Pop Culture - Where Do Bears Shit?

There are some spoilers floating about like former Tory MPs...

...In The Woods

Something a bit different to start. A full 10 episode breakdown of one of television's best things...

Season 3 Episode 1: How do you start a new series of arguably one of the best TV show of recent years? I suppose the best way is to have a little over 30 minutes of Nine Inch Nails' Together from their Ghosts V album of ambience as the ongoing soundtrack for the entire episode.

Apart from the soundtrack this was an almost wordless opener and it was all flashback, some of it we've seen, most of it was new. It was essentially an episode that told us through snippets and clever editing just how Carmy and co got to where we are now. How he went from some Chicago kid to one of the most praised up-and-coming young chefs in New York and how he gave it all up to come home and run his brothers sandwich business and then create 'The Bear' - his new venture which launched in the final episode of season two - the one with Carmy locked in the fridge because he'd completely lost it and how Syd wasn't going to let him fuck it up. It was an unusual episode and slightly longer than we're used to, but it perfectly encapsulates what this show is about - anguish, pain, determination, dedication, exasperation and fucking hard work. It's good to have it back, even if the poncey Guardian claimed that it wasn't a patch on the first two series.

Episode 2: Now, what you need to really kick the new series off is the tension, anger and unbelievable energy that this show displays when it is at its best. This was really the first episode of the new season and in 27 minutes it had everything you want.

Carmy has been up all night making 'non-negotiables' - rules by which the restaurant has to follow if it is going to get the Michelin star he (and Syd) so desire(s). But before he can get his vision across to the staff as they arrive, he needs to make amends for all the shit he caused in the season two finale and try and make up for all the people he insulted because while everyone is committed to 'The Bear' everyone is also fucking angry and upset at him and to make matters worse, Carmy has quit smoking, putting him on even more of an edge. Tensions with Richie are at an all time low; Sugar is two months away from having her baby and while there is 27 minutes of shouting at each other, they also have to deal with the fact that Marcus's mother died the night the restaurant opened. This was a powerful gut-wrenching addition to the pantheon of brilliant episodes and it's just so fucking good. This is the reason we have televisions. This is a TV show that simply cannot be recommended enough.

Episode 3: The frenetic energy of the first two series is replicated here as a week of The Bear is whizzed through in a little over 30 minutes; from the opening at 5.30 on the Monday to the closing at 11pm on the Friday night. It's fast, furious, angry and tense with the ups and downs to be seen straight off the bat. It's a tough episode and in keeping with the series so far.

Episode 4: Is the calm after the storm. It's the weekend and we get snippets of the lives of the staff; what they're thinking, doing and how they spend their time. Syd has taken a lease out on a new apartment, which her father is critical of, for a number of reasons, but as we saw in earlier episodes, she can't live at home any more. Marcus is getting used to not having his mother around and he's dealing with it in strange ways and Sugar (Natalie) is struggling with her pregnancy and juggling the restaurant. Richie meets his daughter's soon-to-be new stepfather (Josh Hartnet), who seems quite enamoured by his new wife's ex.

Episode 5: At some point in the previous episode, Syd meets up with a chef who admits to having been to the restaurant on the Q.T. She doesn't think to mention this, but at the end of the last episode they get a call to say the photographer is coming to take some pictures which sets up this quite perfectly because not only has a rival chef been there, but a food critic has also been...

This is an episode with another special guest star, this time John Cena as another cousin of this incestuous bands of Chicago families. He plays a man who is excellent at buffing floors - among other things - and he is just one of the things to distract the team from getting the restaurant perfect for the photographer. There's more of the ongoing comedy duo of the brothers Fak, which is a little bit of a distraction from the main story at times, but they try hard even if they're both wankers. Uncle Jimmy has also brought 'The Computer' in to cut some costs and make some savings, which Carmy isn't happy about but understands the reality of the situation, especially as one of the places he trained to be a chef at has announced it is closing down. This has been one of those 'treading water' episodes that felt almost unnecessary but nothing is wasted here... 

Episode 6: This is all about Tina and how she ended up working at the Original Beef (the deli bar that becomes The Bear). It's a downbeat episode about how employees in the USA have no rights and can be treated like shit. The thing about The Bear is it might be a lot of arguments and swearing but it also about friendship, loyalty and family, something that is explored in the next episode.

Episode 7: Arguably the weakest episode of all three seasons, with the exception of Sydney being offered a different job, this was about not a lot at all. Lots of conversations and cod philosophy and more of the Fak brothers.

Episode 8: This is a two-hander. Natalie's waters break at the restaurant depot and because it happens just as all the staff of the Bear have locked their phones away there's no one there to answer her calls. So out of desperation, Nat has to phone her extremely mad, bi-polar mother played by the brilliant Jamie Lee Curtis.

It's clear from almost the start that the relationship between Sugar and her mother is not good. There is evidence from the second season that the Berzatto family all have problems with the matriarch, because of the aforementioned madness. She is a monster of a woman who wants nothing more than the spotlight to be on her all the time; but this time around she's there for her daughter and while it's a very wordy episode, it's more background and back story. You learn things about Michael, Carmine and Natalie that maybe are not so important in the grand scheme of things but do add to the tapestry of the series. This has been a season about filling in blanks because we know all the players, we simply don't know who, why and what they are.

Episode 9: As penultimate parts go this was quite tame and seemed to focus on Carmy and Syd for once, although neither were in it for that much, but neither have been the focus that much throughout the series. Carmy is wondering if he's at fault for all the shit happening in is life and is wrestling with apologising to Clare, but time and his strange sense of pride seem to be getting in the way. Syd is wrestling with the job offer and pressures from all sides. Uncle Jimmy meets with Carmy and falls short of telling him that he's got to pull his funding from the restaurant because of outside forces.

Episode 10: As season finales go this was a pot boiler - an apt analogy for this series. This is all about the funeral service for Olivia Coleman's Michelin starred restaurant and the remaining hours waiting for the review to drop from the Chicago Tribune.

This is about confrontations, conversations and culminations, Carmy is still basically a raw nerve wandering around in clothes; he's into the second month of stopping smoking and basically should go and buy a pack. For Syd this is a night at a restaurant fraught with problems as her potential new business partner is one of the chefs there and it's clear that she needs time or maybe just to say no. However, after an exhausting 'funeral' for the restaurant, where Carmy confronts the one chef who gave him a hard time throughout his training, the episode stops with Syd having a panic attack and Carmy seeing the review and while we, the viewers, only catch glimpses of it, it is clear it isn't what it says. Carmy stares up at the overhead subway A train, the screen fades to black with the words 'to be continued'.

We know (or at least we've been led to believe) that season four was filmed simultaneously with three because of Jeremy Allen White's film commitments for 2024/25, so while we're probably going to wait a year for the next part, we know it's probably in the can. With Ebon Moss-Bachrach also involved in the Fantastic Four film - as Ben Grimm, the Thing - it seems that The Bear might be a finite series given the impending success of two of its three stars. We just need Ayo Edebiri to make it big and one of the best TV shows of the 21st century so far could be bidding us farewell.

This series has been as good as the two previous. Do not let any shite centre-right newspaper tell you differently; The Bear is still the boss.

Psi Corps

Instead of inflicting grievous mindfucks on ourselves by subjecting ourselves to Glastonbury and a two hour set by the world's shittiest band Coldplay, we decided to watch a couple of comedy films with the link being George Clooney (again). First up was the 2011 bizarre comedy The Men Who Stare At Goats, a film we first saw about 12 years ago and in a bizarre way should appeal to Star Wars geeks.

This is a movie that features a pretty impressive cast including the aforementioned Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Stephen Lang and follows the story of Bob, a rubbish journalist based in Ann Arbour, Michigan who is sent on a story which somehow leads to him being in Iraq during the second Gulf War and meeting Clooney who tells him the story of the secret US army group trained in the 1970s in new ways of warfare, including being able to kill animals by staring at them and to walk through walls. This is a surreal film, but only in its content. It's a mixture of flashback and 'present' day narratives that will make you laugh. Clooney's character Lyn Cassady is essentially as mad as a box of frogs, but as the film continues towards the end Bob has to start asking himself whether the story Lyn tells him is bollocks or if there's more to it than meets the eye.

