Modern Culture - Picking Carrots out of Vomit

Do you know something? I don't give a flying fuck if I spoil it for you. Half of the shit I've watched deserves to be spoilt if you're going to be as stupid as me and watch it in the first place...

Jurassic Wank

"Let's watch something stupid and throwaway." So we did. That was watching Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a film that doesn't start off badly but falls down a very strange rabbit hole of pseudo-science, arms-dealing and script-writing lunacy about halfway through.

This really is a movie in two parts - three, if you count the monster in a haunted house finale as different from the middle part which was just plain bonkers. What starts off as a seemingly humanitarian mission to save as many dinosaurs from the rapidly exploding Isla Nubla quickly becomes something else entirely. Rafe Spall - often a massive twat in many things he's in - recruits (a slender) Bryce Dallas Howard to help save as many of the lovable reptiles as possible from the island that housed the dino-park and she recruits Chris Pratt because the velociraptor is one of the treasures they want to keep (quite why they would want to save something that has proven to be a voracious and deadly killer soon becomes clear, but no one really thought about that) and he's the go-to man for velociraptors.

These two former items travel to the island with two of Howard's cronies - both fish out of water - in the company of a bunch of mercenaries who quickly make their presence felt leaving our heroes stranded on a melting island. Why would these people be so disposable? Because Rafe Spall is bonkers and he has lots of money making schemes up his sleeve involving selling dinosaurs to the highest foreign bidders, so covering up the deaths of some people is but a fly in the ointment of his megalomania. This is where it stops being an action thriller and turns into a black comedy with few laughs. It's like King Kong chained up in that theatre all over again as the latest big scary dinosaur escapes and causes havoc like we've all seen before. It's at this point where it becomes like a slasher movie set in an old creepy and creaky house, except Michael Myers is actually a dinosaur with claws and big teeth. 

It is two hours of bollocks; pure unadulterated bollocks, but it's got its own likeable quirks; Pratt isn't just Star Lord and the special effects were, as usual, top quality. The bad guys all died in horrible, toothy, ways and even though she had her leg opened up by big nasty dino's big nasty claw near the end, Ms Howard (daughter of Happy Days' Ron) forgets to limp in the closing scenes. We also had more clones, a strange guardianship and some pointless cameos and it all set itself up nicely for the next instalment, which we have planned for later this week. Huzzah and rawr...

Big Dump

Big Mood had some good things written about it. we managed to get 17 minutes into it before switching off. This is, allegedly, what passes as 'cutting edge comedy' in 2024. I really should stop being influenced by what the fucking Guardian says; their reviewers are literally all cretins and morons.

Jurassic Pork

I feel like a sexist twat - not literally or maybe it is literally rather than metaphorically... I dunno... but I do because I seem obsessed with Bryce Dallas Howard's expanding waistline. I think during the making of Jurassic World Dominion she either was given free rein of the catering truck or she might have got pregnant or something because she seemed to put on weight during this film and by the time she made the execrable Argylle (about a year after this) she was the size of an elephant [a little Banana Splits cartoon reference there to The Arabian Nights].

The film itself probably doesn't deserve a 5.6 rating on IMDB. Why? Because it's no better or worse than the other two films in this second Jurassic trilogy; in fact, if nothing else it was considerably less far-fetched than Fallen Kingdom and that - with its 6.1 rating - says something when you're talking dinosaur films. At least Dominion only had one wanker in it, albeit with minions who didn't deserve to live, although one did - Dichen Lachman. Not that she had a huge role to play, but she wasn't a nice person and deserved the same fate as this film's rich wanker playing God. This time around it was all about stealing two children - Blue's self-reproduced off-spring 'Beta' and the Lockwood clone, Maisie. Taking them to a BioSys facility in the Dolomites for something to do with giant locusts, or maybe not, as it seemed the recurring scientist wanted to cure the world of giant locusts but the rich wanker was thinking about promoting his locust immune crops.

