My Cultural Life - Loads of Grief Dragons

What's Up?

I do wish people would apply logic to some of the nonsense they hear and believe. We're currently in a strange situation that I like to call Schrödinger's Russia - where the former Soviet Union is simultaneously struggling to win the war in Ukraine while likely to attack other, well-armed, European countries by 2030. How does that even work?

Apply some logic here; we've been told in recent weeks that Russia is now not winning the war with Ukraine; that the country is running out of money, food is scarce, the people are losing faith in Putin and they're beginning to seek a way out of the war that has lasted over four years. Yet we're also told that the UK has to spend more money on defence because NATO believes that in 2030 Russia is likely to attack the UK. What with? Empty food cartons and bad language?

Remember Edwin Starr? He was the guy who said, 'War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again...' Okay, 'War, what is it good for? Making defence contractors loads of money, shit loads of money; that's what it's good for and that's what is going to happen'. We're being gaslighted into believing that we're headed for a war that by the logic applied to the two narratives is going to happen but can't happen because Russia can't afford it...

26 years ago, the world was safer than it had been for a century, someone flies some jet planes into the Twin Towers and suddenly 25 years later we've got a warmongering leader of the free world and Europe is so scared that this orange Shitler won't help us we're having to forsake welfare and road fixing to ensure that we have enough weapons to fight a threat that simultaneously is and isn't there...

You couldn't make this shit up if it wasn't already made up. The largest corporations in the world are arms manufacturers and like our anything but philanthropic billionaires, they want more money to create more things to kill people and pile huge sums of money into the media to convince us that our freedom is at risk from a country that can barely afford to feed itself any longer.

A Comic Book Tale

Probably the film pick of the week (it's only Tuesday when I write this) has to be the short but almost perfectly formed People Places Things from 2015, starring Jemaine Clement, Regina Hall and Jessica Williams. It tells the story of a moderately successful graphic novelist whose marriage falls apart - without any real warning - and how he bounces back from it with the help of his twin 6-year-old daughters, one of his students (because he teaches to supplement his income) and her mother, who he ends up dating. It's genuinely funny, touching and awkward, with some great performances and a simple idea well executed. If this ever crosses your path, grab hold and give it a watch, it's really good 8/10 

Game of Tears

After last week's bloodbath, this week's House of the Dragon was all about grief and becoming queen of the world. It seems they've upped the dragon count in this series, the big buggers are never off the screen. Matt Smith goes around chewing up the scenery and Rhys Ifans makes a quick reappearance before being separated from his body. Again, the lack of empathy or interest in most of the characters means that I didn't really give a shit about any of them, nor will I as the series goes on, although I'm slightly intrigued by the Targaryen cousin who has managed to tame her own wild dragon and now hasn't got a clue what to do... 

Not Over

Welcome to Wrexham has been renewed for THREE more seasons, taking it through to 2029 and making me feel a little silly to suggest this would be the last. That's not to suggest there wasn't an air of finality about it, but perhaps I just misread disappointment as an ending. The finale of season five was about failure and took us full circle back to the end of season one when Wrexham missed out on a play-off out of the National League by one point. The biggest problem I have is because anyone who has watched this programme now follows the club's progress, nothing feels interesting when there isn't something to celebrate at the end of it.

Sweet Smells

Sugar is a joy to the eyes. A love letter to LA through a skewed lens and the eyes of an alien whose superpower is being nice to people. Colin Farrell is an A list actor who makes this 'hard boiled detective' series such a wonder to behold. As he searches for the brother of upcoming prize fighter Danny Moon, his search takes him to the seedier parts of the sprawling city, into a place where danger doesn't recognise nice people. Sometimes this show puts detective work in the background, but this week it really is the backbone of an episodes that ends with a massive shock and the question of how John Sugar is going to keep his secret if this pans out the way it should. Excellent stuff, the highlight of my week.

Over and Over Again

A film that has sat on the FDoD for almost a year is the 2025 lo-budget sci-fi thriller Redux Redux - a multiverse story about a vengeful mother travelling to different realities to murder the serial killer who killed her daughter. I've got to be clear about this movie; it has some dodgy acting, there are huge plot holes in the story - from how she manages to move the machine that transports her from one reality to another, to how come many years haven't passed given how many versions of her daughter's killer she's offed and the fact she has to wait a week to kill him to steal his wages to ensure she can continue to kill him... But, apart from those things and the slightly naff Terminator style soundtrack, it's actually not a bad film; it keeps you tuned in and it has an interesting twist, so all the faults tend to fade out. 6/10

American Nazis

It's funny how a film that's almost 30 years old can be contemporary and topical, but American History X is both. Made in 1998 and starring Edward Norton, it's the tale of a white supremacist who ends up doing time for killing two black hoodlums trying to steal his car and gradually discovers that his racism is misplaced, so on his release he tries to change his brother from following the same path as he did. It is a vile, violent and depressingly tragic movie that feels like little has changed, maybe it's even got worse in the USA. The acting feels a little forced, maybe the script is a little too polished, but in general it's a visceral and unpleasant high quality film. 7/10

Love and Grief

I was convinced less than ten minutes into Miss You, Love You that it must have originally been a play and while I haven't yet confirmed that by the end of it I was convinced it had to be. The reason is because it's largely a two hander about a women - Allison Janney - whose second husband has just died and the man who has come to help her through the initial process of the funeral - Andrew Rannells - who just happens to be the PA of her son, who won't be attending the funeral. It all sounds rather depressing and funereal, but despite the huge amount of words and exploration of the two principle characters' psyches, it's actually quite an entertaining film. This doesn't pan out the way you think it's going to and there's two stories behind the façade that we eventually learn about. What this movie really is about is grief, not just for a dead loved one, but also for a lost childhood, a failed romance and the sacrifices that are made to make other people happy, even if they make you unhappy through doing them. 6/10 

The Boss

This is going to be a short week because it's Quiz Night on Friday and therefore our week of viewing is cut short. To finish this week off, we decided to finally start watching the final eight episodes of the truly magnificent The Bear, and what an opening two parts we were treated to. The opener - just 17 minutes long [short?] was the aftermath of the final episode of season four - when the clock ran down on their time and uncle Jimmy's time ran out. This, like so many other of the season openers, was stupendous as Chicago is hit with a series of torrential rain storms that show up what a terrible state the restaurant is in from a building's point of view and while I know nothing about this final season, I can guess that this entire season is going to take place over just one day. 

