Pop Culture - Jewels in the Shite

There will be spoilers in this because a lot of things discussed will have been watched by the many or will have been out there in TV land for long enough for people to say 'Elvis is dead' without spoiling it.

At the End of the Universe

When Russell T Davies said he'd never written or seen an episode of Doctor Who quite like the second special - Wild Blue Yonder - he really wasn't kidding. This was strange, disturbing and apart from a really unnecessary and crap joke involving a mixed race Isaac Newton at the beginning, you get the feeling that this might have been an even better bunch of specials had they kept David Tennant around for an entire series and made the reason for his re-regeneration the main theme of the entire series. That's not to suggest Ncuti Gatwa's not going to be a great Doctor with excellent stories, but this again felt like a piece in a much larger jigsaw puzzle.

This time DW and Donna find themselves on a deserted space ship in what appears to be a void, but turns out to be on the other side of the end of the known universe and the Tardis has buggered off in need of repairing itself after coffee was spilled into the main consul, leaving the Doctor without his sonic screwdriver (inspired) and in a place where even he doesn't understand the language. Then things start to get really weird as they try to solve the mystery in front of them only to be confronted by versions of themselves but with problems... Problems isn't the right word, malfunctions might be better except these alien villains are not robots, in fact we're never quite sure what they are except that they adapt themselves and become whatever they adapt themselves with. It's a creepy episode that is almost guaranteed to spook younger audience members and freak out others. It's one of those episodes that offers up snippets you maybe aren't supposed to know about our hero and wanders into nightmare country. It was, again, an above average fair.

I've read a lot of dissenting opinions about this already on line and frankly these people need to get  fucking lives. I think the problem with these dysfunctional Whovians is they want Doctor Who to be what they want it to be and they'd probably moan if the Doctor jumped out of the screen and gave them a blowjob halfway through an episode. Sad, pathetic wankers who don't seem to understand that television is made for the masses and not for them.

X Marks the Spot? Not Really

ITV went to great lengths to advertise how good ITVX is. They employed celebrity B listers to tell us how good it was and almost everything ITV does now is advertised as also being on ITVX. As regular readers of this column will know, I've developed a soft spot for Wrexham AFC and their FA Cup 2nd Round tie against Yeovil was being shown live... on ITVX, so I put the telly on and summoned the streaming guide on my (allegedly) smart TV. 

It too over 5 minutes to load ITVX into my streaming options (BBC iPlayer takes about 7 seconds); when it finally loaded I couldn't find the football match anywhere. I looked through the menu, checked the sports section and did a search for it and all of this took about 12 minutes (by which time I'd missed the first goal). In fact despite it being 'on' ITVX it wasn't actually on ITVX, it was on-line ITVX - a subsection of the station I wasn't aware existed. It's like the BBC's Red Button except it isn't because you can access the BBC's Red Button on your telly. Not only was this a fucking disaster, but you can't rewind, pause or do anything else with ITVX; you either start it from the beginning or watch it from where it is, even if you're watching something that isn't on live. It has all the adverts - you have to pay a premium to have the adverts removed, and on-line there's a huge fuck off Pizza Express banner that takes up almost ¼ of the page - unlike iPlayer, it really is a massive load of rancid shit, a bit like ITV has always been since I was a kid. I watched the game on my PC; they showed the two goals at half time and I saw the third go in relatively live - because it had been on the BBC Football page for two minutes before it 'caught up' on the live stream. What an absolute load of wank... Actually wanks are fulfilling and have an end product that's not as messy or as stinky. 

More Horse Play

Do you know why Apple TV's Slow Horses has such a good rating on IMDB and is so highly regarded by the critics? Because it's bloody excellent and it simply doesn't hang about. This MI5 series can't really be called a true spy thriller because we're not really talking about espionage and John Le Carre stuff, we're talking anti-terrorist and intelligence work undergone by people who should be too good to be policemen. It's a series about clever people trying to outwit proper bad guys or in this case trying to fuck each other over to get the best political advantage from it.

The first season - as I touched on last week - was about far right wing terror cells and how far they stretch into the Establishment, but it's a little more complex than that because the ambitious Diana (Kristin Scott-Thomas) - 2nd in charge of MI5 - had this great idea to stage a right wing act of terror and then thwart it before it reaches completion only for it to go absolutely tits up. This required her covering her arse and she decided that Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his team of MI5 fuck-ups should take the fall for it only to realise she was not up against a team of fuckwits at all. The team members of Lamb's Slough House (or Slow Horses) are actually clever, resourceful and damaged because of MI5 not born that way. They might have all screwed up at some point in their pasts, but that doesn't make them any less capable.

Each season is a rollercoaster ride - just six parts - that resolves problems and conundrums quickly but like all puzzles of this kind there's always a can of worms attached to get opened and make matters worse. It's the kind of series someone like me - a person who gets slightly perturbed by how some TV series (and seasons) like to tread water for half their allotted runs when all I want is a start, a middle and an ending with the occasional epilogue thrown in. Slow Horses does that in spades; no pfaffing about, just BAM BAM BAM. Chalk this one down as yet another Apple TV+ success story; a TV network that currently reminds me of what Channel 4 used to be like with dramas.

In fact, we were so impressed with the conclusion and entire series, we watched season two straight away. We do like it when we discover good television, it makes up for all the shit. Season two is about Russian spies, whether a 'fictitious' spymaster existed and whether or not there were sleeper agents placed throughout the UK. It also is how the Slow Horses team continue to prove, despite their foibles, how good they are at their jobs, or at least some of them. One thing from season two was obvious, the brilliant Gary Oldman, as Jackson Lamb, actually quite likes River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), even if he dumps him in potentially life-threatening situations. The interesting thing about the second season is it's more like a spy thriller with twists and turns and red herrings all over the place. This is quality TV. 

 Awfully Bad Boys

Michael Bay - check. Jerry Bruckheimer - check. Explosions - check. Slow motion close ups - check. Fucking awful film - check. Jesus wept vomit have you ever watched Bad Boys? Did you think it was anything but an absolute load of rancid horse ejaculate? My god, what an execrable pile of ... Jeez, I've run out of insults. There is nothing more I can say...

Well, obviously there is. Bad Boys was made in 1995 and while that's almost 30 years ago it feels like it could have been 50. Absolutely everything about this film was shite. The expletive drenched dialogue; the lack of a coherent script; the unbelievable amount of shouting... sorry SHOUTING!!! The overwrought performances; the contrived set-ups and plot; the fact that Martin Lawrence gets top billing over Will Smith, who, quite unbelievably, was by a country mile the best thing in this utter heap of human excrement. The 1990s was a fantastic decade for many things, especially music, but it clearly wasn't good for Michael Bay directed action 'thrillers' because this film is, allegedly, very popular and has spawned two sequels and there's a fourth film planned for next year. I actually had Bad Boys 2 lined up to watch but I'm just going to punch myself in the face repeatedly because I'm sure that will be more fun and fulfilling. This film doesn't have a coherent story; it makes no sense; it has a comedy premise that doesn't need to be one; it is driven by literally a witness to a murder refusing to speak to anyone but an absent Will Smith, so Martin 'Why the fuck was I famous' Lawrence has to pretend for most of the film that he's Smith. Tea Leoni is in this film; she can't act, she's not pretty, she does things completely out of character and her actions are ludicrous. Joe Pantoliano plays a police captain, all he does is shout, sorry SHOUT, like everyone else in this film. It's just awful; pathetically, stupidly, woefully awful. If you like this film you are a moron.

