Modern Culture - Bromances & Dog Whisperers

The spoilers start straight away... Honest.

Swe.E.T

I really like Sugar, the television series with Colin Farrell as the gumshoe with a heart of gold, who is also quite handy in many ways and is incredibly nice. I had this theory about John Sugar almost from the off. We'd been warned by various publications that there was an absolute shark-jumping twist half way through the story and that twist finally arrived. However...

One thing is definitely for sure, if this is still about finding the missing Olivia Siegel then if she is involved in this much 'bigger picture' then it's going to get even more bonkers than it already is. We discovered in this episode that David Siegel who ended episode five by blowing his own brains out was still alive, except for his brains, which were probably left all over his bathroom. We discovered that Eric Lange's Stallings is involved in this somehow but I suspect it has little or nothing to do with Olivia, oh and that Sugar's reflexes are lightning fast and he really doesn't want to hurt people - he tells us this almost every week and we now find out why. Suddenly the missing girl angle has disappeared and been replaced by a what the absolute fuck moment (that I guessed correctly with my first review). I don't know how or why I got it, but the clues were there and continued to be played with over subsequent parts. We've got two more episodes to go and yet the entire reason for this series has almost entirely disappeared, apart from the fact Olivia has still not been found or if she's even alive. I expect John will solve this case but at what cost and will season two of Sugar, if there is one, even be about private detectives in LA or something considerably more Three Body Problem?

Pigs in Shit

Now that the rest of the critic world has woken up to the fact that while Clarkson's Farm is an entertainment show and is Amazon's most watched show in the UK and pretty high up in other countries, it isn't really about entertainment, as such, but is a hard hitting serious documentary about farming, the tribulations of farming and what happens when you put an arsehole in charge of a farm in the middle of deepest darkest rural Tory land who discovers that all his 'chums' are nimbys and bureaucrats with nowt else to do.

This third series literally carries on from the end of season two. At the end of that series, the gang were all sitting outside the new restaurant, enjoying a glass of bubbly and it was July 2022; we started this one with everything having gone to shit in a giant toilet handbasket. Restaurant shut. The West Oxfordshire council being such massive arseholes they made Clarkson look like just a wee sphincter. It had been so dry that many crops were lost. It was all anything but rosy. 

Obviously, my problem with the continuity thing takes a front seat with things like this, because you're being presented with a linear story, but it's actually chronologically all over the place and edited in a way to make you think it's just a linear story - I get pissed off by having scenes in the summer followed by scenes in November and told in such a way that it's the next day/week etc rather than an entire meteorological season. Other than that this is still excellent TV; it tells us how it is and while people might baulk at rick Oxfordshire farmers struggling while simultaneously talking about £300K budgets, £300K tractors and the skyrocketing price of fertilisers, it does a great job in making whoever watches it realise this is not just a game; there is serious farming going on while Clarkson mellows in his old age. It's a quality product that I get for Diddly Squat... [do you see what I did there?]

Welcome Home!

It doesn't feel long since we watched season two of Welcome to Wrexham, but after the tumultuous season the Welsh team just had again, I can see why it's been rushed into production and streaming so quickly. I think when season two was released everyone was well aware what Wrexham had achieved, they were already playing in the EFL League 2, so a lot of the jeopardy and suspense had gone. Releasing this a week after the club guaranteed their second successive promotion made more sense.

Obviously the result will still probably be known, but this series will finish before Christmas giving Wrexham's League 1 fun to be scheduled depending on how good or bad they're doing. This first episode back was all about the celebrations of winning the National League, the out-of-the-park USA tour, Paul Mullins' punctured lung and that opening game of the season when MK Dons went to the Racecourse and humped Phil Parkinson's side 2-5 to prove that the EFL might not be the walk in the park that many thought, There was a little bit about Ben Foster, presumably because in episode two he's going to retire again and Huge Ackman made a special appearance as Hugh Jackman. It was like Deadpool and Wolverine do bromance at a football stadium... Love it!!

Dead Boys' Perspective

I read somewhere that The Dead Boy Detectives is aimed at younger people and this got me wondering if it was going to be some YA series rather than a spiffing yarn from the Sandman universe. Given the number of fucks in the first episode I'm wondering if the place I read about this series might have not bothered to actually watch. It wouldn't be that outrageous a suggestion.

This didn't do much for me but the wife seemed slightly taken with it, but I was even wrong about that. This is essentially the tale of the two ghosts boys who have a detective agency, who meet a psychic who can see dead people and each episode there's a 'monster of the week' adversary. Unfortunately, it's set in the USA, which is all wrong for characters such as these and I'm really not convinced by this clearly-made-in-the-UK-on-a-small-budget feel. There's also a Japanese girl and lots of angsty, teenage paranormal sexual tension - as you do. I lost track of it at some point and couldn't really tell you what's going on. Suffice it to say, there won't be any more of these particular shenanigans, although it was good to see Kirby playing Death again. 

There also won't be any more than one episode of The Staircase, for no other reason than it all felt a bit meh. It was okay, but we sat there and wondered if this mystery could be spun out over 8 parts and be interesting because after the first part we weren't that interested in the family or the mystery... 

Testosterone

In what has been a less than inspiring week of TV so far, we watched the Brad Pitt 2014 war film Fury and I still think I should have made a Samuel L Jackson joke rather than writing this. As war films go this is a war film, with lots of war action between the good and bad guys. It involves the crew of a tank doing some jobs as they get further into Germany at the end of WW2. The film was essentially a baptism of fire for the newest member of the tank team - Logan Lerman - as we spend two and a half hours watching the violence and futility of war. This is very much a war film, for sure. As warry as a war thing can be. War out I was, completely FUBARed!

Objectivism 

One of the last proper films Peter Jackson made was in 2009 and it was about the aftermath of a murder. It's not a movie you would imagine would make you feel lifted after watching, especially as the main victim was just one of many killed by the serial killer portrayed by Stanley Tucci. Yet, The Lovely Bones is really about being able to move on after grief and how to cope with massive changes.

With this film it made me realise that deaths are just a horrid thing that inflict pain and anguish on those connected while the world simply carries on and you watch it - head slightly cocked - in a way you don't at other times and that's what this film tries to do; it has a horrendous killing, but because we're being told about it by the victim it loses its emotion and becomes a reflection of what people are like when they're consumed by grief. The victim doesn't feel sorry for herself apart from missing out on her first prom kiss, so your focus is firmly on the rest of the people in the film and how they deal with it and because the emotion is taken away there's a degree of coldness that makes this film work even better. In many ways the hint of something slightly supernatural adds to the otherworldly feel but subtracts from the impact it has. It's not going to satisfy people who want clear cut endings but that doesn't stop it from being a very good movie.

Phenomenal

It has been a bad week in Chez Hall; colds, chest infections and something utterly tragic happening that remains as in limbo as I feel; so maybe it wasn't a good idea to watch what is essentially one of the most tragic and sad love stories of the 1990s, possibly any decade...

John Travolta was having a proper renaissance in the 1990s thanks in part to Tarrantino but also for taking on roles that one maybe wouldn't associate him with. In Michael he played an angel - with problems - and in Phenomenon he plays a simple guy called George who suddenly becomes a genius. It's a big but gentle role for the man from Grease and I have to admit that when given the right material Travolta actually acts quite well. This is a film that lulls you into a false sense of security before hitting you with a fact that is crippling. This is, in many ways, a forerunner to the 2014 film Lucy except this was made in the 1990s and most films didn't have a special effects budget even if they needed one. George sees lights in the sky and from that moment on his brain begins to act like a sponge and he goes from mild-mannered but maybe not the brightest bulb to a genius... and of course it's when the genius appears that every form of life crawls out of the woodwork to either exploit him, fear or use him.

