Pop Culture - (Black) Holes (to Fill)

The usual spoilers apply, but I will avoid them with new stuff, especially if it will really spoil it for someone who hasn't seen it yet...

P-P-P-Pick Up A Penguin

Colin Farrell is another one of those actors that we haven't seen appear in anything that hasn't been at least half decent. Earlier this year he was in the sublime genre-twisting Sugar and he's back, reprising his role as Oz Cobb in The Penguin, a direct sequel of sorts to The Batman.

This new HBO series literally follows on from the closing scenes of the Robert Pattinson/Matt Reeves film from 2022, with Oz seemingly cut adrift now his boss Falcone is dead. However, we discover that even his boss had their own bosses and his boss also has a son who, despite being a drug addict, is in line to take over the business. Oz is one step ahead of everyone it seems as he does what is necessary to keep his name out of all the 'fun and games' that is about to happen involving Gotham's two biggest crime families. This is cracking stuff and it's a surprising take on the Penguin because he might be a thug and a psychopath, but he's also got a soft side and one that is being delved into with this series. It's going to be a good old fashioned crime caper, but it will have twists and turns as well as moments that make you wonder if Oz is really the criminal he likes to think he is. The opening episode is brilliant and has a couple of superb set pieces that will make any viewer realise that this is a new show that doesn't need The Batman in it to make it unmissable. Plus Farrell is unrecognisable and unbelievable - this is a series not to be missed.

Loop the Loop

You think you've seen all the time loop films and suddenly you find two more you haven't. Last week it was Before I Fall and this week it's a new film starring Mary Louise Parker and the fantastic Ayo Edebiri (Syd from The Bear) called Omni Loop.

I'm slightly confused by this one on a number of levels. For starters, when I downloaded it at about 5pm on Saturday afternoon it was rated at 7.2 on IMDB and by the time we watched it on Saturday evening about 7.30 it had dropped to 5.5 and this time I take issue with this. What I was also confused about was the film itself, which might be why the rating has dropped like a stone. Yet, not being able to understand the film is absolutely no reason for it to be rated so low. It's an extraordinary movie that deserves our appreciation rather than receiving brickbats. Why is it extraordinary? Probably because it takes the time loop/paradox idea and turns it on its head. The weird thing is it might have a low rating but all the reviews are positive; this is a case of wankers rating it low because they haven't got the emotional maturity to understand something as poignant as this...

The movie begins with Parker in a hospital bed, her family is discussing her condition with the doctor who informs them that she has a black hole in her chest and she probably has about a week to live. This revelation plus a few other more subtle clues tells us we're not in our world, but that is inconsequential. What is important is that Parker is living in a time loop thanks to some pills she found when she was 12 which had her name on them. Take a pill and you go back a certain amount of time; for Parker she takes a tablet just as she's about to die and she wakes back up in the hospital room awaiting diagnosis and literally lives the same week over and over again, until she decides to do something about it thanks to a meeting with someone (Edebiri) she had never noticed before. This new person is a young scientist, just like Parker's character, and the two of them try to solve the conundrum of Parker's time travelling and where the pills came from in the first place.

The problem is because it is Parker's loop, only she ever remembers anything, so she must spend time convincing Edebiri to help her and we eventually learn that the two women have virtually spent a lifetime trying to work out what the hell is going on and are no further to finding out the composition of the pills than they are finding out where they came from and how to solve the riddle. I suppose the inconclusive nature of much of the movie - the genuine paradox - could be what bothers people who watched the film who either don't have a brain or expected something more like Looper, but it ends up being very similar to Before the Fall without ever falling into the old redemption thing. This is a sweet and gentle 'sci-fi' film, all about living life and accepting failure. I was none the wiser at the end than I was at the beginning, but I did think it was a superb film made with love and attention to detail. It is allegorical and while you might end up wondering what you've watched, you won't feel disappointed by it - not if you have a heart. I love time travel movies and this one just made me remember why. 

Moaning Live

Has there ever been a day time TV show quite like Morning Live? It pretty much sums up the UK without ever summing up the UK. It is a place devoid of politics and any other contentious issue, such as religion or sex and places itself firmly at the foot of middle class Britain.

Gethin Jones and a bunch of female presenters bring you a daily dose of anodyne and terrifying. This is a show that tells you on a daily basis to watch out for all those horrible scams and scammers, yet tries to get you to believe that it's the 1950s and everyone gets on with everyone else. This programme rarely talks about the divisions in the country and tries to focus our minds on the key things - such as Strictly Fitness, a five minute homage to the celebrity dancing shite, where people are encouraged to get that little bit of exercise because it will make their lives richer and full of meaning. There are cooking tips, celebrity gossip and chat and lots of tips on how to avoid anything that might cause a problem - personally or publicly. It does have an almost daily feature about how to beat the scammers. It is PCTV... Except, if you really break down the 'walls' of this show, you will notice that a large percentage of it is warning people about the nasty things other people do, while simultaneously telling us to 'love they neighbour' and how everything is great. 

Take Monday 23rd September's edition. There's a 'peoples surgery' discussion where people write in and ask (the most anodyne) questions they're seeking help and guidance on and often it's about things their neighbours do that they either like or dislike or are concerned about. Take this morning's effort; someone wrote in to complain about their neighbour's CCTV cameras suggesting it was an invasion of their own privacy. The advice given was 'have a nice conversation with them. See if you can offer them any suggestions or make it clear that you are worried about an invasion of your own privacy and see if you can come to a mutual agreement. Maybe offer solutions as to how they might be able to solve the problem they're trying to video...' ad nauseum. I mean, if someone has CCTV cameras trained on doors, gardens and drives then they're obviously concerned about burglars, trespassers and want to see who is coming to their house when they're not in - how is having a nice chat with them going to change this? If people are worried about others possibly training their cameras on them or their property - why? What do you do that you don't want others to see? And yes, I understand privacy, but this came across as a mewling and simplistic response to a question that felt manufactured. The problem I see here is the show spends half the time talking about horrid people and neighbours can be horrid people. When is something like this not going to end in an escalation and more conflict?

There was also the question of lopping off branches and overhanging garden debris from neighbours, which was quite useful in that you don't have to return it to the owners side of the garden; it might be nice to offer it to them - 'would you like this shit I've hacked off your shit tree?' - but absolutely don't just dump it over the fence because this might cause problems... I suppose we live in a world with decreasing amounts of common sense and having a show that shows you how to wipe your arse properly is probably needed... 

Trailer Trash

So, after nearly a year (was it really that long), we're awash with superhero films, TV series and trailers again. This time it's Thunderbolts* except ... how do I put this? The first teaser trailer actually landed on June 20th and can be seen here: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=thunderbolts+trailer&mid=0BE8A780CDFA1BEE7C200BE8A780CDFA1BEE7C20&FORM=VIRE and has Steven Yuen as a mysterious man seemingly chatting with Nick Fury and the subsequent video has the Taskmaster from the Black Widow movie and Zemo in it, plus a General Ross played by Harrison Ford with a moustache, which we know he loses because he makes a big thing out of it in the most recent Captain America trailer...

What that trailer does do is suggest this new team of anti-heroes must face Sentry and that they will lose. However, the new trailer looks to be a different beast entirely, even if Sentry does appear in it, albeit as 'Bob' (played by the excellent Lewis Pulman). There's no President Ross, no Steven Yuen, no old style Taskmaster and no Zemo. The reasons for these omissions have been explained but not officially. To be honest it doesn't give any idea what the plot might be apart from they've all been thrown together because someone is either out to kill them or is manipulating them enough to get them to work with each other. Don't get me wrong, as someone who has watched all the films and all but one of the TV shows, this has an appeal about it, but it would have been nice to have some idea what it's about. The first teaser trailer gave us that, but there have been rumours of extensive re-shoots, rewrites and recasting, so who can say.