Welcome to Farce-Land

What have George Clooney, the Russo Brothers, William H Macey, Sam Rockwell, Patricia Clarkson and an almost endless stream of unintentional partners in crime got in common? The farcical and at times extremely funny Welcome to Collinwood.

The movie starts with Luiz Guzman being given a sure-fire job by a lifer in prison and all he needs is someone to take the rap for his Grand Theft Auto arrest and he can perform the robbery and walk away with $300,000. The problem is Guzman doesn't get out of prison and the guy taking the fall for him hears about the job and decides to go and do it himself. Another problem is a number of others have found out about it along the way so it becomes a job for at least five people. All they need to do is gain access to an empty apartment, break through a cheaply made wall into the safe room of a jewellers and crack the safe. Then someone moves into the apartment and things start to fall apart. Guzman escapes from prison; the guy who was going to take the rap - Sam Rockwell - falls in love with the maid of the old women who have moved into the apartment and everyone else involved are also having existential nightmares reining down on them.

This is a superbly funny remake of a 1958 Italian film and even more remarkable is that it was written and directed by the Russo Brothers - the men who brought us Avengers: Infinity war and Endgame! It's the tale of disasters, bad judgement and 'criminals' who couldn't rob their own piggy banks. It was made in 2002, but there's a distinct 1970s feel about it, but it could simply be that Collinwood in Ohio just sits outside of time. 

The Temple of Mammon 

I'm an old codger (I am, I am) and the last time I went to Glastonbury was 39 years ago and almost got pneumonia. It was the fourth time for me, having been to the 1980, 1982 and 1984 events as well. My memories of it are largely good, with the obvious exception of the last time. I've never really been a fan of the television coverage, even when bands or artists I really like have played. Gigs need to be experienced live.

So this year, as usual, I avoided it like the plague. The BBC's blanket coverage is like Wimbledon for people who don't like tennis; it is anodyne, selective and has zero atmosphere and it has been like that since the 1990s when the nation's broadcaster decided to dedicate so much attention to what stopped being a CND festival in the 80s and became a money grabbing middle class attracting icon of shite. I managed to 'watch' less than a minute of it this year, a personal record, and this was achieved by accident while changing channels. I can think of nothing worse than watching Coldsick play for a record fifth time. I mean, if you need a fucking reason why Glasto is just a money pit of despair it's Chris Martin and his talentless band of cunts. Everything about this barf-fest is smug interactions, presenters trying to be hip and hippy and other more derogatory words designed to make you realise that I'm anything but a fan of this corporate bag of vomit.

I look forward to the summer every year; from May to some point in September, I yearn for warm days, sunshine, pub gardens and an al fresco lifestyle, but I also forget that every fucking summer (unless we're really lucky, like having a pandemic or something) we have international football, Wimbledon, Royal fucking Ascot, televisual repeats and the biggest cuntbag of them all - Glastonbury, just to remind us that for every good or bad day we're going to have, the usual summer shitfest is waiting in the wings to make us even unhappier than we thought we'd get when the weather lets us down. It couldn't even rain at Glastonbury this year so I didn't even have that frisson of schadenfreude and wasn't able to laugh at the middle class twats unprepared for what a festival should be - as much mud as there is human faeces, the chance of catching something that might kill you and enough drugs to stop an army of elephants. Glastonbury is now for cunts.  

A Brief Album Review

Anyone who knows me will probably know that over the last six or seven years I have become slightly obsessed with Scottish indie folk band Beluga Lagoon. At the start of 2022, they released a groundbreaking album called The Lagganberry Man and then last year they released The Kilfraggan Forest Choir a concept album I loved so much it was my album of the year. It was haunting, was full of choirs and was dark and beautiful. I'm listening to it as I write this and it's just glorious...

Late spring saw the quick release of their second concept album on the trot - The Slug's Bunnet - about the people and lives of those who use the 'fictional' pub in the title. It was obviously hugely anticipated in this house, especially given how much I've adored the last two releases and think they have a back catalogue that is full of absolute gems. The thing is I'm not really a huge fan of folk music; there has been about ten albums in total, throughout my life, that I've really liked and many of these have been folk rock, folktronica or folk-ish albums; the closest I've got to liking a proper folk band - since Waterfall in the 1970s - has been Andrew O'Donnell's band and they've been laden with other influences, that is until this album. The Slug's Bunnet is what I'd call proper folk; Scottish folk music with a proper jiggedy jig feel to it and subsequently I struggled to get into it. It is the least accessible - for me - album I have actually bought with my own money for years. It's full of what I'd call actual folk music rather than something that borrows from other genres. With a couple of exceptions, most of the album almost hurts my ears. It's like they wanted to do something that was traditional - especially after the haunting Kilfraggan Forest Choir - and while many of their devoted fans love it to bits, I've managed to play it three times and some tracks got skipped seconds into them. I'm disappointed, but I suspect I'm in the minority. I do thinks it's a real shame and I hope the next album will be more like the majority of their back catalogue. 

The Army Game

The Clooney-fest continued with a timely revisit to the 1999 David O Russell movie Three Kings, yet another film where suave and sophisticated Clooney is cast as a thief. It is remarkable the number of movies he's made where he's on the wrong side of the law. 

In a strange way, this is very similar to the set up in Welcome to Collinwood. Someone gets hold of information about a stash of gold and it's up to Clooney, Ice Cube and Mark Wahlberg to go and liberate it from the Iraqis while making sure that the rest of the US special forces don't get their hands on it. It's largely a comedy about the end of the Gulf War and then it takes a dramatic left turn about half way through when the boys realise that the Republican Guard are slaughtering innocent Iraqi civilians because they oppose Saddam Hussein and the comedy gets replaced with a serious undertone of death, torture and oppression and for once it gets the tone perfectly as the carefree group of would be gold bullion thieves suddenly become heroes to the rebels. It is a fable about excess, how the USA is only really interested in itself and how it can ignore the little guy in the interest of its own interests and this film does a good job of showing this but also coming up with a relatively satisfying ending.

Dull Dragon Dung

The much-hyped and exceedingly boring House of the Dragon continued with... actually hang on a minute because not just The Guardian but other review outlets suggested that after the opening two episodes were let down by being as fucking boring as watching Wimbledon, pissed out of your face, things would start to get better. I suppose it depends on what you define as 'better' because this was even slower with less happening than ever before...

Things of note: Matt Smith in a suit of smart armour (that's armour that looked smart, btw) and also in the leakiest and dampest castle in the whole of Westeros, where he's not sure he's still got his mind. An erect penis being given a blow job in a brothel and some other unnecessary nudity, including the decidedly unpleasant Aemond with his own very small Targaryen equipment. A ridiculous meeting between the would be queen and the dowager queen in a church in King's Landing that was simply ridiculous given that Rhaenyra is the most wanted person on this planet and all Alicent had to do was dob her in as she was walking away and the series would be over. Oh and some knights, including the new and vastly out-of-his-depth Hand of the King, get chased by a dragon. That was about it; if anything else of note happened I must have been yawning or scratching my balls.

Insufferable

Blimey. George Clooney made a duff movie! I expected the Cohen Brothers to be involved in some bad films because the law of averages dictates it, but I really thought Clooney had made all of his shite in pre-ER days, but it seems I was wrong as I struggled to stay awake during Intolerable Cruelty, a film about a smarmy divorce lawyer and a gold digger, played by Catherine Zeta Jones. It was a silly load of hyper nonsense, and sure, that might be what it was designed to be but it didn't make it any good. Also appearing in this low quality movie were Geoffrey Rush, Billy Bob Thornton, Cedric the Entertainer and... er... some other actors. As an aside, I found Cedric anything but entertaining; might this be because he wasn't entertaining? However, no one was in this flop.