Along for the ride this time with the chubbier-than-last-time Ms Howard, was Chris Pratt, Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum, all reprising their roles from earlier films. There was a couple of other additions to the cast but you don't really care who or what they did because this was all about the T-Rex, the weird dinosaur with Freddy Kreuger hands and the giganotosaurus - the largest predatory dino ever to have existed. Yet, it wasn't even about those, because this had more dinosaurs than you could staccato wank at - it was brimming with them, this was dinosaur bukkake; the movie positively ejaculated new reptilian bird-like things at the audience while reminding us that the franchise is like 30 years old and Laura Dern looks rough for a woman who was only 55 when she made this, but that's me just sounding sexist again. I mean, to be fair, Chris Pratt was looking his age and Goldblum and Neill looked like they were both in their 70s (which, of course they were). Apparently, Scarlett Johansson is going to be in the next movie, which might be a new trilogy or might just be the death knell of dino-films; who can say?

So, in a nutshell - kidnapped children, Maltese bike chase, planes, trains and automobiles, Italian mountains, lots of dinosaurs, fake sincerity, double crossing, more trying to kill the lead actors, big dinosaur fight, snow,  velociraptors, squirting dinosaurs, failed computer systems, race against time, tunnels with lots of irrelevant shit in them - and dinosaurs, giant bugs on fire, cattle prods, huge weight gains and fake news reportage. Someone suggested I should give Daniel Craig's James Bond films a try, but I said no because there isn't enough dinosaurs in them and I don't count Judi Dench as one. Bazang!

Dead Ending

Over Easter we finished the 1990s hospital drama Cardiac Arrest, something I've waxed lyrically over a couple of times during the last few blogs. Accompanying it was a short programme interviewing Jed Mercurio, the now famous writer and former doctor behind the show who wrote it under the pseudonym John Macure. It has been a fond trip down memory lane, even if the only thing I remembered about it was the totally shocking ending, where one of the many characters we'd grown to love over the 27 episodes was about to meet a very untimely end. That final episode called Death Do Us Part was a real twisting finale with the title likely to apply to all manner of characters in the show before picking one of the least likely candidates out at the very end. It's available on iPlayer for a few more months, so if you've never seen it and fancy some funny but equally hard-hitting medicine then treat yourself to this and allow your mind to boggle at how in the 28 years since the last episode aired nothing has changed... 

The Emo-man

Remember when I used to write at least once a week that I'd seen a film but I couldn't remember anything about it? Then I said I wasn't going to bang on about it any more because it seemed that everything I watched had been erased from my memory? Well, we watched The Batman and it's been less than two years since we did and I'll be buggered with a brontosaurus if I can remember much about it at all. It was like watching a film that I thought I'd watched but maybe only a dream or perhaps I watched an extended trailer and took it for granted I'd seen it before...

This was Batman as a Nirvana track; about as gritty and dirty as you can imagine with 95% of the film taking place at night and 90% of it in the rain. It was filmed mainly in Glasgow and Liverpool so that explains the weather. It is also a Matt Reeves film - the guy who bought us the recent POTA trilogy and this was about emo Bruce Wayne and his bulletproof alter-ego The Batman and in some ways it is possibly the best Batman film of them all, but in other ways it isn't really like a Batman film at all. Yes, the titular superhero is in it an awful lot, sleuthing and knocking heads together, being an honourable vigilante, but it was so grungy and emo it could have been an extended video for a Seattle rock band.

Robert Pattinson is Bruce Wayne, mumbling through his eye-liner and being all dark, brooding and about as menacing as Robert Smith from the Cure. Zoe Kravitz is Catwoman without ever being called it. Jeffrey Wright is an okay Jim Gordon; while Colin Farrell is absolutely unrecognisable as the Penguin. Paul Dano plays the Riddler, almost always one step ahead of everyone, but like any good psychopath is just itching to be captured so he can watch his final act to play out from the comfort of his cell. There's a bunch of other known and local actors in it making up the numbers in what was a really atmospheric and shadowy movie. It just felt like it went on too long; yes, there were some interesting twists on the Batman mythos, but it was all a bit allegorical and full of hidden meanings, not just with the Riddler's puzzles and cryptograms but in the way the story unfolded. I think Pattinson was too emo; too dark and moody and not bulky enough, despite looking like a tank in his outfit. It was the problem I had with Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan's trilogy. Ben Affleck might have been a relatively unpopular Batman but he was the right shape. It was an enjoyable romp but it's dark and gloomy feel made the almost three hour run time feel like a long night at a bad Fields of the Nephilim concert...

