Modern Culture: The End?

Whatever spoilers there are will be for things you shouldn't watch...

Kraven the Wanker

Here's the thing, had this not been a 'comicbook' film it might have been quite enjoyable, but then when you have to factor in the acting, the script, the special effects and the absolute load of horse wank it ended up being and nothing can save this film - and Sony's much-derided Spider-less-verse - from the fate all of it deserves. Why do they make these films? Or more importantly why do they allow these films to be made so badly? My plan was to watch the first 20 minutes and then wax lyrically about what an absolute steaming pile of lion shit it was, but like a bad car crash I watched it until the end, relishing every bad scene, poor bits of dialogue and hackneyed attempt to make it a worthy addition to the 'super' genre. Yeah, that's two hours of my life I'll never see again, but I've got the lurgy and I've been too unwell to moan about it. So much didn't make sense; I presume Sony employ people to watch the unreleased version and if they do how come no one spotted the two or three HUNDRED continuity and story errors. Huge swathes of this made no sense at all; the dialogue was, seemingly, written by an 8-year-old... Actually, that's a terrible insult to most 8-year-olds. For the love of God, no more, please. 

Time's Wonky Arrow

Our decision to watch old films when we could have been watching less old films continued with a visit to Gregory Hoblit's Frequency, his film after Fallen, which we watched a few months ago. This stars Denis Quaid and Jim Caviezel as father and son talking to each other across time via CB radio during massive solar storms over New York state. It's proper timey-wimey stuff with Caviezel first saving his father's life and then getting him to investigate a serial killer, unawares that everything the two do across time has a knock on effect - the Butterfly Effect - which takes place in real time. It's a great concept let down by implausible things happening that should not happen and wouldn't necessarily result in where the film's direction goes. It's a good film that is spoiled a little by the ending and even more by the ending's epilogue, which is about as optimistic and wishful thinking as you can imagine.

A bit of weird knowledge. Hoblit rose to fame working with Steven Bochco, first on over 100 episodes of Hill Street Blues and then 37 episodes of NYPD Blue - during an early scene in this film, much attention was focused on the TV, which was playing an episode of Hill Street with Mick Belcher.

Earth Blah Blah Blah

We were treated to two parts of Earth Abides before Christmas and the final part a couple of days before New Year. It suggests to me that they were trying to get it over and done with before 2025. The thing is this is US TV and those decisions will have been made months ago, so it probably just felt like that. This week more of the same happened. Ish survives his run in with a mountain lion - but we don't know how - and another three years whizz past. This little commune has been together best part of 20 years when they get invaded by their first bunch of dodgy people, led by Charlie, a charismatic wanker who bullies his way into getting what he wants and is followed by either sycophants or cowards. Stuff happens that forces the community into making tough decisions and with one episode to go I'm wondering if the future of mankind, after a pandemic, is to survive as long as it can without falling victim to itself or whatever lies in wait... 

The conclusion to this well made but ultimately flawed series finds tragedy and a way forward for those who survive the second coming of the flu. This was spoiled by an absolute lack of jeopardy but as I said to the wife, it's probably what would happen. It really has been the dullest, but in places extremely fascinating, TV show I've watched in a while...

Law and Order

I wanted our Christmas Night movie to be something to remember; something that has a good set of reviews and looks like a wise choice. It was clearly going to be the Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult white supremacist film The Order. Everything about it looked right - good cast, historical drama that's based on a true story and... The Guardian really liked it. I suppose I should end the year slipping back into old habits and taking that newspaper's recommendations as anything other than a warning to avoid. This was remarkably dull; even the 'exciting' bits were just meh. It tries to paint a picture that Neo-Nazis are humans as well, while simultaneously saying good people do stupid racist things. It just felt like a long anti-climax that looked good but was really difficult to like.

La Zzzz

Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing Christmas 2024 was languid and snooze inducing. The boys went to France and I got the impression that it probably wasn't the best idea they've ever had. They caught some fish, talked about stuff and proved that maybe, sometimes, this is a TV show that has sometimes run its course. Half the show was without the dog Ted, he turned up and it became all about Ted. It's like sometimes they just haven't got much to make a show from and the amount of time spent on the - admittedly - very large carp suggested to me that there was a struggle to film enough useable material. More an addendum than a special. 

Dune and Dusted

The sixth and final episode of season one of Dune Prophecy came and went. Nothing was resolved; people died and everything was set up nicely for season two, which I won't be bothering with.

Dull and Dustier

What might have been the final part of James May and the Dull Men arrived just after Christmas and it was... dull. Not a lot was dealt with apart from chocolate and macaroni, which apparently has potential.

Who's Sorry Now

We didn't watch Doctor Who on Christmas Day, we watched it on Boxing Day and we weren't really looking forward to it. It's often when you least expect something to be any good that exceeds expectations and this might not have made a huge amount of sense - and old leaky eyes managed to cry yet again - but it was quite a lovely and quirky little tale of anger, loneliness and bringing a little bit of Joy to the World. I didn't know who Nichola Coughlin was, but I was impressed with the hotel receptionist - Stephanie de Whalley - and her undying love for the Doctor - a well worn path that never fails to be one of Doctor Who's most endearing traits. I enjoyed this. Like I said it struggled to make sense and there seemed to be some senseless deaths, but it was more than I expected and therefore more than we deserved.

Ghost of a Past

The last century is over 25 years ago now... The last time we watched Stir of Echoes was 25 years ago and it's not really a film that has aged well. It does paint this romanticised version of Chicago, the same way Shameless US did, where everybody parties in the yard all the time and everyone is friends with someone else. Kevin Bacon plays this borderline-arsehole telephone engineer who after getting hypnotised at a party starts seeing ghosts (just like his son, who didn't need to be hypnotised) and what follows is twisting whodunnit, which despite not having seen it for a quarter of a century we both remembered as soon as the reason for remembering came onto the screen. It's a little creepy, but in reality is feels as though it was an attempt to cash in on The Sixth Sense with a less creepy kid seeing the ghosts this time. It's not a bad film, but age hasn't been kind to it.

