Pop Culture - Unpleasant People Do Nasty Things

This is full of spoilers, like some humans (with French sounding names) are full of shit...

Bubble & Squeak

While Doctor Who has been 'getting better' since the poor opening two episodes of the new series, there is an overriding problem with most of the stories - logically they struggle to make sense. There seems to be a flaw in almost every one, whether it's talking babies, chronologically wrong Beatles stories or paradoxes that make no sense. There is also the case of the missing Doctor. You'd have thought they could have scheduled filming of this series so it didn't clash with Gatwa's other commitments - but hey, if the PM can fuck up...

This week's rather creepy episode - Dot and Bubble - was yet another story that focused on other characters. It was an example of deciding who the real antagonists were and how the monsters came to be where they were when a genius like the Doctor couldn't get inside the huge bubble protecting residents from the outside world. It was mainly a commentary on the terrors of social media and it did a really good job of making the Doctor the only person on the planet that gave a shit about these smug and entitled social media users and whether they survived the story.

What we had was a tale about privileged humans who were so dependant on their social media 'bubbles' - operated by a small circular machine called 'Dot'.  They struggled to do anything when they were disconnected from them and we discover some couldn't even walk without help from their bubbles. So when the Doctor pops up in one of the young person's feeds, warning them of impending death, it wasn't a surprise when she blocked him and then was very impatient at Ruby also trying to communicate with her. They were warning Lindy Pepper-Bean about her possible impending death and yet she was being so millennial and trying to get the Doctor and Ruby out of her feed so she could do the two hours of daily work before she could go and party, presumably in the privacy of her bubble rather than IRL. She was such a vain, shallow, self-absorbed and manipulative character that you quickly started to wonder why anyone would want to save her.

So, within the opening ten minutes of the episode I was wondering why the actual fuck the Doctor wanted to help this horrible, self-centred and truly awful girl at all; let her be eaten by the strange mollusc creatures that had appeared, it was what she deserved. As the episode lurched along Lindy was lucky not to die until singer Ricky September stepped up and helped her. Ricky seemed to embrace being normal, something that went so far over Lindy's head she didn't even acknowledge it when told. The Doctor then gave them an escape route, realised all the people in the 'city' were being killed alphabetically and Lindy was next on the list, so Ricky again steps in and helps and Lindy shits on him (not literally, this is a kids' show). It seems that the Dot had rebelled against humans and brought the creatures to this outpost and the home world of these horrible people.

When Lindy finally joins the other survivors under the city, the Doctor and Ruby introduce themselves and this is where it really starts to get painful; she's not really that grateful and treats them like they're some kind of lower-than-snake-shit animals - it's DW facing racism for the first time and it fucks him up. The Doctor offers to save them all and take them to a planet that is safe, but they point blankly refuse, preferring to go outside of the city - and apparent certain death - rather than be in the same space as the Doctor and Ruby. It's quite a shocking finale and one that also suggests that in the future social media users will literally only care about their own bubble of friends and everyone else is expendable - maybe even their own bubble. It was a really annoying episode, but that was the point, these 'kids' who were all ultra privileged seemed to offend the things that gave them access to their bubbles and the operating system was gaining revenge - a case of social media hard/software biting back. The Doctor was desperately unhappy about the certain death of the people he tried to help, the rest of us where grateful these twats were all going to die horribly.

Hotel Genocide

Having watched Romesh Ranganathan in Rwanda, we figured it was time to watch Hotel Rwanda as we'd never seen it before and it's got a really high rating on IMDB (8.1). I suppose the best thing I can say about it is you can't really call it a 'good' film; I mean, it is, but maybe 'historically accurate' or even 'How to make a film about 500,000 people being hacked to death with machetes into a 15 rated film'.

Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo star in this drama about the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus; the civil war that became a killing ground with hardly anyone escaping or surviving without being touched in some way. Cheadle played Paul, the de facto hotel manager who is friends with everyone on all sides - a well educated man who wants nothing to do with the brewing trouble all around him. However, when tensions boil over, he is forced into using his hotel as an impromptu refugee centre, housing over 1000 Tutsis and Hutu 'traitors'. What the film really did though was show that Rwanda is not a strategic country; it doesn't have oil or gas, it has nothing the west really wants, so the west sat back and watched as half a million people were butchered. It also showed us how ineffective the United Nations is. 

