Modern Culture - Wide Angle

Let's Hear It For The ...

It's back! After what seemed like an age, The Boys has returned - even if that does sound grammatically wrong - and it feels as though it maybe shouldn't have bothered. I started to feel, during season three, that it was getting a little too silly - which is an odd thing to say given how actually quite silly it is - but maybe 'silly' isn't actually the word I'm looking for...

I appreciate that the season three finale pretty much sets up this fourth outing and the spin-off series Gen Z added further possible subplots, but there seems to be something a little... desperate about this, especially the first three parts which dropped midweek. Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, Antony Starr and Erin Moriarty are back, with all the other regulars and there's the usual amount of OTT shenanigans and ultra-violence, but there seems to be an element of clutching at straws going on. I suppose there was only two ways they could go with this - what they call in comics circles 'The Miracleman Route' wherein the supers basically take over the world and destroy everything including each other until the strongest remains standing or the Donald Trump route where the USA is split into two warring factions - those who love Homelander and those who hate Vought and Homelander. The strange thing is they appear to be taking a bit of both.

Billy Butcher has got six months to live and wants to save Ryan - his wife's son by Homelander - but he's been ostracised from The Boys. Homelander is beginning to feel his age and wants a legacy for his son and enlists the brains of the smartest person in the world to help him achieve that. A Train's slowly dawning disillusionment is picking up pace and Hughie's dad has had a massive stroke and his mother has reappeared and she only works for Vought now. Frenchie seems to have become a bit gay and Kimoko has discovered beer (and maybe her sister). MM is now in charge and working for the CIA again and Victoria Neumann is a Presidential Elect's death away from becoming POTUS and none of it seems to be very interesting. We're used to arms and legs being ripped off; Butcher calling people 'cunts' and Homelander being indestructible; Gen Z seemed to introduce a way out but that entire mini-series was rendered moot by Butcher saying the virus that kills supes won't work on Homelander. So we seem to be in a bit of a vacuum with the team spending too much time trying to work out what Homelander is doing and lots of quite irrelevant supporting characters who don't really do much but fill up the screen.

This season we had the first three episodes drop at the same time and then it's a weekly until the next cliffhanger or resolution that can lead into another series. I don't want to sound like I've gone off this show, but it simply no longer feels cutting edge and how a superhero show should be done; it's almost a pastiche of itself and needs something to happen that doesn't feel scripted. It's like superhero fatigue has infected this show as well...

There Goes a Million Viewers

It's time to be 62 years old curmudgeon and cause some controversy... This week's Doctor Who will have caused heterosexual men over the age of 50, Gammons, UKIP/Reform voters, prudes and homophobes to call it quits with the show and they may never come back again. This is a TV series that - based on viewing figures in the UK - could well be on its last legs and this may well have tipped it into cancellation territory; I suppose it all depends on how well it's doing for Disney. But Rogue was shite and I'm gobsmacked it could be shown before the watershed.

This was a facile and childish homage to whatever a Bridgerton is and the ridiculously quick and easy way in which the Doctor fell in love with a galactic bounty hunter destroyed all and any ambiguity this new incarnation might have had. I imagine gay fans of the show - of which there are many - were all in rapture about it, while die hard aficionados (who are not gay) are probably writing to the BBC and demanding their licence fee back. This was wrong and I have many LGBT+ friends, but while the Doctor has kissed a number of people since the series returned, I don't think any of them had the sexual undertones this one did. Had the story been better than a bunch of cosplaying childish aliens body snatching then it might have taken a back seat but because the story was fucking ridiculous, had a stupid ending - oh let's not forget the move to save Ruby - and left no one with any doubts that this Doctor is as camp as a gay Christmas in Brighton, I think there are going to be a lot of people angry, disgusted and with absolutely no intention of ever watching a Gatwa DW ever again - who, incidentally, now cries at the drop of a hat.

