Modern Culture - Stinky and Farty

You know the drill - spoilers are likely, so tread carefully...

Pink Jesus Lizard

And so, a week after the streaming release of the awesome Godzilla Minus One we get the antithesis of that movie. The latest instalment in Legendary Pictures' Monsterverse - Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and if another film about a big ape and his giant lizard sidekick wasn't needed it arrived anyhow...

What can I say? I mean, it isn't like anyone is supposed to take these films seriously, is it? There was so much wrong about this movie - there was no logic to a lot of it. Things were said that were contradicted literally seconds later. New titans were introduced with fanfare to last literally seconds; how come Monarch just happened to have a giant Kong shaped exo-skeleton arm complete with painkillers lying around and just how did Godzilla get inside the Coliseum without damaging it and why did he return to it and there wasn't any damage from the last time he left it? In fact, there was so many things about this film that made little or no sense, like how can there be a subterranean level to Hollow Earth? How come Kong seemed to set up loads of traps that only he knew about and when did he do this and why? Why in the Monarch TV series are we told that time passes at a different speed in Hollow Earth but this doesn't seem to apply now? How come the Hollow Earth base is so far away from the main Earth portal? And why did radio contact disappear as they were getting close to the base - why have a base that's far away from your escape route and out of radio range? Why on earth was Dan Stevens channelling Michael Caine as a 1960s love and peace hippy?.

All credit for the LGBT+ Godzilla with his pink sheen and ability to dive off of the rock of Gibraltar or to allow Kong to ride him like a racehorse - if you've never imagined Godzilla running like Usain Bolt then watch this film and have that unfulfilled fantasy become a reality. However, it was nice to see Mothra again, I always wondered what happened to her after Godzilla: King of the Monsters (actually, I never gave it a second thought and neither did you).

This was an unmitigated pile of ape shit, but, thankfully, it didn't really take itself seriously because if it had it would have been even worse than it was. This must surely be the end of the franchise because it needs to be. That is unless the makers of these films haven't finished trashing all the wonders of the modern world, because this time around it was Italy, Egypt, Spain, Brazil and parts of France that got the destruction, maybe next time we can have Kong trashing London and Godzilla stomping all over, I dunno, Machu Picchu. Has anyone ever considered how many people die when these giant monsters kick the shit out of each other in the middle of over-populated built up areas? Absolute horse wank!

Doctor Poo

Honestly? That's 90 minutes of my life I've lost, never to get back. Say what you like about Jodie Whitaker's run it was the stories that did for her and while my jury is still out on Ncuti Gatwa here were two stories that absolutely stank the living room out...

Space Babies was a slight, bottom humour kind of episode that I would not have been proud of. A space station full of babies that can speak and move around on mobiles. There was definitely something a bit creepy about it but probably not the way it was intended. This was full of fart, bogey and shit jokes floating around as the Doctor explains to Ruby who and what he is. I sat stony faced and almost in disbelief at what an abomination of an episode it was. I didn't even raise a smile; this was possibly one of the worst Doctor Who stories I have seen since the 2010 reboot and anyone who condemns Whitaker's run needs to see this pile of soiled diapers (or maybe look at themselves in a mirror).

The Devil's Chord was a tiny bit better, but was so full of chronological mistakes that you would have thought RTD should have done his homework first. The villainous Maestro was another from the Toymaster school of villains - possibly an offspring - and veered between quite menacing and very annoying and then the musical number... I suppose in an episode about music it was bound to happen, but if this is the kind of standard and level we're going to have now with DW then I might do something I've never done since it was rebooted - give up on it...

I still have a problem with Gatwa's accent, which goes all over the place - Scottish, West Country, Patwa and a few other places and his general enthusiasm and boyish charm might be good for a reboot, but, you know, it's a bit too much. I also had high hopes for Millie Gibson but she's grown tiresome very quickly and the entire premise just seems to feel a bit wrong and contradictory to DW stories from the past. I seem to be in the minority at the moment, but I bet you $5 it's not long before everyone feels the same way - this is, if I want to be brutally honest, fucking awful. 

This Farming Life

The first of the last three episodes of Clarkson's Farm is a much more upbeat affair after the tragedy of the pigs. It's about things going right for a change - at least to a degree, especially as Kaleb and Charlie had the misfortune of meeting Rishi Sunak at one point. Kaleb won TV for this week by telling our pointless waste of space PM he had good hair.

The sixth episode was almost wall to wall positivity. Jeremy's mushroom idea literally exploded as he grew probably too many to be able to sell them, it was a huge glut of mycelia (but it did give me some ideas). Then there was the appeal against West Oxford Council who had deemed literally everything the farm was doing as illegal and wanted to shut him down. The independent ombudsman decided that Jeremy's projects were fine, he could build a bigger car park, he could keep his shop, his burger van and even open a café closer to the shop. They could have toilets and anything else they wanted and it would be for a provisional three years before the decision would be reassessed. The weird thing was as we watched it, we felt that justice had been done and Clarkson got what was deserved - leaving us in a strange position of rooting for a right wing millionaire's battle against bureaucracy. Oh and there's the goats - cute and funny with added unintentional cruelty; almost worth watching the entire series for.

However, all that joy and good news turned a bit mouldy in the penultimate episode. While there's a great deal of positivity about the construction - in swift time - of the car park and the impending birth of new piglets, there's the usual 'oh shit, we didn't see that coming' disasters on the horizon, especially as the farming year and this season draws to a close.

The series concluded (it's been renewed for a fourth season despite 'fears' that it would be canned because of Clarkson) with a sort of a cliffhanger-ish 'will they, won't they' get the harvest in and then make any money episode. There was good news, not so good news and some bad news and then an absolute sort of jaw dropper of an ending when we get yet another example of why farming is almost a vocation rather than a proper job. It's unusual that TV series, especially 'reality' ones get better with age but this is an exception because over the last four years we've grown to know and love certain characters and their lives are important to the people invested in the show. This year it was gobbledegook Gerald's battle with cancer that sat around in the background and whether Kaleb's first year as farm manager would be a success and there's a moment in the final episode when you really get to see what farming means to the young fella. I look forward to season four a lot more than Clarkson's Grand Tour specials, because they've lost their sheen while this one still polishes up a treat.

Notts Again!

I'm getting to the stage where reviewing each episode of Welcome to Wrexham might become a chore for me to write and one for you to read. I mean, it's a cracking documentary series with honest to god real people padding the football bits out, but unless something spectacular happens it might be best if I started giving this a miss and not reviewing every episode. 

