Pop Culture - Big Leggy

Spoilerific wassnames abound...

Daddy Issues

The Nicholas Cage resurgence continues. After years of making abominable low budget films, many of which you'd run away from rather than watch, the actor has made, arguably, better films in the last couple of years than he has ever made. Arcadian, Dream Scenario and Renfield have all helped propel him back into the world of reasonable film making, but his latest movie tops the lot. 

In Longlegs he is almost unrecognisable and puts in a performance that is so unlike a Nick Cage performance that it makes it all the more creepy, because Longlegs is probably the most disturbing horror film I have seen in many years and what makes it uneasy and sinister is the fact that it's almost a simple story. The FBI are called into investigate a series of murders, the first took place in the 1960s and the most recent in the film's 'now' of the 1990s. Entire families wiped out in what appear to be murders perpetrated by a member of the family, but all of them have strange notes - all signed Longlegs - and involve lifelike dolls. This is a truly dark and at times almost scary story, with a dream-like feel to it and with barely a soundtrack it makes it all the more strange and unsettling.

Maika Monroe plays the almost autistic agent Lee Harker, called into work on the investigation because she seems to have an uncanny knack of solving things - is she psychic or is she just good at reading situations; whatever she is, she's also a bit troubled and very much on the spectrum. She lives alone and has minimal contact with her mother, by phone. Her boss at the FBI wants to put a lot on her, despite reservations from other senior colleagues, but gradually she starts to work out what the strange messages say and who might be responsible. The movie then takes an unexpected twist, one that links back to the opening scenes and it stops being a dark and foreboding psychological thriller and becomes a truly nasty horror film (not that it wasn't nasty up to this point, already). Suffice it to say that everything starts to fit together, much to the shock of those involved, but not before it gets even weirder and more fucked up. No wonder this film has such a high IMDB rating; it has one because it's the best film of its kind I have seen in years; just a few weeks ago I said I didn't enjoy horror films any longer and that's true, but this is a Silence of the Lambs for the 21st century; I just hope they don't try and make a sequel, because it works fine as a standalone.

A Little Bit of Politics

Just to put something straight, before I'm accused of being anti-Semitic, my paternal grandmother was Jewish. However she was ostracised by her religion for marrying a gentile (non-Jew). Jews represent 0.5% of the population of the UK (Muslims 6.5%). On Sunday morning, the BBC showed a programme called Growing Up Jewish. I don't really have a problem with this, apart from the fact we don't ever seem to have programmes called Growing Up [insert a different religion].

The coverage of the Gaza genocide is always weighted from an Israeli perspective. 40,000 Palestinians can be slaughtered by the Israeli army, but the focus is often on the poor Israelis who were kidnapped on October 7th - there is NEVER a historical context offered. There is NEVER an explanation that the Palestinians have been an oppressed race since the late 1940s, when the UK, with help from the US, gave the land now called Israel to the Jewish people to establish their own homeland. In fairness, the BBC and other UK news providers do show some things from a Muslim perspective, but it's never seemingly done with any real sympathy (or horror). We live in a world that is either too frightened to call Israel out for the atrocities it has caused or is too in bed with Israeli money to be seen criticising a 'nation' that acts like the Nazis did in the 1930s (ironically). Having a programme about being Jewish on a Sunday morning is a red rag to a bull in terms of fomenting more anger towards Jewish people. That is, unless next week we have a Growing Up Muslim programme to counter it (and allow more fomentation of hatred towards Islam).

This is the diversity (probably the wrong description) problem I have the most with television in 2024. Focus on tiny minorities like they're far more prevalent in the world. 0.5% are Jewish; 4% Afro-Caribbean; 4% LGBT+ and something like 0.005% transgender - all are shown on TV more than Muslim 6.5%, Asian 6%, (how about) Turkish people - there's 0.45% of them, 50,000 less than Jewish but we haven't really seen them represented on TV since Eastenders in the 1980s. This isn't a diversity issue; it's either a political choice or an unbalanced view. Another example was given later in the week when there was a debate on the (hated) Jeremy Vine Show about smoking in pubs and public places. 12.9% of the population smokes - about an eighth of it - and yet the debate on Channel Five was a 50-50 even hander. It was treated like one HALF of the population was being picked on rather than putting some context on the issue. Anyone watching would not have been told there was less than 13% of the population class themselves as smokers; it would have simply seemed like an even split. This is one of the major reasons why we have so much division in this country. Instead of telling people how representative this issue is, we blur the lines and make it seem much more 'even'.

I could bang on about this from a socio-economic position and expand on this by suggesting that this is how our governments - whether Tory or 'Labour' - doesn't do anything to quell anger amongst the great unwashed and ignorant. They demonise people from somewhere else; they promote xenophobia rather than educate people, rather than tell the truth that it isn't brown skinned people causing all the problems, but the rich and the powerful who would rather have the ignorant believing that an asylum seeker is clogging up hospital waiting lists or stopping a veteran from getting what he deserves, when in reality - in actual FACT - it's simply governments not funding these things enough because they're too busy ensuring those who have have more and those who have less get blamed...

Dude!

It's been 25 years since we last watched the classic Cohen Brothers movie The Big Lebowski and as usual we remembered very little about it apart from the bowling. This was very much the brothers purple patch of films being the filling in the sandwich of Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou. 

In many ways this is a straight forward movie that really should have ended after five minutes when Jeffrey 'The Dude' Lebowski is paid a visit by a couple of stupid thugs trying to recoup money that his namesake's wife owes a pornographer. The Dude's namesake is the Big Lebowski of the title and his wife Bunny is an airheaded former porn star who spends his money like there's no tomorrow and once the thugs realise that the Dude is not the Lebowski they're looking for that should have been the end of the film. Except the Dude - a big bowling fan in a team that plays in the big leagues - decides that the real Lebowski owes him the rug, which one of the thug's took a piss on and so goes and sees him in his mansion. It's from this point on that we enter typical Cohen Brothers territory and a simple story becomes labyrinthine and more characters enter the story as it gets so complicated you start to need a bowling scorecard to keep up with it.

John Goodman is excellent (and horrendous) as the Dude's crypto-fascist fellow bowler - a blowhard and a bully who refuses to listen to anyone but himself, while Steve Buscemi spends most of the movie being told to shut up. In many ways it's a parade of famous actors from Ben Gazzara, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, David Huddleston, Tara Reid and Sam Elliot (who is the narrator and also stars as, from what I can gather, a cowboy God-type person). It is very much a classic 90s film and probably deserves its status, but, do you know something, it's not actually that funny, it's a little exploitative nowadays and is full of dislikeable characters, including Jeff Bridges' the Dude, who isn't really as stoner-like as stoners I've met through my life.

In the Loop

I should create a macro shortcut; hit alt R and the words 'It's been xx years since we watched this film and we couldn't remember any of it' - then all I'd have to do is a little light editing and add a number and I'd save myself all this typing...

Rian Johnson's 2112 breakout feature Looper is a proper time travel movie with real time changes to the person most affected by changes in the timeline. It's a tough movie with some unpleasant themes and this feeling that you're never quite sure who the bad guy is, or possibly that the bad guy changes with every decision made by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which alters the memories of Bruce Willis - who plays Gordon-Levitt's Joe from 30 years in the future. This is a simple story with a complicated framework; a film about hired guns who work for a crime syndicate who are controlled by the future, in a time when time travel exists. Gordon-Levitt is the younger Joe, living a charmed life and one of the favourites of the guy in charge (Jeff Daniels). At some point he is going to be responsible for killing someone from the future who will be himself and that means he's then retired as a gun man - immediately - and will have 30 years to do whatever he wants before his older self is eliminated.

The problem is, in the future, there's someone who is systematically making sure that every 'looper' (as they are called) is killed off; retiring their younger versions and leaving the syndicate with no hired guns. Because of this when Willis's older Joe is selected, the people responsible for sending him back in time also kill his wife and that pisses him off. So what he does is go through the motions of returning to his own past, but he stops his younger self from killing him in the hope the two of them can work out who the person in the future is who is killing off all the retired loopers and kill them before it all starts, thus fixing the timeline and saving his wife. So far so paradoxical and confusing; the thing is when you watch it, it has such a detailed and yet simplistic way of explaining the situation you don't get confused. Emily Blunt co-stars as someone important to all of this and it is an interesting and heavily stylised time travel movie with a very simple message; if you have loopers then you also have loops and the best way to ensure those loops don't happen is to prevent them from ever existing. This is about the mechanics of time travel, if you truly understood any of the above, you're paying attention. If you don't, it might be me or it might be that time travel does tend to fuck people's heads up. 

