Pop Culture - Heroes and Villains

Spoilers, spoilers ner ner ner...

Civil Wow

Recently an old friend of mine went to see this film at the cinema (in Mexico, no less) and said after watching it that it was a brilliant film that he never wanted to see again. I totally understand why.

Civil War, the new (and likely final film) from Alex Garland is a harrowing piece of filmmaking that is all the more horrific because you kind of expect something like this will happen in four and a half years time if Donald Trump gets into the White House again in the autumn. This film follows three journalists and a young lady who wants to be a photojournalist as they struggle across a war torn USA in the hope of getting to Washington DC to interview the President before he gets overthrown by the advancing forces of the Western Front - a group of insurgents from California and Texas (two of the most unlikely bedfellows you could imagine). Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a wizened old war photographer who has seen everything but is slowly finding the country she loves being torn apart and is struggling with it. She's sort of chaperoning Cailee Spaeny, who plays Jessie, an idealistic 23-year-old wannabe (who looks more like 15) and is accompanied by her regular partner Joel played by Wagner Moura and a New York Times reporter on his last ever story, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson.

As they go the long way round from New York to Washington they meet an assortment of people and travel through a number of places, some dangerous and others quite surreal before reaching the capital in the throes of its last stand. it's a remarkable film that reflects the horrors of war in a setting that you simply don't expect to see it. Yes, the USA has had a civil war before but this was so close to home that it should be used as a warning to any potential insurrectionists or Presidents who believe they're more important than anyone else. It's a cracking film and if Garland really isn't going to direct any more films then this is a fitting farewell to a genre he's given a small but quite brilliant contribution to. An astounding movie that I can't recommend enough.

Doctor Boom

Well, that was both unexpected and surprising. The third episode of the latest series of Doctor Who was most definitely not as shit as the first two. In fact, I'd almost say it was an excellent episode and the kind of thing that should be setting the tone for the series rather than possibly being an aberration. The episode called Boom, written by former showrunner Steven Moffatt, was really quite good, even if it lacked a little in jeopardy because you know they're not going to kill the Doctor off.

This really didn't hang around; it starts with a war scarred landscape with an army made up of religious denominations battling an unseen foe while trying to avoid 'ambulances' - automated medical systems that essentially kill you if you cannot perform your duties as a soldier for longer than, I'd guess, a few minutes. The Doctor responding to a unseen cry finds himself stuck on a landmine with seemingly no way out or off of it. Ruby can't help him so it's simply a matter of trying to work out a way for them to get the situation sorted. Unfortunately for them, the cry that was heard was a blinded soldier being 'terminated' by an ambulance and compressed into a cylindrical shape containing an AI version of the deceased and his death alerts one of his colleagues who now wants the cylinder - which the Doctor is holding as a counterbalance - and she'll shoot the Doctor - and Ruby - to retain it.

Fortunately, the Doctor explains that being an alien being not too far off of an actual god and if the mine goes off - coupled with his awesome power - it's likely to take half the planet with him and the colleague realises that he's telling the truth. However, things go from bad to worse when another colleague turns up, misreads the situation and effectively makes matters infinitely much worse. How this is resolved is a little contrived but will suffice. This was a much better episode even if it already feels like we're heading towards a finale and we're not even halfway through this eight-part run. I loved some of the dialogue, especially when the Doctor is trying to console the daughter of the soldier who died at the beginning. "He's not gone, he's only dead," she said and that, given recent events in the lives of my friends and I, was so true. So was the final comment from the Doctor that when we die all we leave behind is love. Doctor Who gets a reprieve. 

Abs of Steel

I often talk about Marvel's MCU and I've said that Avengers Endgame was the perfect jumping off point and also the pinnacle of the 20 odd films they made up to that point. Everything that came after has either been an epilogue, an afterthought or a heap of shit. The thing was at least they had nearly a decade of success and a stream of great and diverse movies. The DCEU hit its peak with its first film and pretty much everything after that was inferior. That first film was Man of Steel and it remains one of the best superhero films of all time.

This retelling of Superman's origin has all the things the 1979 original had but with a lot more oomph. This is a film where you really could believe a man could fly and as a contemporary updating of an 85 year old superhero there little to compare to it. It has pretty much everything and while people have a problem with director Zack Snyder, this was perfect for his talents and was lacking in his trademark signatures in favour of just spectacular special effects and a relatively simple story that borrows from Superman 2, which was the best of the original franchise but this pisses all over that from an orbital height. Man of Steel is Superman in a real world setting and it's pretty awesome from the word go.

