My Cultural Life - Massive Highs and Putrid Lows

What's Up?

TL:DR... I first encountered this about 20 years ago in the comments of a national newspaper webpage. I had to Google it because I didn't get it. 

Too Long: Didn't Read. The bane of explain. How do you convince someone of something when the explanation is longer than ignorant people have the attention span for? The simple answer is - you can't. Even if you could inform someone that their pre or misconception of something is wrong and do it in ten words or less, their cognitive dissonance would dismiss it and then label you probably as 'woke' or 'leftie' - it is a battle that intelligent people cannot win, especially when ignorant people use the acronym like a medal - advertising their reluctance to actually read something longer than a short sentence like it's something to be proud about.

If, for arguments sake, you can tell idiots the facts about asylum seekers and dispel many if not all misconceptions of them in less than 10 words, the racists wouldn't believe you because you are challenging their beliefs and because they believe lies they will always seek confirmation biased opinions, articles or sentences. It's why people like Steven Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and Nigel Farage (both domestic terrorists in their own way) are able to fuel and confirm bias that has existed in stupid people for a long time. Try convincing a Born Again Christian that God doesn't exist and then try to convince a racist that all the country's problems are not the fault of anyone who isn't white, Anglo-Saxon and proud to display an English or British flag.

I see likeminded friends and acquaintances post stuff on social media in an attempt to change the minds of morons and while it confirms my belief that many of my friends are decent human beings (regardless of how they vote), I also immediately think 'this won't change anyone's mind.' 

Obviously, I'm never going to change a cretin's opinion if I keep insulting them, but, you see, I'm never going to change their opinions, full stop, so why not call it like it is. These people wish ill on people who aren't like them; I wish worse on people who are intolerant or racist. It probably makes me just as bad, apart from the fact I know I'm a decent human being and I know racist twats aren't, regardless of how much they protest. I can't win, so why not make defeat as combative as possible?

However, here's one for you: If you voted Brexit, you are the reason we have so many illegal immigrants! Before 2016, the UK had fewer than 10 small boats a year bringing illegal immigrants into the country; this was because, as part of the EU - it was called the Dublin Agreement. We would process asylum claims like every other EU country and if an individual was deemed as anything other than a genuine asylum seeker they wouldn't even get close to our country, and, more importantly, if they did somehow get here, they'd be shipped straight out again. Now we're not part of that EU agreement, not only are we a great destination for anyone who fancies a change, we have no negotiating powers when it comes to getting the EU to help us. We caused this crisis and now we want to believe the man who pretty much singlehandedly got us out of Europe - Nigel Farage - is the solution... The worst thing about the UK population's lurch to the right? The fact some people are more sheep-like now than ever before. 

Absolutely Fabulous

Oh my word! I think I might have seen the best movie of the year, maybe even the decade so far and it's - technically - a kids film. I don't think I've laughed as much in ages, yet just as I thought it would make the most brilliant family film - for all ages - it takes an almost sinister turn, one which I think would scare the shit out of most kids under the age of 10. The thing is Sketch is everything you will ever want from a fantasy film - in spades! It is a tale about processing grief and how kids deal with the loss of a parent, but don't let that maudlin description put you off because Sketch is enormous fun and has some fantastic acting from both adults and kids and trust me you will believe the cast are actually seeing what we're seeing.

Bianca Belle is Amber Wyatt, an 10-year-old girl who has recently lost her mother; she and her 12-year-old brother Jack are ploughing through grief while their father Taylor - played by Tony Hale - is so wrapped up in his grief he's focusing too much on his daughter and not enough on himself and Jack. Amber is expressing her grief in drawings; really creepy and dark drawings that are upsetting kids at school and have all her teachers worried sick. Meanwhile Jack has discovered a magic pond that fixes things and he has a plan, but that is thwarted by Amber stumbling across him as he's about to enact it. However, her book of drawings falls into the pond and they all magically come to life. What follows will blow your mind, have you laughing like a drain and yet wanting to hide behind the sofa. It is mindblowingly good and writer/director Seth Worley has done an absolutely brilliant job at putting this extraordinary film together. It is beyond brilliant, it's an astounding 10/10.

Hanging on the Telephone

Just when I was beginning to think that I wouldn't find any more old films we haven't seen that I'd like, along came a movie I've had on the TV hard drive for a few months but never felt like watching. The wife said, "We've had The Black Phone for months, are we ever going to watch it?" So we did and it was considerably better than I expected. That might be down to the fact it was directed by Scott Derrickson, who we've seen a few films by, some good, some not so good, but generally all entertaining. This is a weird horror about a serial child killer - played exceptionally creepily by an almost never seen Ethan Hawke - and his last victim, Finn, played extremely well by Mason Thames, who might just have some psychic abilities that give him a fighting chance of getting away.

