My Cultural Life - Grim and Gritty

What's Up?

Fed up with me being all serious and shit in this opening segment? Then fear not, this week levity is far more important. The world is a shit place and we have no control over it. It is full of idiots - literally and the internet and social media are full of people whose self-importance knows no bounds. The sad thing about people, especially on social media, is many of them believe the entire world is reading their posts or comments. They have a lack of awareness and therefore think they are the centre of the universe, rather than simply the centre of their own universe.

The thing is, it's summer, we're having weather that is erring on the side of good rather than the usual damp, dreary and cool we seem to get lumbered with most years and where I live is so much better than where you live because while we had 29 degrees here last Saturday, it was better than what you had. I write this on Sunday night - the last blog went live about 30 hours ago - and it is still 25 degrees in my bedroom, the fan's on and tomorrow it won't be a heatwave any longer. I used to love heat, but yesterday I sat out in it for about 25 minutes and ended up feeling quite shitty, so today I went and stood in the sea (because it's right on my doorstep and because I can).

Wimbledon's over. The Club World Cup has finished (and Chelsea fans will, yet again, be really annoying). There's more cricket and golf to come and in Scotland the fucking football season has started, while Chelsea (them again) have literally only just kicked the last ball of last season - in fact Scottish football started 48 hours before last season officially finished and the qualifying rounds for the coming season's European competitions have also already started. It's like there's never any break from anything any more. Once upon a time, for two years in every four, you could at least look forward to most of June and all of July before football dominated everything. Like politics, misinformation and the threat of something awful happening, football never stops.

So fuck it, let's talk about something positive for a change...

Um... Er... 

Harrowing

Mystic River - a Clint Eastwood film - is about the murder of a 19 year old girl - Emmy Rossum, who was actually just 16 when she made this - and the fallout from the investigation handled by local cops Kevin Bacon and Laurence Fishbourne. It is one of the most harrowing movies I have ever seen as the girl's father - local organised crime boss Sean Penn struggles to cope and decides to take the law into his own hands. One of the chief suspects is Dave Boyle - Tim Robbins - a friend of both Penn and Bacon's characters from 30 years earlier. He is a disturbed man who was the victim of a paedophile when the boys were playing street hockey as kids. This is a superb film which leaves you guessing for most of it and then when it becomes clear who probably committed the murder it lurches into a dark and twisted place that you could always see coming but hoped wouldn't. I completely understand why this has such a high rating on IMDB and I'm amazed it's taken us 22 years to finally watch it. It's worth a 9/10 but... it will leave you with questions.

No Time For Bollocks

I want to say that all James Bond films should be like No Time To Die but it wouldn't be much of a franchise if that was the case. Where did this come from? What a cracking film it was despite being a 007 thriller and yet it felt more like a classic Bond movie than the previous four - what with its bad humour, funky gadgets and exotic locations. The thing was for a 2½ hour feature it absolutely pelted along. Rami Malik was a deranged and ludicrously insane Bond villain; most of the gang from the previous four Bond films popped in, some of them died and I'm still reeling - yes, actually shocked - about the ending. I mean, really? I never saw that coming and it's been four years since it was released and six years since it was made and I never knew that that happened. I'm not even sure I agreed with it, but wow what a way to finish this part of the franchise. Basically, an even worse bastard than Blofeld takes it upon himself to steal a weapon, designed by the Brits, and wipes out Spectre and then targets just about everybody who is anybody. This is a seriously good film; the best Bond movie of the lot and an absolute 9/10.

Party Hard

The one thing that comes across when watching Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People is what a difficult watch it is. It really is a tough movie to like and I didn't really feel any affinity with any of the characters - except maybe Paddy Considine's Rob Gretton. Steve Coogan started off sounding like Tony Wilson very accurately, but as the movie dragged on his accent became more Jimmy Savile and less mercurial Mancunian. Despite this being essentially a biopic, which even featured the late Wilson in a cameo role, this film wasn't particularly flattering towards Wilson, or for that matter most of the people in it (although if Peter Hook's general reaction to the slide of Joy Division's Ian Curtis is anything like the truth I can see why the rest of New Order want nothing to do with him any more). There is an interesting story told here but in a slightly obnoxious way and Winterbottom's trademark of letting his characters break the fourth wall is actually the most grating thing about this talented director's work. It's a film I'm glad I've finally seen, but my lack of real interest in the Madchester scene of the 80s and 90s meant that a lot of the characters portrayed in it came over as complete cunts. 5/10

Kidnapped?

I'm going to try and do something different with The Institute. The reason became clear for me when I was reviewing Murderbot over the last ten weeks. I don't think it was helpful and I think I would have rather watched it all and then reviewed it, but with weekly series that is more difficult than, say, with a box set type series. I also want to try something different with this because I am familiar with the source material so I know - generally - where this is going. So, despite the long intro, what are my thoughts on the opening episodes? Well, it's funny really because the book is quite up front about certain things, whereas the series seems to want to try and breeze over things or be a little enigmatic, probably for more dramatic effect. The Institute is suitably creepy and the people who run the place are coming across as nasty and sadistic as they did in the book. Ben Barnes' Tim, the former cop who seems to be running away from something in his past isn't bad considering I have a problem with his general acting ability - he was the least believable thing in The Punisher series. It's going to be an interesting ride to see if they stick to the book as they've changed one key thing already - the geography of things. Yes the Institute is in Maine, but Tim was half a country away and a lot of the book was Luke - the young protagonist - and his journey to find the man who would be his saviour. I'll return to this further down the line.

