My Cultural Life - While My Catarrh Gently Weeps

What's Up?

I got five minutes away from hitting 'publish' when I realised the 'What's Up?' I'd written didn't feel appropriate and wasn't the right tone to set in a blog that sometimes let's me forget that it's to entertain and inform and not be some soapbox to probably preaching to the converted. So I decided to change it...

Today, February 28th - the last day of winter (meteorologically) would have been my mum's 93rd birthday. I'd say she probably wouldn't have lived that long anyhow, if she hadn't been taken from us in 1998, but given her older sister, my godmother, Tina, is alive and kicking at 95 and smoked Senior Service until she was 40 and then stopped, perhaps my mum (and me) would have had much longer having to put up with what a rotten place the world feels at the moment.

But sometimes, we need to forget that there's a world out there trying to eat us and just become a being in that moment, our moment. To stop. To look and listen. Of course the big problem with doing that in the best possible way is you need it to be a lovely day with just a gentle breeze and that's been as rare as rocking horse shit this late winter. About an hour ago, I was downstairs, pottering about in the kitchen and I could see the sun streaming in through the patio doors.

This had happened on Thursday. We had the best day Galloway has seen since October and I found myself sitting on the remarkably dry bench, letting the sun create vitamin D the best way. It was maybe 12 degrees on our patio - south facing, lot of white, windbreaks from every direction; it looks very Mediterranean in the spring, before the poppies and honeysuckle take over. It also feels it. 

Well, today is a few degrees colder than Thursday, but what breeze there is comes from the north, so the house blocks the wind and the patio is pretty much the same temperature as it was earlier in the week, because of the sun. So, I stood just outside and pushed the nightmares going on in my head after seeing what some senile orange idiot has done this week out of my head and listened to Wigtown at 11.00 am on a Saturday morning.

You know what I heard more than anything else? The sound of birds. They're happy little fuckers round our way, as we often discover around 3.30 am in June, when they wake up and can't understand why everyone else isn't up. However, at the end of what has been a pretty dreich and bleurgh winter, without too many extremes, standing there listening to them chatter and peep because there's shagging to be had. Well, it makes me realise that despite my anxieties, I'm a pretty lucky bloke to be blessed with people who put up with me.

But overall, it was just warm. Not like a muggy summer's evening, but in a 'Jeez, I need this' kind of way. The warmth you have to pick out because it's there waiting for you. Is it any wonder that mankind created religion when it probably spent inordinate more time worshipping the sun, until one day someone realised the sun was not a god but a big glowing ball and needed a more humanity based means of control. 

I like the sun. We don't see enough of her.  

More Questions than Answers

So, it seems, we can't go a week without a new Jaysun Stayfum film. This week is his latest release, Shelter, where he plays a one-man army hellbent on killing people while protecting a girl called Jessie, who might be, but is never revealed to be, his daughter. The first half of this movie is like Statham had thrown his hard man image out of the window to portray a deep and brooding hermit, living on a Scottish island, who saves the life of a young girl who seems to think she has some connection to him. Then it gets a bit silly. MI5 (or maybe MI6) have a new surveillance machine that can literally pick up wanted terrorist suspects if they pass any camera, anywhere in the country. Mistaking Statham for a Georgian terrorist, a team of special ops go to his island and are quickly despatched. It then becomes a strange cat and mouse game where rogue cells of intelligence agents try to beat official intelligence agents to Statham and the girl, all meeting sticky ends. It's slightly ridiculous, like many movies of this ilk. You actually learn almost fuck all by the end of it and it kind of has an ending that either suggests a happy ending or a set up for Shelter 2. You also might find some of the geographical continuity incongruous to where it's allegedly set, which is the Outer Hebrides.  5/10

Runaway Train

Tony Scott's final film Unstoppable is a real seat of the pants action thriller about a speeding, driverless, train heading for a heavily populated area of Pennsylvania. Denzel Washington plays Frank, a veteran train driver and Chris Pine as Will, a newly qualified conductor, who narrowly miss hitting the runaway train and then decide they are the only hope to stop the train, by chasing it down and attempting to stop it from behind. Rosario Dawson co-stars as the person trying to co-ordinate the stopping of what is essentially a giant bomb travelling at 70mph. There are some added subplots, mainly about the two men's families and what they've both been through, but this is essentially a race against time and speed. It was full of jeopardy and was an enjoyable way to end a Saturday film night. 7/10

Police Story

I remember when this film came out. The big talking point was action hero Sly Stallone playing a fat, washed up town sheriff who is walked all over by the NYC cops living in his New Jersey town. This is a James Mangold movie, so it has a pretty good pedigree even before you see the all-star cast, which includes Robert De Nero, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick and Annabella Sciorra. Sly is the sheriff in Garrison, but he isn't the law. He's slow witted, often drunk and isn't a very good police officer by his own standards; meanwhile he's surrounded by a town full of NYPD cops, many of who are owned by the mob. When a young hero cop makes a fatal mistake during an arrest, things spiral out of control and Internal Affairs get involved, but they need the sheriff to work with them and he's just not sure who he wants to be. This is also Liotta's best film since his early career. 8/10

Another Runaway Train

Two Tony Scott movies in two days and both of them have trains - driven at some point by Denzel Washington - as the most prominent feature. I suppose subconsciously I realised this when deciding to rewatch The Taking of Pelham 123. This time it's not so much a runaway train as a train that attempts to run away. This is a heist movie and a very clever one in many ways; John Travolta is the balding heist-meister who has hijacked a train and is now threatening to kill all the hostages if the city of New York doesn't meet his demands. Washington is the guy who is co-ordinating it from rail central, but he has his own story and the two clash very quickly.

This and Unstoppable were the director's final two films before he took his own life and while there's a lot of similarities they both couldn't be much different. This, like Saturday's movie, is a great film with a lot of jeopardy and a lot different from the original Walter Matthau film, yet it pays special homage to that, using many of the names and staying faithful to John Godey's original book, but updating it for the 21st century. It's a movie worth watching. 8/10

Something Completely Different

I'm not quite sure what to make of the 2023 Peacock series Mrs Davis. Except, about halfway through the opener I realised that last year's Vince Gilligan series Pluribus is very similar to it, in many ways... This is an eight part series and it is finite. It's extremely weird. Betty Gilpin plays Sister Simone, a nun with a mission. When she's not being nun-like, she rides through the night unmasking fraudulent magicians on her trusty white horse. She might be a descendent of the Knight's Templar - given the opening ten minutes and the similarity between her and the woman there - or she might simply have to find out where the Holy Grail is. This sounds all quite reasonable, until you realise that Simone has been chosen to take on a quest given to her by a powerful AI that now runs the world and has every human connected to doing its bidding. 

