My Cultural Life - You Stupid Man

What's Up?

I know many of the people who stumble onto this blog (or come back regularly) are not really interested in foreign current affairs. Despite a very skewed coverage on television - Donald mad, Putin bad, Netanyahu ignored - what goes on in other countries should concern us. However, we're subjected to what we need to believe, even if we can see things that suggest something different.

I try to avoid looking in places that would make my blood boil (I don't do a bad job now, to be fair) because as I've said many times in the past, what we believe and what is true can sometimes be worlds apart. The weird thing is I don't really want to see more news on TV that paints an even grimmer picture of the world, but I get infuriated when our press lingers around 'human interest' or 'good news' stories too long. The real concept of a slow news day isn't how they can fill it, it's how can they avoid showing us the true story...

This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Here's something pretty much everyone knows - Israel are not interested in a ceasefire or getting their hostages back (in one piece), they are ironically committing genocide in Gaza. What we have here is this scenario being played out in the middle east: there are 500 known terrorists holed up in the town of Northampton (population 250,000) and the government in charge decides the best way to rid the world of those terrorists is to bomb the entire town out of existence, while carrying out extensive aggressive and deadly incursions to Kettering, Wellingborough and Corby. The government has also prevented all deliveries of everything into Northampton, they have cut off the power and the water and they have armed patrols roaming the streets picking off residents at will, because they might be terrorist sympathisers. If you need an metaphoric example of what is happening, just imagine any large town or city near you being obliterated because there were a handful of bad people in them. That is what Israel is doing to Gaza, they are wiping it off the face of the earth and every government of note in the western world is telling us that we should be celebrating the 80th anniversary of the end of the war by ignoring the horrors of war; because it's better to fixate on the President of the United States being bonkers or Nigel 'Ubiquitous' Farage or Marks and Spencer getting a data breach.

I mean, we should be worried about the way the country is switching over to being digital dependant with zero alternatives. If you want to make the isolated even more isolationist then carry on cutting off means of communication that isolated communities cannot do without, in the event of a power cut, which are all too common now. Apparently, like the phasing out of 3G, its to better use the bandwidth, which just goes over my head when people try to explain it to me and I wonder if it's deliberately like that? Basically they don't want our stinking analogue shite that still works clogging up their digital network that's as safe as a house built of paper. At times when things all around look a little bleak, surely keeping as many means of communication open for the many millions has an iota of common sense about it? Yet Capitalism wins again. People who have even less to try to live on face having more of that little taken away. 

Some of these 'innovators' 'moving the country forward' with 'technology' are also the kind of people who want to get rid of cash. The economy here, in my isolated corner of the UK, would collapse without cash, and the stupid thing? What few accessible banks we have here charge businesses for paying cash in to their accounts! How fucking stupid is that? How to isolate the isolated even more - it's like they don't give a shit... Oh yeah, they don't. How forgetful of me...

Do you know how many power cuts I experienced in the years we were in Northampton before we moved up north? Well, we can both remember one major event we had, and a couple of times the electric clocks had zeroed during the night, meaning the power was off for an indeterminate amount of time. Probably about six. We had six power cuts the first year we lived here! While they are fewer and further between now, localised ones often happen; we're more densely populated than other parts of Galloway, but there are communities in the Highlands and up to Caithness and Sutherland that will still get regular power cuts and at least with old technology without power you could still make a telephone call on an old fashioned phone (which I have, just for that reason). BT's Digital Voice is happening almost the same time as 3G is being switched off, the government should have been staggering this digital expansion over decades rather than in months. We become slaves to electricity and are forced into being dependent on having to have a better mobile device. It's like no one is really on our side, they just tell us they are and we fall for it.

Oh and one final non-sequitur: how sad is it that we live in a country where people will look at a lie and opt to believe it because the explanation of the facts takes too long to read. How fucked are we as a nation when we find the details behind facts just too long to be essential? It's how cognitive bias has become a modern human phenomena centuries after it last had its day in the spotlight.  

X Marks the Spot

There are a number of reasons why the X-Men don't really work on the big screen. The first is you need 20 odd years of history and character building and that was never originally achieved and now it isn't possible in the current MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). The second is there are far too many characters whose powers are shown by holding a hand to the temple, extending an arm and a flat hand or a mixture of both. You have mutants who are not particularly visual and you have others who are faintly ridiculous. This was first demonstrated in X-Men in 2000 and then again with the soft reboot in 2011, the film we decided to give another watch to. X-Men: First Class takes an [imaginary in the comics] elite team of proto-X-Men, gives them a sort of CIA back story and a flimsy reason for the world hating them. It works on some levels but rough casting (Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw?) and overwrought acting (Jennifer Lawrence in almost every scene) brings those levels down to pretty shonky overall. 

There is much to dislike about this film from the disjointed narrative to the preachy and rather ridiculous conclusion; but in reality it just makes you realise that for the MCU to become the kind of place where the X-Men exist, it's going to have to start the story early and allow time for mutants and X-Men to develop a space in a shared universe; if, indeed, Disney are serious about bringing the X-Men to the fore after the 2028 Avengers film. This 2011 reboot, set in the early 1960s lacks charm, interesting characters and depth. It's not like it's a bad movie, Matthew Vaughn was probably the best guy for the job, it's just it perfectly shows me (and hopefully others) how the concept doesn't work on the big screen and probably won't anywhere else. This film gets a 6/10 but only just.

The Invited

Back in the spring of 1978, I saw my favourite film of all time for the first time. Since then I have seen the Special Edition, a Director's Cut, even a fan edit mashing all the version together. In total I have seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind at least ten times. I can recite vast swathes of dialogue. I can watch it without subtitles (during the French and Spanish bits) because I know what is being said and here's the strange thing; I haven't seen this movie this century! It might be 30 years since I last watched it (it was released 48 years ago in November and 48 years before it was released the Talkie had barely been invented) and while I remembered it like I saw it yesterday, I saw it tonight with relatively new eyes...

It really is a strange film because despite being made in 1977, it is full of hope and peaceful vibes, even if there are some vaguely sinister bits in it. This is a movie about obsession, about strangeness and even charm. Richard Dreyfus plays Roy Neary, who has a close encounter with an alien vessel and falls down a rabbit hole and into a unique madness that he can't understand and his family don't want to. At the same time Melinda Dillon - as Jillian Guiler - is trying to understand why her six year old son, Barry, has been abducted and Francois Truffaut is the French scientist with most of the Americans eating out of his hands - but is he even an expert? The film never really tells you what his 'job' is and he never really expresses any 'expertise.' It is very overwrought in places; it plays to the melodrama at times and breezes over the elements that make us wonder how all this started, why it's happening in the USA or just what EZ4 really is? If I want to be honest, it gets a bit flabby in the middle; considering this is a film that is only a little over two hours, it sometimes feels much longer and it's very much a movie of two halves.