I don't want anyone to think I'm being homophobic, but [ouch] since RTD returned to the show we've had so many LGBT+ moments it almost feels like a Party Political show on behalf of a rainbow alliance. I'm sorry, but it has absolutely no place in a family show or in Doctor Who. It spoiled an otherwise shit episode. After this is cancelled and goes on indefinite hiatus it will be brought back in 10 years time with a white asexual Doctor who doesn't show any emotions towards male or female companions. I should stop watching this, especially when I feel the show has somehow become politicised with Davies' personal crusade, because that's what it feels like.

A Kick Up The Nineties 

The thing that spoiled The Bone Collector was the fact it was made 25 years ago, in the 1990s, when films felt so much more sophisticated than films from the 1980s but now feel like movies from an era that desperately wants to be forgotten.

Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie star in this extremely taut thriller about a serial killer terrorising New York over a short period of time. It had lots of famous names looking extremely young and also some future famous faces in fleeting cameos and they all featured in a nasty little thriller that owed a debt of gratitude to Se7en. I expect if this film had been made 10 years later it would have felt completely different, but this tale of a former forensics wizard left a quadriplegic after trying to rescue an already dead NY cop struggled to feel very contemporary and left us both puzzling over Jolie's lips - I mean are they real or fake? We had never seen this film, although we both knew quite a bit about it and there were enough red herrings, garden paths and surprises to allow us to forget about how dated it felt. The killer is playing cat and mouse with the NYPD and is using an old book of murders as his inspiration, but it ends up being a little more complicated than you might imagine. It's worth checking out if it ever appears on TV again.

Texas Hold Em

This decision to watch a bunch of films from the 1990s, many of which we'd never seen before, continued on Sunday with a film that in many ways felt like a low budget movie that made much more of an impact than perhaps it was expected. The 1996 thriller Lone Star had some famous names in it - Kris Kristofferson, Frances McDormand and Matthew McConaughey - all in cameo roles, as it was dominated by names you wouldn't expect to see in 'BIG' films.  

This was a story about a small southern Texas town that is dominated by the discovery of the remains of a dead body - a skeleton - that might be a former sheriff (Kristofferson) who disappeared nearly 40 years earlier. It falls to the current sheriff - Chris Cooper - who just happens to be the son of the former deputy who took over as sheriff when his boss disappeared. As Cooper digs deeper it starts to look as though his whiter-than-snow father might be the man who killed the man whose remains they have found. However, this isn't the only thing going on and we're introduced to many subplots that are seemingly unrelated to the main story. The relationship between a newly arrived army colonel played by Joe Morton and his estranged bar owning father - Ron Canada - a man who had form with Kristofferson's sheriff Wade. There is also an Hispanic schoolteacher - Elizabeth Peña - and her snob of a mother - Míriam Colón, who is very choosey about who her daughter sees romantically, even though she's now in her 40s with two teenage children. Her mother is particularly against her daughter having anything to do with Cooper's sheriff, even though the mother is undoubtedly a snob and very pro-American; she also runs a reputable restaurant in the town, which might be complicit in something - historically - to do with illegal immigrants. Then there's the town mayor, who used to be Wade's other deputy back in the 1950s and a number of other characters who all have stories about Wade, Cooper's father or other things that gradually all begin to either relate to what is happening or have an allegorical relevance.

It's a movie that unlike The Bone Collector doesn't feel as dated, even if it was made nearly three years earlier and like I said, with such an abundance of B list actors in this, you feel that it was never intended to be a highly ranked and well-respected film. The great thing about Lone Star is the way it really does lead you down several paths that seem unconnected and then BOOM you realise they all lead to the same garden. And then there's the ending which is one of the best twists in the tale I've ever seen on film. The 1990s was a great decade for twists - Se7en, The Sixth Sense to name just two (I can think of) but this has one you really don't see coming and probably wouldn't until the final pieces are revealed and then it's an 'Oh wow!' moment with a little bit of ick thrown in. It's a cracking film and is thoroughly recommended.

