Modern Culture - God, Monsters and Mobsters

The usual warnings apply, but mostly as an advisory more than a proper spoilery thing...

Oh My God!

Who would have thought that a movie about picking a new pope could be so riveting? Except that's exactly what Conclave is, and not just that it was sumptuous to look at, relied on a clever script and the power of assumption to get across a very taut and intellectual thriller. I always talk about trying not to spoil anything for you, but sometimes - usually with a shit film - I almost feel obligated, yet that turns to desperately trying not to give anything away when something astounding and quite brilliant comes along and this film certainly falls into that category. With a fine cast including John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, Sergio Castellitto and Isabella Rossellini, this feature is held together by the fantastic Ralph Fiennes. It's about the sudden death of the Pope and the rigamorale of having to elect a new pontiff; except it's also about corruption, deceit, secrets and lies; it's about conspiracies and power struggles, men behaving badly when they want the highest job in religion - it is simply one of the films of the year. Oh and the end of the film delivers something of a triple whammy in terms of shock, unexpected endings. You will not guess what one of them is, let alone the handful of things that will leave you aghast and amazed. Highly recommended.

Monster High

This was the New Captain America and Deadpool's girlfriend versus the monsters! I suppose the best thing you can say about Elevation is that it's okay; it's all right; it's not that bad. I did a little bit of general logistics before I started writing this review; this was a 91 minute film; there was one death, a total of 6 monsters that were on screen for about 35 seconds and considering these 'beasties' wiped out 95% of the world's population in weeks there didn't appear to be that many of them knocking about. Anthony Mackie - playing Anthony Mackie, because that appears to be the only character he plays - and Morena Baccarin are the stars of this flea market monster movie that felt more like a TV movie than anything that might have been on at a cinema. It gets its title from the fact that mankind needs to live above 8,000 feet because the monsters - reapers - don't go above that height. They're almost impossible to kill, no one knows where they come from and Baccarin is an obsessed 'mad cat lady type' who has spent the three years since the world ended trying to come up with a way of stopping them or she gets drunk, because there's a lack of many things in post-apocalyptic Colorado, but not booze or bullets. There's a lot borrowed from A Quiet Place and there's stuff people seem to know despite 95%+ of the population being wiped out - like how they monsters are attracted to carbon dioxide - not from all mammals but only from humans.

It was just all right; it doesn't feel like a film I'll be thinking about watching again in a few years, nor does it really inspire me to recommend it to anyone; it's worth 90 minutes of your time more than some of the other tripe I've subjected myself to. It has a poor - 5.7 - rating on IMDB, but that's maybe a bit harsh, but there are more holes in the plot than a slab of Swiss cheese. There is an explanation as to why the monsters are almost impervious to attack, oh and there's actually a mid-credits scene suggesting that they might be from another planet and whatever sent them in now on its way. I somehow don't think there's going to be a sequel, but you never can tell...

Some Bridges Too Far

I've been trying to work out why we never watched 21 Bridges when it came out in 2019. Was it because by the time it made it to a streaming platform or DVD that its star Chadwick Boseman was dead and we just didn't get around to it. I can't say I'd ever heard of him before Black Panther and I dare say if he hadn't have made the big MCU breakthrough then he might not have made this; it could have ended up a Jamie Foxx vehicle or maybe even a Denzel film? The thing is Boseman is good in this taut little thriller about a couple of dodgy criminals who are hired to knock off 30 kilos of cocaine, but discover there's 300 kilos and the job is crawling with police - there is something fishy about the job, the guy protecting the coke and the speed and interest the cops have almost before the heist takes place...

The robbery goes massively tits up; seven cops are dead and the perps are on the run with most of the NYPD on their arses. Step forward Andre Davis - Boseman - son of a decorated police officer, who died on the job. Has he been picked to handle this because he's killed eight suspects in nine years or because he's a damned fine cop? What this movie does is take a fine cast, including JK Simmons, a surprisingly good Siena Miller, Stephan James and Taylor Kitsch and use them extremely well. The only complaint is I think it was over too quickly and maybe could have got away with a little more of the conspiracy theory that maybe wasn't a theory after all... Good film, worth a watch. 

The Last... Existential Crisis

The Resort did not fail to impress. The second and final part of the series (eps 5-8) took us in an altogether weird direction with subjects like love, loss, death, idiot brothers, red herrings and a couple of other things which might spoil it for you if I mention them. This was a fabulous little series, absolutely right up my street; a mixture of oddball, weird and quirky without being that quirky. Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper were fantastic as husband and wife Emma and Noah, navigating their way through not just a mystery but also their disintegrating marriage. Special mention to Luis Gerardo Mendez as Balthazar Frias, the former head of security at the titular Resort, also a fabulous tailor who belongs to a family that are the Mexican mafia in most ways apart from crime. Balthazar was an unbelievably tactless character, who asked inappropriate questions and missed his friend Alex so very much. He kept the eight parts together purely by being a bit of a dick, but one with a heart. It really is a show that if I tell you anything will ultimately ruin the strangeness and beauty of it; suffice it to say, it's only eight parts, each part is about 35 minutes long and if you stick with it the ending will fill you with joy and completely confuse you. It's a late entry into one of the best things I've seen this year, even if it was made in 2022. 

