Pop Culture - Where Do Bears Shit?

There are some spoilers floating about like former Tory MPs...

...In The Woods

Something a bit different to start. A full 10 episode breakdown of one of television's best things...

Season 3 Episode 1: How do you start a new series of arguably one of the best TV show of recent years? I suppose the best way is to have a little over 30 minutes of Nine Inch Nails' Together from their Ghosts V album of ambience as the ongoing soundtrack for the entire episode.

Apart from the soundtrack this was an almost wordless opener and it was all flashback, some of it we've seen, most of it was new. It was essentially an episode that told us through snippets and clever editing just how Carmy and co got to where we are now. How he went from some Chicago kid to one of the most praised up-and-coming young chefs in New York and how he gave it all up to come home and run his brothers sandwich business and then create 'The Bear' - his new venture which launched in the final episode of season two - the one with Carmy locked in the fridge because he'd completely lost it and how Syd wasn't going to let him fuck it up. It was an unusual episode and slightly longer than we're used to, but it perfectly encapsulates what this show is about - anguish, pain, determination, dedication, exasperation and fucking hard work. It's good to have it back, even if the poncey Guardian claimed that it wasn't a patch on the first two series.

Episode 2: Now, what you need to really kick the new series off is the tension, anger and unbelievable energy that this show displays when it is at its best. This was really the first episode of the new season and in 27 minutes it had everything you want.

Carmy has been up all night making 'non-negotiables' - rules by which the restaurant has to follow if it is going to get the Michelin star he (and Syd) so desire(s). But before he can get his vision across to the staff as they arrive, he needs to make amends for all the shit he caused in the season two finale and try and make up for all the people he insulted because while everyone is committed to 'The Bear' everyone is also fucking angry and upset at him and to make matters worse, Carmy has quit smoking, putting him on even more of an edge. Tensions with Richie are at an all time low; Sugar is two months away from having her baby and while there is 27 minutes of shouting at each other, they also have to deal with the fact that Marcus's mother died the night the restaurant opened. This was a powerful gut-wrenching addition to the pantheon of brilliant episodes and it's just so fucking good. This is the reason we have televisions. This is a TV show that simply cannot be recommended enough.

Episode 3: The frenetic energy of the first two series is replicated here as a week of The Bear is whizzed through in a little over 30 minutes; from the opening at 5.30 on the Monday to the closing at 11pm on the Friday night. It's fast, furious, angry and tense with the ups and downs to be seen straight off the bat. It's a tough episode and in keeping with the series so far.

Episode 4: Is the calm after the storm. It's the weekend and we get snippets of the lives of the staff; what they're thinking, doing and how they spend their time. Syd has taken a lease out on a new apartment, which her father is critical of, for a number of reasons, but as we saw in earlier episodes, she can't live at home any more. Marcus is getting used to not having his mother around and he's dealing with it in strange ways and Sugar (Natalie) is struggling with her pregnancy and juggling the restaurant. Richie meets his daughter's soon-to-be new stepfather (Josh Hartnet), who seems quite enamoured by his new wife's ex.

Episode 5: At some point in the previous episode, Syd meets up with a chef who admits to having been to the restaurant on the Q.T. She doesn't think to mention this, but at the end of the last episode they get a call to say the photographer is coming to take some pictures which sets up this quite perfectly because not only has a rival chef been there, but a food critic has also been...

This is an episode with another special guest star, this time John Cena as another cousin of this incestuous bands of Chicago families. He plays a man who is excellent at buffing floors - among other things - and he is just one of the things to distract the team from getting the restaurant perfect for the photographer. There's more of the ongoing comedy duo of the brothers Fak, which is a little bit of a distraction from the main story at times, but they try hard even if they're both wankers. Uncle Jimmy has also brought 'The Computer' in to cut some costs and make some savings, which Carmy isn't happy about but understands the reality of the situation, especially as one of the places he trained to be a chef at has announced it is closing down. This has been one of those 'treading water' episodes that felt almost unnecessary but nothing is wasted here... 

Episode 6: This is all about Tina and how she ended up working at the Original Beef (the deli bar that becomes The Bear). It's a downbeat episode about how employees in the USA have no rights and can be treated like shit. The thing about The Bear is it might be a lot of arguments and swearing but it also about friendship, loyalty and family, something that is explored in the next episode.

Episode 7: Arguably the weakest episode of all three seasons, with the exception of Sydney being offered a different job, this was about not a lot at all. Lots of conversations and cod philosophy and more of the Fak brothers.

