My Cultural Life - Before the Reformation

What's Up?

Why so glum? Is it anything to do with the rise of Führage? Are you looking at the English council elections and worrying about the future, for yourself and those you love? Well, fear not, my friends and regular readers. All is not lost, at least it's not lost if the people take notice.

The gains made by Reform UK Ltd™ do make grim reading. However, if you've taken any notice of what's happened at council already controlled by Reform UK Ltd™ you will see just how badly they are doing and what a right royal cock up their wannabe Nazi councillors are making of having a little bit of power. These are, after all, mainly racist Tory voters mixed with racist Labour voters who don't like brahn people.

Reform UK Ltd™ do a bad job at running councils and their councils have no reflection of their party politics - they can't; Reform UK Ltd™'s USP isn't covered by councils.

We just have to sit back and hope that the media point out just how badly Reform UK Ltd™ are running councils and before long you'll be growing tired of Führage's pointing the finger at everyone else and blaming them. You will start to wonder what this mob would be like if they ran the country rather than just a county council out in the sticks.

Local politics is a different beast, but not different enough for people not to equate the chaos Reform UK Ltd™ brings to the party and what Führage wants to do to the country. This is good, because we have three years to see just how bad they are; three years of other parties pointing and laughing at the weekly soap opera that these 'politicians' bring to the table. Three years is just enough for people to go 'What the actual fuck?' Enough time to educate people and for them to learn... Yes, I know this is remarkably optimistic for me, but it's also very feasible - Reform UK Ltd™ has nowhere to hide, any longer. They have to deliver and what they deliver won't be less immigrants, because councils don't do that.

It could be a fun ride. Don't give up, just yet.

Everyone Loses

Does it really matter what happens at the end of Daredevil: Born Again? If the MCU is really going to end and a new one reborn in its place, there's likely to be a new Matthew 'Daredevil' Murdock, a new Karen Page, a new Foggy Nelson and a new Wilson 'Kingpin' Fisk. A new twist, with younger actors, in a new direction. Or at least that is what should happen after all the upcoming Avengers movies. We might see one more appearance by Daredevil in the Spider-Man film this summer and that will probably be it; so the final part of this excellent, but at times slow, series was full of revelations, psychopaths, karma and fantastic realism - not realistic, just more real than fantasy. There is the feeling that there's unfinished business, some of the loose ends feel like a blue touch paper has been lit rather than a chapter closing and maybe a third season before the universe goes pop wouldn't be a bad thing...

King of the World

Everything has been leading up to this point. All of the episodes of The Boys since it became a lot less interesting has been about Homelander becoming all important and that essentially happens in an episode that I saw coming almost from the start. The 'to kill the king, first you must make the king think he can't be killed' phase has been entered and that's what the next two episodes are going to be about as The Boys fail spectacularly in their mission to stop Homelander from locating V1 and becoming immortal. All that's left is some loose ends and the downfall - either by an allergic reaction to the drug that makes him god or by something stupid, probably accidentally started by the Deep. Two more weeks to go and then we can forget all about this nonsense.

Taking it Up the Gary

An unexpected TV treat! Something that came out of nowhere to brighten up our televisual experience! A bonus episode of The Bear subtitled Gary about Richie (Ebon Moss-Bacharach) and his cousin Mikey Berzatto (Jon Bernthal) on a road trip from Chicago to Gary, Indiana to drop a package off for 'Jimmy'. It's Frank Castle and Ben Grimm On The Road - what could go wrong? On paper it looked like a no brainer - two great actors, a fantastic series and a chance to find out more about Carmy's dead brother, Michael. However, after the near hour long special all I could think was 'Why? Why did they bother?' It's just an hour of shouty banter, mucking about and pain - because there's a Berzatto involved and mental anguish and paranoia go hand in hand with that family. This was dull, uninspiring and really pointless; even the reason for the road trip was essentially because FedEx were on strike. A wasted opportunity and a wasted hour of my time.

X-Men: Dark & Stinky 

The wife had a Saturday night out with the girls, drinking cocktails and eating fancy nibbles, so that left me alone in the house (apart from three dogs), with a couple of beers and the chance to inflict X-Men: Dark Phoenix on myself, because she didn't want to watch it again. This is a movie that has a 5.7 rating on IMDB, not the worst Marvel film ever, but obviously one of the worst; maybe this is because Sophie Turner - who plays Jean Grey - is about as good at acting as I am at ovulating. The thing is, however bad Turner's 'Marvel Girl' was it wasn't helped by a script and storyline that could have been written by a blind dog with half its brain removed. This is a truly dreadful film and should serve as a warning to Disney about how awful the X-Men are as a visual concept. In comics it works, on film it stinks to the rafters. However, if you can get past the shonky story, the bad acting, the confusing character arcs and the way the X-Men go from heroes to zeros in the space of two minutes, this is a bang average film. It maybe wasn't as awful as I remembered it, but frankly, I didn't remember it. 4/10

A Game of Lies

I was quite surprised at how many Leonardo DiCaprio movies I haven't seen. Some of them we'll probably never watch, but there are quite a few of the others that I simply missed out on. Body of Lies is one of them; the story of an American CIA agent in the Middle East - post Iraq War - trying to track down an Osama Bin Laden type Jihadist. It's a complicated thriller about the USA inventing a new terrorist - using a legitimate and unaware Iraqi architect - to flush out the guy they really want. Russell Crow plays Leo's boss - an arsehole who cares nothing for the people who do his bidding and Mark Strong - as the head of the Jordanian Secret Service, who cares about the safety of Leo because he trusts him as a person, add to the mix. It's maybe a little harsh at times, occasionally a bit turgid, but I was distracted for half the film by the events in a football match I was following. 7/10 

Angel is Bollocks

FFS. I have to stop doing this. After a couple of months, we decided to watch the third of the Gerard Butler trilogy about the President's bodyguard, after Olympus and London, this time it was Angel Has Fallen - a movie shot almost entirely in Bulgaria and Hertfordshire, supposedly set in the USA. This was a spectacular load of shite. It felt like a badly made Straight to Video film from the 90s and I actually said out loud towards the end 'Is this ever going to fucking end?' It's about Butler being framed for the attempted assassination of the President (Morgan Freeman), despite it looking totally like a set up. Awful. 2/10

Brilliantly Ridiculous

My dear friend, Phil H [yes, I know how that looks] asked me the other day if I'd ever reviewed Lucy and I hadn't; simply because it was last watched before I started my regular reviews blog. Therefore, I decided to watch it again, so that I could give it a review. What an absolutely bonkers movie it is; almost from the opening scene to the ending, it's a feature designed to blow your mind. Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a rather below average fun girl who gets roped into dropping off a suitcase full of an experimental drug to a violence happy Korean crime lord, who then decides to use her as a mule. Unfortunately, the drug - derived from foetal DNA - leaks into her body and starts a chemical reaction that allows her to use more and more of her cerebral brain; effectively making her a superhero and then a god. It's largely just a crazy idea that isn't always developed or delivered as well as you'd like - it is great fun though. 7/10