The End of the Grimm Line

What the fuck are we going to watch now? Where are we going to get our fix of crap police procedurals with added monsters? The final 13 episodes of Grimm were evenly split between 'plot' episodes and Wesen killing of the week; except, to focus on the latter first, we saw a different approach to the Wesen stories in this final season. For a start, the story lines were far more complicated, with the appearance that some real thought finally went into the world building aspect of having 'monsters' living among us. Take the standalone where Wesen have someone pay you a visit and quietly kill you if you start to get dementia and put yourself and other Wesen at risk. Or the one where a Wesen comes back every seven years to steal a really fat woman, who he then feeds on for the next seven years - that was weird and slightly gory enough without a giant hippo Wesen chomping his head off and then introducing herself to Nick. There was a massive element of dark comedy over the last couple of seasons, but none more so than this final series.

As for the series' Big Bad, well Zerstörer (basically the Devil) was something of a different foe for the Grimm and his 'Scooby Gang'. For starters it was all about prophecy and overthrowing the planet with evil, but also because unlike Wesen, this guy wasn't really phased by anything, to a point at least. Like its spiritual predecessor Buffy, and, successor, Lucifer, this ended on a final note, with an epilogue.

What I will say about Grimm is that it filled a gap; after 123 episodes, many of which were actually cringe-inducing, it leaves a hexenbiest sized hole. I'm amazed that I feel such affection for it. David Giuntoli was the closest thing to a real actor on show. Russell Hornsby - as Hank - has had a long a relatively successful career in television, but he wandered around this show like a slightly lost lamb at a barbecue; like he got the short straw and was the going-through-the-motions sidekick. Sasha Roiz, as Captain Sean Renard was never a convincing 'villain' nor was he a convincing 'hero', in fact apart from being a fine example of a polyglot, he was a pretty bad actor surrounded by many of his level of quality; no more so than Elizabeth 'Bitsie' Tulloch, who went onto have an even more successful career, this time as Lois Lane. She, like Claire Coffee (Adalind Schade) were afflicted by the ability to seem like they'd been hired from a bad amateur dramatics workshop. Even Reggie Lee - Drew Wu - who became a member of the team wasn't a good actor; he minced around a lot but had some of the best lines, which could easily have been directed at the fourth wall.

I did however have soft spots for Bree Turner - Rosalee - and the splendid Silas Weir Mitchell as Monroe - a man we saw in every single episode but never discovered what his surname was, even though he married Rosalee (but she kept her own surname). The two of them, despite being Wesen, often seemed like two characters from a rom-com who stumbled into the wrong show but hung around because they were having a good time. Like virtually all of the cast, they never really had major careers after Grimm, which seems a bit of a shame. I look forward to finding some other fun load of wank to dedicate over 100 hours of my life to in the future. It's been anything but grim...

Dune Poopacy

This is going to be a tough one because I kept falling asleep during it. The second episode of Dune: Prophecy essentially morphed into Game of Thrones in Space very quickly, lots of sex and boobs, some deaths, ghosts of the past and Travis Fimmel just stinking the set out with his lo rent acting and piss poor presence. I think there's a plot afoot to prevent the Benny Degenerates from becoming queens of the galaxy as Desmond Hart burns up the place in his quest to be enigmatic and help Mark Strong's emperor keep his shit together. Back on Degenerates home world, favourites are being poisoned for the benefit of history and there's some cod philosophy about sacrifices and learning the true nature of bollocks. Like I said, I fell asleep and when I wasn't falling asleep I was struggling to stay awake. I think I might not manage to make it all the way through this and I expect given we've got nearly 11,000 years to cover before the arrival of Paul Atreides then we might end up with hundreds of seasons and I don't have the will to watch one... 

A Man For Old Seasons

76 year old Ted Danson's latest TV show, A Man on the Inside is very nice, but coming from the team that brought us The Good Place that's not surprising. What I found about the first episode of this eight-part Netflix series is how the actual premise seemed so weak... Let me explain; Danson's Charles is a bored man who is over 75; his wife has recently died, his daughter wants him to get a hobby and Charles doesn't appear to be a man who runs away from challenges. So he applies for a job at a private investigators. They want a man on the inside at a care home for the elderly when the person hiring the PI firm goes to them about a very expensive necklace of his mother's that has gone missing. So Charles - over the next seven parts - will infiltrate, befriend and discover what has happened to the necklace. 