This week as well as a focus on the women's team, there's a look at a men's support group featuring Wrexham supporters and the return of the old nemesis Notts County in League Two. With them in second and Wrexham in third is was, yet again, another do or die game, especially as the Welsh team had recently been stuffed 5-0 by eventual title winners Stockport County. we know how this finishes, we have a pretty good understanding that 50% of the rest of the series will be looking at individuals, either involved in the club or supporters from Wrexham and there will be a couple of episodes that will be Rob and Ryan heavy. It's still entertaining and enjoyable, but reviewing it on a weekly basis might become a bit like me reviewing my nightly bath...

However, I will add that the following week's episode focused on what Rob and Ryan are doing for the City of Wrexham as a legacy of their time at the club and it was both interesting and enlightening. These guys have a mission that entails more than just them being successful owners of a football club and the way they have endeared themselves to the place is worth a mention. It is also worth mentioning that this episode has a musical number based on how to properly pronounce McElhenney, which is one of the funniest things ever to appear on this show.

What Ho and Spiffing 

The first thing you realise about The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is how much the cast, especially Henry Cavill seemed to thoroughly enjoy making it and it's no wonder because it's a bally good bit of action adventure in a WW2 setting that's (loosely) based on a true story.

Cavill plays Gus March-Phillips, a real life unorthodox army officer who was given the job of recruiting a top secret team to infiltrate and destroy the Nazis supply chain to the North Atlantic which was creating havoc for the Allies and preventing the USA from getting involved in a war that it looked like the UK was on the verge of losing.

This was great fun with lots of almost comedic violence, excellent set pieces and lots of very funny bits as Cavill and his team, which includes Jack Reacher's Alan Ritchson - proving he can actually act - as a Danish psychopath who cuts Nazi hearts out for fun and Alex Pettyfer as Geoffrey 'Apple' Appleyard, an army officer, spy and reconnaissance man - have fun on the west African coast. Guy Ritchie does an excellent job at keeping the movie moving at a cracking pace and there's not much else to say apart from if you get the chance to watch it, do so, it's my film of the week, so far, even if it has little or no competition.

Blub and Chunder

It was time to give the fourth and worst Thor film a re-watch and I feel it's necessary to be as fair and even handed as I possibly can. Thor: Love & Thunder is a fucking abysmal load of shite and should never have been allowed to have been made...

Other than that, it was a fucking awful film. I kind of hoped that on second viewing it would be better and to be really honest there are some excellent scenes - in isolation - it's just spoiled by being tonally wrong and Chris Hemsworth (and Russell Crowe and Tessa Thompson and Natalie Portman and Taika Waititi, maybe even Christian Bale). Knowing now, as I do, that many original scenes were scrapped - including a briefer and more pleasant meeting with Zeus - and scenes featuring some characters from previous Thor films were also binned, this really was the first MCU film to suffer from executive input and editing by collective wankers. There is also something off about the entire story, with little or no explanation as to how Gorr becomes Gorr or who bestowed him with power and the god killing sword. Plus there's this real problem with Jane Foster's cancer, her becoming another Thor and how this film was the first real effective spike driven into the heart of the MCU's future. The goats, however, were funny even if their presence in the film was abstract at best. It's time Marvel lost Hemsworth and relaunched Thor from another multiverse, maybe played by Alan Ritchson, who really has the build to pull it off and does a half reasonable Scandi accent (see the review directly above this). This really is an MCU movie to avoid; it's like having the choice between a bucket of vomit thrown at your face or a bucket of diarrhoea instead... 

Allegoryville

In 1999, the wife and I watched a film that I loved and she was ambivalent, at best, about. 25 years later, we sat down and watched it again and I still loved it and the wife thought it was an excellent film - funny how time changes some things for some people but not others...

Starring Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, JT Walsh, Joan Allen and the brilliant William H Macy (as well as a couple of Buffy alumni and a bunch of young people who would be well known for film and TV roles in the subsequent years), Pleasantville is a really good movie, serving as an allegory to 1950s America and how it has changed but in many ways stayed the same, rooted in a past that really didn't exist outside of television. This is a fantasy that doesn't need scrutiny; if you watch it there's no point in trying to work out why it's happened or even how because it's telling a kind of fable and doesn't need to be bogged down with logic. Maguire and Witherspoon are bickering siblings in 1997 when an argument over a TV remote control brings a mysterious TV repairman to their door (played by the legendary Don Knotts) who gives them a new remote that zaps them both into the sterile and U rated world of Pleasantville - a TV show that Maguire obsesses over, allowing the siblings to fit right in because of his encyclopaedic knowledge of it. This world of black and white order suddenly gets an injection of reality and gradually the siblings - initially - and then the rest of the town start realise there's more to life than the orderly way they live in this glossy black and white 1950s TV show, where the worst teenagers get up to is holding hands and every husband returns home from work to find his dinner on the table, presented to him by a loving and perfectly manicured wife.

What it really does is use Pleasantville as a mirror on society and how it is prejudiced and chauvinistic but that's okay because this is the US of A. As more and more of the townsfolk, mainly teenagers to begin with, start becoming colourful and daring, the older more staid members of the town rail against it; imposing rules and preventing 'coloured' people from having the same freedoms as black and white people and suddenly things take a scary turn for the worse with book burnings, beatings and raw emotions replacing the cold logic of an ordered society and naturally as these things happen more people become coloured. It's probably a little heavy handed in its allegory, but, you know, sometimes that's needed, especially when you're dealing with Americans, because they're not the most rational people at the best of times and there is a sense that even today many of them want to live in an age that none of them truly remember (a bit like Brextremists and their desire to return to the 70s when they were children and the shit we lived through felt like an adventure). It's still a wonderful film and probably Tobey Maguire's best performance, before he became Spider-Man and saw his career nose dive and fall. The great thing about it is how the people of Pleasantville change but also the siblings also change, helping everyone to become better people. It's probably a bit too altruistic for 2024, which is why it's such a valuable film.

A Detached Existence?

We finally got around to starting to watch Severance and while this part of the review only covers the first episode, I have to say it was unexpected in how it was delivered and when a friend of mine said the first couple of episodes were slow and it didn't start getting weird until episode three, all I could think was 'it gets weirder than this?!?'

It's about a group of people who work for Lumon Industries and have all agreed to be 'severed' - to allow the company to split their lives in half - meaning the time they spend at work and the time they spend at home belong to two separate people who are also the same person. When they work at Lumon they have no memory or recollection of who they are in the outside world and vice versa - when at home they have no idea what they do at work, only that they work at Lumon and they have been severed, so they have no memory of what they do. This alone is as weird as fuck, so if you add to this even more weirdness then you can see why it has been one of the highest rated TV series of the last 20 years. The first part is all about introducing us to the SVR'D department - possibly a department that has severed people because of the security and nature of the work they do, which we don't really know and are given few clues about. We're introduced to Ellie R, a new recruit and someone who has agreed to have her mind split in two, and Mark, recently promoted when his former supervisor Petey 'leaves'. We also meet their two colleagues and two of the management team; we also get a hint that the board are forever and always watching - creating an even more sinister feel.

