My Cultural Life - Echo Foxtrot Foxtrot Oscar Foxtrot Foxtrot

What's Up?

The Oscars, that's what. 

I suppose, this column is essentially both review and critique. I am a critic and therefore I crit. I suppose you could label me a specific type of film watcher, but generally I think my viewing habits - especially with films - are varied and wide reaching. Therefore, I can disagree with peoples opinions until the cows come home, because it's my opinion and I'm sharing it with you. I just want to get that out there and emphasise it's nothing personal.

I seem to be old. I seem to be unable to see the masterpiece inside certain films, which I have never been particularly fond of. Sometimes I can see a good film even if I'm not enjoying watching it - god knows there's been enough of that - but usually I wonder about the opinions of others. Take One Battle After Another, I think it was loud, rambling and utterly pointless. Paul Thomas Anderson's films are largely built around chaotic whimsy. I don't dislike his films, he's a kind of Avant Garde Woody Allen for the 21st Century, but I didn't really like Allen's movies, so... meh.

This particular winner of six Oscars was so memorable, the wife asked me when she saw it had won to remind her what it was about - we watched it 10 days ago. It wasn't funny. It wasn't dramatic. It felt like someone wanted to make a Cohen Brothers movie but had never seen a Cohen Brothers movie. I saw no reason why a film consisting of lots of shouting, peculiar scenes and borderline slapstick would be able to win like that. If [IMHO] the film wasn't really that good, are we talking about rewarding the best films or the best marketed films?

Don't get me going with Sinners. We watched it almost a year ago now and thought it was a strange mixture of post WW1 ethnic poverty and oppression and vampire movie. I didn't see the message. I didn't think it did a very good job of telling what little story there was. It was full of characters and had the rhythm of a modern-day black version of Towering Inferno, but with less jeopardy. 

Except... looking at the list of films nominated for best picture - we've only seen half - there are a couple we have to [can] watch and there were a few we're unlikely to ever watch, so this can't be definitive, but that's a shit selection of 'the year's best films,' isn't it? I can't really remember that many of the previous few years' winners either and if reminded I'd probably shrug. It's like Oscars have become like the Turner Prize for films, maybe crossed a little bit with the Darwin Awards. I don't think it reflects what people watch and enjoy and it probably hasn't for a long time.

Yet, the day after the annual snoozefest, we had my 'favourite' newspaper claiming the Academy Awards are now 'for everybody' and 'have changed for the better'... Really? Because a black vampire film won a couple of gongs? Because Paul Thomas fucking Anderson was finally rewarded for not giving up with his quirky overlong bits of nonsense? The Guardian*, as usual, can go fuck itself. How this newspaper can even call itself a serious commentator of film, when it gives positive reviews to all manner of shit, has been up for debate for a long time. 

* Yes, I know it's an obsession, but tough; it's my column... The Guardian gave Maggie Gyllenhaal's second directed film a FOUR star review and called it 'electrifying' and literally fell over itself to praise actor du jour Jessie Buckley in her role in The Bride, a 'post-modern' reworking of the Bride of Frankenstein as a Bonnie & Clyde gangster movie - yes, that's what it's about. Film fans have been a little less ... accommodating, as it - today alone (Wednesday) - has wavered between 5.8 and 5.9 on IMDB. The reviews have been a little more critical: "Strong concept, thin execution," or "About halfway through The Bride!, I found myself doing the one thing no director wants: checking my watch," or "Did anyone at Warner Bros. watch this film before releasing it?" One reviewer, who claimed they really wanted to like it, called it "Excruciating," while another said, "a terribly slow, misguided, incoherent mess."

But, you know, The fucking Guardian claims it's a FOUR star triumph, in the same month it claims the Oscars are now 'changed for the better,' perhaps the people running the newspaper will give each other reach arounds if this piece of stylised shit gets nominated for an Oscar next year? Suffice it to say, I will not be watching this or even giving it house room...

The only awards I give a minuscule fuck about are ones given to people who have made sacrifices or helped others in the face of adversity. If you have to give gongs out for films, they should be voted for by the people; they should reflect what people like; they should reward acting that makes a shit film average or an average movie good. If I was Michael B Jordan I'd be thinking of all the great black actors who didn't win Oscars for far better performances rather than think of myself as something special.

However, now that they're over we can go back about our normal viewing habits until some cunt mentions the O word just after New Year and the machine grinds its way back into view, yet again...

Trailer Trash

Is it a big thing now when Marvel has a new movie out? It's not like every time you take a shit there's a new MCU film any more, therefore there does seem to be something - dare I say it - exciting about a new feature from the place formerly known as the House of Ideas. This time it's the first official trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and I've watched the trailer three times to give you my thoughts on it... Meh. That's it. Meh. So it has Frank Castle in it. Bruce Banner. Possibly Sadie Sink (she doesn't appear in the trailer, but do a search for the film on something like Duck Duck Go and she pops up all over it). There's the Scorpion - aka Mac Gargan - and there's something wrong with Peter Parker...

So why meh? Well, trailers are supposed to get you psyched up, aren't they? This didn't. This felt a little like we were going through some motions. Nothing reached out, didn't grab me by the balls or slap me around the face like an ancient Tango advert. This felt... meh. This could be a good thing; I mean how often have we watched trailers for BIG films and ended up with disappointment etched on our souls? 

What have we discovered? Well, Parker is still unknown, but Spidey's life seems to have gotten better. He's still lonely and missing his friends. He bumps into The Punisher and the two clearly know each other because Peter calls him Frank. Peter also asks Bruce Banner for some advice, because Peter is beginning to have strange things happen to him, which he doesn't understand and there's a narration over the top suggesting that he is mutating, the way real spiders (apparently) do. There's the briefest of appearances by the Scorpion and the suggestion that Spidey is about to come into direct contact with the Hand (or some other Yakuza-like organisation). Glasgow looks cool though... but... I dunno, I expected something with a little more oomph.

However, while Zendaya is back as MJ, she's also back as Chani of the Fremen in Dune 3, which appears to be arriving about four years earlier than first thought. Denis Villeneuve's third instalment, thus a trilogy, arrives at Christmas and takes the apparent 'impossible to film' Dune: Messiah and makes it the concluding part of the tale, with Timothée Chalamet (sans hair) back as Paul Atreides. This is also a BIG thing and is coming out around the same time as Avengers: Doomsday and is likely to be a huge success. Maybe it's because these trails have caught me on a down cycle in my mood swings or I'm simply growing largely indifferent to any film where I'm supposed to get excited about, but, you know... meh.