The film has flaws, but I expected that, yet these flaws all appeared to be the lackadaisical way Hawke's The Grabber conducts his perverse kidnaps and murders. This is a movie that is great with its misdirection; has a fantastic supporting role for Madeleine McGraw as Finn's sister Gwen, who has psychic dreams which are dismissed by her father but are taken seriously by the local Denver police, simply because she knows things about the other disappearances that no one else does and as she's about 10, she isn't really a suspect. This is a neat, edge of your seat, thriller with some unique twists and turns. 8/10

Visceral

Blimey, good films are like London buses, you wait for ages then a few come along at once! I'm not a huge fan of war films, I was when I was younger, but now I'm an old man I prefer less violence and anger, or if I have to put up with violence I like there to be a fantasy/horror angle to it. However, this is a true story about an attempt to kill a leader of the Taliban by four Navy Seal special ops and how it goes tits up very quickly all because of some goats. This doesn't exactly have a cast that fills you with inspiration; Mark Wahlberg is the poor man's Matt Damon, Taylor Kitsch isn't the world's best actor, Emile Hirsch was in that fucking awful Ironfart series from Disney and Ben Foster tends to play psychos in mid-budget Americana movies; so the four men charged with this assassination attempt are not what you'd call A listers. And maybe that's why this film was so much better than I expected; I mean, edge of your seat and as the subtitle says - visceral.

Essentially, this is like a docudrama about how the Americans, like the Soviets before them, discovered that trying to beat the Taliban in their own backyard is much more difficult than any other war scenario and this operation went south even before it got off the ground. Kitsch plays the group leader who is given a choice very early on in the film and because of the fear of post-war recriminations opts to do the humane thing, which in turn leads to the deaths of three of the four and the fight for survival that the Lone Survivor has to face. It is a really compelling movie, which considering its title is still full of jeopardy and selfless heroics. This is another good film. 8/10

A Pointless Vampire Tale

In 2022, Showtime released the TV series of Let the Right One In. Anyone who saw Let Me In the English language remake, or the original Scandi film with the same title as the TV series, will know what this is about; except this takes the idea of a man - a familiar - looking after and arranging the feeding of an "11-year-old" vampire and her friendship with a loner kid in the apartment next door, a giant leap forward. This ten-part series uses that original premise and adds to it; whether the adding will be a good thing or not is an unknown because, unfortunately, after watching the opening episode, I discovered that the tenth part ended on a cliffhanger and there were plans for at least one more series, but Showtime cancelled it without a conclusion ever being made, so reluctantly we opted not to bother watching any more episodes and unless you don't care about it not having an ending I'd suggest you don't watch it either.

Hidden Secrets 

The Little Things is a neat little thriller about an LA serial killer who may have been terrorising the area for over five years. Denzel Washington plays the washed up ex-LA detective who is now working as a deputy in the middle of nowhere, California, who because of staff shortages is sent back to LA to pick up some evidence and inadvertently wanders into an ongoing investigation that appears to be the same murderer he failed to nail all those years ago. Rami Malik is the hot shot police sergeant who is now filling Washington's shoes.

However, all is not what it appears to be. Why was Washington kicked off the force? Why did he end up as a lowly deputy in the middle of nowhere? Why was the case that cost him his marriage, his job and his health shut down? The thing is, he was a good cop and his instincts prove to be invaluable to Malik as they circle around a prime suspect who thinks he's cleverer than everyone else - but is he the murderer or just a psycho time waster? This is Jared Leto - a serial wanker - doing what he knows best when he's acting, playing a slimy sleaze ball who is wired into the police band radio and has a penchant for following murder cases. This nifty crime drama then does something we weren't expecting and naturally when something like that happens in a movie everything that follows also comes out of left field. A well oiled and compelling movie. 7/10

Preposterous Bollocks

Look, I can never promise this blog is going to have that much good in it over the coming months and years that is going to be positive. We're simply running out of half decent old films to watch and we're now dredging the depths of films ranked between 6 and 6.5 on IMDB. This means we're going to occasionally dip into the world of M. Night Shyamalan - a film director who made two great films and then shot his load into the void and makes nothing but laughable shite now. A movie director who got lucky with his first two ideas and then basically he broke and no one has been able to fix him or anything he makes. The wife quite likes Signs, the third film he made, with Joaquin Phoenix and Mel Gibson about alien invasion on a Kansas farm, but I thought it was a load of horseshit. Other than that I've sat through some movies he's made where I knew going into them that I would be better off mutilating myself with whatever sharp object I could lay my hands on. He's a two trick pony and he should not be allowed to make a fucking Airfix model let alone be given a budget to make feature films.

This brings us to Knock at the Cabin which is unrelentingly a massive load of preposterous bollocks. 1/10

The Crapstitute

The finale of The Institute was so bad, so very very bad, that it felt like it was being set up for a second season given how much of it was changed from the book. This is television at its very worst and how something as fucking awful as this could be made and then allowed to be shown on television is an absolute enigma of world destroying levels. Don't watch this series, go and buy the book because if you watch this series and then read the book you will be left so confused and bemused you might never watch any adaptation ever again, for fear that you might watch something as devastatingly woeful as this. I want to be as excoriating about this as my sometimes imaginative brain will allow me, but I am not going to waste my time trying to convey how shitty this was in words. It is televisual vomit of the lowest order; it defies all logic and was so laughably fucking fucked up - in like having a really bad shit kind of way - that I am giving this far more space than it deserves. I should just try and forget I ever watched it and hope that it never finds its way back into my conscious mind ever again.