It's Only Christmas

The regular series of Only Connect has been replaced by a bunch of specials for this festive period. I know quite a few people who dislike this quiz show because of Victoria Coren-Mitchell rather than for any other reason. I've grown ambivalent about her over the last decade or so, but I do think she's quite amusing, if you like that kind of thing. This year's Christmas specials have been a mix of easy and 'bloody hell, these are supposed to be fun!' Old teams come back; you think you recognise them, but do you or is it just your quiz brain playing tricks on you? I get confused even when I see this year's competitors again because I can't remember them from the last time they appeared...

Shine On 

There's this possible apocryphal story about Stephen King getting excited about Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Dr Sleep until he learned that the studio putting up the money wanted it to not only be an adaptation of the then recent King novel, but also a direct sequel to Stanley Kubrick's divisive The Shining. This meant that Flanagan - a piss poor sell out of a director IMNHO - wrote the screenplay, directed and eventually edited his own version...

Dr Sleep, which stars Ewan McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson, isn't a bad film at all, at least until the last 30 minutes when it veers away from the book and into the territory that King hated so much he paid for and co-wrote his own TV adaptation of The Shining (with I believe his oft 90s collaborator Mick Farris). It has to be said that I loathe Kubrick's adaptation about as much as King, so I absolutely detested the last 30 minutes of this film. It literally threw away the last 100 or so pages of King's Dr Sleep novel and made up an ending to make the producers happy. The way it tied the two together, which, strangely, the follow up book doesn't really try to do, ruins a perfectly good story - but only if you've read the books. If you're a fan of the Kubrick film you'll be happy with the many nods back to the 1980 film. It also needs to be pointed out that this was Flanagan's Director's Cut of the film, so it cuts lots of Henry Thomas's mediocre Jack Nicholson impersonation and keeps the appearances of young Danny and his mother to a minimum - almost as if he was publicly apologising to King for fucking up his adaptation.

Don't get me wrong; it's a good film (I recall hating it much more when I saw it in 2019) and the three hour run time absolutely whizzes past. I'm just always going to have a problem with anything that wants to be associated with Kubrick's film. 

Goofy Goonies

I haven't seen The Goonies for probably 40 years. It's a noisy cacophony of a film with a lot of very silly things happening and is without a doubt a kids' movie. I remembered many people in it like Sean Astin, one of the Coreys and, of course, Ke Huy Kwan... But how many of you know or remembered that a young teenage Thanos was in it? Yes, Josh Brolin (son of James) was the hunk member of the team of kids searching for pirate treasure. He hasn't aged well...

Blah Blah Blah

And that is it. As I write this it's a little before noon on New Year's Eve. There's just over 12 hours - of yet another shit year - to go. I came down with a virus on the 28th and have been housebound since, coughing and sneezing and leaving all the dog work to the wife. 

I've also been in a real quandary for the last few weeks. I've even written a blog about it, which seemed like a good idea at the time but still remains half finished and will probably be deleted after I publish this... The thing is, I have to change my lifestyle a little in 2025. Health concerns (nothing serious, touch wood) mean that I need to get out more, find some hobbies and focus on new goals. I've taken up Tai Chi, which has been fun even if my fragile back hates it and I've decided that I'm going to have another go at writing a novel. I should just go back and rewrite one of the many I've 'finished' but this time it isn't about me, it's about... er... me. The process of writing a novel will give me some of the focus I need; the discipline to sit down and work on an idea rather than be waylaid by the internet, on-line golf games and getting angry at wankers on social media.

One of the side lines of this quandary has been what to do with my blogs. They are one of the few things in my life that give me a purpose, the problem I have with them is I think the blog has lost its purpose and has become a bit directionless. I know, how can a weekly TV and Film blog have lost its direction? I don't necessarily watch too much TV, but it does look like it. The blog has become a diary of my cultural life and that is quite sad because most of the culture I have is from the box in the lounge.

I've tried revamping the blog before and ended up going back to the tried and tested format. I want to continue with it, but do the people who read this (and there are quite a few of you) really want to see reviews of 40 year old films? In fact, do they want to see reviews of anything that's older than last year's Christmas presents? Retro reviews are one thing, but I'm not sure I really want to pad out my weekly blogs with my thoughts on a film that came out in 1977, let alone one that came out in 2017, and I'm sure my loyal readers don't either. 

So, next time you might see the same thing or you might see something a little different. I'm torn. I feel like I want to try something different, but what that different is I have no idea.

I will tell you that I'm kind of done with wishing people a Happy New Year because my experience of life, especially over the last 25 years is that it really doesn't get better and even if we have a reasonable year, there's always some shit that happens to take the shine off of it... Apart from the weather, the death of one of my best friends and the fact I'm now nearly 63, 2024 hasn't been very good at all. We live in a divided world and the future is anything but bright... 

So, in 2025 I hope no one you love dies or gets a horrible disease. I hope you remain solvent and don't want for anything. May you and your loved ones have a peaceful, caring and sharing year. You all get the amount of sex that you want and your orgasms are intense and not at all messy.

Now fuck off and do something useful.

Pop Culture - All I Want For Christmas...

Spoilers exist; maybe not so much here, but they do exist and they will get you...

Definitely NOT The Waltons

Christmas films, eh? So many of them get churned out now that it's an industry unto itself. Even Netflix has got in on the Hallmark act; as November becomes December you just get so much festive shit some of it's bound to stick to something other than the dog blanket. So when I saw a recommendation for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, I was immediately unimpressed and scrolled on... Except, it had a remarkably high IMDB rating - 7.1 (at time of watching) as opposed to most Christmas films being between 4.8 and 6 - and the two positive reviews I read were by people who claim to be Christmas cynics. Was it worth giving it a go?