It Was Inevitable

We watched White House Down on Friday, so it stood to reason we'd watch Olympus Has Fallen on Saturday. What we didn't know was the latter was directed by Antione Fuqua, the guy who directed The Equalizer movies we've watched over the last ten days; so there's been a link. Olympus Has Fallen is head and shoulders a better film that White House Down. Not only was it tonally right, it was considerably more visceral, ruthless and while neither movie is plausible, this had an immediacy about it that other features similar have lacked. I'm not a huge fan of Gerard Butler - he had just about hit his peak with this - and Aaron Eckhart's star had also... ahem... fallen. However, this was far better than the two main stars. It's now opened the door to watching at least one of the two sequels (but maybe only one, because the second film has a shit rating on IMDB). 7/10

Spousal Abuse

I've never been remotely interested in the film Mr & Mrs Smith; despite quite liking the recent TV adaptation of it, the movie simply never pressed any of my buttons and after finally giving in and watching it, I feel utterly vindicated. I think the wife enjoyed it; I found it tortuous, annoying and largely incomplete. This was a film that was two hours too long [it's two hours long] and I struggle with Angelina Jolie at the best of times - I don't think she can act - and while I like Brad Pitt, I didn't like him in this. John and Jane are both hired killers who don't know their other halves are also hired killers. The laughs were strained; the premise was absurd and when it ended it felt like there was a great deal of confidence there would be a Mr & Mrs Smith 2, because they won a battle but not the war. I just didn't like this. 4/10

True Lies False Truths

Paul Greengrass's Green Zone is a fictionalised version of how some people from the USA discovered there were no WMDs in Iraq and how this was manipulated to allow the USA to stage a full scale war and invasion of the Arab country. Whether the events are true or have been sensationalised for the benefit of a movie I don't know, but I think I probably watched a very close approximation of how some people discovered other people had lied about things and those people were the government and the people who knew this were the CIA and they ended up being powerless to stop it. Matt Damon plays a chief weapons searcher coming to the conclusion he's searching for imaginary WMDs; Brendan Gleason is the CIA man who just wants the Americans to allow Iraq to police itself; Greg Kinnear is the shit-bag administrator from George W Bush's office trying his best to cover his and USA's arse and Jason Isaac plays his enforcer for Kinnear. There was an almost documentary quality to this, but it ended up feeling like the main story was lost - or that might be what it was trying to convey. 6/10

Going Anywhere Soon?

Paradise switched between the outside world and Colorado pretty evenly in the sixth part of the second series. The focus from the inside was Jane, who it appears was the subject of a prophecy when she was born that she would be the person who brings about the end of the world. Jane is the Secret Service 'dumb blonde' who killed her boyfriend, framed the President's girlfriend for killing him and has been playing everyone for her own benefit. On the outside, Xavier is planning on attacking the compound to free his wife, using cobbled together explosives without realising he's also being played. We're hanging in there, but sometimes the plot feels extremely contrived and there's feeling sometimes that the writers don't seem to have a clear direction.

Gung-Ho USA

Two themes are emerging this week in things we're watching: war and the USA. 12 Strong has both of these things in spades. It's the story of the USA's immediate response to the 9/11 incidents; when a team of 12 green berets went to Afghanistan to join forces with freedom fighters to attempt to beat both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Obviously we all know how that eventually panned out, but I suppose at the time it was an important mission for the USA to be seen involved with. Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon are the two notable actors in this as they play Captain and Warrant Officer to a small selective group of soldiers led by Michael Pena. Modern war films are a different beast, even compared to movies of the 1990s; there's a visceral feel and the weaponry is designed to do as much damage as possible, so nothing is pleasant viewing and that old gung-ho feel of a John Wayne war film is replaced by a general feeling of fear and fight. This isn't a bad movie and does a reasonable job of humanising the soldiers. 7/10

Mistaken Identity?

I have never in the slightest bit been interested in Lucky Number Slevin. I remember seeing Jonathon Ross review it back in the noughties and thinking, "that's something to avoid." Yet, here I was, on a Wednesday night, watching it. For the opening hour I was feeling vindicated as Josh Hartnett bumbled his way into two situations he didn't appear to know much about. Was this really a case of mistaken identity? Was he really that stupid? The two crime lords wanting him - Ben Kingsley as The Rabbi and Morgan Freeman as The Boss - were surrounded by a lot of vaguely comedic henchmen and there was always a feeling that we were watching a comedy rather than a drama. Lucy Liu played a slightly ditsy pathologist who fancies herself as a detective and Stanley Tucci as the cop trying to make sense of it; while Bruce Willis, who was prominent in the 'prologue' was most definitely pulling the strings. Then it changed tack completely and while the wife had an idea what was coming, I was hoodwinked and realised the film I thought was a load of shite, was actually a cleverly put together idea that I had somehow missed, because I thought it was about something else entirely. 7/10 

Struggling

There's still an element of treading water in this middle section of the final season of Shrinking. Gaby is grieving and hurting about the death of a patient, especially when she discovers things she should - as the therapist - have been aware of and this subsequently leads to issues with some of her other patients. Jimmy ends up becoming an impromptu therapist for his new girlfriend Sofi (Coby Smulders) and her ex-husband and Paul seems to be babysitting his staff a lot, at a time when he should be winding down. There's maybe now this feeling creeping in that this show is going to simply end with stuff that's been telegraphed happening - Paul's retirement, Gaby may get married and open her own practice and Jimmy waving Alice off to uni and starting a new relationship with Sofi, while the world just carries on, because almost everyone else in this show has had their moments and are moving on. If that's what happens then it fits in perfectly with how the show has gone. I won't be disappointed in the slightest if no one dies and Liz stays perfectly horrible. 

Lewd, Rude and Quaaludes 

I don't usually associate Martin Scorsese with comedies; yes, there are comedic elements in some of his work, but The Wolf of Wall Street is a bona fide LOL film. It is without a doubt the film of the week in the Hall house and I'd forgotten what an absolute gem it was. It's a movie that pulls no punches; it's full of nudity, drug taking and some of the dodgiest things you could imagine on a screen, yet it keeps you completely hooked for its almost three hours. It is both astounding and astonishing, not that it is based on a true story, but because the people involved actually got away with what they were doing for so long with almost complete impunity. Leonardo DiCaprio is fantastic as Jordan Belfort, who became a stock market broker the day of Black Wednesday and took that to become a phenomenal power and influence broker across the USA for over a decade, while simultaneously shoving all manner of drugs into his body. 

This movie also stars Jonah Hill, Jon Bernthal, Margot Robbie, Kyle Chandler, Matthew McConaughey, Jon Favreau, Cristin Milioti, in fact, it pretty much has an all-star cast with people only appearing for seconds when they'd be the stars of their own films. It is also crazy and brilliant as it follows Belfort from wannabe stockbroker to the head of a company that cut every corner, broke every rule and threw every dwarf it could to make its staff millionaires. It is quite an extraordinary movie and thoroughly deserves a 9/10.

Remarkable Man

Several weeks ago, the wife said to me, "I've never seen Gandhi." I realised that I also had never seen this Richard Attenborough epic from 1982. I mean, how do you go 44 years without seeing one of the classic movies of all time? I won't bore you with the details, but actually being able to watch this film took more than just three hours of our time, but instead of watching some action-packed adventure on Friday night, to finish our week's viewing off, we settled down to watch Ben Kingsley and a who's who of stars tell the story of Mohandas Gandhi from idealistic young lawyer in apartheid South Africa in 1893 to his death in New Delhi in 1948. 