The overarching thing though is how it isn't really a film about jeopardy or threat. It's a race against an unspecified time, a mystery that never feels mysterious and a desire to understand something everyone is struggling to understand. The aliens are coming and they've invited a lot of people to their party, while the people who think they're in charge are busy making their own agenda, yet this isn't what the aliens want. This is a movie that puts the viewer in Roy Neary's place - what would you do if you were Roy? There is also the fact there's a huge amount of naivety, yet a really well imagined procedure, even if we don't really get much explanation as to why and how it happened. This is a spectacle; it is an event film that allows style over substance but you don't really care because you are swept along by the event. I'd probably struggle to call it my favourite film of all time now, but equally, I can't think of anything I have seen as often or loved as much as this; I've always been able to fill in the blanks to make the narrative work better for me. I watched this Director's Cut for the first time and it has just enough of the Special Edition and the Theatrical release in it to make it possibly the ultimate version. Despite its age and the fact some of it has dated badly, it still probably deserves 8/10. 

That Told Me

My phone rang. I didn't recognise the number and realised it was probably spam.
"Hello?" long pause...
"Hello, is that Phillip Hall?" [always a spam call as no one really refers to me as Phillip any more]
"Uh-huh."
"This is Lisa Smith from [unintelligible]" [clearly her name wasn't Lisa Smith given the thick Asian accent] 
"I'm sorry, could you say who you're from again?"
"I am calling you from [unintelligible]."
"I still didn't hear that, sorry. So, what are you trying to sell me today?"
"I am not trying to sell you anything, you stupid stupid man!" Click! 
...

[An addendum to this: shortly before I pressed 'publish' I got a call on my mobile from someone who clearly wasn't trying to sell me something but wondered why I'd just called him. The thing is my phone has been plugged in recharging next to me all morning and I haven't even turned it on. The guy who rang me - who sounded like a proper geeza - was sort of apologising and wondering how it happened in the first place. It just confirms my suspicions that the digital network is fucked and we shouldn't be reliant on it...]

Memories

I had never seen Christopher Nolan's Memento, it was a film that never found its way to me and I was never that bothered about finding it. The wife had seen it, but I passed up on the chance. So, for our Sunday night film, we settled down to fill in a blank - which is pretty much what Memento is - a movie about filling in the blanks. It's a bit like Groundhog Day but in reverse with violence and without the humour. Guy Pearce plays Lenny, a man who suffers from a rare form of amnesia, meaning he cannot form any short term memories. He knows who he is and why he is doing what he does, but anything that has happened in the recent past disappears from his mind as quickly as it enters. What this film does is tells his story from the end to the point where, we the viewer, can go: "Oh, that's what this was about!" Except, it isn't quite as straightforward as that. It is a riveting watch, trying to work out what has been happening, except that's not quite how this works; this is about working out if what has happened is what you think has happened or if there's an unknown reason for it, or a reason that seemed like a good idea until Lenny forgot about it. it is confusing; it is so clearly a Christopher Nolan film. Is it worth the 8.2 rating on IMDB? Well, I'd only give it a 7/10 because I found a lot of it contrived and almost too simplistic. The film's major problem is you care about Lenny until you start to realise who he is by which point you simply don't care about him or anyone else.

A History of Monday Night

In last week's blog, I spoke about having limited stuff to watch due to it needing to be something both the wife and I fancy watching. This led me to scour IMDB and other sources (such as Wiki) for something to add to the list that the wife wouldn't mind watching. Now, it dawned on me that we hadn't seen Batman Forever (the one with Val Kilmer) for 30 years and we'd never seen Batman & Robin, so I downloaded these and unfortunately Batman Forever was out of synch and it was bad enough having to watch that shite without it feeling like a badly dubbed Kung fu film. Then I looked at IMDB and saw that it had a rating of 5.2, but worse was that Batman & Robin had a rating of 3.5 - I now totally get why we never bothered to watch it. So instead of trying to track down a copy where the words matched the lip movements, we deleted those movies and watched something I'd fancy watching for 20 years, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence with Viggo Mortenson, Ed Harris, William Hurt and Maria Bello. It was something I'd been interested in since I saw trailers for it on Barry Norman's BBC film review show, but somehow it simply escaped me. Now, compared to the two Batman movies, this is a masterpiece, with a 7.4 rating. However, like many Cronenberg films there was just something tonally wrong with it - such as the scene with the blatant truly unnecessary nudity. 

It's the story of a mild mannered religious guy who kills two arseholes who are trying to rob his cafeteria, terrorise his staff and customers. He offs them in a very neat and efficient way and becomes an overnight celebrity, which also alerts some very bad men to his existence because Tom Stall might be former mob enforcer Joey Cusack and much of the next hour of the feature is whether he's a case of mistaken identity or the real deal. If this had been made in 2025 it would have starred Jayson Stayfum and had a body count in the hundreds, but this was not a long picture, just over 90 minutes, that felt like it was on for ever. However, it also felt like it needed more substance; maybe more of an in depth look at Tom's bullied son and his friendships; maybe more about Tom's wife and even their weird looking youngest daughter. It felt superficial and somewhat underplayed and when we get to the denouement, there was just something almost comical about it, especially William Hurt, who doesn't really do mob boss with any degree of believability. Obviously this was a metaphor for the fact that violence is everywhere and it even lurks inside a happy, normal home. It was just an okay film, not worth more than 6/10. 

Not Winning

I didn't realise that the 2010 action film The Losers was based on a revamped DC comic, so when I found out about it I thought I'd best watch it and see what I thought. I remember the original Losers comic, but this was a 21st century makeover and the film reflected this. Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Idris Elba and Zoe Saldana, The eponymous group of ex-soldiers, now jobbing mercenaries, were set up by a cruel and heartless arms dealer called Max (Jason Patric), so they spend the rest of the movie tracking him down to kill him for the nasty shit he did. It was filmed a bit like the director was imagining doing a real life comic, but the freezeframes and slow-mo action sequences felt more 1966 Batman than 21st century action adventure. It had some iffy comedic moments - Chris Evans taking the piss out of Captain America feels like it should have worked but somehow didn't - and most importantly no conclusion. It was like the people who made it thought it would be such a hit they left literally everything in the story unfinished. It also started to get a bit boring and repetitive and ran out of steam. This was a generally poor film - 4/10

An Almost Perfect Balance

By the time Ellie picked up and tuned a guitar to serenade Dina with an unplugged version of Aha's Take on Me, I was really starting to lose the will to live with The Last Of Us, once decent episode so far does not make a classic TV show and I avoided review sites after this episode because I didn't want to get angry. What this was encapsulates this kind of drama; fuck all is happening so you make enough noise to attract attention then you put yourself in a fucking stupid situation and barely escape by the skin of your teeth. Speaking of teeth, Dina sees a set of bite marks on Ellie and thinks she's been bitten, blows her head off and they decided to end the series early to put everyone out of their misery... Or at least that's probably what should have happened, because what we got instead was some lesbian grindcore and more inane and dull conversations between infatuated girlies. I do not understand why people think this is so good, it's like the LGBTQ Gilmore Girls with zombies. 