Well, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is one of the best [new] Christmas films I have seen in well over 30 years. The thing about it though is it's really all about Christians, about the meaning of Christmas and how so many Christians are such utter selfish pricks and arseholes they don't deserve a joyous festival such as Yule. Christians have a massive propensity to be utter cunts; a most pious religion, with blinkered wankers coming out of every vestibule and pulpit. One of the reasons I dislike Christmas so much (and think it should be held every four years, like the Olympics, in a different country) is the way Christians have subverted it and all the other basic tenets of religion. Christians are fucking horrible, by and large, and this film goes a long way to proving this theory of mine by portraying many of the Christians in it as fucking arseholes...

The Herdman kids are the worst family ever. No one has ever seen their parents; they live in the shittiest part of town and the six of them are essentially feral. Beatrice Schneider (who was utterly fantastic and reminded me of a young Emma Kenney from Shameless US) is the oldest Herdman, Imogene - the leader of the rag tag band of trouble - and she decides that she and her siblings should be in the town's 75th Christmas Pageant - a 'living' nativity scene, with the kids playing different parts. Except this year, six of the parts will be taken up by Herdmans - Imogene as Mary, Ralph as Joseph, three other brothers as the Three Wise Men and the youngest Gladys as the Angel. Everybody, including the emergency director of the pageant thinks it's going to be a disaster, especially as the Herdmans only seem to be doing it for free food. The entire movie is narrated by Molly Bell Wright, who plays Beth, the daughter of the slightly ineffectual Grace - her mother who takes on the job of director when the regular woman breaks both of her legs in a freak accident.

This is a feelgood film. Packed to the rafters with hometown, homespun yuletide overload - this is suburban USA in the early 1970s. You sometimes get the feeling that god plays far too much a prominent role in this movie, but I think that's deliberate, because as the feature progresses you see fewer moments of genuine Christian values and a greater number of bigots and people who look down their noses at those worse off. It's packed full of messages, but it's also funny and a bit schmaltzy, but also weird and the Herdmans all ask questions that most people would take for granted. In fact, some of the questions they ask would have them labelled as communists, probably. It's never going to be the best Christmas film you will ever watch, but I'll bet you an eggnog and a full on mistletoe kiss with tongues that you enjoy it considerably more than you think you will. 

Serial Boring

The fifth James May and the Dull Men was surprisingly more entertaining than the previous three. It wasn't a patch on episode one, but the three subsequent ones got quite tedious. This, to be fair, is also quite tedious, but it's amusing, which is more than you can say for the bulk of this series. This week's challenges were: to make a work desk that forces you to exercise (pictured), which might just have some real world practical uses; how to make pasta from pasta and how much ink - in kilometres - is there in your average Bic pen? I still think Seb Tiley - James's odd mate - is as creepy as any villain in a modern horror film, but this week he managed to get one of the production team girls help him out with his Bic challenge and if I was an attractive young lady wearing skimpy summer clothes, I would not be within jizz-lobbing distance of this man; so perhaps he is benign.

The sixth part, had something really useful in it. But first we had to suffer James learning to cut hair in three hours; they made a stupid Sunbrella, bringing the summer under the canopy and making a bowl out of broken bits of old bowls using epoxy resin - which was interesting. Then out of the blue a seventh episode arrived and that was equally as pointless as the previous one... I would be surprised if this show got renewed for a second season.

Comme ci Comme ça

So... Secret Level, the new cgi animated Tim Miller series (the guy who brought us Love, Death & Robots) arrived and we watched the opening four episodes on Sunday night. Two were okay and we gave up on the other two. 50-50 isn't bad, but we're not gamers so what we did watch and became invested in was needed to be good almost from the outset. The best of the opening half of episodes was The Once and Future King about an arsehole Viking-like barbarian - voiced by Arnold Schwarzenegger - it was just a shame that we didn't have subtitles for all the non-English bits. However, after a couple more episodes we decided not to bother with it. The series was only really there as episodic space fillers - something quick to watch when we had less than half an hour to waste - that not to say that the animation hasn't been excellent, it's just been our lack of knowledge of the source material that has been problematic and there's other things out there we need to watch. 

Old Dogs and Wild Cats

Earth Abides reached the halfway point and while the first part covered a year, the second part two years, by the time this one ends - on an actual cliffhanger - 14 years have passed, umpteen children and more survivors - all with stories we never really delve into - now all live in this quiet suburb of San Francisco. The fact that 14 years have whizzed by and very little of note has happened - whatever dramas there have been are all understated and slightly devoid of drama and at times it simply feels like a bunch of off-gridders living in a commune and having little to do with anyone else. The climatic ending of the second part is explained away inside 30 seconds of the third episode and actually little happened between Ish's encounter with a mountain lion at the start of the episode and his next encounter with one at the end. The true thing about this is if 99.9% of people were killed off, there might still be as many as 10 million people left alive; but Earth is a big place and if survivors were evenly spaced there would be an element of luck involved to ever find anyone else.

Wayward Son

[Subtle Kansas reference there...] We haven't really seen Taron Egerton in a bad film, that was until now, because while Carry-On isn't really bad, it is about as far removed from good as you can get in the making of a Die Hard styled movie for Christmas. This was implausible from the word go and while some of the set ups in this might possibly be workable, given the state of US flights since 9/11 and the fact getting on a plane with something dodgy is about as likely as winning two lotteries, one after another. This is your typical going-nowhere average Joe who works at airline security but doesn't really enjoy the job, but is there for his girlfriend, who would rather he became a police officer. From the point where unreliable and uncommitted Egerton decides he wants to be promoted this movie veered into Contrived Land. Jason Bateman is his usual excellent self as the baddy, who always seems one step ahead of everyone else, until something happens that changes it. To say any more would give it away and the last thing you'd want me to do is tell you how they all die horribly at end - the hero, the villain and all the people in the airport - it's Christmas Carnage and, of course, none of that happens. It's on Netflix...