A Game of Two Halves

You might be seeing a film theme; since watching Longlegs we've been opting for old classics and films we've seen that we've enjoyed. Further viewings have uncovered some things I might not have realised, but in general we're on a let's have a fun-filled week of old favourites and modern classics...

After seeing a clip on the Tube of You, I thought it would be a great idea to revisit the two Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films and we obviously kicked off with Sherlock Holmes, the 2009 film with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson. I think it's probably the third time we've seen it, but much of it still felt new and that's good because this film, in particular, hasn't lost any of its charm, wit and mystery. It's jam-packed with fantastic special effects, preposterous hijinks and has the almost common distinction of having Mark Strong as the villain (I'll bet he was glad to have had the Kingsman films to reinvent him as an actual hero). Set in 1891, the viewer presumably needs to have a rudimentary understanding of the Conan Doyle character to realise this adventure is set about midway through his crime solving career - I'm presuming this because Irene Adler is in it (Rachel McAdams - looking very young), but Moriarty is still lurking in the shadows. It's a great film about deceiving death, planning a new world order and trying to confound the world's greatest detective. It makes me wonder why there was never more than two films.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows was made two years later - or at least released two years later. It is a direct sequel almost taking place directly after the first film - almost like they knew it was going to happen (and why not, the first film is great, but I've already said that in the paragraph above...).

The sequel is a much darker affair with most of the action taking place outside of London and across Europe as Holmes, Watson and Noomi Rapace attempt to prevent Moriarty from starting WW1 almost 25 years before it actually started. This is a story that is pretty shocking almost from the beginning; yes it has the trademark comedy but this time it's laced with tragedy and violence. Jared Harris's Moriarty is very much a psychopath and considerably more menacing than Mark Strong's Blackwood from the first film. For much of the movie it really does look as though the villain has been one step ahead of Holmes all of the time, but as with the first, you get to see some of the clues dropped throughout as Holmes saw them and what he had done to make sure that he had even the most slimmest of winning margins. As with the first film, every little clue had a part to play in this from adrenaline to camouflage, nothing was wasted. We also think we'd only seen this once before because much of it was truly new to us. It's maybe not as much fun as the first movie but it's still quite brilliant and while there's been rumours of a third part for years, one wonders if that is ever going to happen.

A Grimm Update

I read this review of Grimm on IMDB that complained that from season two on the show lost some of its oomph because it started to follow a bit of a 'soap opera' approach. I believe what the person reviewing it meant was he didn't like it so much when it started to develop the stories rather than just being like Superman in the 1960s, where every month he dealt with a problem and the following month's comic everything went back to being as it was - no plots, let alone plot development. With season two, we suddenly understand why it was recommended. Yes, it still suffers from some dodgy special effects, but the opening half dozen episodes might still have had your Wesen (pronounced Vessen) of the week, but it's also got an actual continuing story; there is a sense that the people in the show are actually now living linear lives rather than just resetting back to no one knowing anything and treating every weird event like it's new and not out of the ordinary. One thing I have noticed is that for a network TV show it has got quite edgy with blood and gore and hints of things we would file under 18 rated. It's not violent or overtly sexual, but it no longer feels like a PG rated 8pm monster show and it probably makes it more enjoyable. You know, cops have to deal with real shit and as Nick and his partner Hank seem to be the only two detectives Portland has then they have to deal with some dodgy stuff. I think we're beginning to enjoy it, even if it's never going to be classed as a classic.

Mad Sunny

I understand what happened at the end of last week's Sunny. The scene where the robot goes crashing through a broken floor was actually an overload in her system and she is trying to decide whether to give herself a factory reboot. It is, by proxy, a Sunny origin episode and it was largely horrendous. It was 33 minutes of Sunny on a facsimile of a game show to decide if she wipes or doesn't wipe. It focuses on three questions and these are answered in specific eras - one which is where she comes from and how she arrived where she is, made up of largely new footage. The second is whether she is a killer or allows things to die and this is snap shots of the previous episodes suggesting she would. The final question is answered by the realisation this was all in her 'mind' and she knows exactly what she's going to do, to protect Suzie for the grand finale. Apart from Noriko, Masa and a wanker game show host, this had no Suzie (apart from scenes you've already seen) and just a fleeting glimpse of Mixxy (who started this show as a funny, quite sexy New Zealand-ish Japanese woman who used the word 'Twat' and eventually become an annoying addition to a cast that seems superfluous to the story). It's a shame this was such an awful, tawdry, annoying and loud way of doing an origin episode. I suppose it gives a bit of colour to proceedings, but I found it a low point in a very bottom dragging series.

The Other Side of Order

Positive reviews and a notable better than B list cast is usually a good sign, but I found myself struggling with Kaos, the new fantasy centred retelling of the tales of Greek mythology starring Jeff Goldblum and Janet McTeer as Zeus and Hera, 

What we have is a power play. Someone is making a play and planning on killing Zeus and because he's an all powerful omnipotent god he knows this, he just doesn't believe it. The thing is Prometheus holds the key to ending Zeus's reign, along with three humans - one of which dies in the opening part but is married to Orpheus (of Underworld notoriety) - and it's all being tied together, it seems, by Dionysus, a hybrid god/human who craves Zeus's attention but is ignored and told to find a purpose. The problem I had with it is I couldn't take it seriously and it struggled to hold my interest. I'd be quite happy to call it a day after one episode but it seems the wife might give it another go. There's a clever idea here, but there's something a bit too crazy control freak about the entire thing and I'm not sure the Succession-style approach is doing it for me nor 'the Gods live beside us and we're all fine about it' angle. 

However, while the first episode wasn't what I expected, by the second part they got into the story properly and while I still have an issue with the overall feel, the story of Orpheus, his wife Riddy and the other 'dead' person she meets in Hades feels as though it will be the most interesting aspect of this series. The third human involved in all of this is Ariadne, the daughter of President Minos. She is misguided, confused and makes some bad mistakes - she blames her luck on killing her brother when they were babies by rolling onto his face and suffocating him. Her mother blames her as well, but her father dotes on his daughter, until he loses her trust completely. We'll finish this, hopefully, next week, but as you'll find out in the 'Next time...' section, we might not... 

Bored of the Rings

The show with the longest title going is back and there's an unspoken division in the house. The wife said, 'at least it looks like something might happen this series,' while I thought, 'I don't know if I can sit through this confusing pile of pretty blandwank any longer'. I am, of course, talking about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and the start of season two. I just didn't care. I'd forgotten more than I remembered, even the recap didn't help - it still left me confused. It was just nicely filmed paint drying. So it's about the Lord of the Rings before all the things we saw in Peter Jackson's umpteen films? I hope it does enough to keep people amused, because I just don't care, I'm still puzzling over why the guy who declared himself as Sauron is being asked by everyone he meets if he knows where Sauron is... Another problem I have is while this is a prequel, how much suspense and jeopardy can Sauron generate knowing he's going to be all of the Lord of the Rings in a 1000 years or so. Therefore when the wife says 'I've seen enough.' I will say 'TFFT' under my breath and consign it to the fantasy series I either gave up on or didn't bother with at all.

Next Time... 

No promises, but there might not be one next week. We are having visitors from Northampton and Chatham all week and I'm sure there will be more exciting things to do than watch the TV. The day company goes home I have a pub quiz, so I doubt the week is going to have much television at all. The finale of Sunny can wait 7 days and you'll just have to see if one of these appears sooner. The rest will do me some good, I'm sure of it.

Modern Culture: When to Stop

The spoilers are here...

The Very Last Evil

It's over. It's strange because until my mate Jay put a picture of this TV series up on his Facebook page about 18 months ago I was barely aware of its existence and yet since that discovery it has become one of our favourite TV series and I think we both feel like it ended far too soon.

That said, the finale of Evil was nothing like what I expected it to be, but, to be fair, I have no idea what I expected. However, I wasn't disappointed. I just felt it wasn't the finale that people may have anticipated. It did leave everything open for the show to be picked up by a streaming service like Netflix or HBO, but if that was to happen then the Evil as we know it may well be in the form of a different beast. I don't want to spoil anything but as conclusions go this didn't have much of one. The main antagonist - Leland Townsend - suffers his final humiliation and sister Andrea proved to be far better than all of the agents in the Vatican's secret organisation, but there were loads of loose ends that remained loose ends; lots of things that were never resolved or remained unanswered and there were things that were just forgotten about...

The finale was not the apocalypse; in fact that may well have been a red herring to ensure the Vatican was wrong footed into making a fatal mistake. The recurring theme of technology and VR was returned to in a big way, but oddly enough that proved to be something of a joke - in a series that remained dedicated to having a laugh every so often - and the last episode spent a lot of time pottering about, infuriating any dedicated viewer to the point of wondering how it was going to be wrapped up. In the end there was a few knowing nods and winks; a change of scenery for two of our heroes and the knowledge that the fight between good and evil will continue with or without David Acosta, Kristen Bouchard and Ben Shakir; but they might be around if anyone wants to carry on telling their story in the future...