As everything is ruined by the drains overflowing, Syd and Carmy have to try and come up with a way of keeping the restaurant going even though they have no money and Jimmy is going to pull the plug. The staff are all frantically looking over their shoulders as unemployment beckons and Richie - who has been involved in a car accident - seems to have become some kind of organisational guru and is the only member of the team who can see the light at the end of a shit-filled tunnel. As usual this is extraordinary television; arguably the best thing on the small screen.

Dragon Slayers

It's been ten years since Joe Hill's last novel (the execrable The Fireman), so I didn't have a lot of hope for King Sorrow, a book about an imaginary dragon brought into this world to deal, initially, with some bad people from the other side of the tracks. Unlike his father (Stephen King), Joe seems to shy away from prolific and for once having taken almost a decade to write this tome (it's almost 1000 pages long) it seems to have paid off, that's because King Sorrow is a cracking read. It's set in his father's universe, with nods to a number of his books from The Dead Zone to one of his short story anthologies. This story is set across 30 years of a group of six friends' lives and ties the dragon they summon to a number of actual disasters. It would be fair to say that much of Hill's writing is massively influenced by his father and that isn't such a bad thing; this particular story is split into five 'books' and each one is different from the previous in the way the story is told. It is the best thing Hill has ever written - but there was a very low bar, to be honest - and I think you can excuse the dodgy set up and the less than convincing conclusion, but you also have to realise that this is a story that not only has a dragon in it, but also trolls, magic swords, imaginary serial killers and a truly evil tech bro.

What's Up Next?

More of this offensive World Cup, that's for sure. Why offensive? Well, given how corrupt FIFA is and its seemingly obvious desire to ensure that as many teams it wants progress to the latter stages as possible, you can almost excuse all the new rules placed to hinder the game rather than progress it... Look, I hate any international football competition that has FIFA's grubby mitts any where near it. They should not exist; there should be a new world footballing organisation that has the best interests of the game at its core, rather than that Trump loving snake oil salesmen Infantino spouting as many lies as his 'good friend' the orange Shitler...

Anyhow...

The Bear will be concluded; there will be more Sugar (possibly a double bill) and more overwrought dragon nonsense. Our viewing will not be governed by the shite football competition nor the other people hitting balls around on grass with bats or rackets. RAH!

My Cultural Life - Sects and Drugs

What's Up? 

I get it that some people want to label Keir Starmer as the worst PM of modern times, but this appears to be based on his support of Israel and the banning of certain rights to protest and yes, this is awful and not what you'd expect of a Labour PM, but does that really make him the worst?

The economy is in a better place, some of the policies the Tories brought in have gone and we're in a dialogue with the EU about making life a bit easier for people and businesses - none of this would have happened under the Tories or will happen if Reform get in.

A friend of mine claimed what Starmer has done trumps [ahem] being responsible for taking us out of the EU (Cameron); Crashing the economy (Truss), or being responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths, taking the piss out of the nation while partying when the nation mourned the death of the then monarch's husband and being a fat, blonde, posh cunt (Johnson). We know (or at least most of us with a brain) that Israel's government is an evil, almost Nazi-like entity and supporting that is horrendous, but we have many politicians, the media and hosts of very rich people who also try and hide the truth of what that horrid country has done to its neighbours for over 70 years; singling Starmer out for just perpetuating this seems harsh and a little biased.

That said, good riddance to bad rubbish and be careful what to expect from the vaguely left of centre Andy Burnham. He is also a huge supporter of Israel (because they buy UK politicians like a kid buys sweets) and would still be classed as right of the party if this was 10 years ago. He needs to do some radical things, which will likely mean borrowing money, which will attract the ire of the media even if things start to look better for the average person. The media and the Establishment seem to relish the idea of having a corrupt authoritarian limited company running the country; presumably they want to see how far their 'social experiment' can destroy lives before consigning the Essex Fuhrer to the history books.

As the country swelters, forget about this nonsense from right wing politicians about having another General Election (oh the hypocrisy) and just hope that enough positive things are achieved over the next three years to stop the UK's march into fascism and even more despair. Just remember how bad Brexit has turned out for this country and remember that it was originally all the idea of the frog-faced cunt who wants to be the next PM...

Super Drug

If this week's film and TV consumption ends up being light on content, it's probably because we spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday watching the 2021 Hulu series Dopesick, about the heinous drug oxycontin. As someone who was prescribed this in 2014 after I slipped a disc, I can testify that it's a vile and horrific drug and I only used it for about four days and then spent almost two weeks to kick it out of my system. However, this eight-part mini-series follows the trail from 1996 up to when the DEA finally managed to nail the company for misleading the medical profession and the rest of the world with outlandish claims that were totally unfounded.

This is a superb series that examines the case from different angles over multiple timelines; featuring people such as Michael Keaton, Kaitlin Dever, Peter Sarsgaard, Rosario Dawson, Will Poulter, and Michael Stuhlbarg, it highlights the injustice and the lengths a pharmaceutical company went to make money, risk lives and give backhanders to stay beyond the reach of the law. It is one of the best mini-series I have ever watched and you should track it down.