It is a harrowing film, which would have been a lot worse had it not been made for as wide an audience as possible; Terry George, the Irish screenwriter and director, made this film so that as many people as possible could see it; so that the world could see the horrors that took place without too much sexual violence or murders depicted. It's a film that I'd encourage people to see, for nothing else other than a perspective of history. Rwanda isn't that country any longer (although some suggest it's as bad in many ways), but it was only 30 years ago and many of the people there remember the horrors.

No Trolls Under This Bridge

There is something very un-Canadian about Under the Bridge, an eight-part true crime series about the murder of a Canadian-Asian girl called Reena Virk in 1997. Obviously, it's set in Canada with Asians who made the country their home and the small community of Victoria, on Vancouver island, off the British Columbia coast. Except the actual feel of the show, which feels very Canadian and not in a particularly good way. I still think of Canadian TV as being as woeful as Australian TV was pre-millennium and this series, which is set in 1997, almost feels like it was made in 1987.

Victoria is actually south of the normal Canadian border and that might be what makes it seem like a place full of delinquent teenagers with absolutely no moral compasses, because the kids responsible for the death of Reena Virk are all extreme pieces of shit and seem more influenced by the USA and its rap culture rather than Canada and its reputation for being anything but the USA. 

This is about a girl who falls in with the wrong crowd of kids and whatever she does to try and fit in is never enough to impress the two main girls in the gang; one of which is essentially full of shit, while the other is a borderline psycho. Yet, it isn't just about this, it's also about Reena's family's past and also the police officer who is investigating her death and her past. It's also about a writer who has returned to Victoria and her past and all these pasts seem to be connected in different ways and all are tinged with tragedy. I know there's a lot of pasts in that previous sentence but as half of this series is in flashback it's an important part of the story. The problem I have with it is it doesn't matter how much the creators of this series try to make this true crime story interesting it just feels a little too dull.

Riley Keogh plays the young writer back in her home town and getting involved with the kids and the murder in a way that simply doesn't ring true (this might be the bits that were made up to help the narrative along). Lily Gladstone plays the police officer who also happens to be Keogh's former young lover and both of them are haunted by the death of Keogh's brother many years before. Then there's the Virk family, the victims of racial and then religious abuse as they are converted Jehovah's Witnesses - they really don't appear to be people who deserve the shit they've had to suffer for years, especially the twelve months before their daughter's gruesome death. There's just something unpleasant about the entire series and I'm not talking about the story, it's just the slightly detached feel and the focus on characters who don't even feel as though they belong in the story let alone having such prominence.  

Ultimately, you will feel extreme anger at the way this pans out. You will wonder what the hell Riley Keogh's character had to do with this - apart from the fact it is based on Rebecca Godfrey's book and she plays Godfrey - and you can't help but think she should have been prosecuted for getting in the way of an ongoing criminal investigation. Whatever you feel after watching this you will get a sense of relief and justice from the epilogue.

Trailer Trash

I suppose it was inevitable that we'd get a third Venom movie. The first two weren't shit enough so Sony obviously thought, "Let's have another go at trying to simulate a grown man having a really sloppy shit live on camera." 

The only thing I got from the first trailer of Venom: The Last Dance was the hint of desperation. Yes, this particular sub-franchise of the woeful Sony UnSpider-Verse has been more 'fun' than other parts, but that is stretching the definition of 'fun' to include having your testicles (or clitoris) clamped in a shit-smeared vice and crushed beyond recognition. Tom Hardy must love money far more than acting. Chiwetel Ejiofor must have the same work ethic. Juno Temple and Stephen Graham have really let themselves down. And I managed to gleam all of this from a 2½ minute trailer which left me anything but stunned or excited. Yes, at some point in early 2025 I will watch this and I can guarantee now its review will be even more scathing than this one.

Remote Assassin

This spiral of bloody dreadful films we've been on seems to have continued as we watched a film called Possessor with Andrea Risborough and Jennifer Jason Leigh, about a future where contract killers can be implanted into the minds of innocent people and used to kill a target.

The premise seems solid enough until you know it's a Brandon Cronenberg film and like his father, he is able to make cold, detached movies that leave you feeling disconnected and slightly cheated. This is a tale about being trapped, or in this case the assassin - Risborough - who cannot be 'pulled' out of her latest innocent victim and this turns him into a violent killer, pretty much offing anyone who gets in his way; but is it him or is it the woman who possesses him because her psyche is being fucked up by the number of times she's been transferred into someone else's head. This is a violent, highly sexualised and bleak film that is actually really boring at times. I wish there was something more I could say about it to either make it more palatable or to completely dissuade you from ever watching it, but I don't think it deserves more than a fleeting review. It's not the kind of movie I'd want to revisit.