Despite it being a mid-90s set film, there is the clever thing that it almost feels like it could have been made at any point since the 1960s; even in the 2020s I expect there will be small towns like where George and his friends live; there might even by a small-town doctor and everyone lives in everyone else's back pockets. It's a great film without ever being maudlin, especially when you discover what the tragedy is and what the prognosis will be. I'd forgotten just how sad it was without ever feeling like it was slapped on. 

It also proves to me that all the best people are called George and it doesn't matter how much we love them, we always lose them too soon...

Next Time...

Two more weeks of Sugar, five more weeks of Clarkson and anything up to 26 of Welcome to Wrexham, there's the next fortnight sorted and I'm sure there's more... Life is a wee bit in limbo at the moment and TV has taken a back seat (the clue is the short para above Next Time...). 

There might be some films, but equally I might not be able to write a column. I will watch Godzilla Minus One so that might be a highlight or it might not, who can say? I was thinking of inserting a 'break' after Wrexham because the top three were all reviewed last night and telling you that my week has been full of poor TV watching, but I've had a chest infection, a tragedy, a reasonable week of weather that I haven't been able to appreciate, I read a book (Holly by Stephen King) and other stuff. 

Writing these 'next time' things has become even more difficult than the weekly opening spoiler warning...

Believe in miracles. 

Pop Culture - The Horror of it All

The random nature of my relationship with spoilers indicates you should consider treading carefully on a story by story basis, if not then this acts as a warning.

Dance with the Devil

As an experiment in replicating 1970s television, Late Night with the Devil was almost perfect. You would have thought that you were watching footage of an actual TV show from 1977; however if you think you were watching an actual recording of live 1977 television I'm not so sure.

You see, the problem with this film is it's too much like it was a made for TV movie actually made in 1977 with a very small budget and with a couple of exceptions it could very well have been on telly and not scared anyone. It's not exactly a horror film more like an experiment in recreating the past with a supernatural twist and while it is almost faultless it forgot to be anything other than just a very good recreation of what late night 1970s TV was really like. It wasn't scary and in many respects it wasn't very good either. That's not to say it wasn't excellently done and David Dastmalchian is without a doubt a very good actor; it was so authentic it felt cheesy. It is a found footage film incorporating an entire episode of a fictional late night talk show called Night Owls, but by the end it just feels like one of those Movie of the Week things that once proliferated on network TV. There were some unsettling moments in it, but like I said it seemed to spend so much effort and time actually looking and feeling like a 1970s US TV show that it forgot to be what it was advertised as.

With A God By Your Side

We watched the true crime drama Under the Banner of Heaven having heard good things about it. It's a 2022 seven-part mini-series based on true events that took place in Utah in the 1980s. Be sure not to Google the 'Lafferty family' or 'true crime' until you've watched it all otherwise you'll spoil it for yourself... Like I did. 

This is a series with a remarkable ratio of British, Irish and Australian actors in it considering it was about an event in the USA (although it was made in Canada); one wonders if US actors have gotten too expensive to make TV with any more?

We watched the first episode, really to see if it might be something to float our boats, and I came away with the indefatigable feeling that the Church of the Latter Day Saints or Mormons are really some of the craziest religious people on the planet. I mean, Muslims get targeted for their apparent extremism, but the LDS are essentially right wing Christian fundamentalists and as barking mad as the most extreme versions of Zionists - imagine some the very weird Likud politicians and then insert Jesus. No wonder people think Mormons are a weird Christian cult. Therefore it's fitting that this is a TV series about the weirdness of Mormonism and how they think they're perfectly normal when they're all barking mad and capable of committing heinous acts.

A Mormon wife and mother - from Idaho rather than Utah - is found brutally murdered and her child decapitated at their home on the outskirts of Salt Lake City; her husband is the prime suspect, especially as he's found covered in blood, but if it was as cut and dried case as it seems it wouldn't have spawned books, TV programmes and a film focusing on the initial main suspect's utterly bonkers family and how they went from slightly bonkers devoutly religious zealots to completely full-on Charlie Manson mode. If this is a true reflection of the Church of the LDS then all I can think is that Mormon women all seem to be in fear for their lives from what is essentially a massively misogynistic religion  advocating a Patriarchy (but, to be fair, aren't most religions just a way to use an imaginary god to keep women oppressed?). It's also the bizarre story of how a god-fearing family rebelled against the taxation system and went homicidally mad as a consequence. No, seriously, it is.

Pardon My Sexism

The Guardian might be a favourite target for my general ire and why shouldn't it? This gaslighting neo-fascist 'newspaper' that indeed does do some extremely valuable investigative journalism is also a middle class rag that prides itself in telling us how we should think and is big on spoilers. It seems to get a kick out of that and being deliberately contrary; if it can slag off something it will and then when it discovers it's on the wrong side of pubic opinion it will 'correct' itself.

Columnist Barbara Ellen derides veteran Hollywood film producer Carol Baum for genuinely asking about Sydney Sweeney, “Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so hot?” Which I feel is a valid question for an 81 year old woman to ask, although I think Sweeney is 'hot' because of her 36DD chest and her ability to flaunt it, and to be fair why shouldn't she? They belong to her and if she wants to use them she wouldn't be the first or the last to do so and as she's from a very conservative right wing American family it will be considered her right to get her tits out - whereas if she was from a downtrodden 'lefty' family she'd be the target of all kinds of slurs and abuse. The thing is Sweeney might appeal to a younger generation and middle aged men might like ogling at her, but Baum is not wrong; she's not very pretty (not her fault coupled with a 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', disclaimer) and I think she really can't act. I've seen her in about four things now and my overriding feeling is she has two acting positions - dim and vacuous. She can be either or both at the same time, but she doesn't have a range, so to speak. Even in Reality, which wasn't a bad movie, she played a dim ex-service woman caught selling secrets and she was the least interesting thing in a very stagey film - a movie where she didn't use any of her 'obvious' talents. 

I think the Guardian columnist is wrong for castigating someone for asking what she thought was a valid question, which, ironically, after asking this question to an audience of prominently young people and discussing it for a length of time, concluded that she [Baum] would probably hire Sweeney. The thing about Ellen's column is she tries to make it a far bigger issue; suggesting that the producer's comments and age play into the hands of misogynistic exploitative men by showing how much older women's opinions have been honed by a time when men influenced the thoughts of women and she's absolutely categorically wrong to even think such a question. Yet, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and Baum's question is justified, especially if there are others who feel the same way. She was not doing anything other than asking a valid question, although maybe not mentioning that Sweeney has a face like a slapped arse (my words not Baum's) might have made it less contentious. In my world view asking if Sweeney can act is a valid question, but I suppose you're not allowed to have opinions that might offend someone anymore. I'm not being mean, misogynistic, cruel or [insert whatever pejorative you can think of] if I don't think she can act as an expression of an opinion...