Zzzzzzzzz

I've never seen Barry Levinson's 1996 movie Sleepers and now that I have I probably will never watch it again. This sprawling story tells the lives of four good Catholic boys, who through a stupid prank end up serving time in a boys' correctional unit and are changed forever by it. It later picks up their story when they're older, as Brad Pitt's lawyer and Jason Patric's journalist hatch a plan to expose the correctional facility and the guards who worked there, in a daring court case that risks everything. The thing is, even with Robert De Nero, this was as dull as washing up water and remarkably superficial for a film that goes into some detail and still doesn't deliver. I suppose it needed to be made. 4/10

The Wake

Last week's Your Friends & Neighbours ended with a shocking thing and this week the aftermath of the shock is played out, mainly in Coop's folks' house. It's a very good episode, possibly one of the best of the entire show. It perfectly encapsulated what a 'funeral day' is like if you're connected to the corpse; it does overplay the familial tensions, but in general as a 'snapshot' section it's almost perfect. There is also a minor revelation, which the wife saw coming almost immediately, but kudos to the excellent Jon Hamm for being almost perfect for 40 minutes. 

Do the Hag

I wasn't completely sold on Widow's Bay after the opening two episodes, but this week I think I bought the farm. It's a clever little thing, something that balances humour with horror almost perfectly and while there were still plenty of intentional and unintentional LOL moments, there's a distinctly creepy undertone appearing, which suggests to me that while funny stuff will continue, the tone of the 'horror' is going to be ramped up. This, so far, has been a great addition to our weekly viewing and this week is all about a curse from the sea.

One Giant Leap

Man sets foot on Titan, a moon of Saturn! Set six months after the last episode, Sojourner has arrived at its destination, but things are looking bad and they might have to abort and go back to Mars without achieving their mission. Meanwhile, back on Mars, the breakaway government is struggling to both feed and keep everyone happy, six months after they set up an interim leadership and despite the threats from Earth. Dev hatches a plan to wrestle back control of the planet, but it goes disastrously wrong, meaning the situation has become impossible to guess. While on Titan, we could be about to witness the most incredible schism in mankind's belief system ever. This was one of the better episodes - despite the dance scene - of this season of For All Mankind.

What's Up Next?

This could be another short week because of possible plans. I'm going to a pub quiz on Wednesday - attending not presenting. The wife and I have split the team up; she's joining the reigning Phil's Quiz champions - making them pretty formidable, while I am joining Jones and her team to try and ensure they don't finish last. I've given myself an underdog role, because I will still want to win, so it's pitting me against them and I'm up for that - a shot to nothing if ever there was one.

I was going to review Stephen King's Never Flinch in these pages, but I feel so ambivalent about it, I wasn't sure if I'd praise it to the hilt or eviscerate it. I really like the Holly Gibney character and here she's placed in a situation that King does consummately and there's some elements of an older book by King, which I cherish as my favourite book of his, but it just falls a bit flat. It's all foreplay and no orgasm, yet it has the ability to want to keep you reading. Oh look, I've just reviewed it...

More of the same, maybe something different, always on a Saturday.

 

My Cultural Life - The One With the Ginger Wig

What's Up?

The Media can no longer be trusted. I'm aware this is a statement that could be applied to the media at any time over the last 15 years or so, but in 2026 it has finally crossed a line and has become a problem not a reporting medium.

The easy ride the Tories got for 15 years, the demonization of the Labour Party over the last two years, the lack of scrutiny regarding Reform UK, the general ignorance of the Greens or the LibDems - the media wears its political affiliations on its sleeves.

However, it's the overreactions to certain events, not just by the media but by politicians and interested parties that has destroyed any credibility the media, in 2026, might have hoped for. 

I have a staggering figure to share with you. In 2025 there were 14,577 knife attacks in the capital, that equates to more than 40 per day. How many of these knife crimes made the national news? However, at the end of April, a mentally ill young British Somalian, with a history of violence - to any and all nationalities and races - stabbed two Jewish men in Golders Green (an hour after stabbing his Muslim best friend) and we've had wall-to-wall coverage about anti-Semitism, Jewish people frightened to leave their houses and the PM - whose wife is Jewish - denouncing this 'epidemic of anti-Semitic violence'... 

You might remember when famous communist anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn was castigated for everything from not wearing a tie properly to not bowing enough at the Cenotaph. The media has a bug up its arse about conflating everything with anti-Semitism. It's like they have an agenda...

Do me a favour. Not only is this over-inflated hyperbole, it selectively ignores a huge elephant in the room. What it also does, in a strange, off-handed way, is accept that the attacks on British Jews - whether that's physical or in the form of pro-Palestinian marches - has been caused by the actions of Israel in the Middle East. In a strange way, this reminds me of the fly tipping problems the country has at the moment - lots of handwringing and questions asked about who and what is being dumped in fields across the UK, but never asking WHY it's happening.

Fly tipping happens because councils no longer supply easy access council refuse sites. If you want to get rid of rubbish, you have to jump through so many hoops and over hurdles - and pay extortionate fees - so unscrupulous people dump their rubbish illegally. With British Jews, there's much discussion about who and what is being targeted, but no discussion about why it is happening. Oddly enough, the why is exactly the same as why followers of Islam are targeted.

Except... in this Golders Green case, there's a very good chance that the perpetrator could have attempted to stab anyone that got in his way. If he'd stabbed two hipsters in Shoreditch would we have had the kind of coverage we've been subjected to?

I do not class myself as anti-Semitic; my paternal grandmother was Jewish (alienated by her community because she married a gentile) and the closest I've ever got to being racist is having a very poor opinion of many white British people, occasionally calling them fascists or Nazis. So this isn't me jumping on the Hate Jews bandwagon; this is me looking at all the available information and how it has been conflated to suit a narrative that supporters of Israel and its Zionist government want you to be thinking.

I condemn any violence against any race or religion, but I never see the media giving a voice to Muslims when they face abuse on a daily basis. I don't see the police force issuing warnings about future problems when it involves Muslims being racially targeted. Fewer than 4% of the UK population is Jewish - yet given the coverage they get you'd think that was 40%. 13% of the population is Muslim, how often do we see Muslim hatred make the news, let alone be the lead story?

What I will say to people who are targeting Jews is many of them do not support Israel. Rational people don't blame the Asian guy running the local Indian restaurant for Jihadist activities, so why target a Jewish person for the crimes of Benjamin Netanyahu? That's like blaming the cow when your milkman doesn't deliver your daily pint. 

Unfortunately there is genuinely another agenda at work here. One that gets people like me being accused of unpleasant things. This agenda is simple, there are many friends of Israel all over the world and they have a lot of money and influence and this is often reflected in what we see on the TV, hear on the radio or scroll through on our social media feeds. These people dictate the narrative and anyone challenging that is an extremist...