Episode 8: This is a two-hander. Natalie's waters break at the restaurant depot and because it happens just as all the staff of the Bear have locked their phones away there's no one there to answer her calls. So out of desperation, Nat has to phone her extremely mad, bi-polar mother played by the brilliant Jamie Lee Curtis.

It's clear from almost the start that the relationship between Sugar and her mother is not good. There is evidence from the second season that the Berzatto family all have problems with the matriarch, because of the aforementioned madness. She is a monster of a woman who wants nothing more than the spotlight to be on her all the time; but this time around she's there for her daughter and while it's a very wordy episode, it's more background and back story. You learn things about Michael, Carmine and Natalie that maybe are not so important in the grand scheme of things but do add to the tapestry of the series. This has been a season about filling in blanks because we know all the players, we simply don't know who, why and what they are.

Episode 9: As penultimate parts go this was quite tame and seemed to focus on Carmy and Syd for once, although neither were in it for that much, but neither have been the focus that much throughout the series. Carmy is wondering if he's at fault for all the shit happening in is life and is wrestling with apologising to Clare, but time and his strange sense of pride seem to be getting in the way. Syd is wrestling with the job offer and pressures from all sides. Uncle Jimmy meets with Carmy and falls short of telling him that he's got to pull his funding from the restaurant because of outside forces.

Episode 10: As season finales go this was a pot boiler - an apt analogy for this series. This is all about the funeral service for Olivia Coleman's Michelin starred restaurant and the remaining hours waiting for the review to drop from the Chicago Tribune.

This is about confrontations, conversations and culminations, Carmy is still basically a raw nerve wandering around in clothes; he's into the second month of stopping smoking and basically should go and buy a pack. For Syd this is a night at a restaurant fraught with problems as her potential new business partner is one of the chefs there and it's clear that she needs time or maybe just to say no. However, after an exhausting 'funeral' for the restaurant, where Carmy confronts the one chef who gave him a hard time throughout his training, the episode stops with Syd having a panic attack and Carmy seeing the review and while we, the viewers, only catch glimpses of it, it is clear it isn't what it says. Carmy stares up at the overhead subway A train, the screen fades to black with the words 'to be continued'.

We know (or at least we've been led to believe) that season four was filmed simultaneously with three because of Jeremy Allen White's film commitments for 2024/25, so while we're probably going to wait a year for the next part, we know it's probably in the can. With Ebon Moss-Bachrach also involved in the Fantastic Four film - as Ben Grimm, the Thing - it seems that The Bear might be a finite series given the impending success of two of its three stars. We just need Ayo Edebiri to make it big and one of the best TV shows of the 21st century so far could be bidding us farewell.

This series has been as good as the two previous. Do not let any shite centre-right newspaper tell you differently; The Bear is still the boss.

Psi Corps

Instead of inflicting grievous mindfucks on ourselves by subjecting ourselves to Glastonbury and a two hour set by the world's shittiest band Coldplay, we decided to watch a couple of comedy films with the link being George Clooney (again). First up was the 2011 bizarre comedy The Men Who Stare At Goats, a film we first saw about 12 years ago and in a bizarre way should appeal to Star Wars geeks.

This is a movie that features a pretty impressive cast including the aforementioned Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Stephen Lang and follows the story of Bob, a rubbish journalist based in Ann Arbour, Michigan who is sent on a story which somehow leads to him being in Iraq during the second Gulf War and meeting Clooney who tells him the story of the secret US army group trained in the 1970s in new ways of warfare, including being able to kill animals by staring at them and to walk through walls. This is a surreal film, but only in its content. It's a mixture of flashback and 'present' day narratives that will make you laugh. Clooney's character Lyn Cassady is essentially as mad as a box of frogs, but as the film continues towards the end Bob has to start asking himself whether the story Lyn tells him is bollocks or if there's more to it than meets the eye.

Welcome to Farce-Land

What have George Clooney, the Russo Brothers, William H Macey, Sam Rockwell, Patricia Clarkson and an almost endless stream of unintentional partners in crime got in common? The farcical and at times extremely funny Welcome to Collinwood.

The movie starts with Luiz Guzman being given a sure-fire job by a lifer in prison and all he needs is someone to take the rap for his Grand Theft Auto arrest and he can perform the robbery and walk away with $300,000. The problem is Guzman doesn't get out of prison and the guy taking the fall for him hears about the job and decides to go and do it himself. Another problem is a number of others have found out about it along the way so it becomes a job for at least five people. All they need to do is gain access to an empty apartment, break through a cheaply made wall into the safe room of a jewellers and crack the safe. Then someone moves into the apartment and things start to fall apart. Guzman escapes from prison; the guy who was going to take the rap - Sam Rockwell - falls in love with the maid of the old women who have moved into the apartment and everyone else involved are also having existential nightmares reining down on them.