And Then More Shit

"We do like it when we discover good television, it makes up for all the shit." Is a quote I lifted from the review about Slow Horses and how appropriate it was when we watched SurrealEstate a series from the usually awful SyFy Channel and this was about par for the station's course. It was ... how did I describe it? An unsatisfying bland wank with no orgasm.

I'm going out on a limb here but I think this was one of the most heinous crimes against television I've ever seen and yet it manages a 7.1 rating on IMDB. All I can think is the people who rated this series have all got some kind of brain disease or they wouldn't know a good TV show if it bit them on the arse and offered them something more than an unsatisfying bland wank. I mean, this shite was renewed for a second season, which suggests to me that people actually watched it, probably enjoyed it and that simply can't be right...

We gave the first episode a watch; figuring that as a 'pilot' it would skimp on the waffle and filler and would go straight for the thing that first episodes go for, yet somehow it managed to do nothing for 44 minutes. It promised much and delivered lots of mumbling and not much else. The newest recruit appears to have a history of telekinesis - fire starting to be precise, and the first mention of this was when she realised the teenage protagonist was the cause of the poltergeist activity, at almost the end of the episode. There's also a comedy defrocked priest, a man who quotes things and is bald, an office manager with an attitude and Tim Rozon as the heartthrob head of the estate agency that deals with strange events, Luke Roman - who mumbles a lot, has a Michael Buble feel and really can't act - in fact he's a bit like a real estate agent. What we had was the aforementioned 'poltergeist' (was actually a teenage girl with latent telekinesis) and a woman - studying to be a doctor, who looked like she was in her late 30s - with a house that had a portal to hell. Both were tied up and solved so quickly I thought maybe I'd missed something and then I realised what was missing - a decent writer, some actors and its imminent cancellation, none of which are forthcoming. Rest assured there won't be a return to SurrealEstate. 

The thing is back in the late 1970s, a band that I really like called Be Bop Deluxe had a song on their final album called Surreal Estate and I always thought the title was such a brilliant play on words. It was something that inspired me and I always thought it would be excellent if someone took that title and made a truly awe-inspiring book, film or TV series out of it. Imagine how fucking disappointed I was when this pile of rancid dog shit came along. The SyFy Channel should be shut down; it hasn't made anything half decent for 15 years.

Trailer Trash

This week's big trailer is Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and what a pile of hooey it looks. There's one scene in it where Kong and Godzilla are running, yes Godzilla is running. But this does look like a new look Godzilla with glowing pink rather than blue bits and a more streamlined look; how he got encased in ice is anyone's guess. There's a baby giant orangutan, a big scar-faced giant orangutan, other big apes, an ape hand with an exo-skeleton attached. Rebecca Hall sporting a new hair do, Dan Stevens - who I recently said we'd never seen anything in that was crap - and a few of the last film's characters. I'm presuming the New Empire bit means we're going to see an as yet unknown titan emerge who will be able to kick arse; if it's an orangutan then I'm slightly confused because they're never depicted as anything but the least aggressive and most friendly of primates. I guarantee you this will stink cinemas out in 2024.

A Pile of Shit at the Arse End of Iceland

If we hadn't invested a lot of time - about 70 minutes each episode - on A Murder at the End of the World we would have given it up by now. I think the only reasons we've stuck with it is a) to find out who the Silver Serial Killer was and b) to see if it gets any worse. One observation I have is that Clive Owen was good in Children of Men but everything else we've seen him in proves he's a lousy actor. Another observation is this Britt Marling scripted series is just dog shit. Moving on...

There's Some Shit in the Barn

As the credits began to roll, the wife turned to me and said, "So, what have you got to say about that then?" It appears that the quality threshold in the Hall house has disappeared completely and been replaced by a Portaloo. There is no hope for me, I seem to have become attracted to all forms of excrement and there's probably no way to stop it. It might be terminal...

There's Something in the Barn is a real nadir in this week's film and television viewing and frankly if you've got this far in the blog you will realise that for this to be the absolute worst then it really has to be bad. If I was to say 'imagine Gremlins with malevolent garden gnomes in Norway' you might actually think, 'Hmm, that sounds fucked up enough to be good,' and you would be so wrong it would make you limp - that's limp both sexually and ambulatory. It would make you impotent and fuck up one of your legs. It would make you want to claw your eyes out and shove them in your ears. It is possibly the worst thing we've seen this or any other year and I feel really sorry for Norway because while they're no Hollywood, they do make some good TV shows and films - not brilliant, but better than this will ever be considered. 

This 100 minutes of celluloid vomit has the following people in it - Martin Starr, Amrita Acharia, Townes Bunner, Zoe Winther-Hansen and it wastes Henriette Steenstrup (the mother of Thor and Loki in Ragnarok) and her ability to be a good comedic actor. Zoe Winther-Hansen plays an American girl,  she's actually from Finland (but I never knew Rebecca Ferguson was Swedish, so...) and she says 'fuck' a lot. The reason I give you this list of people is because, with the exception of Steenstrup, you should avoid anything with any of these people in it, even if it's just a swimming pool or a public toilet or even a supermarket; if you see them run away as fast as your legs will carry you. If you haven't got legs, throw yourself in the nearest river because death would be a blessed release. This is a film about a family of really annoying Americans who inherit a house in Norway with a barn elf who gets pissed off with them - easily done - and gets help from all the other barn elves in Norway to wreak havoc until it ends. I wanted the barn elves to win and as there was a kind of truce at the end I figured the man who made it got so fed up he decided to make it a kind of draw. The scenes of snowy Norway (although it might have been Sweden or Finland, given the number of Swedes and Fins who worked on the film) were pretty. Even the moose was bad CGI.

Continuity Errors

In a week largely dominated by shite, I really wanted the Cary Grant biopic series, Archie, to be quality TV and in some ways it was. Jason Isaacs as Grant was almost faultless, Laura Aikman as Dyan Cannon was almost as good, but unfortunately everything else about it felt very... ITV.

There was just this profound feeling of cheap and nasty about it and it was also extremely British despite Grant or Archie Leach as he was originally known being from Bristol. I'm not entirely sure any one in the series was American and I think much of it was shot on location in Europe, but really the worst thing about it, despite it being produced by Cannon and Grant's daughter Jennifer, was the glaring continuity errors and if you, like me, know anything about classic films you'd understand why... For starters, the first episode of the four part series suggests that Grant and Cannon first met at some point late 1961, maybe early 1962, however there's a scene in which Grant is talking to Alfred Hitchcock on the set of North By North West about having to get a divorce and that there was possibly someone new in his life - this film was made in 1958 and released in 1959, and that was a bit like the straw that broke my concentration and interest. I mean, I know it sounds trivial, but if the ex-wife in question and their daughter are going to executive produce a biopic you'd think they'd get the dates right and whoever was making it would, you know, check Wikipedia or IMDB or something to see they weren't getting it all a bit chronologically challenged.

We decided that the other three parts were not really worth watching; not because of this error, but because there was also something of a whitewash going on; none of Grant's less public areas of his life were going to be looked at. this means no real mention of the 12 years he lived with Randolph Scott - I mean, it will be mentioned but it will be a platonic set-up with two hunky heterosexual men living the bachelors' life. There also won't be a mention of Grant's extensive use of LSD, his right wing politics or the fact he was something of a pig to most of his wives. One episode was quite enough.