Oh and while I'm on the Guardian (I do look at it every day so I only have myself to blame for looking at the bits I know I'm going to have a contrary opinion. This weekend's edition has a BIG interview with Jeremy Clarkson about his new series of Clarkson's Farm drops next week and will, obviously, feature in next week's droppings and while it does a reasonable job of painting Clarkson as something of a changed man since becoming the poster boy for the ills of farming in the UK, it doesn't forget that the Guardian has history with the paper for some proper hatchet jobs such as Lucy Mangan's original review of season one of Clarkson's Farm and obviously hadn't watched anything more than a couple of on-line trailers. She gave it one star and spent the review telling everyone what a middle class right wing tool the Yorkshireman is and getting large chunks of the review wrong. It led to them having someone else re-review the series when everyone with a TV set and access to Amazon who read that review were wondering what whacky drugs Ms Mangan was on. So this BIG interview is about the huge success the show is and not about the stunts that litter it every season, which, to be fair are at least stunts that might have something positive come from them. It's a gateway piece for the inevitable three star review next Thursday (maybe even chance a two just so the reviews department can feel smug again).

Fucking Foxy Arse Country Bag

Excuse my language but I was paraphrasing Wicked Little Letters, a film about a notorious scandal which hit the Sussex town of Littlehampton in 1918. It stars the brilliant Jessie Buckley and the equally effulgent Olivia Coleman and just to show you how obsessed I am, the Guardian hated it, but no one else does and that meant it went to the top of my must see list. It is an excellent feature marred by an element that I need to look at...

I'm going to cause some more controversy; not only could I be a sexist for the piece above about Sydney Sweeney, but I suppose I'm now a racist for wondering why a historical film - based on a true story - with a couple of books written about it, has more black and Asian characters in it than the whole of Sussex probably had in its county in 1918. Please don't get me wrong, but the policewoman who did most of the investigating is suddenly now Asian; the main protagonist's husband has been transformed into a black boyfriend, the judge in the case is a black African when the first black magistrate didn't serve until 1962 and the first black judge wasn't until 1978. There was also a number of Asian children, another black police officer and various black people in the pub. I have absolutely no problem with diversity, but this is a historical account and most of the film is absolutely as accurate as it happened, so why the need to pad out the film with characters who wouldn't have been in Littlehampton in 1918? I detest the expression 'PC gone mad' but this is why that expression is used; this is why we have gammons being wankers about race in this country when we have historically accurate movies that are changed to satisfy diversity requirements. It shouldn't happen and in many ways it spoiled a cracking little film because someone somewhere thought the film needed to have more diversity. Who would have had a problem if there hadn't been other races depicted in this? I don't have a problem with a black Little Mermaid or Juliet because these are fiction, but to put them in something factual to meet a criteria is mindbogglingly provocative. It's like we're rewriting our racially nasty past and hoping people don't think that the UK was once (and still is) a very racist place that treats non-white people with contempt.

Other than that, it's a story about a woman who starts getting hateful letters with foul and abusive language in them and all fingers point at the Irish girl who lives next door who has a fine line in swearing and being anything but a model Edwardian young lady. On the receipt of the 19th letter, the police get involved and the Irish woman is arrested and from this point on it's about finding out who really wrote the letters because it clearly isn't the foulmouthed Rose Gooding. This is a film about police incompetence, bigotry and above all else mental illness, but it's also extremely funny with a number of LOL moments and a fantastic script that takes a turn for the dramatic about two thirds of the way through as the letters and the contents begin to have unsavoury effects and consequences. When it becomes clear who the culprit is you spend much of the rest of the movie thinking this person will realise the pain they are causing but it just gets worse to the point where you realise they either have a serious mental health problem or they're just plain evil. Jessie Buckley is absolutely wonderful in it and Liv Coleman, yet again, proves why she's probably Britain's finest character actor at the moment. Ignore what the Guardian says and watch this cracking film and enjoy every minute.

Trailer Trash

There's this Tube of You channel, which the name of completely escapes me because I clicked on the Please Do Not Ever Play This Fucking Channel Again option and I don't know if there's a history of what you never want to see again stored somewhere, but I suspect when I hide something on the Tube of You it stays gone. Anyhow, there's this Tube of You channel that absolutely is choc-a-bloc full of 'Our concept trailer' videos that are literally the equivalents to unrequited love letters or fan-wank deceptions by dangerously sad individuals who you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley even if you were the one carrying the samurai sword. 

Fan-wank deception is massive, I mean MASSIVE... except it might not be because these sites might get thousands of people tuning into their I could make trailers too so give me a job efforts but other things gets millions of hits, so I suspect 'our concept trailer' doesn't do anything for many apart from to make people groan about it being 'another bloody load of fan-wank'. Trailers are the art of deception; you can make an Albanian film about a goat-beetroot sex fetish look good with the right trailer maker then you can do it with anything. Sorry, I'm waffling because I want to get you to understand that [fan wank] fake trailer sites that sell themselves as *new* trailers and then happen to mention 'our new concept trailer' which will have absolutely nothing to do with the actual film. The people who do them are massive cunts! The most obvious way to detect them is they feature nothing but extant clips or images, there's nothing in a fake video that isn't already in a video! The people who do these kind of things should fall victim to a filmmaking accident or something!

So, Ryan Reynolds releases a teaser for the trailer that is going to be released 24 hours after this video and what it is essentially, is a piss-take of a fan-wank deception with just one bit of footage that is new. It does, however, have a narration by Deadpool aka Reynolds, which, naturally, authenticates it immediately and I've just written three paragraphs to tell you that while it's a funny joke, the New Trailer Monday Deadpool and Wolverine trailer is just a prick tease; it's amusing but it isn't a trailer for the movie that's scheduled for release towards the end of July, it's a trailer for the trailer, which will have been released the next time I update this blog...

Which brings us nicely to the actual trailer, or perhaps I should say the actual fucking trailer because to my knowledge there has never been a MCU trailer with the F word in it, so there's five in this one. What's the film going to be about? I don't know, but it appears to involve Wade recruiting a Wolverine from the multiverse for a job for the TVA with bits at the beginning and then further bits at the end. Much is hinted at about Marvel and Disney's wholesome image and how this film will break some moulds, but it's not singing for me; there's nothing in it that makes me think there's a winning formula outside of Deadpool's smart mouth and the swearing in the trailer suggests this could be some obfuscation covering up faults we're yet to uncover. The final cocaine scene with Lesley Uggams is a very funny joke.

Monkey See, Do and He Wrote the Script

I remember when The Green Knight came out and that newspaper claimed it was one of the best films of the year, more erudite reviewers than me waxed lyrically about its imagery and I sat through two hours of the most pompous boredom, trying to find something positive to say. It dawned on me after about ten minutes of Monkey Man that Dev Patel might be on an evil streak and I was inadvertently walking into its trap.

I'm not suggesting Monkey Man isn't a good film, because some of the choreographed violence is outstanding. It was like a ballet with knives, fists, feet and anything else that can be turned into an instrument of pain, but when it wasn't being frenetic energy, this movie didn't have much else going for it. It was lacking in a story I can recall and it was only a couple of hours ago that I watched it. It was vaguely about gaining revenge for a mother who was brutally murdered and to stop the exploitation of certain transsexual women in parts of India, but it was really about creating some kind epic ode to the beauty of fighting. It was also about allegory - or at least I hope so because some of the scenes were a bit odd - and honour. It doesn't overdo it with words and it's a very dark - as in film rather than tone - it's the kind of film I'd probably need to see again but it isn't the kind I'd go out of my way to watch again. Moving on...