I wouldn't call it a work of cinematic genius; it needed to tell far too much. What it was though managed to educate me about the man who transcended specific religions and believed in the power of humanity, whatever religion you followed. In many ways, because this was made by the British, there was probably an element of downplaying the atrocities, especially from the Partition - a holocaust if ever there was one, which may well have killed more Indians and Pakistanis than the Nazis killed Jews; but, you know, the British were responsible for that so it's an episode of history that we don't hear much about. However, there was much more to this than just a chronological march through Gandhi's life, but one got the impression that he did so much and touched so many if this movie had been eight hours long it might still only have scratched the surface to his story. 

I'm going to break with tradition here and not mark this out of 10. It's simply a film that if you get the chance and are not familiar with some of the less heroic parts of British Empire history you should watch. 

What's Up Next?

Daredevil: Born Again is back for a second season - but we all know it's just the second half of the first series. There's also some hints that one of my favourite TV shows of the 21st century might be back on the screens before the end of the month, but I'm not going to tempt fate by naming it, but if you've followed this long enough you'll know it's on Apple TV+ and is an alternate history series about how the USSR beat the USA to the moon and what happened next...

Also, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen arrives on Netflix. This might be a load of shit, but the reason I mention it is because... [ahem] ... there's a big feature on it in today's Guardian by Rik Samadder claiming it is the latest series from the Duffer Brothers - you know, the guys who brought us Stranger Things - except it isn't. They are credited as Executive Producers, which means their input into this was at a basic production level, It isn't their idea; they don't direct or write any episodes, they basically stumped up some cash... Yet the Guardian, for some reason, makes then the stars of the show and not creator Haley Z Boston (no, me neither). 

Literally an hour before I put this blog to bed, the news arrived that Nicholas Brendon had died, aged 54. To be honest, in a week where Sarah Michelle Gellar announced that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot was dead in the water and wasn't going to be making a comeback, the death of Xander feels like a real kick in the balls. Nick Brendon was a victim of his own success; he never really reached the potential he showed as Buffy's BMF, got into trouble with the drugs and the law and then discovered a few years ago he had a congenital heart condition - which ultimately killed him. It seems like a huge waste of talent and a tragic end for one of the reasons why Buffy was such a great series...

Anyhow... next week is also a pub quiz week, so there won't be a Friday night feature and it could be a thin week of reading material for you as I'm also supposed to be going out boozing tonight. Whatever happens, you'll be the first people to hear about it...

My Cultural Life - Monsters Munched

What's Up?

It's the middle of March already. How did that happen? 2026 has been an eventful year so far, not helped by the weather, which, the further north you are, is not very spring like and when we do get a taster of something warmer and sunnier it's gone by the next day.

I often wonder if time accelerates for everyone? I mean, the longer you're on the planet, the shorter the years become, but I'm noticing younger people complaining about time flying and while the physics suggests this is all subjective, it's the bloody middle of March already and before you know it it'll be much further into the year. 

... Yeah, I know. Hardly the opening you expected. Where's all the serious guff? Or even something remotely funny? Well, for once I can't be arsed to make serious about current affairs; my football team is in self-destruct mode and as you'll find out by the end of this entire blog, I'm not watching a lot of TV. I think I'm at that March Moment - when the nights are drawing out, but the skies are full of cold and there's more chance of snow than short sleeved shirts. The time of the year when our minds are saying 'why the fuck can't I feel my toes?' Or, 'When the sun shines it's too bloody cold to appreciate it!'

March has always been a month where the light doesn't correspond to the temperature and if, like me, you hate the winter, March brings shit loads of false optimism. Obviously, optimism is in short supply what with WW3 taking shape around us and profiteering rampant. It makes me wonder what those 'in charge' think the world will be like once an apple costs £50 and you heat your homes by rubbing two of your pets together?

It's Saturday morning and the sun is out, the skies are blue and so are my fingers...

Ai Ai Moosey

It's March and the first 'big' film of the year has arrived on streaming platforms and probably DVDs. I have to admit to being a little interested in seeing this movie, because it seemed like a good idea from the few trailers I'd seen. However, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die was a bit of a massive let down. First, though, I want to have a strange moan; apart from Sam Rockwell, Michael Pena, Haley Lu Richardson (who I thought was one of the Richardson dynasty of actors, but obviously isn't) and possibly Zazie Beetz, no one else in this movie has any link to the USA at all. All the other actors in this were either British, South African or German - this was filmed in South Africa - and many of the characters didn't even try to cover up their accents, despite this being set in the USA...

It's essentially: man comes from the future to persuade a group of people to join him on a mission to prevent an all-conquering AI from being created that will change mankind forever. He's done this 171 times and failed every time, but this time it might be different. There are some highly telegraphed twists in this; some things with don't really make any sense and ultimately none of it happens - at least that's what I'm taking from it, because it all seems to be happening in an AI environment... or is it? This is the biggest problem I have with this - is it real, is it a simulation and why don't I give a fuck? Not even the special effects seemed that good. This was a solid disappointment. 5/10

Fungus & the Bogeymen

Is Joe Keery becoming typecast? For those who don't know who Joe Keery is, he was Steve Harrington in Stranger Things and Cold Storage is a film that: a) was more enjoyable than that and b) he played a similar character, except a little less clever and a bit more dodgy. Think Night of the Exploding Dead or The Last of Us played for laughs and you'll be in the right ballpark. Keery plays Travis - aka Teacake - who works the night shift at a storage facility that used to be a government 'storage' facility. Georgina Campbell is Naomi, his new co-worker, and wanna be vet. They investigate a strange beeping sound and before you know it Liam Neeson is there with a small suitcase nuclear device. This is surprisingly well made and while it smacks of B movie, it's actually a bit of solid Saturday night entertainment. I enjoyed it, even if it reminded me of just about everything I've ever watched in my life. 7/10

Legacy of Wankers

The wife is going to be right. This is a load of shite. This week's Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ended on a cliffhanger, except the two people involved in the perilous ending are both still alive 70 years later, so there was no real jeopardy at all. Oh and the special effects on this are atrocious. I don't know who did them but I think someone using an Amiga 500 might have done better. The dialogue is corny; the back story is fucking hopeless and while there does seem to be more monsters in this, it needs a lot more than that to make this even half good.

I caught up with the series, on my own. The third episode of season two arrived on Friday (yesterday, as I write this) and I put the wife out of her misery and watched it alone. I figured I had a decision to make... Here's the thing - this series has weird pacing, unfathomable time shifts, people who are younger than they're supposed to be - and I'm not talking about Keiko's 70 years in the 'other world' but her son, who should be in his 70s - at least - but seems to be in his 50s. The flashbacks to 1957, which seem redundant given that season one ended with Keiko disappearing shortly after this, appear to be building some melodramatic three-way between her, Bill and Lee, all just feels pointless and irrelevant. That said, Hiro's daughter Cate doesn't really have much of a story either apart from tortured lesbian with guilt and daddy issues. I think I'm done with this. I really wanted it to be ... well, not exactly good, but at least interesting or, heaven forbid, exciting/entertaining. It's just dull and absolutely chock full of disappointment...

It Almost Lost Me

Right... Perpetual Grace Ltd is a series from 2019 by Steven Conrad, who brought us Patriot, which we've still yet to watch the second series of. The reason for this is we wanted to recover from that sufficiently before venturing back into the world of depression and espionage tinged with weird Luxembourgian strangeness. This other series is about a man who is persuaded to help initiate a massive con that would see an old married couple swindled out of $4million, except there's not just a can of worms involved, there's a truckload of cans of worms...

