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.