The reason for this is because Simone refuses to have anything to do with the AI and this makes the AI - aka Mrs Davis - very 'nervous'. This is silly, violent, strange and there's more than one storyline going on, but I expect they will all link together, except I doubt we'll stick around to find out.  There are a number of alarming continuity glitches in this, it could be that the entire thing is taking place inside the mind of an AI. Don't get me wrong, it's mildly entertaining, but there's also something a bit shoddy about it - the time frame is all over the place; the narrative isn't at all linear and there's something about Simone (aka Lizzy - her real name) that bugs me. Perhaps it's the shonky tone or the fact it seems to have deeply religious undertones, but we discussed whether we wanted to watch the remaining five episodes and chose not to. Therefore, I can't really recommend it, despite what appeared to be a promising start.

In Days of Old

The finale of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was a remarkably subdued and poignant affair. In the aftermath of the duel and the tragic consequences of it, Dunc appears to have a strange, yet begrudged, elevated status. Baelor's brother offers him the chance to have Egg as his squire as long as it is in the confines of the Targaryen enclaves, but the big fella is reticent about everything now, even his future as a knight. This was a most engaging series, which started by boring me, began to win me over and ended up boring me a little, again. The tale of Sir Dunc and Egg - specifically for the TV series - was slight and surprisingly gentle and I expect this series will have won a few Game of Thrones deserters back into the Westeros vibe. It was not brilliant TV, but it wasn't shite.

The End of the World, Part Two

Paradise returned with a season opener like you wouldn't expect. 'Graceland' has almost nothing to do with the entire first series - which was set inside a bunker designed to mimic the real world after an environmental disaster almost destroys the world. Sterling K. Brown is back, but only in the very last scene of this season's first episode. This was about Shailene Woodley, a women who gave up being a doctor to become a tour guide at Elvis's old home around the time the world is going to end. She manages to survive - despite obvious questions - and nearly three years later she meets up with a band of nerds - people trying to save the planet.

The second of the three episodes to drop, focuses on Brown's Xavier and how he found his way to Memphis and what he needs to do to survive. While we, the viewer, wonder how such a claustrophobic first season can feel so open and wild and then we're reminded, because the third episode is set back inside the Colorado bunker as Jane makes her moves and Sinatra realises that stuff needs to happen to get things back on track. What those tracks are and how it's done are still hidden from us, but I suspect it will be nefarious. We do discover how one of the nerds from episode one is actually a very important nerd, one of world saving abilities.

I wasn't sure about revisiting this series; I think I might have said we were giving it a miss, but so far it's been considerably more enjoyable, we just need it to stay that way.

Below Average

Something we won't be watching is the second episode of CIA - a new CBS series starring Tom 'Lucifer' Ellis as a CIA agent and some other bloke as an FBI field agent, who get thrust together and have to work finding and solving shit that the CIA can't because they aren't allowed to operate on US soil - or something like that. Ellis plays an American agent, who has spent all his life in the UK - hence the slightly wavering British accent (not wavering because he's trying to be a Yank, but because he doesn't seem to know whether he's Welsh, a Cockney or someone from the Home Counties). It's all very style and little substance. Being a Network TV show, there's this general shit feel about the film quality, the script, the lack of realism and the simple fact it isn't very good. It's a shame, I like Tom Ellis, but I suspect he's either good as Miranda's boyfriend or the devil and little else...

Quacks

It's loud. It's flashy. It's full of horribly loveable people. It has Harrison Ford saying 'fuck' so many times it's great and the song that played out this week's episode was Night Swimming - the REM song, covered by Jason Segal, the star of the show, after he admitted to Paul's daughter it was something he always envisaged doing if he ever started another meaningful relationship. I turned to the wife at the end of this episode and I felt quite emotional, because Shrinking has that effect on me. We shouldn't like it; it's everything about happy American entitled middle class bastards we hate, but it also is one of the most wonderful TV shows we have watched. Every single episode there's often a point in it where I wonder why I like it so much and then something happens that makes me love it even more. I'm going to miss it so much and I think Jessica Williams is one of the sexiest women alive today! There, I've said it now...

Dull End

As Friday is a quiz night, Thursday became our end of the week and it was a damp squib, if ever there was one. We started with an old Sean Penn directed film called Into the Wild, gave it 40 minutes, realised it was on for nearly two more hours and gave up on it. 

Then finally got around to watching A House of Dynamite, about an unidentified nuclear strike on the USA from an unknown assailant and how various parts of the government's defence strategy works in the 16 or so minutes they have before Chicago is wiped off the map. It was also really dull, essentially retelling that 16 minutes over and over again from different perspectives. I'd give it a 3/10 for perseverance...

What's Up Next?

Well, much of the same. I don't even know why I have this bit. Apart from occasionally saying something about something that's happening next week that some of you maybe weren't aware of, this is essentially a load of waffle.

If I tell you about last night's pub quiz that isn't what's happening next week, is it? But, it's not like there are rules to this or anything [there are]. The thing is it went very well. I've probably said this before, but I wish I'd done this sooner, or been able to make a living from it since I moved here. The next one is March 27. I already have the questions completed and music loaded onto my phone. I have quizzes written up to June. I'll be thinking about July's before long, but maybe not before spring actually arrives.

My Cultural Life - Where No Blog Has Gone Before

What's Up?

Every week, we're drip fed stories about how we should fear China. How the Yellow Peril is a danger to everyone and we need to be wary of them. I was wondering if this is because they are still regarded as a communist country and as we all know, anything left of centre in politics is very bad...

The thing is if you look at the shitty things the world's largest countries have done over, say, the last 10 years, you'd be hard pressed to rank anything China has done in a top 20 of shitty things big countries have done. There's rumblings about civil rights (which is hilarious given many of our right wing overlords want to strip us of them) and the fact they want Taipei - but unlike Russia and the USA haven't really done anything about it. In fact, with their push for green energy and massive advances in technology (which is bad when China does it, but not if the USA does), you could argue that China is the planet's friend.

The USA on the other hand is fast reversing into the past; abolishing green and clean energy targets and pandering to fossil fuel companies, while threatening Denmark and overthrowing the sovereign nation of Venezuela. In fact, Trump's USA is now far more scary than anyone else on the planet. The world's richest and most powerful nation are now flaunting their position and challenging anyone who doubts it.

The USA is so nasty, they've taken to sanctioning individuals they disagree with. Take the ICC (International Criminal Court); its judges and prosecutors are all subject to USA sanctions. They cannot use Google services, are banned from Amazon, cannot hold credit cards, because the USA threatens any non-American bank with their own sanctions if they give these people any form of credit. If there is a service or a requirement these people need, the USA has covered all bases. Any American company giving these people any service face jail or their own sanctions; any non-American company giving these people any service face threats, sanctions and are banned from trading with American companies and if American companies do business with these foreign companies, they will face their own sanctions or jail.

The thing is it isn't just individuals connected to the ICC. It now stretches to family of ICC members. A Canadian judge, who has effectively had her life put on hold is now telling the press that her daughter, unrelated to the ICC and in a profession that has no links to the ICC, is also now being sanctioned, because she is related to someone the USA classes as a international criminal. The daughter has had her right to enter the USA refused and her ability to get credit or buy things from US companies is now restricted. This is all because the ICC found Israel guilty of war crimes and there's an international arrest warrant out on Adolf Netanyahu.