Dragon Force

I've got to be honest, there's a degree of habit involved when watching House of the Dragon, I'm just not that into it, but I feel I have to stick with it and I'm not even sure why. That said, season three's opening episode was one of those parts that will have people talking because it was almost an hour of relentless stuff happening and the usual Game of Thrones type shocks and things going wrong. I've lost track of some of the peripheral characters; there was a woman warrior in it I had no recollection of whatsoever and those shocks I mentioned no longer have any real shock value. What happens over the next seven weeks will no doubt have newspapers and reviewers chatting incessantly about it, but to what ultimate goal? I feel this 'genre' of TV show might well be on the verge of outstaying its welcome and I'm not really expecting anything unexpected. The dragons are good fun though, until one of them goes a bit rogue... 

Super Spy

The football continues, so to avoid the England match (a dull 0-0 I was informed), we opted to start watching the first series of Jack Ryan (of which there are four seasons and a badly received feature film) starring John Krasinski. My initial impression was how young the lead looked, given his high profile film appearances in recent years. The first series follows CIA analyst and data cruncher Jack Ryan as he navigates the first week of his new boss, a guy with a huge chip on his shoulder, having been dumped into a sideways job after he screwed up on active duty in Pakistan (it might also be because he's a Muslim). One thing is apparent from the get go is that Jack - an ex-marine - is more suited to being an action hero than a desk jockey, although the latter comes in handy as he's on the trail of a new 'Bin Laden' who has been one step ahead of the CIA until Jack comes along. 

He Can Fix Cars

We like a good Jaysun Stayfum film, but I can't recall ever seeing one, at least not since the turn of the century, so expectations weren't very high when we finally got around to watching The Mechanic, a movie that felt as though half of it had been left on the cutting room floor. Stayfum plays Arthur Bishop, a hitman, who has to do a job he doesn't fancy and feels so guilty he takes on the victim's feckless son as his apprentice. The next thing you know the two of them are tracking own his employers with a rubbish truck and a bus. It was 93 minutes long; it could easily have been 113 minutes long and given us some back story, some context, some character development; but what it ended up being was facile and somewhat pointless. 4/10

What's Up Next?

Yes, that's it. A very shallow week and we have a shedload of stuff to watch over the next few days - The Bear, the finale of Welcome to Wrexham, the latest Sugar and maybe start watching Star City, so maybe now the weather has cooled off we can spend more time in front of the box, avoiding football. I also have my first solo quiz night next Friday, so I might be self-indulgent and talk a little about that.

As usual blah blah blah...

My Cultural Life - No Middle Ground

What's Up?

How long before the press get the knives out for Andy Burnham? You could argue that it's already started, what with the BBC ignoring his massive Makersfield majority to concentrate on racist and ignorant Reform voters. Could they not find any of the almost 25,000 people who voted for the ex-mayor of Manchester? Or did they simply choose to make you - the viewer - think that this was a bad victory?

The thing that makes left of centre Burnham different from, say, Jeremy Corbyn is Burnham belongs to Labour Friends of Israel - a little club of people who defend the despot country and will continue to 'work' with it even if the rest of the world has started to finally see what a largely psychopathic nation it is. So he might get a free pass for a while, until he starts doing things that affect shareholders dividends and corporate profits.

I also love the fact that you have Tories, Reform and other right wing parties demanding there be a General Election, when, if memory serves, the Tories in particular dismissed this idea when they appointed their weekly PMs a few years back. I say give Burnham the three years Labour has left to see if he can transform stuff and stand a chance of winning again.

Do I think he will improve things? Probably not, because our media would find a way to make even positive change look like it's terrible. I'll give you a hypothetical - he finds £17billion down the back of the Downing Street sofa and promises to have every pot hole in the country fixed and the work starts the following day; you can bet the Mail or the Express will complain that this money isn't being used for the people who need it most, without ever telling us who they think needs it most (unless it's defence, because we need more bombs to sell). You know it will happen because it happens all the time.

Incidentally, I still wouldn't vote Labour again - at the moment - but I think I'd feel happier about having a Northern PM who talks a good talk...

The Weather, Man

I mention further down in this week's blog about how the FDoD is not as blessed with films for us to watch as it has been in recent times. Looking for something new to look at, rather than try and decide which of the myriad of movies we seem to routinely avoid, I got hold of an old film and a brand new one. We opted for the older one - The Other Guys - and 15 minutes into it we both decided it was a load of shite, so we went for the new release instead. This was a film about a weather man, the one responsible for the D-Day forecast. It was superb.

Andrew Scott plays meteorologist James Stagg, the man charged with getting an accurate forecast for the proposed D-Day landings, which the Allies want to be on June 5th. Chris Messina plays his US counterpart who uses the past to decide his forecasts rather than science, much to the chagrin of the straight-laced and serious scientist Stagg. Brendan Fraser plays General Eisenhower, the man in charge of the Allies and the person who has to decide when D-Day happens. For a 100 minute movie that pretty much takes place in two rooms (it is based on a play), this was a tight and tense true story and is without a doubt the film of the week. You should seek it out, it's bloody spiffing, what, what. 8/10

Magic Moments

I'm obviously getting soft in my old age because I really enjoyed The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a 2013 Ben Stiller remake of the Danny Kaye classic. The wife had her reservations and was still not totally convinced, but I had been avoiding watching this for a long time and now I've seen it, I'm wondering why I didn't earlier. Stiller plays Walter, a mild-mannered man who works for Life magazine and spends a lot of time day dreaming about how his life could be much more exciting than it really is. Kristen Wiig is the love interest and Adam Scott plays the arsehole new boss, who gets on Walter's case because he can't find the final cover photo for the magazine - taken by Sean Penn's character. The interesting thing about this movie is that it starts off feeling like a post-modern remake of the original, but ends up simply being a good story of a man capable of doing more but hindered by his over-vivid imagination. This is an under-rated film. 8/10