Minnesota Madness Part 3

And so to season three of Fargo... This one has some more A listers and classy actors involved - the fact that Noah Hawley has made something that has top celebs queuing up to be in is testament to a quality product and oddly enough, for a while, we started to wonder how season three could possibly stretch itself out to be 10 episodes, when the two police officers had pretty much worked out the nuts and bolts of the plot by the end of episode four. Anyhow, this time around it's Ewan McGregor - in two roles - Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Stuhlbarg, Carrie Coon, David Thewlis, Mary McDonnell, Hamish Linklater, Shea Wigham, Scoot McNary and Ray Wise, all involved in something decidedly dodgy in 2010. It's about two brothers - one a successful real estate man and the other a failed probation officer - and an argument over a rare stamp that escalates into something you wouldn't imagine happening. There's also the subplot - or is it the real plot - involving an extremely dangerous group of people infiltrating the rich brother's life and business with devastating effects...

Here's the thing; Fargo is more than just the Cohen Brothers film. Noah Hawley has created an entire Fargo universe of stories and links to the past, present and future, all taking place in the winter and all taking place in that strange triangle between Minnesota, North Dakota and, at times South Dakota. We're late to this parade, but I suspect we're not the only ones. Fargo has an 8.9 rating on IMDB - let that sink in... there's little else that is rated higher; so if you've never been tempted - be tempted.   

QI XM

The annual QI Christmas Special dropped a week before the big day and while QI is a bit hit or miss nowadays, this was an entertaining and obviously quite Christmassy attempt at elevating festive information into the realms of silly and absurd. As usual with QI now, there is an element of tenuous and titles of programmes tend to be advisory rather than specific. Sandi Toksvig hosts as usual and is joined by Gyles Brandreth, Lulu, (the very funny) Emmanuel Sonubi and, of course, Alan Davies, who still manages to look and sound amazed when he scores so little. Brandreth was a little more restrained than he usually is, although if you didn't know him you'd seriously wonder about the voracity of my previous statement. Lulu might as well not have bothered turning up; they could have just had a recording of her laugh and played it ear-bleedingly loud. Sonubi has been on the show before and is a genuinely funny man, while Alan Davies sometimes looks as though he can't wait for Z to arrive (although what he'd do after QI is a question worth pondering).

Festive Property Porn

You can tell there's fuck all on TV at the moment if I'm reviewing Scotland's Christmas Home of the Year 2024. Actually, at one point about 15 minutes into this, I was on my phone texting my brother, when the wife said, "Are you watching this?" To which I replied, "Not really. If I was watching it I would be moaning about it and you'd be asking me why I'm watching it." ... Anyhow, the best house won the prize, although the third and fourth houses were also worthy of winning. The second house, which I wasn't keen on, came second and the first house that was all a bit sterile was voted the least best. I miss Michael Angus and Kate Spiers who used to present this with Anna Campbell-Jones, who seems to be letting her naturally curly hair grow out. Banjo Beale is quite a character even if he is Australian and the new guy, a young architect who I can't be bothered to check his name, is just a massive twat with big feet and unbelievably boring. The last two sentences are why I don't tend to watch any more because the wife gets fed up with me being fed up with the dull and boring presenters. The thing is, Campbell-Jones is English (but lives and works in Edinburgh), Beale is an Aussie (who lives on Mull) and [checks internet] Danny Campbell might be Caledonian but zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. At least Angus and Spiers were both Scottish and excellent foils for each other - one being an architect (about my age) and the other an interior designer and [ahem] social media influencer. The new guys just aren't worth listening to; if you don't care what they're saying then there's no point in them being there.

Dune But Not Forgotten

So we've arrived at the penultimate part of the (presumably) first season of Dune Prophecy. I didn't fall asleep during it and some stuff happened. Traitors were exposed; people were put into places where they can fail and I think I started to get a slight grip on the story, which I'll admit might have been quite intriguing if it hadn't been so fucking dull. Fantastic sets, great special effects, some good actors and a story that, like other Dune things, is just too up its own arse to be something to actually care about. Mark Strong's Emperor and his pet Travis Fimmell make their moves and try to flush out any traitors and Sisterhood spies; allegiances are formed and ghosts come back to inhabit the living to give this mystic science vibe. I have to admit I've spent almost a third of this asleep, I'll be glad to see the back of it; I'm sure it's been good, but those bits must have happened while I was sleeping... 

Trailer Trash?

Is it James Gunn? Does he have a superpower? I don't necessarily believe that because I have never been a huge fan of the first two Guardians of the Galaxy pictures. I actually really understood Gunn with Suicide Squad and then with the final Guardians film, which I think was down to familiarity rather than it being a imaginative bit of story telling, which we all ignored because it was so enjoyable - in a kind of nasty way. So, while I've been badgering away at the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the last year or so, Gunn has been rebuilding the DC Universe in his own image. The fruits of his labours will be unleashed on the cinematic public in the summer when Superman arrives (apparently a week before Marvel's The Fantastic Four reboot). Originally it was going to be called Superman Legacy, it appears that Warners are going for broke with the basics. 

There's Krypto the Super Dog and lots of Clark and his alter-ego, Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult (blimey, he's come a long way since Skins) as Lex Luthor. There are also other super beings, some recognisable, some new (to me) and one that looks suspiciously like Guy Gardner (unless you know, it's a long and mostly laborious story about a wanker who becomes a Green Lantern). I have to be honest, it stirred something in me that I haven't had for quite a while, but I am a Man of Steel fan and have been since the 1990s. That has waned since I've got old and cynical of superhero stuff. I've never watched the Lois and Superman series (and now I know Elizabeth Tullie from Grimm...). Yet, this seemed to twang a note in me. The thing is, I don't want to get my hopes up, because the disappointment will be too much.

Duller and Dull

So we finally settled down to watch a highly rated movie which we had never seen - Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, a film I now can kind of understand why we never got around to watching it. Yes, it's a great image of the horrors of modern desert warfare and how it affects the people involved, but it was just a testosterone-fuelled two hours of snapshots from just over a month in Iraq in 2004 of a team of bomb disposal men; or to be more precise a bomb disposal man and his two oppos with guns and licence to shoot anyone who looks a threat. Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie - aka Hawkeye and Captain America before they were famous - were the two main actors and it was angsty and earnest and just a little too... meh. I'm sure it's supposed to be so much more than that, but I found myself checking my phone a lot.