Ben Kingsley plays the preacher who is actually a psychopath and owns the town where he lives. Jimmi Simpson plays a grifter called James who organises Kingsley's Pa and his wife, Ma, to go to Mexico to retrieve the body of their estranged son, but he isn't there and they're going to be imprisoned for two weeks to allow James to become their son Paul and have power of attorney over their estate, allowing him to have away with said $4million. Of course, this all seems easy until we find out about Pa's psychopathic tendencies, so what follows is interesting. What's also interesting is James, now posing as Paul, discovers that the man he's pretending to be is wanted for questioning in regards the murder of a young girl. This is a ten-part series and that was just the first part... And after three episodes we decided this was just too glacial and dull to persevere with it.

Denzel's Back

We decided that Sunday night should be The Equalizer 2 night and while this sequel was not as good as the first, it was still a far more entertaining movie than we expected. Denzel Washington is back as the OCD ex Special Ops agent righting wrongs and ensuring good people have a happy ending. It is quite remarkable just what a great guy his Robert McCall is (but I seem to recall that Ewar Woowar was also a decent guy in the original TV series) and how he knows a decent person from a piece of shit so quickly.

What is different, therefore less good, about this sequel is it's really about McCall's past rather than his present and when someone close to him dies unexpectedly, he has to come out of his isolation - where people think he's dead - and go up against some people from his old life. There's a fair bit of vigilantism but the main story is a revenge mission. Like I said, it's good but not a patch on the first film, but that might be because there were no nail guns in this. 7/10

Lives and Deaths

Sometimes I can't fathom why certain films have such poor ratings on IMDB. Most movies with lower ratings tend to be accurate, but occasionally I think it's about a lack of understanding from the reviewers and In The Blink of An Eye is probably one of them. It's a bit of a curate's egg really - a portmanteau like tale of three lives in different time periods of the universe. A Neanderthal family, an archaeologist in the present and a space traveller from the future - why are they all linked? Rashida Jones plays the 21st century scholar who finds an acorn in the palm of the hand of a Neanderthal man from 40,000 years in the past. Kate McKinnon plays an enhanced human, capable of living for hundreds of years, who is charged with populating a new planet light years from Earth and both of these stories are linked and link back to the Neanderthal family.

I thought it was a charming and allegorical movie about how everything is ultimately entwined and how, quite literally, one thing leads to another. It was gentle, unspectacular and poignant, yet totally encapsulating and enjoyable - snapshots of different lives throughout their own lives and the people and things that characterise those lives. I really liked this. 8/10

Up and Down

After the first episode of the second season of Paradise and the promise that brought, there has been a feeling that it's been slipping back into rather dull and tedious 'inside the compound' series. Then, like that opening episode, this one came along and we had the story of how Xavier's wife survived the apocalypse and it was an interesting look at how much of the USA didn't slip into anarchy and become feral. It followed the seven people inside 'The Mailman' bunker - a Post Office capable of withstanding whatever is thrown at it and focused on the guy that Xavier met at the conclusion of last week's fourth part. It felt like a totally feasible scenario until it wandered in The Walking Dead without the zombies territory and then it delivered a number of twists and turns. This show is so much better when it isn't in Colorado, but I think I said that last week.

Cock-a-Doodle-Doo

Steve Carell's new comedy series, Rooster, is about a popular fiction writer who is invited to his daughter's college - where she teaches - to give a talk about his (populist) fiction and also trying to deal with his daughter coping with her impending divorce. It is being advertised as a kind of collegiate Ted Lasso and a bit like Shrinking, but it's neither of these and we don't really know where it's going after the opener, except Carell's character has been offered a job as the writer in residence at Ludlow college and he hasn't made up his mind about it yet, given his reservations about having never gone to college. The problem I had was I didn't find it funny, nor did I imagine myself becoming engrossed with it...

Three Piece Suite

So, it was the wife who chose for us to watch the third instalment of Anton Fuqua's series of movies about former special op Robert McCall. As she said, "Let's watch something we won't feel disappointed about when it ends." And, the thing is, she wasn't wrong. The Equalizer 3 is much better than 2 but obviously not as good as the first. This is a stripped down film, shorter than the previous two with a much older Denzel Washington (he was 68 when he made it - he's 72 now) relocated to the Amalfi coast after travelling to Napoli to do a bit of business that is revealed in almost the last scene.

His relocation is due to the bullet put in him earlier in the film and he's about to bid the place farewell when he sees someone he likes get involved with the local Mafioso and that's really all you need to know. It's Bob versus the Mafia and we all know who is going to win. He also does a bit of CIA work for Dakota Fanning (all is revealed at the end also) and takes on a psychopath in his usual style and slightly OCD way. It's a good way to spend a couple of hours. 8/10

In Laws

This week's Shrinking was as usual full of far too many wholesome people all being nice to each other and generally being nothing like what Americans probably are like. It's Tia's birthday, the second one for all the family and friends since she died and Alice has a plan up her sleeve that bothers her dad but not when he realises the reason behind it. There's also more about Paul's decision to retire and Gabby is distracted by her inability to contact one of her patients. Brian continues to be inappropriate around his new baby and as always while all this unbelievably nice shit is going on something big and nasty is waiting in the wings to fuck everyone up. Candice Bergen (she's 80, you know) guest stars as Derek's mother, who has a problem with Liz (everyone should). This was maybe not the best episode of the series so far, but it still delivers a massive kick to the testicles when you needed it.

Space Filler

We checked out the first part of Netflix's The Dinosaurs, one of those natural history documentaries full of conjecture and cgi, but something that filled in blanks with our knowledge. The evolution and life of the dinosaurs and what was here before them right up until the point when they all got wiped out. It's narrated by Morgan Freeman and while there's an element of dodgy special effects, it's the actual timeline that I'm interested in and the evolution of our own planet. Not brilliant, but most definitely something to watch without it all getting too heavy or with in-depth barely penetrable plots. Freeman narrates this like he died a few years ago. 

A Greek Tragedy

Later on this year, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is released. It is expected to be over three hours long and there's a real buzz about it. Back in 2004, Wolfgang Peterson directed Brad Pitt in Troy and that was over three hours long and this particular film pretty much covered about a third of Homer's other great work The Iliad, albeit the final third. If I learned one thing new about this story - I obviously knew about Helen, the Trojan Horse, Paris, Hector, Agamemnon, Odysseus and Achilles, plus other aspects of this epic poem by Homer (not Simpson) - it was what a bunch of ruthless arseholes the Greeks were and what an honourable people the Trojans were. I always thought the Trojans were the bad guys. 