It's Not Entertainment

My mate Chris has been banging on at me about watching the Tube of You series The Rest is Entertainment with Richard Osman and Marina Hyde, especially the most recent one that discusses podcasts - political and football ones.

The first thing they talked about was how podcasts are now the go to entertainment for millions of people - how they flock to podcasts rather than the TV or radio. This might be the case but as I can probably count on two hands the number of times I've actually listened to or watched one it obviously doesn't apply to me. They then go into some detail about the mechanics of podcasts and why they're more 'cutting edge' than the news or football shows on television and I am aware that this is a specific thing explaining why TV isn't what we want it to be, but being told that journalists can't ask politicians questions without them being vetted by editors sounds to me like an apologist's excuse as to why journalists are not allowed to be journalists any more. Obviously they're not going to deal with specifics, but even if a 'question' might have a dubious history, surely a bit of research and an ambiguous way of asking can be applied? 

For example: why can't a journalist ask the former PM, Rishi Sunk, "If you're responsible for inflation coming down, are you not therefore responsible for inflation going up?" But apparently journalists are no longer allowed to ask the questions the people want, they're limited to boring, anodyne and irrelevant questions, presumably so that the politician already knows the stock answer to what he knows he's going to be asked. This podcast did not make me understand the situation more, it made me angrier and the way it was done in such a matter of fact, 'Oh, this is what living in fascist Britain is like now so get over it' way I found condescending. It's like being gaslighted in a semi-entertaining way by two people who can be funny in their own circles. I switched off after that section of it. Podcasts are not my bag, especially ones that appear to give up on things I grew up to expect.

Axel F Off

An unfair subhead really because Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F wasn't that bad a film, especially one to watch the night of the election. It reunited original the gang, all looking old, decrepit and added some new faces. It was largely predictable; some of the jokes were tried and tested and Eddie Murphy looked like he enjoyed revisiting one of his best loved roles.

This is a movie that struggles to make a lot of sense because Axel Foley and his pals are all in their 60s and 70s and should have been retired off long ago. Murphy has obviously had some work done, but you don't see him running around and his face looks a little puffy, like there's a lot of Botox floating about. The plot? Well, there is one; it involves Axel's daughter - who is a lawyer - taking on a case which triggers crooked cops and drug cartels into action. Then Billy - Judge Reinhold - now a private detective working on the same case, but without each other knowing - uncovers information that is wanted by the crooked cops. Everything is telegraphed in advance, some of the jokes have grown hair on and gone bald, but it's a bit of nostalgic fun updated for the 2024.

Bone Idol

We started to watch the new Mel Gibson film. It's called The Boneyard. We managed seven minutes and then turned it off. We haven't seen Gibson in many movies in recent years and if this is anything to go by we won't be seeing him in many for years to come. It had acting that belonged in a fucking Sharknado film. The opening two minutes is quite good; almost professional, then it simply falls apart. I checked IMDB and it had a rating of 4.2... It came out Friday and it was that low inside eight hours.

Dark and Weird

I don't really understand why the latest Nicholas Cage film has such a poor rating - a 5.5 on IMDB - because while it might not be the best thing you've ever seen, it'd better than a 5.5, even if a lot of it doesn't make an awful lot of sense.

Arcadian is a horror/sci-fi film in the vein of The Quiet Place with something terrorising groups of apocalypse survivors. It starts with Cage finding two baby boys and bringing them up on his own in a farmhouse in the middle of an unspecified nowhere. How he fed them when it seems that the world had gone full on apocalypse is unknown, but 15 years later, one of them is off ogling at a girl of the same age at a nearby farm, while his brother is a nerdy, weirdo who is basically studying the creatures that attack their farmhouse every night. He's the clever one, while his brother is led by his groin and Cage is just on edge all the time because he wants everyone home safe before it gets dark. There's the nearby farm who are claiming that they are not really bothered by the night creatures any longer and they keep sheep, almost to prove it. Shit happens and it's up to the boys to save the day. It's a creepy little film, maybe a little too dark at times (and by that I mean the lighting), but the creatures are as weird as fuck and there is a genuine sense of jeopardy and menace going on. It might have been taken more seriously if Cage wasn't in it, because, you know, he makes one good film in every 100 and this is only a few films after that crazy Dream Scenario. Worth a look, regardless of what IMDB says.

Sadomasochistic Fetishist 

The Boys is beginning to get slightly weird ['slightly' you say? Really?] it's also beginning to show us what is going on, especially with Butcher and particularly with Homelander and his team of world usurpers. It's an absolute bad taste fest this week with more perversion than you can shake a stick at and more tumour induced paranoiac fantasies the same stick would have trouble being waved at. This is Homelander's play to get the arsehole politicians of the USA on his side, but unfortunately the cleverest woman in the world gets shot in the head and now has been lobotomised, which we don't know if it's a permanent one just yet, but I'm presuming her brain will grow back for next week. Mother's Milk has a panic attack as a result of this encounter while Hughie ends up in the most compromising positions - plural - you can't dream of imagining; positions so bad it might have scarred him for life. It was, however, more of the same, yet again. This is a show that either needs a new writer or a new direction because at the moment it's the same old same old. 

How to Dress a Wound...

We're almost at the halfway point of the final season of Evil and the thing I expressed doubt about happening happened as Cheryl took a knife to Leland and he took broken glass to her. They have become enemies now and while Cheryl is still beguiled by something evil she's back on the Bouchard side of the fence and something tells me she's going to have to be.

This starts off about a haunted train driver but soon lurches into weirdness when the ghosts the train driver is seeing are happening on the tracks directly above... Kristen's house. Enter Sister Andrea and a number of discoveries are made, not just to do with ghosts and demons. It appears that the Bouchard house is haunted and possibly infected with demons, so along comes David and Ben to save the day, but in the end it's just a case of bricklaying. Meanwhile the strange case of the Ben we never see ramps up a few notches as his now live in girlfriend shows him a video of something he has no memory of. Is this his Djinn at work or is the proton beam that hit him in the head in the first episode fucking him up now? This was very much a comedy episode but also a plot one and the comedy was darker than usual and it has a great cliffhanger ending which I suspect won't be touched on next Thursday...

Next Time...

More of the same regular TV shows until they stop and are replaced by new ones. There's a couple of new things I might try (and I'm still watching old Doctor Who episodes - the Matt Smith ones - which are truly dark and quite sinister compared to this Gatwa shite we're having) and there's a couple of old TV series I want to watch. One I should have watched seven years ago and another that I watched 38 years ago.

The FDoD is full of new and old films again and both the football and Wimbledon will be almost over by the time you read the next instalment...

 

Modern Culture - Beyond Belief

The Usual Spoilers...

Witchy Women

Kristen states an interesting fact in the latest episode of Evil; the number of cases they have investigated where women are the subject. It was in the 60s compared to just 18 cases involving a man. She wasn't suggesting the Catholic church is a sexist, misogynistic, chauvinistic cabal of men trying to oppress women, but she was really and Ben seemed to agree. This week it was all about witches and whether or not a coven was responsible for the possession and gruesome crime committed by a former member of a dance troupe.

It was yet another strangely 'incomplete' episode that opened up more possibilities while simultaneously shutting them down again. The witches coven and their ghostly muse actually seemed like an interesting development, but you get the feeling that it might be the last time we see them, even if Kristen seemed quite taken by one of the dancers. It was also another fine example of how this show lulls you into a false sense of deduction only for there to be a reveal at the end that is opposite what you might think. The problem I'm beginning to have is we're at episode 6 now, there's only 10 more to go and while some areas of the ongoing story are moving along at a pace; others are floundering around the same way they have for four seasons...

We've now been three episodes without Ben's djinn; Kristen's husband is still in rehab and the girls haven't mentioned the events that led up to it. While Cheryl now knows that Leland might have been trying to murder one of her granddaughters, by proxy; this might end up being an interesting confrontation or it might be weeks before it's revisited. David's slightly dull astral projection/drawing thing subplot is happening more and more, while I'm not seeing anything new that suggests the Vatican might be manipulated by demons; maybe because his new handler seems genuine enough - after a fashion. There's also the fact that Kristen's blabbermouth daughters are now spending a lot of time with grannie and their half brother - the antichrist, who is getting exponentially bigger and older - and haven't yet blabbed anything to their mom is not in keeping with the rest of the show. It's still good TV, but it's going to have to do a lot of housecleaning and quickly if we're not going to have a quick and unfulfilling ending.