We need to start challenging this narrative that the USA is our friend and China is our enemy, because the USA is clearly a rogue nation, threatening and bullying its way across the world stage and everyone is too scared to stand up to them. Maybe it's not prudent to stand up to them, but maybe it's time to tell the USA that there's no special relationship, we're not friends or allies and they should back the fuck away from the rest of the world and its business...

Wanker Supreme

If this is the kind of thing that is one of the favourites to win an Oscar this year then my taste in movies is obviously going down the wrong path. Marty Supreme is loud, brash, obnoxious and Timothée Chalamet, who is up for an Oscar, all on his own, is possibly one of the least likeable leading men of all time. This is an over-long and horrible movie about a grifter whose opinion of himself is so high and so conceited, he doesn't mind who he shits on to get to the top and in this case the top equals the best table tennis player in the world (in the 1950s), except that's pretty much relegated to a minor subplot. It has a soundtrack of banging 1980s tunes and Gwyneth Paltrow is in it, looking her age and probably wondering who the twat opposite her is. This is not a good film; it looks okay, but if you don't give a shit about any of the characters then you're not going to enjoy it; are you? If this wins Oscars then there is no justice. 4/10 

A Blast From My Past

A couple of weekends ago, BBC2 had a Phil Collins and Genesis themed evening and one of the programmes was a TOTP2 featuring songs by Genesis and various solo members ranging from 1974 up to 1992. The penultimate song/video was from an empty Knebworth in June 1978 - a video of the band performing Many, Too Many to a crowd of 11 fans who found out about the soundcheck and the video shoot. Two of those people were me and my brother Steve and if you look at the picture, the two people standing to the left of the group of seven standing spectators are him and me. I had luxurious blonde hair and I had only been 16 for two months; I was wearing double denim and Steve had his work suit on. We even got to meet the band after the shoot and I asked them a question, which ended up not being the best question I could think of and everyone asked them for their autographs apart from Steve and I, because we didn't have any pens or paper. It was my 15 seconds of TV fame.

The A-Holes Are Back

I'm allowed to change my mind. There is nothing wrong with admitting you were wrong. If you didn't like something and then you did it's the sign of maturity and some other thing that my aged mind can't remember. The thing is The Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 is a very good film, if a little overlong. That's not really an issue, but there was a lot of stuff that felt slightly superfluous, such as a lot of the drawn out humorous sections, which would have worked even if they'd been half the length. Obviously stuff changed between this and the third volume, such as the role of the Sovereign race and my rooted in Marvel comics mind has always had a small problem with this Guardians version and the role of Gamora, given that she was one of the main characters in Jim Starlin's Warlock series, which you can read here:  https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Warlock-by-Jim-Starlin/TPB-Part-1?id=135922&readType=1 and you should if you want to see how the MCU bastardised Warlock, Gamora and Thanos. This comic series is anything but a Marvel series, despite it being an... er... Marvel comic...

Anyhow, Volume 2 is about Peter's father; increasing the size of the Guardians, family - whether it's by blood or by choice - and how it evolves from the first part and becomes an excellent standalone series of films. Again there's stuff that seems planned from the outset and this time its tinged with tragedy, but it really is an outstanding addition to the oeuvre that now rates much higher in my grand scheme of all things MCU. I'm not overly sure about the special effects, but I have to admit I really enjoyed watching it again and it's better than the first, but not as good as the third. 8/10

The Flip Side

Where to start? First off - I always said I'd never watch this again because the first time was so bad. 10 years down the line and I decided to question my better judgement and watch it again. It was a bad move... X-Men: Apocalypse is where the Fox franchise started to eat itself, with the reintroduction of existing characters from the first three films but now as kids, because of the events in the Days of Future Past film. It was also where the franchise completely lost it on a number of fronts. Whoever thought Oscar Isaacs had the gravitas to pull of being cast as one of the most powerful villains in X-Men comic history is probably the reason why this movie failed to have the impact that was hoped for. Isaacs plays En Sabah Nur - Apocalypse - a little too camp, a little too quietly and with absolutely no menace at all. He is shite as this supposed mega-powerful ancient mutant.

Then there's the issue I have with Sophie Turner's inability to act. She brings nothing to the role of Jean Grey apart from groans from the audience. She makes Isaacs's Apocalypse seem like Laurence Olivier. Her accent is bad, her contribution felt badly stage managed and she highlighted the big problem Marvel/Disney are going to have when they bring mutants and the X-Men into the MCU. How do you make the less cinematic characters 'sing'? Jean Grey might be one of the most powerful entities in the Marvel comics universe - at times - but when she isn't looking like a phoenix, she's mimicking Charles Xavier with hands on temples and pointing at things with a slightly askew hand. She is the epitome of not cinematically exciting - and she's not the only one. Mutants can be visually excellent, but equally, many of the originals, are anything but.

I don't know how they're going to iron out the problem that a lot of mutants are about as powerful as Daredevil and as visually stimulating as a blank slate. They could leave them out of the reboot all together, but that would mean doing what the Fox X-Men did and dispensing with 40+ years of continuity to have cool looking characters doing pointless shit because it looks good on screen, but relying on the ones who do shit with their minds to clean up the mess. X-Men: Apocalypse is a load of dog's vomit and even a cameo by Huge Ackman doesn't save it. Plus I know what's coming and the final film in this franchise is as good as having the runs for a week. 2/10

Blood and Brains

The penultimate episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was the untold origin of Sir Dunc sandwiched between bookends of men beating each other senseless with the little bald kid screaming - in a bad actor kind of way - from the ramparts. I didn't care too much for the flashbacks, but I see why they were here. The battles were bloody, muddy and unrelenting and I wonder what the consequences will be given the shock death at the end. It was a mixture of WTF and why am I watching this bit when I want to watch the other bits. Next week will be interesting. 

The Dribbles

I remember thinking, first time around, that this film was tonally all over the place and that feeling hasn't changed with its second viewing. I didn't think this was as bad as I initially thought, but it does fall apart the moment the three heroes set foot on the Bollywood Waterworld planet. The Marvels is a low point in the MCU, with its 5.5 IMDB rating and its largely dreadful story about a Kree nutter out to destroy anything linking Carol Danvers while saving her home planet. The thing is I quite like Carol Danvers; she was the original Ms Marvel, went on to other things including becoming Binary - all characters that were other people in the MCU - and even ended up sharing a mind with the X-Men's Rogue. She was one of the first female Marvel heroes to get her own title, which lasted 23 issues, and I even quite like Brie Larson's version of her in the MCU, despite her being reviled and hated by many of the virginal fans of Marvel and Disney.

