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.