There was a time when teenage me loved a good horror film. I was a huge fan of the genre; loving films like The Exorcist, The Omen, The Sentinel, Halloween, Carrie and a whole bunch of other 1970s films, whether they were about demonic possession, children of the devil or just good old schlock horror. I couldn't get enough of them. Then we had the 80s and 90s and horror movies took on a different feel and videos meant there were always something new and cheap to watch, even the bigger budget films felt a little... shite. By the 21st century my love of horror films had all but disappeared and while I've watched a few over the last 20 years, I can't remember one that was memorable enough for me to want to watch it again, or even something to inspire me to search for something else...
for over a month and I haven't really felt inclined to watch it. I just didn't feel it was going to be any good and while it was a prequel to the original Omen, with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick (one of the first X rated films I ever saw at the cinema), I simply wasn't that interested. It appears I had good reason to as well. I sat through two hours of it and it was so fucking boring. It captured early 1970s Rome very well, apart from the scene when in 1971 some people attended a disco that was playing Daddy Cool by Boney M, which came out in 1977. This pretty much made me realise that whoever was making this film wasn't historically minded; nor did they really know how to make a horror film. Nell Tiger Free played Margaret, a young American trainee nun in Rome to do the last of her whatever novice nuns do before being ordained and almost from the word go I realised what was going on, who was who and how they all fitted together in the story. Ralph Ineson - he of the deep northern accent - played an Irish priest on the trail of demonic shenanigans and Bill Nighy played a cardinal, so obviously as dodgy as fuck it almost was written on his robes. This was overlong, tedious, not scary and all style over substance. It tipped its hat to the original film, especially in some of the deaths, but in general it just did very little for two hours and even the red herrings were largely signposted as red herrings. I'm sure some people I know will argue with me about how good this film was, but to quote an old friend of mine, "They're wrong."
Episode three starts with a strange Yakuza-like women obtaining a fake little finger so she can attend the funeral of Masa - Rashida Jones's possibly dead husband. This won't be the last time we see this woman and what her links are to Suzie, Masa or Sunny the robot are unclear, but she's obviously as dodgy AF and Suzie is perhaps beginning to realise that she's getting herself into something she has no understanding of and the people she's getting help from are maybe as out of their depth as she is. This episode was all about robot wars - not the concept, but a kind of version of the TV show. It was also about Masa's mother deciding to have a funeral for her missing son because Suzie is mourning over the discovery of his shoes, which aren't his shoes at all. This is one very strange TV show that was further enhanced by the use of the word 'Twat' by a Japanese woman with a slight New Zealand accent. I have no idea what's happening apart from the fact that had Sunny got involved in the robot war fight that Suzie dragged her out of it might have got very messy.
Episode four got incredibly dark. Almost keeping up with a theme this week for bleak and gloomy,
ventured into the world of the Yakuza and left Mixxy and Suzie wondering what the fuck they were now getting involved with. This is an episode full of secrets and revelations and possibly the beginnings of WTF is actually going on. The bad guys are searching for something and they know it's in one of two places - Suzie's home or Suzie's robot. There's also a suggestion now that Masa might not even have been on the plane and whatever happened to him and Zen is sure to become a topic for a future part. One thing is for sure, Suzie has wandered into a world she had no idea existed and even less idea that her 'missing' husband was involved with it. The comedy has been replaced by a dark and dangerous drama.
In many ways, this is a tough review to write. Only the Brave, the 2017 biopic about a group of Arizona firefighters is a fantastic film; truly exceptional, but it's tough to review it in the way I usually review movies. It's because I don't want to give anything away and by saying that I probably create an air of expectation and presumption.