This is a modern epic full of swords, battles, naked bodies, blood and guts - you name it, this is a BIG film. It's also extremely overwrought, melodramatic and theatrical. It's got an all-star cast and a lot of actors who are no longer with us or no longer are seen as 'stars'. It's not bad, but equally it felt like it could have been at least an hour shorter. At least I got around to watching it as it might make Nolan's The Odyssey a little easier to understand, given it's about Odysseus and his long journey back from the Trojan War. 6/10

Presidential Hokum

Our viewing week finished with yet another film we were giving a second airing for without really remembering much about it at all. I think all I could really remember about White House Down was it came out at roughly the same time as Olympus Has Fallen and they are, essentially, the same movie with different quirks. This one has Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx doing a sort of double act while hundreds of people die horribly around them. Foxx plays the President, Tatum an ex-serviceman hoping to become part of his personal security team and together they do a Die Hard with a bunch of mercenaries led by James Woods, who is out for revenge by destroying the Middle East - all of it, in a series of nuclear attacks, after he gains control of the 'nuclear football'.

Apart from feeling tonally wrong and trying to have far too many quirky characters all vying for screen time, it's not a bad action adventure if you want some escapist nonsense for a weekend viewing - just don't watch the version that's been on Film 4 recently, because they seem to have to darkest, grainiest print available. If you like explosions, dodgy special effects superimposed over actual footage and Channing Tatum in a - I kid you not - singlet, then you'll be all over this like a rash. Was it any good? Does it matter? Well, not really and yes, so therefore just a 6/10.

What's Up Next?

I'll tell you what has been fun watching this week. Not worthy of a review and stretching to a tenuous joke, but I've been watching A New Life in the Sun on C4 for the last couple of days because I've been a little under the weather. The thing that got me chuckling (and then the wife joining me) was the couple who bought half a chateau in France to run their own B&B...

Paul and Melanie, were from New Zealand and South Africa and both well into their 60s (unless they've had hard lives). Paul only had to open his mouth and I was sniggering, because Paul could easily have been the voice of Korg in the Thor films - you know, the rock creature who becomes the God of Thunder's mate. All you had to do was shut your eyes and it was whoever Taika Waititi based Korg's voice on. Mel, his wife, hardly spoke, so whenever the two of them were on screen, for me it became Korg and Mick's French Adventure. Or misadventure, because it appears they bought a place that just wants to fall apart. Yet Korg took it all in his stride, facing everything with a sunny disposition and like no mountain was unclimbable. It was something you needed to see and get the reference to, but if you did then you'd get the joke...

Other than that, this week has really been about giving up. Three things above are not going to be revisited and it might even be four things because Paradise has been hovering around the should we/shouldn't we place and I know the wife wouldn't really miss it if we never watched it again. TV, on the whole, has been largely disappointing in 2026 and a lot of the shows we've tried from the past probably explain why we didn't watch them the first time around...

So, next week Shrinking is the only guarantee, that and a bunch of films. There are some returning TV shows due by the end of the month and there are a few things we should try and get around to watching - it just feels really difficult and like too much hard work to be arsed to persevere with so many of them. 

So, therefore, a Doris Day song...

My Cultural Life - This Means Phwoar!

What's Up?

It would be remiss of me to ignore what is going on in the Middle East, despite my protestations, last week, that this needs to be more 'entertainment' driven rather than a soapbox for my opinions. I try to make my 'opinion pieces' as objective as possible because I'm only interested in the facts and, oddly enough, audit trails.

The anti-conspiracy theorist in me is quick to point out that conspiracies, the ones that usually are easily debunked, have audit trails. Take the fake moon landings, when this didn't happen in 1969, you would have needed an enormous amount of people in on the ruse. It doesn't matter who the person involved was - cleaner to manager - they would have to carry that secret to themselves for the rest of their lives or the worst things possible to their families and friends will happen. Because, let's be honest about this, to keep the faking of the moon landing a secret would be such a massive revelation and humiliation for the USA, you'd need to threaten everyone involved with more than an NDA.

Conspiracy theories have a logical trail and the weak link is people. If there really was damning 'evidence' against Donald Trump in the Epstein Files, at some point, someone working on these - however slimy a lawyer they might be - is going to slip up and mention it to someone or develop a conscience because they see what an inferno the USA is becoming. So, part of me doubts the memes and fake pages set up somehow linking The Donald to something that will bring about his downfall...

However 😁 what if the Great Dictator (we wish we had) could put himself in a position where ousting him as President is off the table? He's in charge now and he's prepared to go rogue to keep himself at arm's length from the attacks. He called out his own right-wing biased Supreme Court for betraying the USA by stopping his tariffs, so he went and imposed new ones, using some obscure war time law. His team have orchestrated this perfectly, from the Noble snub to the FIFA Peace Prize and the Board of Psychopaths for Peace. To the troubles in Minnesota - the least Republican state in the USA - and many other places, we barely hear about or register on people in the UK, because it isn't our problem and watching the USA has lost some of its car crash novelty. Many of us are now aware that his Overlordness is capable of fucking up the world and all the while He has his Mini Me in Israel helping achieve what He needs in terms of instability and a focus, far enough away from the USA, to minimalise the threats to home soil. And probably all because of the Epstein Files...

We're actually witnessing an attempt at creating The American Empire, by a man who is on the same level as Pol Pot in regards his humanity. Even the USA knew they were re-electing an old man with grudges. I think maybe it's why they elected him - put some jazz into politics; get a crazy batshit narcissist as President and sit back and enjoy the ride. I think the Average Joe in Shitsville, Kentucky is going to develop some weird nihilistic belief that politics and what they see on the TV is just one long soap opera. Joe will vote for the next most chaotic world ending event, despite an inner sense that it's just going to get bad for him. It's like people instinctively think we're in some mammoth game of Survival and we can't go forward without having some obstacles in the way.

And that is why I think we had a month of Iranian uprising earlier this year; probably paid for with CIA money; followed by loads of threats, out of nowhere, at Iran and then suddenly we have WW3. Let's not kid ourselves that this isn't a new world war. The Middle East; Ukraine; Sudan; the Congo; Somali; Yemen - all sponsored... er... involving the USA in some way. Then what has happened recently in Venezuela and Mexico plus the Greenland business; The USA has made a big move. If Iran falls to the King of the World, then you can believe that will drive him towards more conquests, because the USA will be at war and I'm sure there's something about war time Presidents and there being a mechanism to prevent them from being replaced, in the event of a coups. Or have him face any judgement at all for what might be in the Epstein files...

Because, at some point, it might be after he's dead, we're going to find out that there was a cover-up at the DoJ and damning evidence about him is going to come out. Or maybe it won't. Either way, it's too late.

Transformer: Badlands

It's like Predator except it's a giant machine, that makes... war! War Machine is actually quite an intense and relentless movie once you get past the gung-ho Americanism of it all. This is 40% training manual and 60% running away to stay alive, but it works even if Alan Ritchson is as big and wooden as Arnie. This is also a surprisingly entertaining film about the final group of trainee Rangers, on their final mission before getting their wings, who just happen to be in the middle of Nowhere, Colorado with zero ammo, no comms and a big fuck off alien war machine trying to blow them into bits. The opening 30 minutes is, in many ways, superfluous. It's a back story we don't really need (or want) about how Ritchson's character - 81 - is too old and too fucked to become a Ranger, but he's doing it for the man he left behind in Afghanistan. I suppose it gives us a bit of back story (that was never needed in Arnie's Predator - which this resembles in a post modern kind of way).