To get a bit 'in-depth': the average cost of a PI in the USA is about $800 per day; some are as low as $500 others in excess of $1000 - PER DAY! This guy whose mother's necklace is stolen looks like a rich guy - his mother is, after all in an exclusive care home - but is the necklace worth more than $30,000 plus expenses? The PI agency has hired Charles to inveigle his way into the staff and residents of the care home for at least 30 days; this includes state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, creating a new identity plus they're presumably going to be paying him? I expect the overall bill will be something like $50K - nice work if you can get it! 

I liked the first part; I laughed at a few things; it's poignant and believable even if the premise feels as contrived as a contrived thing (it is based on a novel/true story). It just makes me dislike the USA in a new and different way than the ways I usually dislike it. We're not going to watch any more, but you should if it's your kind of schmaltz...

Bore

The last time Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and director Robert Zemeckis got together it was to make Forest Gump and win lots of Oscars; so nearly 30 years later they got together again to make Here, a massively boring, static camera movie of the history of a house and its foundations. It was jam-packed with fucking atrocious special effects, making sections of the film look like the bits of back story you get on old video games, the kind that make it try to look like a film. The de-aging technique that helped with making Robert Downey Jr young again in Iron Man 3 has been redeployed and considering there is so much reference material for both Hanks and Wright they make them both look a bit plastic. In fact, Robin Wright simply looks fake and everyone is just too far away to put any detail on things. It needed a story but it doesn't really have one; there is a narrative but it isn't very good; there's a lack of interesting and the lives of most of the people who have lived in this 'Here' were... uninspiring, dull and really boring. It is an extraordinary film and I don't know if anything like this has ever been made, but that uniqueness doesn't save it from being about as interesting and tolerable as thrush. 

It's a FarGo

It's been four years since we watched the first Noah Hawley Fargo and it's been nine years since the second Noah Hawley Fargo was released. It is the longest staying item on the FDoD; it is something that we seem to have never got around to watching, but as we were still suffering from Cristin Milioti withdrawal it was the only place left to go... This story is set in 1979 and like the original Fargo it begins with a triple homicide, coming as a result of someone needing to find a lot of cash quickly to reimburse some dodgy men - this would be Keiron Culkin. He approaches a judge to get her to change her mind about something and it all goes horribly wrong with said judge, a waitress and short order cook all dying. It's from this point on that it gets very weird...

This second series is full of famous actors - Kirstin Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Ted Danson, Patrick Wilson, Jean Smart, Nick Offerman, the aforementioned Milioti, plus Bokeem Woodbine and characters from season one who are going to appear in this even though it's set about 15 years earlier. The opening episodes leave you wondering how these disparate sub plots are all going to segue together, but this being Fargo you know it will. We should really have watched this straight after season one.

Crystal Clear as Mud

We appear to be getting somewhere in Before. I was saying to the wife before we started watching the latest episode that something needed to happen; we've had six episodes of weirdness and no forward movement to speak of. So this week, in what was the shortest so far - 22 minutes including the opening sequence - was about Eli taking Noah to the home of Eli's wife's former lover Ben, who Eli failed to save after an OD. It does appear that we're entering into either a soul reborn territory or a form of possession, because Noah obviously is having some of Benjamin's memories, or at least is feeling the same anguish he felt before he died. With just three parts to go one would hope this gets a wiggle on. It's not that it hasn't been good, but you can only go so far on breadcrumbs alone...

Sweet as a Nut

A couple of months ago, I obtained Sweetpea, the SkyTV series starring Ella Purnell. It was very much a case of never judge a TV series by its initial IMDB rating. It looked good, sounded interesting and we were in the market for something different. Then I saw it had a 5.8 rating inside 24 hours of watching it. It disappeared off my watching schedule and I figured I'd dodged a bullet by not watching a couple of episodes first. Then the other day I was looking at some of the production details of The Resort when on the suggested section it had Sweetpea and it now had a 7.2 rating - the same show just a couple of months down the line, which had obviously been enjoyed by a greater number than those who hated it. So I added it to our list of 'to watch' and instead of continuing on with Fargo season two, as we should have, we watched the first three episodes of six of this instead... 

To say it's annoying would be accurate, but not in a bad way. it's annoying because Purnell's Rhiannon is a meek and mild wallflower, who lives for her dad and her dog and is suffering from the scars of adolescence when she was constantly bullied at school, especially by a certain girl and her entourage. I think we all know someone a little like Rhiannon or some of us have suffered what she did. The big difference is we didn't end up killing people as a result. The thing is Sweetpea - which is Rhiannon's nickname at the newspaper she works at - has horrible people in her sights; there's a unfettered vigilantism about her, even if she's just a little bit bonkers. It's like Dexter with a hormonally-challenged female lead! It's both entertaining and fascinating to watch Purnell's character slowly blossom into an attractive and assertive young woman, all through the medium of mass murder. The second three episodes will be reviewed next week!

Next Time...

Lots of stuff. It's piling up for the dark winter months ahead when all that's on TV is festive excrement, repeats and fuck all until some point in January when TV networks put us out of our misery and release some new stuff.