Adventures in Babysitting

Surely the frontrunner for film of the week - maybe even the month - has to be the 2014 Bill Murray vehicle St Vincent. The story of a misanthropic Viet Nam war veteran and the friendship he forms with a 10 year old kid whose parents have just divorced. This really was a gem of a movie and one I'm surprised I'd never heard about. It also stars Melissa McCarthy as the mother, Naomi Watts as Murray's pregnant lap dancing Russian hooker friend and a lad who is now known as Jaeden Martell as the boy - Oliver.

Murray's Vincent is up to his eyeballs in debt, his wife is in a care home suffering from dementia, he lives like a pig and the only thing he seems to care about is his cat, but scratch the surface, enough, and this grumpy old bastard has a heart of gold and teaches Oliver more about life than his bickering parents have managed and gradually as the film unfolds, the people who think of Vinnie as this waste of space old git start realising that he might be the saint Oliver thinks he is. Bill Murray has always been a favourite of mine but his output in the 21st century has been... different, and this certainly was. 8/10

Back in the USSR

In For All Mankind, the Soviet Union still exists in 2013 and while it is still essentially an authoritarian communist state, it is also capitalist through and through. The first of this week's double bill looks at Margot's former boss, the second in command of the KGB back at the turn of the century. It also expands on the mysterious first murder on Mars, the revelation that Dev was one of the people behind the automation of Mars and the civil unrest on the planet comes to a head, as we're left with a cliffhanger ending.  

The wife has found this latest season a bit underwhelming and I know what she means, but this is probably down to the fact that most of the original cast have been reduced to bit parts, cameos, flashbacks and deaths - it has been over 50 years of time passed since the series started. 

However, as we caught up with the series, something dawned on me. Where the first four series were all about - BAM - in your face events, this one has been far more subdued and close knit, almost claustrophobic. The latest episode showed how the people who have made lives on Mars are desperate to stay there and how they have everyone against them. We've seen brief mentions of the International Space Network - the rival faction to the M6 nations (the countries who have invested in Mars' infrastructure) and I believe they will play a big part in the concluding episodes. Slow burner is how I'd describe this series; yes, it hasn't been as good as the seasons which made this one of the best shows on TV, but it's still better than much of the rest.

In Too Deep?

The now extended episodes of Your Friends & Neighbours spent half of the episode at a Passover party for some of Coop's Jewish friends, which also acted as Sam's (Olivia Munn) return to being accepted by the snobs of the neighbourhood. Coop's ex wife, Mel (Amanda Peet) is the only person who has a problem with this and she's been told to 'get over it.' Owen Ash continues to give Coop grief, this time about not investing $400million in a super hedge fund fast enough, while simultaneously dangling his blackmail video in front of Coop as leverage. Torrey, Coop and Mel's daughter continues to confound her parents (and the viewers, tbh) as she seems to want to give up everything they want for her.

The latest episode is essentially all about fucking, or at least it is for some of the cast, for others it's about being fucked and for Coop it's a bit of both. This was all about excess - a look into the lives of people who made Your Friends & Neighbours look poor in comparison. It was also about Mel's struggle with the menopause and her feelings of being betrayed by Sam - who was her best friend until she fucked her ex-husband and then tried to frame him for the murder of her oafish husband. All of this pales into insignificance because the ending is a real kick in the crotch.

Extinction Event

You might remember a month or so ago, I was talking about starting to watch the Netflix four-part series The Dinosaurs, narrated by Morgan Freeman and containing some questionable special effects? Well, we finished it and while it was entertaining it was also quite facile and superficial. I appreciate it was about dinosaurs, but it skirted evolutionary processes, other life on earth and huge swathes of time to try and make a 'natural history' documentary and I think it only just succeeded in creating entertainment. 

I said to the wife halfway through the third part that I felt like we were getting fleeting highlights of a world that existed and we claim to know more about every year, but is still an interpretation - not that I would expect anything different. I just didn't think this one felt... plausible. I don't think even dedicated palaeontologists can comprehend what it was like 200 million years ago. It would have been interesting if we'd been given an insight into what dinosaurs evolved from and why and how long between [object A] becoming [object B] and why this happened. If mammals and dinosaurs existed at the same time. We know evolution exists, but to our feeble minds and the timeframe they sit in; 'evolution' is just a catch all description for something that changes over HUUUUUUUGE periods of time and sometimes it might be nice if they filled in the gaps, even if it's just more theories.

Absurd Nonsense

Sometimes, I see a film, look at the IMDB rating and think, "It's a 6.5, with 8.5K reviews, it can't be that bad" and I watch it and then almost immediately regret that decision, but I don't just turn it off and start with something else - like I should. They Will Kill You falls into that category completely. Zazie Beetz plays a woman who goes to a building, faking herself as a new employee, but to save her sister from what she thinks is something nefarious. It turns out that she's trapped in a building with people who cannot die and are protected by Satan. There is enormous amounts of blood and guts, but it's quite preposterous, stupid and stylised and quite ridiculous. It was another poor choice of movie entertainment. 4/10

Improbable Bollocks

I don't know. I seem to wander into watching some shite films at the moment. I suppose the good thing about that is, if you believe me, it saves you watching them. In this case, it's another film where a prized and excellent actor is no longer the star he once was and has been reduced to playing hard men and psychopaths. Jake Gyllenhaal used to be in some great movies, but his star waned and he's been in some stinkers in the 2020s, none more so than Ambulance, which he co-stars with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (or Wonder Man as we've recently seen him) and Eiza Gonzalez, about two brothers who rob a bank and then hijack an ambulance to try and make their getaway. This film is over two hours long when it should have been 90 minutes max, but they - actually director Michael Bay - somehow manages to spin it out for almost an extra hour. It is faintly ridiculous and Gyllenhaal is shit as a psychopath. 4/10

Sacrifices

In a surprisingly revelatory penultimate episode, Daredevil: Born Again wasn't one of those scene setters but a part full of surprises and dangerous confrontations and not everyone gets out alive. Matt gives Bullseye a job to do, which will see the downfall of Fisk, while he comes out from his undercover to defend Karen at her trial for essentially unAmerican activities. There's some more of Heather Glen, a character that seemed to be vitally important to this show in the first half, but has become a peripheral character and something of a fifth wheel - will she have a moment in the finale, or was she just a red herring?

Psycho Messiah

Homelander is God is now a thing and it's starting to get difficult for Firecracker and her own religious beliefs. This dedicated follower of Homelander must forsake Jesus for her new master and that bothers her. The Boys this week was all about supporting characters and what is happening through their eyes. It was cleverly done and yet felt as though it was treading water. I've been here before, but Daredevil is so much better at this kind of thing and never feels like it's going through motions to eke out eight or nine episodes. This needs some... oomph injecting back into it, because after last week's interesting episode this felt like the same old same old - that is until the end, which surprised even me.