Josh Brolin leads a band of amateur firefighters in the town of Prentiss, Arizona. They're very good at what they do but in a typical US way are not appreciated, even derided, by 'professionals', because they don't have accreditation. When they achieve this, by doing something that Brolin's Eric thinks has seriously harmed their chances they get to prove just how good they are. Joining his team is a recovering addict, played by Miles Teller - who played Reed Richards in the abysmal Fantastic Four reboot about ten years ago - and other stars include Jennifer Connelly, Jeff Bridges, Andi McDowell and James Badge Dale. It's a tale of camaraderie and devotion, about a group of people who have to trust each other; have to look out for each other and have each others' backs. It's been airing on Film4 recently and if you get the chance you should watch it; it's, like I said, a truly fantastic film and you deserve to watch it, especially if you like true stories that will make you feel...
It's Sunday. By the time any of you read this almost a week will have passed and what is BIG news tonight will be old news by next Saturday. The fact that Joe Biden has dropped out of the Presidential race was quite remarkable, although a little expected.
The President barely knows who he is and is 81 years old, which means if he had done the unthinkable and beat the Crap Orange Shitler he would have been 85 by the time he was due to stop being POTUS. Joe's problem is simple, he doesn't look with it, in fact he looks like Cary Guffey from Close Encounters of the Third Kind - you know, the kid who was abducted by the aliens and always looked bewildered - and if you ever watched the documentary about the making of the movie you'd completely understand why that is and probably why Joe looks the same whenever he's on TV.
The thing is while Kamala Harris is probably really awful and you'll hear all kinds of negative things about her, she does offer one thing that maybe many people didn't see coming. She's a brown woman and this puts the Donald in a difficult situation - or it should do. He got away with his attacks on Hillary, but she was a privileged wealthy white woman and the wife of a former President. He also got away with his 'racist' attacks on Barack Obama. The problem he has this time is if he attacks Harris because of her gender and her race he's going to alienate a lot of potential voters; he's also going to show his true colours - a racist, misogynist, sexist pig or that he's not as popular as he was in 2016. He's also going to have to deal with the fact he's only three years younger than Biden and there are going to be calls for a new generation of Presidential candidate; someone who isn't old and psychotic. This might not lose the election for Trump, but he might have to start doing something he's not used to doing - arguing politics rather than making personal attacks on his opponent or yelling about how great he is. If he gives Harris the moral high ground - and remember she used to be the Californian DA so she knows how to deal with rapist felons - Trump might struggle to regain it and you can bet a rigged assassination attempt that he doesn't have the brains to do anything but shit and stamp in it.
Crispy Fried Knight
Something unusual happened in House of the Dragon. While not a lot happened, a lot actually happened. It seemed like another meandering episode, but in reality it was the most decisive and important episode of the entire season. So many of the chess pieces got moved around and into position that it was almost difficult to follow.
In fact so much was going on in this week's instalment one wonders what the makers were thinking in the previous five episodes. This was pivotal in so many ways - Daemon might be going mad and having flashbacks, but his new Scottish muse has been busy in the Riverlands clearing the path he needs to gain their loyalty. Rhaenyra is on the verge of a lesbian affair with her confidante, which almost felt like it was always on the cards, while her plans to find distant ancestry of the Targaryens to ride the spare dragons has an unfortunate beginning; that is until something unexpected and unusual happens with one of Corlys's bastards. Alicent's life continues to fall apart as her mistake just keeps giving and giving and her sons - one who has usurped the throne and the other who thinks he should be king but is now too fucked up to do it - are clearly at odds with each other and probably to their own detriment. Rhaenyra's new love interest has a brilliant idea to cause trouble in King's Landing and there's a rogue dragon and a big bugger to boot that is following Lady Rhaena around. It's building up to be an interesting climax over the next two weeks.
As Grim As Fuck
This week's first Clooney movie was the 2020 Netflix sci-fi film The Midnight Sky, possibly the least likely George Clooney film you will ever see. This is about as bleak a motion picture as you will ever see and that isn't the reason it has such a poor rating on IMDB. That said, its 5.7 feels a little unjust; it's not a bad film, it's just not very good.