I will say that I would highly recommend this series to anyone looking for something interesting and at times quite creepy. Evil has been a favourite in this house since we discovered it and while we had nearly 40 episodes to binge on before this final season, we probably could have done with 40 more, especially as there ends up being a lot that needs unpacking that remained in the suitcase. Michael Emerson was a fantastic villain; very much the Wile E Coyote of supernatural TV shows; a man driven by his beliefs but constantly ending up with egg or a sidewalk on his face. I've always regarded Emerson as a Marmite actor; some people love him and others loathe him; I used to be on the loathe side; from his horrendous Ben character in Lost to him becoming the go to guy to play untrustworthy shits and nasty bastards; but in this he was fantastic. Mike Colter as Father David was possibly one of the most unlikely actors to play a priest and he wasn't always convincing, but perhaps that's the whole point and then the gorgeous Katja Herbers as Kristen; if a woman in her 40s with four annoying children could ever be sexy then she pulls it off brilliantly; she was the star of the show in the end - a flawed and anything but perfect heroine; a kind of Roadrunner with some annoying habits and the perfect foil for Leland Townsend. I'm going to miss this show, but perhaps only because of the gaps in the story...

Fletch Lives

On the recommendation of my mate Chris, we decided to give the reboot of the 1980s Chevy Chase films a try, this time starring Jon Hamm as the eponymous detective/journalist Irwin Maurice Fletcher or Fletch as some of us will remember him.

Confess, Fletch is a mildly amusing movie about what appears to be an art heist that has happened because of a kidnapping of a rich Italian. Fletch is employed to try and track down nine expensive paintings owned by the victim of the kidnapping, because it appears that the daughter and new wife are more interested in these than they are in retrieving their loved one. This takes Fletch to Boston where he ends up being a murder suspect very quickly when a woman turns up dead in the house he's renting. It's all very gentle and light, even if there's this underlying feeling that someone is being given the run around. The police detectives seem to think Fletch is responsible, while he is doing everything in his power to try and uncover the person who stole the paintings and who murdered the woman in his expensive Air BnB. Like Chevy Chase's version, Hamm's Fletch feels a little silly at times, but in general it's less slapstick and more detective. It's an enjoyable little romp with lots of twists and turns and the general feeling that everything you're watching is not as it should be. It is not a classic, which is a shame because I kind of get the feeling that Hamm would have been good in a series of Fletch films, but I suspect this will be the only one.

The Sunny Always Shines

The eight episode of Sunny did something the previous five were incapable of doing; it reignited the spark of why we started watching it in the first place. It was the best episode in terms of actual story since the second one and oddly enough it hardly had any Sunny or Suzie in it; it was, in fact, a flashback episode that pretty much explained why Sunny is Sunny and all we really need to know now is why any of this happened.

Masa, Suzie's 'missing' husband is or rather has been the key to this series from the off, the problem the viewer has had is we've had to go through a lot of shite to get to the crux of the matter and this episode went a long way to explaining why we're here. It starts with Masa as a young boy, living in the middle of a seeming loveless marriage between his mother Noriko and his father, a cold, disinterested man. We quickly find out why Masa's relationship with the man he called 'father' was the way it was and eventually we revisit the period that Noriko told Suzie about way back in the third part - when her son locked himself away for over two years. Eventually someone offers Masa the opportunity to be alone somewhere else - somewhere that might be more help than being in a room at his mother's and through a home bot designed to clean up rubbish, Masa learns to program and understand how robots work.

It is the best episode so far not only because it moved the story along but because we discover that he is able to program robots to think like humans, to question things and to understand and empathise with their human masters. This is why Sunny is the way she is and presumably Sunny holds the key that Himé (played by You) is obviously after, because she wants to turn the Yakuza into a modern organisation because she thinks it is stuck in the past. There is also the suggestion - possibly more than a suggestion - that Zen is alive and well, which might mean that Masa is not dead. The ending was... very odd and for once I'm keen to see the penultimate episode to find out what I watched at the end.

Rollover

Against my better judgement I decided to watch Jackpot! Despite saying I wouldn't (just last week, I think), I changed my mind and it seems that while many people in the world have a problem with John Cena comedy films, I'm not one of them.

Awkwafina's Katie is the winner of the lottery - $3.2billion - in futuristic LA, where things are so shit that the winner becomes fair game for about eight hours after winning. This means that if you kill the lottery winner you get to keep the winner's money and the organisers of the lottery make it easy for potential killers to find the winner. This is all a bit The Purge and it's probably hard to see where the fun is when it's simply a relentless car chase of violence and mayhem. However, there are some genuine funny moments, a couple of quite tender ones and a bucket load of really stupid and dislikeable characters - this is a movie about everything that's bad about people and the lure of money in the USA; so you can imagine that I went into it with little hope.

John Cena is the too-good-to-be-true 'helper' who turns up just as Katie is about to be killed and offers his services for just 10% of her winnings; he's a good guy, but it takes 2/3rds of the film for Awkwafina to truly understand this; the problem is she doesn't trust anyone, so in many ways she's the best person to win the lottery because she won't necessarily be easy to hunt down and kill off. Cena's Noel does his best to save her, but eventually his old friend and rival played by Simu Liu steps in to help out, except is Louis Lewis really a good guy? With the exception of a three minute lull in proceedings, this is a full-on, in-yer-face film that has balletic fight scenes, mindless violence and some mildly amusing stuff; the funniest things being the occasional quip by Cena and the sharp and witty observational humour of Awkwafina. It won't be for everybody and probably deserves its 5.8 rating on IMDB, but for a mindless Saturday night piece of junk food, it served its purpose well.

Gangster's Parakeet 

We've had the Michael Mann film Public Enemies on the FDoD for a number of months and I've always been a wee bit reluctant to watch it. I don't know why, I just had this feeling I wouldn't enjoy it. Maybe it was because Michael Mann's Heat wasn't the 1990s classic everyone told me it was.

Johnny Depp played John Dillinger and Christian Bale was Melvin Purvis - the FBI agent charged with bringing Dillinger as well as Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd to justice - at least that's what the premise of the film is. Floyd played by Channing Tatum lasts about two minutes; his only scene is running through an orchard before he's shot by Purvis with what looks like an elephant gun. Nelson, played by Stephen Graham, eventually hooks up with Dillinger, but the bank robber nor any of his men don't like the man, because he's essentially a psychopath. This is because Dillinger is portrayed almost like some kind of Robin Hood character who only robs banks not people.

It is an extraordinarily dull and boring film with a lot of cameos from renowned actors and a pretty good turn by Marion Cotillard as JD's love interest. The wife picked up on it pretty quickly when she asked me if I thought the pacing of the film was right. I didn't think it was movie's pacing, just the entire feel about it, with its muted colours, juddering narrative and endless parade of new characters. It isn't a film that you'll like really and after over two hours I was glad to see the back of it. I'm not convinced that Mann is a good director (Collateral wasn't bad) and Depp has starred in some really dodgy movies over his career. This probably needed to be seen, I just wish I hadn't bothered.
There were no parrot-like birds in this film...

Termination Academy

The final season of The Umbrella Academy finally dropped a couple of weeks ago and I was grateful for the extended recap at the start, even if I couldn't remember that much about the ending of season three. The wife gave up on this halfway through S03E01, which meant I watched the rest of the season on my own and therefore I'm watching this final season also on my own. With just six episodes, it is shorter, more tightly wound and benefits from it.

The family have been locked in this new timeline for six years and they all eke out existences that they're not that happy with, even Five who now works for the CIA is unfulfilled with his lot. Meanwhile a couple of strange people are busy collecting artefacts from other timelines and moving towards something they call The Cleanse; which appears to be a way of returning this timeline to the original one; the one the Umbrella Academy originated from. The family, reunited for a birthday party, end up being duped into drinking Marigold - the substance responsible for their powers in the first place and this not only returns them but also makes them much more. After this happens they go in search of a girl called Jennifer; who through some retconning seems to be connected to the family and the original Ben's death. The thing is she is protected in a small town by agents working for their cruel and alien father Regie Hargreeves. There are some incongruous plot and script things, these don't amount to much on their own but they mount up as the series progresses - things like the knowledge of people not from the original timeline about people from it.

