Pop Culture - Classics and Crap Stains

There are some spoilers in this and in the case of old films there are lots of spoilers, but I try to keep the big spoilers out of current TV and newly release films available to stream or if you so wish, buy on DVD.

Dungeon & Dragons

Would you risk your life for the chance to ride a dragon? This is the question Rhaenyra is asking the bastards of Targaryens as her plan to place two bastards on the backs of the remaining two rider-less dragons comes to fruition, despite the disgust of her son and the mass walk out by the dragon keepers.

The penultimate episode of this season of House of the Dragon was a cracking one. Not only does Rhaenyra get her wish, in a most dramatic way, but her estranged hubby gets his arse handed to him on a plate by the new Lord Tully, a mere whipper-snapper of a boy who puts Daemon in such a pickle he can do nothing other than acquiesce to the new Lord's wishes. It was one of those moments when you realise that Matt Smith's character has far more flaws than he lets on as his time going slowly mad in Harrenhal is coming to an end. Meanwhile back in King's Landing, Alicent is going wild in the country to try and regain her poise, while Larys does his best to try and get the damaged king back on his feet. Raena and her nephews are shipped out of their temporary home and off across the sea to lands unknown, but first she wants to find out about this wild dragon. This was one of those episodes that was quite relentless in its content and was arguably the best one of the entire series as we get dragons by the absolute bucket load. Next week should be good.

Unbeatable

Whatever happened to M Night Shyamalan? I mean The Sixth Sense was an extraordinary movie and the one that followed it was arguably the best superhero film ever made, until at least 2008, but in many ways Unbreakable still is the quintessential comic book film. It is an incredible motion picture with almost as brilliant an ending as The Sixth Sense. After these films the director barely made a decent fist of anything...

Bruce Willis is again the star of this, but here he displays as a character so unlike anything he's ever played before; his David Dunne is so understated he's almost a wallflower. Samuel L Jackson as Elijah - or Mr Glass - is, in many ways, also very out of character for Jackson, usually so bombastic and Harlem-esque in the way he plays people. Dunne survives a horrendous train crash that kills everyone on board apart from him and this triggers the attention of Elijah, who believes that Dunne is in some way 'unbreakable' the antithesis of himself, someone who suffers from a bone deficiency that makes breaking them very easy. What follows is a slow but highly effective look at what probably would happen if two comic book characters happened in real life. It is a stunning movie that is packed full of emotions and twists until it becomes clear that Dunne is what Elijah thinks he is. I said in 2000 that it was the best superhero film ever made and while there have been some that are arguably better, I don't think there has ever been one that is so real. It was and will remain one of my favourite films of all time - yes it spawned two sequels, but I don't count them. They just were. 

3 Men in a Boat

The 1970s was the decade I discovered the cinema and in 1975 I discovered Steven Spielberg, the man who would go on to make two of my favourite films of all time. One of those films we watched again on Sunday night and even though it has been nearly 30 years since we last watched it, Jaws is a fucking masterpiece of cinematic history. It is gold standard.

If there are any people out there who haven't seen this film then they need to remedy that fast before films become a thing of the past. It is a perfect example of how to make a movie in two parts - your set-up and your finale. In this case the demarcation line is a long shot out to sea separating the horror that Amity is being subjected to and the hunt for the monster that caused it. Both parts are about one hour long and yet the second half, which is a three hander with Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw, feels considerably shorter. It has brilliant camera usage, interesting thematic twists, umpteen clues to what is going to happen - if there's a gun in the opening reel of a movie then you know it's going to be fired before the end and with this film "Bruce's" demise is actually telegraphed three times in the run up. The thing is, like the floating head in the boat scene that you know is coming but still catches you out - EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. - you're not paying attention to the visual clues, you're engrossed in an almost perfect story. It remains one of the greatest movies ever made because, quite simply, it's one of the greatest movies ever made. 

Invasion Pennsylvania 

There's a lot about M Night Shyamalan's film Signs that could be classed as good, unfortunately there's a lot of bad in it as well. It's a movie that has big boots to fill given the two before it are bona fide classics of modern cinema. This alien invasion film doesn't have any of the subtlety The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable possess and it's spoilt by a strange comedic tonal thing going on.