Mark - in the real world - is out having a meal when Petey from work - a man he doesn't know in the real world - approaches him and sows the seeds of doubt about the entire severance programme and what it might really do and we also discover that Mark's direct supervisor is also his next door neighbour in the real world, but whether she's been severed or not is not known... 

Episode two just ramps up the weirdness (I know, I've said this word a lot), but also adds creepy and sinister to the thesaurus of descriptive words attached. One wonders where and how this series will go forward, especially given that the Ins (people who work inside the severance department) do mundane and strange jobs with no real suggestion of possible excitement; whereas the Outs (their other selves) are full of possibilities mixed with misanthropy - Mark, for instance, is a recent widower and borderline alcoholic. This is one of the most intriguing series I've watched in a long time. I hope we're not let down by it.

Sweet Sensations

I absolutely adored this series; it's one of the best I've seen this year, even if it was too short and not enough explanation was given. Sugar concluded in a (here's that word again) weird way, but leaves it wide open for a second season, which may answer some of the nagging questions left, such as why the aliens were really on earth and who the people who ended up hunting them at the end really were.

Olivia's story had pretty much concluded by the end of last week's episode, but there was to be an epilogue that I figured no one saw coming because the twist in this tale was never hinted at; it was something John sensed when he listened to the serial killer's CD diaries. Yet it wasn't just that; he had never been given a clear reason from his 'colleagues' as to why they didn't want him being involved in this case and that was what was bugging him - such as why his 'people' knew that Olivia was okay when John finally started to unravel the messy story.  John had mentioned his sister a number of times throughout the show and we finally found out the story behind her, what we didn't see coming was who might have been involved in her 'disappearance'. 

The serial killer story was complex and it seems that Olivia's brother might have been inadvertently responsible for his half sister's abduction - although this was never really made clear. Whether the killer's family knew about his foibles is possibly something we'll find out in series two - because I've no doubt there will be one - because the family are far too 'big' for this to just vanish into thin air. What we do know is there was someone else - someone John is friends with - witnessing the killer's deeds and this will undoubtedly be the main thrust of any second series, because this person holds many secrets, some of which John needs to know. Why his people could have departed with stuff like this up in the air is an interesting question which might never be answered but equally for a race of largely peaceful and observant aliens how they could be okay with what transpired offers up questions of an altogether different kind. There was one really nice moment towards the end when john reveals who he is to Mel, she was, after all, his unofficial partner during this and helped save his life; the scene was absolutely heart warming.

At the conclusion we have two aliens who remain on earth and they are on a collision course, as long as they can evade being tracked by the powerful family of the serial killer. This also leaves the question of why the aliens would out themselves to a serial killer or his powerful family or what John's problem with the shaking hand and dizzy spells were, or even why the Siegel family seemed so ambivalent about Olivia disappearance, at first. In fact, when you start digging there are a number of loose ends which some of are unlikely to ever be answered...

It was at times confusing and we were fed so many red herrings that it made your head spin at times, but this was in no way the shark jumping rubbish that a number of critics claimed. Yes, it was fucking unusual and left field to have a Philip Marlow like detective who also happens to be an alien observing life on earth, but equally it gave it a depth and a direction that was unexpected - all in all it was a superb series, well shot with good dialogue and a slightly detached feel throughout - which, of course, is probably explained by the twist (which I was spot on about from the very first episode). 

Colin Farrell was excellent (and he's back as the Penguin in a spin-off series from The Batman later in the year), I want to see him as John Sugar again, with more emphasis on who he is and where he comes from. As I said in an earlier review, I expect the next season to be more 3 Body Problem than Maltese Falcon.

Next Time...

Will I give up on Doctor Who? If I do it will be a remarkable desertion given I've lived through some stinkers of series since the reboot happened. I'm not giving up on Welcome to Wrexham but I'm giving the reviews a break for a few weeks and I'll return to them as the series draws to a close and there's the rest of series one of Severance, other than that the TV front might be a bit thin on the ground again. Movies... the same; the FDoD has less than 12 movies on it (if I discount the eight Harry Potter films the wife wants to watch again and three Lord of the Rings films that I want to watch but suspect the wife isn't bothered about). We are going to watch Man of Steel again and Arthur the King is a new film that isn't about Camelot but is about a dog and an endurance athlete. It's going to be a case of what we see is what you get...

Book Culture - Stan Lee Biography

Review: 
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman 

Forgive me for a moment of self-indulgence...

Back in the 1980s, I entered a collaborative partnership with a friend (who was to become the best man at my wedding). He was a burgeoning cartoonist and I had always wanted to write, so a pairing up seemed to be the logical thing to do, especially as we were spending almost as much time together as I was with the woman who would become my wife. The fruits of our collaboration were limited, probably due to excessive drug and alcohol indulgence, but we had one absolute guaranteed success. A 'daily' three-panel cartoon strip about a misanthropic blowhard, his idiot nephew and an assortment of supporting characters designed to facilitate jokes and add 4th wall breaking comments. The main character was based on a version of me, his nephew on my partner in crime. The characters, strangely penis-like, looked like the people they were based on and to a certain extent were exaggerations of our own personalities.

We had produced about 20 strips and I think we both thought we were going to copy a Northampton-based writer - Alan Moore - by getting our strip in the local papers and kickstarting careers for us both; the 80s after all was a time when if you wanted success you had to get on your bike to do it. 

At the time, I was working for the Northants Community Programme - a Tory government created job scheme that essentially put people into work at a very minimum wage doing jobs where their skills would be appreciated. I was working in the actual Community Programme offices, as a publicity manager and this brought me into contact with a lot of people, including local journalists. One such was Evening Telegraph veteran Anne Jeffries, who I met during a launch in Wellingborough and then kept bumping into her as the weeks and months passed. One day, accompanied by a number of colleagues, we were sitting in the pub and the subject of the comic strip came up and Anne just happened to know that the local Northamptonshire newspapers were hoping to emulate Alan Moore's Maxwell the Magic Cat strip; they wanted to run a cartoon produced by local talent. Anne looked over our 20 samples, took them to her editor and before you know it we were on the cusp of something special...

The commissioning editor of the Evening Telegraph offered us £80 per strip, which would eventually include extra cash from syndication in at least another eight newspapers owned by the people of owned the ET. £80 a day for six strips a week and we would keep copyright and ownership of the characters. This was pretty unbelievable - we were being offered almost a £500 a week - in the 1980s - to produce a comic strip for Northants' second largest newspaper and all the doors that would subsequently open. It was a dream come true and all we needed to do was ensure we had at least a month's worth of inventory, because as Anne said to me, "Once you agree to do this you don't let them down."