The new teaser trailer is available to watch in a number of places, including IMDB, but here's the Tube of You link: https://youtu.be/v-94Snw-H4o?si=c8--G8ogIMnNPk4e and let's hope that it's a good film because when you hear about all those re-shoots, rewrites and recasting all I can think of is that woeful Marvels film from 2023. Oh and I'm sure someone will tell us what the * means at the end of the title...

Memory Banks

There's a reasonable film hidden away in Blink Twice, the problem is there are lots of problems with it. For starters, Zoe Kravitz's debut feature film is absolutely tonally wrong; if it was trying to make a statement about the subject which the second half of the movie deals with, then it didn't do it well.

The film starts with Naomi Ackie sitting on the toilet looking at her phone and seemingly swooning over disgraced tech billionaire Slater King - Channing Tatum. The key to that last sentence is 'disgraced' and yet she's still swooning over him. She and her best pal - Alia Shawcat - have waitressing gigs at a big party, hosted by the aforementioned billionaire and before you know it they're both invited back to his private island for a holiday for (possible) sex and (lots of) drugs and well, not a lot of rock and roll (but some cheesy 70s disco). In fact the first 40 minutes of the movie are just watching privileged people having fun with a couple of lower class girls along for the ride.

However, things start to go wrong when Shawcat is bitten by a snake and something in her changes. By the way, we're told the snake's aren't deadly, they just give you a nasty bite - but someone is literally harvesting them... Now, this is where it gets tonally awkward, but to tell you why would absolutely spoil the film completely. What I will say is if this film is a message about powerful men abusing vulnerable women then it's done in a really exploitative way and considering it was directed by an - one would say - emancipated women, a solid actor and the daughter of a rock icon, you would have thought it wouldn't have gone in the direction it did, or maybe she wouldn't [read: shouldn't] have made this film. It's not bad, but it is, especially the ending that is supposed to make you think Ackie is extremely emancipated, but just tells you a lot of things you don't want to think about women - such as they'll do anything for a bit of money and power, and I don't think women - most women - work that way.

Abruptly Grimm

Yeah, I know, I said I wasn't going to review this every week, but we're halfway through season three, I feel it's appropriate to update those of you who give a shit about my regular viewing habits. I read this review, which I think I mentioned in a previous blog, about the guy who went off the series when it started to become a bit more of an ongoing story series rather than standalones. What I'm finding is that the ongoing storylines are okay; especially the way Nick is assembling his own Scooby Gang of allies - human and Wesen - but some of the other ongoing plots are growing a little tedious. I never have and doubt I ever will warm to the 'Royal family' subplot, which Captain Renard is part of - it had better be worth it in the end. While Portland being the centre of weird and fucked up murders and deaths is starting to feel a little tired - I've said it before but how come so many Wesen live in Oregon? The most jarring thing about the series, which, of course, was always a problem with network TV series, is the way everything concludes so quickly. You know each episode is 42 minutes long and unless you suspect a continuation story, you know it will all be concluded by the 41st minute so that an extra wrapping it up minute can be tagged on at the end. It just feels a little rushed and convenient, especially as the ongoing nature of the series isn't about cases but about the ongoing relationships that Nick and his associates have. Yes, there will be references to the kind of Wesen met before, but it's like once one thing has been concluded it is condemned to the same memory black hole as the film reviewed above this had as a subplot...

A Family History

It's been 13 years since we last watched The Descendants, a George Clooney film which I suppose is best described as a tragi-comedy, but is really about dealing with a tragedy in the best possible way (or not, depending on how you look at it). I'm not being helpful, really. This is a movie about a rich man whose wife is fatally injured in a boating accident and the time between that accident and when she dies. it sounds very morose and maudlin, but in reality it's a good story made better by excellent actors.

Clooney is Matt King, a lawyer and the trustee of a family fortune tied up in a lot of Hawaiian land owned by his extended family. His wife, the aforementioned fatally injured woman lies in a hospital bed unlikely to get better and they have two kids - daughters - aged 17 and 10. Matt has always been, by his own admission, the secondary parent, but now he has to step up and become 'dad' while they all deal with the tragedy that is about to befall them. Matt can't understand why his eldest daughter - Shailene Woodley - has such a hate on for her mother and is such a rebellious and problematic young woman, until she tells him that her mother and his wife was having an affair and was planning on leaving him. as you can imagine, this causes untold extra stress on Matt, who is already struggling to deal with the situation. It's from this point on where dad and his two daughters begin to bond like never before, as they steer their way through the shit that is about to happen and Matt's eldest helps her father do some things that only make sense when you realise that Matt is actually a really nice guy, just a bit on the boring side and probably senses that his wife's infidelity wasn't helped by him.

There are some interesting cameos in this movie; Matthew Lillard (Shaggy from the Scooby Doo films) plays Brian Speer, the man who had an affair with Matt's wife. Robert Forster plays Matt's father-in-law, a man with a serious blame problem. Beau Bridges plays one of Matt's cousins and another of those cousins is played by Michael Ontkean, sheriff Harry S Truman from Twin Peaks. The interesting thing about this cameo is Ontkean is on screen about eight minutes in total and doesn't utter a single word. This is a movie that has some funny moments; it's very tender and deals with a difficult subject in a gentle but honest way and everyone in it is excellent. I remember really liking it first time around and I haven't changed that opinion 13 years later. Alexander Payne, the film's director, was also the director of The Holdovers, one of the best films of 2023, set in the late 60s about a teacher having to 'babysit' a number of boarding school students unable to join their respective families for the holidays.

An Army of Shite

I find, or rather I have found, since doing this blog on a regular basis that films tend to age well. I reckon at least three quarters of all films I've watched and then watch again end up being more enjoyable. Maybe it's because I pay more attention or I can follow it better. This was definitely not the case with Army of the Dead.

Zach Snyder's most recent entry in 'the dead' series is essentially a heist movie with zombies and where it seemed to be an interesting and stylised piece of shite the first time around it was just extremely dull and almost [ahem] predictable on second viewing. I just seemed to recall it being more exciting, with more zombies and a bit more character development for a film that's almost two and a half hours long. Interestingly, the prequel - Army of Thieves is a much better film and if you've seen that and not seen this then don't watch this because it's a load of crap. Or if I wanted to be all down wiv Dead Las Vegas I'd say a load of craps. Dave Bautista plays a man who has got out of Vegas once before but is tempted to do it again for $50million. All he has to do is rob a vault of $200million and he can keep a quarter of it and distribute it between his team as he sees fit. Others are in it as well, including 'dead' veteran Garret Dillahunt and Tig Notaro. It's much worse than other Snyder films, much worse. Avoid like a plague of super zombies.

The Tolkien Thing

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is up to its penultimate episode of its second season. There was a lot of action. People seemed to die. The ring maker sussed out the bad guy. It's looking grim all round. There's one episode to go.

Witchy Women

After a very promising beginning, the third episode of Agatha All Along gives us an explanation as to why some of the media outlets who got the first four episodes before anyone else thought it was slow. The explanation is it's slow. After a very speedy first two parts, this one made like a sloth and chilled.