This is a superbly funny remake of a 1958 Italian film and even more remarkable is that it was written and directed by the Russo Brothers - the men who brought us Avengers: Infinity war and Endgame! It's the tale of disasters, bad judgement and 'criminals' who couldn't rob their own piggy banks. It was made in 2002, but there's a distinct 1970s feel about it, but it could simply be that Collinwood in Ohio just sits outside of time. 

The Temple of Mammon 

I'm an old codger (I am, I am) and the last time I went to Glastonbury was 39 years ago and almost got pneumonia. It was the fourth time for me, having been to the 1980, 1982 and 1984 events as well. My memories of it are largely good, with the obvious exception of the last time. I've never really been a fan of the television coverage, even when bands or artists I really like have played. Gigs need to be experienced live.

So this year, as usual, I avoided it like the plague. The BBC's blanket coverage is like Wimbledon for people who don't like tennis; it is anodyne, selective and has zero atmosphere and it has been like that since the 1990s when the nation's broadcaster decided to dedicate so much attention to what stopped being a CND festival in the 80s and became a money grabbing middle class attracting icon of shite. I managed to 'watch' less than a minute of it this year, a personal record, and this was achieved by accident while changing channels. I can think of nothing worse than watching Coldsick play for a record fifth time. I mean, if you need a fucking reason why Glasto is just a money pit of despair it's Chris Martin and his talentless band of cunts. Everything about this barf-fest is smug interactions, presenters trying to be hip and hippy and other more derogatory words designed to make you realise that I'm anything but a fan of this corporate bag of vomit.

I look forward to the summer every year; from May to some point in September, I yearn for warm days, sunshine, pub gardens and an al fresco lifestyle, but I also forget that every fucking summer (unless we're really lucky, like having a pandemic or something) we have international football, Wimbledon, Royal fucking Ascot, televisual repeats and the biggest cuntbag of them all - Glastonbury, just to remind us that for every good or bad day we're going to have, the usual summer shitfest is waiting in the wings to make us even unhappier than we thought we'd get when the weather lets us down. It couldn't even rain at Glastonbury this year so I didn't even have that frisson of schadenfreude and wasn't able to laugh at the middle class twats unprepared for what a festival should be - as much mud as there is human faeces, the chance of catching something that might kill you and enough drugs to stop an army of elephants. Glastonbury is now for cunts.  

A Brief Album Review

Anyone who knows me will probably know that over the last six or seven years I have become slightly obsessed with Scottish indie folk band Beluga Lagoon. At the start of 2022, they released a groundbreaking album called The Lagganberry Man and then last year they released The Kilfraggan Forest Choir a concept album I loved so much it was my album of the year. It was haunting, was full of choirs and was dark and beautiful. I'm listening to it as I write this and it's just glorious...

Late spring saw the quick release of their second concept album on the trot - The Slug's Bunnet - about the people and lives of those who use the 'fictional' pub in the title. It was obviously hugely anticipated in this house, especially given how much I've adored the last two releases and think they have a back catalogue that is full of absolute gems. The thing is I'm not really a huge fan of folk music; there has been about ten albums in total, throughout my life, that I've really liked and many of these have been folk rock, folktronica or folk-ish albums; the closest I've got to liking a proper folk band - since Waterfall in the 1970s - has been Andrew O'Donnell's band and they've been laden with other influences, that is until this album. The Slug's Bunnet is what I'd call proper folk; Scottish folk music with a proper jiggedy jig feel to it and subsequently I struggled to get into it. It is the least accessible - for me - album I have actually bought with my own money for years. It's full of what I'd call actual folk music rather than something that borrows from other genres. With a couple of exceptions, most of the album almost hurts my ears. It's like they wanted to do something that was traditional - especially after the haunting Kilfraggan Forest Choir - and while many of their devoted fans love it to bits, I've managed to play it three times and some tracks got skipped seconds into them. I'm disappointed, but I suspect I'm in the minority. I do thinks it's a real shame and I hope the next album will be more like the majority of their back catalogue. 

The Army Game

The Clooney-fest continued with a timely revisit to the 1999 David O Russell movie Three Kings, yet another film where suave and sophisticated Clooney is cast as a thief. It is remarkable the number of movies he's made where he's on the wrong side of the law. 