You Won't Care

You see this 'humorous' meme, to the left? They have literally made an entire Christmas feature film about this with Jack Black as Satan. It's called Dear Santa and it's a Bobby Farrelly movie about a young dyslexic child who sends Satan a letter rather than Santa. It has a 5.3 rating on IMDB and has some truly appalling reviews, so I wonder if people in the production team got friends to leave positive reviews about it...

I made the picture as small as I could, but I still couldn't write enough words to fill the appropriate space. Perhaps this proliferation of shite Christmas films is to cover up some abnormality or deficiency in the producers of such vomit. I saw a clip of the above film a few weeks ago and knew instantly that it was going to be a large heap of steaming cow shit. Why can't Hollywood give me a lot of money and I'll given them FIVE ideas of how to make better, more commercially successful movies... 

The End...

You know when you've invested time and effort into something and you quickly realise that you're not going to get the pay off you anticipate? Well, the finale of Before was exactly like that. For nine weeks, we navigated our way through the four hours of bollocks hoping that there would be a denouement that was fitting of the strange and ghostly set up. Sadly, we got to the end and I wasn't really sure what I'd witnessed. Was it about inner redemption? Maybe about ghosts that needed to be rid of? In the end it did seem to be all about Eli (Billy Crystal) and Noah seemed to be a conduit. Why the boy was there and what good using him proved to be was somewhat lost and what started as a creepy feeling psychological thriller descended into a what felt like a lot of New Age mumbo-jumbo. Was there a ghost moving the pieces and ultimately what pieces were being moved. Crystal was excellent, but it felt like a wasted opportunity in the end...

Christmas Film

There have been some excellent Christmas films, we all have our favourites. As I started editing this week's blog The Bishop's Wife had just started on BBC2. It's a truly wonderful film and like many other classics of its ilk you don't really know it's a Christmas movie, despite it playing out behind David Niven, Loretta Young and Cary Grant. Marvellous! 

Next Time...

... you read this column Christmas will be all over apart from that period between Boxing Day and New Year when you don't know if you've had a shit that day, whether or not you have visitors coming round and if your liver can take any more booze that you avoid drinking 363 days a year.

I hope you all have a festive and fun Yule and if you're expecting a list of favourite films and TV of 2024 then can I recommend trawling through the 52 or so posts I've made in 2024 and picking the carrots out of the vomit yourself? Have a good one!

 

Modern Culture - It's Not All Bad

There will be no spoilers in this week's blog (there might be some suggested in the review of Earth Abides, but trust me you won't watch it so I'm not really spoiling it) ...

Venom: The Half Arsed

You kind of want to call it a Curate's Egg, but you know that's not an accurate description because there's a lot of bad and hardly any good. Venom: The Last Dance is a strange conclusion though; a movie that actually feels as though it is trying to escape the stench of the first two films by creating its own stink. Tom Hardy is credited with co-writing this and if that's the case we should start a petition to prevent Tom Hardy from being allowed near a word processor, any pens, crayons or pencils and paper ever again, because he doesn't understand what a continuous narrative is nor how to structure a story. This was a series of slightly unrelated things happening to a largely British cast with a subplot that literally came out of nowhere and sat on the outside looking in for most of the film. The big bad of this film was a spectator and his emissaries were indestructible until they weren't any longer. Everyone picked up a symbiote as all the symbiotes made friends with each other and united in the face of a bigger threat. There were bits of genuine attempts at comedy in this movie; scenes that perhaps were thought to be able to rival Deadpool or even a funny film. Everything about this felt nearly done, almost thought out, like someone had a good idea but it just disappeared as it was coming together.

Venom's constant 'comic' dialogue is a USP, or at least I think it is. I think the makers of Venom movies think Venom is cool and it's why people go to the cinema to watch it. I'm not convinced, but equally I'm not convinced this was what they originally had planned for this film, because, you know, it felt so bloody half-arsed and under-cooked. It's like the crew had a bet to see how many anti-climaxes they could unwittingly unleash on the unsuspecting. It wasn't a bad movie in that it really is a bad movie but there's an element of knowing it was a bad movie but just not giving a shit about it. 

The Big Red One

The problem I'm going to have here is how to convey my absolute disbelief and amazement about this utterly dreadful, tonally-wrong, heap of concepts that have been glued together to try and make a coherent movie from an idea that sucks so badly if it was a blow job it would still take four months and nine days to make a horny 15-year-old spotty oik have an orgasm. This was a truly devious crime against humanity with an all star cast and the - and this is actual - feeling that at least half the actors in this decided they weren't really going to take it seriously. Take Lucy Lui for example; I am convinced she had a smirk on her face for most of the film because she knew she was getting paid a shit load of money for appearing in the cinematic equivalent of a wet fart - except, wet farts have a certain comedic value which this movie was devoid of.

It's essentially about a cynical kid who grows up to be someone who accidentally gives away co-ordinates that lead to the home of Santa Claus and allows some snow witch to kidnap Ol' Nick and try to punish all the naughty people in a really nasty way. Chris Evans - yes, he who has shat his future career away in 2024 by appearing in things that Eric Roberts turned down - is the cynical Jack O'Malley, who has to team up with Santa's head of security Callum Drift - Dwayne Johnson - to find Red One - played by JK Simmons. Involved also is the aforementioned Lucy Lui, Keirnan Shipka (utterly wasted), Bonnie Hunt and a load of people you've never heard of as the 'mythical world' becomes real in this Amazon arse vomit. It's probably like ejaculating your brain through your hair follicles but more painful. This isn't a kids' film; it isn't an adults' film and it probably won't be enjoyed by dogs.