The Marvels is poor. It's badly made, it features two characters from MCU TV shows and the villain, who has about as much menace as a dog chew, is despatched far too easily. Plus there are glaring errors in this movie, including Iman Vellani's Ms Marvel using her powers despite not possessing her power band (I know people claim that she's a mutant and has the powers anyhow, but frankly that's a cop out - this film ignored a fundamental element of her story to allow her to save the day). This was an ill-judged decision, which is compounded by the use of a Bollywood number and the inclusion of far too much Goose the alien not-cat. Don't get me wrong, Goose is great, but Goose is a supporting character to be used sparingly, not as part of the entire plot. Yet, I don't think this is as bad as it's IMDB rating, but it still doesn't deserve more than a 6/10

The Crapt

1990s fantasy horror movies, eh? Most of them were an absolute load of shite and this was no exception. The Craft is about a coven of teenage witches at a Catholic school in LA who basically get their revenge on mean kids in their school, but it goes all wrong and nasty shit starts to happen. Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Robin Tunney and Rachel True are the witches and misfits who pretty much deserve most of the shit thrown at them (well, maybe not Tunney, except for teaming up with the three bitches, um, I mean witches). That's not to say their victims don't deserve what they get either and that's the problem, no one is particularly likeable, you don't give a shit about any of them and it's so superficial and shallow it feels like a bad episode of some crappy TV shows about teenage witches without the comedy or the black cat. Why did we watch it? Fuck knows. 3/10

Stalking

Sometimes Shrinking feels like it should be called Stalking, because the three shrinks in it go way above and beyond the call of duty for their clients that you wonder how they still practice. It also throws up the question of why aren't any of their friends or clients able to make decisions on their own without first consulting the oracles of psychiatry. There is a great scene though where Paul - Harrison Ford - returns to work and is humming the theme tune to Indiana Jones. That was worth it alone. There is also another great cameo from Michael J Fox - this time as a real person rather than an hallucination and the opening sequence where Jimmy takes the cute nurse on a date is also extremely funny.

War Crimes

Apparently there was some artistic licence used in the movie Nuremberg. The character played by Rami Malik was inflated to seem like the psychiatrist he was playing had a larger part to play in the trial of Herman Goering and the Nuremberg trials, or at least that's the accusation levelled at it. Malik's character, Douglas Kelley, wrote a book about his experiences which carried a warning about underestimating what man is capable of doing, but it was felt to be unamerican and too understanding of some of the Nazis on trial. The film is pretty riveting stuff, with an excellent performance from Russell Crowe as Goering and also from Michael Shannon as the US prosecutor Robert Jackson who almost allowed the Nazis on trial to 'get away with it' because he didn't fully understand what he was dealing with. This might have had a few liberties taken with it, but it's also a very good film and should be watched for the middle section if nothing else. 8/10

If I Had Patience...

Everywhere I look there are great reviews of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, most of them focusing on Rose Byrne's extraordinary performance. What none of these reviews tell you is it is almost impossible to watch. This is the story of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown; with a very ill child, an absent husband and a strange relationship with her therapist. The problem is it's interminable; like a breakdown it just never starts and never stops; it is impossible to escape it and equally really difficult to watch... Which is why just before the half way mark, I paused the film, looked at the wife and asked her if she wanted to continue watching a movie where we're both pretty convinced we'd get to the end and proclaim that's two hours of our life we're never getting back. We chose to switch off and never return to this again. Therefore it will remain unrated by me. I will say that if you're in a good mood then don't watch it and if you're unhappy and in a bad place, absolutely don't watch it. The main character's daughter is so annoying it will put you in a really dark place that no parent probably ever wants to visit. Avoid.

Over Budget

George Clarke's new-ish series Building Home is more like a cross between his renovation series and Kevin McCleod's Grand Designs. As always, we watch it to see the look of glee on George's face when he discovers the project is going over budget and how priapic he gets when other troubles beset the project. We've watched three episodes so far and I have to say that one episode was under budget, while the other two would have had Clarke dancing round the production office high fiving everyone he could high five with. Like virtually every show of its ilk, this is 50% bollocks, 25% recaps and 25% money shot. There's something a bit creepy and overly tactile about Clarke now and he seems to ogle the ladies far too much. I don't really enjoy his shows any longer, even Amazing Spaces feels like it's sold out to a production company that has forgotten what it was originally about.

Astounding Story

We ended the week watching a nine-year-old documentary. The Farthest: Voyager's Interstellar Journey is the story of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, two man-made spacecraft that are both now journeying through interstellar space (although V1 hadn't made it when this was originally made). It was a totally compelling film without ever feeling like it was too much science. It was great seeing one of my childhood heroes on screen again - Carl Sagan - and the understandable science about this is utterly mind-blowing; it is staggering in its enormity and I imagine that many of the scientists involved in the making of this film are no longer walking this earth now. It was on BBC4 about two weeks ago, but remains on the iPlayer. You should watch it, it's phenomenal and entertaining and makes you realise just how insignificant we all are (plus it has the story of the Pale Blue Dot - arguably one of the most important photographs ever taken).

What's Up Next?

I almost don't care. There are conclusions; new beginnings, old things and other stuff that will happen. I bet you can't wait?

My Cultural Life - Cheese Creatures versus Super Adrenaline Monkeys

What's Up?

When I worked at the Youth Offending Team back in the Noughties, I worked with a lot of different young people who had broken the law in one way or another. I had a policy, I never looked at a young person's file until I'd met them first. I didn't want any prejudices to cloud my judgement, I wanted to make an opinion of that person before I knew what they'd done wrong.

This was how I met *John. I visited him in the accommodation the YOT had found him, miles from his home town. He was a nice lad, coming up to 18, polite, well-spoken and not really the kind of kid you'd imagine who would get into trouble. John was on the sex offenders register. At 17 he'd slept with his 14 year old stepsister and within a week of that happening, she'd reported him to the police and the law took over. John was sentenced to a two year order and placed on the register for 10 years.

When you look at these facts, you'd struggle to feel any sympathy for him. He wasn't a special needs young person; he'd got eight GCSEs and several of his teachers actually appeared in court to give character references. John was the perfect 'client'. He did everything that was expected of him, kept a low profile and, to my knowledge, never got in trouble again. By the time he was in his early 20s he'd started his own company and I'd often see his van around Wellingborough and Kettering. He ended up with half a dozen employees and if you didn't know about his past you would have thought he was just a young guy who made something of himself...

After John's conviction, his stepsister made allegations against two other men and we discovered that she was something of a 'bad person'. She made an allegation of rape against a neighbour when she was 16 and her 'vulnerable' history began to unravel. When she was 15, social services took her out of the family home because she was classed as a danger to her stepfather and her younger brothers. The further allegations she made were dismissed and John's conviction unfortunately wasn't quashed because he had admitted to having had sex with her. He said to me in one of the few occasions he actually talked about his step sister that he thought they had loved each other and that they would be together forever.

John's life was put back on a proper course. As his own boss, he has never had to disclose his offence and he would have come off the register almost a decade ago. The thing is, over the last few years sex offenders have been rightly vilified, but as John's story attests, not all sex offenders are evil people; some make the wrong decisions, some are coerced into doing something and while I personally believe paedophiles and violent rapists should be castrated, the general public often don't know the story behind the offence. Therefore, as we've seen in recent days, the press and a large part of public opinion seems to want sex offenders to be castigated for ever. Murderers are rehabilitated, but sex offenders (and arsonists) are tarred for life.

