My Cultural Life - Monsters Munched

What's Up?

It's the middle of March already. How did that happen? 2026 has been an eventful year so far, not helped by the weather, which, the further north you are, is not very spring like and when we do get a taster of something warmer and sunnier it's gone by the next day.

I often wonder if time accelerates for everyone? I mean, the longer you're on the planet, the shorter the years become, but I'm noticing younger people complaining about time flying and while the physics suggests this is all subjective, it's the bloody middle of March already and before you know it it'll be much further into the year. 

... Yeah, I know. Hardly the opening you expected. Where's all the serious guff? Or even something remotely funny? Well, for once I can't be arsed to make serious about current affairs; my football team is in self-destruct mode and as you'll find out by the end of this entire blog, I'm not watching a lot of TV. I think I'm at that March Moment - when the nights are drawing out, but the skies are full of cold and there's more chance of snow than short sleeved shirts. The time of the year when our minds are saying 'why the fuck can't I feel my toes?' Or, 'When the sun shines it's too bloody cold to appreciate it!'

March has always been a month where the light doesn't correspond to the temperature and if, like me, you hate the winter, March brings shit loads of false optimism. Obviously, optimism is in short supply what with WW3 taking shape around us and profiteering rampant. It makes me wonder what those 'in charge' think the world will be like once an apple costs £50 and you heat your homes by rubbing two of your pets together?

It's Saturday morning and the sun is out, the skies are blue and so are my fingers...

Ai Ai Moosey

It's March and the first 'big' film of the year has arrived on streaming platforms and probably DVDs. I have to admit to being a little interested in seeing this movie, because it seemed like a good idea from the few trailers I'd seen. However, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die was a bit of a massive let down. First, though, I want to have a strange moan; apart from Sam Rockwell, Michael Pena, Haley Lu Richardson (who I thought was one of the Richardson dynasty of actors, but obviously isn't) and possibly Zazie Beetz, no one else in this movie has any link to the USA at all. All the other actors in this were either British, South African or German - this was filmed in South Africa - and many of the characters didn't even try to cover up their accents, despite this being set in the USA...

It's essentially: man comes from the future to persuade a group of people to join him on a mission to prevent an all-conquering AI from being created that will change mankind forever. He's done this 171 times and failed every time, but this time it might be different. There are some highly telegraphed twists in this; some things with don't really make any sense and ultimately none of it happens - at least that's what I'm taking from it, because it all seems to be happening in an AI environment... or is it? This is the biggest problem I have with this - is it real, is it a simulation and why don't I give a fuck? Not even the special effects seemed that good. This was a solid disappointment. 5/10

Fungus & the Bogeymen

Is Joe Keery becoming typecast? For those who don't know who Joe Keery is, he was Steve Harrington in Stranger Things and Cold Storage is a film that: a) was more enjoyable than that and b) he played a similar character, except a little less clever and a bit more dodgy. Think Night of the Exploding Dead or The Last of Us played for laughs and you'll be in the right ballpark. Keery plays Travis - aka Teacake - who works the night shift at a storage facility that used to be a government 'storage' facility. Georgina Campbell is Naomi, his new co-worker, and wanna be vet. They investigate a strange beeping sound and before you know it Liam Neeson is there with a small suitcase nuclear device. This is surprisingly well made and while it smacks of B movie, it's actually a bit of solid Saturday night entertainment. I enjoyed it, even if it reminded me of just about everything I've ever watched in my life. 7/10

Legacy of Wankers

The wife is going to be right. This is a load of shite. This week's Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ended on a cliffhanger, except the two people involved in the perilous ending are both still alive 70 years later, so there was no real jeopardy at all. Oh and the special effects on this are atrocious. I don't know who did them but I think someone using an Amiga 500 might have done better. The dialogue is corny; the back story is fucking hopeless and while there does seem to be more monsters in this, it needs a lot more than that to make this even half good.