Without giving too much away, the series has an ending, whether you like it or not is immaterial because it's the ending you get. Much is tied up and there is one loose end in the grand scheme of things you can let that one go, even if it makes no sense. The journey to the end is typically odd and as usual Five is the main antagonist and protagonist - everything usually revolves around him, even if this time around it isn't his fault, but he is the one who arrives at the solution and ultimately all the solutions to all the problems. However, if you can remember that first season with Five working for what was essentially a Time Variant Authority making sure that things history says happened actually happened and working completely against and at odds with his six adopted siblings, what you get in this final season is as far removed from that as you can imagine. This ends up being solely about multiverses and timelines - a very popular thing in modern entertainment, even if it's been a trope in the genre known as comic books since the late 1950s - and almost completely disregarding the original series; but that would be my ultimate complaint about this series - a lack of consistent narrative.

The Umbrella Academy has an ending that belongs in the tragedy category, except it has an extremely happy ending - a fitting description for an uneven tale that wobbled more than it was static. Ultimately it has been an entertaining ride, even if some characters - Klaus for starters - seemed like they had no real place in the overarching story. At the end of the day, Lila, who started out as a villain is a key player and it's not a surprise that her involvement is tied into Five's. I think if you watched all four seasons back to back you might find it isn't a very linear story at all.  

Next Time...

After the quietest week for ages - football, family and friends for dinner - I expect the last week of summer (proper) will be so horrid - weather wise - that we'll make up for it by watching more telly... Heading our way this week, as well the last two episodes of Grimm season one, we have Mr Inbetween to try. This is an Aussie TV show about a man juggling being a hitman with looking after his pre-teen daughter; it has an 8.7 rating on IMDB. The penultimate episode of Sunny and probably something returning or new to try (or we might just start season two of Grimm).

I decided to try and expand the TV viewing by having a couple of classics or unseen shows (Mr Inbetween excepted) and I have the two (unseen) seasons of Marvel's Netflix series The Punisher to now watch. It took me years to bother with it and only because it is the only Marvel thing we haven't seen that we feel we should. I have also obtained The West Wing figuring it is nearly 20 years since we've watched it and there's a good chance much of it will feel like watching it for the first time. All or some of these new additions won't be watched next week, but are there in case.

We started to watch Longlegs last night, but company arrived (unexpectedly) so that's going to kick off next week's viewing. There is also a number of films of the FDoD (28) and almost as many on the TV Hard Drive, a few of which - on both drives - are quite recent. 

Whatever...

Time and the Weather

Funny man Sid James once said, "...There always has been and there's nothing you can do about it." Whether he was talking about the weather or something else I will undoubtedly never know, but if you were to suggest this statement is about the weather then you wouldn't be too far wrong. It has, indeed, always been here and there is, indubitably, nothing we can do about it...

The same could apply to time "...There always has been and there's nothing you can do about it." another thing we endure but have no control over and the two are inexplicably linked - certain times of the year you are largely guaranteed certain types of weather and even with climate change you're not going to get hot sunny days in December nor are you going to get blizzards and hard frosts in July. Time marches on and the four seasons, give or take some weird anomalies, marches alongside. Just, being there. 

A good friend of mine reminded me last week that 2023 wasn't a brilliant year for the weather. To be a little more specific, July and August were crap in Scotland, we had some respite in September, but essentially autumn arrived two months early and nearly twelve months later we're pretty much waiting for summer to return. The thing is, we know that even if we get a glorious September, it's going to be another six months before we actually get a chance of having a summer. 

One thing I've discovered since living here, even if we're actually lower on the map than Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and most of Northumberland, is that summer starts early and is over by the first Wednesday in August. There have been some exceptions, but for the first five full years we lived here May was always fantastic and much better up here than down south. The price we paid for this was that Augusts weren't the sultry dog days of summer they tend to be in the south, usually the wet and the windy outnumbered the warm and the sunny.

So that means while we usually get a similar amount of summer to everywhere else in the south, ours starts a wee bit earlier and ends a whole lot sooner. Except for the last two years, summer has been as rare as rocking horse shit...

Now, with age comes wisdom, or at least you'd hope so, but seeing some of the older people involved in the recent riots or being keyboard warriors on-line you would have to challenge that assumption. The number of older people who are ignorant, intolerant and hate-filled seems greater than it was when I was growing up. Maybe old people didn't express themselves as vocally when I was younger, or maybe I was able to tune them out? The thing is one thing is guaranteed with getting older; time speeds up. Not actually; there is no proof that clocks go faster or that there's only 350 days in the year rather than 364. Time speeds up because we become more familiar with it and maybe for some that familiarity breeds contempt?

If you make the same journey every week, by the time you've done it one hundred times it seems as though it takes no time at all, whereas those first few journeys felt long, tedious and like they were never going to end. I first noticed this when I was driving to London every day; I would get to the Luton Airport turn and think, 'I've got here quicker than usual' except I was still going at 70mph and it was still taking me x number of minutes, I was just used to the journey and therefore the time it took was more familiar to me. If it took an hour when I started, it still took an hour when I stopped. I just felt like it took less time - that hour was familiar to me, therefore it didn't seem as long.

If you are four years of age, a year is a quarter of your life. If you are 60 years old, a year is a 60th of your life. Can you see how familiarity with time makes it seem to go much quicker. Most 10 year olds view the school holidays as a chasm of time. Do you remember cramming four or five things into a day? Now you're lucky if you can do one thing. Yes, the older you get the more responsibility you have, but I guarantee you if you took a day off it would be late afternoon before you know it and you'd be thinking about dinner or tonight's TV only for that to soon become something you did (or didn't do) as you were lying in bed reflecting on your day.

Maybe this is why some people get so bitter and twisted, because they see life whizzing past and there's nothing they can do about it? 

And then there's the fact that when you pass 60 you begin to, morbidly, notice the ages of people who are dying, either around you or 'famous' people. The number who die in their 60s which leaves you with this scary possibility that you might actually be entering one of your last laps around the year. People in their 70s makes you count the years between how old you are now and how many years you have if they made it to that specific age. Then there's the thought of making it to your 80s and 90s; you could technically still have a quarter of your life left, in some cases even a third, but it comes with added bonuses, such as ill health, inability to do the things you can do now, which in turn makes you realise that the things you can do now are considerably limited compared to the things you could do then...

So, tie this subconscious knowledge of your mortality and link it to the weather. Why was 1976 such a great summer? Was it the blistering heat? Was it because we were considerably younger and therefore it felt like it went on for so much longer? Or could there be another factor at play? I often wonder what people who live in Arabian countries perceive as the passage of time, because they live in a place where the weather is pretty much the same every day of the year, whereas we live in a temperate climate, which means our weather changes more often than someone with OCD changes their underwear or washes their hands. 1976 felt like a long hot summer because it was but also because every day felt like an extension of the day before. It was literally blue skies and hot temperatures every day of the week from May to the end of September, with the exception of three days of torrential rain over August Bank Holiday - just to prove the weather loves to be ironic.

Here's another thing about long hot days - you grow tired of doing anything but avoiding the heat, so even if you're at work you often find yourself staring into space, looking for an excuse to not do anything because doing something means sweaty and uncomfortable. When we get great weather, the kind we moan about not having, we then tend to look at it from inside a house (or a car) and think perhaps we should go and enjoy it but it's easier to sit and do nothing. This might not apply to everybody, but it is an actual things; so if you live in countries that have six months of hot sunny weather followed by six months of warm sunny weather perhaps the lack of change makes time drag?

Then there's the thing that pisses me off. I know that at 62 with an underlying health condition that every year has to be savoured and appreciated; that means doing things in the summer that I enjoy because I know I don't do much in the winter. Even if it's little things like reading a book in the sun, sitting in a beer garden having a pint, walking in the sea or going out with a pair of shorts on, these are things I look forward to do doing and every year we have a shit summer I've got one less year to do these things. I haven't sat outside in a pub garden since 2022 and since 2020 even if the weather has been fine going to the pub hasn't been easy at times. There was a time when I'd put shorts on in May and they'd stay on until the end of September. This year I've worn shorts for no more than three days at a time because the rain or the temperature has forced me back into trousers or jeans. 

Also, in case I forgot to mention it, as we get older time goes quicker - yes? Then that means summers are quicker, so are springs, but why do autumns and winters feel like they drag? Is it because of the lack of daylight? Or maybe it's because in the spring and summer when the weather is shite, we're constantly looking forward to when the weather will improve, but during the autumn and winter we know the weather is going to be shite so we don't have the same expectation? I often wonder if winter people have the same perception of time that summer people have? I think they must because the wife is an autumn kind of person and she's always complaining about time flying by. 

Science tries to explain why time appears to get faster the older we are. Scientists suggest everything from dopamine levels to something not dissimilar to what I've been yakking on about - after the age of about 20, humans become more adept at measuring time, which in turn means that as we become better at doing it time appears to speed up. This doesn't explain why as kids we manage to cram a lifetime's worth of fun into a summer holiday or maybe all of that just happened in our heads? We're told that memories are not strictly accurate, so maybe as time passes our memories simply make it feel like we did more when we were kids?