Now, the caricature was based on me but was drawn solely by my friend. However, the character, his dialogue, his reason for existence and all of the stories were created by me. The creation of the comic strip was a joint effort - it was in many ways a chicken and egg scenario: the character's look wouldn't have happened without my friend's creation and everything else about the character - his ability to be a comic strip - was down to me and therefore I viewed it as a 50-50 thing; it wouldn't have existed without both of us. Had I not been involved it would literally have been one funny caricature of me drawn by my friend and then forgotten about for the rest of our lives - oddly enough the original sketch appears in my 1986 diary next to words written by me.

However, when the news of our impending employment reached my friend, instead of being over the moon about our great news, he was more concerned about how the £500 a week cheque would be split. His view was it took him about six hours to draw a three panel strip and it took me about six minutes to come up with the story/joke and the dialogue, therefore he would be generous and give me 20% of the £500 and he would keep the other 80%. I said this was a 50-50 deal and he refused point blankly to accept this because there was no way in his mind I deserved 50% of the money for what was clearly not 50% of the work. I explained to him that if we were employed by an actual comic book company, this is pretty much how the deal would be split - we were co-creators and it was fair that we should split the money half each (especially as I'd got us the deal in the first place).

He refused and even suggested that I did nothing more than write the joke and that he was really the sole creator of the character and I had absolutely no rights - despite it being based on me, looking like me and having all the words supplied by me. We reached an impasse, one which not only destroyed our friendship but set our mutual friends on the difficult decision of which one of us they would side with. In the eyes of the layman, my friend did most of the work so he deserved most of the money. It didn't matter how much I argued my side of the case, in the eyes of the ignorant, ownership was based on the amount of work put in not the creative process. 

Then came what I feel was the crux of the entire argument. I challenged my friend to come up with strips written and drawn by him with no input from me. He failed miserably; so miserably in fact that he didn't produce one single strip and all the time this toing and froing was going on we were losing our window of opportunity. We could not agree on anything until sensing the deal was about to explode in our faces, I reluctantly offered him a 70-30% split, despite knowing that I was 50% responsible for the strip. The problem was even this was too much for the man who by this time was supposed to be my closest friend and had been my best man at my wedding (a very poor best man to be fair, but that's another story).

The deal lapsed; we never got into print and the opportunity was missed. We spent a few years not talking to each other, avoiding each other in social circles, which was difficult as we both had virtually the same friends until one night in the early 1990s, when I was busy running my own comic book shop and had started freelance writing for Comics International, I told him he could have it all - complete copyright control, I would not give him any grief, life was too short etc etc.

Around this time he showed me his latest creation, a strip about a werewolf. He'd done half a dozen of them and, being harsh, they were woefully unfunny; nicely produced but nowhere near publication standard. This was really all I needed to know; without my input he was a man with a huge talent for artwork and almost no idea how to write something. Given how this guy's life went (and mine to a certain extent), I wonder what would have happened had he not been so greedy and egotistical. But that's something that will never be answered and the entire episode is one that exists only in the minds and memories of the people involved. I'm sure if there was ever a serious debate about those 1980s days, we'd both have differing memories of it and anyone of our entourage of friends the same. I'm of the opinion that even though the history of payments and credit for co-creation pretty much falls on my side, most people would still think my old friend was the person who created the character, I just brought it to life...

The first impressions I got from Abe Riesman's biography of Stan Lee was that a similar thing happened between Lee and his long time collaborator Jack Kirby, especially during the early years of Marvel Comics; the difference being that Lee was never shy to take the credit for creating the iconic Marvel superheroes, while Kirby just grew old and bitter about what he saw as the unjust situation that had been created. The main problem with the puzzling question of Who Really Created the Marvel Universe is that every single person connected to it has died and every single story or anecdote has a degree of apocrypha about it. There are many written pieces, transcripts of interviews and even comments made to people about it, but we're never going to know what really happened.

This brings me to the main problem I have with Riesman's book - it's a hatchet job. It's a heavily biased, badly written attack on and at Stan Lee, that scrutinises every single detail about his life, but accepts without the same scrutiny anything negative said by literally anyone else - the book borders on philippic - essentially a 300+ page condemnation of Stan Lee. One would almost think Riesman had been commissioned by Jack Kirby's family to write this book.

The thing is I'm not here to canonise Lee or to even defend some of the dodgy things he did during his long and varied life, but I do think that the expression 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' is probably the best way to describe the controversies in his life. Do I think he solely created the Marvel Universe in the early 1960s? No. But equally I don't think Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko did either. I think they were created largely by committee, possibly even including Stan's secretary Flo Steinberg. Maybe Kirby came up with designs, perhaps Ditko did the same but to say they were the definitive creators of characters and all that Lee did was put some words in their mouths and took all the credit is bullshit.

The truth is probably closer to Kirby and Ditko were pissed off that Lee - a serial carnival barker - took all the credit and had this tumultuous period of history happened at a different juncture, both men would have been thrilled to have been credited as co-creators. There is evidence to suggest that many of the accusations this book levels at Lee are nothing more than that, allegations and the grumblings of old men. Obviously these missives and quotes don't have such prominence in this book, almost put in to try and offer some counter argument and zero scrutiny or aspersions are made. It really is a case of 'Stan said white was white so we asked everyone about it, but Jack said black is black and we took his word for it.' This is literally how the first two-thirds of the book reads, with little or no doubt cast at anyone who said anything disparaging about Lee.

It is possible that Lee was a bit of a crook and a glad hander, but it's also possible that all he was trying to do was create a success from something he almost felt he was trapped in - the comics industry. He'd toiled at it since before WW2 and made friends and enemies along the way; he maybe realised by the mid 1950s that the ambitions he harboured were becoming increasingly unlikely to happen, so when these 'Bullpen' inspired creations hit the newsstands and were a huge hit, all he was trying to do was make a success from something he, deep down, didn't really have a lot of belief in. One thing Riesman struggles to avoid are the many anecdotes about what a generous and loyal editor he was in the 1950s, making sure his artists got good rates and recognition. Part of me suspects this is what he did in the 1960s rather than attempt to steal others ideas and I wouldn't be at all surprised by the time the 1970s rolled around and he had started taking absolute credit for Marvel that this might be down to the ungrateful and negative comments made by the disgruntled Kirby and Ditko.

You see, when you're dealing with that specific era it becomes more interpretation and guess work than something that's absolute. I have no doubt the artists and comics people who doubled down behind Kirby from the 70s onwards did so because Lee was a famous millionaire figurehead and the man who inspired many of them was old and relatively poor. It was maybe down to fairness rather than truth. I'm aware that Steve Ditko was a serious misanthrope, but he also appears to be the only person championing his contributions to Marvel, because all the serious creators had thrown their weight behind Kirby, even down to suggesting he was the true creator of Spider-Man. If you take an even handed approach to the Lee/Kirby/Ditko imbroglio you, in my humble opinion, come back to that six of one, half a dozen of the other analogy.