The Curse of the Walking Dead?

Imagine my disappointment; Friday nights are good TV nights, so after the disappointments of the last week it was a chance to kick back and enjoy two of my favourite programmes. Except Monarch: Legacy of Monsters took a dip last week and this week it didn't improve; in fact it was the second weak episode on the trot and I'm wondering if this show has run out of steam.

The reason I've given this such a derogatory sub-title is because our three young seekers of truth have been released by Monarch and are back in San Francisco breaking the news to Kate's mother about Hiroshi's double life. SF is a ruin that is heavily guarded by the army to prevent looters after the destruction caused by Godzilla in the 2014 film, but Kate's mom now works for the  federal government and is allowed into the fenced off area where her husband's office is, so she takes a risk and sticks the three kids in the back of a van and takes them there, warning about potentially being shot for being looters. 'They will shoot you! Don't be seen or THEY WILL SHOOT YOU!' She tells Kate, Kentaro and May, so off they trot and before you know it they're singing Japanese adverts - loudly - and almost getting caught, not once, but twice by the National Guard. They're running around with torches and singing songs while soldiers with guns are chasing anything that moves - there's your Walking Dead reference.

It also told us that Kate is a two-timing lesbian (that was new) who after countless scary situations running from Monarch, a giant frost monster and the possibility of dying in frozen Alaska suddenly is having panic attacks because she's near the school she worked at. Just to add (or is that subtract) it turns out that May has decided to double cross her pals and has sold out to Monarch. Oh and the only monsters this week were some flashbacks to Godzilla's last appearance; nothing new to see there either. All the great promise this show had in the opening three episodes has been blown to smithereens in the last two parts. There might not be any way back from this kind of shite plotting and scripts.

At Least We Still Have Mars

The latest episode of For All Mankind has finally revealed its hand. We knew this series would largely be about an asteroid worth more than the entire planet and it wasn't the one we saw briefly in episode one; this one is about to do a fly-by of Mars in about four months and as it's worth trillions and trillions of dollars, it needs to be snagged and mined.

Then there's the politics going on, especially when President Al Gore declares he's the guy who found the thing, when he clearly did not - but I don't need to tell you that - and this causes all kinds of friction between the M7 countries.

Dev decides he's bailing on the earth and leaving for Mars, with Kelly and Aleida left in charge of Helios, except he wants Kelly to go with him because she has to train the people who are going to use the life discovering rovers, while Aleida has to go to the Soviet Union for a conference of the M7 nations and we all know that means she's going to bump into Margo, who is presumed dead and also a known traitor.

Meanwhile on Mars, Miles has had his secret revealed unintentionally and that's going to cause grief with his Russian black market boss and Admiral Ed's potential Parkinson's has been revealed so Danielle has pulled him from both flight duty and as her XO. We're half way through the series and it's finally really kicking off; we were also treated to flashbacks to what really happened after the North Korean was found on Mars at the end of last season and if I had one quibble; if there's a ten year gap between series, how come Kelly's son is only 7?

Next Time...

We're not going to start watching season three of Slow Horses until Christmas, after we've got all six parts; after watching the first two series over the space of five days, waiting a week for each new part to come out will be too much waiting.

For All Mankind tends to ramp up everything in the second half of seasons, so I expect some interesting developments and shocks; this isn't a show that skimps on killing its stars. Monarch needs, desperately, to regain its mojo and I'm not sure it can. If you noticed there was no Bill Bailey this week, that's because we've given up on it; it only had one part to go and as its trajectory had been downward from the first part we figured we weren't missing anything. Oh and the penultimate part of the murder in Iceland bollocks, which in the intervening two days since we watched it is in danger of never being realised as well. I'm getting old, I might die missing things I want to watch in favour of things that are crap or annoying.

There's a couple of new feature films to watch; a few old ones and we're obviously getting closer to that time, so everything is going to be short on quality and high on shite...

 

Modern Culture - Who Are You?

There's at least 14 things to get through so... Spoilery things...

Meep Meep

I have a confession (or two) to make. It never occurred to me during the entire hour of the new Doctor Who that there was a lot of trans references; the ones to Donna Noble's daughter Rose literally went over my head and the one with the Meep I thought it was simply a joke aimed at cockwombles who don't understand that people can identify themselves as they see fit. 

The second confession is, I really rather liked this. It was a return to good old Doctor Who with a sense of peril, some funny lines and a Doctor I could relate to, but I always did like David Tenant's version and this was peak Donna Noble - absolutely totally Donna and even better than she ever was first time around. If anything the big reveal seemed to come a little too early, but they had a lot to get through and much to do in these three hour long shows before the new new Doctor arrives. The Meep was quite a lovable character in that you'd never have guessed it until it was revealed and then the cute became rather nasty and menacing. Excellent special effects, good to see UNIT back in it and I liked the way Donna was saved by sharing her 'knowledge' through the birth of her daughter. It was clever and that's something else the series has been missing, the feeling we're back in the science fiction with added fun arena, which was missing so much from Chibnall's truly appalling run. Don't get me wrong, I really think Jodie Whitaker would have been a brilliant Doctor had she been written by someone who understood what this show needed. I'm looking forward to being entertained again next Saturday...

Cold Cuts

My mate Chris has finally scored a hit! He recommended a film, we watched it and found it to be enjoyable. Wonders will probably cease from this point on... The film even starred Liam Neeson, so you can imagine how peculiar it was watching a Liam Neeson film and thinking it was good rather than just Liam Neeson being himself with a multitude of weapons to kill his enemies with.

Neeson played a snowplough operator whose son gets mixed up with the wrong people and ends up dead and in typical Taken fashion Liam doesn't stop until he's killed everyone who's connected to his son's untimely death. That is essentially the film and I apologise if it's spoiled it for you but this is a Liam Neeson film made after 2006 so that's essentially every film he's made since then.

However, this is full on surreal in places and is based on a Scandi-Noir film and as Chris said, they manage to make a film almost as good. In fact, Liam manages to do what the CIA couldn't do in last week's Sicario sequel and get two 'cartels' to war with each other with little or no effort. People die - lots of them - in this and not all by Liam's hands and to make it more entertaining it's actually a very dark black comedy coupled with a lot of surreality and oddball weirdness. The characters, with the exception of Liam, are all almost pantomime in their melodramatic approach and the villain is pure twat, nothing mongrel about him. The bottom line is this is an enjoyable romp with lots of unexpected twists and turns, some great cameos and you probably wouldn't have thought so unless you actually watched it. It surprised me and I (intentionally) laughed a lot more than I should have at what is essentially a revenge 'thriller'.

Pooey Potatoes on Mars

The wife has been banging on at me for weeks about watching The Martian again so I relented and we did. I could suggest that whenever Ridley Scott makes a film set in space you're guaranteed for something special, but then I remember Prometheus - the film with the spaceship rolling after Noomi Rapace and all she has to do is run left or right to avoid it but she chooses to try and outrun it... Still, let's not dwell on that shit because what Matt Damon had to do in this movie was dwell on his own shit - how to turn his poo into a form of fertiliser so he could grow potatoes which he then ate.