This is surprisingly visceral and if you're squeamish you might want to look away at some of the scenes, but it is paced incredibly well and I suppose it couldn't have been any other way - this was never going to be a poignant drama about soldiers debating life and death with a death machine. It sets itself up for probably a slew of sequels, depending on how popular this proves to be and I expect it will be watched by a lot of people, mainly because it has been made well and even though the special effects are limited - and the war machine looks very un-alien - there's another story here that people will want to see. 7/10

He's Got A Nail Gun!

I never expected to watch this movie, because I never expected to be dragged into these remakes of 20th century TV shows. But here we are and where we are is Denzel Washington in The Equalizer - a one man army film that, if I want to be honest about it, makes many other movies of its ilk pale into insignificance. I mean, this was really inventive and when the nail gun came out I almost squee'd with joy. I mean, the last time a half decent film had a nail gun in it was Lethal Weapon. This was essentially about an OCD former special forces turbo bastard deciding that the treatment of a call girl, he thought of as a friend, warranted him getting involved and after initially killing five Russian arseholes, he goes up against half of the Boston PD and most of the Russian Mafia and as there are at least two sequels to this you can guess the outcome. I have to admit that there is always a comedy element about one-man army movies and this did make me laugh, but it was more from delight and some really clever ways to kill people. I'm going to have to watch the sequels now... 8/10

Open Hearts Surgery

Too Nice!! It's just too nice! Shrinking continues to plough new depths of a 'lovely people well' as everybody is just so fucking wholesome, fresh and clean. Even Liz, with her caustic wit and violent threats, is just a big softy at heart. This week was one of those 'oh fuck, are they going to kill off #####' episodes. Which wouldn't have surprised me given that I still think Paul - Harrison Ford - is going to die at the end of this all, mainly because it doesn't matter how nice this show is, it has thorns and those thorns are sharp. So dolloping an early unexpected death on us would just have lulled us into a false sense of security... It doesn't happen though, but it's still a funny episode given all the love, the slightly autistic people and enjoyment all of these thoroughly disgusting beautiful people have each week. Get Apple TV+ there's much more than just this, but this is worth the subscription (says a man who has never paid for a subscription to anything televisual, ever).

Baby Blues

The best and most powerful episode of Paradise so far left us feeling like we'd been through a battle to get to the end of it. Heavily pregnant Annie - Shailene Woodley - really wants to go to Colorado, but she knows that Xavier has to go to Atlanta first, to try and find his wife. This means sacrifices have to be made, but it also leads to the two becoming close friends - not in that way - and relying on each other to get through. Annie's distrust of people is soon dispelled as Xavier proves to her that the world is more than just dangerous. Considering this was about babies and flashbacks to President Cal being a decent bloke, it was also quite unexpected and distressing. Hopefully this series will keep this up, but I can't help wondering what this entire subplot was trying to achieve. 

Monsters Inc.

Allegedly, Apple TV+ sent a memo out saying they've learned from their mistakes and season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is going have more monsters and less boring convoluted nonsense with characters we don't give a shit about. The season two opener started with Kong, throwing an eppy at something and everyone panicking, while Kurt Russell is still stuck in monster fantasy world. People with good memories will recall that season one of this show started with Godzilla, who appeared twice more and none of his appearances added up to much more than a hillock of beans. There is a chance that Kong's cameo might be the same.

I struggled to stay awake and even though the end promised some interesting ideas, it just gives me the impression it's going to kick a few ideas around until next year's latest Kong X Godzilla bollocks is released. This feels like Agents of SHIELD did when compared to the rest of the MCU - like it exists but no one wants to talk about it.

Man With the Runs

Whatever happened to Paul McCartney? I mean, after the Beatles split up, what became on their bass guitarist? Well this nigh on two hour documentary spills the beans. How Paul became an organic farmer in the Scottish islands; produced experimental music no one listened to and eventually disappeared without a trace, never to be heard from again. Of course, barely any of that is true and he created Wings, eventually became a National Treasure and this film covers the years between the break up of his first band and the break up of his second band, which happened around the time John Lennon was murdered. Man on the Run is actually a bit dull, even if the wife thought it was better than other crap we've watched recently. I'm not sure this reveals anything new; reintroduces us to some great solo and Wings songs and seemed to spend a long time trying to convince people that Paul was progressive; a hippy and Linda was much maligned; that's about it. 6/10

Just For A Craic

Wikipedia says this about the film we watched on Sunday: "The Boondock Saints is a 1999 vigilante action thriller film about two Irish brothers who kill mobsters in Boston. The film was a box office flop but became a cult classic, leading to a sequel and a documentary." I totally get that it was a box office flop, probably because it didn't know if it was a comedy, an action thriller or something slightly surreal with a hidden message. It was a truly strange film that was superfluous, slight and was notable for having Norman Reedus playing one of the two Irish-Americans who kill bad guys. The other brother was played by Sean Patrick Flanery, while Billy Connolly had a smallish part in it as a hit man. The good thing about getting old and discovering films we haven't seen is that we're unlikely to watch the shit ones again. 3/10

3 Wise Homunculi 

I'm not a devotee of Mackenzie Crook (unlike the wife), but I was drawn to Small Prophets, a series about a man who grows homunculi in his shed in an attempt to find out what happened to his former partner, who disappeared many years earlier. Pearce Quigley plays the eccentric Michael Sleep, who works at a DIY store, visits his father (Michael Palin) in his care home and has an odd relationship with almost every woman in his life, whether it's Hillary, the lady at the care home, his next door neighbours or the cute and bubbly Kacey - played by Lauren Patel. When I say 'odd' what I really mean is it seems all of these women are attracted to Michael, but not necessarily sexually. It is gentle, funny, but not especially LOL and if it was an ice cream with a ripple running through it, the ripple would be slightly sad, tinged with tragedy.

Splendid Chaps

Sometimes, you just have to wonder how you can go 36 years without watching one of the - allegedly - best movies of all time. I mean, I've never seen Titanic and I waited nearly 25 years before I watched ET. Why I've never seen Goodfellas is probably down to the fact that gangster/mob movies never really floated any of my boats, even post Sopranos, I didn't really go out of my way to watch them. I think it was down to me never really enjoying The Godfather trilogy (and there's three films I have to rewatch if ever there was any). This, if you need telling, is about a Mafia 'crew' consisting of Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, who pretty much have everything they want while running rackets on the East Side. It follows Liotta's Henry Hill, as he narrates his way through the story of his life with the mob and how, for at least 20 years, he was a favourite 'adopted' son, until he discovers that loyalty only runs one way.

It's got an 8.7 rating on IMDB, giving it one of the highest ranked films I've ever reviewed, but while it was entertaining and didn't feel overly long at two and a half hours, I wasn't as enamoured by it as others. This is a strange thing to say, but I wonder if it would have been made the same way had it been made in 2026? Obviously this is yet another of Scorsese's myriad of classic movies and I'm never as impressed with his works as others... Maybe I'm just hard to please? Anyhow, I've been torn between two ratings, so I figure a 7.5/10 is the best I can do. 