It also should be noted that as the book ploughs its deeply offensive furrows, the author cites The Daily Mail on a number of occasions - which that alone should cast huge doubts on the voracity of the claims (especially to anyone in the UK who is familiar with this particular pro-Nazi Comicbook) and then goes on to cite the Bleeding Cool website, home of comics' most despised shitmonger - a man about as trustworthy as a starving shark in a swimming pool of babies. 

As for Lee's later life, which we of course see as cameos in MCU films, but was actually dogged by dodgy dealings, illegal activities and some people might argue humiliatingly karmic failures, Riesman seems to want to forget that we were talking about a man in his 80s. Now, I know a few compos mentis octogenarians but I also know as many who are now maybe not as sharp or as careful as they might once have been; but the author of this book gives Lee no mitigation, if he's not making direct accusations, he's suggesting it; implying that Lee might have pleaded and played ignorance but if you believe all the other nasty things I've insinuated about him then you have to accept that Stan Lee was essentially a shitbag who fucked people over as often as possible.

I didn't expect a hagiography; I think there are grounds to believe that more than one person created Marvels icons, but I'm not prepared to believe that Lee was a scheming manipulative bastard who shafted anyone and everyone he worked with right up until his 90s. He was a man who had created a persona and simply kept running with the same ball, not really thinking how his soapbox hyperbole might affect the people he inadvertently trampled over. I do not believe Lee was the bad man Abraham Riesman suggests he was and I do not accept that his co-conspirators at Marvel in the early 60s did anything more or less than co-create the company's legacy with him. Yes, people lost out financially, but I struggle to see why Lee is being castigated as the boss of the company when we live in a world where bosses of companies exploit their workers considerably more than 'The Man' ever did and are almost treated as role models.

In conclusion; a friend of mine once said, read Riesman's biography of Stan Lee, it's all you need to know what really happened. I have done and I found it deeply offensive, badly written and heavily weighted in favour of anyone who crossed Lee's path who possibly didn't receive recognition at a time when no one received recognition. The book overlooks or simply ignores some of the other good work Lee did as Marvel's figurehead; everything from his continued promotion of the company to the creation of such things as Marvel UK or Lucky Man, a successful TV series with his name attached, or even how he remained approachable almost his entire life, happy to have a chat with anyone about comics and possessing a remarkable, almost encyclopaedic knowledge of people and events. 

It is a nasty, pernicious biography that makes no apologies for being like that. I feel sorry for the (mainly now dead) people involved at Marvel during that iconic period who feel they were undervalued, misrepresented or without the recognition they deserved, but I really do not believe you can blame Stan Lee for it. He was a contributing factor, for sure, but he seems to be being blamed for the work culture that was comics at that time, when if he had never been the man he was, the comics 'industry' might not even exist in 2024.

Pop Culture - The Alien Vampire Farmhouse Ghost League Monsters

Death and spoilers... this has them both. 

Film of the Week -1

I can safely say that on May 8th, 2024, I watched the best Godzilla film I've ever seen. In fact, Godzilla Minus 1 [Gojira -1] is one of the best films I've seen this year and was a truly astonishing piece of filmmaking that I really didn't expect. In many ways, it reminded me of Spielberg's Jaws, where the 'monster shark' was on screen for something ridiculous like seven minutes of the entire movie. This is a cracking film and well worth watching. It will confound and amaze you because you will think it's one thing and it turns out to be something else entirely - but it does still have Godzilla in it.

This was a spectacle; a film laden with a mixture of pathos, excellent - but also really quirky - special effects and a story that takes centre stage. This Godzilla film isn't about the monster, it's about the wreckage of WW2 and how some Japanese struggled to cope with the defeat they were handed - not because they lost, but because they were forced into it in the first place. I haven't seen that many Japanese films and I can't tell you if Japanese filmmakers are outspoken about the war and Japan's part in it, but the underlying message here was they - the men of Japan - were forced to do things that were wrong; that defied the people they really were and then after all of that they were burdened with a monster just to repeat the process in a different way. This is a film about shame, pain and redemption and it has a huge fuck off monster in it that trashes Japan and munches on naval destroyers for breakfast.

It starts with a kamikaze fighter failing in his mission, landing on a remote Japanese which is then terrorised by a monster that's about 30 feet tall and destroys the base leaving just Shikishima - the pilot - and an engineer called Tachibana. Shikishima is a disgrace and he gets back to Tokyo a troubled soul; it's here that he inadvertently meets Noriko and the child she has adopted. The three eke a living out in the destroyed streets of the capital, rebuilding their lives while bringing up baby Akiko, who thinks of these two disparate adults as her birth parents. Then, after two years and a nuclear test on the Bikini Atoll, Godzilla returns, except now he's over 100 feet tall and he's vengeful; he's angry and the people of Japan are going to pay for it. What follows is a really riveting and intelligently made film with likeable characters and a pace and narrative like a US film. Yes, the special effects are a mixture of pure genius and very silly, but this is Godzilla. The last thing you'd expect is a Godzilla movie that is actually an Oscar winning serious and sensible attempt to reboot the Japanese franchise, one that achieves it in spades.

This is a quality movie. Do not be put off by the fact there's a 100 foot tall lizard thing causing havoc, because this film isn't about that; this is a film with a story that just happens to have a 100 foot lizard thing in it. It has a beginning, a middle and an ending (of sorts) and it has the right balance of tragedy and happy endings. Absolutely film of the week, probably going to make my top films of the year. I can't recommend this enough.

Of Monsters and Men 

It's been four years since we last watched Love and Monsters, a film that still puzzles me slightly... You see, this is clearly a relatively low budget film with a largely C list or unknown cast and yet in terms of special effects and general feel it pisses over a lot of films made in the last four years with bigger budgets, from major studios, with star names attached.

This is the story of the aftermath of an asteroid heading for earth that is blown out of the sky by missiles carrying - for some strange reason - chemicals to help completely destroy it. And it works! Except it doesn't and the chemicals, presumably transformed at a molecular level, start mutating all living things on the surface of the earth apart from mammals - insects, amphibians and reptiles (of which we don't see any) all become massive, mutated and largely very dangerous. 95% of humanity is wiped out and all the survivors live underground or in shelters. Dylan O'Brien (apparently well known in certain circles, but none that I've been around) and Jessica Henwick are former girlfriend/boyfriend from Fairfield, California, who when the giant mutated monsters attack get separated, but seven years later they reconnect, via CB radio, to discover they're only 35 miles away from each other.