Snowed In

There's a lot of movies out at the moment that mimic the era they are filming so that it looks as though it was made at this point rather than just have good stage managers. The film at the top of this blog is a perfect example and most definitely The Holdovers, which could have been made in the 1971 it is set in. I don't know if trying to replicate an era by the way you make a film is an actual thing but Downtown Owl is most definitely an 80s set film trying to look like it was made in the 1980s.

I'm struggling to give you much on this because it doesn't appear to have much of a story to tell. It's described as retelling the events leading up to an extraordinary weather event - the worst blizzard in Minnesota's history - but it seems to be about a supply teacher - Lily Rabe - who gets a temporary job at Owl High School, goes out with another female teacher every single night until they've been out with everyone who is likely to buy them drinks and when the locals stop doing this it appears to be down to the supply teacher's not sleeping around. She does have a soft spot for one guy and the rest of the film is essentially about her pursuit of this person. It has some other characters in it, who may have some bearing on the story but equally might not; these include Ed Harris and Vanessa Hudgens. It was really boring and I fell asleep twice during it.

Sweet Little Mystery

Quite a bit happened in this week's Sugar and yet it still felt short, like it needed another 15 minutes. What is becoming clear is that David Siegel is involved in the disappearance of his half-sister and he's not terribly convinced she's still alive. The thing is while this week's instalment was most definitely about Olivia, most of it wasn't. It had clever plotting and structure and it had the bits that are odd; just what are Sugar's 'people' doing and what is it about their 'methods' that have changed and why and why is there such an element of the detached whenever any of them appear on screen without Sugar? There's a rumour circulating on Reddit suggesting this was originally touted as a sci-fi series and I'm pretty sure I said after the first episodes dropped I thought he was an alien. I'm sticking with that.

Next Time:

I could have mentioned - above - that we watched the first episode of season two of Them, but I figured I wouldn't bother telling you why we didn't bother after 20 minutes and switched it off and watched a Pointless instead. I will mention we have Dead Boy Detectives but I'm going to stay on the fence about this based on some things I've heard. Episode six of Sugar is when the jaw-dropping twist happens and why are we finding this out right now, I hope it doesn't spoil things or the makers have an even more novel way of explaining it away.

I'm glad about the return of The Big Door Prize which I think was a real find and we have a clutch of episodes to binge on, while the Flash Drive of Doom is down to 16 films it might be time for more outside than inside for a while. There's also going to be some things that are more important than TV.

 

Modern Culture - A Mixed Bag

The spoilers are here, there and occasionally everywhere...

Holey Underpants*

If at first you don't enjoy, try, try again. We went into the fourth episode of Fallout with very low expectations. My argument to the wife was, 'We used to give any series four episodes before we gave up with it and this hasn't been that bad, has it?' The thing was I was feeling as though I was convincing myself as well. This series had been too corny and slightly 'crazy' for my liking; there was just a little too much... dare I suggest it... silliness. 

I think we're both glad we did, so here is my review of Fallout: Season one; episodes 4-6: Blimey, we didn't see that coming. It makes me wonder what possessed the makers of this series to have made the first three parts so derivative and slightly corny; there was too much humour and reverential bollocks in it that it almost put us off and I expect anyone else not familiar with the game franchise would have felt the same way. Just what and where was this going? However, almost from the word go in episode four and despite the appearance [?] of Matt Berry's voice as a slightly psychotic organ harvesting robot, everything about this took a turn for the darker. This literally stopped being a 'black' comedy and just became 'black'; it took on a quite creepy and unpleasant feel. It also started to ask questions of the viewer, such as how much have you been paying attention and has everything you've been told actually the truth...

Let's start with the timeline. This is set 218 years after a nuclear war, in what was clearly - or it appeared to be - an alternate 1950s to the one we had. That would make it - the present day in the series - around the 2170s, except it's closer to the 2270s according to some rather large clues given away and while the flashbacks to Cooper Howard's film star days really do suggest a technologically more advanced 1950s, some things about it seem decidedly off-kilter. Coop's wife is spending large amounts of time developing vaults for Vault-Tec - some vaults would be better than others and all of them were being prepared for the inevitable nuclear war - which Coop has been informed is only inevitable because Vault-Tec is going to make sure it happens. Yet, has it really been 218 years because Coop is still 'alive' even if he's now a ghoul and the woman who was leading the revolution against Vault-Tec is very much alive and is now known as Mordeva and has Lucy's father, who himself has a now rather strange history, one which Norm, his son, has been digging into, seems to have links to the distant past as well. Then there's Betty - in Vault 33, who I'm beginning to think is Coop's ex-wife, because of things both of them say. There's also this feeling that everything is going to be interconnected.

The real story now is just who are the bad guys and just what is going on in the vaults, how are they getting their food and what is going on in Vault 31, that has led to every Overseer of Vault 33 having once been a resident of 31. What's the score with Vault 4 and what is happening on level 12 and will Maximus realise that he's being brainwashed with lavish things, especially for him? This has become anything but a comedy and is now a very serious drama with some quirks. Is the Ghoul really the bad guy? What are the Brotherhood of Steel really doing and do they even know it? They seem to be searching for old Vault-Tec equipment - because we now know that Vault-Tec were the people who made their suits and that they were around when Coop was a human because he wore one in the early years of the war against the Reds. How come people from when Coop was normal are still alive now? Even Maximus claims that he was a young boy when the bombs dropped, which suggests either we're seeing flashbacks to a period when California was its own republic or there's been another nuclear war since the first one. It has, without a doubt, turned into a puzzle inside an enigma and now it's dispensed with the slapstick and low level comedy Mad Max stereotypes, it has developed into something really quite good. Is it possible that the flashbacks we're seeing, to an alternative 1950s, are really set in the Republic of California and are set in the late 2050s and fashion has dictated that everything has a retro 1950s feel? I expect some things will be explained, but I suspect we're going to be waiting for season two for anything to be answered.

Fallout - Season one; episodes 7 & 8: the first season concluded in a spectacular way; it exceeded my expectations and set things up very nicely for season two. Things started to fall into place - and many of my questions were answered - and we saw the story from three different perspectives - Lucy discovered one side of it when she finally got Wilzig's head to Mordeva and found her father; Norm found out another perspective when he discovered the truth about Vault 31 and in the past, Cooper Howard discovered all the pieces in between as he found out what Vault-Tec and especially his own wife had planned for the end of the world.

Maximus was given another chance by the Brotherhood when he tried to deceive them over the head and he also discovered just what his brothers had planned and just how bonkers they all are. Coop in the future met Erik Estrada - of CHiPs fame - and killed both of his sons on his way to a rendezvous with the Brotherhood and the raiders led by Moldeva. His relationship with Hank McLean is also explained as we discover just how old some of the people involved in this story really are - how some of them have survived as long as they have is easily explained, others not so much, but it does seem that in Fallout world the laws of physics don't apply so much. The end of the finale has strange alliances formed, more questions answered and decisions to be made. There are still a lot of unanswered questions but I suppose they have to keep things going for the inevitable second season. In the end it was worth persevering with.
* Holey Underpants = something you get Fallout from...

Scary Monsters

I didn't really know what to expect from the Netflix series Baby Reindeer. This Richard Gadd vehicle has had a lot of publicity, mainly because Gadd is a comedian and yet this is pretty much a horror story about his life with a serial stalker. It's based on his own true story, he's changed the names and some of the details. It was brave of him to star in it.