Killer Sheep

I suppose the best thing about this week's The Boys was the fact that it dished up the obligatory bad taste episode in spades. There's always one in every season that has you going 'WTF?' or 'I can't believe they just did that.' And this season's they went for it BIG time.

I couldn't understand why Hughie's dad had been brought back for this season, especially as Simon Pegg is a bit bigger than the series, but it was so they could turn him into a psychopathic teleporting murderer - just for a while. The amount of blood, guts and internal organs on display in the hospital where he was [not] recovering from his stroke [until given V] was up there with exploding whales and the penis gag from season three. The point of it escaped me a little apart from this show's need to try and upstage anything else they've done previously and the thing is this wouldn't have got anywhere near previous gorefests if it hadn't have been for the V infected sheep the rest of the team encountered. These were the real LOL moments of the episode as they swooped down and took a cow apart and then focused on the Boys as well as various associates of the VP (the one who can explode heads). Oh and Annie seems to be having a problem with her powers and the Seven have decided to become proper superheroes rather than plastic Vought puppets; the problem is their existing ideology. It was all very much the same as it ever was. This has not been the cutting edge show it once was and now seems a little like it's getting bogged down by the myriad of stuff going on here and in the spin-off.

Who's Crying Now?

Oh FFS. Really? Is that as good as they've got? That's me done. I sat through I don't know how many Chibnall/Whitaker Doctor Who episodes but I never once said, 'fuck it, I'm done with this shit.' Well - today, the 22nd June 2024 - I'm done with this shit (obviously until the Christmas special which I will watch because I will have forgotten that I swore never to watch this heap of dung ever again). This was without a doubt the most mundane and boring season finale in the history of season finales. What an absolute fucking let down. Ruby Sunday was nothing special at all, just some average abandoned kid from an insignificant mother who was so pointless and uninspiring the worst evil the universe ever faced couldn't work out who she was or why she was so important. What an absolute load of bollocks. It was the anti-climax to beat all anti-climaxes; the antithesis of the blockbuster ending and... Jesus wept (and boy can the Doctor weep as well, he was more leaky faucet than time lord), what an ending; using the God of Death as the God of Life and using him via the Tardis and a bungee rope to rip a hole in the fabric of time to allow all the billions upon billions of things it killed to magically be reborn again like a perverse version of Avengers: Endgame, except instead of using a magic gauntlet they used a non-magic red herring of an assistant. As I said, FFS. It made absolutely no sense at all; none. It doesn't matter how much you try to understand it, it was worse than bollocks; it was like it had been plotted by a rotting avocado.

Then there was the epilogue, which we now know has been quashed by Disney because that's not the end of Ruby Sunday at all as she's going to be back for the next series along with another female companion - are they worried that a male companion might tempt the gay Doctor to get his trouser snake out and scare all the Disney+ viewers? Absolute wank; turgid pseudo-sentimental horse shit. Please, never darken my TV screen ever again.

Outer My Mind

If one time travel load of bollocks wasn't enough... The reason we stuck with Outer Range was because I'd been reliably informed that while season one was slow and quite boring, season two really ups the ante. Well, fortunately this weird and wonderful neo-western got weirder than a buffalo taking a shit in a corner shop in Bicester.

I can live with most of the first season, but there were some things that just seemed too stupid to be believable. Let's start with the fact that if Royal knew about the hole in his 'yard' since the late 19th century, why was he trying to so hard to keep its existence a secret, when by the end of season one just about everyone in the series knew about it? Is the youngest Tillerson boy mentally challenged or does he just want to be a 21st century Gene Autrey? How the fuck did the sheriff continue with her singular line of investigation on the Trevor Tillerson murder when the coroner told her he'd been dead for eight hours but had been missing for five days? I mean, if she's as good as she thinks she is, it didn't matter how much she suspected an Abbot for the killing, you'd have thought she would have followed the logical course of the investigation? And is Autumn the most annoying fucking character ever to appear in a weird TV show? Except, we now might know why....

One thing I did realise while watching the season one finale was that Lewis Pullman who plays Rhett Abbott also played the fantastic Calvin Evans in Lessons in Chemistry. Anyhow, we have season two lined up to watch and like I said it's supposed to have a lot more happen in it. It needs that to be the case...

Then along came season two like we only stopped watching the first season just yesterday... 

One thing I will say is that we were promised a ramp up in weirdness and that's exactly what we got. This first episode went all in on the 'you think you had an idea what's happening, well think again!' The new tag team of Royal and Autumn make some waves; Wayne's back from the almost dead; Perry's back in the - what looks like - 1980s; Joy is back in the 1880s and Luke is being talked to by dead owls. It stays this way through the opening half of the second season, culminating in a clutch of episodes that are staggeringly bizarre. There's a complete episode set in 1886 - the year Royal went through the hole and into the 1960s or 70s - with Joy living with the Shoshone; this is one of the highlights of the entire series and through this we learn either the truth of what happened with Royal's father or that her appearance there altered it.

Then there's the last couple of episodes (and the long wait for the next series) where everything gets well and truly fucked up. Let's put it this way, if you've watched this series or intend to watch it then season two will considerably blow your mind at times, but by the time you get to the last few episodes it won't just blow your mind, it'll take it out for a walk, give it LSD, shag it, then leave it in a dry and desolate place before throwing it in the sea and getting it drunk. Just the simple fact that stuff happens - mainly with Perry - that is inexplicable and exists in its own self contained madness makes this one of the most fucked up TV shows I have ever seen.

I have to say that as an aficionado of time travel nonsense there are some gaping paradoxical holes in the narrative - but is there? Something does happen in the season two finale that seriously makes you wonder why events in the past are not changing things in the present. As a portal to the future I can understand the confusion, but if the 'river of time' that flows under the West Pasture goes back and forth, how come events of this series aren't written into the fabric of the past? I will say that season two really does get batshit crazy and if you can plough through season one, season two is almost everything you want it to be. Roll on May 2026 and season three.

The Firing Line

The Clooney-fest continues with Up in the Air, a film we both remember watching 15 years ago and we both remembered nothing about it apart from one scene; oddly enough it's the scene that turns it from a wonderful light comedy about firing people to a wonderful tragical movie about loneliness...

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a professional firer of people. He works for a company that are employed by cowardly executives to come into firms and sack their staff because the owners are too chicken shit to do it themselves. Ryan is very good at it, but Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) is a graduate who has joined the company and believes she can save them hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing their job via a video link rather than in person. This is something the self-centred and happily lonesome Ryan doesn't like the idea of at all. You see he's so invested in his life as a man who lives 'up in the air' the last thing he wants or needs is to be grounded back in Omaha, Nebraska. He has a casual life, with casual relationships and accrues airmiles to the point he is on the verge of becoming only the 7th person to get to 10million miles.

Then he meets Vera Farmiga's Alex, who is basically a female Ryan and the two of them essentially become fuck buddies whenever they can, except because of Natalie's old-fashioned-for-her-age look at life Ryan begins to reassess his own life and that's when things start to change for him, especially when he goes home for his younger sister's wedding, a woman he barely knows. I remembered thoroughly enjoying this film, but I'd forgotten just how sad and slightly unsettling it is, especially when you realise that this is what corporate USA is really like - just another reason to hate that fucking country with an absolute passion; a soulless, shit house of a nasty place where people are treated like less than shit. Great film, though.

Twin Tragedy

Exactly what you suspected would happen after the tumultuous final scenes from the season two opener of House of the Dragon happened and Rhys Ifans was very much all over it like the political rash maker he is, unfortunately his authority has been undermined by his daughter's illicit lover and his grandson's grief.