Clooney plays Augustine, an astrophysicist who is on a polar station waiting for the end of the world - an unspecified ending that is likely to have a 100% death rate. His story is told in a series of flashbacks - some as long as 30 years, others just three weeks. He has some form of disease that is killing him and he needs a form of dialysis to keep him alive, without it he has days to live. Everyone else on the station has gone, he is alone, waiting for the end of the world. He discovers that a space mission is heading back to earth and he really needs to stop them because a return would mean the crew's certain death, but his polar station doesn't have the power to contact a spaceship deep out in space, so he needs to go to a more powerful observatory, much further north in the arctic. Add to this a young girl who seems to have been stranded with him, who he starts to become responsible for.
This is a relentlessly grim movie. There is almost not a single glimmer of hope or good luck; it is simply one bit of bad news after another; like the writers and director are saying, "When the end of the world arrives there's not going to be an iota of a happy ending." This film offers no hope, nothing to hold onto, except the two remaining astronauts, who have to leave earth and head back to a moon orbiting Jupiter, which might mean the start of humanity again, but probably a short lived line of inbred freaks - given how fucking miserable this film was. It was also a bit dull and boring; it had action in it but all that action did was point out something new that could, would or did go wrong. It really was one of the darkest, bleakest, devoid of hope movies I have ever seen and even the one shred of relationship that kept the film going turned out to be a slight twist in the tale and a longwinded hallucination. I do not recommend this; I'd advise anyone thinking of watching it to simply run a hot bath, slash your wrists and die...
Hot in the City
One of the highest rated movies on IMDB. Regarded by many as a classic of cinema in general, not just the 1990s and featuring two of the most iconic names in American cinema; Michael Mann's Heat is a film that has alluded me for 30 years. I just never got around to watching it and now I finally have I'm a little perplexed about why it is regarded so highly...
It is arguably an hour, at least, too long. It has a number of dead ends and a couple of subplots that lose all of their impact. Al Pacino is absolutely Al Pacino in this film; playing a police Lieutenant who is so like Al Pacino it's almost a parody. Robert De Niro is surprisingly svelte but is largely De Niro. A bad guy who you don't fuck with who is loyal to his friends and an absolute motherfucker to those who cross him. This is a clever idea, it's a good story, it starts extremely well - a heist goes slightly tits up when the new guy decides to kill the security men in a wages truck and as a result one of the regulars calls him 'Slick' which eventually leads to someone who knows someone else knowing who the bad guys might be. It's proper police procedural with a dash of that Miami Vice swagger of the 1990s. The problem is it starts to get too clever, even having a meeting between Pacino and De Niro so they can almost compare the sizes of their egos. Like any good film, the near three hour running time did relatively whizz by, but it was still too long and I'm not sure the story warranted it. There were subplots that ended up being a little unnecessary and inconsequential. It was a bit style over substance and, dare I say it, a little far fetched in places. It was absolutely jam-packed with famous people, some who would go on to bigger things and others who were maybe on the slide a little. It might have an 8.3 rating, but it could be that its reputation is what has made it such a classic.
It's My Column and I'll Whinge...
I have not been allowed to comment on the Guardian webpages for over a year; like renowned writer Naomi Wolf, I was banned from having an opinion because I challenged the paper's stance on Israel. I wasn't abusive, I simply asked a question and found myself banned for life - gleefully told by a power mad moderator in an email when I asked why I had been stopped from commenting.
A couple of friends of mine took hold of the gauntlet and began commenting, as they say, BTL (Below The Line) and they haven't yet been banned, but regularly have their comments 'moderated' because they allegedly break the newspaper's Community Standards. However, if you fancy ploughing through the pages of community standards you will be hard pressed to determine whether they are objective or subjective. It appears that The Guardian's 'moderators' are allowed to interpret what people comment; effectively giving a small handful of people almost Nazi-like rights to control the discussions.