It's the story of the return of crop circles, this time not by wankers with too much time on their hands. Mel Gibson plays Graham, a former preacher who has lost his wife in a car accident and subsequently lost his faith. He lives on a farm and one day his two kids find crop circles among the corn. At first both Graham and Merrill (Joaquim Phoenix) his brother think it's the work of drunken local kids, but then stuff starts to happen that make them both doubt what is going on. Eventually, it's all over the news - the planet has been invaded by aliens and it's every man for themselves. I suppose the interesting thing about the film is it is set entirely in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania rather than a planet spanning epic like so many other alien invasion things, but that's about it. The rest of it is played out in a strange way - like the director wanted to make an invasion movie that was rooted in real life rather than something fantastical. The problem with it is simple, it doesn't know what it wants to be - is it a sci-fi film or is it a horror/thriller? Why does Mel Gibson seem to be taking it a little less seriously than his character is? It's really a movie about faith and how to rediscover it. It feels rushed and to a degree flippant about its subject material. It's a wee bit like that other alien invasion thing I watched a few weeks ago - Dark Skies - in that it wasn't a half bad film until the actual aliens turned up; then it got a bit silly, a lot contrived and the aliens were defeated unbelievably easily - apart from the one who wanted revenge on Gibson for chopping its fingers off when it was locked in a cupboard... Actually, I know the wife is a fan of this movie, but really it's very much a load of old shite.

Oops I Did It Again

To quote Jim Carrey from the Mask film, "Somebody stop me!" Why? Because I read something in the fucking Guardian and got conned again. I mean, how many times do I have to be fooled into believing something I read in that fucking pointless rag before I stop taking notice of it?

IMDB warned me. It said 6.1 and I figured that being over 6 probably meant it would be reasonable. The thing I didn't pay attention to was the Guardian saying Jericho Ridge was like Assault on Precinct 13 merged with some other classic movie from the 1970s. It listed it as one of the seven - SEVEN - films on [all] TV this week that were worth watching and I fucking fell for it. It was a film made by the British, on location in Kosovo, about an attack on a Hicksville USA police station by unknown assailants while an incapacitated deputy and her drunk prisoner have to survive. No one had a convincing American accent and after an initial opening 15 minutes that was quite poor it just went down hill from there. Several times during the film both of us were heard saying, 'just fucking shoot him' as several characters had an opportunity to end this 87 minute film before it went on and tortured us any further. It was awful; truly awful. As awful as finding mouldy potatoes in a bag. Fuck, I need to stop looking at the Guardian and concentrate on finding an alternative that doesn't make me angry.

A Quiet Pizza

One of the most inventive sci-fi horrors of the last decade was undoubtedly A Quiet Place. John Krasinski's film about aliens who hunt by hearing because they're almost blind was creepy, tense and deeply unusual for its time. In hindsight, the franchise does have logical flaws which are never really thought about - stuff is conveniently overlooked for the sake of action.

A Quiet Place - Day One is only connected to Krasinski via story and production and where his first two parts absolutely nailed it, this third part left an awful lot to be desired. That's not to say it wasn't an enjoyable movie, it just didn't have enough of anything to put it in the same league as the first two.

This time it's back to the beginning and New York, a city that is so noisy it could give a deaf man a headache. It's the perfect place for the aliens to hunt and they do a great job of trashing the city looking for humans to kill off. Lupita Nyong'o is a dying poet, in the final stages of cancer, who is in the Big Apple for one last time to watch a show courtesy of the hospice she's spending her last days in. She somehow survives the initial attack, along with her cat Frodo, and she's heading to Harlem to relive a moment from her past - a drink and a pizza from a place her father used to go. Along the way she picks up Joseph Quinn - the new Johnny Storm - an English law student who doesn't seem to know what he's doing so he decides to follow the dying woman into the heart of the city rather than head for the docks where the evacuation ships are waiting to save people.

There's lot of stuff in this film that lacks logic - some of it odd, some of it, like I said, where the overall logic of the idea falls a little flat. I liked the first two films, but it wasn't until this latest addition that I started to question the idea. If the idea is to remain as quiet as you can all the time, what about sneezing? Coughing? Farting? Having really bad diarrhoea? Talking in your sleep or snoring? How do you avoid making any noise at all, but more importantly what about the noise the aliens make when they're trashing everything; why don't they attract the attention of all the other aliens who aren't currently trashing things? Do they kill all animals that make a noise? Cows? Birds? Frogs? Insects? Do you see (or hear) what I mean?