One thing is for sure, most people fear dying when they're young, which is understandable. However, as people get older, move closer to a time when they will cease to exist, very few are as frightened of it. Yes, there is trepidation and some fear, but there's also other things which only older people truly understand. I sometimes feel dreadful - not because of my underlying health issues, or too much booze, or some other reason; sometimes I just wake up, wander to the loo or down to the kitchen and my body aches and I realise that when I was a kid I got what my mum called 'growing pains' and now that I'm older I'm getting what I call 'aging pains'. I mentioned this to a friend of mine a couple of years ago, a man in his 80s, and he said "It doesn't get any better. Some days your body just screams at you for existing." As someone whose legs ache the day after a long walk and my neck and shoulders appear to be rebelling against the rest of my body, the thought of extended pain as I get older is as scary AF. That's before arthritis ravages older bodies. I mean, why do we not tell younger people about how shit it is to get old? 

Maybe this is why some people move to warmer countries. Perhaps it's not so much to do with the weather, but more to do with monotony and it's ability to make you perceive time slowing down? Obviously warmer weather makes the bones and muscles ache less - at least that seems to be the excuse given. There is also this scientific search to understand why we age and to see if we can slow it down or even stop it. Can you imagine a 160 year old person? If they weren't just a wheelchair full of pain and moaning, they'd also get up on the morning of January 1st and by the time they were ready to go to bed it would be the end of September and it would have rained for most of the time...

Pop Culture - Impending Conclusions

Spoiler warning - there might be some.

Twaddle

The first of the summer 'blockbusters' made its way to my television and... well sometimes something can have a reasonable rating on IMDB and it makes no difference to how I've viewed it. Twisters has a 7.1 rating on the film website and has about a 1.7 rating in Phil's eyes...

It was very ordinary and quite dull. I remember the Guardian having an article about it a few weeks ago wondering what happened to the Big Kiss at the end, because the lead characters, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell (apparently Hollywood's latest hotshot and soon to be A lister), were obviously going to make the beast with the two backs at some point so why wasn't there a big kiss to end the film so we all knew what was going to happen? I couldn't care less. It was a fucking noisy load of codswallop, with far too much country and western music, a far too earnest a story and a slightly silly pretext of being able to shut a tornado down if you suck all the moisture out of it - which might be a thing, but feels like a plot device to make this woeful excuse at an action movie and sort of sequel to the original from the mid 1990s, seem relevant. It wasn't even all right; it was two hours of idiots chasing storms; phony villains, rabble-rousing heroes and this is a film we won't, in a few years time, think about watching again. I've seen more exciting foot fungus. 

The Dichotomy

There's something reassuring and extremely bloody annoying about Only Connect. It's comfort quizzing, yet it signals the end of the summer and ushers in colder, darker nights. It's a favourite in this house and we haven't missed a series in well over ten years now.  We punch the air when we get questions right and puzzle over questions that don't appear to have been written by any sane quiz writer. However, there is one thing that we do not like about it. We really don't like cunts who say Hor-Ned Viper. There should be a change in the rules; anyone saying Hor-Ned viper should be shot, in the head, with a bolt gun, with no anaesthetic.

No Joke

It's been nearly five years since we watched Joker and we'd forgotten just how relentlessly grim the movie is. How it paints a picture of Gotham City as a hopeless shit hole that is not in any way looked after by Wayne Industries. In fact, in many ways, Todd Phillips' film makes the Joker out to be some kind of anti-hero, while Wayne is some kind of corporate villain.

I suppose the biggest problem with this is just how grim it is; you almost struggle to have any empathy for anyone. Arthur Fleck (Joachim Phoenix) is a victim of a piss poor mental health programme and the supporting cast all have their own foibles and dislikeable traits. Talk Show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro - in a weird juxtaposition of his film The King of Comedy) is a privileged arsehole; Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) is just a rich, unfeeling thug and even Alfred is portrayed as a heartless pig. Arthur's mother is a delusional psychotic, which Arthur appears to have inherited despite having been adopted and it's just pain and grief and destitution hammered home every second. It's a tough movie to like despite it being a quite brilliant thing. As an origin story for The Joker - Batman's bête noir - it's pretty much perfect, it contrasts well to Matt Reeves' The Batman and it touches on elements of a number of great comics, yet remains absolutely unique. A supervillain movie that has no heroes and where the villain is his own worst enemy. I've seen trailers for the sequel and it fills me with dread.

A Grimm Update

I watched a Tube of You video the other day, it was in a series of 'Honest Trailers' and was about the exalted Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was describing Buffy like someone who was explaining it to someone who had no idea of it in a way that put aside all the emotive parts which made it a favourite of so many people in the 40 to 65 age range. I really must see if there's an Honest Trailer for Grimm because I expect it will be something to behold. We're over halfway through season one, which I have been told can be a bit of a struggle, and we're starting to get subplots introduced into the 'fairy tale creature of the week' formula. I mean, there were a few subplots at the beginning, but they seem to have been completely forgotten about and I don't know if these new subplots are in any way linked, but essentially it's bad acting, poor scripts, lazy special effects and why is every one of these multitude of fairy tale creatures (who all live in Portland, Oregon) so frightened of Det Nick Burkhardt? He might be a cop, but he displays nothing that would make the average creature hiding as a human be frightened of; in fact he's already almost been beaten to a pulp. It is, however, quite a dark and, dare I say it, grim TV show with some gruesome crime scenes and risqué scenarios. Also on the minus side, there's something a bit 'not really leading man' material about David Giuntoli. Having said that, his partner in the police force - Russell Hornsby as Hank Griffin is one truly lousy actor; who looks like a police detective about as much as I look like a naked Karen Gillan. It could be a long autumn and winter with about 110 episodes to go...

Ms Brown's Boys

We completed the Tarantino jigsaw by watching the 1997 Jackie Brown. We don't intend to watch Kill Bill: Vol 2 so that's everything the auteur has made finally watched (as far as we're concerned). It seems weird it took us 27 years to finally get around to it, but there you have it.

It was good to see a film based on an Elmore Leonard story that didn't totally demean women, although apart from the eponymous Ms Brown, most of the other women in this film were depicted in a relatively poor way. Pam Grier was okay in the lead role and she was supported by a fine cast including Samuel L Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton and the star turn Robert Forster - another example of Tarantino reigniting the career of an actor who seemed past his sell by date.

It tells the story of a heist within a heist within a heist as Brown is arrested - she's an airline hostess - returning from a flight to Mexico because someone has snitched on her to get his own back on the guy she works for - Jackson. It's from this point that things get complicated, with a Bail Bondsman called Cherry - Forster - getting involved because of his attraction to Brown and it soon becomes a triple cross affair as Brown and Cherry work out a way to get her off of her arrest, rip off Jackson and not make the ATF cop - Keaton - think he's been double crossed. It's a good film, but at two and a half hours it really is about an hour too long and most of that hour is full of jive talk and really quite unnecessary filler that doesn't add to the texture of the film at all.

Sunny With A Chance of Something Happening

With three more episodes to go I suppose we have no other options than to see this out. That's just 90 minutes to find out what the fuck is going on and how it's all linked. This week Suzie shouts at Mixxy, who goes all out of character and shouts back, accusing Suzie of many things and not allowing her grief to be used as an excuse. Suzie almost confesses why she originally came to Japan, while Noriko's prison sojourn takes a slightly darker turn with the suggestion she's there to find things out. Himé (played by You) is on the verge of losing any control she might have had over her branch of the Yakuza as he father dies and apparently transfers power to her rival in scenes that might make some sense in the next few weeks. Himé (played by You) does suggest that what's she's doing is bringing the Yakuza into the present rather than being stuck in the past. Sunny wakes up and is acting like a spoiled teenage brat. It makes no sense; it's not very good any more; I feel obligated to finish it.

Bad Monkey in Bad TV Show

The last time I was harping on about people needing to get rid of their shit streaming service and invest in Apple TV+ the superb cross-genre TV show Sugar was concluding and it seemed that the streaming service could do little wrong. Then Sunny came along and gradually the shine went off of Apple - what with Presumed Innocent, Lady in the Lake and a couple of others failing to hit the mark, it really looked as though the 'station' has quickly bottomed out. So there were high hopes for the new Vince Vaughn detective series Bad Monkey, about a failed cop getting involved in the mystery of a severed arm. To be honest, the opening ten minutes did seem like it might be something interesting and mildly amusing, but as the opening 56 minute episode went on the more I felt myself wishing it would end. The adjacent subplot based in the Bahamas about a development company building a holiday complex on some guys beach house felt ... out of place and decidedly amateurish - like Death in Paradise but with less soul.