Henry Cavill is probably the best actor to ever play the Kryptonian; Amy Adams is a sexy Lois Lane (even if she should have much darker hair) and Michael Shannon is a brilliant and menacingly psychopathic General Zod. What starts out as an updated origin movie soon gets into gear as the last son of Krypton faces the biggest threat of his existence from his own surviving people as Kal-El fights for his adopted home against Zod and his army of insurgents intent on terraforming Earth into a new Krypton home world. This is a nasty, violent and destructive film which in some ways reminds me of Godzilla movies in the way mass destruction was wrought on cities with little or no regard to the thousands of people who probably died as Zod and his army ripped Metropolis apart in their pursuit of the secret that Clark Kent holds. It's an absolutely cracking film that unintentionally drove a nail into the heart of DC's attempts to create a film universe to match Marvel, because, like Endgame, this was a height that no other DC film managed to repeat (except maybe for Zack Snyder's Justice League, but that was over four hours long and you really needed to be an aficionado or be on a long holiday to enjoy). I'd forgotten how good this was and when it was over I was left wondering just how many superhero films are better than this?

In Case I'm Mistaken

There was an episode of Pointless last week that puzzled me and probably anyone else who noticed it... There was a round of Shakespeare plays and as the second pass came along the couple of podium 3 scored three points moving their total to four. The couple on podium two, who were next in line to go had scored nine points on their first pass and were 15 points lower than the team on podium one, who would be the last to go, yet as the camera focused on the two on podium three, half of podium two was in shot and their scoreboard was red, meaning they were eliminated; meaning that they scored 100 points (which they did)... But they hadn't been yet! What was going on? Is Pointless fixed? Was there some jiggery-pokery going on? The only explanation I can think was that they reshot Alexander Armstrong telling podium three they had scored four points because of some problem discovered after the round had finished and someone forgot to turn podium two's red light off. I'd never seen that before and I kind of find it a little unsettling despite there obviously being an explanation very similar to the one I offered, but it did look weird and posed questions that will never be answered...

Sever Tomorrow

Essentially, Severance is about the weirdest thing I've seen for a long time and looking as though it's a lot more complex a story than I first imagined. The wife is struggling with it a bit, maybe because it has such a detached feel and she does seem to think it's maybe being weird for weird's sake, but I'm finding just about everything - from the music to the casting - is exemplary and it's dragged me in completely.  

We've ploughed through it now and the story of individuals who want their work selves to be detached from their personal lives by the implanting of a chip is a crazy brilliant idea, especially as the severed 'workers' or 'innies' are literally regarded as not real people and they exist only in the work place, so the only difference for them is discovering they're wearing different clothes or have been off sick as they have no existence outside of the maze-like labyrinth of an office space they 'exist' in. What is also clear is that the first level management are not severed and some of them - chief protagonist Mark Scout's supervisor - are as nutty as squirrel shit. This is a disturbing, unsettling and very off-kilter TV show; it's not a 'drama/mystery/sci-fi' as it's described as, it's very much a psychological horror story with provocative themes and generates an urge to shout at the TV to get these 'innies' to be more proactive in their growing mistrust and fight against the authority they work for. This really is TV pushing the boundaries.

The finale was as cliffhangery as you can imagine and one wonders where they're going to take season two, especially given the events at the end. There's obviously areas they can delve into that weren't explored very deeply, but there are also things that Lumon has to deal with that at the moment look difficult and there's the four protagonists, who we were careful not to know anything about three of them and now we do... oh boy... Yet another fantastic example as to why people need to subscribe to Apple TV+ rather than shite like Disney or Amazon.

Damp Squib

So, for the first time in 4½ long years we're finally back into General Election territory and what an announcement it was, taking over the airways to focus on a little man with ill-fitting troos getting pissed on by the weather before probably getting pissed on by the electorate.

We're now in for six weeks of electioneering, which means if, like me, you're not interested in either the Blue Tories or the Red Tories it's going to be a long hard slog with the government being elected at the very end. If this country needed a new kind of politics or way to elect politicians it's probably now more than ever. It would be nice to see one of these self-serving wannabes promise to fix all the shit that has gone wrong with the country; do the potholes, get rid of the turds in the rivers and seas, try and get energy prices down or stop private companies which provide public services from shovelling money into their shareholders' pockets while expecting us to pay more so they can half-heartedly promise to fix the mess they created by years of neglect. If I could change one thing it would be that people were not allowed to choose politics as a career and that politicians should be made up of real honest people with the country and its people its first priority.

I can't promise this will be the only political comment I make in this particular blog over the next six weeks, mainly because it's going to be difficult to avoid the fucking thing when it's going to dominate the television until the middle of July; couple that with more bloody international football and the usual summer of repeat shite, I might end up reviewing my own bath water as it will be more interesting and not as stinky...

No Speaking, Talking or Hearing...

It's back! Just when I was wondering if something was going to crop up on TV that fills the void left by the good TV, Evil returns for it's fourth and final season and I really hope that we get a satisfying conclusion and a show that lives up to the first three quite excellent series'.