Spooky Island

I don't really know if I can even hazard a guess as to what Widow's Bay is going to be about. The new Apple TV+ show is billed as a comedy horror, but could probably be called a lot of other things. Matthew Rhys plays the mayor of Widow's Bay, who seems to hold the town and its people in some disdain, but is also trying desperately to put the place on the map. There are secrets about the island and stories about the people. Old newspaper headlines are surreal and often hilarious, but... we didn't get much of an idea what the show is going to be about other than it's going to be quirky. We have another episode to watch, so hopefully that might shed some light onto what we need to know.

The second part is really all about a challenge Matthew Rhys has to accept, when he dismisses the stories about the local hotel being haunted, so he spends the night there to prove he knows best. What happens might be able to be explained away by fungus or it might be something more... spooky. All I can say is this is a show that channels both Stephen King and Scarfolk County Council, it's weird but very funny.

The Ginger Wig

If you've never seen Samuel L Jackson in a tight ginger wig, then you get your chance in The Negotiator, a 1998 film that was so far-fetched and overwrought that it could have been a pantomime about hostage taking. The opening ten minutes seemed okay, but as soon as Jackson started to be framed for something he clearly wasn't responsible for, you had to start wondering whether the writer of this film was ignorant or just thought that the viewing public was. Jackson is a 20 year plus veteran of the Chicago PD; he's a hostage negotiator, great at his job and loved by all his colleagues. For some reason (and trust me, there are loads of 'for some reason' moments in this) he is able to be railroaded from hero to zero in about 30 seconds and the real question is 'how many crooked cops are there?'

So Jackson, in a tight ginger wig, does what any sane person would do, he takes a bunch of people hostage, asks for Kevin Spacey to negotiate and there's loads of shouting, hard stares and things that made no sense at all. JT Walsh - in his final film - gets killed, like he seemed to in almost every movie he made and David Morse is so strange you don't know if he's crooked or just a gung-ho nutter with a fixation for killing first and maybe asking a question later. This was rubbish and I feel like I'm on a roll with shit films. 3/10

What's Up Next?

And what a week that was - some shit, but some sweetcorn poking out of the shit... I was looking at the huge list of films we have to possibly watch and I'm not too hopeful that there's going to be much I'm going to get excited about. I suppose, the crappier the film the more chance of a funny review, but it doesn't always work like that...

In other news... Oh yeah, I promised myself I'd avoid that subject for the time being, so there is no other news. Next week will be the first full week of May and summer's over already. Take nothing for granted.

My Cultural Life - Short & Stinky

What's Up?

Welcome to the shortest My Cultural Life ever. It's been a week where TV took a back seat. Except, it didn't. There's stuff I don't review - the staples of our week's viewing; stuff that I do not consider writing about. There might not be much of it, but if I was to include writing about the news, Pointless, the occasional Tipping Point or stuff like Landward and Scotland's Home of the Year then I'd get bored writing this thing, so who knows what you'd think?

However, something on the news caught my attention and it's put something of a bug up my arse. How come corporate crime is more important than just crime in general? Let me explain; one of the things people have been moaning about over the last decade is the police's inability to solve crimes, or even be available to pretend to solve crimes. How often have you or someone else been given a 'crime number' and pretty much been told "this won't be solved, contact your insurers"?

It's frustrating, especially when we see masses of police officers arresting old people who oppose the genocide of Palestinians, but not one when we need one, it starts to feel like a bad joke. So imagine my surprise when I found out this week that the police are clamping down on Firestick users and suppliers. Apparently large amounts of resources have been allocated so that police can a) track down and prosecute people supplying Firesticks and b) will then target people who bought them and are getting their streaming platforms for free.

Many of you might feel this is a good use of police resources and I'm not about to argue with you about that. What I will say is I think the UK police focusing on stopping people from getting US subscription channels for free is like the police giving a pensioner a parking ticket while a bunch of schoolchildren are murdered in front of him. It proves that we are totally in a world where individuals mean far less than organisations. I don't see the police hunting down BBC licence fee dodgers, so why should they be doing this at the behest of the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Disney? 

I don't have to worry about this because Firesticks are slightly pointless for me, for reasons we don't need to go into, but while I don't believe in victimless crimes, I do think that if you're getting something from Amazon for free then fucking go for it because they have more money than God and pay very little in taxes...

Spider-Crap

I remember reviewing The Amazing Spider-Man when it came out in 2012, rebooting Sony's Spidey franchise. I also remember disliking it immensely and oddly enough, watching it again, years later, I still don't like it. Everything from the lame story, to the trying to make it more of a mystery and the awful special effects, the ones which make the Lizard seem really substandard and Spidey's aerobic antics look more like a 2012 computer game than believing a man came swing on webs. I vaguely recall preferring the sequel to the reboot (which we will rediscover soon enough), but this is a slight story that retells 'emo' Peter Parker's origin and conveniently wedges Gwen Stacy in as the new love interest. One of the major problems is that both Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone look like high school happened over a decade ago for them both and Rhys Ifans isn't a good villain. This is the worst Spider-Man film. 5/10

Spider-Crap Too

No, this is the worst Spider-Man film. Everything that was bad about the first Andrew Garfield Spidey movie was amplified in the second one. This had awful villains, a continuation of the Parker parents subplot, that really felt like more was made of it than anyone thought possible, and more wisecracking from emo-Spidey, that works in the comics, but falls quite flat on screen. Jamie Foxx's Electro is woeful - a mentally unstable black man working for a corporation that treats him like shit, and a very deranged and confusing Dane DeHaan as Harry Osborne, this time reborn as some foppish wanker who would never have been friends with someone like Peter Parker and yet is somehow, despite not having seen each other in years. Fucking awful superhero movie. 3/10

Practically Bollocks

Sometimes, I have to ask myself why I subject myself to certain things. In this case watching Practical Magic for what I'm informed was for the second time. Apparently I'd watched it about 28 years ago and as I don't remember, I wondered if I hated it as much then as I do now? In 1998, Sandra Bullock was top billing next to Nicole Kidman - fancy that. Stockard Channing (who hadn't yet become First Lady) and Dianne Wiest, play the two aunts, who also happen to be witches, in a story about cursed love, unintentional magical deaths, unsettled spirits and bigotry. It's essentially a romcom that isn't very funny, not very romantic and isn't spooky. There's going to be a sequel later on this year, I'm taking bets as to whether I watch it or not. 3/10

The Hate Boys

Billy Butcher leads The Boys into the heart of Fort Harmony, where the original superheroes were created and also where there might be some of the original batch of V floating about. They are soon followed by Homelander and Soldier Boy and all of them are walking into a trap. This, peculiarly, was almost like a standalone episode and it benefited from it. The place they're searching is haunted by one of the original heroes and he feeds off of the hatred that people feel. There is also another perfect chance to kill Homelander off, but yet again, he walks away to proclaim himself God. Annie visits her father and lots of home truth are said. Almost a reasonable episode. 

Hell's Kitchen

The aftermath of last week's surprise ending spills out into the streets as Wilson Fisk casts caution to the wind and decides to shut the city down and hound out the vigilantes and their supporters. As we fast approach the finale, this week's Daredevil: Born Again has some shocks - such as an appearance from Jessica Jones and Karen and Matt falling out over how this all has to end. There was a lot going on and yet it still felt like a slow dance until Daredevil and the Kingpin come face-to-face again. With two episodes to go, everybody is in a shit situation and it looks like no one is going to win.