Gadd plays Donny, a hopeful young comedian trying to break through in London and Jessica Gunning plays Martha, a woman who lives in a total fantasy and fabricated world who latches onto Donny when he shows her an act of kindness when she is distraught about something we never discover. From the moment he is nice to her his world is turned upside down; however, it is made worse by his own fascination with the woman, which further fuels her belief that the two of them are destined to be lovers and forever partners or at the very least are involved in a relationship. It is far more disturbing and scary than it is funny, although it does have some humorous moments, this is about psychological obsession and mental health issues that threaten to escalate into dangerous situations. Gadd's character is not only weirdly obsessed by the attentions of Martha, he's also developed his own hang-ups, maybe even sexual peccadillos - he appears to be attracted to transgender women, except is he? He is portrayed as a straight male with a healthy interest in sex, but he is surrounded by all kinds of different sexual behaviours - from an obsessive woman, two very butch gay bosses, his former girlfriend's mother, who dotes on him like her lost son, but also looks at him like she's discovering a lost sexual appetite; then there's his attraction to and time spent on transgender dating sites - he is 'turned on by the different' and Gadd is honest enough to suggest that the problems had with Martha might have been exacerbated by his desire to be the centre of attention or by the trauma from his past that he didn't want to confront but we get to see full on. This is a deeply psychological tale. 

Whatever Donny's interests are they pale into insignificance as Martha turns the screw and begins to assert her lunacy further and deeper into his life. Everything he does she goes out of her way to sabotage as she pops up constantly in his life and drives herself to the brink of illness blatantly stalking him. There are some truly chilling and scary moments and it certainly starts to feel more like a horror story at the halfway point when Martha's obsession turns violent. This is a really disturbing television series and while it is quite excellent it really isn't comfortable viewing. It also deserves to win awards; Gadd is brilliant in it, as is Gunning and it is truly compelling viewing with unexpected things happening and some very difficult to watch scenes. It truly is a unique piece of television and one that I'd recommend people watch. Netflix at its best.

A Gray Tale

We went into The Gray Man thinking we must have seen it because we both remembered Chris Evans looking like a nerdy Freddy Mercury tribute act - I mean, how could we forget a film where he looks so fucking stupid? But it seems that we only remembered the look from things we must have seen on TV or in the press because this Ryan Gosling action thriller was new to us. It's also a Russo brothers film, with a lot of the people who made Avengers: Endgame involved and for all that MCU film's faults, it was much better than this movie.

I think the biggest problem this feature has is that it didn't really know how to pitch itself. Was it a Jason Bourne type thriller or was there an element of 007 in there? It's essentially a movie about covert agents with special abilities and stupid people opting to go up against them. How often in these kind of films are the bad guys told 'He's a fucking nightmare, he's going to fuck up all your men and kill you in the end' so they ignore that and everything they're told happens? Pretty much every single time and this is no different. In fact the only thing about this that is different is the oblique and slightly odd ending, because after the denouement, the 'epilogue' felt more like a set-up for a sequel that hasn't yet happened rather than a conclusion. Too much is left unfinished or unchallenged and the bad guys essentially get away with it leaving their henchman to take the rap. Gosling makes a reasonable action hero, showing off the physique that many thought was fake in the Barbie film, but he was lacking in something - possibly a personality - and some of the 'banter' was tonally very wrong. Evans was remarkable as the sociopathic private sector looney without a care in the world and some of the set pieces were excellent. It was okay. We've all seen better and we've also seen much worse; however, it simply felt like a Ryan Gosling vehicle. A movie that was supposed to go from A to Z but somehow stalled around W and flopped about like a flat fish out of water. It needed a definitive ending not a suggestion that if Netflix were happy with it they'd pay Gosling a lot of money to make a sequel.

Film News

News broke today that Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson were to star in a remake of the 1988 comedy classic Naked Gun. I find this disturbing and worrying and I really hope that the wondrous Leslie Nielsen isn't spinning in his grave at this truly vomit-inducing outrage. That is all...

Mr Bright + Sidekick

Back at Christmas 2017, when we'd lived here less than six months, we had a crappy festive period. I was ill, the wife had just recovered from a bad cold and we missed almost the entire holiday period. Our Christmas night film was something that had been Netflix's Christmas Eve special; a fantasy thriller set in an alternate LA, one with orcs, elves, faeries, centaurs and other fantasy creatures and all having a place in a largely human hierarchy. The film was Bright and it starred Will Smith and Joel Edgerton.

It's been 6½ years and with a couple of exceptions we remembered absolutely nothing about it at all. This was a story about a human cop, played by Smith, who has an orc for a partner, Edgerton, and orcs are hated by humans because of something that happened 2000 years ago and he's hated by his own kind because he's sold out. Jakoby is the first orc to become a policeman and he is despised by his colleagues, even to a certain degree by Smith. The thing is he's a good cop and he's honest. This is the 1980s Alien Nation updated with fantasy creatures and the villain they are up against is an elf who possesses a magic wand who wants to bring the Dark Lord back to rule the earth. The elf, Noomi Rapace, is a ruthless and violent being with a couple of henchmen almost as nasty as she is and they are desperate to retrieve her wand which has been taken by one of her former disciples.

The problem with this movie is the story is pretty flimsy; the wand is desired by almost everyone and the two cops with the elf in their protection are being chased by literally everyone, yet there isn't really much going on... Well, there is but it doesn't seem to have a direction apart from to lurch from one violent set piece to another. It's a great action adventure but there's this feeling that it's also a bit vacuous; it simply nearly two hours of stuff happening. There's talk about prophecy, hints that Will Smith is a Bright - someone who can wield a magic wand - and there's a couple of FBI Magic Division agents who feel as though they should be in this more or that there's more of a story about them, but like the rest of the film it's all just a tad superficial - all style no substance. It wasn't a bad film, but it wasn't brilliant either. It felt like Netflix thought they could have a franchise on their hands but didn't.

Day Shit

There's some films we've seen before that we can't remember and they were okay and then there's some films we've seen before that after watching them a second time we wish we hadn't bothered or that maybe we could have done something more interesting like dying or having all of my limbs hacked off with a blunt spoon. That was pretty much how I felt after [again] sitting and suffering Day Shift a film about vampires with that one-time Oscar winning Jamie Foxx.

This Netflix pile of shite was everything you didn't want from a vampire film or even a comedy horror film. It had bits that made no sense (or were explained away in such an off handed way that it gave you the impression they made it up as they went along), huge amounts of comedy violence and a script that may well have been written by a dog scraping its arse along some paper on the floor. It was so fucking awful it made other vampire films ashamed to be in the same category. Foxx has been in some stinky films in recent years but one wonders what the fuck he did with his career to have been relegated to the kind of film that Eric Roberts might turn down. It starts quite promisingly with some acrobatic violence as the pool cleaner with the Polish name played by Foxx battles an aged woman finally besting her after being drenched in blood vomit. The problem is she was the daughter of a really high and mighty vampire who is also a real estate mogul and the movie pretty much falls apart from that point on. It has vampires who aren't bad, which gets zero explanation and it has Snoop Dog as a lone cowboy vampire hunter who does stupid things and still manages to be alive at the end. Like Bright, one gets the impression Netflix thought this might have sequel legs. I hope to whatever gods there might be that it doesn't, for the sake of people who might watch it.