Trailer Trash Extra

Oh dear. I never try to get excited about trailers nowadays. Maybe 10 years ago, I was peak trailer buff; now, I take them in my stride and wait for the disappointment. The new two minute trail for HBO Max's Lanterns looks like it could be an absolute peach of a superhero series. Allow me to be a little self-indulgent; back when I was a kid and I collected comics and actually enjoyed reading them, I was a Marvel kid, I rarely looked at DC comics and only collected one. However, there was another DC comic that I was drawn to occasionally, the  Green Lantern comic, especially during periods where it was written and drawn extremely well, it introduced me to what was in many ways the most grounded, yet cosmic comic I ever read. It was a comic with swathes of shite and comedic creations by the ring of power, but every so often, Hal Jordan and his subsequent replacements and additions were involved in some fantastic stories (that would all probably feel dated and simplistic in 2026) and dealt with some odd issues.

I liked the Green Lantern film with Ryan Reynolds, I can't really understand the hate for it and while Reynolds wasn't how I visualised Hal Jordan, Kyle Chandler, who is assuming the mantle, is absolutely bang on. Aaron Pierre works as John Stewart, updated for now instead of the 70s and 80s, when he sported a shocking afro. The thing is, this doesn't look like a superhero series; this is being depicted as a battle between two men and a town where something is obviously very wrong. There is a glimmer of what has been omitted from this trailer and I suspect that is on purpose. Make people want to see it through the very good editing in the snippet released and not because there will be people who create stuff with green light. It will be on streaming in August, so, you know, I'm not that bothered about it that I'd want it to be August already.

One Minute After Another

Another Oscar favourite bites the dust and leaves us feeling like we've woken up in another reality, one where people rate shit films. One Battle After Another is over two and a half hours of allegory and arseholes and what is it with this year's Oscars that dislikeable characters are getting all the nominations? My niece said recently, about this film, "that's two and a half hours of my life I'm never getting back," and she wasn't wrong. Leonardo Di Caprio plays a former revolutionary, who gets dragged out of his retirement when an old adversary comes back and puts his daughter at risk. It was just one fucking long slog, stuffed full of wankers, racists and arseholes. I mean, it was supposed to be a 'dark comedy', but what the actual fuck? It was just loud, boring and generally full of characters who didn't seem clever enough to be radical revolutionaries... People apparently really enjoyed this film? Maybe they just wanted to sound like they think they're cool? 4/10

What's Up Next?

More Monarch, much to the wife's 'delight'. More Shrinking, much to my actual delight. More Paradise which has been much better than season one but I can see the wife's eyes glazing over and that's never a good sign.

There will be films, because we have a shedload of them on the new and improved Flash Drive of Doom. There's even some old TV series (and some new ones too) that we could give a go.

That is providing there is still a world left next Saturday...

My Cultural Life - While My Catarrh Gently Weeps

What's Up?

I got five minutes away from hitting 'publish' when I realised the 'What's Up?' I'd written didn't feel appropriate and wasn't the right tone to set in a blog that sometimes let's me forget that it's to entertain and inform and not be some soapbox to probably preaching to the converted. So I decided to change it...

Today, February 28th - the last day of winter (meteorologically) would have been my mum's 93rd birthday. I'd say she probably wouldn't have lived that long anyhow, if she hadn't been taken from us in 1998, but given her older sister, my godmother, Tina, is alive and kicking at 95 and smoked Senior Service until she was 40 and then stopped, perhaps my mum (and me) would have had much longer having to put up with what a rotten place the world feels at the moment.

But sometimes, we need to forget that there's a world out there trying to eat us and just become a being in that moment, our moment. To stop. To look and listen. Of course the big problem with doing that in the best possible way is you need it to be a lovely day with just a gentle breeze and that's been as rare as rocking horse shit this late winter. About an hour ago, I was downstairs, pottering about in the kitchen and I could see the sun streaming in through the patio doors.

This had happened on Thursday. We had the best day Galloway has seen since October and I found myself sitting on the remarkably dry bench, letting the sun create vitamin D the best way. It was maybe 12 degrees on our patio - south facing, lot of white, windbreaks from every direction; it looks very Mediterranean in the spring, before the poppies and honeysuckle take over. It also feels it. 

Well, today is a few degrees colder than Thursday, but what breeze there is comes from the north, so the house blocks the wind and the patio is pretty much the same temperature as it was earlier in the week, because of the sun. So, I stood just outside and pushed the nightmares going on in my head after seeing what some senile orange idiot has done this week out of my head and listened to Wigtown at 11.00 am on a Saturday morning.

You know what I heard more than anything else? The sound of birds. They're happy little fuckers round our way, as we often discover around 3.30 am in June, when they wake up and can't understand why everyone else isn't up. However, at the end of what has been a pretty dreich and bleurgh winter, without too many extremes, standing there listening to them chatter and peep because there's shagging to be had. Well, it makes me realise that despite my anxieties, I'm a pretty lucky bloke to be blessed with people who put up with me.

But overall, it was just warm. Not like a muggy summer's evening, but in a 'Jeez, I need this' kind of way. The warmth you have to pick out because it's there waiting for you. Is it any wonder that mankind created religion when it probably spent inordinate more time worshipping the sun, until one day someone realised the sun was not a god but a big glowing ball and needed a more humanity based means of control. 

I like the sun. We don't see enough of her.  

More Questions than Answers

So, it seems, we can't go a week without a new Jaysun Stayfum film. This week is his latest release, Shelter, where he plays a one-man army hellbent on killing people while protecting a girl called Jessie, who might be, but is never revealed to be, his daughter. The first half of this movie is like Statham had thrown his hard man image out of the window to portray a deep and brooding hermit, living on a Scottish island, who saves the life of a young girl who seems to think she has some connection to him. Then it gets a bit silly. MI5 (or maybe MI6) have a new surveillance machine that can literally pick up wanted terrorist suspects if they pass any camera, anywhere in the country. Mistaking Statham for a Georgian terrorist, a team of special ops go to his island and are quickly despatched. It then becomes a strange cat and mouse game where rogue cells of intelligence agents try to beat official intelligence agents to Statham and the girl, all meeting sticky ends. It's slightly ridiculous, like many movies of this ilk. You actually learn almost fuck all by the end of it and it kind of has an ending that either suggests a happy ending or a set up for Shelter 2. You also might find some of the geographical continuity incongruous to where it's allegedly set, which is the Outer Hebrides.  5/10

Runaway Train

Tony Scott's final film Unstoppable is a real seat of the pants action thriller about a speeding, driverless, train heading for a heavily populated area of Pennsylvania. Denzel Washington plays Frank, a veteran train driver and Chris Pine as Will, a newly qualified conductor, who narrowly miss hitting the runaway train and then decide they are the only hope to stop the train, by chasing it down and attempting to stop it from behind. Rosario Dawson co-stars as the person trying to co-ordinate the stopping of what is essentially a giant bomb travelling at 70mph. There are some added subplots, mainly about the two men's families and what they've both been through, but this is essentially a race against time and speed. It was full of jeopardy and was an enjoyable way to end a Saturday film night. 7/10

Police Story

I remember when this film came out. The big talking point was action hero Sly Stallone playing a fat, washed up town sheriff who is walked all over by the NYC cops living in his New Jersey town. This is a James Mangold movie, so it has a pretty good pedigree even before you see the all-star cast, which includes Robert De Nero, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick and Annabella Sciorra. Sly is the sheriff in Garrison, but he isn't the law. He's slow witted, often drunk and isn't a very good police officer by his own standards; meanwhile he's surrounded by a town full of NYPD cops, many of who are owned by the mob. When a young hero cop makes a fatal mistake during an arrest, things spiral out of control and Internal Affairs get involved, but they need the sheriff to work with them and he's just not sure who he wants to be. This is also Liotta's best film since his early career. 8/10

Another Runaway Train

Two Tony Scott movies in two days and both of them have trains - driven at some point by Denzel Washington - as the most prominent feature. I suppose subconsciously I realised this when deciding to rewatch The Taking of Pelham 123. This time it's not so much a runaway train as a train that attempts to run away. This is a heist movie and a very clever one in many ways; John Travolta is the balding heist-meister who has hijacked a train and is now threatening to kill all the hostages if the city of New York doesn't meet his demands. Washington is the guy who is co-ordinating it from rail central, but he has his own story and the two clash very quickly.