And The Big Prize is...

I write this part of the review with three days to go until the season finale of The Big Door Prize, a show that the wife has finally warmed to. This is really a fantastic series, which has dazzled me over the 18 episodes I've seen so far. The weird thing is Chris O'Dowd's Dusty and Gabrielle Dennis's Cass - the two main characters - have become the most annoying thing about this series and why that's such a juxtaposition is because many of the other regulars were annoying but they have all become really great additions to the cast and I think that was one of the key things about this series - change.

As we hurtle towards the finale, all the supporting characters lives are getting sorted, one way or another. They learned their potentials and then they saw the next stage and now they're all better people for it.

Sammy Fourlas as Jacob and Djouliet Amara as Trina - the two teenagers who have really been holding everything together are also finally working out their positions in all of this craziness and it's just Dusty and Cass left. Dusty has been slowly forming a relationship with Alice (played by the gorgeous Justine Lupe) and Cass has been discovering that she can survive quite well without her mother or Dusty, but neither seem able to admit it and I think that is about to be decided in the final part. This has been one of my favourite 'fantasy' series ever; a show that has very little fantasy, a lot of weirdness and a story that never seemed to be going anywhere until it arrived... 

... The finale episode was... not what I expected, although to be fair I don't really know what I expected, just not this. I figured it would wrap things up and Dusty and Cass would go their own separate ways and everyone would live happily ever after and for a large part of the finale it really looked like it would and then... it started to get weird again. Hana and the priest went back to her old bar to see if the Morpho machine that was there was still there - because Hana believed it was following her around - and it wasn't. However, as she poured her heart out to Reuben, he finds a large envelope in the form of a Morpho envelope and inside it contains a cassette recorder (again playing on this retro feel the entire series slips into at times) and it had a recording or her father and Hana playing a song. Meanwhile Cass steals the show at the Deercoming with her rendition of a boy band hit and her mother ditches being centre stage and spends the time with her new girlfriend. Things go horribly wrong for Trina and Jacob as Trina's propensity for doing stupid things really backfires and Dusty sees a white deer, which tells him to return to the Morpho machine, oh and it starts snowing. By this point we're past the 30 minute mark and it's either going to be a quick resolution or it's going to be an extended finale...

What actually happens is we're left with another cliffhanger. One that is either a metaphor I'm not getting and this is the end - END - of the series or it leaves us in a very weird place. If it's another cliffhanger then I'm slightly disappointed because while it still would have been a shaggy dog story as far as the machine was concerned it would have had a conclusion for the residents of Deerfield, but the fact that we have had a resolution for most of them but it's looking likely that there will be a third season I'm wondering - especially with the incredibly strange ending - where they can take this now? Yes, there needs to be certain things resolved or explained but can they make ten more 30 minutes episodes from that and more of Giorgio being annoying? I suppose I'll find out next year.

Historically Topical 

Steven Spielberg might be Jewish and the massacre of Israelis at the Munich Olympics in 1972 might have been horrendous, but when the two meet you get what I thought was a very ambiguous movie that focused on aspects that you maybe wouldn't expect from a historical film. Munich was a long, violent and harrowing film, something I'd never been that interested in watching but now finds itself in a position of historical importance given what has been happening in Gaza for the last nine months.

Eric Bana and Daniel Craig are the lead actors in a film that doesn't exactly paint Mossad - the Israeli intelligence agency - in a very good light; in fact no one really gets out of this in any way positively. The movie's title is almost misleading in that Munich and the events there during the games is the reason for the rest of the story. In fact very little time is spent on the actual event, what we witness is Israel's revenge on the Palestinian men we are led to believe were responsible. The thing is this is a murky story and nothing is clear almost from the point where Bana playing Avner Kaufman is picked up by Mossad from his home and taken for a meeting with Golda Meir and her chiefs of staff. What happens there is also ambiguous as we discover that Avner was one of her bodyguards and there is a familial relationship between the future assassin and the then prime minister of Israel.

