What's Up?
I got five minutes away from hitting 'publish' when I realised the 'What's Up?' I'd written didn't feel appropriate and wasn't the right tone to set in a blog that sometimes let's me forget that it's to entertain and inform and not be some soapbox to probably preaching to the converted. So I decided to change it...
Today, February 28th - the last day of winter (meteorologically) would have been my mum's 93rd birthday. I'd say she probably wouldn't have lived that long anyhow, if she hadn't been taken from us in 1998, but given her older sister, my godmother, Tina, is alive and kicking at 95 and smoked Senior Service until she was 40 and then stopped, perhaps my mum (and me) would have had much longer having to put up with what a rotten place the world feels at the moment.
But sometimes, we need to forget that there's a world out there trying to eat us and just become a being in that moment, our moment. To stop. To look and listen. Of course the big problem with doing that in the best possible way is you need it to be a lovely day with just a gentle breeze and that's been as rare as rocking horse shit this late winter. About an hour ago, I was downstairs, pottering about in the kitchen and I could see the sun streaming in through the patio doors.
This had happened on Thursday. We had the best day Galloway has seen since October and I found myself sitting on the remarkably dry bench, letting the sun create vitamin D the best way. It was maybe 12 degrees on our patio - south facing, lot of white, windbreaks from every direction; it looks very Mediterranean in the spring, before the poppies and honeysuckle take over. It also feels it.
Well, today is a few degrees colder than Thursday, but what breeze there is comes from the north, so the house blocks the wind and the patio is pretty much the same temperature as it was earlier in the week, because of the sun. So, I stood just outside and pushed the nightmares going on in my head after seeing what some senile orange idiot has done this week out of my head and listened to Wigtown at 11.00 am on a Saturday morning.
You know what I heard more than anything else? The sound of birds. They're happy little fuckers round our way, as we often discover around 3.30 am in June, when they wake up and can't understand why everyone else isn't up. However, at the end of what has been a pretty dreich and bleurgh winter, without too many extremes, standing there listening to them chatter and peep because there's shagging to be had. Well, it makes me realise that despite my anxieties, I'm a pretty lucky bloke to be blessed with people who put up with me.
But overall, it was just warm. Not like a muggy summer's evening, but in a 'Jeez, I need this' kind of way. The warmth you have to pick out because it's there waiting for you. Is it any wonder that mankind created religion when it probably spent inordinate more time worshipping the sun, until one day someone realised the sun was not a god but a big glowing ball and needed a more humanity based means of control.
I like the sun. We don't see enough of her.
More Questions than Answers
So, it seems, we can't go a week without a new Jaysun Stayfum film. This week is his latest release,
Shelter, where he plays a one-man army hellbent on killing people while protecting a girl called Jessie, who might be, but is never revealed to be, his daughter. The first half of this movie is like Statham had thrown his hard man image out of the window to portray a deep and brooding hermit, living on a Scottish island, who saves the life of a young girl who seems to think she has some connection to him. Then it gets a bit silly. MI5 (or maybe MI6) have a new surveillance machine that can literally pick up wanted terrorist suspects if they pass
any camera, anywhere in the country. Mistaking Statham for a Georgian terrorist, a team of special ops go to his island and are quickly despatched. It then becomes a strange cat and mouse game where rogue cells of intelligence agents try to beat official intelligence agents to Statham and the girl, all meeting sticky ends. It's slightly ridiculous, like many movies of this ilk. You actually learn almost fuck all by the end of it and it kind of has an ending that either suggests a happy ending or a set up for Shelter 2. You also might find some of the geographical continuity incongruous to where it's allegedly set, which is the Outer Hebrides. 5/10
Runaway Train
Tony Scott's final film
Unstoppable is a real seat of the pants action thriller about a speeding, driverless, train heading for a heavily populated area of Pennsylvania. Denzel Washington plays Frank, a veteran train driver and Chris Pine as Will, a newly qualified conductor, who narrowly miss hitting the runaway train and then decide they are the only hope to stop the train, by chasing it down and attempting to stop it from behind. Rosario Dawson co-stars as the person trying to co-ordinate the stopping of what is essentially a giant bomb travelling at 70mph. There are some added subplots, mainly about the two men's families and what they've both been through, but this is essentially a race against time and speed. It was full of jeopardy and was an enjoyable way to end a Saturday film night. 7/10
