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?