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.
No comments:
Post a Comment