Sweet Confusion

The fourth episode of Sugar did not deliver the plot twist that The Guardian said happens at the halfway point of this series, or if it did it went over my head. The episode starts with John Sugar having a medical examination by the 'approved' doctor and a little more of the weird things he's involved in outside of his detective work was hinted at. In fact, he was describing The Thing to the doctor which just makes me think he is really part of an alien invasion, which of course would be fucking ridiculous or a stroke of genius. Maybe he's an angel, that might explain why he's so nice to people?

What is good about this week's episode is we're firmly back in the 'where's Olivia' storyline and we start to discover what her half brother Davey has been up to; just what a slimy piece of shit he is and what lengths his parents will go to to protect him. We also know that whoever John really works for are very concerned about him uncovering things he wasn't meant to, which also involves the nutter Stallings - played by Eric Lange - who is trying to find out what happened to his chief henchman but also shut people up who might know what Davey Siegel has been up to. It's clear that Davey - Nate Corddry - is a dangerous sexual predator and that his father is trying desperately to cover something up he's committed, but what this has to do with Olivia is still not clear - apart from the fact she now knows her half brother is a massive cunt. Stallings has something in his cellar which he refers to as his project, if this is Olivia then I don't see how it's going to end well for her and why her father is so ambivalent about her fate. It's still quality TV, I just wish it was longer than half an hour.

Rebel Poo - The Shitgiver

So my birthday treat was to watch Rebel Moon, Part Two - The Scargiver and this is a film that was 6.8 on IMDB when I downloaded it (less than four hours after it was released on Netflix) and by the time I started watching it was down to 5.3 and when I finished watching it two hours later was 5.1. I'm going to be brutally honest about this - the people who have rated this so low are a bunch of sad pathetic wankers. I know I said this after the first film, but I feel really doesn't deserve that kind of hate. Yes, it's derivative nonsense, but it's entertaining nonsense, with reasonable actors and this time round a simple 'Magnificent Seven' story that was simultaneously boring and mega-exciting.

In many ways this is a far better film than the first part, even if the first hour was as dull as dishwater and plodded along at a snail's pace. It was about bringing in the harvest - as a kind of weapon against the 'empire' and then training the villagers to be an army. I had to laugh at one point when they were totting up the weapons and ammo they had and then they spent ten minutes having villagers firing weapons at straw figures, but you know, that's rather trivial. It's the second half that's worth the entrance fee because however overblown and full-on Snyder it was, it did really work as an ongoing action sequence that was both epic and different from your average BIG action sequences.

There was deaths and shocks, but you expect that; in the Magnificent Seven, I think, three of the team died fighting the bandits and in this one we lose two of the team, obviously heroically. Sofia Boutella still can't act and Djimon Hounsou barked lots of General things at the assembled team and villagers. Ed Skrein went through a prolonged rejuvenation process where the idea he might have some serious brain damage after almost being killed by Boutella's Kora, but he ended up being as psychotic as he was in the first film - no changes there and a bit of a pointless subplot/red herring. The Anthony Hopkins voiced Jimmy (or James as he liked being called) got involved just when things were looking desperate, despite telling Kora that everyone would die and by the end of the movie it was clear that Zack Snyder had been told by Netflix that despite the woeful reviews he had the green light to do a third part because even though they won this battle, there was still a war they had to finish.

It was overblown nonsense, but it was fun entertainment and I've watched some much worse films with higher ratings than this (some of them above this review). I think Snyder is a Marmite director and I think Star Wars wankers have deliberately gone out of their way to sabotage ratings on this film to - hopefully - have it killed by Netflix. of course what they've actually achieved is a record number of punters watching it to see if it's as bad as they were told it was and they obviously didn't because they came back for the second part and they will for the third. I would never have gone to the cinema to see this and I do feel it was a knock off of Star Wars, but in a weird way it was so much better than that 9-part heap of steaming shite. The special effects were better than anything the MCU has done in the last few years and the people making it - the actors - clearly had a lot of fun doing it. I will watch the third part, whenever it comes out and I will enjoy it so much more than any Star Wars film I've ever seen (although I did enjoy the first one, but I was 15 when I saw that, but it still wasn't the best Sci-Fi film I saw that year). Treat yourself to some cheesy wotsits of a film; take it as it comes and don't expect Shakespeare. 

Next Time...

Late Night With the Devil is likely to be the next film we watch; I've discounted a lot of new releases, including Immaculate (mainly because I don't see what all the fuss is about Sydney Sweeney - we've seen in her a half decent film, but other than that, not much has impressed me) and a couple of others whose titles have already departed my brain. The thing is this week hasn't been bad, there has been some quality entertainment in there and I struggle to remain optimistic that this will continue. I think it might be an exception to the rule. The thing is, as usual, you'll find out what nonsense I've watched this time next week.

Pop Culture - The Return of Entertainment

The spoilers are right here and right now, so be aware because they will spoil things for you like moist air spoils fresh bread...

A Right Herbert

Denis Villeneuve makes great films. Arrival is one of the best movies I've seen in the last ten years (although I wasn't enamoured by the Bladerunner sequel) and Dune, Part One is BIG. I mean it's absolutely HUGE. It's a spectacle, an event, an epic like we hadn't seen before.

In many ways, if you compare this film to David Lynch's flawed adaptation from 40 years ago you can see how the human race has advanced, even in our lifetimes. This is a Mozart concerto compared to a Brotherhood of Man album; it's caviar compared to cheesy Wotsits - the two films might pretty much tell the same story but there is no comparison, and yet both films had all star casts and famous people in small roles and followed the book as best they could, given that Frank Herbert's books are largely unfilmable. This, second viewing, was a Saturday night event (as the next part will be a Sunday night event) and considering it was almost two and a half hours long, it pretty much whizzed by. Yet, in many ways, very little happens and there's actually a number of questions that hopefully will be answered in Part Two, but most definitely weren't in this one.

Why does House Atreides bother the Emperor so much that he wants to get rid of them? Is it because the Harkonens are now richer than him and this is a political move to ensure he curries favour with the bald psychopaths? If that's the case, why take Arrakis away from them in the first place? You see, as many people will attest from these blogs, I like to work with logic. A story has to be logical, there has to be some kind of internal logic at play otherwise I struggle with it, so there doesn't appear to be a reason why House Atreides has been sacrificed, unless, of course, it was a move by the people I like to call the Benny Degenerates. If this is literally a long game to get Paul - son of Leto - to eventually become emperor, then surely we could have been sent a clearer message? That aside, I can just about excuse the other plot holes until I've seen the second instalment and this logic plot hole I've highlighted might be explained as well. 

This is, as I said, an epic. The Atreides are given the spice world and replace the bonkers Harkonens; Duke Leto wants a better relationship with the indigenous Fremen, while his wife is grooming their son and heir to be something altogether different - a male Bene Gesserit, possibly for even bigger things. The agreement to leave Paul and his mother Jessica alone to live is something the Harkonens have no interest in, but they survive the slaughter and get away to join the Fremen in the desert and that is essentially the film. Other stuff happens, but it's all essentially ... not padding, but fleshing out. Paul not only has Bene Gesserit powers, he also is regarded as the Messiah and he scares people. You wonder why because Timothee Chalamet is a weedy little fucker, but that's maybe part of his charm and power.