Hungover

Time has not been kind to this movie. In fact, my memory of this was that it was a hilarious film and it was only a matter of time before we re-watched it and then indulged in the two sequels. However, The Hangover is something that has dated extremely badly; in fact, I'm amazed this has such a high IMDB rating (7.7) because it's fucking abysmal. I laughed twice, once early on and then once when it had almost finished, at a mildly amusing joke. This spawned two sequels (although I'm told 3 is really bad, so I should watch it just out of interest)? This might have well been a film about four strangers on a stag do for the amount of bonhomie there was on display and whoever said that Galifianakis was funny presumably had a bet on with someone... Four guys go on a Stag Do in Las Vegas and 24 hours later they're trying to remember what happened. Bradley Cooper - yes, that guy - should be ashamed of himself. 3/10

Field of WTF

I was about three quarters of the way through the concluding The Rose Field, the third book of Philip Pullman's Book of Dust trilogy and the concluding part of his sequel to His Dark Materials, when the wife asked me how it was going. "It's a cracking read, absolutely galloping along at a tremendous pace and with loads of nods back to forgotten and much-loved characters." I'm now thinking I shouldn't have opened my mouth, because what was all the things I described suddenly became an impenetrable limited number of words... I have no idea what it ultimately was about, why it existed and how Pullman managed to (or didn't, IMO) tie it all up inside 30 pages. There is a lot of allegory in this book, you can see that Pullman is having a sly dig at modern 'real' life through some of his sermonising, but I simply didn't understand the ending and felt it was a huge anti-climax. I was left feeling that, maybe, there was another trilogy afoot - but the author is 80 and it took him a decade to write this and ultimately I felt utterly let down by it all. If you've never read any of these books then there's little point in me recommending them and if you, like me, are a fan and you have read this, please explain to me what the fuck it was all about.

Daytime Channel Hopping

There's a world cup on and while there is the promise of some nuggets of sweetcorn in all this sporting diarrhoea, I'm getting to the stage where the Flash Drive of Doom (FDoD) is beginning to look like the scrapings of the scrapings of the bottom of the barrel. 

That means this blog is low on content - although I am now toying with the idea of not reviewing every episode of every TV show I like after discovering that some of my readers skip these reviews, despite me trying very hard to avoid spoilers. So, expect some changes once the sports are out of the way. 

This left me with an idea; write a section about all those TV programmes I'd never review or never actually watch more than a few minutes of; so I went channel hopping...

BBC1 - welcome to the social conditioning experiment, where the nation's broadcaster normalises things we should be raging against. Take Morning Live, a show I used to call Scam Daily or even People Are idiots. This is a programme that literally teaches us how not to get ripped off while simultaneously giving us guidance on how to live - if you can see the cistern then you're sitting on the toilet the wrong way. I'm gobsmacked that we're even getting TV like this in 2026; something akin to a huge daily public information film. The thing is while I doubt this show is aimed at Britain's poorest people - it's far too middle class - it does appear to be showing people how to live life for less money, how to save, how to avoid huge fees and how to accept less as the new normal. It's a hideous TV programme and it has bloody Helen Skelton on it, a woman who gives me hives.

BBC2 - during the day this station is all about news and we all now know that the BBC News is either too left wing or too right wing depending on who's watching it. The reality is when you have a news station (occupying a TV station) that is made up almost entirely of members of the Conservative party and a brief that is to scrutinise anything left of centre and breeze over anything that's right of centre then you know you're in for a political kicking. The BBC has a huge archive of programmes, I fail to see why they can't just turn BBC2 into a classic TV station until 6pm at night.

ITV(1) - does anyone watch this? Even when I'm channel hopping I rarely stay on channel 3 for longer than it takes the information screen to disappear. Quiz shows are, I suppose, the only reason this side is ever on in my house. It's not snobbery, I just find 98% of ITV's output off putting.

Channel 4 - Frasier... it used to be Friends. I expect in the future it will be some other 'classic' US sitcom. When it's not repeating something it didn't make it's got travel and property shows. Channel 4, like pretty much all other mainstream channels, is about as middle class as croissants. In the afternoon it's all about living somewhere else, like they're subconsciously telling you that elsewhere is so much better than here - then they show Brits living calamitous lives in countries where they refuse to learn the lingo...

Channel 5 - fucking Jeremy Vine and all the spin-off shows. Let's have a continuous stream of phone-in shows to highlight the fact the UK has so many fucking opinionated right wing arseholes, all being cheered on by that ghastly fucking cyclist. Not only should Vine be castaway on some distant planet, the entire day time output of this sleaze-infested channel of shite should be covered in petrol and burned.

Other Channels - have you ever wondered how some of you can have over 100 TV channels to choose from and they all seem to show programmes from somewhere else? Ignore the shit TV and concentrate on the adverts - everything from cheap cremations to 'Ronco' styled deals for everything from high powered anus washers to 'no strings attached' insurance policies that come with a free pen. If ever we needed a reminder why society is all about money now it's the adverts on the lesser TV channels. Everything has been monetised - this is why there's a clamour for more volunteering, because they only look for volunteers for things cunts can't make money from...

And breathe.

Spoiler Warning

So, the revelation that Jeremy Clarkson has had cancer was slightly ruined by it being plastered all over the news channels before anyone watched Clarkson's Farm. So I make no apologies for dropping that bombshell, if you didn't know then congratulations for not watching, reading or listening to the news. Given that Mr Geniality has made a couple of series of Who Wants to be a Millionaire since concluding this season, it would be safe to assume there will be a sixth series of his farming adventures and given he's had heart surgery and cancer in recent months, perhaps we might see a different Clarkson; one a little more tolerant and less Conservative (with a giant C)...