I have believed, since working with young offenders, that many of them should never have gone near the criminal justice system. I worked with kids who were convicted of what we called 'survival crimes'. Young, homeless kids, who would steal food from supermarkets (or even supermarket bins) and would end up with a label attached to them that might never go away. I firmly believe that if John had offended in the last few years and his 'crimes' had somehow become public he would never have been able to have achieved what he did. I firmly believe that if people in parts of Northants knew that the bloke who fixed their plumbing had been a convicted sex offender the least they would do is not employ him; the worst is almost unthinkable. 

The way the press stirs up things and social media promotes mob rule, what do we do, as a race, when circumstances are unknown? Do we turn our backs on certain offenders and leave them alone, alienated and without any support, because we're worried that we might get labelled as 'paedo sympathisers' or 'woke lefties who don't think about the children'? There are often two sides to every story, but in 2026 people seem quick to ignore this.

Ask yourself this: How would you look at John and how do you think the mob would look at him if all they knew was he'd had sex with a 14 year old?

* John was not the young man's name and he wasn't a plumber. He was one of the least offensive young people I ever worked with.
On the flip side of this, there was a 16-year-old child from a rural village in Northants, who stole a car while drunk, lost control of it and drove it through a garden and into the front of a house, destroying many things. His victim was a pensioner who had recently lost his wife; the car destroyed many of his cherished memories and because this irresponsible twat was a first time offender and came from a well off family, the magistrate sentenced him to a 3 month referral order (the lowest order that can be issued) and one that doesn't go on your permanent record...

Flash Barry

I'm sorry, but The Flash is a bloody excellent movie and I don't care who disagrees with me. In the future, when people can get past Ezra Miller being a dick, they will look at Andy Muschietti's movie and nod with appreciation - it is a fantastic comic book film and one that sticks very closely to how and where the original Flash comic book went and the impact that Barry Allen had on the DC Universe. I have a soft spot for Barry, even though I can probably count the number of Flash comics I've read on one hand. I never really liked the character until the late 1980s when Marv Wolfman and George Perez (both men I have had the pleasure of meeting and knowing, briefly) created a comic book called Crisis on infinite Earths, where Barry died in one of the most tragic, heroic and pointless deaths that has ever befallen a superhero.

This film's premise is simple, Barry wants to travel back in time, change the past, save the life of his mother and prevent his dad from being framed for her murder. This is the part of the film that I think many struggle with - how and why did Barry's mother actually die, other than being stabbed. There was never a real murderer suggested, it's like she stabbed herself just as her husband walked through the door. That aside, Bruce Wayne (1) - Ben Affleck - warns Barry that changing the past will have countless effects on the now present, the butterfly effect will come into play. But Barry ignores this sage advice and goes back in time, and prevents certain things from happening and effectively creates a massive paradox loop...

Barry finds himself in a new reality, having created a multiverse, and his mother is alive, but he's only 18 and really stupid and immature, This is also a reality where General Zod, from Man of Steel tries to terraform the earth and make it into a new Krypton, but there's no Superman. So Barry and his younger self try to track down the Justice League of this reality, which is essentially Bruce Wayne (2) Michael Keaton, reprising the role he last played over 30 years ago. With the help of an alternate Supergirl, the four of them try to stop Zod and his army. At the conclusion of this, Barry is left with one choice and not one he wants to make. It ends up with him meeting Bruce Wayne (3), who is still his friend, but is now the George Clooney version and that's the last of the spoilers, because one day you will watch this film and realise it's much better than people think. Ezra Miller is superb as the Barrys and while some of the special effects are as dodgy as fuck, the majority of them though, in the action sequences, are superb - it's during the circle of endless possibilities where they struggle. Anyhow, I rate this film highly, which is why I give it an 8/10.

Hit and Run

Guy Ritchie's 2021 action thriller Wrath of Man is slightly off-kilter. It's told in chunks, each overlapping the other, but with a distinct timeline. Jaysun Stayfum plays some bloke who takes a job with a security firm and almost immediately makes himself a bit of a hero by thwarting a heist in clinical fashion. But this isn't the opening sequence, that is a heist that does go well for the people committing it, but there are some deaths. What we have here is a story told from differing perspectives, with Stayfum actually playing a Londoner - but just who is he? It's one of those movies where whatever I say is going to act as some kind of spoiler, so what I will say is it's not what you would expect from your usual one-man-army feature and when Stayfum plays a Londoner, he seems to be able to become an actor again. It's not brilliant, but it has enough twists and turns in it to make it a cut above the average. 6.5/10

IMDB I Love You

I have avoided some dreadful movies thanks to IMDB. However, I have also watched some stinkers that IMDB's reviewers have rated highly. I have never seen anything with as low a rating as Melania. Well done IMDB and your reviewers. Take a bow. 

Trailer Tra...

There wasn't an awful lot that floated my boat from the Superb Owl trailer bonanza. Spielberg's Disclosure Day is bound to be good, his alien films usually are (but this looks a bit... I dunno... done before). There was some extra scenes added to the Supergirl teaser and this now feels like a Guardians of the Galaxy film with a girl in the lead and no Guardians. Ryan Gosling's comedy sci-fi Project Hail Mary looks like it might be fun, but Gosling is to comedy what I am to being a blonde Adonis and The Adventures of Cliff Booth is the only thing I'm looking forward to, because we both loved Once Upon a Time in Hollywood despite it being a Tarantino movie. The others? Nah, not for me.

Utter Bilge

Our second Guy Ritchie film of the week was an absolute load of confusing shite. It was poorly made, obviously filmed in London, with plenty of English actors, despite supposedly being somewhere in the USA and Jason Statham had hair and a beard - which was a little disconcerting. The film, Revolver, didn't get a hugely positive review when it came out and I can see why. It involved a gambler, some dodgy geezas (don't they all?) and other elements which might spoil it for you should you be fucking stupid enough to watch it. We both struggled to follow it in places; there was lots of strange sequences, some involving animation, others having the same scene played out in different ways. The acting was abysmal and it ended extremely abruptly, which I'm not complaining about as it should have ended abruptly about two hours earlier (which would have been about two minutes before it started). Utter shite. 2/10

The Big Bang Wassname

I think the Adam Driver movie 65 is much maligned. It has a 5.4 rating on IMDB (which I wasn't aware of until after we watched it) and while this is faintly ridiculous movie with a silly premise and felt a little like watching a man wander into death trap after death trap without a second of self-awareness. It was also a bit of fun. I mean, it had a lot of dinosaurs in it, and conveniently it had some bad boys, like the T Rex and as we all know from those dreadful Jurassic Park sequels, no one dislikes a big dinosaur...