Guar-stly

Anyone who knows me won't be surprised to learn that I think the new look on-line Guardian is a fucking dog's dinner of style over substance. It is one of the worst page redesigns I have ever seen as the newspaper tries to represent its image of a newspaper on line and it fails so miserably I'm facing something of an existential crisis. I have grown to despise this once great newspaper, but it has been almost impossible to give it up. The reason for this is simple, I might not agree with the paper's political leanings, or I despair at its 'better than you' attitude and I absolutely hate the fact it spoils film and TV, but it had always been by far the easiest news web page to navigate. It did a good job of putting stuff where it belonged and it was easy to find things, most of the time. There were clear lines that separated Opinions from things in the Spotlight to Sport and Culture. That has gone in favour of garish headlines, huge pictures and literally three or four times the amount of strap line information than ever before. If I wanted to see what was happening in Sport, I'd quickly scroll down to the Sport section and look through the headlines. Now, when you eventually find the Sport section it's hiding behind this In-Your-Face design and has about 75% fewer stories. That's because further down the page, after News UK and a couple of new subheadings, there's More Sport, with a bunch of 'lesser' sporting stories, stuck somewhere else which seem more designed to catch you out than give you that all-encompassing coverage feel. It's fucking horrible and has left me with a serious dilemma - am I going to dump The Guardian completely? And if I do where else do I get my 'newspaper' fix? 

It's become like an abusive relationship in recent years. I hate the paper far more than I like it, but I just can't bring myself to walk away - to say goodbye to an old friend who has gone from being my ally to being something I struggle to be in the same room as at times. I stopped buying it five years ago, but it's a 'favourite' bookmark and I usually look at it a couple of times a day. I want something that does what the old Guardian web pages did. I don't need this new not-user-friendly layout and I'm not sure I can see myself getting used to it. I probably would if it had only just started to piss me off, but the newspaper I started reading in 1989 feels like it become my enemy about five years ago and I just keep an eye on it to see how far right it can shift without the ignorant realising it.

Princetown Road Trip

In a strange way, the seventh episode of Your Friends and Neighbors [sic] was probably the most enjoyable despite a lot of it being away from where the 'action' has been taking place. Coop, his ex-wife and their two kids are off to Princeton to look at the university as a place for their daughter to go, while the rest of their extremely rich and entitled neighbours deal with a police detective who seems to be extremely cynical about everything; thus making everyone a potential suspect in her eyes; especially Coop because he'd been seen a week earlier having a 'fight' with the dead body he woke up next to at the beginning of last week's episode. In many ways everything that happened between John Hamm and Amanda Peet this week was always going to happen, the surprising thing was it happened but not for the reasons we probably all suspected. Their daughter almost has sex with a Princeton student, gets very drunk and spends a lot of time throwing up and when they got back home the shit really hits the fan, but again in not the way you might have suspected. This shouldn't be as interesting and entertaining as it has turned out to be, but despite the rich and entitled arseholes inhabiting the screen it's taking on a life of its own and the knowledge it has already been renewed has now added to the intrigue. It has won me over.

Columbo With A Bad Wig

Oddly enough it was not The Guardian's recommendation that started me watching Poker Face, it was a friend who said I might enjoy it and he was right. Two episodes into the first season and it is extremely entertaining and not at all what I expected. Natasha Lyonne - last seen in the strange Russian Doll - plays Charlie Cale, a woman with a unique talent: she can tell when someone is lying to her. This proves to be very useful if you're a card player, but as we discover in the opening episode it also landed her in trouble and the way she avoided that trouble returning was by switching off her 'power' and just living life, nice and easy. However, greedy men will go to great lengths to increase their wealth and that goes tits up for everybody because of circumstances too long and complicated to go into (or spoil it).

Essentially, Lyonne's Cale is going to travel across the country solving murders while being pursued by the reason she got into trouble in the first place. That's all very good and slightly formulaic, but the thing is this is simply Peter Falk's Columbo reimagined for the 21st century with a female in the lead role, but all the same traits and foibles - but no cigar. That's not criticising it because it is a lot of fun and we quickly picked up on the things that Charlie would pick up on once the set up is complete. I kind of think Lyonne's gruff (maybe) New York accent and scruffy nomad looks might start to grate on me after a while, but at the moment it's filling a gap that last week I didn't think would be filled.

What's Up Next?

You may have noticed no Doctor Who for the second week on the trot? That's because I don't watch it any longer. I haven't even missed it a teensy-weensy bit...

There are a couple of new things coming out this week. Murderbot looks like it might be interesting and will be given a chance and I'm sure there will be something else to tickle my fancy. As usual what you see is what I see. 

 

My Cultural Life - Short and Curly

What's Up?

Controversy time... If you know me you know I'm very much pro feminism. In fact... actually don't get me started or I could fill pages with reasons why I think that women (the biological ones) are treated as second class in a still largely male dominated world. That said, if a woman does something that I find questionable or wrong then I'm not afraid to call it out, exactly like I would if a man did the same thing. It's called balance of opinion and I'm not scared to be completely gender inclusive.

I am not a fan of women's football. To be clear, as I've got older I've kind of stopped being a devotee of football in general. I'll watch matches (club football) but this season (for obvious reasons being a Spurs supporter) I have been doing more interesting things instead. The problem I have with women's football is quite simple, with my interest in the men's game waning it doesn't really get a look in. I'm not going to talk about quality or comparisons because they're not relevant. However, there is one ex-woman footballer turned pundit who I never cease to have a problem with... Eni Aluko. 

This week she criticised Ian Wright about his role in women's football punditry along with generally criticising football coverage as being too male with not enough women involved - which if you've watched any football coverage over the last few years is absolute bollocks. As for her dig at Wrighty - a man I'm not a big fan of because of his Arsenal connection - is just bang out of order; you'd need a complete detachment from football not to realise he's been one of the greatest advocates of the women's game. The thing is Aluko has form when it comes to criticising men, almost to the point where you wonder if she's just a man hater. She had former England boss Mark Sampson sacked for alleged racist remarks, which many of her teammates disputed, so she criticised her teammates for supporting the then popular England manager. Then she came out as a supporter of the Tory party at a time when they were increasingly unpopular, but then criticised the political party, specifically Rishi Sunak, for funding the furlough scheme, suggesting that it was a waste of money and people should simply go to work despite the risk of Covid and then she backtracked on these comments as well.