One of my friends avoids politics completely, but spends a lot of time on the articles about Culture, which allow comments, and she has discovered the same approach. In this instance, the paper's 'moderators' will allow criticism of reviews, but not criticism of the paper's reviews position. It does appear that many of the reviews that appear are contrary to what we shall loosely call 'general consensus' - for example; a recent film release I Saw the TV Glow has some truly abysmal ratings on line - IMDB gives it a 5.9, TMDB gives it a 59% - which is the same as a 5.9. Rotten Tomatoes has it higher, but a quick search through the internet for reviews of it sees it sit between 50 and 70%; it's an average film, apparently with a 'specific' audience in mind. The Guardian gave it 5 stars and suggested it was 'one of the best genre films of its time.' My friend pointed out this in a comment that fit all the criteria of the paper's community standards and an hour later found her comment had been removed, moderated, censored and all because she challenged the suggestion that the film was only really liked by The Guardian.
Now, my mate Chris wonders why I have such an obsession with the centre right leaning piece of shit Guardian newspaper and this is just one of many reasons. I supported this newspaper from 1990 until two years ago when I cancelled my subscription because it no longer felt parallel to my own beliefs. I still use the on-line version, especially for sport, culture and big news stories, but oddly enough I do this because I haven't trusted the BBC for much longer. I am essentially politically and culturally bereft; there isn't a media outlet that I feel is close to what I want and there is no longer a political party that appeals to my very left wing attitudes. The only reason I still look at it is a mixture of habit and the fact there isn't an alternative and I do like to be as up-to-date with the world as I can be. However, if ANY of my friends and acquaintances asked me I would almost be inclined to recommend the Daily Mail or Express over the Guardian, because, quite simply, you know what you're getting with those Nazi rags, the Guardian is exceptionally good at gaslighting; at painting this picture of objective impartial journalism, but in reality it's a neo-Liberal clickbait heap of populist shite.
Black as Oil
Jesus, we're having a fun-filled week so far... It's just Wednesday night and so far our 'entertainment' has been black and fraught with grimness. It's been a week to match the weather, relentlessly dark and gloomy. This was further extended with the viewing of yet another film we'd avoided watching for a long time...
Syriana is another George Clooney film jam-packed full of optimism and happiness... It's a great movie, but it's another relentlessly grim offering, this time about what a fucking shady, sinister and nasty business oil is and how the US government, specifically the CIA, keeps America's interests ahead of everyone else.
This is a story told in almost staccato fashion. I don't think any scene lasted more than a couple of minutes, as it jumped back and forth between a number of characters as they wheeled and dealed or plotted and schemed all in the cause of 'freedom' and money. It follows a number of threads - the CIA agent (Clooney), the businessman (Matt Dillon), the Arab prince (Alexander Siddig), the Senate investigation (Jeffrey Wright and a bunch of others) and the fundamentalist Muslims intent on destroying something that is never made clear but is all tied in with the merger of two of the USA's largest oil firms. This is a movie that only has happy endings for the rich as they get away with stitching each other up while others pay the price. It's a nasty film with no real heroes, but those who come out of it with credit don't last long enough to make any change. it's about corruption spreading down from the highest levels and it might be fiction but you know it's based on something factual. It's an intense and important movie and I can't believe it took me almost 20 years to watch.
Time Wankers & The Future
This week of doom and gloom might have had a bright spot - the new
Time Bandits TV show from Apple TV - a brand synonymous with good quality. Except, it's shite. I mean proper shite. Taiwa Takiti's oeuvre seems to be one good project in every ten and this was not the one. I'm sure it might have improved, but we literally said 'no more' after about 20 minutes. Given the appalling score it has amassed on IMDB less than 48 hours after its release, one gets the impression that torture would have been preferable. Watch this at your peril and don't be disappointed when you think punching yourself in the face is more enjoyable...
