The Umbrella Academy (season 3)

 The Umbrella Academy is cool. I mean, really cool. The characters are so different and well developed. The story is clever and well written. The production and editing are great.

It doesn't try too hard.

There's a lot to see if you look and listen.

After Elliot Page announced his transition following season 2, I wondered how they might handle that. Would there even be a season 3? Would they recast Vanya? or write her out? No. No, they didn't. They rewrote the script to transition Vanya to Viktor. Genius. After all, the Vanya character was indirectly transitioning via the body of Elliot Page in season 2 anyway... so it's not a plot swerve at all. Good writing.

And each season has at least one seismic shift: season one was all about the emergence of the White Violin; season 2 was the coup at the commission (and Lila) and WW3; now season 3 is the apocalypse of all time and the umbrellas being ursurped by the sparrows.

 So there is always a lot to see. Often you have to just wait and see how things develop. There are a few red herrings. But it is never dull. It's always a great ride and the pay-off is always great... then confusing. Each season ends with "OK!... wait... what?"

Before watching season 3 I went back over seasons 1 and 2. They rewatch really well. Which is never a given, for shows that have a lot of surprises. But there is so much to this show, and the characters are so great, that even when you know what is going to happen (and I had forgotten a fair bit) it is still exciting and fun to watch again. If there is a season 4 then I will be watching 1-3 again ahead of it!

Ms Marvel (Disney+)

 I always knew that at some point I would probably be too old to enjoy new Marvel material. But I thought it would happen gradually, across the board. Instead it looks likely, in the near futture at least,  that there will be a mix of shows that I like and don't like.

That's because after liking pretty much everything in the MCU since the start (and the X-Men and Fantastic Four movies that Fox produced) I have hit something that just didn't grab me - Ms Marvel.

It's a character that I was aware of from comics, but only superficially. So I can't say whether the material is on-canon or not. That's not the problem. It's a youth show... there are clearly youth in-jokes that I don't get.

As such, not a lot happened in this show for me. It's all about the Pakistani youth culture in the USA. Which I know nothing about. It goes into historical detail. The British are the villains... oh, hang on, no... they were the villains until the Djinn. 

The vibe is more Scooby Doo than Captain Marvel. Maybe Disney+ should age-rate these shows in future so that adults don't waste their time watching shows intended mainly for kids?

Stranger Things (season 4 volume 2)

 I wont get into the argument about whether splitting a "season" into two volumes makes sense. The end of volume 1 was an enjoyably constructed revelation and volume 2 continues on from there. Perhaps a bigger question is whether all these episodes needed to be quite so long?

Because, for all the time spent, I was disappointed in the final episodes. After all the time spent getting Hopper out of the Russian prison, he just broke back in again to kill the monsters. That was it, that's why he was there. He had to kill the monsters to weaken Vecna... a bit. Maybe it didn't even matter at all because Eleven seemed to kick his ass pretty easily anyway.

When it suited.

So, when Eleven appears in Max's mind to confront Vecna she beats him easily... then he beats her back easily... then her boyfriend says "I love you" and "fight"... and then she can beat him easily again. But just late enough for Max to die for a while... just long enough for the 4 gates to open and the clock to chime. Then she can bring Max back to life again. Well, an empty coma anyway; and she has broken arms and legs and is blind. So, it didn't work out so great for Max. Or Eddie, who didn't seem to need to die either, really; especially when the insane basketball team get taken out of the game.

Given how long it took to build to this "final" battle; it was a rubbish battle. I was really hoping for some insights into why Vecna and Eleven were so powerful compared to the other specials and why Eleven was ultimately stronger than Vecna. Maybe we get that in the final season? But this part didn't make sense - the trio were supposed to kill Vecna while he was defenseless in Max's mind... but he woke up before they killed him... and a couple of Molotov cocktails and a shotgun are enough? Clearly not... he's still "alive", right? (yes, just wait 2 days)

This was a long season and yet the ending felt so rushed. Vecna's down! Yay! Or not... he says it's just the begining. There's an "earthquake", people die, oh no the upside down is leaking into our world.

Oh, and in case you missed it, Vecna was the Mindflayer thing all along. He did all that other stuff before he realised he only had to kill 4 people to open up a gateway between worlds and turn all the flowers grey.

In summary. The episodes were too long. The pacing was a bit ropey. Some of the set-ups for the final season were very clumsy. Still pleny to enjoy, but I hope the final season is structured better.

The Primitives @ The Boileroom (Guildford)

 My favourite band of all time, The Primitives, played at The Boileroom in Guildford last night. My ticket was dated 2020, reminding me that the gig was postponed twice due to Covid-19... and this was the first live music event I have been to in 2.5 years.