This really was an episode about how to deal with a disaster as best you can. While Rhaenyr could not believe that her husband was stupid enough to allow the idiots he sent to kill Alicent's second son to take someone else's life instead, so heinously that any support she might have got could be seen slipping away like sand through her hands. The new king was simultaneously winning the propaganda war and then pissing all over it by having every single rat catcher in the city hung from the city gates, causing something of a faux pas that he didn't really give a shit about. This was an episode about making bad choices when prudence might have been the better option. There are changes in allegiances and a battle between two brothers that was only going to end with more tragedy. One wonders where this series is going to end up, but given how fucking mad the Targaryen family is I wouldn't be at all surprised if they don't all try to kill each other off to claim the Iron Throne. 

In an unexpected plot twist, [is the Guardian reading my blogs?] that awful newspaper has suddenly realised this is a very dull and boring sequel and nothing much happens, there's no sex, no one of any worth has died yet and it's too dark and mumbly... Or maybe one of their critics actually bothered to watch an episode rather than think they know what's going to happen from a plot synopsis?

O Boy, You're Really Here

It came out 24 years ago and while the wife has always fancied watching it, I have never been that bothered about it. That's probably down to the fact that I haven't enjoyed a film musical since the late 1950s made ones; I'm not even keen on West Side Story, which I believe was the last of the truly great Hollywood musicals.

Tonight, we remedied that and finally watched the Cohen Brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou and while it was an enjoyable and slightly silly movie, I'm struggling to understand why it is such a cult classic and beloved by almost everyone who has seen it. It's okay, some of the tunes are catchy, but it's essentially about three idiots wandering across the southern States trying to avoid being captured after they escape from a chain gang. It's a film built on lies and incompetence and how the three - George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson - even managed to escape the chain gang let alone have so many strange and fantastic adventures along the way is a mystery unto itself. It was fun; the cast obviously had a ball making it; Clooney has never looked more at home but it felt more like an homage to the Three Stooges than to anything else and with a couple of LOL moments early on I found it dragged on a bit and really wasn't what I expected. However, as I don't really know what I expected that's a bit of a throwaway comment. Still, that's another Cohen Brothers and Clooney film ticked off the list, I'm sure there aren't many more to watch.

Barely Burbling C**t

The BBC's Colin Patterson is anything but a journalist. This gurning, ever-smiling bag of Scottish wind somehow got a job as the BBC's entertainment correspondent and does his utmost to help give the Beeb a bad name... Have you ever seen a TV correspondent (Okay, Andi Peters maybe) so vacuous, fawning and  annoying? Everything is so brilliant he could be the Scottish cousin of Paul Whitehouse's Brilliant character from the Fast Show and this week he's been interviewing Glastonbury guests in a way that would have made Hello! Magazine vomit...

To music icon Shania Twain on BBC Breakfast he asked such important questions as: As the Legends slot usually brings fans out wearing fancy dress based on whoever is appearing, what would you recommend fans wear when you appear in this slot? How about: You're a big fan of animals, would you consider riding a horse onto the stage? FFS, is this really the level of 'interviewing' we can expect now from the BBC? No facile questions like: how does it feel to be classed as a Legend and sharing a stage that's usually is occupied by really old, nearly dead pop stars? Or maybe: How do you feel about appearing at Glastonbury; is it something you ever thought would happen? Does your arse look bigger now? Do you give a fuck about what anyone asks you anymore? Jesus on an inflatable carp...

And then Glastonbury arrived with almost blanket coverage from the moment the gates opened on Wednesday to Dual IPA's Pyramid Stage performance [last night] and there was Patterson poncing about like someone had slipped him a dozen Ees. He gets fucking paid to attend this pointless spectacle for anyone over the age of 50. He even managed to interview Keane for about ten minutes this morning which had all the relevance of watching a bison take a shit in a corner shop in Bicester... I know I'm an old cunt who hasn't been to Glastonbury for 39 years, but can't the BBC show this on BBC3 and on line and not plaster it all over BBC1 and 2 like it's important for everyone?

The Really Gong Show

The George Clooney directed biopic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is an odd fish at best. Sam Rockwell played Chuck Barris, the man who invented the concept for Blind Date, Mr & Mrs and created the Gong Show, which was the template for so many talent contests. Barris also claimed he was a CIA undercover operative who killed 33 people.

What this movie actually felt like was the delusions of an egotist and fantasist. Barris had an extraordinary amount of success as a producer and a host but there doesn't appear to be a lot of corroborating evidence to suggest he was a hitman for a secretive branch of the CIA. Clooney played his 'handler' and the man who recruited him based on his ability to get beaten up in bar fights and the all-star cast included roles for Brad Pitt and Matt Damon - neither of them spoke a word - and Julia Roberts as a femme fatale who worked with Barris on some of his hits. This is a tonally awkward film; there is lots about it that felt like it really was the ramblings of a man who possibly took too many drugs or drank too much or simply had the shit beaten out of him so often his brain was addled. It purports to be a comedy but felt like an examination of mental illness; the drama wasn't particularly dramatic and I got the impression that Clooney, a huge fan and star of a number of Cohen brothers films, wanted to make something in the same vein as they did. This was entertaining but not great entertainment.

Simply Amazing

We've given up on most of George Clarke's TV shows, but we stick with Amazing Spaces because it's always a mixture of brilliant and bonkers watching people do crazy things with unusual stuff and watching it come out quite... amazing. I think the good thing about this new series is that Will Hardie is back - after a year's sabbatical - and he adds an element of professionalism to the show. He's not an architect like Clarke, he understands the stuff that is happening, while his big Geordie privileged friend takes his amiable self around being the star of the show. Will is the brains of the outfit; he's the guy who does all the donkey work with their annual 'big project' and there's something slightly irreverent about him, especially when he's dealing with the ever ebullient George. The other entertaining aspect of this are the people who do their own projects; the imagination and ability many of them show and the remarkable results they have. If anything, after ten seasons, the least amazing thing about this show is actually George Clarke; who's looking a bit overweight, old and frayed around the edges, like he either needs a makeover, or Will Hardie builds a new compact and bijou replacement - with a wider vocabulary and less cheese... 

Wondrous Repeats

I have been so disappointed by this revamped, relaunch of Doctor Who that I decided instead of watching football matches over this summer I'd watch some classic David Tenant and Matt Smith episodes and I started off with two double bills from season 4, when Tenant and Catherine Tate were flying the Tardis.

The first thing about Silence in the Library, Forest of the Dead, The Stolen Earth and Journey's End is simply how fucking good they are compared to anything that has been on over the last five years. They simply ooze class and while I fully understand that there's a lot of baggage in at least two of these episodes, compared to the dog shit dished up by Chibnall and then the camp excrement squeezed out from RTD's return, these are uber classic episodes, with a sense of investment and brimming with tension and entertainment. This was Doctor Who at its very best, with guest stars galore, intriguing ideas, and a sense of knowing what it was doing and plots that made sense. No wonder RTD brought Tenant back for a swan song before the arrival of cry baby Gatwa. All of the reboot episodes are currently on iPlayer and I'm going to watch quite a few of them over the next couple of weeks, because it's better than international football, Wimbledon or politicians who only care about themselves and the divisions they sow...

Next Time...

The Bear will be watched, probably starting Saturday night. We didn't watch it during this 7 day cycle because we had other things to get out of the way and I expect we're going to do all 10 episodes over three nights - which might limit the amount of stuff in next week's blog. Which, if you've been paying attention, you'll know might have to (or maybe already has) migrate to a new home as Facebook hasn't allowed me to post from this blog's address recently because they view it as either spam or offensive, which might be accurate to a point but isn't really the point.

There will be other stuff as well. Evil, The Boys, House of the [Boring] Dragon and other observations and opinions. Like always, you'll read what I end up watching.

The MCU and Where It Went Wrong

Where Marvel Went Wrong and What I Would Have Done.

Most of you have probably realised that I'm slightly obsessed with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I view it as a reasonably healthy obsession because it allows me to flex some of my writing muscles, even if a lot of stuff never gets seen by anybody. It's also a continuation of something I've done, in comics, for over 40 years - predict the future and relive the past.