The thing is, this isn't a bad idea. Humanoid alien from another galaxy gets knocked off course and crash lands on primitive earth, a few days before the big asteroid fucks the planet up and kills off most of the dinosaurs. His cargo of humanoids is lost and just one pod remains - containing a little girl and, of course, our hero - Driver - has just lost his own little girl to an unknown illness. It's essentially a survival movie, which has more pitfalls and pratfalls than an episode of The Walking Dead but with dinosaurs rather than corpses. I have seen much worse and one can only presume it's got a low rating because it was made with money and took itself a bit too seriously. Still a fun thing to watch. 6/10

A Loki Love Affair

Apart from being a load of shite, the thing that spoiled Thor: Love & Thunder was the lack of Loki. This week's dip into the MCU's past brought us to Thor: The Dark World, a film that I could actually write an awful lot about, such as it being the first in what would end up being a theme in the God of Thunder's later three films - tragedy. This is the movie that Thor's mother dies; the next one Odin dies and the most recent one Jane Foster. Thor's plagued by those he loves dying. I mean, take Avengers Infinity War, even Loki dies in that. Everywhere Thor goes death follows.

This second outing for the God of Thunder is much maligned and frankly, like Iron Man 2, it deserves a lot more love. Yes, there are sections in this that feel a bit too comedic, without actually being funny; some of the supporting characters are either underused or shouldn't have been in it and given the seriousness of the story, it feels a bit frivolous at times. However, it is a good film because of Tom Hiddleston's Loki. Written in character again after that awful rendition in the first Avengers film, which if anything should be etched on Joss Whedon's headstone that 'He fucked up Loki.' Loki is brilliant in this, heroic, deceitful and always the best character on the screen whenever he's on it. Oh and I have to point out that Fandral, the dashing blonde haired swordsman friend of Thor, is played by Zachary Levi - aka Shazam - but you'd never see it unless you know he plays this part, because he doesn't look a thing like you'd remember him.

The Dark World is the story of a dark elf called Malekith, who wants to plunge the universe into darkness, but Asgardians get in the way. The villain, played by Christopher Ecclestone, is really just a cypher to introduce us to another of the Infinity stones. Bits of this feel as though the MCU was still just feeling its way; that it had an idea but it was still embryonic. It's far better than the 6.7 rating IMDB gives it and far more important to the grand scheme of things than people thought. It's a movie that deserves another, careful watch. 8/10

Dear John...

I first discovered Michael Dorman in the fantastic For All Mankind, so I was pleasantly surprised when he turned up as the lead in a 2015 TV series called Patriot, some of which I talked about in a previous blog. This is one of the funniest, most surreal pieces of television I have ever had the pleasure to watch. A show where lots of random shit happens and yet eventually it makes total sense. We have just concluded watching the first of the two series and while there has been a slight suspicion that we might have seen some of it before, it was one of the best TV shows I have seen in a long time. Dorman plays John, a CIA 'specialist' who has to do a job for his security chief father - Terry O'Quinn - but it requires him to do it without CIA help or cover. It involves getting $6million to a puppet candidate in Iran, who would be president but also 'working' for the USA. So John gets a job at a pipe manufacturers in Wisconsin to enable him to take the money to Luxembourg, to deliver it to an agent of the Iranian who is aligned to the CIA. The problem is one thing goes wrong and that has a domino effect that means by the end of the first series there's a Japanese puppeteer, some Brazilian Ju Jitsu experts, an all-female homicide department, a car accident, a folk duo, some duck hunts and a man who wants John to kill him. You will not watch a better, more twisted TV show this year...

Two Thor to Thit Down

Right. I'm going to make a definitive statement. Thor: Ragnarok is the best MCU film of the lot. It has everything - tragedy, comedy, action, peril, jeopardy and redemption. It also has the Hulk and, of course, Loki, who I declared as my favourite MCU character, ever (except in Avengers, because Avengers he was badly written). I find it remarkable that Taika Waititi could make such a brilliant movie and then follow it up with such an abysmal film, because Thor: Love & Thunder is probably the worst MCU film and there have been a few stinkers over the years. Ragnarok is almost perfect as an action/comedy/ adventure superhero film; it has everything and even has an epilogue full of menace.

For those of you who might not have seen it, it starts with Thor defeating Surtur, returning to Asgard to discover that Loki - not dead - has tucked Odin away in a retirement home in NYC. A brief cameo from Doctor Strange sees the brothers head to Norway where Odin shuffles off this plane of existence, releasing their sister Hela who plans to destroy everything and regain the Asgardian throne. Before Thor and Loki can do anything they are kicked out of the Bifrost and find themselves on an alien world where Thor meets up with old pal The Hulk before they enlist the aid of a failed Valkyrie and return to try and save the day. It is relentless, yet still manages to tell a great story, have excellent quiet moments and have a villain who is as nasty as you can imagine. The special effects are fantastic and it has absolutely everything you want from a superhero film. 10/10

Babies

After what I thought were two slightly underwhelming episodes of Shrinking to kick off the third and final season, episode three came crashing back with an absolute brilliant episode full of laughs and poignant reflection. We meet Jimmy's dad, played by Jeff Daniels, in what seems like inspired casting and Paul - Harrison Ford - is beginning to realise that he hasn't got long for this world and his friends are beginning to realise the same. Brian is about to become a father and as usual has most of the funny lines and Christa Miller's Liz is both hideous and fabulous at the same time. Yes, there's way too much neighbourly love and it's full of larger-than-life people, but it's still one excellent TV show and it's episodes like this that will make me miss it terribly when it's gone (and to think I didn't even fancy watching it when it started, I just felt that as an Apple TV+ show it was worth giving it a chance, and boy was I right).

A Bunch of A-Holes

In a week of superhero films, we ended it with a revisit to The Guardians of the Galaxy (Volume 1) and the introduction to what must have been the MCU's biggest risk, at the time. Like so many of the older Marvel films, it's surprisingly better than recent efforts, but like the second Thor film, there were lots of things that got ironed out by the time they got to Volume 2. What is also surprising was that James Gunn probably had the entire trilogy thought out before he made this, because there were things in it that played important parts in the later movies. 

This is essentially an origin story of how the team got together and all the characters, apart from Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) were a little rough round the edges. Lots of things were introduced that fell by the way, such as the Nova Corps, the strange aliens that worked for Thanos and other little things that I'm not going to get into or this will likely become longer than the rest of the blog put together. It's a film that I have grown to like more after three or four watches, because I really didn't like it the first time round and I still feel the dialogue and plotting have issues. Considering I really didn't like Volume 2 (which I expect we'll watch in the next week or so) and I think Volume 3 is one of the best MCU films of all time, you can see why my feelings about this trilogy are all over the place. 7/10

What's Up Next?

In a week largely made up of Guy Ritchie films and superheroes, whatever next week brings is likely to be... well, strangely similar, given I have more Guy Ritchie films to watch and I still have a few superhero movies to rewatch...

Shrinking will edge towards its conclusion and we might start watching some of the things I've alluded to in recent weeks, but never seemed to get around to, just yet. I also want to watch Small Prophets as everyone seems to think it's brilliant. As I've got a bit of a Tom Hiddleston man crush at the moment, I might even finally get around to watching season two of The Night Manager. 

Other than that, who can say? The sun shone this morning. It was fantastic and we really need more of it in our lives. I'm still going to exercise classes - yes, I feel like I've fallen out of a plane for about 24 hours after, but I suspect it's doing me more good than harm. 

