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.