Hangman, what an absolute shit her father (Mark Strong) was and what 10 years in Arkham Asylum can do to a lovely free-spirited young woman. This was head and shoulders the best episode so far and The Penguin was in it for about four minutes as we see how he betrayed the woman he was looking after and how, if there's any justice, she should eventually get her revenge - however unlikely that is going to be.

How's Your Father?

The conclusion of the fourth series of Slow Horses felt like slightly unfinished business. It has been, as usual, one of the best things on TV and there are a couple of things that happen, especially in the finale, that will probably have you cheering at the TV while quietly looking at yourself. This season has absolutely whizzed past, but that might be because only one episode is over 45 minutes long. It started with a suicide bomb at a shopping mall in central London and goes down a maze until we discover a few very unexpected things about some of the Slow Horses. If I have to be honest, it's probably been the most ... strange... season so far; not because it wasn't very good, but because there seems to be plots left dangling where they are usually cleared up. Such as what happens to Hugo Weaving's 'cult' leader and what the score with the new First Desk is. It felt like it could have done with an extra episode just to properly fill in some of the vagueness you might be left feeling. Gary Oldman, as usual, is brilliant and Jack Lowden does another sterling job as River, who discovers a family secret that has far reaching repercussions for the whole of MI5. This wasn't the best of the four series so far, but it's still better than most things I will watch.

West Wing Wormhole

At some point in the coming months, the wife and I are going to rewatch The West Wing. We'd been toying with it for a while, but lots of other things get in the way and we're talking about seven seasons and over 150 episodes, but I expect it will be worth it. Ironically, once we decided to watch it again, I discovered The West Wing Channel on the Tube of You and promptly fell down a massive rabbit hole watching a succession of 5 minute clips from all seven seasons. It has simply made my enthusiasm for rewatching it grow.

A Folly

I'm not suggesting I'm some kind of prophet or oracle, but I did say, in these pages, about a year ago that the idea of a Joker sequel being a musical sounded like possibly one of the most ridiculous ideas I've ever heard and a guarantee it fails - especially in the current comic book film market. So, it appears that Joker: Folie à Deux has been a catastrophic failure, with audiences staying away in droves and the film is set for an early release on streaming sites. The movie with Joachim Phoenix reprising his role as Arthur Fleck - the Joker - and Lady Gaga [real name: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta] as a version of Harley Quinn, was one of the most highly anticipated films of 2024, especially given the success of the first film, but it has been described as 'boring' 'execrable' and has one of the lowest ratings on IMDB for a major comic book film, currently sitting at 5.3 after nearly 75k reviews and ratings. I have to say that when I heard about it, my first thought was 'I don't know if I want to watch that' and now that has changed to 'I don't want to watch that.' 

Time's Arrow

You see, this is where the importance of me NOT spoiling a movie becomes an imperative, because if I tell you much about Caddo Lake I will be spoiling a bloody excellent film for you. Dylan O'Brien plays a guy in his 20s called Paris who is trying to recover from the death of his mother after she drives off of a bridge spanning Caddo Lake. Paris works in the lake, helping clear away debris and junk that has washed up. Meanwhile, Ellie (Eliza Scanlen) is a teenager who constantly fights with her mother (Lauren Ambrose), especially about the mysterious disappearance of her father, but these arguments stop when her step-sister Anna goes missing. While Ellie helps search for her sister, Paris is searching for answers about his mother, but no one wants to give him what he wants. As the two people get closer to discovering the truth, their lives start to become completely entangled without either of them ever meeting... And that is as much as I'm going to tell you. This is a fantastic mystery that I urge you to go into with as little knowledge as you can; if you see it's on, watch it, don't even read anything on IMDB, watch trailers or anything - just watch the film and see if you can work it out as it goes along. Personally, I think it's one of the best films I've seen this year and as a cryptic clue, when you've seen it you will understand why I rate it so highly. It has more twists and turns than a switchback race track and when you do start to realise what is happening you're already totally committed. Fabulous. 

The Hahn Problem

The sixth episode of Agatha All Along was, for 35 of the 42 minutes, the best one so far. However, this was because there was no Kathryn Hahn. Let me try and explain this... The worst thing about Agatha All Along is Agatha. She is just a fucking horrible character and Hahn is an incredibly annoying actor. There's this massive elephant in the room and it's the only thing in this series that was in WandaVision. There's also the fact that Hahn reminds both the wife and I of a woman who lives near us who is really annoying, self-centred and narcissistic, so watching this series just feels a little like having to be stuck in a room with someone we both detest...