Political Bollocks

Robert De Nero, Dustin Hoffman and Anne Heche are the main actors in the 1997 political satire Wag the Dog. A film I thought I'd seen before, but am now convinced I haven't. This I find illogical, given who's in it and what it's about, yet after watching it I find myself strangely unimpressed. It had funny moments and was absurd yet totally believable, but... Anyhow, when the incumbent POTUS is implicated in an under age sex scandal, it's up to De Nero to come up with a smokescreen story to knock the allegations out of the mainstream press. The USA gets involved in a war with Albania and Hollywood producer Hoffman is the man to 'produce' this 'war' and sell it to the public. Maybe it was the fact it could be true that helps the film lose it's impact or maybe the current POTUS makes satires look old and dated, either way I can only give it a 6/10 and that's at a push.

What's Up Next?

Double For All Mankind and Your Friends & Neighbours, because this week is a quiz week. Plus we seep closer to a conclusion in The Boys and there's the penultimate episode of Daredevil: Born Again - which I think is going to have a surprise ending. 

Hopefully, my choices in films will be better.

As usual...

My Cultural Life - Time Zones

What's Up?

I've been having anxiety issues for a few years now. It comes and goes, usually depending on the time of year or how much stress I'm under, but it has been something of an enigma, given that I've not been happier than I have since I moved to Scotland. I think a bunch of things probably set it off, the most obvious one being the pandemic in 2020, although I didn't really start having serious issues until 2023 when I pretty much had a full on breakdown...

I used to be quite dismissive of agoraphobia - a symptom of anxiety - but I think that was because I didn't understand it, despite having had a bout of it in the late 1990s - also due to stress and anxiety and probably all brought on by that bastard ex-employer of mine, who made my life something of a living hell (and is still alive). Now, agoraphobia is something that is the most prominent product of my anxiety and something I'm slowly beginning to understand, maybe even deal with.

I went to the doctor's in the September 2022 about my growing anxiety issues, but then that serious chest infection that led me to being rushed into hospital happened and everything got thrown into confusion and I had a couple of years of medical professionals treating the symptoms and not the cause. The thing is the pandemic led me down that 'I don't feel happy in places I don't feel in control of' path and that's not a control freak thing, but a COPD thing, because I irrationally panic in situations I can't control my anxiety in. This was amplified by Covid. Again, it's now something I'm beginning to deal with, but it's been a long old process.

Why am I telling you this?

Partly cathartic and partly explanatory. It has been noticed that I rarely socialise now and yet people who attend my pub quiz would probably be hard pressed to think there was anything wrong with me at all. Like many mental health issues, it's something I've learned to hide well. The stupid thing is I'm fine when I get wherever I'm going, it's the getting there and then getting back bits that I struggle with. I also could do without finding situations stressful, especially when there's nothing to get stressed about, or stressing about situations where I have the chance to dwell on worse case scenarios. 

The mind, eh? Can't live with it, cant live without it...

Is There Life on Titan?

The first post-Ed Baldwin episode of For All Mankind started with a dedication to the show's principle character and then featured a guest appearance from his old space partner and adversary, while introducing us to Gordo's granddaughter and the chief subplot of the series. There was me thinking it was going to be about discovering life on Titan (a moon of Saturn), but it's actually going to be the survival of the Mars colony and whether or not Ed's own grandson - born on the red planet - will be able to survive. There's still a feeling of understatement about my favourite TV show, but it's finally taking shape and Aleida's arrival on Mars, after a 40 year wait is a very interesting thing.

The Future of AI

Just before the opening credits rolled on Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future, the wife said, "Oh shit, you're going to be screaming at the telly before the end," as the show opened with Grayson chatting to a woman who had married her chatbot. The irony is that within a few minutes, she was shouting at the television about the world being full of fuckwits. However, this wacky start was a prelude to 45 minutes of some quite scary ideas and a wee bit of relief, as AI becomes extremely powerful, but has limits to its capabilities - at the moment - which might take a lot longer to master than the experts hoped. Perry is a knowledgeable and amiable host and this is a must see show for fans of dystopian sci-fi...

Double Crossed

As Coop (Jon Hamm) reels from being caught red handed by Ash (James Marsden), he's given a dilemma - retrieve what he stole or face the consequences. This sends Coop down a path in Your Friends & Neighbours he doesn't really want to, but has to and when he finally gets what he needs, he discovers he's not been double but triple crossed. Meanwhile, Coop's business manager has some new found energy since discovering what his client does for a living and Coop's daughter goes full on 'anti-mom' mode and moves in with her dad, much to the annoyance of her control freak, menopausal mother (Amanda Peet).

Legal Eagle

It's been about 25 years since we last watched Erin Brockovich and I'd be honest by saying we'd forgotten what a great movie it is. The story of a woman who essentially was on the waste tip of humanity; two former husbands, three kids, loads of debts and no chance of getting a decent job, who somehow gets a job in a law firm as a legal secretary and then discovers that some of their clients might have a Class Action against a power supplier in California. It's all about her relentless work in the face of discrimination and people looking down on her because of her appearance. It won Julia Roberts an Oscar and she absolutely deserved it. 9/10

Cream of Bailey

Bill Bailey's Thoughtifier, his latest comedy offering, is a mixture of hilarious and tedious, but that's probably just me. I find Bailey a very funny man who has waned with older age, but I've always struggled with his music. Yes, he writes and performs funny songs and his musicianship is remarkable, but I like my comedians to be comedians and I always get the feeling that Bailey is a repressed rock musician who would have been equally as happy in a prog rock band as making people laugh. This hour long special is good, but I think it was poorly edited and we well may have missed some of the more surreal and funnier bits.

We Are All Slaves 

I've often said that we have never seen a bad Matthew McConaughey movie and as we close in on seeing almost everything he's ever made, I can add The Free State of Jones to that list. It's an excellent film, but it does nothing to quell the feeling that the USA is just a giant lie dressed up as a democracy. The slave trade is a difficult period for any normal person to get their heads around; how we as a human race can imprison and force other humans to do whatever we want and if they don't acquiesce then we can punish them as we see fit. White Americans, especially those from the southern states, have a history that will rarely be looked back at fondly by anyone with a working brain. The MAGA movement, led by that Orange Racist in Chief, might want to return the USA to a period in its history that is abhorrent, but for all their power, at present, there are still filmmakers out there who show the country up for what it was - a barbaric, psychopathic and intolerant society that is anything but the land of the free...