I don't know a Marvel (or DC) fan who hasn't had his or her own story to tell or idea they think would be a great comic and I'm sure everyone who's had some investment in the MCU will wonder about things that have yet to come. It's part of the attraction, it's what makes comics films a big thing, or at least it used to. I got thinking how Endgame ended it for many people, how there was literally a jumping off point offered to everyone. You could walk away from that and not really wonder what happens next.

That was a catastrophic idea and I know we have the benefit of hindsight but someone must have thought it had a finality about it, like people wouldn't bother any more, especially if they throw new unknown characters at us.

So what I would have done? What could Marvel/Disney done that wouldn't have helped kill off the superhero film genre? 

First up, I would have postponed Avengers: Infinity War for a year, at least. Everything up to that point is okay and you can work with it. I would have scheduled the Black Widow film, not necessarily the one we ended up with, but not too dissimilar and the Captain Marvel film, with slightly altered post credit scenes. I would even have considered adding another film - possibly a final Iron Man acting as a preamble to Avengers: Infinity War. 

It's what happens after this film that is important because Marvel missed an opportunity and that was to have a two year gap between Infinity War and Endgame; the fear of audiences forgetting was too real to them and they couldn't see what an opportunity they missed - three extra films looking at life after the blip. You could have had a Captain America/Black Widow film tying in with the underused Hawkeye/Ronin idea in a Mission Impossible styled thriller. They could have introduced the multiverse concept and arguably they could have had an entire film that looked at the consequences of this new timeline and then you have Endgame, and more importantly you can have a different ending - a logical ending...

In the Infinity War, Thanos uses the Time Gem to reverse time to regain the gem that powered the Vision. No one seemed to think about this after it happened. The Time Gem by its very nature can move time back and forth depending on who is wielding it? This is one of the flaws in the entire story's logic and that is based on what the Ancient One tells Bruce Banner in Endgame. Once the gem is used an alternate timeline is created, therefore by its very nature the Time Gem either cannot EVER be used or if it has been then there are multiverse strands already in existence and the Ancient One's lecture is moot and unnecessary. When Thanos used the Time Gem to restore Vision's Gem to then steal it, the first alternate time line was created, therefore this is the crux and solution to the entire story...

Endgame then could still have been a time travel movie, but one that needed to go back to that point at the end of Infinity War to prevent Thanos from using the Time Gem. In fact, not a lot would have to have been changed in that movie, except the circumstances which led to the final battle. Had the Avengers managed to use the newly discovered Quantum Realm's ability to manipulate time and returned to the point where a multiverse was created by kidnapping Thanos (and his army) and transporting them to a neutral playing field - say the Quantum Realm. You could still have achieved what was needed but without the subsequent baggage and it would give you a relatively clear slate to carry on. Everything about Endgame could have remained virtually as it did; you could have killed off Natasha; Tony could have taken the gauntlet and erased Thanos from existence and Steve Rogers, instead of being given a happy, timeline bending ending (wow, what poetry!) could have been, say lost in time, giving them an open goal to be able to introduce a multiverse logically, through some accident of winning.

How can you carry on with a superhero franchise when it's clear this is the end of the best story? You do the thing that Marvel did but with far more of a Phase One feel and you've sown your seed about the multiverse. It would have been crazy and inspired if...

The film that followed Endgame (and the Spider-Man film with bits changed) would have been the Fantastic Four...

Except it would start like it's the cliffhanger of a first unseen film; the FF fighting Doctor Doom atop of the Baxter Building and beating him with the help of a few other heroes, Iron Man, Black Widow and someone we haven't seen yet, a male Captain Marvel looking much different from the one in the MCU. Doc Doom is defeated and in the aftermath Iron Man takes his helmet off and it isn't the Tony Stark we know, but someone quite close and the Natasha Romanova isn't 'our' Natasha. We're clearly not in Kansas any more.

The story could have been Doom trying to get access to the Negative Zone because he feels he can use it to channel energy from parallel dimensions and has woken up Annihilas who now can see this dimension. The film will end with the FF falling out of their reality and into a new one, not unlike the one they left... A standalone film obviously set in a world that is similar but not the same as the MCU we've grown to love.

You can then have your next Doctor Strange and Thor films, you could then have introduced a T'Challa from another multiverse, you could have moved the story forward and had fun at the same time as the multiverse's walls crumble and the many worlds collide and that gives you the chance to introduce new characters and aim for another Avengers film which would realign the worlds and you've already got either a new jumping off point or a clean slate to jump back on. Using the multiverse to your advantage rather than as a problem. Introduce variations of existing heroes and new heroes and villains via the multiverse and then using another Avengers film to realign all the multiverses as one unified universe but now inhabited by many of the same heroes but also many more, newer, ones.

This could allow you to retell the MCU yet again with new, younger actors, playing the key roles. It allows you to introduce X-Men and mutants; to introduce characters that the usage of has been returned to Marvel. Marvel could have tested the waters for new concepts inside other films, by introducing them in one movie and spinning them off from that if the box office seemed conducive. Instead of throwing enough shit at the wall hoping some of it stuck. it could also have used Disney+ as a way of tying up old subplots and introducing new ones; made the two interactive, thus allowing the viewer to want to see TV shows rather than feeling they have to and then abandoning them. 

It was clear there was no real plan after Endgame, whatever Kevin Feige says about it, hoisted by their own petard the people in charge of the MCU just threw shit everywhere, not even at a specific target. Let's do this, let's do that, let's do a kung fu film, let's introduce Gods from almost every culture on the planet, let's do a comedy Thor film about death, let's introduce an entire team of immortal beings who did fuck all during the Thanos business, let's just shit on the floor and spread it all around! Can you honestly defend Marvel and Disney execs for the rubbish we ended up with? Can you forgive them for fucking up what was a pretty good thing?

It's quite possible that the superhero genre might have imploded anyhow - just look at the excrement DC pumps out or how, say, The Boys has lost its edge (and that's nowt to do with either of the big boys). The superhero entertainment genre is in the shitter and there's nothing to suggest the MCU wouldn't have bottomed out; people are fickle and would have got bored even if the MCU had continued to bang out highly rated films. The point is had the MCU followed Endgame with a mix of actual MCU films and movies set firmly in the Multiverse, meaning they could literally do whatever they liked; introduced whoever they wanted and killed off all kinds of familiar characters it would have introduced an element of 'what's going on?' That keeps cinema goers on their toes.

I mean, imagine if a Fantastic Four film had ended with Galactus consuming Earth and the four heroes escaping through the Quantum Realm into a new universe similar but not the same? That would have been unexpected; people going to the cinema would, at least, been mildly astounded. The Multiverse should have been a licence to fuck about, but instead we had that bag of toilet waste that was Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Wankers and TV shows that were so boring shaving your own arse with a blunt Bic razor became more enjoyable. It's like Disney threw a lot of shit at a lot of marginally talented writers to see which ones swallowed it and then they said 'go, write an MCU TV show and make sure it's as shitty as what you have just consumed.'

I suppose if this had been a Multiversal world where I was Kevin Feige, I wouldn't have thrown too much shit at the wall. I would have argued with Disney execs about quality over quantity and I wouldn't have gone, "Ooh, the Chinese market is huge let's do a crap kung fu film." I might have done it, but I would have found a way to introduce the character in a clever way and I wouldn't have had big fuck off dragons fighting at the end and I might not have tried to tie it all into the MCU and the Avengers. I definitely would not have commissioned a load of crap TV shows. Yes, I'm sure no one knew they would have been shit, but maybe I would have said to other execs - "we had a lot of success by not sticking our oars in, so let's leave these talented filmmakers alone." I maybe wouldn't have tried to introduce cultural deities every single time a superpowered individual appeared. The whole thing about the Norse 'gods' is that they're not really 'gods', they're an alien race who believe they're better than everyone else. Asgardians are just super powerful humanoids; they might have been treated as actual gods by the Norse, but, you know... common sense. 