This week it was Teen's origin story, as we discover that he was originally William Kaplin, a 13-year-old Jewish boy enjoying his bah-mitzvah and discovering from a fortune teller that something is about to go seriously wrong in his life. Little did anyone expect that the something serious would be him dying in a car crash about ten minutes later. We find out who casts the spell over him making it impossible for him to reveal his true identity, which is what he becomes when young imaginary Billy Maximoff 'possesses' William Kaplin the moment he dies. We then follow Billy as he tries to find out who he is and why. Along the way we meet Evan Peters again - you remember him, he was the guy who Wanda made her brother Pietro, but was also Pietro in the Fox X-Men films (just to muddy already murky waters). We also discover that Billy is now gay (is it that Billy Maximoff is gay and has made William Kaplin also gay or is it the other way around?) and he's also possibly some kind of witch. I mean, whatever he is, it was an entertaining episode until the back story caught up with the series and he broke into Agatha's house, then it just got fucking annoying again. This would have been so much better had they called it something else and never employed Kathryn Hahn again - she's just ghastly.

Not the West Wing

What better way to enjoy a dreich Friday night than to curl up with a warm and comforting film from the 1990s. This West Wing rabbit hole I'm still trying to crawl out of was widened slightly when I was reminded of Aaron Sorkin's first foray into the world of US politics, when he wrote the Rob Reiner movie The American President, a film that pretty much was a test run for the TV series that would come five years later.

Watching this 1995 feature was a little like trying to get two similar illustrations to marry up to each other. The number of West Wing alumni in this was remarkable, including Martin Sheen as the President's chief of staff and Joshua Malina and Anna Deavere Smith in back up roles. There was someone else in it who would return to the White House a few years later, but I was so wrapped up in remembering this excellent film that I didn't keep a scorecard. Michael Douglas plays Andy Shepherd, a widowed POTUS who falls in love with Sydney Wade, a lobbyist, played by Annette Bening and then has to deal with the fall out of him having a relationship with a woman while the prospective Republican candidate (Richard Dreyfuss) spends most of the movie smearing his opponent - so far so pretty realistic. Honestly, this was made in 1995 (probably a year earlier) and even 30 years ago Republicans were just essentially a bunch of lying worthless cunts who will say anything to get elected and know full well that 50% of Americans will believe any bullshit that spews from their gobs.

Obviously, there's more to this than just a love story. it's at times a hilarious comedy; it paints this picture of a President's administration being about the team rather than the man and focuses on climate change 30 fucking years ago, when the USA really should have been doing something about it (and look at us now, with a prospective Republican madman hoping to win the ticket decrying climate change as a myth). If I was handing out ratings for films this would get a solid 8, but on IMDB it sits at 6.8 and that's largely down to anti-Democratic viewers leaving nasty, spiteful and vindictive reviews because they can't differentiate between real life and fiction. We're heading towards one of those crucial moments in history when the USA decides in November whether they want a bright orange Shitler or a black woman as President. There shouldn't even be a contest, really, but I don't know if the world has stopped making stupid, suicidal decisions yet. This film just reminds us that once upon a time we hoped for altruistic nice guys as leaders of the free world.

Next Time...

Shrinking, Teacup, Agatha, The Penguin, and some other stuff, no doubt. I want to watch The Wild Robot because it looks good and still has an 8.4 rating on IMDB even after 75k ratings and there's a couple of other recent films on the FDoD such as Speak No Evil and Bookworm - it all depends on what's out and whether we can fit it in.

 

Pop Culture - A 'Slow' Week

It's mostly about TV this week. I've tried to avoid spoilers but I might not...

The MI5 Run-Around

As we have grown accustomed, Slow Horses starts off with one thing and invariably will end up somewhere else entirely. This superb show is anything but predictable, however there is an element of predictability in the opening episode of the fourth season... 