In fact, I'd be hard pressed to tell you what happened. The witches entered a smart looking house and are promptly set a task for which they have 30 minutes to solve. They don't know what the task is, how to solve it or what is going on so they sit around and drink some wine and get all paranoid about everything. Then the woman who isn't a witch has some stuff happen and then she dies, I think. I say I think because it struggled to hold my attention. The rest of the witches now know that Teen has an enchantment on him and there's a long and very specific scene where someone tells the 'Teen' that Agatha sold her own child for the Dark Hold and it was done in such a way, if the Teen turns out to be her son I will be very surprised. This needs some pace and the feeling of jeopardy and movement because it stopped stone dead here. We know that Audrey Plaza re-enters the show next week and while she's not the fabulous nerd queen she was about ten years ago, she can still bring more to the party than any of the other actors in this.

Incidentally, the wife isn't a fan. I thought the first two parts had something going for them, but she informed me as we were about to watch episode three that she isn't impressed and thought it was a bit boring and meh. After watching the third part, I'm inclined to agree. However, we tend to forget that this was supposed to be released last autumn, but got pulled from the schedule and had some rewrites and re-shoots take place over the last twelve months - and there were problems with this last year, which meant there was a question mark hanging over whether it would eventually make the TV screens. It could be that time has made us forget this was almost cannon fodder for a struggling 2023 MCU and seems to have arrived the past conveniently forgotten about...

Barely a Growl

What's not to like about a film with Brad Pitt and George Clooney - even now, with them both in their 60s. The problem is it needs to be something special and Wolfs isn't that film. I simply didn't know what I was watching - comedy, drama, mystery, I was never 100% sure.

These now veteran actors play the same role, ostensibly, as two 'fixers' called to do a job where only one of them would do. This never happens; they didn't even know each other existed and it gets stinkier from that point on. I'm not really sure where the film even is a film... The men are called to clear up a mess - the DA is in a hotel room with a dead young man and she needs the mess clearing up. There's a thinly plotted bit of nonsense about how the two men have to work with each other, but for a large part of the rest of the film it was just the two actors sniping at each other. The thing is the dead young man also has a large quantity of narcotics on him and apparently this makes it more complicated until the dead kid wakes up because he's not dead and really, at this point, the film becomes a bit pointless, but it still trundles along for another half an hour or so with stuff that feels contrived and unrealistic. These guys must have read the script, they must have seen how ... meh ... it looked on paper? Pitt and Clooney don't need the money, do they? If so, why? They look like some middle aged guy's parents - maybe even gay parents. 

Next Time...

Does it even matter?

Modern Culture: Old Demons and New

Spoilerific wassnames abound...

Twisting the Witch's Tail

So here we are. The latest Marvel TV show and absolutely a direct sequel to Wandavision even if it's only a direct sequel by virtue of it being set in Westview and featuring a lot of that show's original cast. 

Agatha All Along is in many ways, at this early stage, a bit difficult to explain. It's nine parts and we've seen two of them and they do little more than set us up for what will happen; or at least that's what I think is going to happen. It starts with what appears to be a TV show with Agatha - Kathryn Hahn - as a worn out police detective, back from suspension, trying to solve the death of a Jane Doe. Whether this will have any bearing on the rest of the series is unknown, but my guess is there will be some link otherwise it was a detailed set up that wasn't a set up at all; just a cruel unbroken joke played by a now dead former hero who created a place where she and the Vision could live happily ever after. In fact 25 minutes of the detective series is played out, and then thanks to Audrey Plaza as Agatha's sworn enemy we get dragged back into the real world - the post Wanda Westview; a place that is still traumatised by the Scarlet Witch nearly three years after she left. A mysterious (and very camp) kid is trying to show Agatha who she really is because he wants her to take him on to the Witches' Road - a place that is dangerous but can bestow anyone who completes it with what they are missing to make them whole again. The kid doesn't appear to be able to tell Agatha anything about himself and if he tries his mouth either gets sewn up when he speaks or his voice just fades away. His presence is enough to shake Agatha out of her funk and into action. However, at the same time Agatha's sworn nemesis, someone with a black heart (Plaza again) attempts to kill her and she persuades her enemy to allow her to restore her witchy powers so she can be bested as a complete witch and not weak and powerless. 

With this challenge accepted, she then needs to recruit a number of witches with different powers to create a new coven to be able to go to the Witches' Road and much of the second episode is spent finding the right witches - all of whom have their own problems and most know and despise Agatha but are all drawn to her and her desire to restore what is missing from her life. The five witches and the mystery boy, now known as Teen, begin their journey and we have no idea what is going to happen. I have to say that this might have worked better without all the trailers, because the opening of the first episode and its impact is kind of lost when we know it doesn't have a huge role to play in subsequent parts. There is an element of 'musical' about it but not in the way you may have been dreading and it absolutely doesn't deserve the 6.8 rating on IMDB, but less than 24 hours after it came out it was as low as 6.5. If you read those reviews you will see a thread of misogynism and stupid boys who want their superheroes to all be male and rugged but heroic - a kind of unspoken homoeroticism lurking in the background, I have no doubt. It was okay. it looks very good and the dialogue is snappy. It wasn't what I expected and therefore I'm intrigued.

Something Orcish

So, what happened this week in the programme with almost the longest title on television (as you will find out later in this week's blog, there is something with an even longer and more bewildering title than...) The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Well, one of the two little Irish Harfoots, Nori, is suddenly being depicted as quite elven and sexy. it's weird, but she seems to be wearing eyeliner and has shed a couple of stones. I don't know if they're deliberately sexing her up or if there's some other reason for it, but she's absolutely being portrayed as something other than cutely frumpish, as she was. The 'Gandalf' character is spending time with Tom Bombadil, who appears to be teaching him how to magic proper. In Numenor there's a revolution going on involving a sea creature and the blind ex-queen and the rest of it was just Sauron being Sauron and deceiving elves and orcs and humans. Last week there appeared to be an episode of building up for something to happen and this week was the beginning of something happening. I expect next week will be the start of other things happening and episode eight will have things happen, but not tumultuous things because Amazon hope to make three more series after this. Woo and indeed Hoo. I doubt we'll be joining them on that journey should it arise.

Overrating the Cannibal

It's been over 30 years since we last watched one of the most famous films of the last 40 years. The much praised, but largely overrated The Silence of the Lambs. If ever there was a film that lives on a reputation it is this one, with its overwrought performances and highly telegraphed set pieces.

The film that put Anthony Hopkins [back] on the map and reinvigorated Jodie Foster's film career is actually a very slight thing and feels very dated and pseudo-psychological now. Jonathan Demme's seminal movie won Oscars and high praise, but now feels a little tawdry and cheap. Some of the shock tactics of the opening minutes feel a little sleazy now and the relationship between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector feels quick and contrived. There are some good parts of this movie - Lector's eventual escape from the police is quite a clever thing - but in general it just feels like style over substance. The fact that the serial killer in this film was a former acquaintance of Lector's feels a little too coincidental, or that the FBI would send a trainee to talk to a maximum security lunatic because they know he'll be more inclined to talk to an 'innocent' than anyone else also feels like a plot device rather than clever writing. It is a good film - for its time - but there is much about it now that feels sensationalistic and to shock. I've seen better films with fewer points on IMDB's rating system, especially in the last week or so...

Spare Us the Cutter

If you ever fancy going to the theatre and you don't know what to see then I'd advise you to find a stream or DVD of The Outfit, a film made in 2022 with the fantastic Mark Rylance in it.