Avner leads a mission with four other men he doesn't know to track down and kill the 11 men he is told are responsible for the deaths of the Israeli athletes and the majority of the film is just that; this team of five men tracking down individuals and killing them, in most cases with extreme prejudice and as cold blooded as possible. The problem is the longer it takes to track down these Arabs, the more the Israeli secret team of killers become targets themselves and gradually three of Avner's team are killed off and the ambiguity continues to be ramped up. Who has killed his men; can he trust the remaining member - Craig, playing a South African Jew who has been antagonistic from the very beginning. Has Avner's information source reneged on their deal? Paranoia takes over and finally with six kills in 18 months, he returns to Israel where he discovers he is something of a 'superstar'.

The interesting thing about this film is that Spielberg paints a picture that suggests that while the Israeli's deserve their revenge, the people Avner is targeting might not be linked to Munich. His team might be committing murder and targeting people that Israeli intelligence simply want dead - are they now a rogue team offing enemies of their State? Avner can no longer function as a human being, he jumps at every noise, is terrified for his family and has no idea if his life is in danger and whether it is in danger from his own people. The other picture that is painted is Israel has become as bad as the people they now hate the most, the Palestinians. There is also a chilling moment when he meets his Mossad handler in New York - played by Geoffrey Rush - when he is offered a chance to return home with his wife and daughter. Avner offers Ephraim to come to his house and break bread with him so they might talk about the proposal, but his handler turns him down - a most un-Jewish thing to do, or as the wife said, "I can't accept your offer because I still might have to kill you."

The '90s Become the '70s

One of those 'classic' 1990s films that I never bothered to watch finally made it to my TV. Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused has been considered a 90s equivalent to Francis Ford Coppola's American Graffiti which was a 70s film about the 1950s.

This is a movie that has an enormous amount of young actors, many of which we will grow to know and love, but mainly in this particular film it's a case of 'God, doesn't he/she look young!' This is also a movie that doesn't have a plot; it's 100 minutes of the lives of high school and junior high school students on the last day of school before their summer holidays. It switches back and forth between different groups of friends never settling on one specific person or persons for more than a minute before cutting to someone else. It does focus on a number of individuals but I'm not going to waste either of our times concentrating on them because this is a snapshot of young peoples' lives on a hot late spring day. There's pot smoking; perverse arse paddling by senior males and weird rituals by senior females; there's beer buying, car racing, party arranging, making out and fights and frankly it's not really a particularly interesting or even good film. It does paint an interesting picture; it has an excellent mid 1970s rock soundtrack, but it doesn't feature Led Zep's Dazed & Confused, which is a bit strange. Matthew McConaughey is probably the most famous person in it and his hair is worth the admission price (if you saw it at a cinema or on VHS) and... well, I've seen it and I'll probably never see it again. I'm wondering why it's a 'classic'. 

Mr Fixer

It has made a change to have a week of entertaining films, especially ones we haven't seen and Michael Clayton was no exception. This film about a law firm 'fixer' probably came onto our radar 17 years ago when it came out, but for some reason we never got around to watching it.

This was George Clooney at that stage in his career where he could have embraced Grecian 2000 but instead started to let his greying hair take over. A man in his 40s allowing himself to look like a man in his 40s. Employed by a top law firm to fix problems, because his history of gambling debts meant he had too many skeletons in his closet to afford him to make partner; what Clayton is is a problem solver. He goes into shit situations and makes the best of bad situations and the reason he is where he is is because he is very good at his job. When an associate - played by the late great Tom Wilkinson - appears to have a breakdown from not taking his meds, putting a $3billion class action in doubt, it's up to Clooney's character to solve the problem. However, the chief lawyer - Tilda Swinton - for the firm that Wilkinson was representing begins to panic and she makes some bad decisions. For huge parts of this film you think you're watching a clever man unravel, but is it really like that or is there just an expert at work? This is a cracking film that is ambiguous and secretive - even down to the dialogue - with such a satisfying ending you will almost punch the air in delight. I'm surprised Clooney didn't get an Oscar nomination for this.