Gary Oldman is back as Jackson Lamb, the guy running the department where all failed spies go to waste away until they die or get killed off. But of course, as we've discovered, Lamb has apparently no time for his team, everyone thinks they're shite and yet they seem to spend more time solving MI5 problems than MI5 does and this is likely to be another one of those cases. The new series kicks off with Jonathon Pryce (River Cartwright's grandfather, David, who is suffering from early stages of dementia) accidentally killing his grandson with a shotgun, except when Lamb is called to identify the body of his most able bodied but accident-prone team member, he seems less than bothered - usual par for the course antics from a man who makes the Steptoe brothers look well kept. It soon becomes clear that someone wants David Cartwright dead and as he used to be First Desk - ie: head of MI5 - this could be important.

Obviously, MI5 are way behind everyone else, except for Kristin Scott Thomas's Diana Taverner, who hasn't become First Desk like we expected her to be, but is running around sorting out the new #1's problems because he's got chocolate teapot written all over him. She suspects something is going on, but apart from River's apparent death doesn't think this is a Slough House thing. Meanwhile, Jackson has already visited Saskia Reeves' Standish and worked out most of what is happening and mobilised his team of misfits into doing some work. Jackson has a new PA who has already pissed him off - just by being there - and there's a new team member who doesn't appear to do anything and seems deeply disturbed. It's great to have it back. I'll conclude my review next week.

Second Thoughts

This week was all about Victor (Rhenzy Feliz); the boss's apprentice in The Penguin. Oz's young assistant, recruited because Oz could see something of himself in the stuttering young Hispanic, is at a crossroads in his life and has to make some decisions. This played out by looking at Vic's days before the flood and before Gotham's fall. Things didn't seem that bad for him - loving family, girlfriend and mates. Then the Riddler came along and anyone who doesn't have money in Gotham has been paying the price ever since. This episode was really more about decisions than actions. In this case, specifically Vic's reasons for being Oz's new kid; Oz's reasons for now being on Sofia's side (or is he?) considering his betrayal of her a decade earlier and the reasons both want revenge over the wide Falcone empire. This week includes extortion, double crosses and admissions of guilt, but it's just part of the long game. The only problem I have with this is Sofia might be a psychopath but she's as sharp as a razor and some of Cobb's moves can't be going over her head quite as far as they appear to be...

Afterthought

You remember the other week when I was filling space by talking about shit I won't watch, anime with ridiculous names and ... oh yes, talking about anime with ridiculous names, does anyone fancy a season of As a Reincarnated Aristocrat I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World? Who knew? Aristocrats have an appraisal skill; that's what they do! I mean, is life so fucking exciting in Japan that they make boring anime as anti-dopamine for the masses?

Stretch Armstrong

I think Ryan Gosling is a lucky man because he is a film star, a veritable A lister, and yet, by and large, he comes across as really fucking dull, so who better to play Neil Armstrong. First Man is a biopic of the first man on the moon and I'm amazed it weighs in at over two hours, because Armstrong was never a charismatic individual and always came over as a bit boring - almost the perfect choice for first man on another planet - no hyperbole from Neil. It's not an exciting film as you can imagine because you know everything that's going to happen, it's just the bit beforehand that we weren't really clear about. I don't know if this is factually accurate; I can't say if Armstrong and his first wife had a strained relationship (they lasted another 25 years after he walked on the moon) and I don't know if he dropped beads belonging to his dead daughter on the surface. I didn't really care, to be honest. I don't know what I expected really; I knew about NASA and the moon landings and I knew Armstrong was as exciting as watching paint dry. I shouldn't be disappointed that his biopic was meh.

Shameless Copy?

The entertaining thing about Brassic when it started was how it felt like a derivative, there was a charm that made it feel more authentic, not a knock off. Then, at almost the perfect time, ten minutes from the conclusion of season four, it really looked like they were going to wrap it all up and let Vinnie and his chums go their own way, we got a cliffhanger epilogue and everything changed.

It was from that fourth season that things changed. Joe Gilgun started to sound like he wanted to be somewhere else; Damien Molony wanted to be somewhere else, so he did and Michelle Keegan's bright future had come to a stuttering halt - Brassic was now the only thing she had left. There was also a massive drop off of Dominic West from that point as well - he's Vinnie's psychiatrist and large buyer of weed as well as being so much more at times... The thing is, Brassic had its faults but it was fun, even the serious subplots had a pantomime feel about them, but with season five, to try and reinvigorate things and to try and replace what they'd lost, they started to delve into the worlds of Vin's supporting crew and the thing is you don't need to do that. Vinnie has dodgy mates, we don't need to know how they got dodgy.