O'Brien's character Joel is absolutely shit at protecting himself or anyone else and has been reduced to looking after a cow and making minestrone soup; he isn't even allowed to help protect himself he's that much of a freezer - he freezes in the face of fear. However, when it becomes clear that he has no real respect or reason for living, he decides to leave his colony and go in search of Henwick's Aimee. His colony friends probably give him less than a couple of hours to survive. However, through some luck and help of a couple of cynical survivors he finds his way to Aimee just in time to help save their colony from food stealing pirates. It's fast, fun and is yet another example of filmmakers doing post-apocalypse with aplomb. The irony is Michael Rooker is one of the cynical survivors and he spent a few seasons on the Walking Dead, yet in the 30 minutes he was in this film he was far more believable as a survivor in a hostile apocalypse than he ever seemed in TWD. This is a great little film with a slightly contrived, simple story with lots of signposts along the way - such as you can tell a good or bad monster by their eyes, etc. If you ever get the chance to see it, it's worth checking out.

This Farming Death

As a vegetarian, certain farming things don't really fall on my radar. I'm not interested in the livestock side because, you know... a vegetarian. I don't eat meat therefore I'm on the side of the animal and that doesn't always work out the way I'd like. Livestock farming is something my vegetarianism isn't going to stop and frankly I don't want to stop it. I don't have prejudices like vegans; if you want to eat meat, go ahead. I'll sit it out.

The fourth episode of Clarkson's Farm was called 'Harrowing' and by God it was. This might be a farming show about a hapless buffoon getting in the way of a farming operation, but if Clarkson hasn't converted people into actually liking him by the end of this series I will be very surprised. In fact, if he's still farming with animals by the end of the series I will eat my neighbour's alpacas (I won't but you know what I mean). The episode 'Harrowing' is about Jeremy's new line in forest reared pigs and he's gone to great expense to obtain pigs, accommodation for said pigs and to get an area of woodland prepared so that the pigs can live safely among the trees and then it starts to go horribly, tragically, wrong and it's literally down to bad luck rather than bad farming. There was no one pointing fingers at Clarkson or Lisa Hogan, his partner, because bad luck, bad weather, unexpected illness and so much death, that by the end of the episode my wife was blubbing, Lisa was blubbing and Clarkson looked like a man who had just lost everything. He became a human being in these 40 minutes, one who said a number of times, 'I can't do this. I can't farm pigs. I like them too much.' He even looked uncomfortable when he took a delivery of pork from seven of his young boars that had reached peak usefulness.

Yes, there's always a lot of contrived nonsense and anyone watching would not believe that Kaleb would get away with talking to Jezza the way he does sometimes. Equally, a lot of ignorant people would probably get Jezza to sack Charlie Ireland, because he gets in the way, far too much and if you start wondering just what Lisa Hogan is capable of understanding at this point you're going to have to be very careful how you say it because she's from Ireland. It is extremely good television even if it's bewildering why.

Goals Galore!

The second episode of season three of Welcome to Wrexham was about goals - the high number of them happening in Wrexham's opening six games of the season - and Ben Foster realising that as a top class goalkeeper he needs to be younger than 42 (he retires after the 5-5 draw with Swindon). It was also about a local photographer, who came across as a self-centred dodgy geezer but capable of taking a good photo. 

Frankly, I sometimes wonder why this programme is so popular, but then I realise that we're talking about real people in a reality show setting rather than people who want to be famous. The footballers are already writing their names down in local folklore and when Wrexham are in the Championship or even the Premier League, these will be the outriders; the men who made the future possible. The people of Wrexham, however, are bearing their souls for the TV show and while it might be a little uncomfortable to watch at times - almost cringeworthy one moment and deeply sad the next - you see that what Rob & Ryan have done is regenerate a town (now a city), give it hope and pride and set it back on the road to recovery. I expect they'll sell the club in the next two years for a huge profit and the main story will end; there are, after all, 91 other clubs in the football and Premier league and what makes Wrexham so special are the celebrities and the people who don't want to be celebrities, they just want to be seen associated with the love of their sporting lives.

*** This week's episode dropped on Friday (the day before this column goes live) and as usual I downloaded it and we sat down to watch it only to be presented by an episode of Black Mafia Family instead - a programme that we weren't aware of and are unlikely to pursue in the future (not for any specific reason other than it seemed to be a badly acted Blaxploitation piss take). However, this particular thing has never happened before - download something and it turns out to be something else entirely. It ended up being quite funny because there's an MPA rating just before it starts and we were warned of 'violence', 'nudity' and a couple of things you do get in Welcome to Wrexham and because Ryan Reynolds has a reputation for being a little bit bonkers, we actually watched five minutes of Black Mafia Family thinking it was such a bad piss take of dodgy Blaxploitation films of the 70s that perhaps it was WTW just hiding...

Homes Under a Mullet

I'd intended to give up on Scotland's Home of the Year after the tedious and slightly boring Christmas Special with the revamped presenting line-up, but the wife is a fan and I don't have to enjoy the presenters to appreciate some of the homes.

The new mega-hunk architect who has replaced the man in black Michael Angus is as dynamic as watching an apple go mouldy. Whereas Angus was erudite and humorous, this new guy is a nerd and fucking boring despite looking like a bodybuilder with dodgy 90s hair. Anna Campbell-Jones has always been the most forthright and least likeable of the original three judges and one gets the feeling this is her baby now the other two have gone. While Banjo Beale, the Australian interior designer who looks like a vagrant bin man is kind of growing on me because two years into his gig he's finally beginning to show a bit of personality. However, I don't really like any of them, to be honest. The new series kicked off with three houses in the North East of Scotland and it's always good to see the least expensive, most home-like, house win in the heats. This is a programme that usually likes to have - per episode - something expensive and old, something expensive and brand new and something you, me and our mates could afford with a garden so small you couldn't lift a cat up let alone throw it around. There is an honesty about the choices and I warm to this show when the cheapest option wins - but we are talking about 'homes' and not 'houses' or any other 'designer' aspect. It's still cheap TV that has deteriorated over the last couple of years.

Reading

Amazingly, I've read two books this year already. The first time I've done this since I moved to Scotland. Obviously this isn't a happy admission because there was once a time when I would have read two novels by the end of January. I usually manage about four a year now - a couple of new ones and a couple of re-reads. I like to sit in the garden and read and this year hasn't been conducive to even going out let alone sitting outside...

The first book was a collection of short stories, but the highlight so far was Holly, the latest novel from Stephen King and featuring a character he created as a walk on extra in book called Mr Mercedes and has ended up featuring in now six different tales. Holly Gibney has changed since her first, tentative steps into the King Universe. Once written as a borderline autistic basket case, she has been developed into almost a 'normal' woman with a few OCDs and a couple of psychological holdbacks from her past. Now in her mid-40s, she's not the marrying kind, but has her extended family around her and she looks out for them like the mother she will never likely be.