Now she's looking at losing her job as a pundit because ITV, who employ her, were really unhappy with her comments about Ian Wright. It seems this woman is a tactless attention seeker who might have finally been found out. I get it she's a black woman in a difficult world, but her lack of self awareness and ability to create controversy because of her marginal opinions and accusations makes her a good reason to avoid women's football coverage on ITV.

Surprisingly Entertaining

Despite the considerably low score it has on IMDB and the fact it's essentially a slapstick and silly comedy (with bad language and hammy acting), Death of a Unicorn is actually quite a fun film, even if some of the special effects are a bit shoddy and it's yet another entitled billionaires story. The thing is the movie is actually saved primarily by the fantastic Jenna Ortega, playing Paul Rudd's teenage daughter - in many ways it feels as though she knew she was starring in something a bit shonky so dialled her performance in and that actually made her character seem... relevant. Oh and the ever reliable Anthony Carrigan as Griff, the Man Friday/Butler and GDB of the rich family who see nothing but money, even in the face of death. Ortega and Rudd are en route to his boss's Canadian retreat to finalise the details of his ascension into the family's business upper echelons, but on the way accidentally run a young unicorn over. There are stretches to this film, one of them being the fact they loaded the dead unicorn into the back of their Volvo when dumping it in the woods would have saved a lot of trouble. Once at the retreat of his boss - played by Richard E Grant - things start to get gruesome.

The supporting cast includes Tea Leone, Will Poulter and Jessica Hynes in a movie that was made almost entirely in Hungary and basically is a satire on greed and vast riches. Once the rich scum realise what Rudd has in his car the place is overrun by employees dissecting the unicorn, processing its blood, looking at its horn [oo-er, missus] and assessing what the magical properties can do and how that equates to huge amounts of money. I think this was deliberately made as a comical satire of wealth and desire because it is rather silly at times, while very very violent and gory. The weird thing is despite it's 6.2 on IMDB, I actually really enjoyed it because it really wasn't trying to be anything other than just a fun filled blood splattered excess. I'm giving this film a 7/10.

Ever Increasing Madness

The combined 12 episodes of Llamas With Hats last a fraction over 18 minutes. It's essentially two llamas - Carl and Paul - who stand in the centre of the screen and talk to each other, usually because Paul is worried about something usually in the backdrop. This is because Carl is a crazy psychopath with a fetish for baby hands and Paul doesn't like this very much. The stories start with Paul finding a dead man with his hands missing, who it turns out was knifed 37 times by Carl before he chopped the guy's hands off, cooked and ate them. By the fifth part, Carl was ripping holes in the fabric of time and space and watching thousands of baby hands fall through it, in a way even he doesn't quite understand... It is funny, if you like that kind of thing (I did) and it's also gross, sick and extremely childish in a 'THAT CHILD IS A PSYCHOPATH WITH A CHAINSAW' way. It was a recommendation to me by someone called Phil, who is from Wales and he probably won't read this, which is useful because I can say horrible things about him and he'll never know...

Bye Bye Who

The stupid thing about the ongoing subplot in the new Doctor Who series is the cry baby (Doctor Boo Who?) has promised his reluctant sidekick that he'll get her back to Earth on the day in May she left, but they can't get there for some unexplained reason. So why don't they try to go to the day after? Belinda's a big girl, she can lose a day without anything big happening, surely? That's essentially the crux of this ongoing Anita Dobson filled storyline. I watched seven minutes of this and decided that my long running relationship with Doctor Who is finally over*. I'm done with it because it's basically a load of shite. 

* To the people who claim I've said this before, I have watched every episode of DW since the reboot, despite not enjoying many of them I persisted with every. single. episode. And have never given up on one or not watched one. Until now. It was how I broke that habit.

Porn Hub

Our attempt to watch all the 90s films we never watched in the 90s continued with another Paul Thomas Anderson movie - the controversial Boogie Nights with Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg and Julianne Moore, plus a host of PTA's regulars from Philip Seymour Hoffman to John C Reilly and Philip Baker Hall. It is a fictionalised story of the porn industry from the mid to late 1970s to the mid 1980s and follows the life and career of Dirk Diggler (Wahlberg) who rose to fame because of his 13" penis. I know that Anderson has a great reputation for making movies that reflect the quirkiness of real life, while sometimes having a surreal slant. There are also the complexities of interlinked relationships and synchronicity, but frankly I think his films are pretty dull, boring and up their own arses. I literally went through IMDB to look at his body of work to see if I could remember one of his movies that I've actually really enjoyed and I just don't get it. There's a lot of necessary nudity in this, because it's about the porn industry and the transition from film to video, but if the characters aren't hucksters they're idiots or dangerous. Also, remarkably, there is absolutely no mention of AIDS which decimated the porn industry during the same period. I just can't find anything particularly positive to say about it really. I didn't like or sympathise with any of the characters. I didn't care what happened to any of them and even the 'comedic' finales to the different stories felt contrived. 4/10

Back To Normal

In the aftermath of Joel's death, the township of Jackson decide that sending 16 fighters after his killers is an unnecessary and dangerous thing to do, so it's up to Ellie to do it (with the aid of Dina). They kit themselves up and head off to Seattle to track down the murderous Abby. This was The Last of Us reverting to type with an episode where absolutely fuck all happens; there's lots of 'character building,' the suggestion of a worse threat than the fungals and Washington Liberation Front. Frankly this was so slow and dull that you would have been excused thinking last week was a fever dream. I'd like to suggest this was just a lull before a storm, but this show has form with fuck all happening and my guess is we're going to get a lot more of this before Ellie decides not to kill Abby at the end of the season. I mean, if the TV show is going to remain absolutely faithful to the computer game then that is what will happen. I'm sorry if that spoils it for you but fans of the computer game seem to think it's okay to do. I don't know why they do it. The feeling of superiority, perhaps?

The Dull Theme Continues...

Let's be clear about this, Hell or High Water is a good idea executed in a dull and laborious way. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are brothers robbing provincial banks, but in a clever and relatively untraceable way. The money they're collecting is to ensure that their mother's farm stays in the family because there is a threat of foreclosure on it now she has passed away. Jeff Bridges is the Texas Ranger tracking them down and pretty much nothing happens for 90 minutes, then there's a 'courageous' sacrifice, a half-hearted confrontation and a conclusion. It's not a bad film, it just doesn't really do much, even during the bank robberies and while it has a high ranking on IMDB - 7.6 - I'm struggling to see why. My rating is a less charitable 5/10.

