It was yet another strangely 'incomplete' episode that opened up more possibilities while simultaneously shutting them down again. The witches coven and their ghostly muse actually seemed like an interesting development, but you get the feeling that it might be the last time we see them, even if Kristen seemed quite taken by one of the dancers. It was also another fine example of how this show lulls you into a false sense of deduction only for there to be a reveal at the end that is opposite what you might think. The problem I'm beginning to have is we're at episode 6 now, there's only 10 more to go and while some areas of the ongoing story are moving along at a pace; others are floundering around the same way they have for four seasons...
We've now been three episodes without Ben's djinn; Kristen's husband is still in rehab and the girls haven't mentioned the events that led up to it. While Cheryl now knows that Leland might have been trying to murder one of her granddaughters, by proxy; this might end up being an interesting confrontation or it might be weeks before it's revisited. David's slightly dull astral projection/drawing thing subplot is happening more and more, while I'm not seeing anything new that suggests the Vatican might be manipulated by demons; maybe because his new handler seems genuine enough - after a fashion. There's also the fact that Kristen's blabbermouth daughters are now spending a lot of time with grannie and their half brother - the antichrist, who is getting exponentially bigger and older - and haven't yet blabbed anything to their mom is not in keeping with the rest of the show. It's still good TV, but it's going to have to do a lot of housecleaning and quickly if we're not going to have a quick and unfulfilling ending.
Killer Sheep
I suppose the best thing about this week's The Boys was the fact that it dished up the obligatory bad taste episode in spades. There's always one in every season that has you going 'WTF?' or 'I can't believe they just did that.' And this season's they went for it BIG time.
I couldn't understand why Hughie's dad had been brought back for this season, especially as Simon Pegg is a bit bigger than the series, but it was so they could turn him into a psychopathic teleporting murderer - just for a while. The amount of blood, guts and internal organs on display in the hospital where he was [not] recovering from his stroke [until given V] was up there with exploding whales and the penis gag from season three. The point of it escaped me a little apart from this show's need to try and upstage anything else they've done previously and the thing is this wouldn't have got anywhere near previous gorefests if it hadn't have been for the V infected sheep the rest of the team encountered. These were the real LOL moments of the episode as they swooped down and took a cow apart and then focused on the Boys as well as various associates of the VP (the one who can explode heads). Oh and Annie seems to be having a problem with her powers and the Seven have decided to become proper superheroes rather than plastic Vought puppets; the problem is their existing ideology. It was all very much the same as it ever was. This has not been the cutting edge show it once was and now seems a little like it's getting bogged down by the myriad of stuff going on here and in the spin-off.
Who's Crying Now?
Oh FFS. Really? Is that as good as they've got? That's me done. I sat through I don't know how many Chibnall/Whitaker
Doctor Who episodes but I never once said, 'fuck it, I'm done with this shit.' Well - today, the 22nd June 2024 - I'm done with this shit (obviously until the Christmas special which I will watch because I will have forgotten that I swore never to watch this heap of dung ever again). This was without a doubt the most mundane and boring season finale in the history of season finales. What an absolute fucking let down. Ruby Sunday was nothing special at all, just some average abandoned kid from an insignificant mother who was so pointless and uninspiring the worst evil the universe ever faced couldn't work out who she was or why she was so important. What an absolute load of bollocks. It was the anti-climax to beat all anti-climaxes; the antithesis of the blockbuster ending and... Jesus wept (and boy can the Doctor weep as well, he was more leaky faucet than time lord), what an ending; using the God of Death as the God of Life and using him via the Tardis and a bungee rope to rip a hole in the fabric of time to allow all the billions upon billions of things it killed to magically be reborn again like a perverse version of Avengers: Endgame, except instead of using a magic gauntlet they used a non-magic red herring of an assistant. As I said, FFS. It made absolutely no sense at all; none. It doesn't matter how much you try to understand it, it was worse than bollocks; it was like it had been plotted by a rotting avocado.
Then there was the epilogue, which we now know has been quashed by Disney because that's not the end of Ruby Sunday at all as she's going to be back for the next series along with another female companion - are they worried that a male companion might tempt the gay Doctor to get his trouser snake out and scare all the Disney+ viewers? Absolute wank; turgid pseudo-sentimental horse shit. Please, never darken my TV screen ever again.