Holly is actually quite a light tale in that it's about the disappearance of a young woman and after the police basically fail to even investigate the girl's mother hires Holly to find out what's happened. The girl it seems might have fallen victim to a couple of 'unusual' serial killers; two people who literally live a few miles from Holly's base of operations. Each chapter represents a different period in time, until you get to July 2022 when the different timelines start to converge; each chapter signifying a period where one story moves into the other's plane. Also going on is a subplot about the Robinson siblings - Jerome and Barbara - who are both in the process of making names for themselves as upwardly middle class black writers in a country that sometimes frowns on anything that isn't white.

Compared to The Outsider, the first book I read with Holly in it, this is a huge evolution in the character, but it's also a slight almost silly story that isn't really creepy and, actually thankfully, avoids some of the supernatural elements previous stories have veered towards. I expect we'll see another Holly Gibney story in the next few years, depending on whether King is still able to write - he's 77 in September and while that might still be young for some American writers, you never know what's round the corner...

Wall Flowers

There's a fair bit of interesting TV circling around at the moment - possibly confirming the decision to axe certain shows from the Flash Drive of Doom because, you know, we're never going to get around to watching them - we decided to dip back into the world of The White Lotus again, despite not being blown away by the first series.

This time around we're in Italy with a new trio of holidaymakers: half a family from New Jersey; a couple of rich entrepreneur/lawyer types and Jennifer Coolidge is back this time with an assistant and her newish husband in tow - the guy she met halfway through season one.

As with the first series, we have a bunch of dislikeable people, with the exception being one kid from one of the families. You think the poor browbeaten assistant of Tanya, who is essentially being bullied for being told she had to go on holiday where she is no longer wanted (a situation I can relate to as it has pretty much happened to me), is going to collect your sympathy as well, but she just joins a long list of people in this series that you wouldn't want to meet in real life. The rest of the characters are, as usual, vacuous, full of themselves and snobs. Added to the mix are a couple of young Italian 'hookers', a maitre d who is both the antithesis of the Hawaiian one and extremely alike, while assorted other characters crop up as the series unfolds and like season one this one starts with a dead body... well possibly three dead bodies, so the 'fun' is working out just who dies by the 7th episode. It has wall-to-wall stars in it this time; I mean really much higher profile than season one and there's something about it that 'feels' better than season one. 

A Frozen Turd

Oh no, no, no. You might remember how I really am not a fan of the original 1984 Ghostbusters? Well, I hated Ghostbusters 2 the 1989 sequel with an absolute passion. It was a really very poor film with remarkably bad special effects given it was made five years after the first and it pretty much put paid to any hope/idea/fear there might be a franchise of more Ghostbusters movies.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is much worse than Ghostbusters 2 and that is a real shame. This is all wrong. It's pretty much a remake of the original film with a few post modern twists and less story and considering it was on for almost two hours makes me wonder how something so vacuous was allowed to be made, especially after the relative fun and success of Afterlife. I'm struggling to find anything positive to say about this film; whoever Gil Kenan - the director - is he's no Reitman (Ivan or Jason) and this really felt like someone had made a three hour film then indiscriminately ripped an hour of it away with a pair of sheers wearing a blindfold. Why was James Acaster in it, playing James Acaster? What was the point of Finn Wolfhard again? How come Carrie Coon was in it for most of the film but didn't seem to contribute anything at all? Paul Rudd stopped being funny and became something of a waste of time and even the excellent Logan Kim as Podcast was a huge disappointment. 

It starts with little or no explanation as to why the Spengler family are back in New York, with Rudd in tow and various other characters from Oklahoma and why there are ghosts popping up all over the Big Apple yet again. From the moment they break something trapping a sewer demon the movie starts to imitate the original, even wheeling William Atherton out as the mayor determined to shut the Ghostbusters down despite ghostly sightings all over the city. Then there's this truly unexplained scene where the once brilliant Phoebe decides to go and play chess on her own, in Central Park, in the middle of the night and starts playing it with a girl ghost from 100 years ago, who beats her every time and there's a suggestion that there might be some 'gay' attraction either that or the girl/ghost girl new friendship was just handled badly. The word 'contrived' kept popping up while I was watching it and what was even more bizarre was I remember looking at the clock and thinking 75 minutes has passed and fuck all had happened really. Just the same old shit that hampered the Ghostbusters first time around.

There were lots of trailers for this circulating since last autumn and I think it would be fair to say that very few of them made it into the final cut, or if they did they were so heavily manipulated you recognised the words but not the scenes. In fact the trailers really made this look a lot better than it was, mainly because they didn't feature Winston's new Ghostbuster HQ, the ghost girl, some of the original ghosts, supporting characters who were just making the numbers up, any of the pointless 'why are they even here' ghostly caveats or the fact it had a script that felt like it was written by a AI ghost. 

In the first film McKenna Grace stole it; her character - Phoebe - knocked the ball out of the park as Egon's granddaughter, this time around she seemed to spend a lot of time covering up the fact she's a growing woman. Look I'm not being creepy here, but when she made Afterlife she was a 13-year-old playing a 13-year-old, in Frozen Empire she's a 17 year old playing a 15 year old nerd and she literally spends the film deliberately covering up her growing maturity... She was still instrumental in the closure of this film but the character lost so much of what she seemed to show and literally became a cipher; a pawn in a plot that was given absolutely no lead in; this is why I feel the film has been hacked to pieces because I don't believe it could have been made with such glaring holes in the plot. It was not a good film and that pisses me off because I spent as much time as this just a couple of months ago bigging up Afterlife for being an actually really enjoyable film; this was boring, dull and slightly pointless. The Guardian actually suggested in a recent review that this should maybe be the last in the franchise and I thought this was just another of their reviewers being contrary and a bit of a wanker. I now agree. It either needs putting to bed or, in a neat twist, we get Multiverse Ghostbusters where this mob, the surviving originals and the all girl reboot from 2016 all have to team up to stop some new apocalypse... Okay, maybe not. 

A (Not So) Brief Interlude...

Bob Iger, head of Disney, has been in the news this week, as have Disney, the company that lured him out of retirement. It appears that the company's streaming platforms - Disney+ and Hulu - have actually made money despite being expected to lose money yet again. This has changed the way of thinking at the House of Mouse and has led Iger to double down on a number of pledges, such as better quality products and less frequency...

My 'insider' at Marvel suggests that while things look rosier at the moment it's not going to facilitate 'positive' changes. Disney still has four Marvel films scheduled for 2025 - Captain America: Brave New World; Thunderbolts, Blade and Fantastic Four and people inside Disney, including Iger, still believe that is far too much product to be releasing in a dwindling market. In fact, Disney+'s change in financial misfortunes don't necessarily point to a change to what Marvel product is coming out and we need to remember there are a shit load of projects on the horizon, none of which have been shut down, which suggest that Marvel's output can't really alter over the next FIVE years.