This 'movie' is set in one place - a tailor's shop in 1956 Chicago where Rylance plays Leonard Burling, a Brit living in the USA and running his own bespoke men's outfitters. He's also a front for a local mob family; a place where people drop things for the 'family'. He works with a young local girl called Mabel, played by Zoey Deutch, who is sleeping with one of the mob family but doesn't think Burling knows about it. The entire film is about the mob thinking they're on the verge of joining a crime syndicate but have suspicions that there is a mole inside their organisation and the way everything spirals out of control, but how Burling keeps on top of the escalating situation with the same kind of aplomb as his suit making skills. It's an intriguing little 'film' but it's not exactly action-packed, has as many British actors in it as American and Simon Russell Beale as the crime boss is extraordinarily bad casting - this fine actor does British and aristocracy fantastically well, but Chicago crime boss? Nah, not so good. It would have made an interesting one act play and feels a little like the kind of thing that was made during the pandemic. I'm glad I watched it, but somehow I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone else.

Things I Will Never Watch

There's a lot of stuff out there that I see - on Torrents sites and on film and TV sites - that either astounds me with the titles or makes me think I'm never going to watch anything called that as long as I have a hole in my arse. You may have heard of some of these; a few of them are anime series, so you expect them to be a little weird...

Take The Ossan Newbie Adventurer Trained to Death by the Most Powerful Party Became Invincible for example; this anime series could be about anything and it might help if it was translated into a form of English that is easily understood. It's a Japanese series about a man who served the strongest fighters who decides to start fighting himself when he reaches middle age. Looking at the pictures of the series on IMDB I expect it has lots of 'action' sequences and no end of buxom women who all look like slightly constipated elves.

Staying with anime, there's the humorously titled A Journey Through Another World Raising Kids While Adventuring, which is obviously relatively self-explanatory. One wonders why the Japanese can't give things catchy titles, in this case something like Irresponsible Wankers. Then there's That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime which is such a good title I'm not even going to google it. I'm just going to leave it there and you can use your imagination...

Four Go Flatting was almost impossible to find, but it turns out it's a New Zealand reality show about four intellectually challenged individuals who leave the safety of their parents' homes and get flats. I just hope New Zealand TV is less exploitative than US or UK TV.  Ancient Aliens has been going for 20 seasons; it began in 2009 and basically explores the relationship between science and mythology - or in other words it extrapolates a scientific thesis and then equates it to some bollocks. There's this British TV show called Strictly Come Dancing that appears to be about a number of dominatrix that learn to dance while having orgasms, which sounds quite good but looks gaudy and has awful presenters. 

The excitingly titled Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives would probably have been more fun if it had been called Dinners, Drive-Bys and Daves, but it wasn't. This is more self-explanatory than the above anime series. DD&D has been going almost 20 years and started in 2006. It's essentially a guy driving round the USA looking for the eponymously mentioned places and rating them. Imagine Man versus Food but with no challenge, less critique and a real dick presenting it. Talking about shows that would benefit from slight name changes - making the programme far more interesting - take Cheap Irish Homes presented by Maggie Molloy; this series explores what you can buy in Ireland for as little money as possible. However, had it been called Cheap Irish Holmes it conjures up everything from a rubbish detective from Dublin to a crap Cork-born 800m runner...

Finally there's this thing called Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power which, I believe, is a gay dating show about who has the tightest sphincters on the block. If I didn't know what Bluey was I'd want it to be the adventures of a frozen corpse and the show called Beat Bobbie Flay should be about acts of violence towards someone called Bobby but it's a cooking show. Damn. 

Over and Over Again

I thought I'd seen every time loop/reliving the same day film worth its salt, but something turned up that I'd not heard of so I had to give it a chance. Before I Fall is essentially a YA emo version of Groundhog Day and here's something unusual, the following paragraph contains a massive spoiler...

Ennit weird when you watch a movie with an actor in it you're not familiar with and a couple of days later you watch another film, made five years earlier, and it has the same actor in it. This has happened with Zoey Deutch this week; she played Mabel in The Outfit and is the lead in this film about a high school graduate reliving the same day - February 12 - over and over until she does the right thing. What the right thing is probably sets it aside from all other redemption arc time loop films because usually the main protagonist relives the same day until they do something altruistic, change their outlook on life and everyone lives happily ever after. With Before I Fall this is indeed the premise and like Groundhog Day it doesn't matter what Sam Kingston - Deutch - does - lives, dies, etc - she wakes back up at roughly the same time the next day. There is this slight twist in that she doesn't always wake up at the same time, but most of the following day goes very much how it went the first time. You can see a lot of movies with a similar theme in this - it's not original - but I suppose what sets this apart from other films of the same ilk is - and here's that spoiler so look away if you ever decide to watch this - this one doesn't have a happy ending, at least not for Sam.

It's not a bad film if you like this kind of thing. It follows the same well worn path except this is focused on these teenagers and the lives they lead and the good or bad decisions that are made. There are so things that happen in it that make me wonder if so much change could be enacted in such a short space of time and there were elements in it that felt a little uncomfortable for a PG rated movie clearly aimed at teenagers and with a slight whiff of God about it. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't feel like a religious film, but it delves into the kind of tropes that you'd expect to see in a film made by The Bible Network, even if God is not really mentioned at all.

A Pause for Thought

Horror films. Ghost stories. Monsters. Psychological thrillers. Well, maybe not so much that last one, but I'll tell you why later. The first three are all designed to scare us, either by trying to be frightening or with jumps and good editing. The thing is we all know [that kind of] the supernatural is a fairy tale with monsters and fewer princesses. 

Imaginary monsters really don't exist and ghosts? I don't know. It's probably got to do with how humans are a range of areas on a spectrums except this spectrum is the sense of possibly seeing on a different level to others and even then they might not be ghosts but an altogether more science fiction thing, which we don't need to bog us down. Monsters aren't real (apart from human ones), zombies, the walking dead, ancient creatures, modern ones - none of it real. The supernatural is a fantastic creation of human imagination probably based originally on what you couldn't see at night.

So, why do they scare some people and others watch them like a boring sports game? And why can't we all understand that what is about to happen is on film, it's a story and people are not eaten by giant slug monsters living in ancient woodland. Ever. Horror films only work if you're gullible enough to believe the myths they're peddling. However, psychological thrillers tend to be scarier because they deal with human beings and as we're all well aware humans are fucking nasty creatures capable of mindboggling acts of depravity. The reason they can be very scary is because, unlike fictional monsters, we all know it would not be impossible for us to fall victim of someone very sick and twisted.

Picking on the Wrong Person

There's been a lot of good things said about Rebel Ridge over the last couple of months. It's basically a thinking man's First Blood - the debut Rambo film before he went really gung ho. It's the story of a man on a mission to save his cousin who unfortunately runs into the wrong cops on his way to paying his cousin's bail money. From then on in it was just a matter of time before this movie went BANG!

Brit actor Aaron Pierre plays Terry Richmond, a former army training officer who has sold most of his stuff to fund the bail of his cousin, who might have ratted on some dodgy guys in his past. Richmond is in a race against time to get his cousin out before he goes to the local penitentiary - on remand - because if he's recognised he could easily be killed. Unfortunately, for Richmond, he's black, on a push bike and the target of a couple of overzealous and racist Hicksville cops. Now what these dodgy boys in blue have is an obscure law on their side that means they will keep Richmond's $35000 and he won't have a leg to stand on, even if he fights it legally - the money is lost. However, it turns out the money is lost to a bunch of corrupt local police officers and they don't like a black guy causing waves. Then some shit hits the fans and the police try to back track and in doing so they inadvertently make matters even worse.