I caught up with the series, on my own. The third episode of season two arrived on Friday (yesterday, as I write this) and I put the wife out of her misery and watched it alone. I figured I had a decision to make... Here's the thing - this series has weird pacing, unfathomable time shifts, people who are younger than they're supposed to be - and I'm not talking about Keiko's 70 years in the 'other world' but her son, who should be in his 70s - at least - but seems to be in his 50s. The flashbacks to 1957, which seem redundant given that season one ended with Keiko disappearing shortly after this, appear to be building some melodramatic three-way between her, Bill and Lee, all just feels pointless and irrelevant. That said, Hiro's daughter Cate doesn't really have much of a story either apart from tortured lesbian with guilt and daddy issues. I think I'm done with this. I really wanted it to be ... well, not exactly good, but at least interesting or, heaven forbid, exciting/entertaining. It's just dull and absolutely chock full of disappointment...

It Almost Lost Me

Right... Perpetual Grace Ltd is a series from 2019 by Steven Conrad, who brought us Patriot, which we've still yet to watch the second series of. The reason for this is we wanted to recover from that sufficiently before venturing back into the world of depression and espionage tinged with weird Luxembourgian strangeness. This other series is about a man who is persuaded to help initiate a massive con that would see an old married couple swindled out of $4million, except there's not just a can of worms involved, there's a truckload of cans of worms...

Ben Kingsley plays the preacher who is actually a psychopath and owns the town where he lives. Jimmi Simpson plays a grifter called James who organises Kingsley's Pa and his wife, Ma, to go to Mexico to retrieve the body of their estranged son, but he isn't there and they're going to be imprisoned for two weeks to allow James to become their son Paul and have power of attorney over their estate, allowing him to have away with said $4million. Of course, this all seems easy until we find out about Pa's psychopathic tendencies, so what follows is interesting. What's also interesting is James, now posing as Paul, discovers that the man he's pretending to be is wanted for questioning in regards the murder of a young girl. This is a ten-part series and that was just the first part... And after three episodes we decided this was just too glacial and dull to persevere with it.

Denzel's Back

We decided that Sunday night should be The Equalizer 2 night and while this sequel was not as good as the first, it was still a far more entertaining movie than we expected. Denzel Washington is back as the OCD ex Special Ops agent righting wrongs and ensuring good people have a happy ending. It is quite remarkable just what a great guy his Robert McCall is (but I seem to recall that Ewar Woowar was also a decent guy in the original TV series) and how he knows a decent person from a piece of shit so quickly.

What is different, therefore less good, about this sequel is it's really about McCall's past rather than his present and when someone close to him dies unexpectedly, he has to come out of his isolation - where people think he's dead - and go up against some people from his old life. There's a fair bit of vigilantism but the main story is a revenge mission. Like I said, it's good but not a patch on the first film, but that might be because there were no nail guns in this. 7/10

Lives and Deaths

Sometimes I can't fathom why certain films have such poor ratings on IMDB. Most movies with lower ratings tend to be accurate, but occasionally I think it's about a lack of understanding from the reviewers and In The Blink of An Eye is probably one of them. It's a bit of a curate's egg really - a portmanteau like tale of three lives in different time periods of the universe. A Neanderthal family, an archaeologist in the present and a space traveller from the future - why are they all linked? Rashida Jones plays the 21st century scholar who finds an acorn in the palm of the hand of a Neanderthal man from 40,000 years in the past. Kate McKinnon plays an enhanced human, capable of living for hundreds of years, who is charged with populating a new planet light years from Earth and both of these stories are linked and link back to the Neanderthal family.

I thought it was a charming and allegorical movie about how everything is ultimately entwined and how, quite literally, one thing leads to another. It was gentle, unspectacular and poignant, yet totally encapsulating and enjoyable - snapshots of different lives throughout their own lives and the people and things that characterise those lives. I really liked this. 8/10

Up and Down

After the first episode of the second season of Paradise and the promise that brought, there has been a feeling that it's been slipping back into rather dull and tedious 'inside the compound' series. Then, like that opening episode, this one came along and we had the story of how Xavier's wife survived the apocalypse and it was an interesting look at how much of the USA didn't slip into anarchy and become feral. It followed the seven people inside 'The Mailman' bunker - a Post Office capable of withstanding whatever is thrown at it and focused on the guy that Xavier met at the conclusion of last week's fourth part. It felt like a totally feasible scenario until it wandered in The Walking Dead without the zombies territory and then it delivered a number of twists and turns. This show is so much better when it isn't in Colorado, but I think I said that last week.