Outer My Mind
If one time travel load of bollocks wasn't enough... The reason we stuck with Outer Range was because I'd been reliably informed that while season one was slow and quite boring, season two really ups the ante. Well, fortunately this weird and wonderful neo-western got weirder than a buffalo taking a shit in a corner shop in Bicester.
I can live with most of the first season, but there were some things that just seemed too stupid to be believable. Let's start with the fact that if Royal knew about the hole in his 'yard' since the late 19th century, why was he trying to so hard to keep its existence a secret, when by the end of season one just about everyone in the series knew about it? Is the youngest Tillerson boy mentally challenged or does he just want to be a 21st century Gene Autrey? How the fuck did the sheriff continue with her singular line of investigation on the Trevor Tillerson murder when the coroner told her he'd been dead for eight hours but had been missing for five days? I mean, if she's as good as she thinks she is, it didn't matter how much she suspected an Abbot for the killing, you'd have thought she would have followed the logical course of the investigation? And is Autumn the most annoying fucking character ever to appear in a weird TV show? Except, we now might know why....
One thing I did realise while watching the season one finale was that Lewis Pullman who plays Rhett Abbott also played the fantastic Calvin Evans in Lessons in Chemistry. Anyhow, we have season two lined up to watch and like I said it's supposed to have a lot more happen in it. It needs that to be the case...
Then along came season two like we only stopped watching the first season just yesterday...
One thing I will say is that we were promised a ramp up in weirdness and that's exactly what we got. This first episode went all in on the 'you think you had an idea what's happening, well think again!' The new tag team of Royal and Autumn make some waves; Wayne's back from the almost dead; Perry's back in the - what looks like - 1980s; Joy is back in the 1880s and Luke is being talked to by dead owls. It stays this way through the opening half of the second season, culminating in a clutch of episodes that are staggeringly bizarre. There's a complete episode set in 1886 - the year Royal went through the hole and into the 1960s or 70s - with Joy living with the Shoshone; this is one of the highlights of the entire series and through this we learn either the truth of what happened with Royal's father or that her appearance there altered it.
Then there's the last couple of episodes (and the long wait for the next series) where everything gets well and truly fucked up. Let's put it this way, if you've watched this series or intend to watch it then season two will considerably blow your mind at times, but by the time you get to the last few episodes it won't just blow your mind, it'll take it out for a walk, give it LSD, shag it, then leave it in a dry and desolate place before throwing it in the sea and getting it drunk. Just the simple fact that stuff happens - mainly with Perry - that is inexplicable and exists in its own self contained madness makes this one of the most fucked up TV shows I have ever seen.
I have to say that as an aficionado of time travel nonsense there are some gaping paradoxical holes in the narrative - but is there? Something does happen in the season two finale that seriously makes you wonder why events in the past are not changing things in the present. As a portal to the future I can understand the confusion, but if the 'river of time' that flows under the West Pasture goes back and forth, how come events of this series aren't written into the fabric of the past? I will say that season two really does get batshit crazy and if you can plough through season one, season two is almost everything you want it to be. Roll on May 2026 and season three.
The Firing Line
The Clooney-fest continues with Up in the Air, a film we both remember watching 15 years ago and we both remembered nothing about it apart from one scene; oddly enough it's the scene that turns it from a wonderful light comedy about firing people to a wonderful tragical movie about loneliness...
Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a professional firer of people. He works for a company that are employed by cowardly executives to come into firms and sack their staff because the owners are too chicken shit to do it themselves. Ryan is very good at it, but Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) is a graduate who has joined the company and believes she can save them hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing their job via a video link rather than in person. This is something the self-centred and happily lonesome Ryan doesn't like the idea of at all. You see he's so invested in his life as a man who lives 'up in the air' the last thing he wants or needs is to be grounded back in Omaha, Nebraska. He has a casual life, with casual relationships and accrues airmiles to the point he is on the verge of becoming only the 7th person to get to 10million miles.