That said, talking with another mate this week, we came to the conclusion that TV and film might well be struggling. The internet is fast becoming something aimed at Millennials and younger; there's a general disregard for Boomers, Gen Z-ers and anyone born before modern technology was king; the feeling seems to be these people either evolve or they're going to die soon anyhow. Maybe entertainment is going the same way? Apparently under 25s spend more time looking at TikTok and Reels on Facebook than they do watching actual, physical television; this isn't going to change because streaming services think that revamping old ideas for the 21st century might bring a new generation back to television or the cinema - for it to do that it needs to have a level of quality (and be original).
Think of it this way - when video technology arrived it revolutionised certain areas of the entertainment industry; by the 1990s CD and DVD technology looked like it would be dominant, making cassettes and video obsolete. By the 2020s streaming had made all these former cutting edge tech look like wireless from the 1930s. I can't see what comes next (because I'm old and out of touch), but if there's a logical evolution after being able to stream stuff to any device in your home or pocket then we'll go down that route. If these things don't make enough money for the creators then we'll eventually see a decline in content made, or at least content that people over the age of 40 want to watch or listen to. Many modern musical artists are dumbfounded by the idea of 'albums' and I'm sure that there are many 15 year olds out there who think the idea of going to the cinema a bit of an anathema. Could we be seeing the beginning of the end for the traditional entertainment industry?
Dead Poo?
The Irish Times ran a review of Deadpool & Wolverine on Tuesday. I believe there was more, but the takeaway line from it was, "Awful. Truly awful." It would seem that, in general, the film is garnering three star reviews; on-line geeky places seem to be giving it four-ish, while esoteric and erudite places, such as the Irish Times, are much less forgiving...
It appears that if you didn't watch
Loki, you might struggle to actually understand much of the plot and others suggest it spends far too much time in the Mad Max landscape and not enough time being funny or action-packed. Another review I read suggested it would have worked if the Wolverine they used had been one that we were familiar with, rather than a new iteration and one, quite damning opinion, suggests that if it had spent some time on a story rather than an endless parade of B list characters and variants it might have been almost passable as a feature film. One thing is for certain, it's going to make a lot of money; less certain is whether or not it's going to save the superhero film and specifically the MCU franchise. I know I'm a cynic, but I never felt it would; I just believed it would make enough money to keep Disney from pulling the plug in 2024.
The forthcoming Fantastic Four film is to be set it in the 1960s in an alternate reality as the FF and their sworn enemy Doctor Doom battle Galactus, a female Silver Surfer and Annihilus (from the Negative Zone, which is aligned to the Quantum Realm) for the fate of the planet. Given that the film is expected to end with the FF in the MCU's universe, I'd say they fail in their battle. The film is due to drop exactly a year to the day I'm writing this - July 25, 2025 - which is likely to be an incredibly fast turnaround given four of the last five MCU films have all had extensive re-shoots and the FF film has literally just started shooting in London, this week. One thing is for sure, it needs to be a success.
How To It Get Back
Maybe it was the plan. Maybe having four weeks of continuous inanity was the idea, to lull us into a false sense of something and then BAM! After nine weeks of mediocrity, Evil finally reminded us what a fucking brilliant show it was and can still be with an episode that was like a category five hurricane!
How to Survive a Storm sounded like it was going to all be about New York facing a category five hurricane - a once in a lifetime occurrence - but it was also about metaphoric storms and a massive event. This was by far the best episode of
Evil of the entire four seasons and there have been some bloody excellent ones to choose from. This was an absolute plot episode; it had some of its now customary comedy, but in the end it was tragic; utterly tragic, as one of the regular cast bites the big one and leaves the rest of the show's characters reeling from the shock. It was one of those episodes that suggested from the start that it might be the end of one of the characters and then it went around throwing curve balls in to make you wonder just who it might be - would it be Kurt? Andrea? Sheryl? One of the kids? Maybe even Leland?
In the end it was a shock but it really makes the last six parts take on a completely different feel. There's no escaping the fact we're on the final lap now; that the end is nigh and while we pretty much all know that good will triumph over evil, one wonders at what cost. This was Evil at its very best; a TV series that isn't frightened to do scary, unexpected things. This is the reason fans of this show watch it; if you haven't seen it then try and track it down, because it's episodes like this that make it special.