I also would have limited films to two a year; if Sony wants to pump out non-Spiderverse excrement there's nothing you can do about it and I would have asked Disney if there was something they could do to remove the Marvel MCU rolling logo from Sony's films. Their existence puts pressure on other superhero films by virtue of them being unbelievably awful, but without what seems to be a favourable endorsement by Marvel they'd perhaps get the attention they deserve, which is none at all. I also would never be telling punters what we're planning on doing for the next ten years; tell people what is coming out in the next two years and what is planned for the third year, but everything else is under wraps. As one year ends, reveal what is planned for the next third year arc. If there's internet leaks, so what? Let the fanboys generate the interest; it worked for comics, it should work for films.

The bottom line is, at the end of July we'll get the first MCU Deadpool film and first film in over a year and the only one this year. Whether that's a huge success or a pile of wank is immaterial; we might see the Fantastic Four film, we also might see the fourth Captain America movie (although the longer that drags on and the more re-re-re-shoots that happen the less confident everyone becomes) and I'm sure Blade will happen (Ha ha ha), but everything else I'd wage money that we never see them, or they won't be coming out through Disney. Marvel/Disney are not solely responsible for the end of the superhero genre, but they fanned the flames and did nothing to raise the bar and instead of standing above all the shit from DC and Sony, they appeared to allow themselves to be dragged down to that level. Compare anything from Marvel's Phase One to the wank that comes out now and you'll completely understand.

Pop Culture - It Don't Half Dragon

Spoilers - there might be some, there might not; more likely I'll skirt around them without giving too much away that spoils it...

Dragon and On and On

And so the Game of Thrones prequel returns complete with an opening titles sequence that now uses the GoT theme tune but with a slightly more medieval feeling. In fact, it has been something like two years since the end of the first series of House of the Dragon, with the death of Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen's youngest son by the hand of her former best friend the Dowager Queen Alicent Hightower's youngest son Aemond and the declaration of war between the two Targaryen factions, yet I didn't really need that much of a recap because the story is essentially quite a simple one.

Chronologically, no time has passed at all from the end of last season and it's still a case of wounds being very raw and plans gone out of the window thanks to the insanity that House Targaryen is riddled with. Rhaenyra (pictured left) is off grieving while her uncle/cousin/husband (Matt Smith) has been scheming and planning the death of Aemond and rallying his own troops to side with his wife; who you might remember was supposed to be the new Queen but she was betrayed by her former best friend who lied about the late King's wishes so her own child would become king. That would be Aegon II who might also be as mad as a box of frogs but also might have some compassion in him, which will need to be knocked out of him and that is likely to happen given the events at the end of this season opener. The thing is I'm not sure I give a shit about this series any more. I can't vouch for anyone else watching, but the GoT zeitgeist seems to have gone away and the two year gap between this and the first series might well have not so much lost fans they just might have moved on and are maybe not that bothered about this mumbling, dark and brooding series about family, betrayal and shagging your sister while a bloodthirsty dragon watches on. I enjoyed the first series of House of the Dragon because it was less complicated and had considerably less baggage than its parent show, but I found this all a bit dull and, dare I say it, boring.

Smoke and Mirrors?

A Doctor Who fan and friend of mine called the latest episode 'the best one he's seen in years; proper science fiction,' and that got me excited. I trust the opinion of this person because he's a proper fan. Sadly, I think he was blinded by all the noise and flashing lights, the faux technology and the apparent twists and turns; because The Legend of Ruby Sunday was not as good as people seem to think...

New/old big bad, old and new faces and a mystery within a mystery, but what does it all mean? Is there something we're missing? Does Ruby hold the key to this or is it a red herring? Is her mum something special - maybe an incarnation of the Doctor or another Time Lord? What has it got to do with the new God of Death? Do I actually care that much? I don't know that I do; you see in the past the Doctor would have done something about it, rather than stand around looking puzzled or looking out of windows. yes, he was confused; he couldn't work out what was going on, but, you know he wouldn't have allowed the things that happened if he'd been a true Doctor. It just makes me think he's a poor facsimile of an actual Doctor and given the trailer for next week's episode it's clear that David Tennant is back, but whether that's to die or to bail out this new rubbish incarnation, we'll have to wait and see. Too many new characters, too many comedic digresses and not enough of anything happening other than menace. It was like we were being led down a specific garden path that was going nowhere we expected; which isn't a bad plot idea but some idea of it might have also been good - a clue or two that everything wasn't simple and easy.

Yes, it was entertaining, after a fashion, but I'm no longer sure it serves a purpose. I'm thinking next Saturday might be the day I finally bow out and leave everyone else to worry about Doctor Who...

Is It Me?

Between seven and ten years ago, when we lived in Northampton and had to suffer Look East and their extensive coverage of tins of beans falling off of shelves in Diss. We also got our first look at the weather woman Elizabeth Rizzini - she was the fill in forecaster, usually at weekends and Bank Holidays. She was exceptionally annoying. In recent months, we've seen many of our traditional weather people disappear from our screens; they probably move on to other things, many of them are actually meteorologists and about 18 months ago we saw Rizzini establish herself as one of the BBC's main presenters and she's still cartoonishly annoying. 

I know she's an actual meteorologist, but she seems more like eye candy than serious weather forecaster and I've got to the stage where I've subscribed to the Met Office's Tube of You channel rather than watch the, now rather erratic, BBC weather coverage. Plus, the Met Office use their own forecasts, whereas the BBC has used Accuweather for the last half a dozen years and Accuweather are essentially data miners - taking everyone else's public forecasts and producing forecasts that are the 'average' of everyone else's. The thing is, whatever they tell us they're getting it wrong more often than right. A week ago we were told the shit weather would last until at least the 24th June, but as the week progressed the forecast, thankfully, changed and now we might actually see some summer before midsummer. This is pretty much diametrically opposite what they were suggesting until they quietly changed their forecast. Weather forecasting should carry a warning along the lines of 'this forecast is advisory at best.'

Starshit Poopers

It's been so long since we last watched Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers that we forgot it is essentially an ultra-violent comedy. I remember when it came out and critics were fawning over the depiction of the future and 27 years later it does have elements about it that are prophetic rather than crazy, but it's largely a Freudian exploitation film - especially towards women - with genitalia references all over the place and the acting is, in general, fucking abysmal.

Based on the Robert Heinlein book, it's about a group of Buenos Ares 'civilians' who join the army to fight the bugs that have, inexplicably, decided to wage war on us from several galaxies away by firing rogue asteroids at us (see? Bonkers!). Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris join up to fight bugs, but when the bugs destroy the capital of Argentina (full of Americans with Latino names) a full scale war is declared and it's all about getting as much bug goo on you as you can without being killed. It's overblown, overwrought, melodramatic to the point of pantomime at times, tragic and as funny as fuck without ever giving you a Laugh Out Loud moment (or even a snigger). It reminds me of a 1950s Sci-Fi film but updated for the late 90s. It's also not even a complete story but a snapshot of different points in the progression of the 'gang' and obviously sets itself up for a sequel (which there were four and all of them shite). The special effects are off the scale for a 1997 film and the general tongue-in-cheek feel was a welcome change when it was released. The two biggest problems are how much parts of it have aged and not stood up to the test of time and the am-dram acting, which is borderline nonsense.

A (Not So) Game Show

The wife is a big fan of The Chase and I have been known to watch it from time to time. The problem I have with it - like many quiz shows we watch - are the contestants, or at least the contestants with no balls (and I'm not being genderist). On The Chase once you've done a cash builder round, the Chaser offers you a low figure, the figure you achieved and a much higher number. I have never been able to understand why someone would go on a quiz show and accept the low figure - especially if it's a minus. I mean, what's the fucking point of going on a quiz show to win money if you don't feel confident enough to at least try for the amount of money you originally accrued? As someone who is - modestly - very good at General Knowledge, if I was on that show I'd make it clear to any of my team members that if they go for a lower figure they'd be on their own in the final because I wouldn't share what I've won with a quitter and a 15 minutes of famer, because that can be the only reason they're on a show like it. Cowardly wankers, the lot of them.