Anyhow, the film doesn't have enough action, aliens or interest in it. There's a lot of stuff that happens that revolves around not making a noise, which like the first two films is the reason for this film's existence, but in the first movie the family were essentially avoiding one, maybe two beasties, this film has literally thousands of them and yet Nyong'o and Quinn manage to talk, scream and do all manner of things because of thunder or rain or extraneous noises that they use for cover. It wasn't tense; the characters lacked any real appeal and things that people discovered in the second film seemed to be obvious to people in this third outing even though it was like 48 hours after the aliens arrived. Like I said, it was enjoyable but it wasn't particularly that good. I expect the franchise will die here.

Grimm's Fairy Tales

We finally dipped into Grimm, the TV series that we watched one episode of in 2011 and gave up on. We've returned to it because I've been recommended to watch it by a couple of people and some of the reviews I read suggested that after a slow and slightly crappy start it really developed into an interesting show. I'd just like to say that after watching the first two episodes, I hope that the crappy and slightly slow start is not an indication that the entire 6 seasons will be as cheap and patchy as this. While I was watching the first two parts I was filled with a number of thoughts and observations, which you'll be pleased to hear I'm not going to bother pointing out. It does strike me as something that needs to up its game a little to keep us occupied because had this been a new show we would have not bothered after episode two. It has promise, but it needs to deliver that promise, especially as there are six seasons and 127 episodes.

Into the Woods

I think I'm beginning to struggle with Apple TV's Sunny, the series about a grieving woman and her strange robot. I like weird, but I also like a story that I can follow and the problem with Sunny is that there seems to be a lot of Japanese idiosyncrasies involved and if you're not familiar with the culture - which is difficult for most gaijin like me - then you're onto a hiding to nothing. We're five episodes in and every time you think you're getting a handle on it an episode like this comes along and BAM you're back to square one. This week was mainly being lost in the woods with Mixxy after they run away from Suzy's house that has been ransacked by the Yakuza (last week). The three - Suzy, Mixxy and Sunny are looking for Mixxy's uncle's place but she doesn't seem to know where she's going; there's a sinister looking man hanging about; lots of peeing in the woods and Sunny has developed a big problem with Mixxy and I'm beginning to think the robot might be right. It ends with Sunny disappearing and that rubber finger (from last week) under a pillow. I have to admit, I'm running out of patience.

Out Of Touch

This week's Clooney was one of his first feature films as a star - Out of Sight, a kind of light comedy drama heist movie, with Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle and Denis Farina.

Let's be honest about this. It isn't a bad movie; it's about an escaped con and serial bank robber called Jack Foley - Clooney - and the plan to rob a rich fraudster who ended up in the same prison, who made it clear he had loads of money. That's the premise of part of the story but the part that dominates is the relationship between Jack and the US Marshal - Karen Cisco played by JLo - who he accidentally kidnaps on his escape from a prison in Florida. When I say relationship, what I mean is the outrageously far-fetched and slightly soiled almost wishful thinking that a failed bank robber could start a relationship with a beautiful law enforcement agent after being locked in the trunk of a car with her for a couple of hours and gently stroking her thigh, in a this is clearly not at all violating and creepy way.

The fact that Cisco is attracted to Jack is explained away by the flimsy idea that she has appalling taste in men and ends up making ridiculous decisions with them, such as shagging married men and, in this case, falling for a vaguely suave, but largely dense bank robber who borderline molested her in a boot of a car. This film was made in 1998 by Steven Soderbergh; it was based on an Elmore Leonard book, which might explain why the female character felt more like a wet dream for wankers kind of gal. I just found the idea morally dubious and I'd seriously doubt that this movie could be made now given the suggestions it was implying. There was just something wrong about this film's portrayal of women; something very wrong indeed. 

Fear of the Future

As we're heading towards the end of Evil, it was good to see last week's stonking episode was followed by yet another quite excellent addition. The endgame is approaching so the team are no longer off gallivanting, this is about firefighting and trying to deal with the shit that is known and unknown.