Plus and especially last series, I started to get increasingly hacked off with the filming schedule and the subsequent editing. What is it with Northern dramas and television? Is it not possible to shoot things chronologically any longer? In the opening episode - a jaunt to Dublin for a 'Fools and Horses' styled 'heist' episode - the filming took place in the spring, summer, autumn and winter and was then spliced together. It might be a small and simple thing but it is disconcerting if you notice it.

There is a familial comfort about this series, but I no longer think it has the strong characters it once had. However, this new season appears to be an ongoing plot inside of an existing narrative - if you know what I mean - there were many questions left unanswered at the end of season five and so far each episode has dealt with one of those questions, while simultaneously introducing new stories that help the story flow. The wife said, 'this is better than the last series, isn't it?' and she's probably right; it does feel as though some of the mojo has been rediscovered. We're halfway through, the remaining episodes will be talked about next week.

Cheated?

The extremely strange Outer Range, the time travel, black hole, neo-western series starring Josh Brolin was cancelled in July; after two seasons and a massive cliffhanger, Amazon pulled the plug on the show leaving anyone who followed it (and enjoyed it) a little disappointed. Brolin said in an interview recently that he'd like to see the story concluded but it was unlikely to happen in the current climate.

This was a TV show with big bucks and big stars but was a difficult watch at times because you never really had a clue where things were going. Brolin played Royal Abbott, the head of a family of ranchers, who it seems came out of nowhere in the 1970s and was adopted by the Abbott family. On his land is a black hole; a seeming portal to different times and alternate existences. Included in this was his wife played by Lili Taylor, his two sons - Lewis Pullman and Tom Pelphrey and his grand daughter played by Olive Abercrombie and Imogen Poots. The biggest problem the Abbots have, apart from themselves, is the Tillerson family who own the next door farm and want to acquire the land where the mysterious hole is. By the end of season two it was more like a game of time-related snakes and ladders than a straight forward narrative, but it was a cracking series that felt like a re-imagining of the brilliant German time travel series Dark - despite there being absolutely nothing to suggest this other than the time travel business. Hopefully someone will come along and try and get a final season made, but with many of this show's stars having moved onto bigger and greater projects, I expect that will be unlikely.

Agatha OMG

Do you know, I almost forgot I watched this, it is having such a profound effect on me... One thing is certain about episode five of Agatha All Along is the comedy (what little there was) was drained away with this, rather dark and foreboding instalment.

This is still dull and little boring, although we're learning some things, a couple of them should not surprise anyone. Agatha is an absolute bitch; she's a bad guy and no one has anything decent to say about her. She uses people, manipulates them and then 'absorbs' anything positive from a situation and turns it into her advantage and all of her coven knew this but they still came along for the ride. The biggest problem this show has apart from very little happening is the absence of jeopardy and threat. None of the characters - apart from Agatha - have been seen before, therefore no one has any investment in them and subsequently when one 'dies' it's more of a shrug moment than anything else. The underlying mystery of who 'Teen' is might be interesting now it's clear he isn't Agatha's sacrificed son, especially the closing scene of this part, which suggests he's going to be one of the Romanov twins - the children Wanda had in WandaVision but, of course, were just constructs from her warped and damaged mind. To be honest, that works for me because we're talking magic here and I figure it's a template for 'no holds barred, we can do anything'. 

This week was also another opportunity for the cast to dress up in groovy, multi-coloured outfits like they're about to appear on a 1980s Noel Edmonds TV show. There were also some nods to other MCU films that include magic in them and the Salem Seven showed up again - a genuinely scary bunch of characters, I'm hoping they offer some resistance in the closing four parts because at the moment they're a creepy looking damp squib. This series will not go down as a glorious success.

Next Time...

It's been a busy week and most of the TV viewing has been parts of boxsets. Next week, as well as the latest instalments of Agatha All Along and The Penguin, there will conclusions for Brassic and Slow Horses. In the queue waiting to be watched are season two of The Old Man, that 2022 HBO series Let The Right One In, there's also Grotesquerie and Teacup to be started. We left Grimm at the end of season three with a cliffhanger, but we're trying to have some variety in what we're watching, so we might try and go another week without dipping back into creepy Portland...

There are films on the FDoD and on the set top box hard drive; Caddo Lake and Speak No Evil are two films recently released that will be prioritised over the older stuff. It will be what it will be and you'll be the first to see it, next Saturday...