This and Unstoppable were the director's final two films before he took his own life and while there's a lot of similarities they both couldn't be much different. This, like Saturday's movie, is a great film with a lot of jeopardy and a lot different from the original Walter Matthau film, yet it pays special homage to that, using many of the names and staying faithful to John Godey's original book, but updating it for the 21st century. It's a movie worth watching. 8/10

Something Completely Different

I'm not quite sure what to make of the 2023 Peacock series Mrs Davis. Except, about halfway through the opener I realised that last year's Vince Gilligan series Pluribus is very similar to it, in many ways... This is an eight part series and it is finite. It's extremely weird. Betty Gilpin plays Sister Simone, a nun with a mission. When she's not being nun-like, she rides through the night unmasking fraudulent magicians on her trusty white horse. She might be a descendent of the Knight's Templar - given the opening ten minutes and the similarity between her and the woman there - or she might simply have to find out where the Holy Grail is. This sounds all quite reasonable, until you realise that Simone has been chosen to take on a quest given to her by a powerful AI that now runs the world and has every human connected to doing its bidding. 

The reason for this is because Simone refuses to have anything to do with the AI and this makes the AI - aka Mrs Davis - very 'nervous'. This is silly, violent, strange and there's more than one storyline going on, but I expect they will all link together, except I doubt we'll stick around to find out.  There are a number of alarming continuity glitches in this, it could be that the entire thing is taking place inside the mind of an AI. Don't get me wrong, it's mildly entertaining, but there's also something a bit shoddy about it - the time frame is all over the place; the narrative isn't at all linear and there's something about Simone (aka Lizzy - her real name) that bugs me. Perhaps it's the shonky tone or the fact it seems to have deeply religious undertones, but we discussed whether we wanted to watch the remaining five episodes and chose not to. Therefore, I can't really recommend it, despite what appeared to be a promising start.

In Days of Old

The finale of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was a remarkably subdued and poignant affair. In the aftermath of the duel and the tragic consequences of it, Dunc appears to have a strange, yet begrudged, elevated status. Baelor's brother offers him the chance to have Egg as his squire as long as it is in the confines of the Targaryen enclaves, but the big fella is reticent about everything now, even his future as a knight. This was a most engaging series, which started by boring me, began to win me over and ended up boring me a little, again. The tale of Sir Dunc and Egg - specifically for the TV series - was slight and surprisingly gentle and I expect this series will have won a few Game of Thrones deserters back into the Westeros vibe. It was not brilliant TV, but it wasn't shite.

The End of the World, Part Two

Paradise returned with a season opener like you wouldn't expect. 'Graceland' has almost nothing to do with the entire first series - which was set inside a bunker designed to mimic the real world after an environmental disaster almost destroys the world. Sterling K. Brown is back, but only in the very last scene of this season's first episode. This was about Shailene Woodley, a women who gave up being a doctor to become a tour guide at Elvis's old home around the time the world is going to end. She manages to survive - despite obvious questions - and nearly three years later she meets up with a band of nerds - people trying to save the planet.

The second of the three episodes to drop, focuses on Brown's Xavier and how he found his way to Memphis and what he needs to do to survive. While we, the viewer, wonder how such a claustrophobic first season can feel so open and wild and then we're reminded, because the third episode is set back inside the Colorado bunker as Jane makes her moves and Sinatra realises that stuff needs to happen to get things back on track. What those tracks are and how it's done are still hidden from us, but I suspect it will be nefarious. We do discover how one of the nerds from episode one is actually a very important nerd, one of world saving abilities.

I wasn't sure about revisiting this series; I think I might have said we were giving it a miss, but so far it's been considerably more enjoyable, we just need it to stay that way.

Below Average

Something we won't be watching is the second episode of CIA - a new CBS series starring Tom 'Lucifer' Ellis as a CIA agent and some other bloke as an FBI field agent, who get thrust together and have to work finding and solving shit that the CIA can't because they aren't allowed to operate on US soil - or something like that. Ellis plays an American agent, who has spent all his life in the UK - hence the slightly wavering British accent (not wavering because he's trying to be a Yank, but because he doesn't seem to know whether he's Welsh, a Cockney or someone from the Home Counties). It's all very style and little substance. Being a Network TV show, there's this general shit feel about the film quality, the script, the lack of realism and the simple fact it isn't very good. It's a shame, I like Tom Ellis, but I suspect he's either good as Miranda's boyfriend or the devil and little else...

Quacks

It's loud. It's flashy. It's full of horribly loveable people. It has Harrison Ford saying 'fuck' so many times it's great and the song that played out this week's episode was Night Swimming - the REM song, covered by Jason Segal, the star of the show, after he admitted to Paul's daughter it was something he always envisaged doing if he ever started another meaningful relationship. I turned to the wife at the end of this episode and I felt quite emotional, because Shrinking has that effect on me. We shouldn't like it; it's everything about happy American entitled middle class bastards we hate, but it also is one of the most wonderful TV shows we have watched. Every single episode there's often a point in it where I wonder why I like it so much and then something happens that makes me love it even more. I'm going to miss it so much and I think Jessica Williams is one of the sexiest women alive today! There, I've said it now...

Dull End

As Friday is a quiz night, Thursday became our end of the week and it was a damp squib, if ever there was one. We started with an old Sean Penn directed film called Into the Wild, gave it 40 minutes, realised it was on for nearly two more hours and gave up on it. 

Then finally got around to watching A House of Dynamite, about an unidentified nuclear strike on the USA from an unknown assailant and how various parts of the government's defence strategy works in the 16 or so minutes they have before Chicago is wiped off the map. It was also really dull, essentially retelling that 16 minutes over and over again from different perspectives. I'd give it a 3/10 for perseverance...

What's Up Next?

Well, much of the same. I don't even know why I have this bit. Apart from occasionally saying something about something that's happening next week that some of you maybe weren't aware of, this is essentially a load of waffle.

If I tell you about last night's pub quiz that isn't what's happening next week, is it? But, it's not like there are rules to this or anything [there are]. The thing is it went very well. I've probably said this before, but I wish I'd done this sooner, or been able to make a living from it since I moved here. The next one is March 27. I already have the questions completed and music loaded onto my phone. I have quizzes written up to June. I'll be thinking about July's before long, but maybe not before spring actually arrives.