The Martian is a bloody brilliant film. It pushes every button it needs to and it really does feel like a biopic rather than something based on a novel set 40 years in the future from about now. Damon plays the botanist Mark Watney, who because of a freak accident in a massive storm on the surface of Mars is believed to have been killed and the other five members of the crew leave without him. He wakes up the next day, discovers that the spike that breached his bio-suit and penetrated his own flesh didn't kill him, in fact his own coagulating blood blocked the hole and saved his life; but for how long. His team have left Mars and he's a minimum of four years from being saved.

What follows is essentially Robinson Crusoe (on Mars - a film with Adam 'Batman' West) with no Man Friday and a lot of potatoes, probable science and a film that essentially glorifies the technical brilliance of the physics, chemistry and biology of the scientists who work for any space agency. The thing about The Martian is whether it's factual or not it highlights the ingenuity of human beings; the will to live and the extremes we would go to just to cling onto life as long as we can. If there was one thing that bothered me, it would be the denouement and the rather Hollywood ending - the need to have a nail-biting climax when, perhaps, something simple and easy might have been just as gripping, filling the viewer with a sense of peril without resorting to pandering to the action junkies. Still a quality film.

Tomorrow Never Knew About Gojira

We decided to watch The Tomorrow War again, given that we often can't remember shit about films made two years ago let alone longer and as this came out in 2021 we figured 'ah what the hell.' As I said to the wife, I sometimes think when we watch movies for the first time we don't actually take anything in, we just sit there watching the television and nothing goes in and stays there.

The interesting thing about this was just how enjoyably bad it was, from the fascistic opening to the ludicrous ending, it was literally gung-ho all the way. In fact, an hour and six minutes had passed and we were gobsmacked it had been on that long, it was so in yer face at times.

Chris Pratt plays the part of an ex-Marine who is also a scientist and works teaching high school science because he can't get a well paid job in the private sector. He lives with his wife and daughter in a nice house in suburbia and is estranged from his dodgy father - JK Simmons - and they're having a massive Christmas party during the final of the 2021 World Cup final (I was told - ordered - not to pick holes in the plot by the wife) when a load of soldiers from 2051 appear out of nowhere on the pitch and tell everyone if they don't send people into the future to help humanity fight nasty aliens or the world will end in 30 years time. Eventually Pratt's character is 'drafted' and turns up in the future where he's co-opted by someone from his past to help come up with a serum to kill the queen of the aliens and take it back to the past to ensure that humanity has something to fight the alien baddies with something other than machine guns and bombs, which are effective but there are so many of these bloodthirsty ETs that it's like trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of tea.

The fight is then brought back to the present as the man known as Star Lord and his fellow survivors of their week in the future head to Siberia to find the spaceship that has been lying dormant under the ice for centuries. It's like The Thing meets Aliens meets The Day After Tomorrow meets any other humans versus almost unkillable aliens film. It has lots of schmaltz, quite a bit of unnecessary comedy, lots of violence and pathos, some quite earnest and overwrought characters and it's on for a little over two hours and I've seen a lot worse...

In fact, the film we switched off to watch this instead was also about a monster terrorising the world and we watched it on the recommendation of my old pal Kelvin, who seemed to think I would enjoy it and, to be honest, I might have had the subtitles been on screen long enough for me to read them and half the dialogue wasn't lost because the subtitles seemed more focused on telling me where every single scene was set and who was speaking rather than the actual dialogue. I am talking about the rather odd comedy monster movie Shin Godzilla - a 2016 Japanese film that is more like The Thick of It than an actual Godzilla film. We lasted 27 minutes before realising it was on for another 93 minutes and frankly I didn't think either of us had the stamina to endure that and the wife was especially happy when I switched it off. The idea was quite good as it focused more on what the Japanese government would do in the event of a giant monster attacking Tokyo - for instance they spent the first half an hour moving from one room to another and changing into different uniforms rather than actually doing anything and while this was happening the comical sea monster destroying Tokyo was slowly evolving into Godzilla. It was quite surreal and I never knew the Japanese could make comedy films because I never considered they'd even have a 'normal' sense of humour... You learn something new every day. I also learned that I didn't want to watch any more of this film, so I didn't. The power of positivity, eh?

Coup-y Coo 

Do you know what was wrong with Freelance, the new John Cena movie? Too much slapstick and base humour. Had it played slightly more serious and actually had a proper villain rather than a bunch of nasty South Africans working for an unnamed corporate 'sponsor' it might have worked better. Being a comedy wasn't a bad thing; Cena is good at comedy and he's okay at action adventures, but there was so much about this film that the director failed to capitalise on and far too many... misjudged scenes.

Cena plays an ex-Delta Force special ops soldier who after an ill-fated mission to the fictional country of Paldonia is retired out of the army and returns to his original trade of learning to be a lawyer and he's not happy with his new life and his wife isn't too pleased either. So when an old army buddy, played by an aging Christian Slater, offers him £20k to be a bodyguard for a journalist whose career is on the wane and it's going to be around the President of Paldonia - the man his ill-fated mission was sent to kill eight years earlier - he jumps at the chance. Said President is a bit of a twat and within an hour of the journo and Cena arriving there's an attempted coup and the rest of the film is really about keeping the journalist and El Presidente alive.

Obviously as the film goes on we learn a lot more about what is really going on in the country and we discover that the twat isn't such a twat and that outside forces - namely corporate USA - wants the country for its precious metals and needs its own 'head' in charge because the existing 'dictator' isn't really what the west think he is. You expect a twist in the tail that doesn't materialise and you expect the real villain to be someone who isn't at all. It was an enjoyable 100 minutes, but it could have been so much better had it actually treated the politics with more seriousness and less slapstick. I expect as the weeks pass from the release it's IMDB rating will drop very low indeed and that's probably unfair to John Cena at least.

The Latest Load of Shite

After four episodes of A Murder at the End of the World, I think we're both running out of patience. There is a great TV show here, told for about 10% of each episode, the bits set in the past when Darby and Bill were uncovering a serial killer with just the internet and a lot of good will.

Unfortunately, we have to suffer the interminable Icelandic murder mystery which dominates this series and not only is it a load of bollocks, but the actors trapped in this icy prison are really fucking awful. I said last week that Britt Marling isn't a good actor, well apart from Emma Corrin as Darby Hart, no one in this lifeless heap of shite is any good at all and the feeling of menace and jeopardy is rather washed away by the fact that it might be best for everyone if they all died. This week Alice Braga - the spacewoman doctor, Sian - decides to take Darby on a trip to the northern Icelandic coast just as a super storm is about to hit them, to find out what the guy who died last week was up to and what connection he had to Bill. Then after their snow bike breaks down, she finds a Volvo and then drives it like a maniac in a blizzard, almost killing Darby and then discovering her all-weather spacesuit has been hacked and she's running out of oxygen and will die in front of everyone. Jesus wept, this is an absolutely appalling load of shite - my review might sound like 'then this happened and then this and then this' but it's literally written like that, like it was scripted by a 14 year old. I have to say that while I put too much credence in IMDB ratings, this was an 8.5, then an 8.1 and is now a 7.5; it's dropping exponentially week on week and you don't need to be a TV critic to understand why. Don't get sucked into this; it's dross. Oh and even its Wikipedia page hasn't been updated since the second week, like the people who do that just went, 'can't be arsed.'