Ball(s)

Did we watch Sphere when it came out in 1998 and forget everything about it because it was so bad or did we simply not bother with it in the first place? I fear, this is a question I'm never going to be able to answer. All I do know is that we watched it this evening and was left with the overwhelming feeling that, once again, I should have bowed to my better judgement. 

With a cast including Dustin Hoffman, Peter Coyote, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Liev Schreiber and Queef Latina and a director of the calibre of Barry Levinson, based on a Michael Crichton book, how could this science fiction film be anything but a massive hit; I mean... Men in Black for starters and that cast? Hoffman, Coyote... It would take something unnatural to ruin this, surely? But, you see, there's a catch and one I have to confess to. This movie may well have been seen and forgotten about, but equally it may never have fallen on my radar, but it tickled my interested button last week when I read an article in an on-line film magazine about the 50 worst films made by brilliant directors. Nothing leapt out at me that I either didn't remember or was never likely to watch, apart from Sphere. I checked IMDB and found it had a 6.1 rating, which is above my usual threshold and therefore it was a shoo-in to be watched.

A group of disparate professionals - a psychologist, a biologist, an astrophysicist and a mathematician [walk into a bar] are summoned to a site somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean, with them is a senior figure in an organisation called OSSA [I dunno] who tells them they've been summoned because they've found a spaceship on the ocean floor, thought to have been there for 288 years and they were the best qualified civilians to investigate. The lead civvy - Hoffman - wrote a guideline for the first Bush administration outlining what to do in the event of an alien invasion, so he immediately was considered; the others - Schreiber, Stone and Jackson were all people that Hoffman suggested would be suitable, based on what he knew ten years earlier - which becomes clear was nothing. It should also be noted at this point, they were doing a lot of adlibbing - there was no definitive script, so they were making up dialogue as they went along and at times boy did it show.

The twist here is while the Navy were involved, the only 'suit' was Coyote and he must have been told to be as different from his ET persona as possible because, well, he was. The five enter the spaceship ridiculously easily and soon discover the ship came from... dun dun dun... the USA. It had obviously travelled through a time loop from probably 2043, but maybe 21, 22 or even 2343 after an unexplained something or other happened. The crew were all dead and there was clearly more adlibbing than one would have expected because the script was fucking atrocious. Then shit starts to happen; people get killed off, almost without explanation, they start talking to an 'alien' called Jerry - via a computer screen - and then more people get killed off as we start to wonder if something is going on here... You see, they had discovered a giant golden sphere in the middle of the spaceship that reflected no faces or light and it could be that as many as three of the crew might have ventured inside said sphere and been 'changed' by it, given the ability to conjure up anything they might fear, thus placing everyone in peril. Queef Latina was attacked and killed by malevolent jellyfish (a manifestation of something Dustin hates) that managed to penetrate technologically advanced underwater suits, yet super poisonous sea snakes (something else Dustin was scared off) attacked him but didn't kill him. Everything is a dream, nothing appears to be real and all the time Sam Jackson is reminding everyone that because the ship was from the future and no one knew about this happening, they all must die.

It was stunningly bad. It was so bad that I'm sitting here thinking it could be one of the worst things I've ever seen because narratively it was just a hysterical cacophony of (bad) lunacy; so much made no sense. Such as what possessed Stone to ignore watching out for her mate, in case he got into trouble at a 1000 feet down, and go to the spaceship - the one that's been there almost 300 years - to see if she could find some food or maybe a special bottle of wine and then not even remotely understand how fucking insane she sounded just speaking those words? Oh and the ending... Don't get me started on that, because it would take up an entire blog just to explain what happened and not even delve into the realms of why, where or even how. So much talent on show, so little talent used...