Part Two is scheduled for tomorrow. I really can't wait. After weeks of largely sifting through shit to find some nuggets, it was great to watch a film - albeit with some plot holes - that didn't treat me like an illiterate twat... 

Another Right Herbert

The first thing about Dune, Part Two you notice is that it starts literally a couple of minutes after Part One ended. Paul, his mum and the Fremen are taking the body of Jamis back to their settlement and are attacked by a squad of Harkonen psychos. Once they've been despatched - and frankly if the Harkonens can hover and float about in their war suits you wonder why they bother with 'foot' soldiers - the film settles into essentially 90 minutes of 'How Paul becomes a Fremen'.

Like the first part, a lot of time passes with little happening but that's fine because this is still an epic story and epic stories deserve to have time taken over them. What we do discover is why the Atreides were sacrificed and that Paul is just one of the Bene Gesserit's myriad of schemes; some put in place in case others don't work. They are the real driving force behind this story and I imagine the other stories in the Dune Universe. But the real thing in the first 90 minutes is how Paul Atreides becomes Paul Muadib Usal, honorary Fremen and would be Messiah. How he conquers lots of obstacles and learns to be a desert man. However, one thing puzzled me (and the wife) and was never explained - how do you get off of a sandworm after you've taken a ride on it. It was never shown and given how huge, destructive and dangerous they are, getting off of one, especially when you can place special compartments on their backs to keep vulnerable people in, is never shown and that bugged me.

What I will say is - and stop now if you haven't seen this and intend to - while it concludes many things, it clearly sets us up for Dune Messiah or Part Three, because it ends with conclusions but also with beginnings and unfinished parts - such as the birth of 'The Abomination,' the fight with the other Houses and whatever happens to Chani. It is a cracking film, but it's also a bit like The Empire Strikes Back (except in this case it's the Empire Gets Royally Butt Fucked). It's not an ending, just a stopping off point. I don't think this duology, which will eventually become a trilogy, will ever be anyone's favourite film series, but it is quality filmmaking with a great cast of actors and a story that is both as old as the hills but also refreshing and bold. Denis Villeneuve is apparently going to adapt Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama as his next project - that is also something decidedly weird and believed to be difficult to film.

Ship of Fools?

So... one of the televisual highlights of the last couple of years was the German/Netflix production called Dark. It was almost perfect even if it had subtitles and got very very weird in the final series. The people responsible for this work of pure unadulterated genius were also responsible for the TV series 1899 about mysterious goings on aboard a steam ship that finds its deserted 'sister' ship somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.

Unfortunately, instead of being a quality follow up series it becomes this week's first flop. We managed two episodes of the eight, but it was so bloated and uninteresting we decided to give up. The thing about Dark was it made sense even if it was dealing with some weird time travel business. Not once in the first two series did we stop and think 'WTF' - I mean, we did, but in a good way. 1899 was just strange with an assortment of characters none of which were particularly likeable and while I'm sure it would have made sense in the end (despite being cancelled, I was informed that the eighth part has an 'explanation' of sorts), I just wasn't interested in it. It was boring; very boring and felt like it was being weird for weird's sake. It's a shame, I was expecting something like Dark but instead got something like ITV's Passenger.

Sweetness

[heh heh] The Guardian currently rates Kate Winslett's The Regime as 'quality TV, guaranteed to make you laugh - 4 stars'. IMDB currently has a 6.1 rating for it. I know which one I believe. That said, the same newspaper gave the new Colin Farrell TV series Sugar a two-star rating and found lots wrong with it and complained about an apparent plot twist halfway through the series of which we've only got access to the first two - which I think is a bit shitty, a bit spoilery. It's literally a review that says 'we liked it but halfway through there's a plot twist we didn't like so we now think it's shit. You're going to have to wait for it because you're just the paying public.' I think that's a fucking dereliction of reviewing duties. How dare that abysmal pseudo-right wing newspaper talk about something that happens in an episode we won't see for at last three weeks. It's pseudo-spoiling; it's trying to come across as better than people watching on a weekly basis - we know what happens and we don't like it, but you plebs are going to have to wait to find out what, ner ner, ner, ner ner. Fuck the Guardian and anyone who thinks it's a good newspaper...

As opening episodes go these were absolute corkers. It was everything you want from a mystery thriller. Just enough story, intrigue and hints of what's to come. A good introduction to the main character and his people and a nice juicy missing person's case that is obviously not going to be straightforward or easily solvable. Sugar is the kind of thing I expect from Apple TV; there's an element of class about it that won't even be spoilt if the plot twist halfway through is that John Sugar is an alien or a transsexual dolphin. This is well made entertaining, intriguing TV and we definitely need more of it.

John returns to Hollywood from a relatively straightforward case in Tokyo and takes on a new job without his 'boss' knowing, or more importantly, she did know she just didn't want him to take the case on - he needs a holiday. It's about the missing granddaughter of a famous Hollywood producer and John is a huge film buff and this is something that's right up his street. We quickly discover that he's also not your average PI; there's a Holmesian logic about his actions and the questions he asks and the things he looks for. He's also an incredibly nice man; he's a polyglot, nice to dogs and everyone who meets him is pretty much blown away by his charming arresting personality. He also has a problem, but what that problem is more than likely is what the plot twist is going to be (and why I'm erring towards extra terrestrial as the moment). I liked the first two episodes; I expect we've found something weekly that's finally going to fill some of the void left by all those other Apple TV shows we were banging on about until last January when TV became shit again.

Episode three, which like two, was about 30 minutes long and felt as though it needed to be longer was just as entertaining, but some of John Sugar's mystic was being unravelled. He's either a spy (or an alien working undercover) because he's a member of a polyglot society that are charged with watching rather than getting involved and Ruby is likely to be his handler. It feels slightly unnecessary in the context of the detective aspect of the series and could be what the Guardian was banging on about. My gut feeling is while whatever secrets John is hiding and part of might be important to his character development, it's Olivia's disappearance and the myriad of stories emerging from this that is holding my interest, because that's what drew me in originally. There is definitely something going on with the Siegel family and Sugar is beginning to realise why Ruby didn't want him to get involved with this case because it appears to be more than just a single can of worms. Intriguing stuff, even if John's subplot feels misplaced.

Thieves Like Us

Had Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead been half as good as the prequel, Army of Thieves then we'd be talking about a quality zombie movie rather than an absolute heap of steaming shite. This is a heist comedy and it pretty much hits the right notes for most of the film. Yes, there's an element of corniness about it, but not from where you might expect.

This is about 'Ludwig Deter' the safecracker from Snyder's Las Vegas set Zombie faeces and how he became a safecracker, when he was just simple Sebastian Schlencht-Wöhnert - a bank teller and part time opener of locks. He gets recruited by Nathalie Emmanuel's Gwen, who is part of a team of international thieves and these include Guz Khan, Ruby O Fee and a massive twat wannabe Huge Ackman clone played by someone called Stuart Martin. You can imagine the two women as part of an international heist team, but the men... not so much. They want to crack the three most difficult safes in the world - or to be more precise, three of the four most difficult safes, all named after Wagner's Ring Cycle and posing a huge risk for Sebastian and his new team of bad guys, especially when the buffoons from Interpol get on the scene. What follows is an entertaining and really likeable romp that doesn't have the happy ending you would hope for, but anyone who's seen Army of the Dead will understand why - that film really wasn't as good as it could be, while this, directed by Matthias Schweighöfer (the guy who plays Sebastian/Ludwig) is good and is worth watching as long as you ignore the epilogue if you haven't seen Snyder's really bad zombie flick.

