Pop Culture is Dead to Me, Part 219½

Television and film is coming thick and fast at the moment, so much so that we're freely giving up on things as quickly as possible so not to waste what's left of our life on pointless bollocks. This is a practice that hasn't paid dividends so far... Let me explain:

Star Trek: Black Female Jesus Saves the Universe Again and Again

Or Disco Very as we (well 'I') call it. This is fucking awful. I mean I don't even feel bad about saying it's fucking awful because it's fucking awful. It has steadily gone down a wormhole that has done nothing but accentuate how idiotic and stupid the people behind this fucking awful piece of shit must have been and still are. There are a couple of mildly interesting characters - the ugly horse alien and former captain with the wiggly ear glands; the fat sweary girl who's been canned and the gay, slightly-autistic chief engineer, who has stopped being interesting - outside of that, it's just fucking awful. Gene Roddenberry's ghost should be haunting whatever fucker is responsible for this fucking awful heap of shit.

Chapelwaite

A sort of prequel to Salem's Lot and (loosely) based on the short story Jerusalem's Lot by Stephen King. It stars Adrien Brody - you know the Oscar-winning serious thesp. My personal jury is still out on this; it was relentlessly grim, full of nasty characters and was genuinely creepy until episode four when... ah but that would spoil it. So, here's a kind of metaphor: the first SK book I read was Salem's Lot. I knew nothing about it when I bought it and for the first 200 pages it creeped me out. Then the fact the book was about vampires sort of diminished it and while it was a cracking vampire novel I felt it lost something being about something tired and old. This series also starts off very creepy and weird and quickly descends into 'campire' nonsense, with laughable villains and an almost paint by numbers plot. The only genuinely odd thing about it was the ending. My advice is it's much better than Midnight Mass but that doesn't set the bar particularly high.

Midnight Mass

Everybody was raving about this overlong, wordy and ultimately fucking awful vampire series. The pandemic has meant a raft of TV shows and one can only hope that when this is all over all these people will have died so they don't ever make another TV show ever again...

The Wheel of Time

Or Boring Boring Fantasy Boring. How do people make TV series like this and keep a straight face when they're delivering their lines? Does Rosamund Pike really need the work? She's an executive producer on this and one wonders if that was to tempt her in or if she's really a fantasy geek? Either way, she should have known better. As fantasy series go, apart from being dreadfully dull it's also fucking awful.

Hawkeye

This is fucking awful...

Aha, fooled you. This is actually the best thing I've seen on TV this year* and plays out like a slightly overlong feature film. I'm looking forward to clumping them all together and watching it as a film in a few months. It feels like an Avengers movie without most of the Avengers in it and also is another link to Marvel series from the past. It isn't over yet, it concludes next week, but I do think we're going to see a cameo from Daredevil. The Steinfeld girl is both really annoying and incredibly lovely and I was very impressed with the reveal, very early on, that Clint is almost as deaf as a post. Cracking TV.

*It's not, but it might be the best Marvel series so far

Superman & Lois

Anyone who knows me knows that around 1986 I kind of discovered Superman. Don't get me wrong, he'd been around for quite some time, but I always found him to be a bit... DC. Therefore a huge thanks to a bunch of creators who changed my perception of Superman, because by the late 1990s it was one of the few comics I was still reading (despite having deteriorated in quality from a high point in the mid 1990s). As a result, I have a weird soft spot in my heart for the big blue and this TV series was nowhere near that soft spot. I have struggled with DC's TV adaptations and pretty much avoided this when it first came out mainly because Tyler Hoechlin is the least super Superman I've ever seen.

However, watching it on BBC1 - harking back to the nostalgic days of Lois & Clark - it has proved to be slightly better than I thought. I like the idea, even if Lois looks a bit like a cross between a dead Margot Kidder and the ugly horse alien from ST:BFJSTUAAA. The kids are almost believable too and did anyone notice that Dylan Walsh plays Lois's dad - he was the straight (as in not crooked) guy from Nip/Tuck.

Doom Patrol

Do you remember last time? When I was just about ready to kick this series into touch? We were about a third of the way through the third series and I couldn't understand where it was going or why it was going in the direction it was. Then it all started to fall into place. Yes, some of the characters just seemed to be flopping about, treading water and there didn't seem to be any direction any more; just a group of weird characters knocking round a big mansion and the introduction of Michelle Gomez seemed like a stupid idea rather than an act of genius; then after that seeming nadir episode where I wanted to stop watching it suddenly started to make sense and in the end it was a dazzling example of how to write a superhero story without any heroics, no real villains and keep it fresh and weird.