This is a story that starts with the desertion of a Confederate officer who has realised that the Confederate army is being run by rich powerful Americans who were not putting themselves at risk, but getting poor, innocent people to believe in a world they had no real place in. McConaughey plays the deserter, Newton Knight, a man who has to hide with escaped slaves because there is a bounty on his head. He rallies his friends and other deserters to fight back against the corrupt Confederates and for a while they not only succeed but are at the forefront of the end of slavery and the birth of the freedmen. However, as Knight's story unfolds, we are treated to chunks of more recent history and a court case from 1950, where a descendent of Knight, who might have been one eighth black was imprisoned for marrying a white woman in Mississippi. As a historical 'document' it's tough watching; it's a great movie, but it will leave you angry and bewildered that the USA paints this fabulous picture of itself, but is really one of the worst places to live in the world if you are not white and privileged. 8/10

The PI Stakers

There is a team at my monthly pub quiz called the P.I. Stakers and I didn't know it was a reference to someone from the film Hot Fuzz. The reason for this is I've never seen Hot Fuzz. The team were amazed, given I write a column about films and I knew Simon Pegg (casually). So, on Monday night, we watched Hot Fuzz and I wasn't very impressed. It was okay, nothing special. I laughed a couple of times, but generally I found it tedious, predictable and exactly how I'd imagined it. There's not much else I can say about it really; if you've seen it you know what it's about and if you haven't my advice would be not to bother. 4/10

Mission Improbable

James Mangold's Knight and Day is essentially a piss take of Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible films. It might not be dressed up as such, but with Cruise playing a flippant, slightly sociopathic, version of Ethan Hunt and getting himself into all kinds of situations with dodgy, double-dealing baddies, while also having the best looking woman around, the comparisons were always going to happen. The problem with Knight and Day is it just isn't in the same league as the movies it's attempting to parody. Cruise plays Roy Miller, a CIA agent seemingly on the run from his own people who 'recruits' the help of Cameron Diaz and subsequently puts her in danger. It rushes around a lot, does clever things 'off camera' and generally makes a good fist of a comedy action thriller, except it isn't very funny and a lot of the action happens 'off camera' so what you get is style over substance. It's entertaining without ever being much more. 6/10

Yawn!

Is it superhero fatigue? I doubt it because I'm really enjoying Daredevil. So why am I finding The Boys just tedious now? That's a tough one to answer with any conviction. It might have been Gen V and the fact, at some point, the wankers from that are going to turn up in this. Possibly it's the fact it has gone on for so long now that the actual aim of the story seems like it has outlived its stay - there have been a couple of occasions where Homelander could have been killed off, but here we are, with him going even more insane and yet becoming less threatening. This week some stuff happened.

Yay!

I have a soft spot for Daredevil. It's a comic that for years plodded along with no real direction and then a couple of writers - Frank Miller and then Ann Nocenti - did something different with it and the essence of that took root in Netflix's Daredevil series and now in Marvel's Daredevil: Born Again. This week was the aftermath of last week's boxing match with the WTF ending and much of it was told in flashback - utilising that Marvel de-aging technology they used originally in one of the Iron Man films. As Matt tries to get Bullseye safe from the AVTF, Fisk paces hospital corridors waiting for news of Vanessa. There's a sense of dread all through this and there's even a little subplot that keeps you guessing all the way to its conclusion. This is quality TV and far more entertaining than that The Boys shite.  

Drive My Cars

After watching Hot Fuzz I fancied watching another Edgar Wright movie, because I do find him to be a reasonably good director. That film was Baby Driver, something I'd avoided seeing, mainly because I felt it was going to be a different movie than it turned out to be. Ansel Elgort plays Baby, he's an actor I'm not familiar with but he does a good job as the slightly damaged kid who can drive a car like a pro. Supporting him included Jon Hamm, in a role that was a real change to his usual, Eiza Gonzalez, Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx. It was a really entertaining feature with a banging soundtrack, but I felt it was let down by the ending which I found a little disappointing, but I suppose it was the only place they could go. 6/10

What's Up Next?

More of the usual and probably less as well. I'm off to the pub tonight for my impending birthday, where I will be 64 and humming a Beatles tune. Then this coming Friday I have another pub quiz and you never know what's going to happen on the other days, especially with a reasonably warmer weather forecast.

A Matter of Taste

I see the irony in having no taste. Even before the Coronavirus robbed me of my ability to taste pretty much anything that isn't spiced up to the eyeballs or made entirely of sugar.

It was just about three years ago when my only bout of Covid 19 didn't kill me, like I had feared, but just hung around like a really bad cold for about a week - then the aftermath because of my other underlying health conditions. The thing is my ability to taste and smell obviously disappeared when the virus hit me; you could have shovelled any old shit into my gob the first couple of days I had it, not that I was eating much, bit I didn't notice it until the memory of things' tastes disappeared.

The first time I really noticed it was when I couldn't smell a flower, but the wife could. Over the next couple of days it was a realisation that I didn't think for a second would be permanent that made me feel okay about it. It wasn't like there's anything I could do about it. "Doctor, I've got no taste." "You need a fashion consultant not a doctor. Now stop wasting my time with trivial things." It's not a thing medicine really knows how to treat, as far as I can ascertain from reading up on it. 

Anyhow, it's actually something you learn to live with - seriously; you know which foods will allow you to taste something and I like eating. Salads work particularly well, because of the different textures (and salad dressing). It's the loss of smell that has been both a blessing and a curse. Apart from not being able to smell food, or when it's burning - which opens the door to a much more horrible scenario; I can't smell spring, or summer or autumn even winter, cold clean air is lost on me, senses wise. Flowers, perfume, herbs, petrol - nope. Diesel smells like burnt camphor; because I do smell somethings, although 'smelling' is maybe more a sensation that lingers, if you can imagine that. I have anosmia, parosmia and euosmia, these being changes to way things smell, nasty and nice. 

The blessing is things like not smelling the collective arses of the inhabitants of the house, mine included. I don't smell farts. I can't smell shit - which opens the door to a much more horrific scenario - and therefore I can't smell rotting things or gas, but fortunately I can smell smoke, but not as you do. It's smoke to me but it smells of something that I don't remember smoke smelling like. Most unpleasant odours you all suffer, I don't. I don't think the wife would let me leave the house if I personally  smelled, so I'm coping with it...

Sometimes it comes back. Don't get excited. If the sense returns, it's for maybe 20 seconds and then it's gone. I can smell a rose, sometimes, but once it registered, it's like it's locked out from then on. So it's a mixture of pleasure and crushing realisation, because I miss it. 

But, you know, this is supposed to be an upbeat piece about the irony I mentioned right up at the top is that I have no taste. I have been accused of having lousy taste, questionable taste, if you can think of a derogatory taste example I've probably been accused of it and my artistic tastes have avenues which most others find unfathomable. And I've been told I have no taste. 

I've never been quite sure what that specific accusation actually means. The 'sense of taste' search doesn't really deal with 'that' taste. I type in 'I have no taste' and there's nothing existential there.

As I've gotten older and I hope a little wiser, my tastes, whatever they are, are not things I shy away from. Each to their own, but get a laugh from it if you can. 