As for Clarkson's Farm, well it concluded (eight episodes in three weeks feels like Amazon was dumping it out there) with a couple of parts that were... well, frankly, tragic and devastating and none of it was to do with Jezza's cancer diagnosis. This was harrowing TV that was difficult to watch, had the wife in tears and made you feel real sympathy for the people who work at the farm. I've said for a long time that this is a truer reflection of British farming reality than anything Countryfile could offer and this proved it. Brilliant TV, but Jesus... it was heartbreaking.

Finale of Death

Widow's Bay ended in a truly disturbing way. Yes, there's probably going to be a second series and we should all be grateful - but if there isn't it still works as a standalone mini-series. The twist we all knew was coming was exactly as I forecast (not here) four weeks ago and it was joyously horrific. This TV series absolutely hit the right notes with its mixture of horror and absurd comedy, although the humour got drowned out a lot in the end, but was still lurking in the shadows. I can't recommend this enough. 

Trailer Trash

The new Spider-Man trailer has dropped and I've got to be honest, there seems to be an awful lot going on in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. There's the Scorpion, the Hand, Frank Castle, Bruce Banner, some ethereal villain, Spidey mutating, not a peep of 'Jean Grey' (if Sadie Sink is even playing her?) and tons more. Could it be senses overload with this? It's set in the city; no obvious big bad and there's a grittiness to it that reminds me of some of the early Captain America films, yet nothing about it is making me excited. 

Under-rated Gem?

I think I've been conned. I saw several reviews of a 1987 sci-fi action flick that all claim it's a great but overlooked movie. The Hidden isn't great, but it is a film, at least after a fashion it is. Kyle MacLauchlan plays an 'FBI' agent on the trail of a number of related serial killers with a penchant for fast cars, guns and women. Michael Nouri (no, me neither) is the cop he's teamed up with to track the wanted people. This is a film that has a cameo from Claudia Christian - pre Babylon 5 days - showing off her (arguably expensive and impressive) rack and giving them a good rub - yes, it was that tacky. I don't think I've seen a worse movie in the last dozen years. This is an absolute stinker about an alien chasing another alien across the planet, who happens to do so my inhabiting the bodies of people. It has a script that fell out of a donkey's arse; acting that would look bad in an Am-Dram pantomime and direction that stunk out the place. This is not an under-rated gem, it's fucking awful. 1/10

She-Punisher

Where to start? Maybe with the fact that Jennifer Garner can't really act or why was this film called Peppermint? Despite being quite an awful Punisher rip off (literally), there was some quite clever build up, but the acting was so poor that anything marginally good about this movie was lost in the fog of shite that descended on it after about 10 minutes. This is essentially the story of a woman (not called Francine Castle) whose husband and daughter are killed by members of a Latino drug cartel, so she waits five years, trains herself to be a one-woman-army, and then comes back to LA to kill everybody remotely linked to her family's deaths and all the corrupt officials who allowed the killers to walk away. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't very good. it was essentially the story of the Punisher tweaked a little and with a female Punisher rather than a man. 3/10

Tying Up Loose Ends

Next week is the season finale of Welcome to Wrexham. I firmly believe that two things will happen between now and next June. The first will be that Ryan and Rob will sell their controlling shares of the football club, stay on as emeritus directors and will be able to walk away with their heads held high and the fans adoration. The second will be that if Wrexham do not win promotion to the Premier League, there will not be a not be a sixth season - anything they film between now and next May will be shelved if the plucky little Welsh city doesn't reach the footballing nirvana. The reason for me thinking this way is simple - it feels like they're tying up all the loose ends at the moment; putting spotlights on people who haven't had the attention and continuing with the valedictorian theme I spotted last week. If this is the case then it was good while it lasted...

Sweet

I can't think of a better way to finish the next eight weeks than with an episode of the sumptuous Sugar. Colin Farrell is back as the benign alien private detective, now stranded on Earth and continuing to be a private eye, while driving in his classic car and wearing the sharpest of suits. Oh how I've missed this utterly stunning modern noir series. This new series is three pronged, by the looks of things, as John tries to track down the dodgy brother of a Korean boxer; keeps tabs on the senator whose son was the serial killer from last series and exploring whether he's the only alien left on the planet. There's little wrong with this series that I can see, it's also on Apple TV+ so it's another reason for you to watch it. Superb.

What's Up Next?

The final series of The Bear, the third series of House of the Dragon, more Sugar and more shite movies. Woo hoo!

My Cultural Life - Reimagining Stuff

What's Up? 

The World Cup is here. Woo and indeed Hoo. I've already had to field comments from disgusted football fans because I have no interest in this corrupt and stupid tournament, but this year feels different, perhaps it's the febrile and rampant jingoism of the current mood? I have not watched more than a small handful of games at a World Cup since 2008. I am not interested in international football and have been clear about this for 18 years. So if you think I'm a traitor, I've been one for longer than men under 30 have been able to ejaculate...

However, this year it seems to be different (and I'm not talking about my Scottish friends, who are at the competition for the first time since 1998). Several people I know have expressed dismay and, in one case, anger at my refusal to be interested in it. The thing is, it's not just international football that doesn't interest me; I feel nothing but contempt towards FIFA - the world governing body and massively corrupt organisation - and anyone reading this blog regularly will know that while I have many lovely American friends, I love their country, I just loathe the racist, redneck, entitled twats, who live there.