A Swift Escape?

Other than the election and the European Championships, the most common thing on my TV for the past week has been... Taylor Swift. Apparently, she's the biggest thing in music now and this concert tour is set to gross over £2billion, which is about £1.25billion more than any other concert tour, ever. Woo and indeed hoo! So how come I've managed to shoehorn the woman into my weekly column? Am I a secret Swifty? Well, no. I have decided to talk about her because I heard some of one of her songs the other day and it dawned on me that I've never knowingly listened to a Swift record. I couldn't tell you a single solitary hit single she has had and apart from the fact she once went out with Tom Hiddleston and is currently going out with an American footballer, I know nothing about her. However, I've since discovered that she's had 19 boyfriends since becoming a superstar, which suggests she's possibly had [at least] 19 sexual partners and while I give her an encouraging 'you go girl' shout out, one does wonder if she likes sausages and if she's ever been to Liverpool...

Demons of Comedy

I don't know how many of you actually watch Evil but I get the feeling that the comedy has been ratcheted up not just a notch but a whole nine yards. This week's episode - which was called 'How to Build a Coffin' but had nothing to do with building a coffin - was heavy on the humour, from the opening sequence with Leland having to deal with an antichrist baby that shits everywhere, projectile vomits at him, won't shut up or let him sleep, to the fantastic Sister Andrea, tracking down two demons running rampant in the Catholic Church's New York HQ.

The premise of this week's story was that there is a demon who is stealing peoples' words to the point where they all forget how to talk properly. As Sister Andrea pursues this, she also has to do more for the priests, including their washing, ironing and cooking, and she discovers large holes in Wallace Shawn's shirts - that only she can see - and soon discovers that as well as the word demon there's also a grief demon living inside her boss. Meanwhile Leland discovers that Kristen's voice is the only thing that will quieten the antichrist and conspires to fool Andy into killing one of his children so Kristen will take the antichrist in as a replacement. You sometimes have to wonder how this genius of moronic thinking ever got elevated to someone high up in Satan's plan to conquer the world.

Ben gets some oats; David takes something of a back seat in the entire episode, while Kristen has to deal with the fallout from Leland's nefarious plan. This week really was a case of a nasty idea wrapped up in comedy hour, which I suppose is the show's way of dealing with certain subjects, but I am beginning to feel as though there is too much comedy; like the show has stopped taking itself seriously and there's a knowing wink and a nod at the viewing audience. There's still that usual sense of it being slightly contrived, such as Kristen still hasn't been told by her usually blabbermouth kids that Andy was found in the bath tub quivering like a mad thing at the sounds of Feliz Navidad a couple of episodes ago, which, of course, would make her immediately realise that her husband isn't a secret drug addict but is being manipulated by Leland (and her own mother). It's still a great show, though.

Goodbye to Wrexham

I suppose the real question is how the first two series can be 18 episodes and then 15 but the third series, looking at possibly the most important season for the Welsh club is only eight? Are they running out of stories? Interesting people to focus on? Given the TV documentary was hugely successful and one of the many positive things to come from the football club's falling into the hands of Ryan Reynolds and his mate called Rob, eight parts seems almost like an insult. Everything was wrapped up faster than a teenager ejaculating over a jazz mag. People who were constant characters in the first two series were ignored or forgotten about; the fact they were playing in a proper league rather than a feeder league got less focus - maybe the EFL were not happy about the coverage whereas the national league were happy for the exposure? Who can say. It just seemed a little weird considering what an enjoyable show it's turned out to be.

Don't You Forget About Them...