A Period Piece

I want to call The Holdovers an extraordinary movie because if you started watching it from the beginning and knew nothing about it at all you would believe, without a doubt, you were watching a movie made in 1970. Everything from the grainy, late 60s soundtrack to the way it was filmed and the look of the film stock; even the colour felt like something out of time, from over 50 years ago - it is an achievement that deserves attention in that director Alexander Payne has achieved such a period piece. The problem though is it isn't an extraordinary story, it is a very sad story about tragic people.

The tale it tells is typically an American one and one that I think we've seen a number of times through the years, of alienation, of loneliness and of people being left behind and forgotten at times of the year when families should be together. It starts with Paul Hunman (Paul Giamatti) - a misanthropic teacher at an exclusive prep school in New England - being asked to stay at the school over the two week Christmas break to supervise the five kids who aren't going anywhere, because of whatever reasons their parents' gave. Hunman is a massive twat; he's not liked by the pupils and liked even less by the faculty members; he's pompous, a snob and seriously hard work.

Also remaining at the school is Mary - DaVine Joy Randolph - the head of the school canteen and a woman who has just recently lost her only son in Viet Nam; she is a kind but heavily cynical woman who doesn't mince her words. Of the five pupils who remain, four of them get a reprieve four days before Christmas when one of the boys' parents takes them all skiing, but Angus Tully's parents could not be reached, so he has to stay at the school with Hunman and Mary. Tully has problems, he has been expelled from three schools already but has been turning his life around, the problem is he's older than most of the other kids, he's also a wee bit pompous and he's also extremely lonely. These three begin to form a bond and more importantly Paul Hunman starts to thaw a little. It was something you could see coming.

Then it starts to get very sad; secrets begin to come out; truths are revealed and it seems that the young man and his older teacher are not exactly what you think they are and an off-the-cuff trip to Boston after Christmas leads to some more tragedy and the cementing of an unlikely friendship that in itself leads to even more tragedy. It's a gentle film, with a lot of humour, but in the end it is tinged with a deep unhappiness and is a really emotionally sad film that, yet again, shows what a fucking god awful place the USA has probably always been. This is a film about discarding human beings because they're not able to slot into an allotted space; about deeply selfish people dumping on the helpless and then blaming them for their own ineptitude. It is a film that will leave you glad you watched it, but absolutely gutted that justice, in some way, hasn't won. I want to tell you that it's a brilliant film because technically it is, but the utter sadness - borderline despair - it generates makes me want to tell you that while it is a Christmas film it won't fill you with festive goodwill and you will probably wish you hadn't watched it in the end. It's a great movie which deserves to win awards and I never want to watch it again...

An iPlayer Recommendation

If you're stuck for nothing to watch for half an hour, search out Landward episode 23 on the iPlayer and see why we love Scotland so much. It's just under 30 minutes of looking around the Ardnamurchan peninsula - the furthest westerly point on the mainland and one of the most beautiful places in the United Kingdom. Filmed at the end of the summer, beginning of the autumn it is simply stunning and is one of the best adverts for this bonny wee country I live in.

Very Disturbing

We've watched some strange things over the years, but Swiss Army Man is possibly one of the most disturbing, offensive and downright psychotic things we've ever seen and it started off so funny... In fact it starts off with Paul Dano's Hank attempting to kill himself as a result of him being stranded on a desert island for who knows how long but he's dissuaded from doing it by a dead body washing up on his beach. The body belonged to Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe.

I know that Radcliffe has tried repeatedly to distance himself from his wizardly background in a brave attempt not to be typecast, but this really was something else. All credit to him and Dano for starring in something in such bad taste, but really once you get over the farting jokes in the opening five minutes this becomes a very disturbing essay on mental health, mental breakdowns and loneliness. However, unlike The Holdovers which also uses these themes, this was a film that pushed the boundaries of bad taste as far as it could possibly go and not in a good way. I think many of the laughs you get from this film are the same kind of laughs you get when you're in an uncomfortable position or watching an actual scary movie - they are nervous laughs as you wonder just how low the film will go. I'm not even going to give you a breakdown of what happens because it's just nasty and not in a nasty way, but in a let's trivialise loneliness, masturbation, necrophilia, invasion of personal space and death to make something crass and pointless with it. I suppose Radcliffe deserves some kudos for playing a dead man for 97 minutes and I know Dano has made some strange things in the past but really, both of these actors should have known better. Avoid.

I Spy

This is going to be one of those weird series reviews in that there are currently two series floating about and the third has just started. We came to Slow Horses because it's yet another Apple TV+ series that has exemplary reviews, but we started it at the wrong time of the week - a Thursday. Why is this wrong? Well, Fridays have the two shows that will follow this review, so we might get a second episode in tomorrow, but the likelihood is we won't finish season one (6 parts) until the middle of next week, so you're going to get this as if it's an episodic watch rather than something we can do in one go.

Gary Oldman plays Lamb, the man in charge of MI5's shit house - the place where agents who have fucked up go to work in the hope they'll either redeem themselves or quit saving everyone a lot of hassle. They do shit jobs, aren't real spies and are generally abused by Oldman's Jackson Lamb. His team all have problems and none of them want to be there and he's not just abusive, he's also a massive cunt (or is he?).

His latest fuck up is River Cartwright, the grandson of a well-respected former MI5 agent who has possibly caused a terribly faux pas in what turned out to be an exercise, but it was enough for him to be shuttled off to 'Slough House' where he's sifting through the bins of a right wing journalist with connections to serious fascist paramilitary groups. In fact, most of the team are looking into Hobden - the journo - because obviously someone upstairs (probably Kristin Scott Thomas) thinks there's the chance of a major incident happening. Cartwright, who feels he's been stitched up by a fellow agent and has ended up bored shitless in Slough House is doing his own private spy work - not a terribly sensible thing to do, but we wouldn't have a TV series if he didn't. The first episode spends time introducing us to the key players and ends with the kidnapping of a Muslim who just happens to write comedy for a controversial stand up comedian in Leeds.

The second part really stirs the pot as River goes very rogue and also discovers something that is either a huge worry or a possible bonus; Lamb continues to be an arsehole; Diana seems to suggest all MI5 heads of departments have to be complete cunts to get ahead and more of the Slough House's team's lives are exposed. It ends on a proper cliffhanger and has already cemented itself among the pantheon of brilliant Apple TV shows. I expect the rest of season one will be watched over the weekend. Top drawer stuff.

Bailey's Bollocks

Bill Bailey's Australian Adventure has really gone off the boil. After a really interesting opening part, the last two weeks have been dull and don't really paint a picture of a particularly wonderful place, nor do they do anything to make you think Bailey is good at travelogues. In fact, I thought last week's episode was lightweight and dull, but this week lowered the bar even more. He's lost his edge as a comic and whoever produced this show obviously made some dodgy decisions in the things he had to do, which included a slightly boring tale about Stanley Kubrick, a very dodgy Australian prog metal band who all looked like a bunch of boring nerds and some tall trees.

Mystical Monarch

Well, after three episodes of above average shenanigans, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters kind of loses its way big time with part four.  Our four protagonists are stuck in the frozen wastelands of Alaska having avoided the attention of this (and last) week's big monster, but two of them are in a bad way and there doesn't appear to be any help or heat in sight.