Insanity
It's been 16 years since we last watched Tropic Thunder. It was an absolute classic movie first time around and watching it again reminded me of one thing I'd forgotten all about - it's one of the funniest LOL films of all times. It is simply insane and one wonders if it could ever be made in 2024.
This has an all-star cast that is off the map. Literally everyone who was anybody in 2008 was in this film at some point; I'm surprised Pacino and De Niro weren't in it, because... well... because Tom Cruise! He's not even the star of this film but he steals it like a cat burglar. He plays fat, balding millionaire Les Grossman, the producer of
Tropic Thunder, a film about Vietnam war heroes and he is just as insane as everything else in this utterly crazy movie. It stars Ben Stiller - as an action hero; Jack Black as a drug-addicted comedy actor and Robert Downey Jr as a FIVE time Academy Award winning character actor who has undergone surgery to be able to play a black army sergeant. It also has so many cameos and supporting actors than you can shake a stock at - Nick Nolte, Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel, Steve Coogan, Matthew McConaughey and many more. If you weren't aware, it's the story of a film being made that goes a little off-piste and ends up being a movie about idiots managing to stay alive in the face of lunacy. It's just funny and incredibly not PC - from a white actor playing a black man to a baby being thrown into a swamp with malice. It's just what we needed after a week of doom and gloom and things we didn't see coming. It was like someone let the pressure off and if you've never been keen on this classic film I can't understand why, it's brilliant.
What The Fink?
Sometimes watching films you've heard much about but never seen doesn't pay off. This week that has largely been a feeling of being underwhelmed. If the three highly rated movies we watched for the first time this week only Syriana managed to entertain (and that was a pretty grim thing). To round the week off, we finally got a round to watching the Cohen Brothers' Barton Fink and by the end of the it we wished we hadn't bothered...
The frequently excellent John Turturro plays the eponymous Fink, a New York playwright who, after a hit Broadway play, is offered the chance to go to Hollywood and work for a major motion picture producer. He is an ambitious, but fragile and complicated man; he views his art as torment and doesn't want to sell out for the Hollywood buck, but he accepts the job and finds himself in a seedy rundown hotel that is nothing like as fitting as his $1000 a week salary offers. It's a movie that desperately needs something to happen and when it does it's quite unexpected and shocking as the borderline black comedy takes an incredibly sinister turn of events as Fink wakes up one morning next to a brutally murdered dead woman (this is a 1991 film that has been on TV several times, so I'm not giving anything away to most people who suffered watching this).
It is an unbelievably dull and tedious movie that wanders around for over an hour before something happens and then it goes from being a dull and tedious movie to being a dark psychological examination of a young man's madness. It is not an enjoyable experience; it is yet another dark, almost pitch black motion picture and what 'humour' there was felt tonally wrong. I have heard so many positive things about this and I suppose it's very much a brilliant piece of filmmaking that needed a fantastic story to go with it and one about a tortured writer struggling to write a superficial wrestling flick seemed almost trite. It's not a film I'll watch again.
Next Time...
What is going to happen in the next Evil? It's one of those points in the life of any TV series where following on from something so extraordinary is a massive ask. Sunny continues, as does House of the Dragon - Sunny was a great idea done weirdly, but now seems like it might be something almost normal; while Dragon has had some moments but in general it's been dull. We also now have Grimm to watch; over ten years since it first appeared. I managed to get hold of all six seasons and I just hope it lives up to the recommendations I've seen.
In the film world, the FDoD is constantly being replenished; this last couple of weeks has seen me add heist and classic films to it, including Jaws which we reckon we haven't seen since the 1990s. I just fancied watching it again, as well as Unbreakable and a few others. Plus, there's a chance the new A Quiet Place film might be out. Hopefully, next week's entertainment will be that, entertaining rather than the largely dark and moody week we've had. We need a week full of distraction so we can avoid the Olympics.
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