Monster Nuns

It now seems that the only thing I've enjoyed this week might be a film with dodgy CGI unicorns in it, because everything else seems to have been made for people who like watching glaciers move... I'd heard some promising things about the historical drama Small Things Like These, the story of the uncovering of the scandal involving Irish nuns and the girls they took in, who had fallen pregnant out of wedlock. There was no scandal taking the girls in, but the scandal was how the girls were brutalised and tortured; made to sleep in coal cellars and beaten for the slightest indiscretion. The problem with this Cillian Murphy vehicle is it's painstakingly slow, Murphy's character reminds me of Paul Whitehouse's Ted and like so many other films I've seen this week - fuck all happens, until the end when a bit more fuck all happens. Don't get me wrong, it's a good film, the wife really enjoyed it and prodded me a few times to stop me from falling asleep. 5/10

A Very British Story

Over on iPlayer, there's a two hour Martin Scorsese led documentary about two of the UK's greatest filmmakers; Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger tells the story of how film director Michael Powell met Hungarian refugee Emeric Pressburger and forged a near 20 year relationship that produced some of the most iconic movies of the war and post-war era and also some of the strangest. Scorsese does a great job of basically being a gushing fanboy about the pair's work, which ranged from epic to absolutely bonkers. For every classic film they made, they followed it with an envelope-pushing zeitgeist defying work of impenetrable weirdness - in fact, even some of their most famous films are tinged with a charming strangeness; take A Matter of Life and Death as an example - an epic movie shot in both colour and black and white, about the battle for an airman's soul between heaven (in monochrome) and Earth (in Technicolor). I'm not even going to suggest the pair were ahead of their time (although it would be interesting to see what madness they could produce now), but they were doing things that no other filmmakers were even trying. This is a fascinating documentary that does a marvellous job of showing us just what geniuses the pair were and how, through a quirk of fate, Scorsese became so close to them. If you like cinema, then you need to watch this.

Breathe

The puzzling thing about Last Breath is that it was already a Netflix documentary in 2019, so did it need to be a docudrama as well? The answer is probably no. This is the account of the diver who became detached from his life-giving umbilical line and then went nearly 30 minutes without oxygen and still survived was well documented when we first moved to Scotland - I remembered it well. It was a big story and this film with Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu, feels a little unnecessary; the two main stars are not actually doing that much. Harrelson sits in a pressure chamber for most of the film, fretting about the life of his colleague, while Liu does get to do more but he also seems like a big name employed to sit around and look worried. Mark Bonner is the man coordinating everything and yet he's low down on the credits and the whole movie felt cold, detached and far too long... This was 40 minutes of story crammed into 90 minutes. 5/10   

Full Circle

It's taken five episodes, but we're finally at the point in the story that we came in on at the start of episode one of Your Friends and Neighbors. The house Jon Hamm opens his eyes in at the start of the first episode? We now know that he was about to burgle the house owned by his occasional shag and neighbour. The load of blood Hamm is laying in is the from the body of her ex - the dull boring fat guy who left her for a younger woman. Yet, weirdly, this was one of the least important events in this mid-way point in the series. Coop steals a Lichtenstein because some serious money is needed, but the guy he's matched up with is a crazy coked up sex pest who dumps Coop in a really difficult situation. Plus there's his son who has been getting himself almost expelled from school and Coop's business manager who literally burns a million dollars because he hates his in-laws. There's still not a lot going on, lots of style over substance, but it's all I have left and it's better than Doctor Who... 

What's Up Next?

But seriously, the UK is sleepwalking into electing the UK's very own National Socialist Party. What is rarely talked about when discussing the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s was their actual politics. They didn't get elected because they stood on the campaign trail saying, "We're going to rule the world and you're all going to love a short man with a silly moustache who hates Jewish people!" They got elected because they said "We're going to take control of our country back! To hell with this 2nd class European citizen bullshit! We will build our way out of this slump and all the work will be done by our people!" I'm not making this up. This isn't Leftie rewriting history. The National Socialist Party is a fantastic name ruined by the Nazis. I mean what better political party for (mainly) the English. They're nationalists - they love [England] their country; don't like foreigners and think they're better than everyone else. Socialist - a word which we all believed was dead in politics, or at least dormant for a few generations. However, the policies they tout - renationalisation, fairness and a degree of protectionism are incongruous to the ideology, which is more quangos, less rights, authoritarian control and the return of the class system.

The problem the people of this country have is things have been so bad for so long now (and not just here) that 'fascism' always looks like a good 'short term fix'. It's almost like we want to self harm again. Brexit wasn't bad enough, now we want to see if we can inflict even more chaos into our lives. We have become nihilists - we live in a nihilist society; almost a social experiment to see how much collective damage you can do to a society before it cracks and despite Starmer being as effective as an aspirin for a broken leg, I think many of us thought, "Phew. The madness has finally ended, let's have some boring for a while." Instead, we have 2025 and now Farridge is looming large - again? I find it quite disturbing that in the short time Jeremy Corbyn was elevated into the spotlight the press managed to twist everything he ever did into some kind of EVIL thing, while Farridge has been around since the day he went from the Posh-Poster-Boy-for-the-National-Front unknown to celebrity, because of his plane crash in 2010, which seemed to be the moment the press fell hopelessly in love with him.

Nigel will be pushing 70 by the time of the next election, so his window of opportunity is narrowing quickly, given the amount of fags and pints he's consumed. I get the impression he's not a vegan... The thing is he's a canny populist and he will be PM in 2029. It doesn't matter then if Reform couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, it will always be someone else's fault and our lives will whither on the vine. Welcome to the future, there's nothing we can do about it...

What Else is Up?

Television, eh? It's the start of May and it feels like there's a desert in front of me with a screenshot of tumbleweed. I'm sure there will be some things to watch, the problem is we have stuff to watch sitting on this computer. I never mention my TV folder which currently has stuff ranging from The West Wing to Silo to Outlander (that last one is more an experiment than anything else as we've never been remotely interested in it, but we know so many people who love it to bits). I've got Legion, Let the Right One in, and every Marvel TV series from WandaVision to all the shit ones. Some of these we've seen before, others are new, but even this is shrinking and the problem is we both have to want to watch them (we're not yet at the stage of beggars can't be choosers).

As for films... I can't remember the last time I watched a contemporary - real life - movie that I felt like I'd treated myself to X number of minutes of enjoyment. I'm sure someone will say, "It was three weeks ago." But if I can't remember what it was already, then it might have just been slightly better than the current meh we're getting. It's like films don't seem to have a real originality any longer. It feels like the industry has run out of ideas. That said, there's also 20 films on the flash drive and another 25 on the TV hard drive - with the same problem husband/wife as with TV. It reduces your choice by more than you would think. The thing is, I can waffle on about this until the cows come home, but what you see will be what I got.

My Cultural Life - Death and Repetition

What's Up?

Spring comes in a few stages. While late winter is white - both in the flowers and sometimes the weather, spring is different. Just before it arrives you get the first yellows with daffodils and celandines, then we get flushes of gorse, followed swiftly by dandelions, buttercups and then it finishes with a flourish when the fields of oil seed rape do their yellow thing - the brightest and visually the best. Fields of yellow like someone has taken a highlighter pen to certain fields. 