The Dune Prophylactic 

This is how it went. I struggled, again, to stay awake during Dune: Prophecy. It might have been because Fimmell was in it again, or it might be for a more basic reason. Let me explain by giving you an example: at the conclusion of this fourth part, I turned to the wife and said, "Do you know what's going on?" To which she replied, "I think so, but equally I'm not sure." I said, "Last week worked for me because it was a simple two handed tale about how the sisters became who they are. I just don't understand what is going on with all this current stuff and I don't know who half the people are." The wife nodded sagely and we're faced with a dilemma. I think neither of us are enjoying Dune: Prophecy and given half the chance I think we'd give up, right now. I mean, we do have a choice, but I think there's only two episodes to go, then we can give up on it having watched an entire season and not give a flying fuck whether it gets renewed for another 5 or 500 more seasons.

The Reasonable Seven

There was a remake of The Magnificent Seven made in 2016 - 50 odd years after the original. This multicultural remake starred Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio and a whole bunch of people you've never heard of and Peter Skarsgård as the villain. It was, at best, unspectacular, reasonably paced entertainment that tried to capture the feel of old westerns while also trying to give it a contemporary feel. It was as westerns go a film about cowboys, with some 'Indians' and  some bad guys; lots of altruism in a time when the USA was not renowned for being altruistic and it felt a little long at nearly two hours. The only woman in the cast was portrayed as sultry and borderline sexy and there was just something about this film that felt old fashioned in more ways than one.

Nope, No Idea

I think what Before needed was a story that was more... direct. It's been an interesting series so far, but it has simply lost me (and I'm sure others as well). Is it a ghost story? Is it all in his mind? Is it about a dead man possessing a young orphan? Something came to light with this - first part of a double bill this week - with the existence of the cabin that has been prominent throughout the series. It was important because it was where Eli's dead wife Lin took her beau-before-Eli Ben before he died under the care of Eli (and if that sentence was confusing just remember what comedy series Billy Crystal made his break in). The truth is I have no idea what's going on and I doubt whatever is happening will blow me away when it's finally revealed, but we head into the finale next week with Eli and Noah 'on the run' and hoping to find a resolution to all of the supernatural mumbo-jumbo we seem to have waded through. This and the previous episodes were 22 minutes long, minus the two to three minutes of recaps and opening titles; it started as a 35 to 40 minute show and almost halved that by the penultimate part; it was like whoever made this didn't want to overwhelm us too much with all the nothing that has been going on...

Rat Planet

Welcome to a variant on Schrodinger's Television programme - something that is simultaneously dull and exciting at the same time. While I'm sure the wife could stop right now, she did take on board the simple reality of this odd little mini-series; Earth Abides is as boring as The Walking Dead and just a wee bit scarier. At least the humans are not wandering into jeopardy to be able to get from A to B. You might have noticed I said 'humans'? That's because Alexander Ludwig has been joined by Jessica Frances Dukes - the person he suspected was living nearby from the end of episode one. The interesting thing for me is that Dukes was last seen in Ozark as the heavily-pregnant FBI agent trying to turn Jason Bateman into an FBI informant. In this, her character Emma, falls pregnant after some well telegraphed sex with Ish and she spends most of the episode looking extremely heavily-pregnant - typecasting?

The big thing this week was vermin. It starts with Emma - checking out Ish's pad - finding evidence of mice in his cupboards and pretty much ends with them fighting a plague of rats. It seems that the world's ecology is not conforming to how people thought it would if man disappeared. There aren't many birds, but that might be because of the proliferation of rats and other rodents. The thing is, when the couple and Lucky the dog were essentially overrun and attacked by the hordes of rats, it was a damned sight more scary than anything the zombie shows ever threw up at us. The problem is Earth Abides is boring and yet it covers a huge amount of time in 50 minutes; we start with the meeting and end with an addition - well over a year is covered. Yet other than the rats - which were genuinely quite scary, in a because-it's-so-logical way, the most jeopardous thing was Ish falling off the roof while trying to put some solar panels up. That is until the final scene... Emma takes some spray paint - signposted earlier (see attached picture) - and writes a big HELLO message telling any survivors where exactly they are and it immediately attracts someone. It might seem like a logical thing to do - announcing your presence - but we all spent years watching TWD and know that 'other people' are the ones you need to worry about the most...

The Hit Man and Her

The difficult thing about Black Doves, at least for me, was keeping up with it. I'd sort of lost my way by the end of the second episode and it took a gentle reminder in the third for me to remember what this entire blood soaked slightly comedic thriller was about. The thing is events in episode one are quickly ... forgotten about is the wrong expression, but parked to one side is probably better. By the end of the second episode I was a little confused almost bordering on bored, but by the end of the third I was back onboard with this black ops/spy thriller starring Ben Wishaw - as a very gay assassin - and Keira Knightly as his occasional 'beard' and deeply infiltrated field oppo. She - Helen, wife of the Defence Secretary - just happens to have been having an affair with someone deeply involved in the next sentence... It all revolves around the death of a Chinese ambassador. But also a hit job that Wishaw didn't finish seven years earlier that is now coming back to haunt everyone; it's also about a very influential crime family and possibly a dodgy PM. It's good fun, very violent, but there's an element to it which I'm finding a little too trite - it should be fresh and unique, but it just misses out; perhaps it was the simplicity of the story, or the fact that everything became mired in everyone's own self-importance. It also leaves you with the feeling they might come up with an excuse to make another series and if that happens they might need a less flimsy story to build around. 

Coming of Age

Nearly a decade ago, my brother-in-law Neil recommended a film for us to watch and we duly watched it and were glad he'd recommended it. Recently, I heard about a film starring Martin Sheen called The Way and I thought it might be worth watching and I managed to snag that, but while I was looking I also found that other recommendation, called The Way Way Back and thought it might be worth watching again. It was!

The film stars Liam James as an awkward 14 year old called Duncan, who is forced to spend summer with his mother - Toni Collette - her insufferable twat of a boyfriend - Steve Carell - and their summer base's extended family, which includes an immense Allison Janney, Robb Corddry and Amanda Peet. Duncan is bullied by mom's boyfriend, but in a subtle, mentally abusive way and mom is giving twat a free pass because her ex-husband and Duncan's father left her for a younger woman and she's emotionally weak. It's all too much for Duncan, so he finds himself at the local water/swimming pool venue where he's befriended by the park's carefree and highly immature owner played superbly by Sam Rockwell - in his best role by a country mile. Rockwell's Owen sees a kindred spirit in Duncan and gives him a job for the summer.