There's a lot of flashbacks to Kentaro's life as an artist - about a year before the current events - and we discover this series is taking place in 2015. The rest of the episode is essentially more bickering and a lot of mystic mumbo jumbo involving 'psychic' hallucinations, atomic monsters with an energy signature akin to Godzilla's big San Francisco debut and more time at Monarch's HQ where their status as potential bad guys is slightly eroded and suggestions are that they probably care more than our four protagonists think. Overall though this felt like a filler episode where nothing really happened of consequence.

Meanwhile, Back in the USSR

This week on For All Mankind it was a Russian-centric episode with pro and anti revolutionaries on Mars falling out; the new regime in the USSR acting more like the Russians from series two and a lot of emphasis on Margo's position in Star City and Ed's anger and frustration at events that are beyond his control.

It kicks off with Sveta almost killing a Russian grunt from below decks, who just happens to be related to one of the new regime's KGB heads, this creates a potential international incident in Happy Valley as the new Soviets distance themselves from the rest of the M7 nations. The USSR wants her back in Russia to face trial for almost killing someone and that means she's going to be executed and Ed isn't going to let that happen. Diplomacy doesn't seem to be working and ironically it's Margo who saves the day without even realising it because of the job she's been given by the new head at Star City. It appears that Grigory's death in episode one might have been the fault of lazy Soviet engineers and the new regime can't really afford for the USA to know this even if they might find out themselves and when Danielle comes up with a solution they have no other option than to agree with it, although they treat it like a victory all the same. Miles fucks up and almost kills himself because of his greed and because he won't listen, especially when he's told that Mars wants to kill anyone on its surface. 

Next Time

Well, this week didn't turn out to be the beginnings of a desert in TV land as I thought it would be, but that's not to suggest it isn't going to happen eventually, as we zero in on the festive season and all we get is Christmas Specials that no one in their right minds want to watch...

On the schedule - the rest of Slow Horses, the next episodes of For All Mankind, Monarch and that fucking awful Icelandic murder bollocks. The finale of the Bill Bailey borefest and the second Doctor Who special. We might even give SurrealEstate a try as it seems to be getting reasonable reviews.

In terms of films... well, on the Flash Drive of Doom, we might watch Leo which is a new film, but everything else is likely to be old and with a heap of TV to watch we might skip watching a film this week. Whatever happens I just hope that it's a better week than this which seemed to be filled with ennui and despair and not too much enjoyable fun. 

Pop Culture - Secrets, Lies, Spacemen and Big Monsters

Spoilers again...

Life on Mars - Part One

The second episode of season four of For All Mankind ambled along at an interesting pace. Danielle Poole arrives on Mars to take over as CO from Ed Baldwin, who is still reluctant to leave Happy Valley, while Toby Kebbell's Miles Dale is finding life below ground, as a grunt, a little demeaning and not at all what it was advertised on the tin. However, Danielle isn't there for fun and soon realises that the grunts are disgruntled and starts by fixing something that Ed didn't feel was necessary to fix - the broadband connection to the lower decks. Miles has a meeting with Ed and doesn't get what he thought, but is eventually given some hope that his two years there won't all be miserable.

Meanwhile Kelly Baldwin, who has just had the funding withdrawn from her eight year robotics project, meets Aleida Rosales, who, while still suffering from PTSD goes back to NASA for her old job and ends up telling them where to stick it. The two of them get very drunk and hatch a plan to save both of their careers.

Over in the Soviet Union it looks very much like what happened in the 1990s is about to happen in 2003 as the fall of the USSR suddenly happens around Margo's ears and she just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It ends with her being carted away by the Russian police. 

It's That Time Again

It's time travel time as The Lazarus Project returns for a second season and we're stuck in the middle of the new three week time loop with no good happening from it apart from they creep along towards a solution by being able to remember what happened in the last loop. This, obviously isn't good for Shiv as he's still being shot by George (excellently played by Paapa Essiedu, who manages to do bewildered and funny very well), but for others it's allowing some good to come out of all of this mess.

The opening episodes see the team expand and disperse, recruiting Rebrov to help save the world and try to find a way to travel back to 2012, where Janet has been sent with Cassie, her daughter. Then it all goes a wee bit timey wimey as George accidentally activates the newly discovered time machine under a Swiss mountain and the three week time loop now has anomalies in it that have never happened before.

But that's nothing to what is going to happen as everything starts to get very complicated... The team discover that the reason for the three week loop might be closer to home than they realise and they are literally in a race against time to come up with their own time machine to go back a year and prevent the second singularity from being created, except the problem closer to home has other ideas and they, at first, end up in 2018 in what is essentially a light-hearted interlude (although given the amount of death in it, it isn't that light-hearted), before going back to 2012 and encountering their own project and earlier versions of some of them. This is a paradox inside a paradox inside a series of paradoxes and if you watched Bodies and thought that was confusing then wait until you get introduced to a causal loop - its like the grandfather paradox but nuclear powered.

However, without giving too much away the last few episodes kind of meandered around a bit and I had a lot of problems with it. Not necessarily the paradoxical aspect, more to do with general logic. George is a great character, but he's not a good explainer, so when the raid back to 2012 goes tits up and he needs to get Wes to reset time to allow them to complete their mission to prevent the world from ending, he doesn't particularly put the point across very well and resorts to doing what he was hinted he might do; Sarah was with him and when she persuades Wes to reset time she doesn't bother to tell her that if the Lazarus people from 2024 don't succeed the world will end because of another singularity and resetting it won't matter. It's straightforward logic and might have saved an entire episode of pfaffing about.

The denouement also leaves a lot to be desired with the person who betrays the team not looking at the bigger picture and being sucked into Wes's generally evil intentions. I saw the final scene miles off. In fact the only characters who come out of this with any respect are Shiv and Rebrov - the former doing the right thing and the latter proving that he's far more the hero and the Lazarus Project are really the bad guys. This has been a really excellent and slightly mind-blowing time travel series let down by the ending and the fact it's now distinctly possible that a third series will be on the horizon - I mean there is a conclusion but there are so many loose ends you wouldn't think it was an ending. Another series wouldn't be a bad thing, but it would be nice to have some form of resolution and maybe another threat rather than this almost endless loop of trying to solve problems they themselves cause. It feels a little like a Marvel comic - we're being subjected to the illusion of change and nothing more. I will, of course, watch season three if it happens, but I'd like there to be an ending.

Falling Flat

As an aside, there's been a bit of a resurgence from Flat Earthers recently; from my mate Mo getting sanctioned by Facebook for showing a joke meme about it to absolute wankers posting 'reels' on the platform 'proving' inconclusively that the world is flat and there's nothing else anywhere except us...

Did you know that the Flat Earth Society has over a quarter of a million members (all around the globe)? That's an awful lot of extraordinarily stupid people who will believe any old nonsense to try and get Elon Musk to allow them on his spaceship. The weird thing is I actually knew two people who believe the earth is flat and that the moon landings were staged and that at least as many people who belong to the FES will have been sworn to secrecy not to divulge the truth about it and over 50 years later not one of them has said 'it was all staged' - not even someone on his death bed who had no family to worry about being killed by the CIA... Seriously mad tosspots, the lot of them...