Like a Rich Man's Benidorm

The White Lotus has garnered praise from all corners of the press - from my hated The Guardian to the Times and even websites dedicated to film and TV, it is top rated and I'd never been in the slightest interested in finding out why. So, we decided to give it a shot and we watched the first season over three nights and here's what I thought...

The first three episodes laid the foundations but I'm not sure what kind of building it was for. We're introduced to the Mossbacher family; a mega-successful mother who owns her own search engine and works with the Chinese and comes across as something of a snob, her needy lawyer husband who thought he had testicular cancer but doesn't but gets traumatised by the fact his father had a secret gay life and died of AIDS and not cancer. Their two children, Quinn - addicted to computer games and porn who is perpetually bullied by his older sister, Liv, who is an elitist Gen Z snob and is there with her best friend, Paula, who is more interested in having sex with one of the staff. They are an awful family, but in many ways the most normal of the three different 'families' we're introduced to.

Then there's Rachel and Shane Patton - the honeymooners - he's a Class A wanker and she's way out of her depth - also his mother who helps ruin Rachel's time by turning up unannounced - she's a nice girl, her new husband is a monstrous rich cunt. Finally there's Tanya McQuiod, an unbelievably needy and neurotic woman who is at the resort to dispose of her overbearing mother's ashes. These are all white privileged uber rich people that deserve absolutely no sympathy from the viewer. However, as The White Lotus is supposed to be this exclusive chain of fantastic resorts, it doesn't deserve any sympathy either, apart from some of the staff who, like all hospitality staff, are treated worse than shit on the sole of someone's shoe. The resort manager is Armand, a gay Australian who has been drink and drug free for five years and takes his job very seriously, except this latest intake of wealthy arseholes has driven him over the edge...

The thing is it isn't that funny; it does have funny moments but in general it seems to be several characters in search of a plot or even a story. It's like they're all vying to see who can be the most obnoxious of them all, apart from Rachel who has just got unhappier over the first five episodes and is hinted at in the show's prologue to be the dead person being loaded on the plane at the beginning. It's not bad; but I'm struggling to understand why there is so much love directed at the show because it isn't really anything special. It's just, as I said, a show about white privileged wankers and how fucking annoying they can be and personally I don't really get a hard on about TV shows about privileged people, regardless of how badly they get fucked over in the end.

The second half of the debut series was considerably more ... vibrant. Armand's falling off the wagon really causes problems; Shaun Patton becomes even more of an arsehole now that his mother has turned up on his honeymoon, poor old Rachel is beginning to look as though she'd rather be dead than be married and Tanya continues to be a very odd woman, leading a hotel employee on while eyeing up a single guy. The Mossbachers are really beginning to show their true colours especially Mark who appears to be a desperately unhappy man with a horrid wife. Meanwhile, Armand is really pissing off Shaun, which makes Shaun even more of an arsehole than he was already, but, of course, something happens to really tip things over the edge... 

The problem with the conclusion of this is simple, much of it makes little or no sense; such as Quinn's story and his parents complete lack of caring, or the pointlessness of Tanya's story (yet she's the only character to reappear in the second season); even how Shaun literally gets away with murder. The beginning promised an interesting whodunnit, but even that seemed to be glossed over and stuff happened to characters that made little or no narrative sense. This had people do things that you get the feeling they wouldn't have done had it been scripted by someone with a semblance of the real life, or they're just presuming that rich people and those connected to them go 'off-piste' a lot. The reason why I was never interested in watching Succession is because I don't give a fuck about rich people, even if they're being fucked over. I find obscenely rich people obscene and vile, so I don't really enjoy anything about them in TV series, unless it's a fleeting guest shot that ends violently badly. The jury is out about season two - it rests with the wife, because I don't think this deserves its 8 rating on IMDB; it was a bit facile and I didn't really root for anyone; even the staff were dislikeable.