What follows is just the story of a young man discovering himself and his confidence coming up against an arsehole who's so much of a control freak that when he lies he thinks the world will lie with him, until, in the end Duncan stands up to possible stepdad and exposes him as a philanderer. Written down this sounds like it could be a mess of a film, but it's utterly splendid and any shy or nervous youngster should be made to sit and watch this. There's an odd 'other time' feel to it, but it is contemporary, it just plays down things like mobiles and the internet for human relationships. Watch it, it's brilliant.

Grey Greyness 

I couldn't find a suitable picture for the fourth episode of James May and the Dull Men, a series we'd forgotten about but reappeared on my torrents web page, so I downloaded the remaining three parts under the express hope that it got interesting again. The fourth part was by far and away the dullest so far. It involved Milton Keynes roundabouts, which might have been interesting but wasn't; how to dispense the correct amount of toothpaste and working out correct cheese, cracker and pickle ratios - yes, it was that exciting. Plus, there's May's 'friend' Seb who is the kind of guy you wouldn't leave within a 1000 yards of a primary school unattended. 

Next Time...

There will be a next time, there usually always is (unless there isn't). 

 

Pop Culture - One Jewel in the Poo

The spoilers are here but really only for very old things...

Those That Remain

Many years ago, I wrote a blog about what I thought a zombie apocalypse would really look like. None of this Walking Dead nonsense, more like 'how to create an agrarian society high up in the mountains with plenty of warning if zombies wander in the vicinity' - I concluded by suggesting that The Walking Dead would have been a little on the boring side if there was lots of talking about potato crops and whether or not the wheat crop would fail. It would not have been successful because people would have got bored and gone and watched a farm instead...

In a month where original and imaginative television is as rare as an 80 year-old Essex virgin, something I imagine could well end up being the above paragraph arrived... Earth Abides is a six-part series about the survivors of a devastating pandemic that wipes out 99.9% of the human race, in the space of about three weeks. The weird thing about this series is that it starts in a strangely similar way to The Walking Dead. In that Rick Grimes was in a coma in hospital when the world ends, in this Alexander Ludwig (no, me neither) plays Ish - short for Isherwood - who is bitten by a rattlesnake, doesn't die, but spends three weeks in a coma, at his cabin, and when he wakes up from it he has not shit himself, or soiled himself in any way, and although he's a young man, he hasn't deteriorated, feels weak or is unable to function; he wakes up like he's had a good night's sleep.

What follows is essentially an uplifting snapshot of what the USA would be like if most of the people died. There's lots of wandering around places full of dead people; lots of empty streets and, naturally, Ish decides to go from north of San Francisco - where I think he lived - to Las Vegas, presumably to see if anyone is alive or to play the slot machines. There he meets Ann and Milt, two survivors who have decided they're going to end it all because there's not a lot of point going on, despite Ish trying to convince them otherwise. There's lots of anguished looks, fast driving and then he finds a dog, which naturally gives him a reason to live and the rest of the opening episode is him growing a long beard as a year passes and he's just living at his home, managing as best he can, presumably now that the lights have gone off. It was both boring and slightly fascinating. It is based on a novel I don't know and across the next five parts I get the impression (from details in IMDB) that he meets other survivors and presumably they form a commune and grow their own food. There's likely to be wankers with guns and the special effects need to be impressive, but oddly enough I think we're going to stick with it for a bit longer, if only to find out where it's going.

Not So Sweet

When I reviewed the first half of Sweetpea in last week's blog, I was quite taken by it. I liked the premise and expected a sort of female, British Dexter. However, the second half turned into something altogether different and it was to its detriment. Ella Purnell's Rhiannon achieves half of what she set out to do by kidnapping the horrible Julia Blenkingsopp, with the express intention of killing her. Yet circumstances change, as does Rhiannon's attitude towards the woman she had always considered had ruined her life. Whereas the first half felt like a plausible potential serial killer idea, the second half became formulaic. extremely guessable and seemed to forget all about reality. There were some very tenuous links and plot connections, while DC Marina's drive and suspicions were not explained at all; she seemed to arrive at her belief via totally circumstantial ideas, ones her colleagues - wrongly, but realistically - dismissed, but for all the right reasons. I expect a second series, but I'm not sure we'll be watching it.

Massive Cunts

If there was something I'd do more than abolish, it would be the ban, block and possibly kill people who make 'concept trailers'.  The thing is they're not just 'counterfeit' they're also 'theft' and the film industry ignores something that, IMHO, is actually detrimental to possible bums on seats than helpful. Some of you must fall down Tube of You rabbit holes, surely? You see there's an actual trailer for [insert film] and you watch it. When it finishes, you are kindly shown at least 12 thumbnails of other shite you might be interested in and sometimes depending on your search preferences, sometimes random, you'll get at least one that's as real as unicorn shit. Something that some tosspot with no real friends who wants to work in the trailer making industry so he can brag about seeing all the blockbuster films before anyone else or some other banal bullshit that he thinks is going to impress whoever he wants to impress.

Some of them are quite inventive, but you need to avoid these; the more inventive the worse it really is. The day before the final Deadpoo & Snoozerine trailer dropped, Disney released a teaser-trailer trailer in the form of a 'concept trailer' and the worst thing about it was it was as fucking annoying as real concept trailers. If that isn't a reason to stop, I don't know what is. If the film industry is taking the piss out of you, understand your time is gonna come and it won't be earning you a lot of money, unless it's in the sex trade for people who like having sex with hopeless, endlessly sanctimonious nerds who don't think they're nerds... It's just really annoying and the Tube of You don't appear to give you the option of blocking the perpetrators - such as Screen Culture, Foxstar Media and Smasher. I wouldn't mind so much if the sometimes skilled people who put them together had the ability to hint at a story or a reason for the film existing. They make their trailers a) how they see it in their head and b) because they want to recreate the feeling they had when a previous, extant, version of the concept they are making first appeared. While I expect the latter is the case with individuals. it's a bit pointless when they find out that it's just some sentimental, implausible LIE created by some dumb shit who doesn't understand how anticipation and wishful thinking work. 