Wow. What a great show. I mean, I was always going to enjoy it, but it was even better than I expected. Starting with Thru The Flowers the largely 40years+ audience took a few minutes to warm up, but by the end of that first track everyone was transported back to the 80s and having a great time. 

This was far from a mere nostalgia trip though. Add in a few of their new songs (post 2009) like Spin-o-rama and Rattle My Cage and even a couple of really new ones that I had never heard before (Don't know where to start?) and you see a band that is still creating, not stuck in the past.

(I didn't recognise the bass player... it definitely wasn't Raphael Moore who played with them 2009-2019 when I saw them... according to Wikipedia it was Paul Sampson (again) is that right?)

To cap off a great show the Prims played a 3 song encore including my favourite (if obscure) track Spacehead which judging by the volume of audience participation is also very popular with many other fans too (but were they wearing purple socks as I was?)

Each time I see The Primitives this century I think "this will probably be the last time I see them". So far I've been wrong. Hopefully I will be wrong again!

Guardians of Justice

 The first impression of Guardians of Justice is that it is simply a very thinly veiled spoof of the DC Justice League comics / movie(s). But quickly we see that it is far from a light-hearted piece. This is dark; very dark; very, very dark.

In some ways this is what a lot of fans wanted when they complained that some of the Batman films were not dark enough. But darker than that. So, maybe, this is instead a spoof of what fans say they want... or rather an illustration of what the result might be if fans got what they asked for.

SPOILERS

Yet, as the episodes pass (there are only 7) the story is nicely coherent. There is a lot of violence, some of it clearly inspired by video games, other parts perhaps inspired by Scott Pilgrim, with no apparent reason behind the random switches. That was a bit grating sometimes. And it was sometimes a real effort to remember who had been killed, who was a suspect, who the good guys and the bad guys currently were.

I think The Speed was my favourite character, which turned out to be handy as she survived in play a lot longer than some of the other Guardians. I couldn't figure out who Awesome Man was for a long time and why he didn't do more... but that turns out to be for good reason later on!!!

Anyway, back to good guys versus bad guys. That is probably the whole point of the show. There are no good guys, really. Certainly by the end. The idealists who you might normally pick out as the good guys all get killed off. As do the fanatical bad guys. Leaving the pragmatic "all for the greater good" guys... who think of themselves as the good guys, but are not averse to killing anyone who gets in the way of their idea of a "peaceful world" where everyone behaves as they should!

Did I enjoy this? Probably a lot more than if they had taken shots at my favourite Marvel characters (was Sepia Spider a cross-over or a DC character I couldn't match?) as I always felt DC characters are inherently more ridiculous anyway (just my opinion). There were several "aha" moments that I definitely enjoyed. Overall, probably more "yuk" moments, and certain episodes dragged a bit in the middle.

On balance, definitely worth a watch; not as a superhero series but as a dark look at prejudice and authoritarian regimes... maybe a comentary on a direction that certain Western countries might be drifting if they are not careful.

Obi-wan Kenobi (3 + 4 + 5)

 I would have waited until the end of the season before posting again on the Obi-wan show... but I don't think I am going to watch it any more. I'll probably do what I did with The Rise Of Skywalker and swear blind that I will never watch it, but then be drunk enough one night to give it a go anyway. It is testament to how much I hated "Skywalker" that even then I only watched the first hour before bailing out!

So, now Star Wars is dead for me. Disney have wrecked it. I won't say "beyond repair" because anything can br rebooted or retconned in the future... but my plan now is clear - avoid all new Star Wars movies and TV shows unless and until a significant number of genuine fans sing its praises (like they did The Mandalorian). I can't give anything Star Wars the benefit of the doubt now; and I can't get excited in anticipation that it might be good. It's broken. I've been disappointed too many times and too deeply. 

Given the resources that Disney has, I can only conclude that their Star Wars material is not bad because of cost or lack of talent. It must be bad because they are deliberately targeting a new audience that they think doesn't care about the original trilogy and about consistency with that original world in which the story was built. The original characters don't matter, they were mostly white men (the human ones anyway) and it's not cool to show too many of those now. The force doesn't matter, it's only wielded by a hand-picked elite, even if that elite is incredibly diverse of species, race and gender; we just don't like elites and the ambiguous semi-religous undertones - give everyone a blaster and have done with it.