This film could easily have simply fallen into a revenge thriller category, but a young paralegal wants to help, even if it's putting her safety at risk, because it seems a number of people are being held in prison for crimes that don't carry prison sentences, but the money involved always ends up in the chief's pocket and appears to be funding the police force - which had its funding cut after a civil case for wrongful arrest goes against them. From this point on it's about trying to prove the cops are corrupt without killing any of them, but doing enough damage to really upset a few people. It's perhaps a little overlong at just over two hours, but it rattles along at a pace. Don Johnson is good as the chief - he's having something of a renaissance in recent years - and naturally it leaves you with yet another sense of the USA being the shittiest place on the planet to live. Aaron Pierre is not someone I'm familiar with but he plays a surprisingly menacing dead pan American with some special moves.

Next Time...

The Penguin is on the agenda as well as the third part of Agatha All Along. The Middle Earth nonsense creeps towards its final episode and we've happened upon a two year old TV adaptation of Let the Right One In which we're going to be watching. We'll have the usual amount of Grimm, we're on season three now and despite them being in the same format as the previous two seasons, the subtitles don't work any longer - which is a pain in the arse. You probably might not maybe here about that, because if you've seen it, it was a long time ago and if you haven't seen it and are tempted by it you're not going to want to read my reviews of a series you haven't caught up with yet.

There will be films, there always is. 

 

Pop Culture: Versus

Some spoilers aren't really spoiling anything...

Anger and Despair

Earlier this year I reviewed a four-part drama and then the follow-up documentary about it. It was one of the most anger-inducing examples of how this country does miscarriages of justice better than any country on the planet and this week we watched a further follow-up that just compounded that belief.

Mr Bates versus The Post Office: The Impact was the sequel to the original documentary. It took another look at the [ahem] impact the drama and documentary had on the Post Office Inquiry and the people involved in the case. It didn't do anything at all to appease the sense of anger and injustice the poor souls who were fucked over by the Post Office and a number of governments to simply stop the name of the PO from becoming synonymous with cunts and bastards. I, as you can see, have not lost a shred of my anger and disgust at this awful scandal and I suppose a lot of that is because back in 1987 we considered buying a Post Office in - of all places - Gretna Green and while it was years before the Horizon scandal, it wasn't impossible that we could have run a PO for years and then been fucked over by them (or even been screwed over by the predecessor to Horizon, a system called Capture which it now seems might have fucked over a lot more innocent people).

The Impact looked at new cases of people who lost a lot more than just money; it also looked into some of the original victims and how their claims for compensation are going and still made it look as though the Post office was/is trying to get away with paying out as little as possible because it's still the Post Office making these final decisions. The fact we live in a country where nearly 30 years later we're relying on documentaries and average decent human beings to try and hold a corporation to account is despicable and disgusting; if nothing else the new Labour government should make sure that every single one of the poor sods fucked over by the Post Office should get more than they will ever need again and the cunts responsible for that despair should be locked away for a long long time.

The Mass Debate

I appreciate that as far as politics is concerned I'm very much a leftie, almost bordering on communist. I no longer consider the UK Labour party as anything other than neoliberal and while I root for Democrats in US elections, I am of the belief that neither of the USA's main political parties are anything other than right wing. in fact, right wing politics across the globe is having a day in the sun. However as Poland (and the UK to a certain extent) has proved, people realise that after a while of being ruled by authoritarian right wing arseholes, the normal person in the street is usually the person who suffers as a result. Right wing policies do not work for the workers and all they tend to do is make lists of all the things people should be wary of or even hate. When you have enough people who are prepared to put aside their political principles to support someone who says it's okay to hate immigrants you're headed for problems...

The problem with right wing politics - even if you don't think of yourself as being particularly right wing - is the coverage it gets in our very biased media (and I appreciate that some people will argue with me that the media isn't biased, but these people are usually wankers). Take the highly entertaining Harris vs Trump Televised Debate on the US ABC network. In the UK, the Daily Sieg Heil (or Mail as some people call it), the Express, the Telegraph and maybe the Sun (but I tend to avoid this fascist comic book when I do my research because any contact with Murdoch tends to make me break out in a rash) were all quick to attack Harris, while making sure they didn't praise Trump too much, probably because they would have realised that many people will have seen some of his rants, especially about wind turbines giving you cancer and peoples' pets in Ohio being eaten by Haitian immigrants, and realised that a fucking madman was running for office (again). 

However, it was the BBC and Sarah Smith - the daughter of the celebrated Labour leader John Smith and the Beeb's North American correspondent - who really managed to astound the country by declaring the debate 'too close to call' and avoiding some of Trump's crazier assertions, insults and lies. It was like some editor at the BBC thought, "No. we won't subject British people to this wholesale ranting of a very stupid man." Except, we know from the national broadcaster that even though their mates the Tories are no longer in power it hasn't stopped them from doubling down on the scrutiny of the new Labour government, making stuff headline news that they would have ignored had it been the Tories. But Sarah Smith? You have to ask yourself whether she is reading out editorial rhetoric or if she actually believes the shit she's talking? Is her job at the BBC worth compromising her socialist roots or does she subscribe to the current BBC stand of not criticising right wing parties where possible? If so, she should be ashamed of herself. Why? Because it was clear, Harris won by a country mile. She was clear, precise and yes a little light on policy, but she didn't ramble and rant like Trump, didn't make false accusations and just to emphasise a point, he didn't talk about any of his would be policies either; he just told people how horrible other people were and how good looking he is... 

The BBC's refusal to be seen condemning any right wing party is tantamount to them running a news story about a child killer and suggesting there were mitigating circumstances because the children who were killed were rude to their killer... I agree in freedom of speech, but not in cases where those freedoms are abused and slanted towards one - dark - side of the political spectrum.

Trailer Trash

At some point in the future the final (Hah!) film in the Venom trilogy will appear. Venom 3: The Last Dance is likely to be as shite as the first two Venom movies as famous film stars line up to receive a huge paycheque from Sony to prostitute themselves one last (Hah!) time. Mega-Rich Tom Hardy is likely to never appear as Venom again unless he's offered lots of money; whether the script or film in general is any good won't bother this once great British actor because he can fuck about as a non-superhero. The final trailer for the final (Hah!) film does little to make people want to go and see this horrendous pile of horse shit and I say 'horse' because someone in the special effects team thought that merging a symbiote with a horse would be a novel idea. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING about this trailer makes me think it's going to be anything but the same old load of shite the first two films were. It will have the same tired old jokes, the same embarrassing situations and lots and lots of pointless exposition. Do yourself a favour, don't go to the cinema to watch this, go and have a long and enjoyable wank instead...

Arriving the same day as the final (Hah!) Venom trailer was a preview of the third adaptation of Stephen King's first big blockbuster novel Salem's Lot, this time a film rather than a TV mini-series. It looks atmospheric and has Lewis Pullman in it. Pullman, son of Bill, is currently one of my favourite actors; not only was he brilliant as Calvin Evans in Lessons in Chemistry, he's also pretty good in the time travel lunacy that is Outer Range. This new adaptation also stars Alfre Woodard, Bill Camp and William Sadler, in what looks like a parred down version of the book - notably there doesn't appear to be a Barlow in it. It's out on HBO and if I had any concerns about it they might be that this film was finished in 2021 and is now coming out on a streaming platform three years after additional photography happened. This is out October 3rd, so not long to wait.