I've never really been that into international football and after Russia and Qatar my tolerance is so low that I don't expect I'll watch a single game this time around. I mean most of the matches are on when I'd be watching something else and that's how it will stay. Television and media seem bemused and confused that more than 50% of the nation are not interested, so the majority have to suffer this Trump riddled rip-off fest whether we like it or not. It seems to me that if you're not a fan of certain sports (football, tennis, bashing left wing politicians about their alleged antisemitism while ignoring The Clacton Fuhrer's Nazi salutes and crypto-crypto-fascist funders), you have no other options. Let's hope summer makes a reappearance, eh?

***Since writing this, we have discovered there are some good TV shows scheduled during the snorefest and the weather is going to stay shite in the UK, so my ambivalence levels are still very ambivalent. 

Modern Horror

Horror films are currently having something of a renaissance in the cinemas; everywhere there's a new horror movie that people are talking about. The thing is horror films are a load of bollocks because we live in a world where the supernatural only exists in our heads - ghosts don't exist and if they did what could they really do? 2026 seems like it's going to be a horrific year in more ways than one, and the first big 'scary' cinematic release was Hokum, a feature by Damian McCarthy and starring Adam Scott.

Scott plays an arsehole writer, who travels to Ireland to dispose of his parents' ashes in a place where they were happy - there's a back story about this, but frankly I fail to see how it impacts on anything other than why Scott's Ohm Baumann might be such an absolute cock. Within five minutes of arriving in Ireland he's insulted two locals and by the time he's settled into his hotel he's upset a bunch more. Then the movie goes off in a direction I didn't see coming and we're plunged into a strange mix of aged hippies, suicide attempts, murder cover-ups and is there really a witch living in the cellar of an old hotel? This is an atmospheric and, at times, creepy film that had a cast of characters you cared little or nothing for (except maybe Fiona, but [spoiler] Fiona doesn't last long). The problem I have with 'scary' movies is very few of them are actually scary and this was no exception. 6/10

The Young and the Old

What a delightful but devastatingly sad film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is. A truly wonderful movie that leaves you feeling like there's an empty space where your heart once lived. Brad Pitt is the eponymous Button and Cate Blanchett plays Daisy, the woman he keeps coming back to (and vice versa), in a story that goes from the last day of the First World War to the early 2000s. Benjamin is born baby sized but like an old man; he is riddled with arthritis, cataracts, wrinkles and like a very old man on death's door, but as time goes on he gets stronger, and then he gets younger. He is raised by a black woman in New Orleans, after his father, in a mad frenzy, dumps him on her doorstep, where she shows him genuine love. In many ways this film is like a post modern Forest Gump. David Fincher, a director who has made some truly disturbing movies, manages to make this a joy to behold rather than something that might be a bit... strange. I'd forgotten what a brilliant and deeply moving feature this was, with some awesome special effects. 10/10 

Just The Old

I had no idea that Going In Style was actually a remake of a 1979 film starring George Burns. I'm not sure it would have made any difference... Starring Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin, this is an updated version of how three old men decide to rob a bank; this time due to banks, corporations and the general shitness of the USA and the way it treats 'normal' hard working people (and how that is an accepted norm by the people suffering it). There are some genuinely funny moments in this movie, but it did feel frivolous, like it was attempting to be a feelgood heist movie. It was all right, but it was nothing I'd be looking at watching again. 5/10

The Madness is Strong

Over a year after acquiring it, we finally watched Bugonia and that means you don't have to and I don't have to watch it again. This is a simple tale of a raving mad conspiracy theorist - Jesse Plemons - and his simpleton cousin who kidnap the CEO of a company because they think she's an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. Most of the film takes place inside Plemons' basement as the now shaven headed CEO - Emma Stone - tries to convince her kidnappers that she really isn't an alien trying to destroy the planet. It's a generally slow paced slightly bonkers movie (oddly enough a remake of a South Korean film from the 1970s) until the last fifteen or so minutes when it becomes just bonkers. I didn't enjoy it, but I was distracted, so there are extenuating circumstances. 5/10

Have You Seen the News?

I said to the wife the other day that I wish I could just cut the news out of my viewing and reading habits. It's simply too depressing and I no longer trust it to reflect what normal people want or feel - it's always slanted with an angle and that angle feels politically motivated.

Take this unfortunate case in Belfast - the Somalian refugee who stabbed an Irishman or the murder of that Nowak lad, by a British-born Sikh, who obviously had issues. At the same time as these things were reported, a Manchester school girl stabbed to classmates and a teacher and it barely made the news; in fact there were several murders, lots of stabbings (also non fatal) and lots of rioting that gets less coverage because there were no brown people involved or there wasn't a Jewish person connected to it.

We don't need the tin pot Führer from Clacton to stir up racial tension when we have the BBC and all the right wing newspapers doing it for him. It's the news media driving the Zack Polanski is anti-Semitic narrative, despite him being a gay Jewish man opposed to the Zionists in Israel. It's the news that fuels the hate in the hearts of the intellectually-challenged and it will be the news media that 'guides' the ignorant to electing a government this country definitely doesn't need.

I remember Martyn Lewis - an ITN newscaster - bemoaning 30 years ago that there was too many negative news on the news and how it would be nice if we had some Good News every so often. Now, we have 'consumer' programmes that just add to the rhetoric; we have entertainment programmes that seem to be made to deliberately enrage the hard of thinking and we'll soon live in a country where third generation black and brown people will be wondering how long it will be before some Reform supporting Musk financed flash mob will turn up on their doorstep demanding they leave the country and go back to where they come from.

If you haven't got a foreign sounding name and look like a WASP you'll be safe - for the time being - because once all the reasons for this country being so shit have been deported, the gammons are going to have to blame someone else for it not getting any better and the news media will be there, pointing at gays, disabled, single mothers, lefties and people who aren't flying a Union Jack on their houses...