The plot of the Obi-wan series does not make sense. It is ridiculous. This scared old man who has forgotten, sometimes, how to use the force is not Obi-wan Kenobi. He is supposed to be watching over Luke Skywalker and learning how to commune with Qi-gon Jinn. He doesn't work in an open-air meat factory and go off chasing the kidnappers of Princess Leia ... kidnappers who are so dumb that it took them 10 years to figure out that the way to force Obi-wan from "hiding" was to kidnap her?

Anakin Vader isn't a scary evil villain. He's an incompetent fool, who has the power to single-handedly stop a space-ship from taking off, but can't actually do any of the important work himself... instead he sends off complete incompetents to do everything and then kills them, or not, when they fail.

In episode 5 there was a glimmer of hope, when Sister Sinister turned out to be one of the younglings that Anakin killed in the temple... except she didn't die. Now she's just doing all these evil things, like hunting Kenobi, to get close enough to Anakin to kill him. Except she's been plenty close enough to him plenty of times to take a shot. And anyway, when she does try her hand, surprise, surprise, Anakin Vader knew all along and was just using her to get Kenobi. So then he kills her again, with her own lightsaber because he can't even be bothered to get his own out... except she doesn't die again, and the Chief Inquistor that she killed in episode whenever wasn't dead either. FFS does no-one die of lightsabre runthroughs now? Only the nice lady officer with the hand-grenade actually perishes in the whole attack.

Urgh. It's just rubbish. And that's all excluding the involvement of Tiny Leia, who is more heroic and smarter than anyone else in the show. They might as well have called the whole thing "Young Leia" and have done with it.

I don't know how they will try and fix this in the last episode, how they will leave things, whether they will set up for a second season. And I don't care. I'm done. Maybe if I rewatch the original trilogy enough times then eventually I will forget about the whole Disney nightmare.

Next (2020 Disney+)

 I have a real problem with Disney. The only reason I subscribe to Disney+ is because I am a big Marvel fan. If there was a subscription which was only the Marvel stuff, then I would go for that in a heartbeat.

A friend of mine, who's tastes match mine pretty well, recommended another show on there called "Only Murders In the Building" ... which I watched and enjoyed. I also noticed that they have "Devs" which I saw when it was on UK Broadcast TV and thought was brilliant.

OK, so maybe there are good shows on Disney+. Or maybe not. I tried watching "Next" which looks like my thing on paper - sci-fi, dangerous AI potentially out of control. But. I didn't even make it to the end of episode 1. It was dreadful. I only watched it a couple of days ago and all I can really remember is that it was awful... er, there was a car crash and ... some people ... and the billionaire genius ex-CEO of the company that made the AI was a bit of a dick. Nothing interesting. Nothing that made me even want to watch the whole episode, let alone plough on through the season.

Often I give things the benefit of the doubt if the start is slow... but this wasn't so much slow as just bad.

(just had a look on Wikipedia and apparently this show was cancelled after 2 episodes when it first aired on TV... cheers Disney+ for mopping up shows of this quality to pad out your sci-fi section!)

Man of Tai Chi (2013)

 This is a dreadful film. I saw it this week (in 2022) and thought it was a new movie, but it seems it was released in 2013. I couldn't even bring myself to watch it in one siting. I thought the fight scenes would be good, and many of them are, but the connective tissue is so awful that I just had to stop a few times and then pick it up later, or the next day.

So many cliches.

Another anoying thing is that it appears on Netflix as an English language movie, but half the dialogue is in one of several Chinese dialects, so I had to manually turn on subtitles for those bits and then ended up leaving them on for the English parts too, as it's too much hassle to flip-flop. I'm sure presenting only subtitles for the non-English parts is a solved problem... but it just didn't work here.

It's a real mish-mash of movie types. I couldn't figure out what it was trying to do. What was the message? Who were the characters? Did Keanu Reeves have to direct the movie just to get to play a bad guy? He kind of sucked at that... since he played him almost exactly as Neo from the Matrix.

Oh, another annoying thing on the Netflix front (which may not be their fault) is that the description says this is a Kung-fu movie... when the whole point is that Tiger is adapting Tai Chi not Kung-fu - the clue is in the title, after all.

I think the worst part was where the old Chi = Magic myth was trotted out as the ultimate lesson. Tiger's master manages to bruise him a bit with a "magic" strike and then Tiger kills Keanu with a more powerful version (sorry, SPOILERS, not that it makes any difference as you see that coming a mile off).

The same emotional content was done better by "The Blues Brothers" (!) and the fighter's journey was done better by many, many other martial arts films, including "The Matrix".