I think of all the conspiracy theorists out there the people who believe we live on a disc are among the most bonkers people to draw breath. What is missing from their lives that they can determinately believe there are hundreds of thousands of people out there dedicated to a lie that benefits no one? What possible benefits would there be from hiding a fact about the planet (or disc) and then bribing or threatening millions of people to continue this bonkers lie? How come no one with an iota of scientific knowledge, former NASA employees or any other space agency just come out and said, "It's all a lie. There's no space, no gravity, it's all bullshit so that you can be controlled, because if you knew the world was flat you wouldn't be able to be controlled any more..." I actually think the FES was created by someone having a laugh to see just how many wankers he could get to follow him. In fact, their Facebook page resorts to insulting anyone who questions their beliefs, rather than offering up proof or testimony from anyone who doesn't whoop whoop when sitting on the toilet.

Cartel Games

We finally got around to watching Sicario 2: Soldado and while it was another example of true American horror stories, it fell a little flat compared to the first film which pushed all the right buttons. This time around there was a disjointed and slightly erratic feel to the story.

I think this is because it starts out as one thing and becomes something else entirely. The film starts with what appear to be a suicide bomber crossing the US/Mexican border who then blows himself up when confronted by the Border Guard and quickly switches to a Kansas City supermarket where four more suicide bombers kill 18 people. Cut to Josh Brolin threatening a Somalian pirate for information and thinking that the Mexican drug cartels are smuggling jihadists through Mexico into the USA. Our CIA buddies hatch, with the aid of a US senator, a plan to start a drugs war by kidnapping one of the children of the one of the leading cartel leaders and then staging it so they all think each other is to blame - quite what this has to do with suicide bombers seems a little vague. This is where the film starts to go a little wonky as it soon becomes clear that the suicide bombers weren't anything to do with the cartels and the guy on the border might have just been a fanatic.

However, Brolin, Benicio del Toro and their team have already snatched the daughter of the top man of one of the cartels, this happens to be the same man who killed all of del Toro's family prior to the first film. The plan is to put the girl in protective custody in the middle of a rival cartel's territory and sit back and wait for the war to start, but corruption spreads far and wide in Mexico and when the state police try and ambush their own convoy to try and... well, I'm not sure because by this point in the film the narrative is kind of lost and you don't really know what the hell is going on. The bottom line is the girl escapes and Toro is charged with chasing her and bringing her back. What he doesn't know is the US govt. has decided they've caused far too much of an international incident and want the girl and Toro eliminated. What follows is a fulfilling denouement, even if it continues with the same disjointed feel. It's a good film but I don't know if stuff got lost on the cutting room floor or the idea was to show how things go tits up and change quickly, I just felt it all seemed a tad confusing and as clear as mud...

A Bunch of Unpleasant People

There were fewer flashbacks and more time spent with the arseholes in the latest instalment of A Murder at the End of the World as Darby starts to follow her instincts regarding the murder and seems to fall foul of everyone there. You start to wonder just why she was invited when all she does is solve crimes and wrote a book when all the others have something 'important' to offer. This is why I likened it to the second Knives Out film from last year.

There's an intriguing premise at work here, but the millionaires, artists, hackers and assorted wankers that billionaire Andy has assembled in Iceland are all incredibly irritating and the mystery is marred by the fact that apart from Darby you really don't give a flying shit if they all die, which given the similarities to Ten Little Indians, is precisely what looks like happening when the second guest keels over and dies just as he decides to tell Darby everything he knows about Bill's death. Half the guests are arrogant wankers while the other half are self-important blowhards and when Andy Ronson tells Darby she's no longer welcome at his retreat because there isn't a murder to investigate and puts her on the next flight out of Iceland your guilt detector is focused directly on him, but unless there's a double whammy at play here he's not going to be the killer. 

Just to obfuscate things; Ronson's kid Zoomer yet again plays a significant role while staying in the background; Britt Marling really isn't a good actor and some of the scenes were obviously shot on a set rather than outside in the Icelandic wilds. There's an army of AI robots building something odd; there's people wearing masks, the staff are not at all helpful and to keep harping on about it, you wonder why Darby's been brought there unless this is some kind of set up or they're playing an elaborate murder mystery. The rate we're going the killer is going to be Ray - the AI. The few flashbacks we had this week were focussed on Darby and Bill getting closer to uncovering who the silver jewellery serial killer is, but there simply wasn't enough of this and you get the feeling that it would have made a far better series without this Icelandic bollocks getting in the way of an interesting story.

Here Be Monsters

The wife isn't especially keen on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters but I'm not letting that get in the way, because this is a fun TV series with big creatures, an interesting story and frankly it's got a lot more going for it than the films, which have tended to be great action sequences with duff human involvement, especially when the massively overrated Millie Bobby Brown has been involved.

Episode three ramped up the action and the intrigue as Lee Shaw and his three young pals break out of the Monarch 'retirement' home and head for South Korea where an old friend of Lee's is on hand to help them out of crisis. Meanwhile, we get introduced to the woman who appears to be leading Monarch now as she makes it clear that Lee and Hiroshi Randa's notes need to be found, whatever the cost. Lee's buddy provides them with a plane as they head towards Alaska and the last known destination of the missing Hiroshi and it's here they run into the latest Monster of the Week (as pictured). Back in the 1950s, we get our first glimpse of Godzilla as the US military decides to blow an atomic bomb up next to him, leaving the proto-Monarch to think that big green has been vaporised... Heh, little do they know... I don't understand the wife's general disdain, I thought everyone loved a good monster and this series has had quite a few so far.

Operatic Musings

The last time we saw Peter Dinklage was in Game of Thrones and while he has been in other things, there has been nothing we've watched; for a quality actor that doesn't feel enough, but his latest movie She Came To Me is kind of in the vein of the excellent The Station Agent, which we watched long before he became famous and I remember it for being a simply delightful but odd. The same can be said for this movie; it's certainly on the unusual side.

Co-starring Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei, Dinklage plays an opera composer who is having something of an existential crisis. It's been five years since his last hit opera, but he's lost his confidence and has a block that even his OCD therapist wife can break him out of. Yet this isn't really the crux of the film because we also have a teenage love story going on in the background - involving Hathaway's son from her first marriage and his relationship with the daughter of her new house cleaner, who is herself in a difficult marriage because her husband is pretty much a grade A arsehole, who also happens to be a LARPer. To make matters worse, Hathaway plays a women who had a Catholic mother and a Jewish father and is herself having her own existential crisis because she wants to give all their belongings away and become a nun - mainly because she feels they have much simpler lives surrounded by the kind of order she wants in her own life.

Then there's Marisa Tomei's Katrina, a tug boat captain who is suffering from a romance disorder - which is essentially that she craves relationships and becomes obsessed with anyone she shags. She bumps into the disillusioned Dinklage in a seedy bar, takes him back to her tug boat, seduces him and changes his life completely. What follows is a strange, slightly surreal tale that you can never be sure where it's going and has some very unusual things happen in it that you feel are almost for a psychiatrist's chaise lounge rather than a movie. Worth watching even if it feels a little... sordid and slightly wrong.

Life on Mars Part 2

Finally. The third episode of For All Mankind has, at last, got back into the groove that made it the consistently best thing on TV for the last three years. This show is at its best when it defies the odds and goes against the norm; when the characters challenge the narrative and do what is necessary rather than what is expected and this week's second helping was the perfect example.

Kelly and Aleida take their proposal to all the major players in space tech and get kicked back every time; it seems no one wants to invest in finding life on Mars. So they take their idea to former Helios boss Dev who also kicks them back, except this time Kelly mentions her mother, the woman who basically stuck a knife in Dev's back and took his company away from him and that seems to spur the former tech billionaire and genius out of his hibernation and solitude, as this new team take the fight to the Helios board. We see a welcome return of Bill, aka Peanut, but Aleida fails to persuade him to come and work for her at Helios, even though he is a shareholder. He does play a huge part in making Aleida realise she has PTSD.