The Next Level

Here's a recap on season one: a mysterious video game type machine appears in the local hardware store of an average town in the USA. It gives you a card that has your potential written on it in the form of just one word and it completely takes over the minds of most of the adults in the town.

Season two of The Big Door Prize starts where one finished, with the machine asking if 'you're ready for the next level' and we start on a new journey, this time to decide what to do with your potential or maybe how to fulfil it. Not much else has changed; the adults are all still searching for the something that's missing from their lives, apart from Hannah, the owner of the bar, as we discover she's maybe more closely linked to this than even she knows. How come? Well, at the start of the opening episode, she is in another bar somewhere else when Jacob's dead brother Kolton walks in trying to get a beer; he doesn't have the right ID so Hannah refuses him so he goes to the bathroom and walks past another Morpho machine. As Kolton leaves she notices he has blue dots on his neck like the ones she has on her back and this eventually causes her to go and look for him, unaware that he's now dead and buy a bar in Deerfield.

It seems this new season will simply take the story on a little further. I recall saying in my reviews of it from season one that I feel this is a shaggy dog story that won't have a satisfying ending. I have to say that I absolutely love it, the wife is not so big a fan, she thinks something needs to happen, whereas I think something is always happening, and I think the further you get through season two the more likely there will be some kind of ending, although we may never find out why the Morpho machine came to Deerfield or what its origins or true purpose might be. I do know that for all the cringeworthy bits - usually involving Chris O'Dowd's Dusty or the restaurant owner Gorgio - there are some incredibly sad and moving moments. This has been one of the most unusual TV shows I've ever seen and it's another success for Apple TV+.

A Mexican Handicap

Faced with a dilemma on Wednesday night, I decided to put a film on in the knowledge that the wife wouldn't want to see it. However, if I didn't put it on we'd probably never get around to watching The Long Game and therefore we would have missed a film that was both excellent and incredibly anger inducing. This was a movie about golf, but not a golf movie - if that makes sense?

Jay Hernandez plays JB Peña, a golf fanatic, who served for the US Army in WW2. In Europe he became friends with a former golf pro, played by Denis Quaid who was also his CO and when Peña moves to South Texas in 1955 to take up a job at a public school (that's different from UK public schools), Quaid's character invites him to join his local golf club. However, this is the USA in the 1950s and racism was (and still is) something that tended to get in the way. Peña is turned down by the club, his Mexican heritage is the reason even if it isn't stated verbally. So he decides to start a golf team at his new job and gradually he turns a bunch of young Mexican caddies into a very good golf team that eventually qualifies for the State finals to be played at the club that turned him down.

There are ups and downs in this true story and Peña learns valuable lessons, teaches his young players many things and while racism kind of wins the day, the events depicted in this film helped change the way people of Hispanic heritage were treated by the game of golf, which eventually gave us Lee Trevino and then an influx of Mexican and Central American golfers. This is a very enjoyable movie, but it does something, yet again, that I tend to harp on about in these blogs - it makes me (and hopefully you) wonder why anyone would ever want to live in the USA. It is a beautiful country filled with nasty, ignorant racist twats and that's just the tip of a huge iceberg of reasons why I've grown to hate the USA. I have a number of really fantastic US friends; some of the loveliest people I've ever known, but there are so many more arseholes there that I just wish my nice friends would leave and go and live in a country that would love and respect them far more. The Long Game is an admirable film, but even the feel of it made me wonder if they had to film the golf scenes away from proper golf courses, because there were too many Mexicans involved. 

Possessed Pigs

Evil continues to please me no end, even if I get frustrated at times at the glacial pace the actual plot seems to take given there's now only about a dozen episodes left before it concludes.