In a strange way, this is very similar to the set up in Welcome to Collinwood. Someone gets hold of information about a stash of gold and it's up to Clooney, Ice Cube and Mark Wahlberg to go and liberate it from the Iraqis while making sure that the rest of the US special forces don't get their hands on it. It's largely a comedy about the end of the Gulf War and then it takes a dramatic left turn about half way through when the boys realise that the Republican Guard are slaughtering innocent Iraqi civilians because they oppose Saddam Hussein and the comedy gets replaced with a serious undertone of death, torture and oppression and for once it gets the tone perfectly as the carefree group of would be gold bullion thieves suddenly become heroes to the rebels. It is a fable about excess, how the USA is only really interested in itself and how it can ignore the little guy in the interest of its own interests and this film does a good job of showing this but also coming up with a relatively satisfying ending.

Dull Dragon Dung

The much-hyped and exceedingly boring House of the Dragon continued with... actually hang on a minute because not just The Guardian but other review outlets suggested that after the opening two episodes were let down by being as fucking boring as watching Wimbledon, pissed out of your face, things would start to get better. I suppose it depends on what you define as 'better' because this was even slower with less happening than ever before...

Things of note: Matt Smith in a suit of smart armour (that's armour that looked smart, btw) and also in the leakiest and dampest castle in the whole of Westeros, where he's not sure he's still got his mind. An erect penis being given a blow job in a brothel and some other unnecessary nudity, including the decidedly unpleasant Aemond with his own very small Targaryen equipment. A ridiculous meeting between the would be queen and the dowager queen in a church in King's Landing that was simply ridiculous given that Rhaenyra is the most wanted person on this planet and all Alicent had to do was dob her in as she was walking away and the series would be over. Oh and some knights, including the new and vastly out-of-his-depth Hand of the King, get chased by a dragon. That was about it; if anything else of note happened I must have been yawning or scratching my balls.

Insufferable

Blimey. George Clooney made a duff movie! I expected the Cohen Brothers to be involved in some bad films because the law of averages dictates it, but I really thought Clooney had made all of his shite in pre-ER days, but it seems I was wrong as I struggled to stay awake during Intolerable Cruelty, a film about a smarmy divorce lawyer and a gold digger, played by Catherine Zeta Jones. It was a silly load of hyper nonsense, and sure, that might be what it was designed to be but it didn't make it any good. Also appearing in this low quality movie were Geoffrey Rush, Billy Bob Thornton, Cedric the Entertainer and... er... some other actors. As an aside, I found Cedric anything but entertaining; might this be because he wasn't entertaining? However, no one was in this flop.

It's Not Entertainment

My mate Chris has been banging on at me about watching the Tube of You series The Rest is Entertainment with Richard Osman and Marina Hyde, especially the most recent one that discusses podcasts - political and football ones.

The first thing they talked about was how podcasts are now the go to entertainment for millions of people - how they flock to podcasts rather than the TV or radio. This might be the case but as I can probably count on two hands the number of times I've actually listened to or watched one it obviously doesn't apply to me. They then go into some detail about the mechanics of podcasts and why they're more 'cutting edge' than the news or football shows on television and I am aware that this is a specific thing explaining why TV isn't what we want it to be, but being told that journalists can't ask politicians questions without them being vetted by editors sounds to me like an apologist's excuse as to why journalists are not allowed to be journalists any more. Obviously they're not going to deal with specifics, but even if a 'question' might have a dubious history, surely a bit of research and an ambiguous way of asking can be applied? 

For example: why can't a journalist ask the former PM, Rishi Sunk, "If you're responsible for inflation coming down, are you not therefore responsible for inflation going up?" But apparently journalists are no longer allowed to ask the questions the people want, they're limited to boring, anodyne and irrelevant questions, presumably so that the politician already knows the stock answer to what he knows he's going to be asked. This podcast did not make me understand the situation more, it made me angrier and the way it was done in such a matter of fact, 'Oh, this is what living in fascist Britain is like now so get over it' way I found condescending. It's like being gaslighted in a semi-entertaining way by two people who can be funny in their own circles. I switched off after that section of it. Podcasts are not my bag, especially ones that appear to give up on things I grew up to expect.

Axel F Off

An unfair subhead really because Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F wasn't that bad a film, especially one to watch the night of the election. It reunited original the gang, all looking old, decrepit and added some new faces. It was largely predictable; some of the jokes were tried and tested and Eddie Murphy looked like he enjoyed revisiting one of his best loved roles.