A Comedy of Errors

You're going to see a theme over the next few weeks - a lot of George Clooney films. Some we've seen and most we haven't. For some reason, despite both of us being something of a fan of the Kentucky-born actor, there are a lot of his films we've never seen, so I remedied that and we now have about ten Clooney films to indulge in.

Burn After Reading is a film we saw 15 years ago, but like so many films we've watched it might as well have been the first time. We both remembered Brad Pitt's dozy gym bunny character, but other than that we might as well have been watching a film that comes out next year. This is a Cohen Brothers film and like all Cohen Brothers films we've seen it was quite superb and absolutely as odd as fake mince. It starts with John Malkovich being fired from his job as an analyst for the CIA, allegedly for having a drink problem and from this point on it just gets tangled up in a crazy mess like a game of Twister with ten drunk monkeys on LSD.

Malkovich is married to Tilda Swinton who is having an affair with George Clooney - a philandering fantasist who works in government security - his wife is a children's author and while she's hardly in the movie she is important to the plot. Pitt and Frances McDormand work at a gym that Malkovich's personal files from his computer - on a CD - was stolen and then lost by Swinton's lawyer's secretary and falls into the hands of Pitt, who thinks it's CIA secrets and he then tries to blackmail Malkovich - badly. Clooney as well as shagging Swinton, also hooks up with McDormand. He's also as paranoid as fuck and starts thinking he's being followed by government agents; he is being followed but they're not the government. It's all incestuous and interlinked and all the time the CIA are sort of monitoring it and the two gym workers attempts to sell Malkovich's bank account details and outline for his book to the Russians. We're talking farce here, but it is done so incredibly well you almost get lost in the twists and turns. It has a conclusion, but probably not the one you imagine happening. If you've not seen it, you should, but you might need to watch it twice!

What IFs

I'm probably a sentimental old fool, but I thought IF was a wonderful film, with comical characters and if it went over the top on the sentimentality then so what. It was a movie about rediscovering the things you give up when you grow up and about the imaginations of individuals being unique to them and no one else. Imaginary friends belong to the person who imagines them and no one else...

This is the latest Ryan Reynolds vehicle, directed and co-starring John Krasinski and featuring a veritable host of famous actors doing voice parts ranging from one line to entire monologues. It is a fantasy family film about a girl - Bea - who has faced enormous heartache and could be on the verge of facing even more when she starts seeing peoples' imaginary friends. To begin with she's scared and bewildered, but before long she begins to understand that these fantastic and strange creations were all once loved by children who grew up and moved on. She is guided into helping these IFs into finding new children by Cal - Ryan Reynolds - a mysterious man who lives on the top floor of the apartments where her grandmother lives. While this now 12-year-old brings hope to these strange assortment of characters, she has no real success unless she takes the IFs back to their original 'owners'. This is a film with some neat twists, some absolutely 'reach for the tissues' moments and Cailey Fleming - who played Judith Grimes in The Walking Dead - plays Bea in a confident and assured way that really makes the film work. This is a for all the family thing, but it's also the sort of movie that you can watch in your 60s and get an absolute kick from, whether you had your own IF or not.

Get Outer Here

I read about a TV show from Amazon starring Josh Brolin that sounded weird enough for me to give it a try and weird is an understatement to say the least. Outer Range is yet another show that really defies logic and could either end up being a load of old bollocks or the new Twin Peaks; whatever it is the first few episodes certainly left us bewildered and befuddled. It's described by IMDB as a mystery drama, but on Wiki its the more accurate Science Fiction Neo-Western.

Brolin plays Royal Abbott, the owner of a ranch in Wyoming who is involved in a land struggle with his neighbours regarding 600 acres of his ranch. This area just happens to be where something inexplicable and unfathomable has appeared - a black hole in the ground that swallows up anything that is thrown into it, but might be a time portal either into the future or maybe the past. Royal's sons have an altercation with the neighbouring Tillerson boys and one of them is killed in a fight, which the Abbotts' then cover up, by throwing the body into the black hole, but a mysterious woman who has asked for permission to camp on their land sees Royal dispose of the body and pushes him into the hole. There is a lot more going on and both the mystery woman and Royal have strange pasts which they have little or no memory of and there's a lot of very odd dialogue, references to the myth of Cronos and a struggle between religion and atheism. There's two seasons of this so far and we're just starting out, it does appear to be glacial slow but given it appears to be about time and I love time travel things, I can't wait for this to develop.

That 50s Film

Our second Cohen Brothers film of the week was almost diametrically opposite Burn After Reading and yet it kind of had the same feel; but perhaps that's the whole point of the Cohens, they make movies which are multi-stranded yet through the quirkiness of how they see the world they all end up coming out similar in the wash.

In a week that seems destined to be full of George Clooney, it might also have a lot of Josh Brolin in it as well as Hail, Caesar! has both of them in the two leading roles. This is a movie about a fixer - a job that Clooney often does, but this time it's down to Brolin as Eddie Mannix. the guy a top studio hires to not only run the studio smoothly but to get its top talent out of as many scrapes and controversy as possible. He has his fingers in all the pies while trying to decide whether he wants to take a job working for Lockheed and trying to locate his star performer, Clooney's Baird Whitlock, who has been kidnapped by communists. As usual with Cohen Brothers films there are characters involved you simply don't understand how they fit in yet in the end it all fits together very nicely. However, this simply doesn't have the panache and style of any other Cohens film I have ever seen; in fact it look fantastic but it's a very slight movie that feels as though there should be more to it than there is. Like the aforementioned Burn After Reading, there's that comedy of errors elements in it, but this time it doesn't really work. It isn't that funny, the set pieces are all a bit forced and it felt like re-tread rather than anything original.

Blood, Sweat and er... Blood

Episode four of The Boys offered something a little different, but whether it was enough to stop this from the doldrums remains to be seen. It felt like a pivotal episode especially as it's the half way point of the series and it really needed something to happen.

Homelander went 'home' to where it all started and it didn't end well for most of the people in the lab where he was 'grown'. Annie's deepest darkest secrets are revealed live on TV and her reaction was probably exactly what was wanted by the cleverest woman in the world, while Frenchie's guilty conscious got the better of him when he probably shouldn't have let it. Billy might still be invested with superpowers, but one thing is for sure he's as mad as a barking fish and he appears to have some kind of worm living inside him, while Hughie and A Train bury the hatchet to enable Hughie to try and save his dad, which he opts against only for the situation to get way out of his control. This was the episode where it probably reaches the nadir for our 'heroes' which means everything from now on in will probably start going their way.

High-Flying Evil

The latest episode of Evil dispensed with the comedy - to a degree - and swapped it for something of a shaggy dog story which seemed, from the start, to be a way of allowing certain events to happen, casting a shadow over the Vatican's role in all of this. 

The team needs to deal with an exorcism gone wrong, especially after the first they hear about it is after it's gone wrong. They do some investigating and something crops up that seems to have such a great religious significance the three are summoned to Rome, where they're given something of a run around until they're sent home with the now apparent worthless antiquity. However, while they're on the flight, David gets a call from the Vatican telling him that the artefact might not be what they thought it was but it's still dangerous and they're put in a tricky situation. Meanwhile, Kristen has left the four kids with a friend of hers, who mysteriously gets called away from babysitting duties within an hour of Kristen leaving for Rome. A series of unfortunate and weird events lead the girls to call their grandmother, who comes to the rescue and during her unexpected visit, she brings Timothy, the Antichrist with her to Kristen's house where she eventually tells the kids who he is. Ordinarily I wouldn't have read anything into this had it not been for the silent treatment and weird behaviour of the priests in the Vatican. Yet, by the end I started to think that the Catholic Church is fully aware of what Leland's plans are, especially for Kristen and they want the nasty peoples plans to grow and escalate - maybe for genuine religious reasons, but I'm beginning to think that our three heroes and maybe their genuine allies at CCHQ are the only ones trying to stop something they don't know is coming and it wouldn't shock me if the Catholic Church ended up being complicit in all this shit.

Next Time...

The Bear season three. That is all.