This week's episode is about evil pigs but it's also about some revelations. Ben admits to the other two he's been seeing a Djinn; David, who seems increasingly frustrated with the Vatican bullshit he's going through, has started having visions that are essentially a projection of the powers the church seems to think he's gained and Kristen, for all of her brave face and standing up to the bullshit that surrounds her, seems to be on the verge of being dragged into something she has steadfastly avoided - getting involved with the antichrist, or the baby created using her stolen egg. This might be the one part of the ongoing plot that I have a problem with, but given this series specialises in side-tracking you and leading you down paths that you didn't see coming, my judgement is reserved on this and I think her mother might just be a trump card in this entire thing. Cheryl might be a really annoying and seemingly gullible woman, but her ambition outweighs her stupidity and her sense of family has been challenged by Leland and family wins out in the end, or at least I hope it does here.

Anyhow, back to the possessed pigs... We get introduced to three 'hot' exorcist babes, who go around 'cleaning up' some of the Catholic church's misses and screw ups. It seems these girls are responsible for the whole 'possessed pork' TikTok thing going on - that alerted the church in the first place - but only indirectly. The team are sent to a farm - in the same vicinity as the new Hadron collider and the werewolf in the graveyard business - where they discover more evil doing has been going on, but also the chance that this entire episode might be scientific in nature. I still get frustrated at the chopping and changing of plots and subplots, but there does now seem to be a line running through this season that has been missing in the three previous ones, in that references to previous episodes are quite common.  

There was also a short six minute mini documentary about this final series tagged onto the end and the show's creators Robert and Michelle King admit that the show is essentially something of a comedy, not that we really needed to be told. 

Full Circle

We started this week's blog describing a character in Doctor Who as a 'vain, shallow, self-absorbed and manipulative character' and we end the week with a former Doctor Who companion starring in a film where she is a character who is... vain, shallow, self-absorbed and manipulative... 

Late Bloomers stars Karen Gillan as Louise, a 28-year-old who is all of the things described above, who two years after breaking up with the love of her life is still struggling to get over it and making everything about her. One drunken night, after a party that doesn't pan out the way she wants, she does something stupid and breaks her hip - something women 50 years older than her tend to do. It is lying in a hospital bed that she meets Antonina played by Małgorzata Zajączkowska (or Margaret Sophie Klein as she is better known in US acting circles), who is an elderly Polish woman who cannot speak English and is beginning to suffer from signs of dementia. She is a proud and determined woman who lives with her granddaughter and doesn't want to be put in a home and fiercely wants to have her independence back and to do the things she wants to do. Through reasons you discover later in the movie, Louise takes the old woman under her wing and eventually becomes her carer, but the young woman's bad habits come back to haunt her and she throws a good thing out of the window.

We then, slowly, discover that Louise's own mother has a degenerative form of dementia, which is killing her long before her time and Louise has sort of run away from that after an incident where she left her mother in peril because of her own self-interest; a millstone that has subconsciously been hanging round her neck for over a year. This is a lovely film with its heart in the right place and a redemption arc that feels more like a real thing than a Hollywood version of it. Gillan is convincing as an American, while Zajączkowska is something of a revelation given she has absolutely no English lines at all and most of her Polish ones are not subtitled, because the sense of alienisation and being alone is an important part of the film and a valuable lesson. It doesn't have a 'happy' ending, but it does have a very real one with plausible conclusions, but that shouldn't put you off because it's a good film and it was am equally good way to end the week's viewing.

I could have watched England lose to Iceland (again) or watched Scotland throw away a two goal lead against Finland. I could have watched six politicians and a massive thundercunt with daddy issues argue about the General Election, but I opted to take a chance on a film that - at the time of writing had no IMDB rating and could have been a load of shit. I think I know who won tonight.

Next Time...

The most depressing thing about this section of the blog is it seems to come around faster every week and the weather has been fucking awful since the last one, we're two weeks from midsummer and we've put an extra blanket on the bed because it's so fucking cold makes it doubly depressing - but at least it's not just Scotland, it's the whole of the UK and much of western Europe - this might be one of the hottest years on record so far, yet again, but it's good to know that for all the climate changes going on, the weather is still a massive cunt.

What's that got to do with TV and film? Absolutely nothing. I could have slipped in a review of the latest - episode 7 - of Welcome to Wrexham because it seems this season is only going to be eight episodes and that means next week is the finale and if that is the case they probably managed to put the least interesting episode on for the penultimate week, but I won't.

Next week there's another Doctor Who, the last four episodes of Big Door Prize and another awesome episode of Evil. There might be some regulars that don't get reviewed very often just to pad it out and there will be another bunch of films, but given that I didn't think there would be many if any this week and there were actually four you can never tell until it happens. As usual, you'll get what you get.

Bazang!