And Lo, There Shall Be an Ending (NOT)

If the final episode of Resident Alien is the final FINAL episode then it's been left on a cliffhanger... No, not a cliffhanger, just a bunch of unfinished story lines. It spent 35 minutes of this alleged final episode tying up loose ends and then pulled a big fucking shark out of the closet and began jumping over it all over again. If it reappears I won't be watching it. I do feel slightly concerned because I have believed that my old acquaintance Pete Hogan, who created and wrote the comic for Dark Horse, probably had no idea the TV show had ruined his clever idea so badly, but he appeared in the final episode. Nice gesture, but if it had been me I think I'd have preferred to have been put at the bottom of a trench and had concrete poured over me - the quick drying stuff. This has been such a shit show that it gives shit a bad name.

The New Adventures of Star Fleet Jesus

Just as Resident Alien finishes, some other shit comes along to fill its void. Yes, that unbelievably bad Star Trek spin-off Star Trek: Disco Very is back and it's even more shittier than before. It still wants to be Star Wars and it still wants to make Michael Whatserface the 31st century Messiah, because, I mean she's so fucking important and reverential, how can anyone possibly defy her effulgence? 

Just when you thought they'd wrapped everything up and gone to the great Star Trek graveyard in the sky, Paramount+ went, "Tell you what, do you fancy doing another 8 episodes? You do? Great, we don't care what the fuck they're about, here's lots of money and you can use Doug Jones again..." Star Trek: Discovery was a bad idea after the second season; in many ways having a spaceship that was about a fucking thousand years ahead of any other Star Fleet vessel was always going to be a problem, especially when you decide to rewrite Gene Roddenberry's ideas and give Spock a black human adopted sister who was NEVER EVER mentioned ever by any previous incarnation of Spock EVER...

This time the crew has been reunited to chase two mercenary traders across the galaxy for a book that was written by a Romulan 800 years earlier - in Jean Luc Picard's era - that not only explains the history of all humanoid life (as covered in an episode of ST:TNG) but also purports to have made a weapon out of this technology that could, yet again, have devastating results on all universal life, again and while David Cronenberg goes out of his way to tell Michael Whatserface that it's above Top Secret so he can't tell her anything about it, he goes ahead and does anyway, because she's really female Star Fleet Jesus. The fat girl - looking even fatter and with really bad skin - is back in it in a big way, so are the gay couple, the transgender person and the weird physically enhanced with computer tech humans, oh and Doug Jones as the spindly insect like alien who's porking a Vulcan with whatever the spindly insect aliens use as penises. Please don't think I'm being an aged right wing arsehole, but this show doesn't appear to have any white, heterosexual male characters. It's like they've been outlawed...

IT'S FUCKING APPALLING!!! It's sanctimonious horse wank. It's condescending science fucktion. It's super advanced technology with Neanderthal men and women trying to operate it. It expects the viewer to be dazzled and awestruck, yet it's lacking in so many things and for a show set a thousand years into our future, there's so much ignorance and prejudice that one wonders if the writers of this show realise it's fucking Star Trek... I've witnessed animals have more fulfilling shits than this fucking awful - AWFUL - load of vomit. It really isn't very good. It should be avoided like a teenage girl would avoid a really drunken uncle at a wedding or someone with explosive diarrhoea - the kind that comes out of every hole not just an anus. I will not entertain this bile ever again. The people who make this are cunts. Massive cunts.

Next Time...

I'm looking forward to Sugar mainly because the Guardian hated it - so it must be good and I like Colin Farrell. Knox Goes Away was an 8.5 on Wednesday, when it was released, it's now a 6.9 on Saturday, so I expect if it drops below 6 by next week I won't be watching it - it's a Michael Keaton film about a hitman with dementia. Fallout drops in five days and the trailers have promised so much, so we're bound to hate it (and I really don't like Walton Coggins) and there's going to be other stuff - new and old - that I'll subject myself to and rise above the tortuous pain to try and entertain you all; or I might just go mad and wibble for 2000 words (which might be equally as entertaining - who can truly say?).

Oh and Dune (gets watched again) and Dune Part 2 will be the big things. So it might be a better week.