Police Story
I remember when this film came out. The big talking point was action hero Sly Stallone playing a fat, washed up town sheriff who is walked all over by the NYC cops living in his New Jersey town. This is a James Mangold movie, so it has a pretty good pedigree even before you see the all-star cast, which includes Robert De Nero, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick and Annabella Sciorra. Sly is the sheriff in Garrison, but he isn't the law. He's slow witted, often drunk and isn't a very good police officer by his own standards; meanwhile he's surrounded by a town full of NYPD cops, many of who are owned by the mob. When a young hero cop makes a fatal mistake during an arrest, things spiral out of control and Internal Affairs get involved, but they need the sheriff to work with them and he's just not sure who he wants to be. This is also Liotta's best film since his early career. 8/10
Another Runaway Train
Two Tony Scott movies in two days and both of them have trains - driven at some point by Denzel Washington - as the most prominent feature. I suppose subconsciously I realised this when deciding to rewatch
The Taking of Pelham 123. This time it's not so much a runaway train as a train that attempts to run away. This is a heist movie and a very clever one in many ways; John Travolta is the balding heist-meister who has hijacked a train and is now threatening to kill all the hostages if the city of New York doesn't meet his demands. Washington is the guy who is co-ordinating it from rail central, but he has his own story and the two clash very quickly.
This and Unstoppable were the director's final two films before he took his own life and while there's a lot of similarities they both couldn't be much different. This, like Saturday's movie, is a great film with a lot of jeopardy and a lot different from the original Walter Matthau film, yet it pays special homage to that, using many of the names and staying faithful to John Godey's original book, but updating it for the 21st century. It's a movie worth watching. 8/10
Something Completely Different
I'm not quite sure what to make of the 2023 Peacock series
Mrs Davis. Except, about halfway through the opener I realised that last year's Vince Gilligan series
Pluribus is very similar to it, in many ways... This is an eight part series and it is finite. It's extremely weird. Betty Gilpin plays Sister Simone, a nun with a mission. When she's not being nun-like, she rides through the night unmasking fraudulent magicians on her trusty white horse. She might be a descendent of the Knight's Templar - given the opening ten minutes and the similarity between her and the woman there - or she might simply have to find out where the Holy Grail is. This sounds all quite reasonable, until you realise that Simone has been chosen to take on a quest given to her by a powerful AI that now runs the world and has every human connected to doing its bidding.
The reason for this is because Simone refuses to have anything to do with the AI and this makes the AI - aka Mrs Davis - very 'nervous'. This is silly, violent, strange and there's more than one storyline going on, but I expect they will all link together, except I doubt we'll stick around to find out. There are a number of alarming continuity glitches in this, it could be that the entire thing is taking place inside the mind of an AI. Don't get me wrong, it's mildly entertaining, but there's also something a bit shoddy about it - the time frame is all over the place; the narrative isn't at all linear and there's something about Simone (aka Lizzy - her real name) that bugs me. Perhaps it's the shonky tone or the fact it seems to have deeply religious undertones, but we discussed whether we wanted to watch the remaining five episodes and chose not to. Therefore, I can't really recommend it, despite what appeared to be a promising start.
In Days of Old
The finale of
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was a remarkably subdued and poignant affair. In the aftermath of the duel and the tragic consequences of it, Dunc appears to have a strange, yet begrudged, elevated status. Baelor's brother offers him the chance to have Egg as his squire as long as it is in the confines of the Targaryen enclaves, but the big fella is reticent about everything now, even his future as a knight. This was a most engaging series, which started by boring me, began to win me over and ended up boring me a little, again. The tale of Sir Dunc and Egg - specifically for the TV series - was slight and surprisingly gentle and I expect this series will have won a few
Game of Thrones deserters back into the Westeros vibe. It was not brilliant TV, but it wasn't shite.