The taste I'm talking about are things like music, film, art and anything else you would include. I've been accused of having no taste and to be fair I don't really understand the term because of course I have I just have tastes that don't suit some people. It's actually a personal slight whether benign or humorous, not an all encompassing suggestion - chacun à son goût, as the French say.

Once at a pub quiz, a guy who is a few years older than me, said, "I listened to that record you put on Facebook. What a load of rubbish." And then he burbled on about some other things I'd put up, basically saying he thought my music taste was shite. I find it quite funny now. I'm eclectic. It's great.  

I spent ages working and reworking this original closing paragraph, however I did it felt like I was saying to you that having no taste is a thing that makes me sad. It doesn't. I hope it comes back, I suspect it won't. Like blood pressure tablets, inhalers and other meds I take to keep me young, it's something you learn to live with. I could be dead, I wouldn't taste fuck all then!

My Cultural Life - Time Waits For No Man

What's Up? 

Me. That's what's up. I was looking at Facebook memories last week and it being April, six years ago we had that thing called lockdown, where everything stopped and we avoided each other so we wouldn't die. It was a bit like WWII except without bombs and fewer Nazis. I posted a lot on Facebook, much of it humorous or poignant. One thing stuck out for me, one of my family suggested I write a novel and I admitted, honestly, that I simply didn't have the inclination or motivation to sit down and write anything...

The thing is, I wrote a novel (my last) about 10 years ago now. It was called The Imagination Station and it was about a sentient mushroom and the small Leicestershire village it took over. The wife read it and I've never looked at it again. Back in January, I decided that 2026 was going to be the year that I opened up my 'In progress' folder (a misnomer if ever there was one) and either dump stuff or do something with it. I even contemplated looking at the seven or eight novels I've got first drafts of and trying to do something with them. But it's now April and I didn't do any of those things...

I'll be 64 in eight days and I think I've had an interesting life, so far, but I do have this nagging regret that for someone who has written so many words, professionally and in blogs or everything else I've written, that I haven't become the widely published author that I said I was going to become way back in 1980 when I wrote my first 'novel' - incidentally about a young man with such amazing abilities that he was almost a god (I was reading a lot of comics and had just discovered Stephen King). I found that in the loft when we were moving nine years ago and it's now about four feet away from me (and hasn't been looked at in nine years).  

When I say 'regret' that isn't really what I mean. probably more angry and pissed off with myself that I have the discipline to write this blog every week, write quizzes (not the same thing, but you get the drift), emails, diatribes on social media - usually in comments sections where I'll be lucky if a handful of people bother reading and yet I can't sit down and develop any of the countless ideas I've had over the last nearly 50 years, or go back and do some turd polishing. 

This isn't going to be an opening monologue that ends with me declaring I've written or am going to write a new novel - that's not the case here, because over the last few years I've had fewer ideas than I used to have and even fewer of those ideas have actually made it to the 'word processor' and all of them have never been followed up. I have only myself to blame, it's not like I'm working or anything. I suppose this is more of an if you want to do something and you find yourself with time then don't piss and moan about not achieving things kind of thing; because, you know, time waits for no one so you have to seize the day.

Not the End

Shrinking finished. What I thought was the penultimate episode was, in fact, the finale (because episode one was actually episodes one and two). It became clear very quickly that this was the finale because Alice went off to college. Paul was already in Connecticut and Gaby asked her Derek to marry her. Jimmy discovered that Sean had moved out and everyone's lives were sorted apart from Jimmy's. He was nursing his wounds and feeling lonely and alone; his argument with Paul bothered him, his daughter leaving was killing him and he realised he still had a lot of work to do. There was a genuinely poignant and lovely ending, in two parts, one of them expected, the other not so much. And it was over and I felt a pang of loss; it had been such a great show, despite all the lovely wealthy people living their best lives and being impossibly happy and funny... except just before I sat down to write this, I discovered that it had been renewed for a fourth season, despite everything I'd read suggesting this was it. I am happy, because it's a great show, it will be interesting to see where it goes now the cast have all gone their own ways. 

Back in Town

The Boys are back for a final season and I think it's just about outstayed its welcome. It started off really good - a great contemporary superhero series that went the extra mile in terms of pushing the envelope, but after the crap spin-offs and the meandering shite story lines of the last couple of seasons, I don't really care what happens to it now. I'd like it to conclude and we can all move on to whatever comes next. Homelander now runs the USA, the Seven are just a front for Vought and a lot has changed in the year since season four's finale. Billy Butcher has reassembled the team, with Starlight in tow, for one last attempt at stopping the rise of the superheroes, by using the virus that was created and now is apparently strong enough to kill Homelander. It's full of bad language, bad taste and bad choices and even the death of a major character in the first of two parts, that dropped, hasn't really done anything to make this any better.

Plus, I have to mention Erin Moriarty - aka Starlight aka Annie January. What the actual fuck has that woman done to her face? Her eyes, nose and mouth are almost completely different shapes; there have been countless rumours about her having had plastic surgery and other cosmetic work and even if she hasn't (which I don't believe) it hasn't given her the acting ability she's been missing since she took on the role. Whoever has been advising her about her appearance needs drowning in a pool of their own vomit. I really don't want to seem like I'm being sexist or judgmental, but she looks both wrong and awful...

On the Bullseye

After the two kind of lifeless episodes last time, this week's Daredevil: Born Again was anything but. It's hard to believe this is a Disney show, but it really could be the way forward for Marvel if it can continue to make superb TV shows like this. It's just full of tension, jeopardy, violence and great acting. This time around the focus falls on Bullseye and his decision to repay Matt for killing Foggy. Matt's code prevents him from allowing the hired assassin from killing the Kingpin - although in reality it was Vanessa Fisk who ordered the hit. There was also a boxing match, one that could have spelled a problem for Fisk had circumstances not taken over and there was some hope for our heroes and our villains as the chess match continues to wind its way towards the inevitable ending. Top notch stuff.

Related to this is the trailer for Punisher: One Last Kill, a TV movie that's out the week after DD finishes in May, which will also tie in with this summer's new Spider-Man film, but is a standalone story. It looks very good and for once I'm excited to be excited because DD has lived up to his Netflix days, so I expect Frank Castle will be the same. 

No More Offers

I had never seen The Godfather Part 3, (or The Godfather: Coda as it was repackaged as) and after watching it I completely understood why. I'm almost tempted to ask if it was a comedy, but given the lack of levity in the first two films, I doubt it was, at least deliberately. In this third part of the trilogy Al Pacino is no longer playing Michael Corleone, he's playing Al Pacino (something he did from about the late 1980s on) and in some ways that adds a new dimension to this. The remaining cast members from the first two films - Diane Keaton and Talia Shire - actually have parts to play in this, although Keaton's role as Michael's ex-wife feels like it was needed to give the family aspect some balance (and to help Anthony escape the family). The real surprise was Sofia Coppola as Mary Corleone, this was nepotism as its finest. This girl cannot act. She was awful and whenever she was on screen, or speaking, which seemed like huge chunks of it, the film took on a quality way below what you would have expected with people like Pacino and Keaton on the cast list. Maybe she can direct, but she doesn't know how to act.