Boston Bungle

You know when you watch a film and at the end of it you think, "it wasn't bad, but it wasn't that good either"? Well, The Instigators is one of those movies. Despite the talents of Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Ron Perlman and Ving Rhames, there was something about it that just didn't feel... right.

Damon plays Rory, a man who is in therapy for a number of things, who feels that life isn't really worth living any longer after trying everything his therapist - Hong Chau - suggests. Somehow, he finds himself being asked to be involved in a heist to steal from the Mayor of Boston's campaign fund. Quite how and why isn't really clear, but appears to be a couple of guys who run a bakery, who might be organised crime, hiring an idiot to assemble a small team to knock off the Mayor's stash, but everything goes wrong almost from the word go. Involved in this is ex-petty con Affleck as Cobby, a sarcastic guy who makes you think he's been brought into this because the guys hiring them want it to fail - which is clearly not the case.

What follows is a catalogue of disasters as Rory and Cobby first escape the heist with little or no money but a bracelet belonging to the Mayor, which just happens to have the combination for his safe etched on the back. Then there's a hostage situation of manufactured means - involving the therapist - and then another heist against the mayor that goes equally tits up because of the two men and their raging incompetence. The thing is barely a second of the movie rings true; not the set up, not the heists nor the way they play out and definitely not the ending. It's just a slight enjoyable mess with Damon and Affleck both good in their roles but obviously not in the film they should have been in.

This Week on Grimm

Way over halfway through season two and the difference between this and the first season is astounding. Yes, it's still a bit like it was written by someone with little or no knowledge of fairy tales, police procedure and relationships - whether they're between humans or Wesen, but the thing is the introduction of a general on-going story works far better than the standalone monster of the week stuff of season one. If I did have a problem with the show it's probably the lack of imagination regarding the varieties of Wesen and the general shoddiness of the special effects. However, season two has introduced an interesting twist with all of this season so far having Nick discovering his boss is part Hexenbiest, an amnesiac girlfriend, and the beginning of an assemblage of a team, which is reminiscent of Buffy. There are other things going on, a lot of them annoying or [ahem] a bit far fetched, but most of those are to do with the way Portland's police department do their business and why there appears to only be two detectives in a city of 650,000 people. It's a bit of fun though.

Feels Like the First Time

As any regular reader will know, I love a good time travel/loop/paradox movie and Déjà Vu is exactly that. Tony Scott - brother of Ridley - made bigger, bolder and far more glossy movies than his [living] brother and this was no exception, even if it had a bit of a grainy quality to it.

Starring Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, Jim Caviezel, Paula Patton and Adam Goldberg, Déjà Vu is about a massive terrorist explosion on a ferry in New Orleans that kills over 550 people and the people trying to piece together what, how and why it happened. One of those involved is Washington as ATF agent Doug Carlin who is very good at his job and quickly picks up on some interesting things, including the death of a woman who has all the signs of being involved in the explosion but was dragged out of the river ten minutes before the bomb went off. This, to all intents and purposes, is a victim of the bomber but not a victim of the bomb, so finding out who she was and how she was involved is key to finding the killer. Enter Kilmer's FBI team packing experimental equipment that blows Doug Carlin's mind... They have equipment that can literally see into the past, but when Doug accidentally does something with a laser pen it sets off a chain of events that means there might not be a chance to catch the killer but also stop the ferry from exploding in the first place and as with all films of this kind it becomes a race, literally, against time.

It's an unusual 'time' movie because it's a big budget Hollywood film, but it's also unusual because there are clues almost from the beginning that things are going to happen except you don't see them until they... happen. I like Washington and his penchant for making strange films; eight years before this he made a film called Fallen, which I'll be revisiting very soon...

Demon Daze

How do you make a film about demonic possession, serial killers and make it very very nasty and yet you don't have any twirling heads, extreme violence, bad language or sex? The thing about Fallen is that it does all of those things; it is almost the perfect horror/cop film - if such a thing exists.

Denzel Washington plays a Philadelphia detective - John Hobbes - who has brought a nasty serial killer to justice and on the night of the execution, the killer warns the cop that he's basically not seen the last of him and he will enact some kind of revenge. Obviously, this wasn't taken terribly seriously, but the killer gives Hobbes a strange clue to look into and the clue leads to a former police officer who was believed to have been a serial killer himself back in the 1960s. Then a series of homicides appear, almost copycat perfect to the murders committed by the executed killer and before long Hobbes is chasing his tail as the demon who jumps from person to person starts to not only taunt the detective but threatens him and the people he cares about the most. Things escalate to the point where Hobbes starts to see that the demon is doing the same to him as it had done to the police officer in the 1960s and it becomes a guessing game as to who or what is going to win.

This movie was a bit of a flop at the box office, but over the years has developed a real cult following and it isn't difficult to see why. This is a taut and edge of your seat thriller; a proper horror movie without any proper horror movie tropes; an absolutely brilliant detective thriller and the only thing that lets it down is the lack of explanations for some of the characters, but that's really just a minor complaint because this is one of the best - probably second best - film about demonic possession ever made and completely different to the other great film about demonic possession. If you get the chance watch this movie, it's absolutely brilliant.

Wedding Vows

I suppose it isn't a recommendation when Ryan Reynolds says that one of the films he's least proud of is The Proposal although, to be honest I don't really know what his problem is with it as he has made much worse films (just).

Admittedly it is an uneven, slightly strange film - not least because Sandra Bullock plays a Canadian and Reynolds - a Canadian - plays an Alaskan American. Other than that it is tonally all over the place and the plot jumps about all over the place as well, without anything really happening to make anyone watching expect the plot to go the way it does. Bullock (who is 12 years older than her male co-star and pretty much looks it in this movie) plays a nasty, pernicious and much loathed editor of a major publisher in New York. Her visa has expired and she has done nothing about renewing it and has ignored every prompt from her lawyer, her employer and her downtrodden assistant, Andrew (played by Reynolds), so she's going to be deported, lose her job and everything she's worked for and it couldn't happen to a nicer [read: nastier] person. Andrew, her PA, is a human doormat; he's treated badly and while he hates his boss, he's desperate to either become an editor or be published. She wouldn't be as successful if it wasn't for him and she treats him crappier than shit on her shoe... This is tonal scene setter #1.

But she's getting deported and needs to come up with a plan, so she tells everyone she's marrying Andrew and we wander into tonal shift #2. He, sensing he has an advantage, goes from placid forelock tugger to self-assured borderline blackmailer - telling his boss what he wants from this arrangement. She agrees and they go off to Immigration to fill out the necessary forms only to be faced with Denis O'Hare's Immigration officer who tells them that he is going to prove that they're just marrying for convenience and it will end badly for both of them. We then enter tonal shift #3 as Bullock and Reynolds fly to Alaska for his grandmother's 90th birthday party and she realises that her lowly assistant belongs to one of the richest families in Alaska, who own most of the town they're in and live in a house that makes most mansions look like bungalows. They announce their wedding plans and things basically happen from this point on. Tonal shifts #4 and #5 involve Bullock liking his family and then suddenly developing a conscience until we reach tonal shift #6 where Reynolds realises he's fallen in love with Bullock, despite there being very little evidence to support this.

Don't get me wrong; I've seen worse Reynolds movies and I really don't rate Bullock in anything apart from Speed, so this film was actually 100 minutes of reasonable light comedy fun, but it has a flyweight script and I can sort of understand why Reynolds has a personal disliking of this because he's essentially the straight man to Bullock's comedic role and she's simply not funny and I can't fathom how she has managed to have such a successful movie career. It wasn't crap though.