Retro Apocalypse

Right... I'm not sure how I'm going to do this because when you get entire series dropping in one lump (and then have a what's going to happen segment at the end of the first episode), it's difficult to review. We're not going to watch this in the allotted span of a week's blog [it's late Thursday night as I write this] so I either write this as a few episodes this week and the rest next week - by which time anyone wanting to watch the entire series will have binge watched it or given up entirely - or I come up with a different approach... So I decided to try something a little bit different. It might work, it probably won't. This could all have been edited out by the time this goes live on Saturday. Who can say?

Fallout - season one, episode one: The End: I remember when the first Fallout computer game came out in 1997. A friend of mine - who later became someone I really didn't like being in the same room with - was mega excited about it and that just about concludes my knowledge of the game. I remember watching him play it a couple of times, but I was probably stoned and therefore unlikely to remember anything. The guys in the big metal suits seemed to ring a bell, but even that might be some kind of subliminal thing where I'd seen their picture somewhere and just assimilated it, like I do with all the knowledge that makes me good at pub quizzes. The thing is, while the rest of the world - Gen Zs and Millennials mainly - have been wetting themselves about the new Fallout TV series, it's largely gone over my head. I've seen a few of the trailers and thought it looked both interesting and expensively made, so if it had a good story as well, we might be onto a winner. Episode one - The End - was just over an hour in length and does a good job of setting us up for what to expect, or at least it does enough to make me retain some interest.

It starts in the 1950s with a former famous cowboy actor working children's birthday parties - because he was probably a bit of a pinko liberal (from what one of the parents said) in a world that looked similar to 'our' 1950s, but with technological advancements that looked very out of place. There's a threat of a nuclear war but everyone is just trying to enjoy a kid's birthday party; that is until a nuke goes off in the city, followed by a number of other nukes - we're in a war and given the amount of nukes going off, one that isn't going to have a happy ending for many. Fast forward 218 years and the world is a desolate and broken place and inside one of the many underground 'cities' are the people of Vault 33 and the daughter of their leader - Lucy - who is trying to find a husband who isn't related to her so that breeding can take place without genetic problems. She's paired up with someone from Vault 32 and a wedding is arranged and all will be good in Lucy's life. That is until her brother notices that the 'guests' from Vault 32 are all dishevelled and smell, then chaos ensues. Lots of death and blood and the people from Vault 32 aren't from there at all; they are in fact raiders from the outside world. The chief raider sort of knows Lucy and her father, who she kidnaps and we're introduced to our first mystery.

Meanwhile, there's this Brotherhood of Steel, protectors of the USA (or what's left of it). Guys in big metal suits, with their own squires - all very knights of the round table kind of thing. The squires are chosen from people who do all the shit jobs as training to become squires and eventually become 'knights' - among these is Maximus, who gets a job as a squire because his mate, who was to become a squire, gets seriously injured in what looks to be a sabotage - was it Maximus who did it or someone else?

While all this is going on we're reintroduced to the cowboy from the opening scenes, now referred to as The Ghoul, because he's over 200 years old, has no nose and is being kept alive with some substance and woken up every now and then so the guy who is keeping him in this state can do something that isn't clearly explained. The Ghoul is taking on the same job that the Knights are - searching for someone who has escaped 'The Enclave' - which we know nothing about as yet - and is valuable.

This is where we're at with the first part. Introductions and mysteries, which I suspect will be explained as we move further into the realms of this new post-apocalyptic world. Was it good? Well, it wasn't bad. It pushed enough buttons for us to be looking forward to the next episodes. I kind of think it's a shame that it couldn't have been released like an old fashioned TV series, but box sets and streaming is taking over the world and I'm an old cunt with no input or say in the matter. Episodes two and three will follow this.

Season one, episode two: The Target: Something I've touched on in the past is how I'm not really a fan of Mad Max - the idea of post apocalyptic slapstick has never really pushed any of my buttons and with the second episode of Fallout we got introduced to the population of the world outside of the Vaults and there was this lack of credibility about them. 

As with the first episode, we're following Lucy, Maximus and the Ghoul, but this starts off about Michael Emerson's Wilzig - the guy who worked for the Enclave who has defected from there with his dog and is carrying some 'secret' that could change the world. He has a bounty on his head which the Ghoul, the Knight called Titus and the woman who kidnapped Lucy's father want, but before the end of the episode, Titus is dead and the 'town' called Filly has been pretty much levelled by the Ghoul and Maximus, who has taken on Titus's armour. This was a violent episode that explained a little more about the way of the rest of the world and how Lucy is like a fish out of water. Oddly enough, it's she who ends up having to rescue Wilzig and he gives her some excellent advice.

This was also the first signs of a slight ... I dunno, disillusionment? Bewilderment? Possible lack of interest? The aforementioned Mad Max style of natives coupled with a distinct effort for this to be as much a black comedy as a post apocalyptic thriller grated on me a little. The comedy doesn't push any buttons with me and we're not really learning enough about our playing field for me to be caring about any of the players. The seeds of concern were planted by the end of this episode.

Season one, episode three: The Beginning: Except, it wasn't really the beginning. We had some flashbacks to when Coop (later to become the Ghoul) was a famous cowboy actor with his black wife and mixed race daughter in a USA that hated communists but clearly was not as racist as it really is; the main thing was more travelling towards the ultimate destination which Lucy is hoping will mean the release of her father - in what, I have to be honest is a very altruistic and slightly insane concept given what she's faced since she left Vault 33.

This was, I'm sorry to say, more of the same, although thankfully fewer moments with the people who inhabit the place. There is an encounter with a Gulper - a mutated fish thing with human fingers for teeth, who has stolen Wilzig's head and the Ghoul loses the stuff that keeps him alive and instead of trying to track down Wilzig's head - which is inside the Gulper but with enough time to retrieve it before it is digested - decides to take Lucy somewhere else. Maximus turns up and with the help of his new squire beats the creature by what appears to be pulling its insides out through its mouth. By the time we finished the third episode I could see the wife's eyes were beginning to glaze over and I could tell she was thinking that we were watching yet another TV series that she wasn't going to want to stick with.

We're almost halfway through and I expect next weeks blog will be more akin to a general review of the last five parts rather than this breakdown. This isn't going to be for all tastes and spending so much time on it here feels like an overindulgence for something I'm not sold on.

Next Time...

Probably the conclusion of Fallout and the next episode of Sugar will dominate the TV part, we might dip into Baby Reindeer. On the film front there have been a number of new releases this week and virtually all of them have been discarded through lack of interest; we might give Wicked Little Letters a try - especially as the Guardian hated it - and I've added a few movies we saw in 2020 and 2021 to the Flash Drive of Doom given our collective shit memories for what happens in films.

It has been a better week for televisual entertainment, but I can't help feel that I'm no longer easily pleased (if I ever was) and probably much harder to please, especially as I'm too quick to find fault in things, even if it's deserved. You know, nothing beats a simple story well made with good actors and a solid script. You don't need to be as complicated as a Rubik's cube to entertain and having a simple story isn't a sign of weakness. 

I'm not the kind of person who TV or film is made for nowadays, the same as I'm not who phones and the internet are aimed at either. This is something that will become more apparent as time passes. We shall see, I suppose, won't we?