This week was Sheryl's wake, but it was also a time travel story - with a twist - and the beginning of the end of the assessment team as the archdiocese gives David the job of running the parish and then promptly pulls the plug on the team he heads. So Kristen not only loses her mother, but also several other rather important things and then her job; oh and her night demon is back and she's struggling to deal with it and look after baby Timothy, who is now firmly ensconced in the Bouchard house. Leland is in prison and having problems and then he gets a shite attorney, who just turns out to be something a little more than shite. We have five more weeks to go and I expect the next thing on the agenda is solving Ben's Djinn problem. There was no Entity this week, despite David's dilemmas, but there was something we've never seen before in Evil. This season saw the introduction of the word 'fuck' to the show, but this week saw the first pair of tits, the first actual nudity that wasn't a deformed demon. It was almost as shocking as all the events that happened. This show, with or without boobies, is now really 18 rated.

Fox on the Run

I got the impression that while this film wasn't the inspiration for the great Apple TV+'s The Morning Show, it probably was a big influence in it. Bombshell is about the Fox News scandal of 2016 when several women who worked for the ultra-right wing 'news' station went public about the head of the Network - Roger Ails - and his sexual peccadillos and use of his power to influence women into giving him sexual favours. 

This was pretty much an all-star cast, with Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie, Mark Duplass, John Lithgow and scores of other famous film and TV stars literally sometimes only on screen for seconds. It was like all of these actors just wanted to be involved in this groundbreaking true story that saw Fox News kind of admit some culpability while obviously denying everything. It's quite a shocking movie in many ways and you get the impression whoever made it wanted to make sure that Fox and the Murdoch family came out of this with as little credibility as possible (without facing their own lawsuit). There's not really much to say about it because it's very much in the public domain, but it did do some interesting things, such as show Donald Trump in as bad a light as possible (and he was still President when it was made). It's an informative if slightly cold movie, but it is worth watching if you, for no other reason, want to see Fox News and the Murdoch look bad. The sad thing about it is it probably only changed the culture at this shit stain of a TV network for about 10 seconds.

Inside Out

I'm not a fan of Clive Owen. I think he's quite overrated unless he's in a British film and even then I think he's not a brilliant actor by any stretch of the imagination. He starred in The Children of Men, which is something of a 21st century SF classic so he seems to get a free ride, but normally I see him in a film and I pretty much dread it.

Inside Man is a 2006 Spike Lee heist film about a bank robbery with a difference and as well as Owen it stars Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer and Willem Dafoe. It feels like a straight forward bank robbery movie but there's something slightly odd about it almost from the word go. It's meticulously planned and the robbers always seem one step ahead of the cops and the hostage negotiator played by Washington. He even suspects they're being played by the robbers, but he doesn't know how. They even go to elaborate hoaxes to make the many cops laying siege to the bank believe they're serious if they get their demands met. However, we're talking something very complicated that involves the man who owns the bank and the contents of a safety deposit box, which, oddly enough, he - Plummer - has already hired a top fixer - Foster - to ensure the contents of said box do not fall into the wrong hands.

This is a top film that keeps you guessing right up till the end. You continuously wonder about who is the inside man in this and of course it leads you to having your own suspects and you work out how they're going to get out of the bank but to what end? It's not like they can escape with any money or anything else because they're going to be in custody until they can be cleared of any wrong doing. It's just a taut thriller and a mystery that races along at a cracking pace and simultaneously deceives but doesn't deceive the chief negotiator - who eventually works most everything out apart from the key parts. It's a movie worth tracking down; I can't recall having ever actually seen a Spike Lee film other than Summer of Sam, but on this evidence I might check a few others out.

Next Time...

The big thing for the next few weeks is going to be Evil; if you're a fan you'll know exactly what I mean and why, if you don't then you probably need to invest in it. There'll be the season two finale of House of the Dragon, which promises to be exceptional, but we've seen promise turn into let down so many times before. Sunny needs to give us some rope and show a leg or two because it really is in danger of being given up on with very few episodes (four) to go. We're also going to watch a few more episodes of Grimm, but you won't get reviews of them unless there's something exceptional (or we give up).

The FDoD is getting thin on the ground again with just 20 films on it. Yes, I know, that sounds like an ample amount of choice, but a third of these films have been on it for over two years and that probably means we're struggling to get the enthusiasm to watch them. There are about another 30 films recorded off the TV on the set top box hard drive, so it could well be a case of watching some of these. Obviously while the Olympics are still on we're going to be forcing ourselves on anything that isn't sport, but we also have a busy week with a couple of days probably being television free, so next week's column might be a little on the light side, which I'm sure won't disappoint anyone...