This is a movie that struggles to make a lot of sense because Axel Foley and his pals are all in their 60s and 70s and should have been retired off long ago. Murphy has obviously had some work done, but you don't see him running around and his face looks a little puffy, like there's a lot of Botox floating about. The plot? Well, there is one; it involves Axel's daughter - who is a lawyer - taking on a case which triggers crooked cops and drug cartels into action. Then Billy - Judge Reinhold - now a private detective working on the same case, but without each other knowing - uncovers information that is wanted by the crooked cops. Everything is telegraphed in advance, some of the jokes have grown hair on and gone bald, but it's a bit of nostalgic fun updated for the 2024.

Bone Idol

We started to watch the new Mel Gibson film. It's called The Boneyard. We managed seven minutes and then turned it off. We haven't seen Gibson in many movies in recent years and if this is anything to go by we won't be seeing him in many for years to come. It had acting that belonged in a fucking Sharknado film. The opening two minutes is quite good; almost professional, then it simply falls apart. I checked IMDB and it had a rating of 4.2... It came out Friday and it was that low inside eight hours.

Dark and Weird

I don't really understand why the latest Nicholas Cage film has such a poor rating - a 5.5 on IMDB - because while it might not be the best thing you've ever seen, it'd better than a 5.5, even if a lot of it doesn't make an awful lot of sense.

Arcadian is a horror/sci-fi film in the vein of The Quiet Place with something terrorising groups of apocalypse survivors. It starts with Cage finding two baby boys and bringing them up on his own in a farmhouse in the middle of an unspecified nowhere. How he fed them when it seems that the world had gone full on apocalypse is unknown, but 15 years later, one of them is off ogling at a girl of the same age at a nearby farm, while his brother is a nerdy, weirdo who is basically studying the creatures that attack their farmhouse every night. He's the clever one, while his brother is led by his groin and Cage is just on edge all the time because he wants everyone home safe before it gets dark. There's the nearby farm who are claiming that they are not really bothered by the night creatures any longer and they keep sheep, almost to prove it. Shit happens and it's up to the boys to save the day. It's a creepy little film, maybe a little too dark at times (and by that I mean the lighting), but the creatures are as weird as fuck and there is a genuine sense of jeopardy and menace going on. It might have been taken more seriously if Cage wasn't in it, because, you know, he makes one good film in every 100 and this is only a few films after that crazy Dream Scenario. Worth a look, regardless of what IMDB says.

Sadomasochistic Fetishist 

The Boys is beginning to get slightly weird ['slightly' you say? Really?] it's also beginning to show us what is going on, especially with Butcher and particularly with Homelander and his team of world usurpers. It's an absolute bad taste fest this week with more perversion than you can shake a stick at and more tumour induced paranoiac fantasies the same stick would have trouble being waved at. This is Homelander's play to get the arsehole politicians of the USA on his side, but unfortunately the cleverest woman in the world gets shot in the head and now has been lobotomised, which we don't know if it's a permanent one just yet, but I'm presuming her brain will grow back for next week. Mother's Milk has a panic attack as a result of this encounter while Hughie ends up in the most compromising positions - plural - you can't dream of imagining; positions so bad it might have scarred him for life. It was, however, more of the same, yet again. This is a show that either needs a new writer or a new direction because at the moment it's the same old same old. 

How to Dress a Wound...

We're almost at the halfway point of the final season of Evil and the thing I expressed doubt about happening happened as Cheryl took a knife to Leland and he took broken glass to her. They have become enemies now and while Cheryl is still beguiled by something evil she's back on the Bouchard side of the fence and something tells me she's going to have to be.

This starts off about a haunted train driver but soon lurches into weirdness when the ghosts the train driver is seeing are happening on the tracks directly above... Kristen's house. Enter Sister Andrea and a number of discoveries are made, not just to do with ghosts and demons. It appears that the Bouchard house is haunted and possibly infected with demons, so along comes David and Ben to save the day, but in the end it's just a case of bricklaying. Meanwhile the strange case of the Ben we never see ramps up a few notches as his now live in girlfriend shows him a video of something he has no memory of. Is this his Djinn at work or is the proton beam that hit him in the head in the first episode fucking him up now? This was very much a comedy episode but also a plot one and the comedy was darker than usual and it has a great cliffhanger ending which I suspect won't be touched on next Thursday...

Next Time...

More of the same regular TV shows until they stop and are replaced by new ones. There's a couple of new things I might try (and I'm still watching old Doctor Who episodes - the Matt Smith ones - which are truly dark and quite sinister compared to this Gatwa shite we're having) and there's a couple of old TV series I want to watch. One I should have watched seven years ago and another that I watched 38 years ago.

The FDoD is full of new and old films again and both the football and Wimbledon will be almost over by the time you read the next instalment...