Bad Monkey is pretty poor TV. It doesn't feel like there's a good enough plot here for a man who wants his badge back to be obsessed with. None of the characters are particularly interesting or likeable and it felt like it wanted to be seen as a stylish TV show, but it even failed at that. You know I use the expression 'style over substance' a lot? Well, this has no substance and its style is outdated and of little interest. We had two episodes to watch, we gave it one and I should have turned that off with 20 minutes left. Avoid like the plague.

Free AI

Three years ago, when this film was originally released, the threat and presence of AI in the world was still very much a thing of the future to most people. Chatgtp (or whatever it's called) and other AI things were still a way from being rolled out and the idea of a free-thinking AI was very much in the realms of the Terminator movies. So Free Guy, brought to us by two-thirds of the latest Deadpool film - Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds - had an element of being a bit far fetched. 

The story of a NPC - Non-Participating Character; a background object put into a game to be either used as kill fodder or to pad out the apparent more realistic scenes - a guy called 'Guy' who suddenly starts developing his own thoughts and ideas and goes off program is, in 2024, a far better idea. A kind of meta-Terminator redux, if you will. Of course there's a reason for this and the reason is down to clever programmers and an idea that you can create an algorithm that will eventually think for itself and while this is what is now happening that has heads of countries, industries and people worried about the future, this film makes it a cross between a video game - maybe a film about a video game, such as Wreck-It Ralf - and James Bond/Jason Bourne. The problem this film had three years ago was it was difficult for someone like me to fully explain it because I'm not a gamer and I knew little about AI. Now, I'm still not a gamer and still know very little about AI, but I did understand the subtext of this movie and why it was happening.

Reynolds is Guy who through meeting the girl his character was always longing to meet suddenly starts to develop understanding and an inquisitiveness that leads him down the path of enlightenment (to a degree). His obsession with meeting this girl again means he eventually becomes part of the game he's meant to be in the background of. He becomes a hero in a game where being the villain is the main purpose. Jodie Comer plays his dream girl, while Joe Keery is her ex-developer partner. These two created an AI game that was stolen by the increasingly annoying Taika Waititi and turned into Free City, a kind of hybrid of every shoot'em up that's available now and it's up to Guy and his dream girl - Millie - to try and find the back door to expose Waititi's arsehole character's theft of other developers' ideas. It is a special effects feast, has some genuinely funny moments and is actually a far better film the second time around than I remembered it being in 2021.

The Penultimate Evil

If I want to be honest, there's going to be a lot to cover next week if the final episode of Evil is going to leave no subplot unresolved. Ben's Djinn, Kristen's numerous problems, from one of her daughters being a demon to Timothy possibly still being the anti Christ. David's crisis of faith, his remote viewing, his new job on Vatican security detail and, of course, there's the end of the show and the impending apocalypse/Armageddon - all of this needs resolving, without contemplating the will they, won't they issue between David and Kristen. Whatever will happen to Sister Andrea and, of course Leland Townsend - the best worst villain in TV history! I know, that's a brave suggestion, but honestly, in four series he has been beaten, knifed, kicked, hit by a car. mentally tortured and all manner of unfortunate humiliations have been dumped on him; for the main antagonist of a show he's had very little actual success; he's a comicbook villain who is still here by virtue of the fact he has friends in very low places...

Speaking of demons, hell and Satan, this penultimate part reopened a question I have asked a couple of times in the last year or so since I've become hooked on this show - just who is the evil one and are we heading towards a conclusion that will throw the entire idea of good versus evil into the air? Is the church really good and are these houses of demons really that bad? It would be a crazy way to end it if we find out that the three good guys have been working for the real bad guys all along. The reason I say this is because David has new wranglers and they seem as sinister as anything the devil has thrown up. The Vatican has always seemed to be a bit creepy since the word go in this show and there is a two pronged attack in this episode, with the Holy City asking the team to do one more assignment to determine whether a Stephen Hawking-type physicist is 'good' enough to join a consultation council the Vatican is developing to help prevent global climate change. Then there's what happened to David's previous wranglers and the sudden placement in Rome. This is weird and a bit fucked up and as usual while it plays a big part of this last but one episode, it also feels like a distraction from everything else, which includes the de-consecration of the church and the ending of it being a place of worship. The Catholic Church does not come out of this particularly well.

Like I said, it feels like there's going to be a lot to sort out and all I know about it is it will be the final episode; there won't be any reprieves or moving the show over to Netflix; the story of Kristen, David and Ben will conclude next week and those of us who have watched this show will feel like something is missing from our lives...

Dead Clean

We ended the week with a dark but gentle comedy about people who clean crime scenes. Starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, Sunshine Cleaning is a slight story about people struggling with their place in a society that judges you if you haven't got the status others require you to have.

Adams plays Rose, a single mother working menial cleaning jobs and spending two evenings a week being fucked by her ex-high school boyfriend, who is also the father of her son. The reason they're not together is because he chose to marry someone else, of better standing in the community. Blunt plays Norah, Rose's younger sister and a bit of a rebel with a poor employment history and an attitude. They both look after and in turn are looked after by Alan Arkin as their father, Joe - a man with lots of brilliant ideas who is unable to make any of them work (mainly because his brilliant is other peoples' bad ideas). Rose wants the best for her son, who is clearly on the spectrum and possibly mildly autistic, and her son has been kicked out of junior school for doing strange things his teaching staff are unable to deal with.

Rose's married shag - Mac played by Steve Zahn - suggests she should go into the crime scene cleaning business because there's lots of money to be made from clearing up blood, brains and dead detritus and that is what she does, taking her feckless sister along for the ride. They prove to be good at it and Rose strikes up a friendship with the one-armed owner of the cleaning supplies business, while Norah tries to track down the daughter of the first case they deal with. It's not a long movie, it weighs in at a smidge over 90 minutes and it's really just a snap shot of their lives with little concluding and a few false starts and endings along the way. It's a gentle film even if it deals with tragedy; there is a comedic vibe to it but these are from circumstances and reactions rather than jokes and while you could argue that little happens, it is a sweet, good natured movie about struggling people in a country that I have grown to detest because it isn't the land of opportunity, it's the country of blame and lawyers and people screwing others to gain a footing. I really enjoyed it, but yet again it shows us what a fucking horrible country the USA is and why the Yellowstone caldera exploding would be a good thing...

Next Time...

Despite my best intentions, I didn't manage to start watching the final season of The Umbrella Academy, maybe I'll find some time next week? However, the highlight (I hope) of this coming week is going to be the finale of Evil. I don't want to be disappointed; I want it to have a fitting final episode and one that at least gives us closure on a number of issues (as an article in an on-line publication points out, there are at least 10 outstanding subplots and questions that need answering).

Sunny reaches episode eight of ten and one hopes that it has something satisfying happen. It'll finish in the first week of September (boo*), in the same week as Slow Horses returns (yay), so while I hate the idea of another autumn and winter when we've had so little spring and summer, at least there will be some stuff to help the weeks fly past as we all hurtle towards our certain deaths. 

In the film world... well, there's a few new movies that might get watched and obviously a shit load of back-up films on the FDoD and the TV box thing. I'm not even going to waste my time (or yours) by hypothesising what I might watch next week because it probably won't resemble what I actually get around to seeing.

One thing is certain, this coming week my football team kick off their opening game of the season on Monday night; we have family visiting (and the weather forecast is shit - surprise, surprise) and therefore next week's blog might be bright, breezy and shorter than usual. But it might not...

* Boo that it's September, not boo that Sunny is ending.

Modern Culture - Follow the Money

There are some spoilers, mainly in the first review because it acts as a warning more than anything else...

Red Queen Freezes

Oh for fuck's sake. Seriously? Did we just sit through eight episodes for it all the end on a massive fucking anti-climax? It certainly seems that way. Obviously stuff happened, but this entire season, which was all about chess pieces being moved into position, ended with more chess pieces and more positions. I was led to believe this was an extended episode, but in reality it was just ten minutes longer than usual; an extra ten minutes to seriously fuck off people who have dedicated eight bloody hours to this. Yes, we saw a way for Rhaenyra to become queen without bloodshed, which meant Alicent had to acknowledge her mistake and probably give up one of her sons and we saw Daemon take the knee for his wife and queen, but only after he was shown the future by his Scottish muse come witch. But really this was 70 minutes of prick teasing and not very good prick teasing and now we're going to have to wait at least two fucking years before these dragons dance again. Just avoid this show; it will leave you angry and frustrated. 

Fine Margins

The 2008 financial crash did an awful lot of damage and allowed people to blame other people for it - such as the Tories blaming Labour despite Gordon Brown stopping the UK from having to endure the fire sale that many other countries went through (but why listen to history when a lie can achieve so much more?)...