Ever since we discovered this show last year it has been a real pleasure to watch with it's mixture of horror, mystery and black comedy, which at times makes it feel as though there's an element of piss taking going on. The way the show can introduce a subplot, get half way through it and forget about it for weeks before returning to it is both infuriating and hilarious. It's a little like a standard 1970s procedural cop show but with an actual ongoing plot that may or may not be revisited depending on how quickly the murder of the week is solved. This is a show that defies logic at times, has subplots that are laughably grand guignol, with villains that are absolutely fallible and heroes who seem as confused as the viewer is sometimes.

This final series kicks off with a typically strange episode about whether a Large Hadron Collider thing under New York State might possibly be a gateway to hell, builds up to a finale and then stops leaving you knowing full well that next week it will be about something else and this may never be resolved or even spoken of again. Meanwhile Wallace Shawn is now the team's go-between with the Vatican and anyone who's seen this will know he no longer believes in anything and adds a sardonic and humorous twist to proceedings. Leland and Kristen have an entertaining encounter, which Kristen yet again walks away winning and she's also completely ostracised her mother (and about time too) and her husband is still being manipulated and is now making ridiculous accusations like he's just acting out the whims of Leland. It's great to have it back for a final 16 weeks.

A Million Yawns

And so we get to the most difficult review I have ever written... Why? Because the director of this film is one of my oldest and best friends; a man who at certain points in my life I spent all my time hanging around with from when we were at middle school until the last time I saw him in 2017. Someone whose photographic career was pretty much unsurpassable, who was one of the most artistic people I've ever met without being particularly artistic - he's a bit of a visionary... 

A Million Days is a 2023 feature film by my dear friend Mitch Jenkins and it is really quite dreadful. It's a boring, stagey and about as atmospheric as the space which the film is based around. The actors are unconvincing, with dull, uninspiring dialogue in a sci-fi film that feels like it was made in lockdown during the Covid pandemic about AI involved in a moon mission to set up a base, which would then lead to mankind seeding other planets as earth is slowly dying. I don't know if Mitch can be blamed for the casting, or the script or the special effects or the Grand Designs type house it is mainly set in or the fact that just about everything about it was dull and boring, but his name is still attached as a film by him. It also has a 4.3 rating on IMDB and that kind of feels generous...

There was something a bit creepy about Simon Merrills, the actor playing the astronaut spending his last night on earth with his wife and her assistant as they discover the AI his wife has created has developed a sentience and plans on doing some unspeakable things when it plans to send Merrills and his ship to Alpha Centauri via Europa rather than to the moon. Obviously when I say 'creepy' I mean about the actor not the character he plays, although there's something a bit slimy about him as well; while the two women supporting him - Hermione Corfield and Kemi-Bo Jacobs - speak dialogue that isn't at all convincing a feels as though it was written by someone who didn't really understand what they were writing about. I almost fell asleep a couple of times during the film; the wife declared it boring after 15 minutes and in the end I felt so utterly disappointed and almost upset by it. The imagery was excellent and some of the camera work was exceptional, but it was so few and far between because most of it felt like someone had simply filmed a three person play and added a few exterior scenes to break up the boring narrative. I hope he never sees this, but he's not really on Facebook and probably doesn't read my blogs, but if he does - 'sorry, mate...' 

The Last Word Again...

I know, I said last week that I wasn't going to bother reviewing Welcome to Wrexham again but as usual when I do something like that the next episode set the bar a little bit higher. This week it was all about Harry, a 100 year-old supporter; Wrexham midfielder James Jones - whose own personal story almost ended in an horrendous tragedy; how the Hollywood duo decided to lose half a million quid just to give the town a temporary stand and the fall of Notts County (Wrexham's nemesis last season). It was done in such a way you really didn't know if Harry was going to make it to 100, if Jones's family was going to die in an Intensive Care Unit or if Humphrey Ker was going to go to prison for agreeing to have a temporary stand built that could collapse and kill fans. There was also a very funny scene featuring Rob and Ryan on the set of the new Deadpool film, which was essentially three minutes of redacted footage with a tanning salon wagon being approved. Kevin Feige even appeared at the Racecourse, which must have been a revelation for him especially as it was Wales in December. This is still an absolutely brilliant reality TV series.

Next Time...

More Evil. Maybe season two of The Big Door Prize. Doctor Who's reprieve. Some other stuff and probably not a W2W review unless it features copious sex scenes and Ryan Reynolds cutting off Huge Ackman's penis with a sharpened plastic spoon in front of the new temporary Kop stand...

There might be films too; including - Atlas (at the moment but that might change depending on how low it goes on IMDB - but as it's at 5.7 after two days, I think not), Boy Meets World, The Fall Guy and maybe another outing for The Suicide Squad plus whatever else finds its way onto my TV.