Meanwhile on Mars, Ed and Sveta start to have eyes for each other over Ed's Mars grown weed, which they're using as a pain relief drug and it's clear that Ed is suffering from Parkinson's. Miles gets himself an extra job working for the Russian black market guru and does something he's been strictly forbidden to do and makes contact with the North Koreans. He's also finally making some money - from his less than legal activities - which might persuade his estranged wife not to move out of the family home. While in Russia, Margo faces an episode of sheer hell as the new Russian Revolution goes an unexpected way and she's suspected of being in thrall with a KGB head who might be one of the perpetrators of Gorbachev's downfall; however despite some quite haunting experiences for her, things might just be looking up. This felt like a real return to form, but it might have been as brilliant as ever, it was just up against something very special...

Lessons in Sheer Television Brilliance

I'm of the opinion that Lessons in Chemistry might be one of the best television series I have ever watched in my 61 years on the planet. It's like the prefect LP; one with X number of tracks on it and every single one of them an absolute banger. It is such a perfect TV show that a couple of times during the final episode I found myself welling up. I cannot recommend a TV series more than this; it is and was an absolute joy to watch and while not everyone had a happy ending, there was enough sheer brilliance to go round so those who it didn't quite work out for still had light to bask in.

It would appear that my prediction from last week was almost nailed on. This was really all about Calvin. Elizabeth Zott, her precocious daughter Mad, their fantastic neighbour Harriet, and all the other characters who helped weave this delightful tapestry of joy were just players in a bigger, bolder and brave story about how one tragic man could have such an influence on everybody whose life he touched. The fact that he was only ever there in spirit for the last six episodes was not an issue, because this was all about Calvin and like I said last week, there hasn't been such a likeable and totally fantastic character in a TV series ever.

I don't really want to spoil anything, but I've given much away over the last eight weeks and if you ever do get the chance to watch this I doubt the bits I've touched upon will stick in your memory, only, I hope, that I thought it was simply a heavenly piece of television and that you do to. This week Elizabeth quits her job, Mad finds her grandmother, Harriet's dreams are smashed, Walter gets propositioned and everything ends up being fine. It almost seemed too quick, but the final scene with Elizabeth and Mad surrounded by their extended family with Calvin looking on approvingly from the kitchen, which Elizabeth converted into a laboratory, almost made me lose it. I simply can't think of enough superlatives for this. I have no idea why I should think this was probably one of the best things I've ever watched; it simply was. I will be very surprised if this love story come social historical commentary is ever bettered. I'd give it 11 out of 10 and still think that's not a high enough mark. Find it, watch it and love it.

West is Best

Bill Bailey's Western Australia expedition takes a more gentler pace with the second part as he drives 10 hours north of Perth and swims with whale sharks, meets a woman who is an expert on microbial lifeforms, explores what used to be a coral reef that's now five miles inland and visits Northampton, which appears to have more bins per square kilometre than people. It's your average travelogue fair, Bailey is okay, but I feel the man who used to have me in fits of laughter has never been the same since winning that dancing competition; he no longer seems as surreal and off-kilter as he used to be; it's like he's become a bit too mainstream. Still, it's interesting enough and fills an hour when there's nothing else on apart from fascists eating insects in some other part of Australia...

Swampy Nonsense

"That felt a little like a TV movie," was the comment the wife made about The Marsh King's Daughter, a film starring the excellent Ben Mendelsohn and the overrated Daisy Ridley. To be fair it did feel a little like a Made for TV thing and it might have been, I have no idea, nor do I care to find out. It was okay, nothing special and felt like a bit of a waste for such an excellent actor like Mendelsohn, but he was recently in Secret Invasion so his quality threshold has obviously gone down the toilet since the fantastic The Outsider.

What we have here is a film that examines a control freak at work, but not your average one. Mendelsohn plays Jacob Holbrook, a man of the wild who lives in isolation with his wife and daughter and for much of the opening 20 minutes you think it's an idyllic set-up focusing on a loving father and daughter, but there are cracks around the edge, such as why the mother looks like she hates life and how Holbrook has a thing for tattooing his daughter. When a man on a quad bike strays into their territory lost and in need of help, the mother goes berserk, begging the man to leave and take her and her daughter with him and then BAM! He gets shot from a distance away and the daughter, Helena is fighting her mother to prevent her from being taken away from her father. The mother goes to drastic measures to get her daughter on the quad bike and she wakes up in a police station in the middle of a civilisation she had no idea existed. After a failed attempt to escape and be reunited with her father, who is now wanted for murder, the clock jumps 20 years.

Helena is now married with her own daughter; she's hiding all of her strange tattoos and she seems happy even if she appears to have some hang ups. Then her father escapes from a prison van, the FBI turn up - treating us to a ten minute segment that just further compounds my belief that the USA is a fascist dictatorship disguised as the Land of the Free. There's a car accident and the police and FBI declare Holbrook dead and everyone can go back to their lives, except Helena's husband is a bit sceptical about his wife and there's a lot of work to be done. Then Helena starts to think her father might not be dead and she has to use all the skills he taught her as a child to determine the truth from a growingly obvious fake trail. The rest is an attempt at an action adventure type of resolution, but as the wife said, it all felt a little PG13 and not really something to get excited about...

Animated Stuff

A brief mention for something we've obviously watched but I forgot. Season three of Love, Death and Robots came out last year and I thought we'd missed it, but not the case as we got to the second episode and the wife told me exactly what was going to happen. We watched three episodes in all and I couldn't remember any of them apart from a vague recollection, but enough to know we'd seen them and wouldn't bother with the rest. LD&R isn't a bad series; it has stunning visuals and some of it has excellent SF stories, but if I had to stick my neck out I'd say only about a quarter of the episodes in total are any good, the rest being derivatives of better known stories, rip offs and poor attempts at being cutting edge.

Next Time...

It feels like this week hasn't been as fruitful or productive as previous weeks and despite three excellent TV shows - one of which finished - compared to recent weeks it all felt a little like an anti-climax, despite me declaring Lessons in Chemistry as one of the best TV shows I've ever watched. The coming weeks promise very little apart from For All Mankind and the second half of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and that's because we're fast approaching Christmas, which will be in a month.

There is Doctor Who to dissect next week; my feelings are this - I expect Russell T Davies to bring the Doctor back after a number of years where it/he/she has been missing in action; he obviously knows how to find the right buttons to push and I expect a lot from what is to come - I might be setting myself up for a heap of disappointment, but, the trailers for the upcoming three specials all look fabulous and I have to admit I'm a fan of David Tenant's Doctor, even if he looks like he's been out on the town for a very long piss up! I'm not even too bothered about Donna Noble returning as this does feel like they've been brought back to tie up a loose end or two. Plus, compared to some of the more recent companions, at least Donna was something different.

The rest of the week looks a little barren and devoid of anything to get excited about; it might be time to explore some of the series we overlooked in 2023; to return to things we've watched over the last few years and to bite the bullet and watch some of the things on the Flash Drive of Doom that we've avoided for one reason or another. Whatever we sit down to watch, you'll be the first to hear about it.