Then he meets Vera Farmiga's Alex, who is basically a female Ryan and the two of them essentially become fuck buddies whenever they can, except because of Natalie's old-fashioned-for-her-age look at life Ryan begins to reassess his own life and that's when things start to change for him, especially when he goes home for his younger sister's wedding, a woman he barely knows. I remembered thoroughly enjoying this film, but I'd forgotten just how sad and slightly unsettling it is, especially when you realise that this is what corporate USA is really like - just another reason to hate that fucking country with an absolute passion; a soulless, shit house of a nasty place where people are treated like less than shit. Great film, though.
Twin Tragedy
Exactly what you suspected would happen after the tumultuous final scenes from the season two opener of House of the Dragon happened and Rhys Ifans was very much all over it like the political rash maker he is, unfortunately his authority has been undermined by his daughter's illicit lover and his grandson's grief.
This really was an episode about how to deal with a disaster as best you can. While Rhaenyr could not believe that her husband was stupid enough to allow the idiots he sent to kill Alicent's second son to take someone else's life instead, so heinously that any support she might have got could be seen slipping away like sand through her hands. The new king was simultaneously winning the propaganda war and then pissing all over it by having every single rat catcher in the city hung from the city gates, causing something of a faux pas that he didn't really give a shit about. This was an episode about making bad choices when prudence might have been the better option. There are changes in allegiances and a battle between two brothers that was only going to end with more tragedy. One wonders where this series is going to end up, but given how fucking mad the Targaryen family is I wouldn't be at all surprised if they don't all try to kill each other off to claim the Iron Throne.
In an unexpected plot twist, [is the Guardian reading my blogs?] that awful newspaper has suddenly realised this is a very dull and boring sequel and nothing much happens, there's no sex, no one of any worth has died yet and it's too dark and mumbly... Or maybe one of their critics actually bothered to watch an episode rather than think they know what's going to happen from a plot synopsis?
O Boy, You're Really Here
It came out 24 years ago and while the wife has always fancied watching it, I have never been that bothered about it. That's probably down to the fact that I haven't enjoyed a film musical since the late 1950s made ones; I'm not even keen on West Side Story, which I believe was the last of the truly great Hollywood musicals.
Tonight, we remedied that and finally watched the Cohen Brothers
O Brother, Where Art Thou and while it was an enjoyable and slightly silly movie, I'm struggling to understand why it is such a cult classic and beloved by almost everyone who has seen it. It's okay, some of the tunes are catchy, but it's essentially about three idiots wandering across the southern States trying to avoid being captured after they escape from a chain gang. It's a film built on lies and incompetence and how the three - George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson - even managed to escape the chain gang let alone have so many strange and fantastic adventures along the way is a mystery unto itself. It was fun; the cast obviously had a ball making it; Clooney has never looked more at home but it felt more like an homage to the Three Stooges than to anything else and with a couple of LOL moments early on I found it dragged on a bit and really wasn't what I expected. However, as I don't really know what I expected that's a bit of a throwaway comment. Still, that's another Cohen Brothers and Clooney film ticked off the list, I'm sure there aren't many more to watch.
Barely Burbling C**t
The BBC's Colin Patterson is anything but a journalist. This gurning, ever-smiling bag of Scottish wind somehow got a job as the BBC's entertainment correspondent and does his utmost to help give the Beeb a bad name... Have you ever seen a TV correspondent (Okay, Andi Peters maybe) so vacuous, fawning and annoying? Everything is so brilliant he could be the Scottish cousin of Paul Whitehouse's Brilliant character from the Fast Show and this week he's been interviewing Glastonbury guests in a way that would have made Hello! Magazine vomit...
To music icon Shania Twain on BBC Breakfast he asked such important questions as: As the Legends slot usually brings fans out wearing fancy dress based on whoever is appearing, what would you recommend fans wear when you appear in this slot? How about: You're a big fan of animals, would you consider riding a horse onto the stage? FFS, is this really the level of 'interviewing' we can expect now from the BBC? No facile questions like: how does it feel to be classed as a Legend and sharing a stage that's usually is occupied by really old, nearly dead pop stars? Or maybe: How do you feel about appearing at Glastonbury; is it something you ever thought would happen? Does your arse look bigger now? Do you give a fuck about what anyone asks you anymore? Jesus on an inflatable carp...