Cock-a-Doodle-Doo

Steve Carell's new comedy series, Rooster, is about a popular fiction writer who is invited to his daughter's college - where she teaches - to give a talk about his (populist) fiction and also trying to deal with his daughter coping with her impending divorce. It is being advertised as a kind of collegiate Ted Lasso and a bit like Shrinking, but it's neither of these and we don't really know where it's going after the opener, except Carell's character has been offered a job as the writer in residence at Ludlow college and he hasn't made up his mind about it yet, given his reservations about having never gone to college. The problem I had was I didn't find it funny, nor did I imagine myself becoming engrossed with it...

Three Piece Suite

So, it was the wife who chose for us to watch the third instalment of Anton Fuqua's series of movies about former special op Robert McCall. As she said, "Let's watch something we won't feel disappointed about when it ends." And, the thing is, she wasn't wrong. The Equalizer 3 is much better than 2 but obviously not as good as the first. This is a stripped down film, shorter than the previous two with a much older Denzel Washington (he was 68 when he made it - he's 72 now) relocated to the Amalfi coast after travelling to Napoli to do a bit of business that is revealed in almost the last scene.

His relocation is due to the bullet put in him earlier in the film and he's about to bid the place farewell when he sees someone he likes get involved with the local Mafioso and that's really all you need to know. It's Bob versus the Mafia and we all know who is going to win. He also does a bit of CIA work for Dakota Fanning (all is revealed at the end also) and takes on a psychopath in his usual style and slightly OCD way. It's a good way to spend a couple of hours. 8/10

In Laws

This week's Shrinking was as usual full of far too many wholesome people all being nice to each other and generally being nothing like what Americans probably are like. It's Tia's birthday, the second one for all the family and friends since she died and Alice has a plan up her sleeve that bothers her dad but not when he realises the reason behind it. There's also more about Paul's decision to retire and Gabby is distracted by her inability to contact one of her patients. Brian continues to be inappropriate around his new baby and as always while all this unbelievably nice shit is going on something big and nasty is waiting in the wings to fuck everyone up. Candace Bergen (she's 80, you know) guest stars as Derek's mother, who has a problem with Liz (everyone should). This was maybe not the best episode of the series so far, but it still delivers a massive kick to the testicles when you needed it.

Space Filler

We checked out the first part of Netflix's The Dinosaurs, one of those natural history documentaries full of conjecture and cgi, but something that filled in blanks with our knowledge. The evolution and life of the dinosaurs and what was here before them right up until the point when they all got wiped out. It's narrated by Morgan Freeman and while there's an element of dodgy special effects, it's the actual timeline that I'm interested in and the evolution of our own planet. Not brilliant, but most definitely something to watch without it all getting too heavy or with in-depth barely penetrable plots. Freeman narrates this like he died a few years ago. 

A Greek Tragedy

Later on this year, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is released. It is expected to be over three hours long and there's a real buzz about it. Back in 2004, Wolfgang Peterson directed Brad Pitt in Troy and that was over three hours long and this particular film pretty much covered about a third of Homer's other great work The Iliad, albeit the final third. If I learned one thing new about this story - I obviously knew about Helen, the Trojan Horse, Paris, Hector, Agamemnon, Odysseus and Achilles, plus other aspects of this epic poem by Homer (not Simpson) - it was what a bunch of ruthless arseholes the Greeks were and what an honourable people the Trojans were. I always thought the Trojans were the bad guys. 

This is a modern epic full of swords, battles, naked bodies, blood and guts - you name it, this is a BIG film. It's also extremely overwrought, melodramatic and theatrical. It's got an all-star cast and a lot of actors who are no longer with us or no longer are seen as 'stars'. It's not bad, but equally it felt like it could have been at least an hour shorter. At least I got around to watching it as it might make Nolan's The Odyssey a little easier to understand, given it's about Odysseus and his long journey back from the Trojan War. 6/10

Presidential Hokum

Our viewing week finished with yet another film we were giving a second airing for without really remembering much about it at all. I think all I could really remember about White House Down was it came out at roughly the same time as Olympus Has Fallen and they are, essentially, the same movie with different quirks. This one has Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx doing a sort of double act while hundreds of people die horribly around them. Foxx plays the President, Tatum an ex-serviceman hoping to become part of his personal security team and together they do a Die Hard with a bunch of mercenaries led by James Woods, who is out for revenge by destroying the Middle East - all of it, in a series of nuclear attacks, after he gains control of the 'nuclear football'.