There are a few other plants and flowers that show their heads - we've got pink heart-shaped flowers in the garden attached to a ... yellowish plant (the wife told me what they were called and I immediately forgot) and there's the magnificent magnolia. We've had camellias with their reds and pinks only to be replaced by cherry blossom pink. We're only halfway through it, but there's something utterly refreshing about the colours of spring and the fact it's here. There's a bit of optimism around, given the start of the spring we've had, that we might get a half decent summer, but what we deserve and what we get are rarely on the same page. 

The Second Episode of Doctor Who 2025

Oh FFS. Just FFS.

An Imperfect Noise

Once upon a time this would have had its own blog and I would have waxed lyrically about how Talk Talk were and are the greatest band to ever have existed that produced music. That's not to suggest I still don't think this; I'm listening to Laughing Stock as I write this. I have read a number of biographies about musicians and I have usually been majestically underwhelmed by them. The Rush biography - Chemistry - is a truly remarkable piece of spectacular boredom about three men who literally were as exciting as watching a brick wall on a dull day. I remember reading Peter Gabriel's biography, written by someone who didn't have access to Gabriel or any of his previous bandmates. There was a segment in that which talked about how Gabriel used to have to go and use a phone box down the road from where he lived because he didn't have his own land line. You can see why it's such a riveting and compulsive read... A Perfect Silence by Ben Wardle does a perfunctory job of giving us a reasonably comprehensive time line of Mark Hollis from the moment he wanted to break into the music industry until his final solo album in 1998 - bookended with some words which may or may not be accurate about his youth, family and his short-lived old age. This story is brought to life by musicians, engineers, production staff and peripheral people on or around the scene at each album recording. These are the most detailed sections of this book, but they are also the dullest. Yes, we got an insight into who Mark Hollis was - a bit antisocial, misanthropic and arrogant - and what his fellow band members were like, but it's all a bit repetitive and, well, meh... 

My problem starts when you realise who has actually contributed to this biography... There is nothing from Tim Friese-Greene - who apparently had a major falling out with Hollis after Laughing Stock which appeared to get more acrimonious, but Friese-Greene will not talk to anyone about it and all Wardle can do is speculate. Then there's Paul Webb - Talk Talk bassist - and Lee Harris - the drummer - the two closest people to Hollis during their most prolific period. There is nothing from either of them; they offered zero to this book. None of Hollis's family agreed to be involved in it; no interviews or anything concrete about his wife Flick and two children. In fact, the only people involved in this seem to be people who weren't keen on Hollis at some point of another or worked with him and might have had a beer after a session. Simon Brenner's words are of a man who felt he was pushed out of the band, but you only get the bare whiff of bitterness; the former keyboard player is pretty much the main source of information. People intrinsically linked to Talk Talk offered words, but then you realise that James Marsh - an illustrator - and others had no real relationship with the songwriter, they were really employed by the team behind the band at EMI. Previous contributors, such as Phil Ramocon and Robbie Macintosh offer some nuggets about Hollis, but the entire book felt like it had been cobbled together from the internet with as little interesting facts as possible. However, we did learn how later works were 'constructed' rather than played. Hollis (with Friese-Greene) used to literally record fragments of songs and then build them together to form longer sections of music and all of this was done prior to digital recordings. Working with Hollis was never fun and always laborious.

I'm not suggesting that I think Mark Hollis's life should have been more exciting or been written to make it sound more exciting than it was, but this musical genius was probably on the spectrum, was most definitely the kind of guy who grew tired of peoples company like a faucet being switched on and off and literally got to the stage where he was earning enough from his royalties to just call it a day and spend his life with his wife and kids. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I question the need to even try and write a book about Hollis. When you have about 10% fact and 90% memories and extrapolation (there's a lot of presumptions and 'so-and-so said this happened') to expect anything other than a dry, humourless and vague biography is probably a desire for Hollis to have been some rock and roll animal, rather than a man who had little or no patience and didn't suffer fools gladly. This would have made a really good [shorter] feature for a broadsheet or for a music magazine, when people still bought music magazines. One thing is clear about A Perfect Silence, it is a horrendously expensive book with writing in it; it answered some questions but in the end I'm not sure I really wanted to know. I suppose Wardle got a lot of praise for even attempting to write something about a man who was so painstakingly private. 3/10

Let's Go Round Again

As it was my birthday on Saturday, the only thing I got to watch was that fucking god awful episode of Doctor Who, which will be very lucky if I see this series out. So, on Sunday, wanting to watch something I knew I'd enjoy, we decided to watch Captain America: The First Avenger again and I'm sitting here puzzling as to when it fell to 6.9 on IMDB. This is one of the best MCU films ever made and if my memory is correct, one of the most loved by critics and fans, so to discover it had dropped so low on IMDB made me wonder if all the MCU films had taken a battering from all the idiots out there who don't like women or Muslims being cast in superhero films... The origin of Captain America was true to how it happened in Timely Comics in the early 1940s and the special effects were excellent, as were the sets and the supporting cast. This follows weedy Steve Rogers into the lab where he is turned into an actual superhero, with super strength to go with his strong morals. Where Iron Man was the MCU's tech bro and modern amoral billionaire, Rogers was its metronome; the ordinary Joe with a heart of gold given the opportunity he never thought he'd get. It is still one of my favourite MCU films and it was great revisiting it again. 8/10

The Second First Avenger

This was the first time Sam Wilson appears in a MCU film and he's great. The fact he is Captain America now just shows you how far the franchise has fallen since this true high point. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the best MCU films - full stop. There's very little else that can stand up to this relentless and utterly brilliant movie. It is a rollercoaster of a story as Steve gets used to the 21st century and discovers that Hydra has infiltrated SHIELD and an actual new world order is about to take control. This is a story that spirals out of control almost from the first action scene, as Steve starts to wonder what he's doing and why he's doing it and then someone tries to kill Fury and ambushes him and Natasha, he knows he's got a real battle on his hands... This would have been a brilliant film even if Bucky Barnes had not been in it. The story of Rogers' best friend who become a superhuman like Captain America - but bad - is the real stretch in this because everything else works really well, even if it felt really early in the life of the MCU to have such a 'political' schism happen. This gets a 9/10.

And Then Something Happens...

Spoilers, spoilers, everywhere...