Farmyard Banter

While we're fans of Clarkson's Farm (despite him being a cockwomble), it came as a shock to see an hour long special featuring Kaleb Cooper, Clarkson's young assistant. Kaleb comes across as a good young man, who knows farm work and knows a fool when he sees one. The thing is I'm not sure he's got what it takes to present an hour special; he's a farmer not a comedian and he's a farmer not a showman. He puts up a valiant effort to come across as an entertainer but it's clearly scripted. It's not funny and while it's supposed to mainly focus on farming - possibly a little more than Clarkson's Farm - it still felt like it was designed to 'entertain' rather than educate. We managed about 20 minutes of this before turning it off - too many stupid gimmicks holding it together and bad jokes; we wanted to like it, but...

Loch Dune

I managed to stay awake through the entirety of the latest Dune Prophecy. This was maybe down to there being no Travis Fimmel in it, but more likely because it was a two-handed flashback episode that explored Valyra and Tula's young lives and the paths they took. It was quite shocking in different ways and while there is still a feeling that this wants to be Game of Thrones in space, it at least started to explain stuff, even if not by anywhere near as much as I'd like. The GoT similarities continued this week with time spent in the frozen wastelands of the Harkonnen home world and the forest and greenery of the Atreides home world and definitely shades of the Red Wedding at some point. It needs to be as interesting as this every week, sadly it isn't going to achieve that with fucking awful actors like Fimmel stinking the place up.

No Shock Value

The problem with films that sell themselves as being something different with twists you will never see coming is they tend not to be different and you can see every badly plotted twist coming a mile off. That is, without a doubt, the biggest problem with Strange Darling. Starring Willa Fitzgerald, even the title gives you a clue to what 'they' hope is going to shock you and go "OMG, I never saw that coming!" Essentially this is a very unerotic erotic thriller about a couple who hook up in a hotel and what happened over the next six to eight hours. It has been cut into six chapters and the chapters are played out of sequence - 3, 5, 1, 4, 2 and then 6 followed by an epilogue. It claims to be a true story, but there doesn't appear to be anything that corroborates that claim. Even with the twist, this never really gets above the mildly amusing stage; everything is so... underplayed that you think the actors are trying to get some hidden message across. There are brief supporting cameos from Ed Begley Jr and Barbara Hershey, but even they fail to drag it up into anything other than a reasonably well made film that simply doesn't quite hit the right notes. 

Flying Saucers?

The second season of Noah Hawley's Fargo was so annoying. Not the actual show, just the fact we waited for so long before watching it. I mean, we knew the film was brilliant; we watched the re-imagining of it with season one, so it wasn't like we were going into this blind, just years after when we should have been watching. The main thing is we're probably going to try and get the last three seasons watched between now and the start of decent TV again. This particular series was all about Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons as two seriously out of their depths idiots who make the wrong choices almost perpetually throughout the ten episodes; from the moment Peggy (Dunst) hits Keiran Culkin in her car and doesn't think to report it to the decisions that culminated in the denouement, it's amazing that two such stupid people could cause so much trouble and for it to still be relatively believable. The closing scenes when several of the cast - in character - try to decide how to approach the subject of the flying saucer pretty much perfectly encapsulate everything this show is. Roll on Season three. 

An Aside...

I've had a busy week and therefore went and did something more interesting instead. I just started to edit this week's blog when I thought that I had something else to say this week. There has been an attempted start to doing something different in my lifestyle. 

I'm taking tentative steps into the world of Tai Chi and putting on a fundraising hat for the new community-owned pub - doing what I can to help get us up and running. Subsequently, TV has been restricted this week and apart from our usuals to watch, it's going to be like that for a while.

So, I'm writing/editing the blog and I'm listening to Held by Trees' album Solace. I spent the last few years avoiding this band and what little I'd heard caught me in a highly defensive mood and I put shutters up against it. You see Held by Trees - oh God this is a tough sentence to write without upsetting someone - are a band that wants to be Talk Talk II. HBT has a few tenuous links to the greatest band that has ever existed which in a way makes it worse and they are attempting to capture the sound of the last two Talk Talk albums and take it in other narrow directions. I should approach them as any other band because a number of artists I like have got Mark Hollis's stamp on their work, but that isn't the only reason I like it. The thing is the artists understand the depth and emotions of the work, where the Held By Trees guys seem to be only understanding the musical notes and how similar orders might make something that sounds like Talk Talk. Its problem is It doesn't have the tortured soul vibe that Hollis and Friese-Green infused in all their later work.

Here's the thing though. At times I hear the other influences on this band's members, because every so often when there's an opportunity not to sound like Talk Talk this band gets a bit inventive - not Hollis level, but enough to make them a band worth listening to, if and it's a big IF, you can put away the slightly uncomfortable feeling it gives you having someone try to copy something unique and sacred.

The other thing I thought about was AI and how that might end up interpreting music in the future to bring us 'new music' that is considered by some as an extension of the band it is extrapolating on. That poses an interesting question; Is it possible it's better for AI to go down this path than encourage people to form homage bands? The reason being nothing will ever capture the original's soul.

And there ends your sermon on Held By Trees album Solace - it's alright.

Next Time... 

Who can say? Really. We've got stuff to watch - Black Doves, Day of the Jackal, The Madness, Shrinking and the regulars that are coming to an end, if they haven't already. We've got a few recent release films, but, you know, nothing's really jumping out at me, so the likelihood is we'll probably start watching season three of Fargo. The fact we come to it so late has some advantages; it's good to have something to get our teeth into in a usually barren landscape of festive television.