Apart from feeling tonally wrong and trying to have far too many quirky characters all vying for screen time, it's not a bad action adventure if you want some escapist nonsense for a weekend viewing - just don't watch the version that's been on Film 4 recently, because they seem to have to darkest, grainiest print available. If you like explosions, dodgy special effects superimposed over actual footage and Channing Tatum in a - I kid you not - singlet, then you'll be all over this like a rash. Was it any good? Does it matter? Well, not really and yes, so therefore just a 6/10.

What's Up Next?

I'll tell you what has been fun watching this week. Not worthy of a review and stretching to a tenuous joke, but I've been watching A New Life in the Sun on C4 for the last couple of days because I've been a little under the weather. The thing that got me chuckling (and then the wife joining me) was the couple who bought half a chateau in France to run their own B&B...

Paul and Melanie, were from New Zealand and South Africa and both well into their 60s (unless they've had hard lives). Paul only had to open his mouth and I was sniggering, because Paul could easily have been the voice of Korg in the Thor films - you know, the rock creature who becomes the God of Thunder's mate. All you had to do was shut your eyes and it was whoever Taika Waititi based Korg's voice on. Mel, his wife, hardly spoke, so whenever the two of them were on screen, for me it became Korg and Mick's French Adventure. Or misadventure, because it appears they bought a place that just wants to fall apart. Yet Korg took it all in his stride, facing everything with a sunny disposition and like no mountain was unclimbable. It was something you needed to see and get the reference to, but if you did then you'd get the joke...

Other than that, this week has really been about giving up. Three things above are not going to be revisited and it might even be four things because Paradise has been hovering around the should we/shouldn't we place and I know the wife wouldn't really miss it if we never watched it again. TV, on the whole, has been largely disappointing in 2026 and a lot of the shows we've tried from the past probably explain why we didn't watch them the first time around...

So, next week Shrinking is the only guarantee, that and a bunch of films. There are some returning TV shows due by the end of the month and there are a few things we should try and get around to watching - it just feels really difficult and like too much hard work to be arsed to persevere with so many of them. 

So, therefore, a Doris Day song...

My Cultural Life - This Means Phwoar!

What's Up?

It would be remiss of me to ignore what is going on in the Middle East, despite my protestations, last week, that this needs to be more 'entertainment' driven rather than a soapbox for my opinions. I try to make my 'opinion pieces' as objective as possible because I'm only interested in the facts and, oddly enough, audit trails.

The anti-conspiracy theorist in me is quick to point out that conspiracies, the ones that usually are easily debunked, have audit trails. Take the fake moon landings, when this didn't happen in 1969, you would have needed an enormous amount of people in on the ruse. It doesn't matter who the person involved was - cleaner to manager - they would have to carry that secret to themselves for the rest of their lives or the worst things possible to their families and friends will happen. Because, let's be honest about this, to keep the faking of the moon landing a secret would be such a massive revelation and humiliation for the USA, you'd need to threaten everyone involved with more than an NDA.

Conspiracy theories have a logical trail and the weak link is people. If there really was damning 'evidence' against Donald Trump in the Epstein Files, at some point, someone working on these - however slimy a lawyer they might be - is going to slip up and mention it to someone or develop a conscience because they see what an inferno the USA is becoming. So, part of me doubts the memes and fake pages set up somehow linking The Donald to something that will bring about his downfall...

However 😁 what if the Great Dictator (we wish we had) could put himself in a position where ousting him as President is off the table? He's in charge now and he's prepared to go rogue to keep himself at arm's length from the attacks. He called out his own right-wing biased Supreme Court for betraying the USA by stopping his tariffs, so he went and imposed new ones, using some obscure war time law. His team have orchestrated this perfectly, from the Noble snub to the FIFA Peace Prize and the Board of Psychopaths for Peace. To the troubles in Minnesota - the least Republican state in the USA - and many other places, we barely hear about or register on people in the UK, because it isn't our problem and watching the USA has lost some of its car crash novelty. Many of us are now aware that his Overlordness is capable of fucking up the world and all the while He has his Mini Me in Israel helping achieve what He needs in terms of instability and a focus, far enough away from the USA, to minimalise the threats to home soil. And probably all because of the Epstein Files...