I have no idea where this series is going to go now that Cliff is a 50 foot tall robot, Larry has a new passenger, Vic is no longer a cyborg and Rita is a proper no-holds-barred superhero. Frankly, I have no interest in what they do to Jane because I think they fucked up her character in season two and have struggled with her ever since; we need to see more of her superpowered alter egos not less of them.

Dexter: New Blood

It's great, except... is it? Yes, it's much better than the last couple of Dexter series but I always feel the word 'contrived' applies to this character. It's good to have him back and his dark passenger, but... did I say contrived?

The Walking Dead franchise

Let's just say that Fear the Walking Dead almost became essential viewing for a couple of years; Lennie James introduction and the Mad Max feel to it made it almost light relief from the main feature. However, the last couple of years have been poor, culminating in a nuclear disaster that has you scratching your head at times. 

The World Beyond - the series looking at life 10+ years after the apocalypse and featuring New Age Nazis the Civic Republic started badly and deteriorated beyond the 'fucking awful' stage and well into the 'who the fuck gave this the green light?' If the ultimate aim of the two series was to reintroduce us to Jaden (sp) the dumpster lady who saved Rick Grimes as a wannabe Nazi storm trooper then it succeeded. It offered us a clue to Rick's fate and introduced us to a new generation of utterly shite actors. I really don't want to upset overweight people, but one of the lead characters in this spent 9 months on the road, in a world that has little in the way of provisions and she was arguably a more rotund young lady at the end than she was at the beginning. It's like Tilly in ST:BFJSTUAAA surely a thousand years in the future if you had body size issues you'd just hop into a transporter and get them to lop a few kilos off? It was a fucking awful two-series fart and the sooner they finish this entire franchise off the better.

Dr Who: Flux

Is something I rather enjoyed even if it often made little or no sense and I couldn't quite fathom the significance of many of the characters because the writer didn't bother to explain. Chibnall's run on the good DW has been woeful; Jodie Whitaker just a little too in-yer-face and the supporting cast have struggled (although Mandip Gill has been excellent and hopefully will remain for a while). There are three more specials before RTD comes back. I think any casual viewer will just hope that this means stories that make some sense and have some fun and wonder about them. It all got a bit too PC and earnest...

We finally got around to watching season one of Fargo and I recommend anyone who hasn't seen it to watch it. We're going into seasons 2-4 in the New Year. We also dipped into a number of things and quickly dipped out. Foundation being an excellent example; we gave it three episodes before we started to lose the will to live. 

Moving onto films...

Dune

Very enjoyable in a not a lot happens kind of way. It looks fantastic and I expect the next two parts will cement it into cinematic history or something...

Shang Chi and the Legends of the Ten Rings

I expected more and less at the same time. It was an okay fun film but... I think we're seeing Marvel struggling with films featuring second rate heroes and also getting too clever with themselves. I always felt when Kevin Feige confirmed that the trailer did indeed have Wong fighting the Abomination that this was a red herring and so it proved to be. In fact, Trevor Slattery aside, this felt like an attempt to shoehorn in as much of the MCU past as it could. I expect I will enjoy it better in a couple of years when I watch it again, but ultimately it felt empty, pointless and a bit unnecessary. 

Free Guy

Was fucking awful, but also a bit of fun, but on the whole it was fucking awful and Jodie Comer was wasted (metaphorically, not literally... or is that the other way around?)

The Green Knight

Was The Guardian's #2 film of the year. I'll go along with the #2 bit. It was as boring a piece of shit as I can remember. It looked very nice, but it was unbelievably dull and left me thinking that people who liked this film probably also like modern art or will spend £50 on a shin of beef or mac and cheese at a Michelin starred restaurant... I like Dev Patel, but he's lost and a little wasted in this pretentious load of old wank (literally, but don't watch it just for that or like a warm bland wank you will be disappointed).

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Really? I mean REALLY? This was worse than fucking awful and seems to exist entirely for the post credit scene where Eddie and Venom are transported into the actual MCU proper as opposed to the Sony pocket universe. FFS, even the special effects are crap. This is a film that was so weak and flimsy it struggled to make it to the 90 minute mark including aeons of credits. Sony needs to look at Fox's Marvel output and decide whether they want the future ridicule...

I haven't seen Eternals yet, I expect that will be available the second week of the New Year. Like Shang Chi, I had no real investment in these Marvel characters in the 1970s either and the reviews ranging from 'Watches like a Powerpoint explainer presentation' to 'Very dull and boring' don't augur well for a fun night in. With the latest Spider-Man film hitting cinemas about now, I expect that will be a spring thing for the Hall house and I expect by the end of it the Marvel MCU will probably be missing a Spider-Man.

If there was more and forgot it then ask yourself why I forgot it and don't bother...