There was an all-star cast for the 2011 movie Margin Call about a fictional bank (probably based on Lehman Bros) discovering they were about to lose everything on the eve of one of the biggest financial disasters ever to hit the planet. Arguably, this film suggests the company discovering they were worth much less than their actual company thought it really was, because of stuff which, even when explained in layman's terms went over my head, was responsible for the beginning of this global economic catastrophe. This had a bunch of top notch actors all vying for power and money; including Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Mary McDonnell and Aasif Mandvi (Ben from Evil).

This movie starts with the firing of 80% of the company's brokers, in scenes reminiscent of George Clooney's film (Up in the Air) about company's hiring outsiders to do their dirty jobs for them, but quickly changes tack as one of the guy's whose job was safe discovers something really bad in the forecasts and figures of his company. This isn't an action-packed adventure movie, it's a pacey financial blockbuster that feels just as taut and full of jeopardy. It's about rich people trying to remain rich while not caring about the human debris they leave behind. Ultimately they all lose, but it's a really great movie that I wholeheartedly recommend. 

Not So Fine Margins

It soon dawned on us, about five minutes into The Big Short that we were actually watching the other side of the coin to the film we watched the night before - the one reviewed above this. Where Margin Call was all about the banks doing what they could to stave off disaster, this was about hedge fund entrepreneurs doing the thing that made the things in the above film happen.

This starts with Christian Bale's character realising that literally every single mortgage package offered by US banks was basically not worth the paper it was printed on. That the entire mortgage business was essentially based on a long series of guesses, presumptions and people saying that they thought A would happen so they bet against B and C. I don't for a second feel confident about trying to explain the way this works, but Bale's character, then Ryan Gosling's character picked up on it, who then sold the idea to Steve Carell's company and then a couple of wannabe investors happened on the idea, got their rich and weird friend - Brad Pitt - involved and suddenly three groups of hedge funders and a banker stood to make $billions at the expense of the entire world economy.

The film by the renowned writer/director Adam McKay plays out like a docudrama at times, with loads and loads of guest stars either playing small parts or playing themselves, as they segued into layman's explanations of the complicated stuff that was going on and probably losing loads of people watching it if it didn't have these idiots guides. Whereas Margin Call watched - in almost real time - a bank realise that it was going to go under because of mortgages; The Big Short looks at it over the space of two years, from the point where Bale starts to see the problems with the numbers in mortgages to the same events that happened in the other film. What this film does it try to paint most of the people involved as actual people who realised that despite them making millions and millions of dollars were also making loads of people lose their homes, their jobs and their life savings. They tried very hard to show what a fraudulent world banking inhabited but as Steve Carell said just before he became super-rich, "The tax payer will bail the banks out and in two years the banks will blame migrants and the poor for everything that happened and they'll start again." Which is exactly what happened, because by 2015 US Banks were selling mortgages in the same format as they did before the crash but with different names, proving once and for all that banks run the world and the little guy is fucked.

A Game of Spies

Tony Scott (late brother of Ridley) was renowned in the 80s, 90s and 00s for his action and blockbuster thrillers; like an esoteric Michael Bay he made big bombastic movies and Spy Game is no exception - a proper spy thriller with some good performances by Robert Redford as retiring case agent Nathan Muir and a youthful Brad Pitt as his protégé Tom Bishop - a skilful operative but prone to emotional decisions, something CIA spies should not be. This is a film about trying to do the right thing for an agent who had given so much for the US government and was about to be thrown under a bus to ensure a trade deal between the USA and China goes through. Redford is exceptional as the experienced fixer who has one last thing to fix - saving the life of an agent he cared about. 

Yet there was something just not quite right about this 2001 movie and it soon became clear what it was... Remember last week's blog about the film Jericho Ridge and how it was made with nothing but British actors in Kosovo and the lack of authenticity made it a difficult movie to like even before you realised it was a shite film? Well, Spy Game is essentially a British film with a small handful of American actors and literally none of it shot in the USA and it felt like it at times, especially scenes with Stephen Dillane in - he's a good actor probably best known as Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones, but give him an American accent and make him a department head of the CIA and he doesn't cut it, neither did many of his supporting actors. There's something about Brits doing American accents that I struggle with; I think 90% of the time British actors, especially men, aren't very good at portraying Americans; there's an element of mid-Atlantic about them or a lack of regional accent and for me that spoiled an otherwise entertaining film.

Misadventures

It's a rare thing to watch a movie where Ryan Reynolds plays a role straight and is an absolute douchebag in it, but Adventureland is just that film. He plays or rather is a supporting character called Connell, who is the repairman at the eponymous theme park where Jesse Eisenberg goes to work and meets a bunch of interesting misfits, wankers and Kristen Stewart, who will become his love interest. She's the girl with an 'it's complicated' situation that involves the aforementioned Reynolds. Largely, this is a coming of age movie about a young man whose dreams are dashed when his father's job circumstances change drastically. Where he was going to travel around Europe with his fellow middle class wealthy friends from high school he has to take on a job working at Adventureland because he literally can't do anything else.

What is never said but is pretty much implied is that Eisenberg's old man hasn't been 'moved' he's probably been 'fired' because it's now all about downsizing where it used to be about grand schemes. The situation isn't that dissimilar to Stewart's home life, where she lives almost autonomously from her father and stepmother, who she hates. This is a movie that plays on the USA's unspoken class system; a place where your average Jew is treated with a modicum of contempt; Catholics are all viewed as a bit weird and everyone else is just normal. There's an interesting supporting cast, including Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as Adventureland's managers and Martin Starr as a nerdy Jewish guy who comes from a very poor family and dreams of having a relationship with any girl. Reynolds plays a man who preys on younger women with tales [read: lies] of things he did as he was making his way up in the music world. He's married and seems to be able to get away with anything because of his 'ineffable' charm. It's a solid, quite enjoyable black comedy set in 1987 which evokes the era extremely well and is by far a more watchable movie than some 'teen comedies' can be.

An Actual Amazing Space

This 12th season of George Clarke's Amazing Spaces is almost over - next week will be the last for now - but I don't think I've ever seen an amazing space quite as bonkers as the one in the penultimate episode. A madman in Coleshill, Birmingham decided to build the world's shortest canal in the grounds of his hotel, float a narrowboat on it, build a fake tunnel, adjacent to it and a lock keeper's cottage. It was, as George said, like someone had transported something from the Victorian age and dumped it in the garden of the hotel. The builder even fixed some piping onto the fake lock gate so it appeared to be leaking, the way proper lock gates do. It cost him £30,000 and I sat and wondered throughout the episode what the fuck was he going to do with it and right at the end we discovered. He turned a 35 feet narrow boat into a swimming pool!

It hasn't been the most inspiring series of this show; in fact even though people are getting more and more adventurous with their plans, this 12th series has felt a little tired, like the concept needs shelving. Even the 'project' that George and his mate Will Hardie hatched seems like an [ahem] stretch too far - turning a scissor lift into a folly. It's a show we'll always come back to, but, you know, it feels as though it needs a shot in the arm but with material and house prices the way they are it's not likely to get put out to pasture any time soon, I'm betting.

Let's Talk About...

... the weather. 

I don't tend to have that many other blogs now. You might get three or four politics blogs a year and one sport blog (that is incoming in the next week), but most of my blogging is about TV and film and when I do get the urge to moan about something else; usually it's the weather. Where we live in Scotland, the far south west, it is actually lower down than Newcastle and most of Northumberland. We get a very temperate climate; winters are hardly ever really bad, summers are rarely stifling. We have a microclimate that is, by and large, very pleasant, but because we're in the north it always feels as though we get seven months of autumn and winter and only five months of spring and summer. So when summer has been as shite as this one you kind of feel cheated out of it, especially when you get old. Let me be straight about this; being in your sixties (and older) is a little like being on a rollercoaster with no brakes; things just speed up like crazy.

Just recently I looked at the calendar on the longest day of the year and the next thing I know it's the fucking second week of August and while we might have had a grand total of eight days where the temperature got above 20 degrees, we've had ONE day that really felt like proper summer, when I went out in a shirt and shorts and thought I was over dressed and because of the acclimatisation, that day was only 23 degrees, which has been the warmest day of the year for us. The highest since we've lived here has been 32, but on average we get two or three days when its above 25 and about a dozen days when it's around 25. More importantly, we get about 30-40 days of above 20 and the rest are usually mid to high teens. The problem is, the locals will tell you that autumn pretty much starts the day of the Wigtown Show - that's last Wednesday when you read this. The nights start drawing in faster after the end of the first week of August; it's actually noticeable - one minute it's light at 9pm, the next it's getting dark at 8pm and by the time the autumnal equinox arrives it's dark by 7pm.