The story starts off reasonably okay with Michael trying hard to legitimise the Corleone family, but still having to deal with mob business, especially when Sonny's bastard son Vincent comes along, busts his way into the family - at the behest of Connie (Shire) - and then begins an almost incestuous relationship with Mary. Instead of having this punk wannabe Mafioso rubbed out, Mikey takes him in and shows him the ropes, but its not long before Michael is having to do boss business as Vincent can't leave bad alone. Then it gets catastrophically stupid, chronologically weird and completely batshit. The Corleone's foundation, which is charitable and does a lot for the Catholic church wants to bail out the church from a massive debt by buying one of its companies; this eventually leads to the summer of the three popes, suggesting that Pope John Paul I was in thrall to the mob and was killed off because of his relationship with Michael Corleone. [The year of the three popes happened in 1978, but this movie is set in 1980] It concludes with an almost 30 minute opera simile that is so ridiculous you had to think that Francis Ford Coppola was simply taking the piss. 3/10 

The Thief, the Cop and the VP

There's something about Chris Hemsworth that often bothers me - the simple fact he's not very good at acting unless he's playing Thor, which he is very good at. In Crime 101 he plays an emotionally stunted super thief, who robs expensive things from wealthy people but never harms anyone. Joining him are Mark Ruffalo as the rogue cop, looking washed up, who is obsessed with catching this lone thief that his department thinks of as the detective's Moby Dick and Halle Berry as the disillusioned insurance broker who is watching her life fly past while being overlooked for a partnership in her firm. This makes a heady cocktail of possibilities in a thriller that also has Nick Nolte (he's 85 you know) and Barry Keogh as Hemsworth's Bette Noir. It's an enjoyable movie with some convincing characters in modern LA, especially given how the gap between rich and poor is widening in the USA all the time. Not a classic, but worthy of a 7/10.

Shocker

Guy Ritchie has made some good films and he's remade one of his movies several times, changing just the characters and subtle tweaks to the story. Rocknrolla is essentially a rehash of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels which has also been remade in different forms, at different times, in Ritchie's career. This time it's about dodgy real estate, a missing painting, which we never see, Cohen-esque style double crosses and unexpected events and it was loud, brash and not very good. There were none of the director's usual geezers in it, presumably because they'd all graduated to other films and roles, so this time it's Gerard Butler, Idris Elba, Mark Strong, Tom Wilkinson, Tom Hardy and Toby Kebbell as crooks, musicians, gangsters and gay associates; Thandi Newton is also in it as a kind of link between them all. I didn't enjoy it. 5/10

Powell's Curse

Glen Powell is a good looking fella, he also has a great speaking voice and there's a lot of smart money on him becoming the next George Clooney or Brad Pitt; the sex symbol actor of the 2030s, perhaps. The problem the 38 year old has is his choice of roles, specifically in film, which aren't bad, he could just do with reading the script before taking them on. His The Running Man remake was remarkably entertaining until the final 10 minutes when it became a WTF mess and his latest How to Make a Killing - which is a modern updating of Kind Hearts and Coronets - is spoiled by the final ten minutes or so, when the film ditches its moral dilemmas and goes for plain stupid. This is the story of Beckett - Powell - who is the illegitimate offspring of a mega-wealthy family, a family that dumped his mother when she fell pregnant and then refused to have anything to do with her ever again. So Beckett decides to kill all the potential inheritors off to claim the family fortune for himself. This was entertaining nonsense, with a slightly twisted viewpoint, until we enter the home stretch and it just becomes bad farce and bollocks. 6/10

The Krap

I'm not really sure how to describe the 1983 film The Keep mainly because it makes almost no sense at all. There's a good idea in there but it's hidden by one of the most appalling scripts I've ever heard. It was like the writer of the dialogue started sentences and forgot what he was writing about before he got to the end of the same sentence. Apart from making no sense at all, it was full of things that I don't really understand why they were even there. The film is about a platoon of German soldiers who have been assigned to guard a pass in the Carpathian mountains and set up camp inside an ancient keep - which was the most impressive thing about it. After a few nights there, the men start being killed off in horrible ways, so the commander - Jurgen Prochnow - contacts his superiors and instead of reassigning him, they send Gabriel Byrne there with his SS platoon and they start killing people and acting like proper Nazis.

The soldiers have unleashed some kind of demon and as this happened a man in Greece - played by Scott Glenn - wakes up and travels to Romania - by boat; we don't get any idea of who he is or why he's in Greece or why he's been summoned to the Keep and it pretty much stays that way. Also, Ian McKellan (sounding like a New Yorker) and his daughter Alberta Brooks - both Jews awaiting a move to a concentration camp - are also summoned to the keep, because he's an expert at something. There are lots of cameos from people we never see again, lots of dialogue that literally makes no sense at all and the special effects were... remarkable. I think I could have done better with some toilet rolls, sticky backed plastic and a used washing up liquid bottle. An achievement of staggering proportions, possibly the most nonsensical thing I have ever watched. 1/10

Names & Names & Names

Anyone who reads this blog often enough will know that I'm a big fan of time travel and time loop movies, so when a new one comes out I'm usually all over it like a rash. However, when I first saw trailers and heard about Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice I was a little sceptical about it. Yes, James Marsden has suddenly - in middle age - become the star he was touted to be in the noughties; Vince Vaughn has his moments and Eiza Gonzalez is a rising star, but any film that has Keith David or Dolph Lundgren in usually means 'cheap'. This wasn't cheap, as such, it just wasn't quite on target. Vaughn plays Nick, who travels back in time to get Mike to help him stop Mike from being killed. Alice has a key role to play, but anything else I say will ruin what is a thin premise with little science involved. It's not going to win anything. 6/10

Trouble & Strife

Two main things happened in the second episode of the new season of Your Friends & Neighbours - Coop's daughter makes a decision that rocks her parents, but especially her mother - Amanda Peet - who is entering the menopause and not coping well at all. The other thing is one of those things that you'd expect people with more money than sense to have floating around their unguarded houses, something which Coop hadn't counted on, but instead of going one obvious way, it decides to go in a far more 'interesting' direction. 

Death on Mars

One thing For All Mankind has never shied away from has been to kill off main cast members; it's happened in every series and usually they weren't expected, which is why they have been so profoundly impactful. The latest death is possibly the most poignant and deep reaching of them all, as a beloved character says goodbye and leaves us with just one of the original gang. This was an episode about the longest serving cast members - Joel Kinnaman, Wrenn Smidt and Coral Pena - how one arrives at the end of their story, one is going nowhere and one of them is finally getting the chance to do something that has never happened before. This was an episode about life and death and while it felt a little self-indulgent - with cameos from Michael Dorman and Shantel Van Santen - this show has earned the right to do that kind of an episode. I wonder where it's going to go now?

What's Up Next?

More of the same, maybe some wiser choices of films.

This has been an Orange Shitler free zone.