Lost Hope

I know I often ask this question and if I had an/some American readers perhaps they'd try to answer it for me, but why would anyone in their right mind want to live in the USA? I mean, it's a fantastic country spoiled by about 50% of the people and why would anyone trust a police officer? We often hear complaints about British cops, but in the USA you often wonder what their officers do on a daily basis - other than pick on non-white people or women and eat donuts? The reason I'm back on this again is because we watched Lost Girls, a true crime drama about a woman whose daughter goes missing that eventually leads to the uncovering of a huge number of human remains, all belonging to women, yet the local police force seemed to want to spend its time bad mouthing the grieving rather than finding a killer. This is [another] harrowing and ultimately unsatisfying story that will have you wondering what the police actually do in the USA, because they're obviously not solving crimes. Amy Ryan plays the mother of a sex worker who literally has to threaten the Long Island police into doing their job and then has to continue harassing them even when a number of female remains are discovered near a gated community. This isn't a pleasant movie, but it is very well made and just leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth as you watch a re-enactment of police incompetence at its most useless. it's on Netflix and I'm giving it 7.5/10. It would have got more if not for the fact that it's an incomplete story - but that's no one fault bar the US police.

Nevermore 

The first thing I realised about The Raven was that it only had one American actor - John Cusack - and then I discovered it was mainly filmed in Serbia and Hungary. The rest of the cast was made up of British and Irish actors despite the film being set in Baltimore, Maryland in 1840. What it tries to do is fictionalise the last days of Edgar Allen Poe - Cusack - who died after being found raving and rambling on a bench in a park. He was just 40 years old and was a drunk and pretty much destitute, but this movie tries to turn his largely unknown last few days into a gory thriller where he teams up with a Baltimore detective - Luke Evans - to try and unravel the mystery of a serial killer using all of Poe's ideas from his short stories as his modus operandi. I remember being pretty unimpressed with this film when we watched it in 2012, but like many movies a second viewing proved to be far more enjoyable, especially given we didn't remember any of it, at all. Cusack hams it up and ramps up the melodrama, but he's also a class act, so his Poe is both charming and a snivelling shit. The rest of the supporting cast do an adequate job and the story would be great if it was based on anything like fact, but even so it's just about worth 100 minutes of your time, even if parts of it make little or no sense. 6.5/10

Big Flop?

A film written, co-directed, produced and starring Stanley Tucci, about a failing Italian restaurant in New Jersey in the 1950s seems like a guaranteed winner. Tucci is synonymous with Italian food and the film was co-produced by Oliver Platt, who plays the uncle financing The Bear - the brilliant series about a restaurant - and despite this being 30 years old it just seemed like a delightful movie to have discovered and watch. Tucci and Tony Shalhoub play brothers Primo and Secundo, who run the failing business. The bank are closing their line of credit and up the road their good friend Pascal is running a rival restaurant that is literally crawling with customers and he wants the brothers to work for/with him. The brothers are in an awkward situation personally and professionally, but Pascal concocts a plan to get Italian jazz legend Louis Prima to visit the brothers restaurant and help them kickstart the business, except Pascal is a successful businessman and more than capable of being a wolf in sheep's clothing. This is a genuine Indy film of the 90s; probably made on a budget of about $100 and it doesn't know if it's a gentle comedy or a light hearted drama, but it's got enough in it to stick with and while it looks dated, this actually adds to it. 6/10

Light My Fires

The fifth episode of Smoke, for me, needed to go somewhere. After the great opening two episodes, the last two seemed to tread water and go nowhere fast. It felt like we know what the two main characters are and how long it's going to be before both get their comeuppances. However, this part introduced Gudsen's former partner Ezra Esposito - John Leguizamo - who gives Calderon more wood to stoke her suspicious fire (if you'll pardon the puns). It also begins to show the viewer just what a lot of Gudsen's fellow fire people actually think of him and how he views himself. Taron Egerton is great in this series, but he's also playing a complete narcissistic arsehole and it seems that we got the impression that only Calderon thought this, but this is not the case. Then just as things start to get weird and interesting again, we get the second WTF ending of the series so far. I'm not sure if I love this show or if I despise the characters so much I need to find out how they eventually fall.

What's Up Next?

More of the same, plus Untamed, a new six part series about a murder in Yosemite National Park. We haven't gotten around to watching the Dexter reboot yet; the wife wants us to either have it all or most of it before we start wading into that (and given what I said here last week, that suits me fine).

The FDoD is getting low on content again and the Set Top Box Hard Drive has a number of things which are sitting there that I'm just avoiding. I'm going to have a weekend of watching some golf and going to the pub on Saturday night (I've turned down two opportunities this week to do that already) because we're celebrating living in Wigtown eight years today! 

As always...