The other thing about turning 60 is whether you like it or not you start noticing that people of a similar age or ten years older than you are dying, which brings home your own mortality and that pisses me off because I'm running out of summers and while I don't want 40 degrees that Northampton has had in recent years, I love a bit of sunshine - it makes me feel good. 

Of course, there's not really anyone you can blame. I mean, you can but it isn't going to do any good and the people partially responsible for climate change aren't interested in Joe Blow whinging at them; they're being whinged at by experts and ignoring them. The last year I remember the summer being so bad was 2012. It was a weird year, the Queen's jubilee - the year her and Philip almost froze to death on that barge on the Thames as the UK experienced one of the wettest and coldest summers on record. That was the year we were handed a free holiday to Wigtown, a place 14 years earlier I vowed never to return to. Our holiday coincided with the London Olympics and that first week was the best week of the entire summer and we got lovely warm and sunny weather here, which helped us fall in love with the place...

Every year it seems, someone is glad to see the back of it. Everyone has their own annus horribilis, but it does seem like it's something that repeats itself more often. It isn't just the weather that fucks up years - death, illness, unexpected pressures on finances and mental health are all things people are never prepared for and 2024, all eight and bit months of it so far, hasn't been memorable for any good reason. Even our fabulous new kitchen has the stain of us knowing it was the last thing our dear friend George completed before we were robbed of him by a destiny that is neither fair nor forgiving. The forecast for the next couple of weeks suggests more changeable weather and before we know it September will be here, the BBC weather presenters will be talking about autumn and Christmas will, again, just be round the corner. Why is it that the months of November through to March always seem to last twice as long as the months of April through to October?

A Serious Meh

This week's Cohen Brothers film we hadn't seen before was the 2009 Jewish black comedy drama A Serious Man. It really is a Hebrew movie, set in Minnesota in 1967, in a Jewish community that could easily have been mistaken for Israel. It is probably the most Jewish film I have ever seen and I mean that in a most definitely not anti-Semitic way.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a professor who lives with his wife and two children in a suburban area of Bloomington, Minnesota. His life is looking pretty good until one morning he goes to his office and speaks with a Korean student who has failed maths but leaves him a $3000 bribe to change his mark. This seems to be the starting point for Larry's life to fall apart. His wife wants a divorce, his son is a pot addict, his daughter doesn't seem to do much apart from wash her hair, he has a subscription record company on his back for a subscription he knows nothing about, he's up for a tenure at the college he teaches at but they're receiving libellous letters about him and he thinks his gentile neighbour is stealing some of his land. oh and his brother, who has a very productive cyst on his neck, is staying with them and hogging the bathroom. It is a very surreal movie.

And that is about it... Over the space of about two weeks, leading up to his son's Bah Mitzvah, Larry's life falls apart, but in many ways so does a lot of the people around him. The man his wife wants to leave Larry for dies in a car accident; Larry is involved in his own car accident and his brother is arrested for gambling and sodomy. Larry gets no joy from his rabbis, his legal bills are horrendous, someone is stealing money from him and it is in many ways just a relentless midlife crisis for him and even when it looks like his life is turning a corner the end of the film seems to simply start a new cycle of misery. I suppose it's a typical Cohen Brothers movie, but it feels like an acquired taste, something where you need to have a rudimentary understanding of the Jewish faith to be able to understand what is going on and it is neither very funny or dramatic. It was all a bit meh.

Ain't No Sunny-shine

The sixth episode of Sunny was... virtually free of Sunny. It was about Suzie (with an i and an e not with a y as I did last week) and it was about Mixxy and it was about Hime, the Yakuza woman with half a little finger missing who is played by someone called You. However as Mixxy is played by someone called Annie the Clumsy, then having someone called You seems almost normal. Suzie is played by Rashida Jones, btw, she's Quincy's daughter - that's Quincey Jones (the guy who produced Michael Jackson, no the MD played by Jack Klugman). if this paragraph seems to be going all over the place then welcome to the world of Sunny...

I realised what the end of part five meant - Sunny has been kidnapped by Hime (played by You, not 'you,' obviously) and is being used as collateral so that she can get Suzie into her lair and get her to see if she can crack Masa's laptop password - which she does. There's lots of strange dialogue, oh and Noriko - Masa's mother and Suzie's mother-in-law - has deliberately gotten herself arrested for shop lifting and provocative behaviour. Hime seems to believe that Masa has something very valuable on his laptop that will benefit her greatly, but my guess is she won't find anything because I think whatever it is the Yakuza are looking for is inside Sunny and when she finally makes an appearance - in the final ten seconds - the only thing she can do is malfunction and fall over. I know the wife has just about run out of patience with this series and I totally understand why; there are four episodes to go and I want enough to happen over the next four weeks to make it worth the slog, but I think we won't get any answers until episode nine, at the earliest.

Dead Funny

As satirical mockumentaries go, Drop Dead Gorgeous was both funny and slightly silly. Set in Minnesota, it reminded me of Fargo in many ways because everyone talked the same way as they did in that Cohen Brothers film and this almost felt like some kind of spiritual cousin.

Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards, Amy Adams and Brittany Murphy were among the contestants in this spoof of mid-west beauty pageants. Kirstie Alley, Allison Janney, Ellen Barkin and Mindy Sterling were some of the adults, with Alley the slightly deranged pageant organiser who just happened to have her own daughter (Richards) in the competition. Inside the opening ten minutes one of the contestants dies in a mysterious tractor explosion and before the finale of the contest another two have mysteriously died; yet the police don't seem unduly phased. Several attempts are made on the life of Dunst's character, including one that blows her mobile home to pieces and leaves her mother (Barkin) with a can of beer fused to her hand and still the police don't see anything odd.

It is a very funny film that borders on the realms of bad taste but never really steps over the line. The mockumentary feel is a bit weird to start with but you soon realise that it's probably the best way to showcase the numerous characters in the movie and how they fit into the scheme of things. Without ever really doing anything but filming it, the documentary crew begin to clearly show that Alley is a psychopath intent on her daughter winning the pageant and going to the state finals and that her husband - owner of a furniture business - has bought off the judges to ensure their daughter wins. Their daughter who might be quite pretty but is spoiled, narcissistic and as raving mad and self-centred as her mother. 

Fear of Doppelgangers

If the last two episodes of Evil have been two of the best, this one was most definitely one of the weirdest... The series has almost finished, there is just two weeks to go. What I believed was a 15 episode season, is actually 14 and even that is a little on the strange side. Episode 10 was the death of Sheryl, which was also, essentially, the season finale. What we have with episodes 11 to 14 are either bonus episodes or an unnamed four-part season five and obviously these two most recent parts have followed on from E10 in the feeling that all is coming to a head. This part though felt simultaneously like it was treading water and hurtling towards a conclusion - no mean feat.

Kirsten, Ben and David are asked by Sister Andrea to look into the strange case of the son of her former lover, who believes he is possessed by his own doppelganger, who self-immolated a couple of weeks earlier. Meanwhile as Leland looks certain to be locked up for the rest of his life something both weird and violent happens and he's no longer in the pickle he was. The church has sold the diocese for £85million and Kirsten was due to come into money but that has now evaporated, while Ben is getting job offer after job offer all at exponential pay increases. We also almost see Kristen naked, seemingly following on from last week's first bit of nudity and the violence and swearing levels have been ramped up yet again. Armageddon is coming, the assessors are going to be out of work, the Entity has disappeared and people are starting to act out of character or through a sense of fear and dread. I expect the next two - concluding - parts are going to be tumultuous and final. 

Next Time...

There's two more episodes of Evil to go and then another regular view will bite the dust. Speaking of conclusions, I have the final six-part season of The Umbrella Academy to watch. The wife gave up on this after season two, so it's one of the few things I've watched myself; finding the time to do that could be interesting as I tend not to like watching TV in the day time...

Sunny is still hanging in there and, frankly, with just four episodes to go I suppose we'll finish it, but it needs something happen - but to be honest that can be said about a number of TV series at the moment. 

In the world of film (or specifically the FDoD), there's about the same as there was last week because I downloaded a few things in the last week, which has mainly comprised of the majority of the films we've watched this last week.

Obviously, on a different note, the football season restarts, the Olympics finish and networks start to gear up for the (dreaded) autumn; or at least one would hope they do. It seems the BBC is simultaneously promoting and besmirching the name of Strictly Come Dancing - a show that celebrates over 20 years of being one of the jewels in the crown of the corporation and a television programme that we have NEVER watched and we're not about to start. If I wanted to see 'celebrities' dancing on the TV, I'd take loads of drugs and imagine it.