Stranger Things (season 4 volume 1)

 Firstly, when I started watching this season I didn't know that it was going to be split into 2 volumes, so I got increasingly worried that things were not going to get resolved neatly by the end as the episodes ticked by. Because clearly nothing gets resolved at all, this volume is a big "set up" for the next volume. Hopefully there is only one more volume and volume 2 doesn't also end with "aha, now just wait another month for volume n+1".

Having said all that I did enjoy this. There is still an element of "The Red Hand Gang" (and other kids vs adults shows from the past that you really shouldn't bother looking up) about it... but unlike those shows, which I hated as a kid, this kind of works... or is it just because I'm old now? Who knows; maybe both.

The back story of 11 is well told in between Hopper trying to escape from Russia (oops, SPOILERS, yes he is alive and somehow didn't get blown to bits like we thought) and this mysterious new bad guy in the upside down, Vecna, who is killing off people who go near Dungeons and Dragons players (ish). Less fun are the sterotypical bigotted sports jocks bullying everyone into lynching D&D players because they think they are some kind of demonic cult. I guess that bugged me for personal reasons. It does play its part in the overall narrative quite well, I grudgingly admit.

MORE SPOILERS

The cleverness of the backstory becomes apparent in the final episode when it is revealed that we are also seeing Vecna's backstory! Didn't see that coming... although I did guess that the nice orderly helping 11 was going to turn out to be the original special child (number 1).

I'm looking forward to volume 2 now. I read somewhere that there were 2 final seasons of Stranger Things to come... I hope that is season 4 v1 and v2 plus a season 5... if not then this next volume has a lot of ends to tie up.

Chaos Walking (2021)

 As usual I sat down to watch this without seeing any reviews. I like Tom Holland enough to take a chance on it... even though the "tags" on Netflix suggested it might be a "young adults sci-fi" which can be a bit of a minefield... and it has Daisy Ridley in it who I have only seen in a couple of Star Wars films (let's not get into that again).

Pre-spoiler summary: it's OK, but nothing to write home about.

SPOILERS

I quite liked the premise of this: on a New World colony everyone's thoughts can be heard and / or seen by everyone in the viscinity due to a phenomenon called "noise". When I say everyone, it's actually only males, but we don't know that because there aren't any females around.

Tom Holland portrays the torment of this situation really well. It would surely be a nightmare to be laid bare like that all the time. And not everyone is... some people can control their noise better than others. So there is an uneasy peace in the colony amongst the men.

Then a spaceship crashes, killing all the passenges except for one female, Daisy Ridley. She has no noise so the men want to capture her... or... actually they want to capture her before she tells the mothership to come and steal their land... or because half of them have never seen a female?

It's all a bit muddled. Which is fine. Life here is baffling and frustrating. The problem is that Daisy Ridley plays the same character she had in Star Wars, just without any force powers, which makes her not very interesting at all. Alongside a lesser co-star that might slide a bit, but against Tom Holland it's just clear she can't compete for impact... maybe the writers don't give her a a chance. I don't know, but the Viola and Todd conflict / dynamic felt very flat to me.

Despite that the film plays out OK. The story moves along, things happen, there are a few fights. Some of the fights make sense, a couple are cool, a few are really dumb (how did he get there?)

By the end I neither felt that I'd seen a great film nor a terrible one. I'm glad I watched it. I'll probably have a look at the original books. I wouldn't watch any sequels...

Obi-wan Kenobi (1 + 2)

 It's probably not a good idea to comment on a new series after only watching 2 episodes, but I'm going to do it anyway. I don't even know how many episodes there are going to be in this series / season, since the Disney+ player doesn't show you that (!) and I haven't googled it because I wanted to avoid spoilers.

Urgh. I'm disappointed. That's the spoiler-free version. Read on if you don't mind finding out some details of the plot (there isn't much).

OK, so 10 years after the Revenge of the Sith and Obi-wan is hiding in a cave on Tatooine, watching over Luke and working at an open-air meat processing factory so he can earn money to buy Luke toys (which his farmer uncle Owen doesn't allow) and buy back machine parts from Jawas that steal them from him in the first place.

This part isn't too bad. But then we see a precocious little Pricess Leia and think "oh oh" she's going to get kidnapped... just before she gets kidnapped. I wonder why? Oh, is it so the nasty Sithette lady can draw Obi-wan out and kill him? Maybe... oh, yes definitely it is, there she is, no need to wonder about that then.

Obi-wan is supposed to be learning how to commune with his late teacher Qi-gon, but instead he seems to have become terrified of using the Force in case he gives himself away. He doesn't even know that Anakin isn't dead... presumably despite Darth Vader and his sithereens sending tremors through the Force on a daily basis. (see my review of RotS for why Obi-wan absolutely should have finished off Anakin)

So instead of any Jedi fights, we get fist fights and slight of hand tricks. Nothing to do with keeping the budget down, honest? And lots of running round with little Leia, who is so switched on that you can't belive that in another 10 years time she will have completely forgotten about him when she sends the "years ago you served with my father in the clone wars" message.