Today, is Valentine's Day. A special day created by greetings card companies to exploit idiots out of even more money. FFS, if you fancy someone tell them, if you love someone then if you aren't telling them every day, you're a massive cunt.

My Cultural Life - I'm Mandy, Fire Me

What's Up?

I wonder who really runs the world?

I also wonder if the dumbing down of the human race - through poor education and subtle propaganda - means that dodgy people get away with dodgy things because the people in governmental power think they can get away with it.

Look at Jimmy Savile. He did heinous things and got away with it for years because, above all else, the police failed to treat his accusers seriously until it was far too late. This Peter Mandelson business is no different, although I feel he's being used as a sacrificial lamb to a certain extent.

That's as far as I will give the man any benefit of the doubt, because even as early as the 1990s, before New Labour swept to victory, there were people who felt the then chief SPAD to Tony Blair was as dodgy as fuck. A pit bull dressed up as a benign gay man. I was never a fan of Blair, ever since seeing him squirm and seem oleaginous in a TV phone in during the 1992 General Election campaign (on the Robert Kilroy-Silk show) and by extension, his mate, who was pulling all of his political strings was even more dislikeable. The fact Gordon Brown put him in his cabinet and then Starmer made him US ambassador made it feel like we were never going to see the back of this bad penny.

However, he is being used as a scapegoat. The coverage in the press is warranted, but if you want to look at a bigger picture - something we're no longer encouraged to do - then Mandy, Andrew Mountbatten and the wanker in the Norwegian Royal family seem to be easy targets to deflect the attention away from certain other people. We know that these people were not the only co-conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein, but the press appear to not want us to look at other people involved, or more pertinently, the current administration in the USA wants us to focus on these non-Americans rather than wonder who in the USA is also involved.

I know people, some I class as friends, who believe that there's a secret cabal of paedophiles who run the world and have been saying this for a long time. I've always reached for the tin foil hat whenever one of them has started proclaiming all manner of ridiculous stuff, but... you know... what if they were on the right track? What if the people who run the world are just power hungry sickos? I don't think it's that crazy an idea any more.

We see evidence of rich and powerful people up to their necks in scandal almost every year. Only the extremely wealthy and powerful manage to remain untainted by it. Take the world's very own Orange Shitler; he's admitted stuff (grabbing pussies or making lewd comments about his own daughter) and been found guilty of other stuff (rape and fraud), but has managed to manipulate (read: own) the press enough for there never to be that much scrutiny. Shitler is seen in a very public video cosying up to Epstein in a room full of women (among other things) and we're seeing the DoJ in the USA redact so many things, claiming it's in the interest of National Security, and still not releasing the rest of the Epstein Files, that you have to wonder, even if you like Shitler, if there's something a bit fishy about all of this...

The Gruesome Twosome

With two thespians of the calibre of Jason Mamoa and Dave Bautista it's no wonder that The Wrecking Crew turned out to be so good... I'm sorry, did I just write that? Here's the thing, it's a surprisingly entertaining movie, if a little ... extreme and totally ridiculous. Mamoa and Bautista play half brothers whose father is a Hawaiian private detective, who's discovered a huge conspiracy taking place on one of the islands, which is owned by the indigenous people - unfortunately, he's killed because of what he knows. Mamoa is a rogue cop from Oklahoma, while Bautista is a commander in the marines - both men are one man armies, so together they're like a tactical nuclear weapon. This is incredibly violent and the swathe of destruction across Hawaii is amazing, not only for its extremism and death but because there never seems to be any consequences. Enjoyable isn't quite the right word, but you get my drift. 7/10

Dead Like Harris?

Richard Harris was only 72 when the Grim Reaper paid him a visit shortly after making Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. John Lithgow is 80 and has just embarked on assuming the role of the latest incarnation of Albus Dumbledore. Will he make it to season three? This is a ten-year project and while there are a couple of books where the headmaster of Hogwarts doesn't feature prominently, the veteran actor, who probably was first noticed by British audiences for his role in Third Rock From the Sun and has popped up in countless TV shows and movies, is going to be needed right up until he's knocking 90. I don't wish to seem cruel or blunt, but once a human being reaches 80 (unless you are David Attenborough) all bets are off. The difference between a healthy 80-year-old and one who's 90 is pretty marked. I would never wish ill of anyone, but I think it's a little like tempting fate.

The Twat Guys

A day after we watched a comedy buddy action thriller, we decided to watch another one. It was not deliberately planned that way, it just happened. Now, let's park that sentence for a second and explore this: Shane Black is a fucking awful filmmaker and The Nice Guys is his joint highest rated movie and I'm pretty convinced he paid his friends to up-tick this film because anyone with half a brain would have realised it was a pile of shit. Tonally this is a film that purports to be a comedy but isn't funny and tries hard not to be a serious film and fails that test too. Now, we watched The Fall Guy a couple of years ago, with Ryan Gosling and it was execrable - this is worse. Someone needs to tell Gosling that whacky comedies with him playing idiots in the lead role doesn't work. Russell Crowe, who co-stars, seems to be in a different movie. This is dreadful and to be honest every time Gosling is on screen you kind of want him to get shot... This is because as well as being incompetent, he's also an arsehole and a shyster.

Essentially it's about the daughter of a bigwig in the Justice Department discovering her mother is on the take from car manufacturers in Detroit and who plans to not do her job properly, this leads to several deaths, of which the LAPD don't seem to even be in this film. The best thing in this is Angourie Rice as Gosling's daughter, who has more detective skills than the two detectives and pretty much solves most of the case while the two adults fuck about destroying things and watching people die. Shane Black should not be allowed near another movie; he's a massive cunt. 3/10

Just Say Uncle

Despite a good rating on IMDB (7.2), Guy Ritchie's The Man From Uncle didn't really feel like an homage to the 1960s espionage series; more like a musclebound attempt at making a superhero film without superheroes. Had it simply been an action spy thriller it might not have sat so awkwardly, but Henry Cavill has never made a good American and isn't Robert Vaughn, Armie Hammer (before all the controversy) isn't David McCallum and why was Alicia Vikander in this unless it was to supply extra sex appeal. Elizabeth Debicki is actually a good villain, but in general this was a bit hammy and not as enjoyable as I thought it would be. However, we did watch this film 10 years ago and the only thing I remembered about it was feeling slightly underwhelmed by it all. 6/10

Bewildered

Both the wife and I had a peculiar sense of Déjà vu when we watched the pilot episode of Patriot. Certain bits of it seemed so familiar, at one specific point she said to me, "Doesn't [####] push [xxxx] under a [***]?" and exactly that happened. Later, there was a kind of follow up scene and I remembered it totally. The strange thing is neither of us remember watching Patriot when it came out in 2015 and if we did we probably only watched the pilot, or maybe we didn't and we were having some kind of freaky moment.  