And then Glastonbury arrived with almost blanket coverage from the moment the gates opened on Wednesday to Dual IPA's Pyramid Stage performance [last night] and there was Patterson poncing about like someone had slipped him a dozen Ees. He gets fucking paid to attend this pointless spectacle for anyone over the age of 50. He even managed to interview Keane for about ten minutes this morning which had all the relevance of watching a bison take a shit in a corner shop in Bicester... I know I'm an old cunt who hasn't been to Glastonbury for 39 years, but can't the BBC show this on BBC3 and on line and not plaster it all over BBC1 and 2 like it's important for everyone?
The Really Gong Show
The George Clooney directed biopic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is an odd fish at best. Sam Rockwell played Chuck Barris, the man who invented the concept for Blind Date, Mr & Mrs and created the Gong Show, which was the template for so many talent contests. Barris also claimed he was a CIA undercover operative who killed 33 people.
What this movie actually felt like was the delusions of an egotist and fantasist. Barris had an extraordinary amount of success as a producer and a host but there doesn't appear to be a lot of corroborating evidence to suggest he was a hitman for a secretive branch of the CIA. Clooney played his 'handler' and the man who recruited him based on his ability to get beaten up in bar fights and the all-star cast included roles for Brad Pitt and Matt Damon - neither of them spoke a word - and Julia Roberts as a femme fatale who worked with Barris on some of his hits. This is a tonally awkward film; there is lots about it that felt like it really was the ramblings of a man who possibly took too many drugs or drank too much or simply had the shit beaten out of him so often his brain was addled. It purports to be a comedy but felt like an examination of mental illness; the drama wasn't particularly dramatic and I got the impression that Clooney, a huge fan and star of a number of Cohen brothers films, wanted to make something in the same vein as they did. This was entertaining but not great entertainment.
Simply Amazing
We've given up on most of George Clarke's TV shows, but we stick with
Amazing Spaces because it's always a mixture of brilliant and bonkers watching people do crazy things with unusual stuff and watching it come out quite... amazing. I think the good thing about this new series is that Will Hardie is back - after a year's sabbatical - and he adds an element of professionalism to the show. He's not an architect like Clarke, he understands the stuff that is happening, while his big Geordie privileged friend takes his amiable self around being the star of the show. Will is the brains of the outfit; he's the guy who does all the donkey work with their annual 'big project' and there's something slightly irreverent about him, especially when he's dealing with the ever ebullient George. The other entertaining aspect of this are the people who do their own projects; the imagination and ability many of them show and the remarkable results they have. If anything, after ten seasons, the least amazing thing about this show is actually George Clarke; who's looking a bit overweight, old and frayed around the edges, like he either needs a makeover, or Will Hardie builds a new compact and bijou replacement - with a wider vocabulary and less cheese...
Wondrous Repeats
I have been so disappointed by this revamped, relaunch of Doctor Who that I decided instead of watching football matches over this summer I'd watch some classic David Tenant and Matt Smith episodes and I started off with two double bills from season 4, when Tenant and Catherine Tate were flying the Tardis.
The first thing about
Silence in the Library, Forest of the Dead, The Stolen Earth and
Journey's End is simply how fucking good they are compared to anything that has been on over the last five years. They simply ooze class and while I fully understand that there's a lot of baggage in at least two of these episodes, compared to the dog shit dished up by Chibnall and then the camp excrement squeezed out from RTD's return, these are uber classic episodes, with a sense of investment and brimming with tension and entertainment. This was
Doctor Who at its very best, with guest stars galore, intriguing ideas, and a sense of knowing what it was doing and plots that made sense. No wonder RTD brought Tenant back for a swan song before the arrival of cry baby Gatwa. All of the reboot episodes are currently on iPlayer and I'm going to watch quite a few of them over the next couple of weeks, because it's better than international football, Wimbledon or politicians who only care about themselves and the divisions they sow...
Next Time...
The Bear will be watched, probably starting Saturday night. We didn't watch it during this 7 day cycle because we had other things to get out of the way and I expect we're going to do all 10 episodes over three nights - which might limit the amount of stuff in next week's blog. Which, if you've been paying attention, you'll know might have to (or maybe already has) migrate to a new home as Facebook hasn't allowed me to post from this blog's address recently because they view it as either spam or offensive, which might be accurate to a point but isn't really the point.
There will be other stuff as well. Evil, The Boys, House of the [Boring] Dragon and other observations and opinions. Like always, you'll read what I end up watching.
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