Let me explain: there is no way Disney will allow four Marvel films to be released next year, not even if Deadpool 3 (or whatever it's going to be called next week) is a huge box office smash. The appetite for 'genuine' superhero films has all but disappeared and Iger allegedly said at a meeting in March that in an ideal world the only film that would come out in 2025 would be the Fantastic Four [and boy would that need to be good]. However, the new Captain America film (of which there is a ridiculously low expectation for) has been in the can since 2022 - despite just recently having its fourth set of reshoots - Blade has just been a catalogue of problems and is still shooting and Thunderbolts which is due in 14 months hasn't even got a working script. Disney are also keen to rush through another Spider-Man film/trilogy, despite only making a percentage of the profits. The truth is if anyone really knows what is happening then they're being tight-lipped about it.

My guy suggested that the test screenings for Brave New World are going to be all important. The first batch that took place over a year ago forced Marvel into having extensive reshoots and as we discovered from The Marvels, the more you tinker with something the less coherent it becomes. There is a rumour circulating that there's over FOUR hours of footage that needs to be turned into a two hour movie that Disney has no great hopes for. "No Chris Evans, no hope" seems to be the motto being bandied around. Even Harrison Ford's presence doesn't appear to have made anyone particularly excited and, of course, there's the Israel angle, which has a number of people glancing nervously over their shoulders about - the irony is since this film was announced, we have had very much a 'new world order' and one where public opinion moves like the tides - this film could be so problematic for Disney that they might just cut and run from it. I suggested a year ago that this could end up being converted into an eight-part TV series and I still think this is the best way forward. 

So, to contradict the last paragraph... I wouldn't be at all surprised if we only see two films in 2025 - a reluctant release for Brave New World and the Fantastic Four film. I expect Thunderbolts will be delayed again, possibly even cancelled and Blade will come out early 2026, if at all. Disney might be happier about certain things at the company but I don't think the MCU is one of them; Deadpool 3 is going to be R rated (which means a success will make it easier to schedule Blade) and probably won't even feel like anything that's been released recently. It will not be a true gauge of where the MCU is or where it is going and I'm more inclined to think we'll see Disney selling Marvel off by 2026 than keeping it and ploughing money into a now dead cash cow.

Vampire Weeknight

I suppose the best thing I can say about Abigail is that it wasn't a absolute load of shit. I have seen much worse movies, this week. However, it was still a disappointing film considering it has Dan Stevens in it and given the next film I see him in is going to be the execrable Kong/Godzilla mash up then I think the former Downton, Legion and I'm Your Man star is likely to disappear from my 'actors who never disappoint' list.

The weird thing about Abigail was something the wife noticed during the end credits; it was made in Ireland by mainly Irish people - not that this is a bad thing, but it did seem a bit strange. The next weird thing about the film is how little I have to say about it. It also stars Kevin Durand (who plays Proximus Caesar in the new POTA film) and Kathryn Newton - last seen in that woeful Ant-Man Quantumania bollocks - as well as Giancarlo Esposito (he of Gus Fring fame), Mellissa Barrera - who apparently has been in a few things we haven't seen; some actor who died shortly after making the film - of a drug overdose and Alisha Weir - the only Irish actor in the credits and the person who plays the titular Abigail. This is essentially about a kidnapping that goes terribly wrong. It has an inconsistent story, some poor plotting, very bad accents - especially Stevens as a crooked former New York cop - and it didn't quite know if it was a comedy, a horror movie or a heist film. It was okay, but that's about as charitable as I can muster. I suppose it's okay if you have about 100 minutes to spare and you don't fancy a really long wank or a walk in the woods or a few packets of super noodles...

Dark Sugar

The penultimate episode of the genre-bending Sugar answered a lot of questions, asked a whole bunch more and left us in a place where the final episode has a lot of explaining to do in more ways than one. John's secret is out (to the viewer at least) but it still doesn't explain why the missing Siegel - Olivia - has gone missing or where she is.

John also discovers that his own kind are hunting him or at least appear to be and they're also covering something up regarding Olivia. Sugar does the leg work which eventually leads him back to Ruby's where his 'colleagues' are all gathered with the news that their mission is over and they're leaving very soon. This doesn't sit well with our PI who demands to know where Olivia is and why what has happened has happened. There's also something slightly incongruous about the actions of certain individuals, an inconsistency that takes something away from an otherwise excellent little show.  It appears that someone rich and powerful knows the secret of the alien 'watchers' and that Olivia may or may not be involved in it, but in reality - extrapolating a little - it appears that the rich and powerful who know of the alien presence might also be covering up for a family member who is a serial killer and Olivia might simply be his latest victim, but because the family knows of the aliens, they have warned them away from allowing John to track down the girl, which suggests the family are complicit. Whatever happens in the final part, I don't think our hero is going to be very happy and that might mean more unnecessary violence on his part, which, of course, he doesn't like.

This has been a fabulous little story and sadly even with the unexpected twist I don't think there's been enough of it. Episodes could have done with being longer and while it has been quite riveting viewing perhaps a slightly more linear story with some explanations along the way rather than saving it all for the final episode would have been good. Something tells me there isn't going to be a second season and if that's the case it will be disappointing because I think it works extremely well and it would be great to delve deeper into the whys and wherefores of these characters - that said, who says we won't get full disclosure in the last part. I just can't help thinking that more could have been made of the entire sub-story to make you feel as though the missing Olivia case didn't end up feeling as though it was a footnote rather than the reason we got hooked in the first place. 

Next Time...

The rest of Clarkson's Farm - which did a really clever thing and dropped half the series in one go, waited a week and dropped the episode 'Harrowing' and then dropped the rest of the series the following week. A couple of episodes of Welcome to Wrexham and the last couple of parts of season two of The White Lotus (which is unlikely to be reviewed because, you know, I've told you everything you need to know and short of a staggering event isn't going to make another review anything other than a space filler). We might get around to watching some Severance - we kind of didn't go for it when it came out last year (especially as the Guardian loved it) but as it still has an 8.7 rating on IMDB we figured we should at least give it a go... Oh and the new series of Doctor Who, which I have to admit to being a little underwhelmed about.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is Guy Ritchie's latest offering, which is likely to be our Saturday night film and we're tempted by Patient Zero - a 2018 horror film which has an absolutely woeful score on IMDB - because several other reviews we've seen suggest it doesn't deserve such a low rating. Other than that we're at the mercy of whatever comes out in the next week because there isn't much on the FDoD to set pulses racing (in fact, I've added the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy because it's been over 20 years since we saw these films and we must be due a 400 hour film marathon at some point...

As usual you'll read what is given!

 

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.