The End of the World, Part Two
Paradise returned with a season opener like you wouldn't expect. 'Graceland' has almost nothing to do with the entire first series - which was set inside a bunker designed to mimic the real world after an environmental disaster almost destroys the world. Sterling K. Brown is back, but only in the very last scene of this season's first episode. This was about Shailene Woodley, a women who gave up being a doctor to become a tour guide at Elvis's old home around the time the world is going to end. She manages to survive - despite obvious questions - and nearly three years later she meets up with a band of nerds - people trying to save the planet.
The second of the three episodes to drop, focuses on Brown's Xavier and how he found his way to Memphis and what he needs to do to survive. While we, the viewer, wonder how such a claustrophobic first season can feel so open and wild and then we're reminded, because the third episode is set back inside the Colorado bunker as Jane makes her moves and Sinatra realises that stuff needs to happen to get things back on track. What those tracks are and how it's done are still hidden from us, but I suspect it will be nefarious. We do discover how one of the nerds from episode one is actually a very important nerd, one of world saving abilities.
I wasn't sure about revisiting this series; I think I might have said we were giving it a miss, but so far it's been considerably more enjoyable, we just need it to stay that way.
Below Average
Something we won't be watching is the second episode of
CIA - a new CBS series starring Tom 'Lucifer' Ellis as a CIA agent and some other bloke as an FBI field agent, who get thrust together and have to work finding and solving shit that the CIA can't because they aren't allowed to operate on US soil - or something like that. Ellis plays an American agent, who has spent all his life in the UK - hence the slightly wavering British accent (not wavering because he's trying to be a Yank, but because he doesn't seem to know whether he's Welsh, a Cockney or someone from the Home Counties). It's all very style and little substance. Being a Network TV show, there's this general shit feel about the film quality, the script, the lack of realism and the simple fact it isn't very good. It's a shame, I like Tom Ellis, but I suspect he's either good as Miranda's boyfriend or the devil and little else...
Quacks
It's loud. It's flashy. It's full of horribly loveable people. It has Harrison Ford saying 'fuck' so many times it's great and the song that played out this week's episode was Night Swimming - the REM song, covered by Jason Segal, the star of the show, after he admitted to Paul's daughter it was something he always envisaged doing if he ever started another meaningful relationship. I turned to the wife at the end of this episode and I felt quite emotional, because
Shrinking has that effect on me. We shouldn't like it; it's everything about happy American entitled middle class bastards we hate, but it also is one of the most wonderful TV shows we have watched. Every single episode there's often a point in it where I wonder why I like it so much and then something happens that makes me love it even more. I'm going to miss it so much and I think Jessica Williams is one of the sexiest women alive today! There, I've said it now...
Dull End
As Friday is a quiz night, Thursday became our end of the week and it was a damp squib, if ever there was one. We started with an old Sean Penn directed film called Into the Wild, gave it 40 minutes, realised it was on for nearly two more hours and gave up on it.
Then finally got around to watching A House of Dynamite, about an unidentified nuclear strike on the USA from an unknown assailant and how various parts of the government's defence strategy works in the 16 or so minutes they have before Chicago is wiped off the map. It was also really dull, essentially retelling that 16 minutes over and over again from different perspectives. I'd give it a 3/10 for perseverance...
What's Up Next?
Well, much of the same. I don't even know why I have this bit. Apart from occasionally saying something about something that's happening next week that some of you maybe weren't aware of, this is essentially a load of waffle.
If I tell you about last night's pub quiz that isn't what's happening next week, is it? But, it's not like there are rules to this or anything [there are]. The thing is it went very well. I've probably said this before, but I wish I'd done this sooner, or been able to make a living from it since I moved here. The next one is March 27. I already have the questions completed and music loaded onto my phone. I have quizzes written up to June. I'll be thinking about July's before long, but maybe not before spring actually arrives.
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