We're actually witnessing an attempt at creating The American Empire, by a man who is on the same level as Pol Pot in regards his humanity. Even the USA knew they were re-electing an old man with grudges. I think maybe it's why they elected him - put some jazz into politics; get a crazy batshit narcissist as President and sit back and enjoy the ride. I think the Average Joe in Shitsville, Kentucky is going to develop some weird nihilistic belief that politics and what they see on the TV is just one long soap opera. Joe will vote for the next most chaotic world ending event, despite an inner sense that it's just going to get bad for him. It's like people instinctively think we're in some mammoth game of Survival and we can't go forward without having some obstacles in the way.

And that is why I think we had a month of Iranian uprising earlier this year; probably paid for with CIA money; followed by loads of threats, out of nowhere, at Iran and then suddenly we have WW3. Let's not kid ourselves that this isn't a new world war. The Middle East; Ukraine; Sudan; the Congo; Somali; Yemen - all sponsored... er... involving the USA in some way. Then what has happened recently in Venezuela and Mexico plus the Greenland business; The USA has made a big move. If Iran falls to the King of the World, then you can believe that will drive him towards more conquests, because the USA will be at war and I'm sure there's something about war time Presidents and there being a mechanism to prevent them from being replaced, in the event of a coups. Or have him face any judgement at all for what might be in the Epstein files...

Because, at some point, it might be after he's dead, we're going to find out that there was a cover-up at the DoJ and damning evidence about him is going to come out. Or maybe it won't. Either way, it's too late.

Transformer: Badlands

It's like Predator except it's a giant machine, that makes... war! War Machine is actually quite an intense and relentless movie once you get past the gung-ho Americanism of it all. This is 40% training manual and 60% running away to stay alive, but it works even if Alan Ritchson is as big and wooden as Arnie. This is also a surprisingly entertaining film about the final group of trainee Rangers, on their final mission before getting their wings, who just happen to be in the middle of Nowhere, Colorado with zero ammo, no comms and a big fuck off alien war machine trying to blow them into bits. The opening 30 minutes is, in many ways, superfluous. It's a back story we don't really need (or want) about how Ritchson's character - 81 - is too old and too fucked to become a Ranger, but he's doing it for the man he left behind in Afghanistan. I suppose it gives us a bit of back story (that was never needed in Arnie's Predator - which this resembles in a post modern kind of way).

This is surprisingly visceral and if you're squeamish you might want to look away at some of the scenes, but it is paced incredibly well and I suppose it couldn't have been any other way - this was never going to be a poignant drama about soldiers debating life and death with a death machine. It sets itself up for probably a slew of sequels, depending on how popular this proves to be and I expect it will be watched by a lot of people, mainly because it has been made well and even though the special effects are limited - and the war machine looks very un-alien - there's another story here that people will want to see. 7/10

He's Got A Nail Gun!

I never expected to watch this movie, because I never expected to be dragged into these remakes of 20th century TV shows. But here we are and where we are is Denzel Washington in The Equalizer - a one man army film that, if I want to be honest about it, makes many other movies of its ilk pale into insignificance. I mean, this was really inventive and when the nail gun came out I almost squee'd with joy. I mean, the last time a half decent film had a nail gun in it was Lethal Weapon. This was essentially about an OCD former special forces turbo bastard deciding that the treatment of a call girl, he thought of as a friend, warranted him getting involved and after initially killing five Russian arseholes, he goes up against half of the Boston PD and most of the Russian Mafia and as there are at least two sequels to this you can guess the outcome. I have to admit that there is always a comedy element about one-man army movies and this did make me laugh, but it was more from delight and some really clever ways to kill people. I'm going to have to watch the sequels now... 8/10

Open Hearts Surgery

Too Nice!! It's just too nice! Shrinking continues to plough new depths of a 'lovely people well' as everybody is just so fucking wholesome, fresh and clean. Even Liz, with her caustic wit and violent threats, is just a big softy at heart. This week was one of those 'oh fuck, are they going to kill off #####' episodes. Which wouldn't have surprised me given that I still think Paul - Harrison Ford - is going to die at the end of this all, mainly because it doesn't matter how nice this show is, it has thorns and those thorns are sharp. So dolloping an early unexpected death on us would just have lulled us into a false sense of security... It doesn't happen though, but it's still a funny episode given all the love, the slightly autistic people and enjoyment all of these thoroughly disgusting beautiful people have each week. Get Apple TV+ there's much more than just this, but this is worth the subscription (says a man who has never paid for a subscription to anything televisual, ever).