Future to the Back

About three weeks ago, I watched a Tube of You video created by AI of a trailer for a famous film done in a 1950s style. It was bright, had just the right kind of voiceover to make you think it was a 1950s movie and about one in every three I watched, I thought, "I'd watch that if it was a real film."

Some of these fake trailers are excellent, while others - either poorly written and described or using a lesser capable AI programme - are literally all over the place with the same character appearing differently in every different scene they are in. A perfect example is the Guardians of the Galaxy 'trailer' which depicted Groot three different ways in three different appearances in the same video; while Rocket remained reasonably similar apart from what he was wearing. These AI variants go heavy on the heaving breasts and glamorous looks and every leading man looks like some extra from a Gary Cooper western of the early 1950s. Some of the trailers make the characters look like the people who play them IRL, which feels a little like cheating (if you can understand that rather odd concept regarding these flimsy offerings), while others have such poor AI CGI that it starts to feel a little hallucinatory. There are an awful lot of these floating about the Tube of You - don't fall down a rabbit hole.

The Rings of Zzzzzz

What can I say about this second season that will stop me from falling asleep? What can I say about this second season that would make those of you who haven't been tempted to watch to change your minds? The answer to both of these questions is - fuck all. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Zzzzzzzzzz is just interminably dull and boring. It is like watching rocks form or rust form on metal. It is just not exciting in the slightest. I'm sure there are people out there that really care about this series, but if there are then they need to find a new hobby or maybe wank more, possibly using pictures of an orc or one of the hairier dwarves to aid with erections (or moistness). All that money spent on a huge pile of shite. Amazon could have paid their staff more money or maybe not monitored them when they needed a shit. Maybe Jeff Bezos could have given it to the homeless or the terminally ill to make their lives less shite. But no, he chose to make a fucking TV series that only really anally retentive nerds wanted and even they've probably fucked off to watch alien porn films or maybe dream about an episode of The Chase where all the chasers are naked. This is a fucking awful TV show. Channel 5 do more interesting things.

This Will Be the Last Time

I have a confession to make (although it's probably the third or fourth time I've made it on this blog); I quite like the old Top Gear trio of Clarkson, May and Hammond. I enjoy James May's TV shows and I think Clarkson's Farm is one of the best documentary shows about farming ever and does a good job of spotlighting problems the UK farming community has; in fact it does a far better job than the BBC's anodyne Countryfile. We have watched all of the Amazon series The Grand Tour and after who knows how many years it draws to a close with this final part called One For the Road. 

The final ever episode takes the trio of buffoons across Zimbabwe - not the most obvious place to finish a long lasting (23 years) relationship with viewers, but it's clear after a while that they were going to make the most of it. However, Zimbabwe might not have been the oddest choice after all, because when the three men were presenting Top Gear, their first road trip was to Botswana where they concluded that trip on Kudu Island in the middle of the Botswana salt flats. As the trio ended their final Grand Tour, they decided to go across the border, into Botswana, to return to the site of that first road trip, which kind of proves that these things are not random at all, but meticulously planned long before the buffoons reach the country they're driving across... 

As for the show itself; it was funnier than the last couple and that might have been because they all knew they weren't going to be doing one again. When you look past all the scripted stuff - because there is obviously a rudimentary script guideline - there were times when they genuinely enjoyed themselves and other times when you could see that they realised this was a poignant moment in their 22 year career of hosting car shows. Zimbabwe provided a quite spectacular backdrop, but in many ways it was never going to be as good as some of their other jaunts - such as the USA, Vietnam or the controversial South American road trip. The best lines as usual came from the erudite James May, especially when he asked if he could delete both their names from his phone when the show concluded; "You're both together; the world's smallest cunt and the world's biggest cunt." Obviously 'cunt' was bleeped out, but you knew what he was saying. Then there was Hammond's, "We're not going to have to live in the same old peoples' homes, are we?" Clarkson, as usual, was just Mr Unwoke, but even that was toned down.

The thing about this trio is that taken out of this context they all have made extremely entertaining and informative shows. Hammond's ability to fix things and understanding how other things work has allowed him to build a niche as the man who does things. May has learned to cook and produced two extremely worthwhile cooking series for Amazon, as well as his travelogue shows, which, if I had one complaint, are just not long enough sometimes. And then, of course, there's Clarkson's Farm, a show that has really annoyed Clarkson haters because he isn't anything like the Clarkson behind the wheel of a car. Yes, his on screen persona is brash, Northern and privileged; he says things that in 2024 are not regarded as tasteful, but he has turned farming into a spectator sport; his relationship with Lisa, his partner; Charlie his 'boss' and Kaleb his friend and assistant on the farm has meant that it's only the really determined people who dislike him. His jobs outside of his real life are designed to upset and annoy, but actually this is a man who will probably die of a massive heart attack and leave a huge hole in the lives of the people who actually see the real Jeremy - a man who loves pigs, has changed his mind about Brexit and stopped supporting the Tory party.

The Grand Tour and to a certain extent Top Gear are of a different era of television (especially now that the replacements on the BBC show have had to stop over health and safety concerns and the accident that almost killed Freddie Flintoff) but I shall miss them. 

Next Time...

Autumn is well and truly here. Will I like Agatha All Along? Especially as it might be a musical... The Old Man is back and if you remember I was so pissed off about the unexpected cliffhanger ending and the fact there's a second season I vowed not to watch it, but have since changed my mind. Obviously the Tolkien thing is still going on and this week I didn't fall asleep during it but I also wrote a scathing review (see above) and we're committed to it even though we've pretty much decided we're not going to indulge in season three. There are a couple of other things, but they won't get reviewed next week - Slow Horses we're waiting until we have all six - and anything else that pops up, like for instance The Perfect Couple and we might get around to watching more Mr Inbetween...

We still have a stack of films to watch, but TV is again starting to become the dominant format - as it often is from September until the end of November. Whatever we watch is difficult to forecast in advance and as with this week's effort I'm trying to branch out a little. As always, you'll find out next Saturday.  

 

Modern Culture - Short and Pithy...

There will be spoilers.

The Moon and Back

Probably the last thing NASA or sane people, in general, need is a film that suggests that some black ops wing of the US government planned to fake the moon landing in July 1969 for fear that the actual moon landing went wrong or failed. I mean, there's enough fucking nutters out there who think it was faked without making a film suggesting the US government were planning on faking it.

Fly Me To The Moon is an Apple movie starring (and produced by) Scarlet Johansson as PR guru Kelly Jones and Channing Tatum as flight director Cole Davis. Both these characters are fictional, Davis was not the Apollo flight director of a senior person at NASA - that was Gene Kranz - and all the people in this film, apart from Richard Nixon and the three actual astronauts - are fictitious. This makes a reasonably enjoyable film an absolute mess of bollocks. It is based on a book, which also featured made up characters, but suggested these were all covered up by the US government to ensure the truth never came out. This really is a movie that conspiracy theorists will look at in a few years time and call a biopic.

It isn't a bad film; it has some funny moments and the Americans do one thing better than anyone else in the entire world; they do 20th century movies absolutely flawlessly. This looked like 1969; used actual footage from 1969 and got most things absolutely spot on - apart from the names of the characters, a woman in a senior PR position and a black man on the mission control team. It also got a few other things wrong, but it looked authentic. Everything good about this was destroyed by everything that is bad about it. Johansson should know better; Tatum is prone to making shit decisions.