The Last Descendent

Apparently, Widow's Bay is a water-cooler TV show. It's one of the most successful shows Apple TV+ has had in recent years and the Guardian loves it... Usually, that would be a big red flag for me, but I was watching it before the newspaper I've grown to dislike latched onto that bandwagon. Widow's Bay is great and the penultimate episode saw the island go into emergency mode as a north-easterly storm is about to hit it with almost hurricane force winds. There is the usual mix of comedy, but the horror is dialled back a touch because there are other heinous decisions that need to be made, especially when the curse of the island can finally be broken. This has been a quite excellent series and is highly recommended. I'll soon be able to make a long list of reasons why people should receive Apple TV+ by whatever option they choose.

Jezza's Farm

This week's double bill of Clarkson's Farm had many LOL moments, also some rather squeamish bits and the usual 'farming is really a nightmare' scenarios. These were the reasons why this show has been so successful, rather than the sermonising and gammony bollocks that Jeremy comes out with from time to time. There are some joyous moments and some really unpleasant things - which I saw coming and I don't know fuck all about farming. The crispy fried squirrel didn't go down too well though...

Old Customs

Legends is a Netflix series about how HM Customs & Excise broke the back of some of the worst heroin dealers in the early 1990s. Tom Burke, Steve Coogan, Hayley Squires, Charlotte Ritchie and a few others are the people on the outside trying to be close to and infiltrate the people on the inside. It's gripping stuff and while some of it has been changed for dramatic purposes it's still well worth a watch. It's a six part series, set in London and Liverpool - with excursions to Turkey, Pakistan and Germany - and while no one expects this to have an unhappy ending that doesn't mean it isn't filled with jeopardy. The makers have also captured the early 90s really well.

The Valedictorian Episode?

I have a suspicion that this might be the last series of Welcome to Wrexham. Given the team didn't achieve promotion and another season in the Championship probably won't have the same appeal to casual fans, I wouldn't be surprised if they just quietly shelved this, at times, truly excellent documentary series. The reason for this belief is how this sixth episode seemed to be focusing on all the great players and names we've got to know who aren't at the club any longer, or are no longer there in the same capacity. Take Humphrey Ker for instance, this director has spent less time at the club over the last 18 months and was eager to talk about his diminishing role (almost like he was being forced out). It just felt like a look back at five glorious seasons (because they don't get promoted at the end of this one) and all the great characters who were part of those years. It was a strange episode to have with very little focus on the side's rise to the play-off positions and that, to me, felt like the tying up of certain loose ends... 

I think Wrexham will be sold in the next 18 months. Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac will ensure that whoever buys it will keep the onus on the town and the people who have followed the adventure, but neither of these Hollywood stars have the power, the money or the skill to turn Wrexham into the team they dream of. They both might retain honorary positions, but I think the club is now worth a shed load of money...

What's Up Next?

The TV show with lots of mumbling and dragons is back next week and four days after that's back The Bear's final season drops. There will be some TV during the World Cup, we're just going to have to search for it...

And the usual stuff...

My Cultural Life - Rinse and Repeat

What's Up?

You might not have considered this before, but if you hold a placard up criticising the Israeli government for committing genocide, you are more likely to be thrown into prison than if you incite a riot.

There has been little or no outrage at the twat who ponces about as our would be UK Führer inciting people to 'show their rage' at the unfortunate bad policing of an incident in Southampton, while two US academics, who both oppose Zionism, are banned from coming into the country, because they might say something that offends.

Double standards? Nah, double standards is no longer something that even ruffles the feathers of politicians and their groupies. We live in a world (not just a country) where the people are angry and getting angrier, mainly about things that either don't affect them or are unlikely to. Everything is shit, from the roads to the price of food, energy and fuel to the fact that ignorant morons are still happy to blame everyone but the people responsible.

Our would be UK Führer is a lazy, corrupt, racist who is also a very dangerous man. He has somehow elevated himself to a position where whatever he does his supporters believe it's a left wing conspiracy to besmirch his fine name and wondrous words. The thing is, when the right wing media do the same to any politician who isn't a right wing cockwomble, the same morons lap it up. Zack Polanski, he's just a Jew hating Jewish gay man who wants to tax everyone, ban your wood burner and drive all the rich people out of the country. Our would be UK Führer can be as racist as a member of the KKK (or Donald Trump) and he's being misquoted, taken out of context, said these things when he was a boy or, in many cases, has about 15% of the country complaining that he doesn't go far enough in his hate speech.

We're fucking doomed and like in 2016 it's going to be because of the idiotic turkeys who vote for Christmas. What a sad world/country we live in now; where shysters and billionaires dictate the message and cretins believe every word. I just feel sorry for the people who will suffer because of this shift towards an idiocracy...

New Life!

The season finale of For All Mankind did something the previous nine episodes failed to do. It reminded me why it's my favourite TV show of the 2020s. It was seat of the pants television that left us guessing right up to the ending and... boy, what an ending. The sixth and final season, set in 2020 and beyond, looks like it could be very strange indeed. This season concluded with the war on Mars being resolved, but not before some tense stand-offs between all sides and some nasty decisions that have to be made to save peoples lives. However, Mars has always been the secondary story even if it's taken up the most time; the real story has been Kelly Baldwin on Titan and whether her 20 year search for extra-terrestrial life would be resolved. It is and that's no spoiler, because we always knew she would, it's the circumstances around it and the kind of life she discovers that opens a can of worms and sets us up for a final season that could blow our minds. This was one of the best episodes of this truly groundbreaking alternate history show...