I know I gave this away last week, but even I was surprised that Pedro only lasted one more episode. This was by far and away the best episode of The Last of Us since it started; with a two pronged storyline that ends in tragedies. In the town, a surge of infected attack the walls in a concerted effort to break in and infect the uninfected. This was a relentless attack with countless dead and so much damage done to the group that had been largely free of fungal madness. Meanwhile, paramilitary nutter Abby - Kaitlin Dever - wants Joel and we discover that she is the daughter of the doctor he casually shot dead in the season one finale and as you can see from the picture, there's not much left of Joel after she's finished with him. This means Ellie is going to be pursuing the team of assassins because I can't see any other, logical, action, especially if this is going to be a far more action packed series than the first. It was very good to have an episode that actually made us - the viewer - see just how bad this world is and it was exciting.

The Perfect Noise

I can see a theme developing this week... After finishing the biography of Mark Hollis and Talk Talk earlier this week and already spoken of it, I decided it was time for me to break out the band and give the catalogue a listen, because I don't think I have for at least five years. I play the odd track, I revisit favourites when I put a playlist together, but listening to the albums as albums? The second album on my list was The Colour of Spring, the 1986 release and the band's third album. I was hooked by the band before this came out and it took me several plays to understand what a timeless and original album it was and still is. I've always regarded this as my second favourite Talk Talk album (It's My Life as always been the #1) but in many ways it is the ultimate album, the pinnacle of what the core of the original band achieved before Hollis went all Scott Walker. The book [I just finished reading] tells how - probably - EMI were really happy with the album, but sales didn't reflect this. 

What the book doesn't seem to convey is that it's an extraordinary album of textures it is. Yes, it has hints of what's to come, but it retained that band cohesion, which in fact was the last time they played live when touring this album. Looking back on how I used to view the band and how I do now, knowing what I took from the book, I think the last two Talk Talk albums were really a man trying to escape the successes he had. They are quite sublimely works of genius, but there's no joy in them. They are without a doubt the band who created post rock, but they'd already done that with The Colour of Spring and in a small way It's My Life. It's not pop music, even their 'pop' songs aren't pop. Maybe when they started, but from the second album on they were doing different things and if you got on the band's wagon then you knew all this. If you get the chance, go and listen to this groundbreaking album, alone in a room with good acoustics, or watch it on You Tube, but do it, you will be rewarded. 

Luck O' the Irish

Another perfect way to have two helpings of the same thing this week would have been to follow up watching Patriot Games with its sequel Clear and Present Danger - probably the two Harrison Ford films I've never seen. After watching Patriot Games, I can safely say the sequel is unlikely to ever be watched... This is a movie - from 1992 - that not only has dated but feels a little... racist. A film about a rogue breakaway faction of the IRA led by a bunch of actors who aren't Irish playing Irishmen. I mean, was there a shortage of Irish actors available to play people from the Emerald Isle or was it just lazy casting asking the likes of David Threlfall and Sean Bean to just imitate the Irish accent? I really lost the plot with this early on, struggling to understand why Bean's nutty terrorist is more interested in killing Ford's Jack Ryan and his family than performing his mission. The sound was awful, the acting worse. It felt like all the scenes that didn't have Ford in them were made for about 75p. It had something to do with assassinating a member of the royal family to make a statement but the CIA get in the way. It's a really meh film. 4/10

Avengers Civilities

Do you know what stops Captain America: Civil War from being probably the best MCU film ever made? Spider-Man and that really pointless superhero battle at Leipzig airport. In fact had they trimmed this two and a half hour film down by about 20 minutes they could have had their cake and eaten it. Yes, there needed to be some extra superheroes in this, but it didn't need to become an unofficial Avengers movie, nor did it need to introduce two new superheroes to the MCU. I get why it was done, but there's a quite brilliant film here being mired by the need to expand a universe. We didn't need Hawkeye, or Ant-Man, or Spider-Man, or even half the others; Steve, Sam, Natasha, Tony Stark and maybe the Black Panther were important to the story, the rest not so much.

Strip away the frills and the special effects and what you have is a tale of revenge executed by someone from outside but designed to have maximum effect inside a group of friends and allies. Daniel Bruhl's Zemo might not be the guy from the comics, but he possesses skills that allowed him to drive a wedge between Earth's Mightiest Heroes. This film also introduces the Sokovia Accords - regulations by which 'superheroes' must act within or break the law - something that Steve Rogers cannot agree to and as he is Captain America then he must be right. Fighting him is Tony Stark, who instead of being driven by common sense is driven by emotion - a thing which Zemo exploits to the full when he finally gets his men all together in one ex-Soviet bunker. The great thing about this film is the number of times the viewer gets wrong footed. It's a real shame that the most recent Captain America reboot just wasn't in the same league as the original trilogy. I like Sam Wilson, but he's best as Cap's slightly wonky moral compass and sidekick. When the MCU gets its reboot, I hope they bring a Steve Rogers back, even if the actor is no Chris Evans. 8/10

Death Takes A Holiday

A little over 25 years ago, we sat down and watched Meet Joe Black, a film about Death, taxes and billionaires. I suppose back in 1998, a movie about an incredibly rich and entitled head of a communications business was quite a unique perspective, but obviously in the intervening time we've had things like Succession, Billions and The White Lotus to allow us to get our fill of mega rich entitlement. The thing about Meet Joe Black is how lovely Anthony Hopkins is for a man with so much power. He knows he's going to die yet he's accommodating, he's convivial and he welcomes Death - in the guise of Brad Pitt - into his home and life despite it looking a bit... odd. Add to the mix Claire Forlani as one of his two daughters - the special one, who is a doctor with a heart of gold stuck with an arsehole boyfriend - and Marcia Gay Hardin - the needy one, who craves for the same attention her younger sibling gets without trying. This is a relatively normal family despite them having more riches than Croesus - so that's totally wrong from the outset. 

What no one expected was that the body Death chose randomly to inhabit was a young man who had made such a fantastic impression on Forlani earlier in the same day, or that Death would fall in love with her and create a difficult situation. Wrapped up in this is also Forlani's now ex - Jake Weber - who is a Machiavellian huckster who is only out for himself and plans to force Hopkins into selling his company. This is almost three hours long, yet it rattles along at a surprisingly fast pace. It is riddled with flaws - such as Death has taken 'trillions' of souls, but he has absolutely no comprehension what humans are like, acting like a new born during his first hours as a human felt tonally wrong - like it was added to give the movie some humour. The way Hopkins allows Pitt into the most secretive parts of his business feels contrived (although we know why) and while Weber's character might be an arsehole he actually asks all the right and pertinent questions - as one would when a seemingly simple man is suddenly the right hand man of the boss. 

It's largely a load of sentimental twaddle wrapped up in a doomed love story and surrounded by characters who really should be contemptuous and hated. I'm surprised it was such a box office hit all things considered and knowing that Americans struggle with endings that are not straight up happy. The ending went from fantasy realism to just plain fantasy in the space of two minutes. I dunno, this isn't a bad film, it just left me a little cold. However, it was good seeing it again as I remembered almost nothing - apart from the car accident. However, it's only really worth a 5.5/10 and that's half a mark for Thomas Newman's brilliant score.