This highly rated series follows the complicated life of intelligence officer John Tavner, whose latest assignment - to strangely help Iran go nuclear while preventing it at the same time - requires him to forgo all safety nets and assume a perilous, non-official cover. Or at least that's how it's generally described on IMDB; from an opening episode standpoint it felt like watching a psychopath deal with depression problems while writing folk songs about his trauma. Either way it was a great start and if we did watch this pilot 10 years ago then let's hope we missed the rest of the two series because of an afterthought or an oversight.

There's 18 episodes in total and it gets even much weirder than the opener. It's essentially just a bonkers comedy about a depressed borderline psychopathic (oh, I said that already) CIA agent who literally will do anything to achieve his objective - there are so many LOL moments you wonder why it isn't a comedy. Watching Kirkwood Smith stand and deliver a speech about nonsense pipe manufacturing is worth the admission alone. However, if much of the dialogue is just surreal, there are subplots that leave you bewildered, yet engrossed. Honestly, track this down, it's utterly crazy.

The Wonder [Man] of You

There is something better about Wonder Man than I expected. The opening two episodes (reviewed last week) were quite weak and left me wondering if the series could claw its way back from such a mediocre start. But the third episode, where Simon returns to the familial home, with Trevor Slattery in tow, is touching and full of promise. This is followed up by the fourth episode which is in black and white and tells the story of Doorman, a man bestowed with amazing powers who becomes an actor, something goes wrong and we discover why super powered individuals aren't allowed to be actors. I think the most annoying thing about this series is how it gets progressively shorter with every episode, but that is offset by - and I can't believe I'm going to say this, but - how well Williams and Slattery work together on screen. I had serious reservations about Ben Kingsley reprising his role but the series has not been shy about his connection to the Mandarin and how it has followed him around as both a positive and negative.

In conclusion, all of my reservations were unfounded. I even think it might have made a half decent two hour film if they'd edited it properly and given it some extra oomph. I really enjoyed it and many of my own personal quibbles were addressed. What puzzles me is why Disney waited so long to release it and why they released it all at once. Yes, it was as thin on material as a Cher outfit at times but it was satisfying, if quite strange that it sits inside the MCU yet somehow is a standalone. Check it out, it's the best MCU series for a long time.

Dead Can Dance

There's this feeling you're watching an emo zombie film, or maybe a existential walking dead episode. We Bury the Dead is odd. It starts with the news that the USA has 'accidentally' exploded a new prototype bomb off the east coast of Tasmania and has killed 500,000 people. Daisy Ridley is an American woman who is flying to Australia because her husband was on Tasmania when the bomb went off and she wants to recover his body. But, there's now a twist, some of the corpses are coming back. Here's the thing, that isn't the only twist in this, there's a couple more - one that is gradually revealed as the movie winds its way to the conclusion and another you really don't see coming. I say one, because it's actually two but they're both along the same lines. It's more like an indie road movie at times and some of the creepiest bits are enacted by humans not the dead. It wasn't bad, but I wanted it to be more, in the end it's a slight tale and should not have a sequel, because it works well as a standalone. 7/10

Over and Fallout

The season finale of Fallout tied up enough things for me to never watch it again.

Closure

I like Brett Goldstein; he's a good writer and in Ted Lasso his Roy Kent was perfect. The problem he has outside of this is he can't act for peanuts. He's a dreadful actor who sounds like a man out of his depth trying to be a professional actor. That said, his role in Shrinking as the man who killed Jimmy's wife in a drunk driving incident has been pivotal to many of the important things that have transpired over the first two seasons. The fact that Jimmy and his daughter have befriended the man who took something valuable away from them has been one of the strange yet wonderful things about this joyous comedy series. While everyone else has accepted Louis (Goldstein's character), Gaby hasn't and this comes to a head in this second episode. I wonder if Jimmy will discover what happened in his kitchen between the two - these things rarely happen without a reason and Gaby's mouth often goes charging in when her brain doesn't want it to. Lots of other stuff happens, including lots of bare men's arses and Paul is still hallucinating.

Dodgy Geezas

So... Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a film we last saw in the 20th century and while it hasn't really dated - apart from the mobile phones - it did feel as though Guy Ritchie has remade this several times under different titles. It's your customary cross/double cross and then triple cross story balanced with incompetence, misunderstanding and mistaken identities. It's classed as a proper cinema classic now, but it feels incredibly slight for such a complicated tale. Obviously it's made as easy to follow as possible, but I found myself struggling to keep up with it after less than half an hour. I managed to get myself committed to watching again, but like last week's Snatch I struggled to see what all the fuss is about. It's essentially about four wide boys who enter a poker game that's rigged and end up owing half a million quid and how they go about finding that money from dodgy geezas they live and work around. Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Dexter Fletcher, Vinny Jones, Sting, and a bunch of others star in a film that I think has a bigger reputation than anything else. 6/10

The Doctor is In

This week's old MCU movie was Doctor Strange, which was an absolute cgi-fest of weird, wonderful and seamless effects. This is a great film and a moderately good adaptation of Stephen Strange's metamorphosis from arrogant surgical wanker to Master of the Mystic Arts. I have some gripes about the film, mainly to do with the Ancient One - and those gripes have nothing to do with Tilda Swinton. This was as much her film as it was Buffalo Custardbath's, but there was a reluctance (or refusal) to explore the Ancient One's life, despite some tantalising hints. I also had a problem with Mordo - Strange's bette noir in the comics, but in a watered down role in the film and the second post credit scene ended up going nowhere. Like other earlier MCU movies that we haven't watched for a while, I found lots of stuff that breezed over me in the first two times and Mads Mikkelsen's villain was more lightweight than I remembered and Dormammu's role could have been bigger. This felt like a Sorcerer Supreme film, whereas the sequel felt like a load of bollocks. 7/10

A Knight's Tale?

I actually watched episode three of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms on Monday night and while I'm warming to it I also completely forgot to write a review about it - which isn't an auspicious sign. However, with the Superb Owl or whatever it's called on this coming Sunday it was double Westeros bubble this week and the fourth instalment has won me over. At last something is happening and Sir Dunc the Tall appears to have a moral backbone that makes him are far more honourable knight than say the arsehole Targaryen who he punched and kicked in the face in episode three. The fourth part is all about knights and honour and fighting for what you believe in and it was head and shoulders the best so far and actually has me wanting to watch the next part, which, if I'm calculated correctly won't be reviewed until the week after next.

What's Up Next?

Death... Seriously, I've taken up exercise classes, every Friday, and my second one was this week and the work out was more intense than the first week. I thought I'd handled it well; thinking that maybe after last week my body was growing accustomed to parts I haven't used in decades being given an airing. However, as I write this I feel like I've been run over by a bus and I've developed another cough. Actually, it's the same cough, it just has peaks and troughs over the last six weeks.

Elsewhere... we suddenly have a lot of stuff to watch - TV and films, so I expect next week's blog will be full of interesting reviews and cutting remarks or it might just be the same old same old. We might get around to the Night Manager, there will be a new Shrinking, more Patriot and other stuff. I also expect there will be a Trailer Trash on account of this Superb Owl thing happening and that's a customary time for film trailers to fall.