Our end of the week viewing was a documentary. A film by Andrew McCarthy, which also starred him and was largely about him. You'd remember him as one of the members of the infamous 80s group call the Brat Pack and this documentary about that and was called Brats.

It featured many of the original Brat Pack 'members' including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Lea Thompson, Jon Cryer, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and a few other - not Brat Packers - including Timothy Hutton, David Blum and an ancient Lauren Shula Donner - with ears that rivalled Dumbo's (if I want to be horribly cruel to a 76 year old woman). Notable by their absence were Molly Ringwald (who didn't want to appear in the film) and Judd Nelson (who McCarthy struggled to track down). I don't know how accurate this is but both these former stars have had personal problems. Ringwald has struggled with her weight, while Nelson is apparently barking mad and looks like a man who has lived in the wilderness tending a juniper tree for many years. Whether this was the reason they didn't appear or if they somehow sensed it would end up being a slightly facile idea and (with one exception) a bit like a self-help group we will never know.

Except for Rob Lowe, who still looks youngish (at 60) and Ally Sheedy, who looks fantastic for 62 and clearly has had absolutely no work done at all (there's a lesson for Demi Moore there) they all looked old and used. Estevez, the man who was responsible for David Blum calling them the Rat Pack in the first place looks and sounds like his dad (Martin Sheen) but on helium and while it was mildly entertaining, you get the impression it would have been better as an hour long feature, without some of the padding bullshit (because that's what it was) that polluted the middle. There was also this odd thing about it - yes, it was a documentary, but did it have to be so obvious about it? The crew that McCarthy took around with him (who all seemed to think there was still a pandemic going on) were constantly in shot or hurriedly walking out of shot when they realised they were in shot. 

At one point, Sheedy, who I don't think thought being in the Brat Pack was that bad, suggested it was all a bit trite and that's pretty much what I thought of the doc. It's interesting and mildly entertaining, but when you realise that the label wasn't actually aimed at "all of them" but at Estevez, Lowe and Nelson because the night they were interviewed they were partying hard. It then suddenly got blown out of all proportions because they and others of a similar age were simply making a lot of films and occasionally together. It was really the press that picked up on the original article and ran with it, labelling almost all of them with the tag, yet conveniently missing obvious inclusions - Mare Winningham, Tom Cruise, Charlie Sheen, Michael Anthony Hall, Patricia Arquette, even James Spader, Robert Downey Jr and a whole bunch of other famous actors who were of a similar age, starred in films with them and could easily have been associated as part of their 'pack'. It felt like the term was used to describe this specific bunch of young talent who appeared in films about young people regularly. Only Rob Lowe really embraced it and, of course, he is probably the most successful of those who got labelled. In the end it seemed like Ringwald and Nelson made the best decisions; they didn't want to revisit that part of their history so they avoided it. I kind of wish I'd avoided this as well.

Next Time: .

Well, depending on how much football and politics interferes with television, it could be a fallow week. That said, I thought I'd be scraping the barrel this week and look at the bumper crop (of word salad) we ended up with - it's almost a thesis on the entertainment industry mixed with borderline bigotry...

There's two more Doctor Who episodes, so I won't bail out this time, but next year's offerings better be science fiction or I'm going to do what I did with Tom Baker and walk away. The Boys will need to improve greatly because it all felt a little uninspiring and Evil still has 12 episodes to go, so without sounding disillusioned I expect there will be more episodes like this week before we get to the nitty-gritty of it all. Plus House of Dragons returns, so it will be interesting to see just how much fawning over this series there is, given how much verbal ejaculation there was after the first. 

We have a bunch of new films on the FDoD and I'm sure there will be some commentary on something or other - maybe how I was deprived as a child because Sky TV hadn't been invented or how I thought Charli XCX was a porn star. Maybe I'll do a diatribe on diversity.

Things would improve greatly if we had some summer, but that's as likely as men having multiple orgasms or parrots with teeth.