All Is Revealed 

I think one of the main problems with Dope Thief is how it became so complicated without actually relaying this to the viewer. It pretty much wandered along for six episodes before the penny started to drop. There was no real hint that Ray and Manny were being set up and the person who set them up was never a suspect, while the person who was often at the other end of menacing phone calls was someone we didn't even meet until half way through this finale. I find it a little lazy when you have seven and a half parts and then drop a bombshell in that you wouldn't have guessed because you wouldn't have any idea because no one has ever mentioned this ever. That's not to say that it didn't all fall into place, even if we took the long way round for that to happen. Ironically it was Mina - the injured DEA agent - who helps Ray out of his mess mainly because she had been saying for ages that Ray was just a pawn in a bigger game. It was an entertaining series if a little too long. I think I said a few weeks back that this would have made a good compact film had it been made that way. Would I recommend it? Probably, but it wasn't anywhere near as good as it thought it was going to be.

Mired in Riches

Here's a weird one. I was pretty much for pulling the plug on this but the wife seems to have become something of a fan; maybe it's that 2025 Desperate Housewives vibe (or at least the first two seasons of that old classic). The thing is Your Friends and Neighbors [sic] is a lot more than just amiable John Hamm robbing his neighbours to pay for his lavish lifestyle. It's also about his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and her descent into what looks like a midlife breakdown; it's also about Coop's business manager, the disintegrating marriages that are popping up all around and what is happening at the Hedge Fund where Coop was unceremoniously thrown out of because of an indiscretion that no one knew about. There's also Coop's new partner, a Dominican cleaner who catches him in the process of stealing his ex-wife's boyfriend's varsity football ring. If I want to be honest about it, this is a mildly entertaining TV show, there's not been much that makes me think it's anything more than that, but I'll stick with it while the wife enjoys it. 

Scotland's Bores of the Year

The barely entertaining Scotland's Home of the Year is back and the first part was the West which was rather loosely decided upon as being a house in Ayrshire (correct), somewhere near Loch Lomond (basically north west of the Central Belt) and Giffnock (in south Glasgow). I got the impression last year that the areas of Scotland were going to be more... fluid than previous years and this seems to follow that pattern. I don't know why they simply just have 18 houses and ditch the regions.

I'm sorry, but this is a format that has grown hairs on and gone bald very quickly. Anna Campbell-Jones, one of the show's original presenters is still there and she's the most annoying thing about it, although she now has the slag-heap-like Banjo Beale and that thunderously dull Danny Campbell (who surely can't be related to Anna?) to fight her for being the most annoying things in this nice home show. I mean, I couldn't even find a useable picture for this show on Google. It's not even property porn because the presenters act like a cold shower. I've long since grown bored with this when the interesting presenters were shoved out in favour of the anodyne wankers currently spouting bullshit about peoples' houses in a chummy, we're-all-mates way.

What's Up Next?

As we edge further towards summer the choices are going to become fewer and further between. This week's blog, while quite long, has felt like a chore at times - not writing it but watching some of the TV to write about. If it's any consolation, I have noticed that newspapers and websites have grown very threadbare with their TV and movie reviews. I said to the wife that we seem to be watching a lot of old things because there's a paucity of the new.  It will be interesting to see what next week brings...

 

Music Culture - Tombs o' the Faeries by Beluga Lagoon

Tombs o' the Faeries by Beluga Lagoon

When I moved to Scotland I never imagined I would get [back] into folk music. That said, when I first discovered Beluga Lagoon, they weren't exactly common folk music. I would have described them as contemporary Scottish folk rock music with a hint of something far removed from 'folk' music. I first encountered the band's music in 2018 and while my relationship with the band's music was very much to pick and choose the songs from, by then, a pretty varied back catalogue. They had albums out, but the one I was drawn to The Small Boat and the Big Sea, had a dark side; it was tinged with melancholy and tracks like Neverland and On The Shore hinted at a small band with big intentions. By 2020 I had learned that Beluga Lagoon was the project of wildlife photographer Andrew O'Donnell from just north of the Central Belt - a multi-talented man who could, it seems, turn his hand to many things. 2020 saw the release of The Lagganberry Man, a strange mix of joyous songs and dark, brooding intentions. It became a favourite during lockdown and beyond; I was hooked by O'Donnell's gruff voice and twisty lyrics; the fact that while this was essentially a folk band there was elements of so many other music genres hiding in the background of every song. Whether it was the jangly folk pop of Rainbows or the haunting prog-like Homo Sapien Lullaby, Beluga Lagoon seemed to have hit the right notes at the right time...

In 2023 the band released what has become my favourite album - The Kilfraggan Forest Choir - pretty much a concept album featuring choirs and a whole host of contemporary styles mixed with old fashioned music making. The album was pure genius and I never grow tired of listening to it. However, as the band went from obscure to emerging there seemed to be a bit of a change in their music. First there was a Christmas release for Ronnie the Reindeer - a dark festive tale with an almost trad folk song tagged on the end. Then in 2024 they released The Slug's Bunnet, another concept album, this time about a fictional pub and its customers. I still struggle with this album. It is jam-packed with proper Scottish folk music; happy tunes and diddly diddly moments. The band obviously had a great time making it, I didn't listening to it.

So, what was I supposed to make of The Tombs O' The Faeries? A new album and the third in just over two years, I get the impression Beluga Lagoon are catching the wave. When I started following this band they had fewer than 2,000 followers on social media; now that figure on Instagram alone is well into the tens of thousands and today (April 26th) they play a short set before Scotland's Women's Six Nations Rugby match and are headlining some middling festivals in 2025. However, where The Slug's Bunnet was not my cup of tea, Tombs is infused with that darkness that attracted me to the band in the first place. It's probably yet another concept album, but I don't let that affect anything. It's an album that feels so much more like the band I originally started to follow. The distant feeling of melancholy has returned to the music and vocals and while there are a couple of 'dancing' songs on this album, it is mainly a very atmospheric and emotional selection of songs.

I have had it on constant rotation since the album's preview was released a week ago. There are a couple of tracks which feel like they could become classic Beluga Lagoon songs, but... has their growing acclaim taken the edge off of O'Donnell's music? For a folk band, there has always been something soulful about them; however, that seems to have gone. It was possibly burned out with Kilfraggan because that album touches so many parts their other albums didn't get close to; yet despite being very impressed with The Tombs O' The Faeries, it hasn't grabbed me by the balls like some of their earlier works. That said, it's still on target to be my favourite album of 2025. 7.5/10

Track list: 

1. Bòcan
2. Raineach
3. Ghillie
4. The Hawk
5. Mirren o’ Murlaganmore
6. Gooserider
7. Ruairidh’s Revenge
8. The Crossing 
9. Mòrar
10. Tomb