Baby Blues

The best and most powerful episode of Paradise so far left us feeling like we'd been through a battle to get to the end of it. Heavily pregnant Annie - Shailene Woodley - really wants to go to Colorado, but she knows that Xavier has to go to Atlanta first, to try and find his wife. This means sacrifices have to be made, but it also leads to the two becoming close friends - not in that way - and relying on each other to get through. Annie's distrust of people is soon dispelled as Xavier proves to her that the world is more than just dangerous. Considering this was about babies and flashbacks to President Cal being a decent bloke, it was also quite unexpected and distressing. Hopefully this series will keep this up, but I can't help wondering what this entire subplot was trying to achieve. 

Monsters Inc.

Allegedly, Apple TV+ sent a memo out saying they've learned from their mistakes and season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is going have more monsters and less boring convoluted nonsense with characters we don't give a shit about. The season two opener started with Kong, throwing an eppy at something and everyone panicking, while Kurt Russell is still stuck in monster fantasy world. People with good memories will recall that season one of this show started with Godzilla, who appeared twice more and none of his appearances added up to much more than a hillock of beans. There is a chance that Kong's cameo might be the same.

I struggled to stay awake and even though the end promised some interesting ideas, it just gives me the impression it's going to kick a few ideas around until next year's latest Kong X Godzilla bollocks is released. This feels like Agents of SHIELD did when compared to the rest of the MCU - like it exists but no one wants to talk about it.

Man With the Runs

Whatever happened to Paul McCartney? I mean, after the Beatles split up, what became on their bass guitarist? Well this nigh on two hour documentary spills the beans. How Paul became an organic farmer in the Scottish islands; produced experimental music no one listened to and eventually disappeared without a trace, never to be heard from again. Of course, barely any of that is true and he created Wings, eventually became a National Treasure and this film covers the years between the break up of his first band and the break up of his second band, which happened around the time John Lennon was murdered. Man on the Run is actually a bit dull, even if the wife thought it was better than other crap we've watched recently. I'm not sure this reveals anything new; reintroduces us to some great solo and Wings songs and seemed to spend a long time trying to convince people that Paul was progressive; a hippy and Linda was much maligned; that's about it. 6/10

Just For A Craic

Wikipedia says this about the film we watched on Sunday: "The Boondock Saints is a 1999 vigilante action thriller film about two Irish brothers who kill mobsters in Boston. The film was a box office flop but became a cult classic, leading to a sequel and a documentary." I totally get that it was a box office flop, probably because it didn't know if it was a comedy, an action thriller or something slightly surreal with a hidden message. It was a truly strange film that was superfluous, slight and was notable for having Norman Reedus playing one of the two Irish-Americans who kill bad guys. The other brother was played by Sean Patrick Flanery, while Billy Connolly had a smallish part in it as a hit man. The good thing about getting old and discovering films we haven't seen is that we're unlikely to watch the shit ones again. 3/10

3 Wise Homunculi 

I'm not a devotee of Mackenzie Crook (unlike the wife), but I was drawn to Small Prophets, a series about a man who grows homunculi in his shed in an attempt to find out what happened to his former partner, who disappeared many years earlier. Pearce Quigley plays the eccentric Michael Sleep, who works at a DIY store, visits his father (Michael Palin) in his care home and has an odd relationship with almost every woman in his life, whether it's Hillary, the lady at the care home, his next door neighbours or the cute and bubbly Kacey - played by Lauren Patel. When I say 'odd' what I really mean is it seems all of these women are attracted to Michael, but not necessarily sexually. It is gentle, funny, but not especially LOL and if it was an ice cream with a ripple running through it, the ripple would be slightly sad, tinged with tragedy.

Splendid Chaps

Sometimes, you just have to wonder how you can go 36 years without watching one of the - allegedly - best movies of all time. I mean, I've never seen Titanic and I waited nearly 25 years before I watched ET. Why I've never seen Goodfellas is probably down to the fact that gangster/mob movies never really floated any of my boats, even post Sopranos, I didn't really go out of my way to watch them. I think it was down to me never really enjoying The Godfather trilogy (and there's three films I have to rewatch if ever there was any). This, if you need telling, is about a Mafia 'crew' consisting of Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, who pretty much have everything they want while running rackets on the East Side. It follows Liotta's Henry Hill, as he narrates his way through the story of his life with the mob and how, for at least 20 years, he was a favourite 'adopted' son, until he discovers that loyalty only runs one way.