Temporal Anomalies 

I've got to be honest with you; season two of Legion felt like it was too complicated and trippy to really totally understand what Noah Hawley was trying to convey. I actually had to read the recap of the season in Wikipedia to get a complete handle on it and even then when we started watching season three I still have more questions than answers... It's clear to me that now that Farouk - the Shadow King - has his body back he's manipulating things to ensure that the one person who can stop him - David - has to be eliminated; the problem for the now Farouk-led Division 3 is that David, intentionally or accidentally is remaining a couple of steps ahead of them, even if that requires the use of Switch, a new cast member who is also a time traveller. 

Season three is, remarkably, easier to follow. I don't know if the people at FX told Hawley to be more coherent or if I'm such a time travel nerd that I get it, but so far so good. David has realised the best way to stop Farouk and save himself is to find a time traveller who can take him back in time and stop everything that happens by stopping Farouk in the past. What I have noticed is the fact that this world of mutants might not be what I thought it was, because in the third episode we finally meet David's real parents - Charles Xavier and Gabrielle Haller - and they appear to be casualties of war, which puts them both as adults at the end of WW2. This means that 33 year old David now exists in about 1980ish, which might explain the oddly retro feel of the series. A friend of mine suggest that season three felt like more of a compromise than perhaps Hawley wanted, but so far I'm thinking it's pretty good and exactly what I would have done in this crazy world. Marvel/Disney should really take some notes.

Tedious?

Don't get me wrong, Alien Earth is a great TV show (by current standards), but there is something about it that bugs me. There's this feeling of predictability about it; like when something happens you almost see it coming before it happens. The flaws in the synthetic human children trapped in adult bodies; the possible subterfuge from certain members of Prodigy; the incredibly annoying boy trillionaire with his slightly bonkers holier than thou attitude - all these things felt a little like I knew it was going to happen and I don't want my Noah Hawley TV shows to be predictable. We are heading for the inevitable aliens versus the humans on a tiny trillionaire's island and whether the synthetic humans with children's minds will be fighting for Prodigy or maybe standing back and watching the guaranteed carnage we all know is going to happen. It's good, but it feels like it's lacking in something and that something might be originality, or it could be entertainment.

Existentialism 

Obviously (to me), the order of how you read this blog isn't always chronological, although what I will review here is going to be the last thing I watch this week (because tomorrow - Friday - I will be hosting my latest pub quiz, so I won't be watching Peacemaker until Saturday). Sometimes the order of the blog is mixed up; for instance, I started the week watching Knock at the Cabin and it felt like I'd reached a nadir as far as previously unseen films were concerned; however as the week moved on, it seemed like every movie I watched made my initial fears that I would never watch another one that I might enjoy disappear, but every film after that heap of donkey shit has been a really enjoyable experience.

To conclude my week and this blog, I decided to watch Stranger Than Fiction, a 2006 feature starring Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhaal and, quite remarkably, Tony Hale, who I hadn't seen in any movie at all until I watched Sketch, last night (Wednesday). Some films are just bloody weird and this most definitely falls into that category. It tells the story of boring tax man Harold Crick, who wakes up one morning hearing an English woman narrating his life. The problem is only he can hear her and it begins to affect his life in a very existential way, to the point where he ends up going to great lengths to understand why this strange thing is happening to him. Part of his narrative involves falling in love, while another part is considerably more sinister and potentially tragic, until he sees the woman narrating his story on an old television interview and seeks her out. It is an absolutely crazy movie, that obviously makes no sense at all, yet makes perfect sense and I'm puzzled why I've never heard of it before recently because it was right up my street.

In many ways, despite the year it was made, it feels like a post modern retelling of The Life of Chuck, which I reviewed last week, in that it's a story about a man who is the centre of his own universe and whatever happens to him has consequences for the rest of the world. It is also a delightful love story, a clever comedy (Hoffman proving yet again that he has fabulous comic timing) and just fucking weird enough to make you wonder what the hell you are watching. It felt like a perfect end to the week's viewing and there was a synchronicity about it which I have already alluded to. It was yet again another excellent movie and it makes me concerned that I might have overdone the excellence and I'm doomed to spend the rest of the year watching shite. 8/10

What's Up Next?

A double helping of Peacemaker for starters; the finale of Dexter Resurrection comes out which will signal our watching it (the wife wanted to watch it as a box set rather than weekly). We'll finish Legion and the latest Alien Earth will no doubt entertain and annoy me in equal measures. There are also a couple of other TV shows due to drop next week, so what has been a top heavy movie blog for the last few months will see the balance re-established.

And that's it. Next week more of the similar...