The Arms Race

As we race towards the season end of Your Friends & Neighbours there are still a number of unsolved mysteries; such as who kidnapped Coop at the end of the previous episode if it wasn't Owen Ashe? Where has Ali disappeared to? Will Coop and Mel get back together? And how the hell are they all going to get out of the latest situation after an apoplectic Ashe goes on the rampage with a gun, after really saying some stupid things. I actually said to the wife at the end of this episode that we almost didn't bother watching this show, we only did because it was on Apple TV+ and had Jon Hamm in it. We're so glad we did.

Anyhow, what a season finale it turned out to be... An episode I didn't see coming (and I'll bet no one else did). Talk about downbeat and depressing; this wasn't a finale to uplift your mood, this was a slow pot boiler of a continuous cliffhanger. This was setting pieces in place so that the domino effect would come along and wreck the lives of these comfortable rich arseholes. Those unanswered questions I mentioned in the earlier paragraph? Well, they weren't resolved but are left like hanging question marks over Coop's life (apart from Ali's new home, which Coop bolts for when it gets too tough). This was unexpected and extremely good; roll on next season.

Only Reconnect 

We've been watching the reruns of the earliest Only Connect quiz show - from 2008, on BBC4, from when Victoria Coren was a mere slip of a thing (and wasn't as attractive as she has become in later life). This was before Egyptian Hieroglyphs and really clever people. There's a plodding feel to the hardest quiz show on TV and back in 2008 it was absolutely bloody ridiculously hard and obscure. Great fun watching it though.

Spider-Ham

I struggled to find the love for Spider-Noir. It's one of the best looking shows on TV, the reimagining of classic Spidey villains is really good - all linked to mad German scientists - natch - and I just couldn't seem to like it. Maybe it was Nick Cage's casting - hey, just because he voiced the character in an animated Spider-Man film doesn't mean he has to play the character on screen. The wife enjoyed it, but I think she ended up thinking it was a bit of a one trick pony, with dodgy dialogue and even dodgier plots; she like me struggled with Cage playing a superhero 25 years his younger. The other problem I had with it was the fact it was trying to be a smart-mouthed comedy, in the wise-cracking Spidey way and it was just a bit cringe. I expect it will get a second season, I suspect I won't be watching it...

Hide and Yawn

I dunno... Maybe sometimes I'm just hard to please. When we watched the original film - Ready or Not - it was silly, slightly stupid and quite original. I think I gave it a 6 or a 7 out of 10. The sequel - Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is possibly a step too far. Samara Weaving, who survived the first film where she had to survive until dawn or become the prize of some devil worshipping family, is back this time with Kathryn Newton as her sister as they battle four families who all want to become Satan's ruler on earth. This was very silly and despite a relatively short run time and some interesting actors - Sarah Michelle Gellar (looking old), Nestor Carbonell and David Cronenberg - still got a bit boring after a while. It just wasn't necessary. 5/10  

Grey Areas

Guy Ritchie's In the Grey is quite a complicated set up; it's about retrieving dodgy money using legal and illegal means. It stars Eiza González, Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal and plays out like a post-modern rendition of the A Team. It's 100 minutes of lots of scenes, some of them done in a show and tell way, others as a straightforward narrative. It's entertaining and while it's not lightweight, in terms of subject matter, there's a triviality about it. It was better than chopping my own genitals off with a rusty blunt spoon. 6/10

Back On the Farm

Jeremy Clarkson is back with his usually extremely educational Clarkson's Farm. The one good thing about this series was its focus on the plight of British farmers; yes it has lots of staged stuff to entertain the stragglers, but generally it does more for farming than say Countryfile does. So season five kicks off with two episodes that highlight what an arsehole Clarkson is - in case you'd forgotten - and the show has now veered dangerously close to jingoism. It has all the usual buffoonery but maybe it's because of Clarkson's health issues or just that he's a miserable old git, but there was an element of 'Do you know, I no longer care about this guy's woes' for me. That's a shame, this has been a good programme and to be fair, the second pair of episodes (3 & 4) were much better - one was extremely educational, about the future of farming, while the last of the first four to drop focused on Clarkson's biggest emotional fuck up so far - buying rare breed pigs and having to have them slaughtered because they simply are fit for very little in the food chain. 

However, the wife made a very good point about this - if you follow the chronology of the TV series, the pigs were obtained in year two, we're now on year five - how come he's only finding out now that the meat is fit for sausages only? Is it possible that some things happen earlier than they are depicted  in the show because of the way it is made, edited, put together, etc?

Friday the 13th, Part?

Thinking that having killed off the 300 year old man, the island and town of Widow's Bay seems a much less threatening place, everything seems fine again until someone notices that a murderer's mask has gone missing from the museum. As the Mayor, played by Matthew Rhys, arranges to take his son off island and to a Red Sox game, Patricia, the assistant mayor, is being stalked through the streets by a masked slasher, who looks straight out of a 1980s horror flick. The mayor's son finds stuff about his mother that comes as a surprise and Wick (Stephen Root) can't be everywhere at once. This was back to being quirky and sinister. Great stuff.

What's Up Next?

I did watch other stuff this week. Welcome to Wrexham among them; the thing is however I reword my reviews, something like this tends to be... much the same format so much the same to say; so what's the point? If you watch it my reviews are moot; if you don't it's just something to skip over. I'll revisit the show at the end of the season.

Anyhow, the coming week is likely to be a bit thin on the ground. In fact the coming six weeks is going to be dominated by the fucking World Cup and I don't watch international football.

Whatever... 

My Cultural Life - Disappointed

What's Up?

Nothing. I have nothing to talk about.

Why I Hate America Part 214

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

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

Born To Die

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

Road to Bollocks

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

Widow's Peaked?

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

Corn-Fed Spider

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

Pain No Gain

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

Hanks' War

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

What's Up Next?

Whatever happens, that's what.