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.