Sunny Can Suck A Dick

There's one thing you can safely say about the finale episode of season one of Sunny and that is we won't be watching any of season two of Sunny because the utter fuckbags only went and left it on a cliffhanger ending that neither the wife nor I give a single toss about. Sunny is turned into a raging protection robot whenever Suzie utters the words 'Go suck a dick' and if she says that then Sunny has to protect her 100%. So after everyone being reunited in one way or another - apart from Masa, who is probably still alive, we get some sort of general resolution that leads to something else... Mixxy then offers to drive Sunny to wherever she needs to go to do whatever the Yakuza needs to find something out and we discover it's all been a set-up, oh and Mixxy works for Hime (played by You), I don't even feel disappointed, I just feel I've wasted 300 minutes of my life to a big curly turd. This was not an Apple success; not in the slightest.

A Thin Line

What do you get if you cross a hit man with a loving father? Probably something a little like Mr Inbetween, a 2018 Australian TV series, with a huge IMDB rating, about a professional crook who has to look after his 9 year-old daughter - part of visitation rights - occasionally, which makes a strange juxtaposition, especially when his dodgy side has to surface when he needs to be nice. 

Scott Ryan plays Ray Shoesmith - the professional criminal who does 'dirty' jobs for the people he does work for. He's a reliable hard man and he's obviously as dodgy as fuck. He's also mad about his daughter and will protect her more than anything else and this is a TV series which is going to be about that and little else. In the opening episode Ray drops a man who owes someone money off the edge of a balcony, then beats up half of a duo of twats who bump into his daughter because they're not looking where they were going and meets a woman dog walking who I can't see would be the slightest bit interested in him but this is a TV show after all. As debuts go, it was all right, I expect it will develop as the episodes are wracked up.

No Ending For Film Fans

I remember the first time we watched No Country For Old Men, the Cohen Brothers film that won loads of awards and everyone raved about. We thought it was an okay movie, but the ending completely lost us...

In many ways, this follows the rules of most Cohen movies; something unexpected happens to someone and the film shows how that unexpected thing plays out. Sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's shocking - you don't really get half measures with these two and this is no exception. Josh Brolin stumbled across a drug deal gone wrong and finds a lot of money. The people who want the money hire Javier Bardem's Chigurh to recover it and to ensure the people involved are all kept silent. Chigurh is an A-list hitman; completely doing his job with a thoroughness that is admirable - literally no one ever walks away from a meeting with him. Tommy Lee Jones plays a local sheriff, on the verge of retiring, who is sorting through the mess that Brolin and Bardem are leaving in their wake and never really getting close to it - it is like he and his co-stars are literally in another movie. It is a violent film with lots of bloodshed and after two hours it ends with many unanswered questions. Lots of bits of key action are never played out on screen and you don't walk away with a feeling of satisfaction. The general theme of Jones's character is he's realised that - the USA in 1980 - is no country for old men...

Stocks and Shares

The thing about Trading Places is that I've never fully understood what the buying and selling bit meant apart from whatever they did they made a lot of money. The unfunny thing about Trading Places is its racial stereotyping; plus its glorifying prostitution as a 'business opportunity' and it had far too much gratuitous nudity in it - it was unnecessary and offered little to the story. For starters, it has the famous Jamie Leigh Curtis topless scene, the one that catapulted her into the realms of top actress and also spawned a strange meme in the 2000s that she was a hermaphrodite. I don't know if that last one is true I was told the story by a visitor.  

It is a story about two racist, intimidating, old men who decide to make a failed man's dreams come true while simultaneously destroying the life of a wealthy privileged man just because they could. Eddie Murphy plays the smart-mouthed soul brother catapulted into the riches and handling it surprisingly well, while Dan Ackroyd's charmed life comes to a screeching halt and only the help of a 'tart with a heart' - Curtis - saves him from going from hero to zero in less than 30 minutes of a film, except he wasn't a hero at any point and was still a privileged twot at the end of the movie. It actually hasn't aged that well, but I suppose lots of 80s films were like this...

Bits & Pieces

** When you've already reviewed a series that dropped all episodes at once and you feel it's unnecessary to write more reviews... This is the weird position I'm in with our TV habits at the moment. We're one and a half seasons into Grimm and while I've dipped my reviewing toe in a few times, this is a 10+ year old series that doesn't require constant attention. Kaos should have been reviewed in one go, but we only got halfway through the eight parts when Saturday came. Reviewing Sunny on a weekly basis has proven to be horrendously difficult, but that's mainly due to it not being very good...

** Then there's the LotR prequel which we're three episodes into the eight scheduled. It's now weekly for the next five weeks and that means I will normally be doing a review on that schedule, but... Let's put it this way; I think I'm watching it to see if anything happens and I somehow manage to understand what's going on. It's the Sauron character mainly in because his first reappearance in S02E01, he looked completely different from the Hallbrand identity he's been in all of season one. Yes, I realise that he's able to 'adapt' his appearance to his surroundings, but this isn't really made clear straight away. In fact, because of the two year gap, to be fully up to date with season two you'd really have to watch season one again and frankly I'd rather self harm. So, why are we persevering with it? I don't really know, is the honest answer. The problem with prequels is always the fact they're rarely innovative, you know the main villain is going to survive and because of this everything else just gets a bit... so what?

** Evil is over and I didn't expect to be talking about it so soon, except I'm not. Katja Herbers's character Kristen Bouchard has a husband in the series called Andy (a subplot that was never fully concluded), Patrick Brammall played Andy and was someone I'd never seen before, but he was convincing as an American. Then the BBC started to show adverts for the popular Australian comedy Colin From Accounts and it appears that Brammall, with his broad Aussie accent, is the main star (I would have said Colin, but that's the dog, apparently). Strewth, mate.

** Going somewhere else entirely... I know some people who prefer the platform formerly known as Twitter (and now known as Xitter in this house) and while I have an account, I rarely use it. What I find interesting about this is the way it reflects the real news and asks the questions you'd like journalists to ask, yet no one of any real importance looks at it and if they do they ignore things and subsequently it becomes this haven for hatred. There is a lot of things wrong with Facebook, but Xitter is really in the shitter. I'd love for some real journalists to appear on the landscape and ask some of the very valid questions thrown up on Xitter, but given the 'balance' we now have in our actual journalism that is unlikely. If you want to see very angry people being extremely hateful to each other it's worth checking out; you'll only want to do it once because you'll feel as though someone has taken a shit on you if you stay there any longer.

** One final thing. The weather, as reported elsewhere, has been shit this year and at present we're having proper summer at the start of September. This has been a year of bad forecasts, dashed hopes and watching all the optimism drain from weather forecasts. Every good spell of weather has disappeared faster than a something disappearing very fast... Except, the weather forecasters are very good at predicting shit weather. We have been told that once this short spell of fine weather is over we're going to be plunged into arctic air, it will get COLD and there might even be snow over the mountains, and do you know something? They will get this absolutely spot in; it will be so accurate you're going to be wondering how they do that so well yet can't get their optimistic forecasts even remotely correct. It's a fucking conspiracy, I tell you...

Next Time...

Don't listen to a word of my 'forecasts'. Yes, this might be a short week in terms of entries but it's still enough to satisfy. Next week we'll have the first two episodes of season four of Slow Horses, the fourth and fifth episodes of that fucking Tolkien nonsense, maybe some more of that Mr Inbetween and a number of recent films (or not). It'll be crazy or something, man.