It's got an 8.7 rating on IMDB, giving it one of the highest ranked films I've ever reviewed, but while it was entertaining and didn't feel overly long at two and a half hours, I wasn't as enamoured by it as others. This is a strange thing to say, but I wonder if it would have been made the same way had it been made in 2026? Obviously this is yet another of Scorsese's myriad of classic movies and I'm never as impressed with his works as others... Maybe I'm just hard to please? Anyhow, I've been torn between two ratings, so I figure a 7.5/10 is the best I can do. 

Trailer Trash Extra

Oh dear. I never try to get excited about trailers nowadays. Maybe 10 years ago, I was peak trailer buff; now, I take them in my stride and wait for the disappointment. The new two minute trail for HBO Max's Lanterns looks like it could be an absolute peach of a superhero series. Allow me to be a little self-indulgent; back when I was a kid and I collected comics and actually enjoyed reading them, I was a Marvel kid, I rarely looked at DC comics and only collected one. However, there was another DC comic that I was drawn to occasionally, the  Green Lantern comic, especially during periods where it was written and drawn extremely well, it introduced me to what was in many ways the most grounded, yet cosmic comic I ever read. It was a comic with swathes of shite and comedic creations by the ring of power, but every so often, Hal Jordan and his subsequent replacements and additions were involved in some fantastic stories (that would all probably feel dated and simplistic in 2026) and dealt with some odd issues.

I liked the Green Lantern film with Ryan Reynolds, I can't really understand the hate for it and while Reynolds wasn't how I visualised Hal Jordan, Kyle Chandler, who is assuming the mantle, is absolutely bang on. Aaron Pierre works as John Stewart, updated for now instead of the 70s and 80s, when he sported a shocking afro. The thing is, this doesn't look like a superhero series; this is being depicted as a battle between two men and a town where something is obviously very wrong. There is a glimmer of what has been omitted from this trailer and I suspect that is on purpose. Make people want to see it through the very good editing in the snippet released and not because there will be people who create stuff with green light. It will be on streaming in August, so, you know, I'm not that bothered about it that I'd want it to be August already.

One Minute After Another

Another Oscar favourite bites the dust and leaves us feeling like we've woken up in another reality, one where people rate shit films. One Battle After Another is over two and a half hours of allegory and arseholes and what is it with this year's Oscars that dislikeable characters are getting all the nominations? My niece said recently, about this film, "that's two and a half hours of my life I'm never getting back," and she wasn't wrong. Leonardo Di Caprio plays a former revolutionary, who gets dragged out of his retirement when an old adversary comes back and puts his daughter at risk. It was just one fucking long slog, stuffed full of wankers, racists and arseholes. I mean, it was supposed to be a 'dark comedy', but what the actual fuck? It was just loud, boring and generally full of characters who didn't seem clever enough to be radical revolutionaries... People apparently really enjoyed this film? Maybe they just wanted to sound like they think they're cool? 4/10

What's Up Next?

More Monarch, much to the wife's 'delight'. More Shrinking, much to my actual delight. More Paradise which has been much better than season one but I can see the wife's eyes glazing over and that's never a good sign.

There will be films, because we have a shedload of them on the new and improved Flash Drive of Doom. There's even some old TV series (and some new ones too) that we could give a go.

That is providing there is still a world left next Saturday...

My Cultural Life - While My Catarrh Gently Weeps

What's Up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Questions than Answers

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

Runaway Train

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

Police Story

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

Another Runaway Train

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

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

Something Completely Different

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

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

In Days of Old

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

The End of the World, Part Two

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

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

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

Below Average

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

Quacks

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

Dull End

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

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

What's Up Next?

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

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

My Cultural Life - Where No Blog Has Gone Before

What's Up?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanker Supreme

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

A Blast From My Past

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

The A-Holes Are Back

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

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

The Flip Side

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

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

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

Blood and Brains

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

The Dribbles

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

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

The Crapt

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

Stalking

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

War Crimes

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

If I Had Patience...

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

Over Budget

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

Astounding Story

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

What's Up Next?

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