The longer it went on, the less I enjoyed it. I will watch episode 3 next week and then possibly bail (at halfway?) if it doesn't improve. I didn't finish the Boba Fett series either... TBH I find myself hating everything that Disney have done with Star Wars... except The Mandalorian, which remains the one reason to keep hoping that some of the future material might be OK. Is that a way to live though? Hoping for OK?

Maybe it is time to let Star Wars go. Disney have killed it. Move on.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

 The title is a bit of a mouthful isn't it? Anyway, I finally got to see this movie about a week after it came out (long story) after carefully avoiding spoilers and reviews. Having followed up with some reviews since, I'm glad I did avoid them, as this movie had a few surprises that added a lot to its impact.

After this point there will be a lot of SPOILERS so come back later if you want.

Right, the first surprise was that Wanda / Scarlet Witch is the villain. I guess she was the kind of villain in the WandaVision series too, but then she seemed to be redeemed. Here she is back to suffering terrible grief at the loss of Vision and repeated regret at not having the two children that she invented. 

The brilliant thing about this is that we get a villain that we care about. We know a lot about her. We care about her... she's not bad, really; lots of bad things have happened to her. She's had to sacrifice a lot. Given the amount of power she has, as is said repeatedly in the dialogue, this is her "being reasonable".

Alongside the great villain (Scarlet Witch has always been my favourite character in the MCU) we get a lot of action. This is a very exciting film. The balance between showing people with huge power smashing each other about and telling the story is very well struck, I thought.

We learn a lot more about multiverses and with America Chavez get an "easy" way to move between them. Clearly this is a tool that Marvel are going to use to expand the MCU in many ways which can be contradictory without destroying the overall cohesion of the collection of movies.

Relatively short-lived appearances by Reed Richards, Black Bolt, Prof X and alternative versions of Captain America and Captain Marvel highlight this... as does the ease with which they are all brutally killed off.

I didn't have very high expectations for this film, mainly because I am not a massive Doctor Strange fan. But this is as much a Scarlet Witch film as anything else, so for that reason I loved it.

Very exciting. Also very moving at times. Excellent movie.

National Treasure (2016 TV series)

This is about the TV series from 2016, not the earlier action moves of the same name.

The series was inspired by the aftermath of the Jimmy Saville revelations, where we learned (in real life) that a supposed National Treasure can turn out to have been a serial sexual abuser.

But this is not a fictionalised version of the Saville story, since he died before any of his accusers were believed, nor is it an account of any of the men who were subsequently prosecuted as "proxies" for Saville to prove that the authorities had learned their lesson. Some of those men are mentioned by name in this series, as is Saville, and some of the men who were prosecuted and aquitted.

Since the central character is purely fictional, we don't know if he is guilty or innocent. That kind of turned it into a mystery, which makes you question all the things that happen as "evidence" one way or the other. In one of the flashbacks during an interview Finchley claims he sent the babysitter home in the cab he had taken home... we see the cab leaving, but we don't know if the girl is in it or if he is just sending the cab away. There are lots of other clips that could either verify or disprove his evidence, but we never quite see enough to decide until near the end.

As the story proceeds to court we do find out more and I started to shift to a definite opinion as to my preferred outcome. Which was a problem, since well before the ending I realised that there was no good ending possible. Finchley was an unpleasant man, his accusers clearly suffered, other women probably suffered just as much but didn't come forward. On the evidence presented to the court he should probably be aquitted; but on the weight of probability he was probably guilty.

I think the show found an ending which was at least believable. Overall I didn't particularly enjoy watching this, but it was sobering viewing which I think does a good job of examining the carnage caused to people's lives by sexual abuse.

Bigbug

 French comic sci-fi / futuristic farce on Netflix. The garish colour palette and over the top acting make this a real in your face attack on the senses. As usual I watched it in the original soundtrack with English subtitles.

The story is kind of incidental - rogue AI decides to kill people, house robots protect their owners (or are they friends) - because this is really just some good French characters doing what they do best... not getting what they want from life and complaining / fighting about it.

It's kind of clichéd with the older rejected wife facing her ex-husband and his younger girlfriend, the chancer poking around, the young man awkwardly desiring the young girl and the much older lady with the mechanised gigolo (or talking dildo as I'm sure someone says at some point).

But throw in some robots and it is novel enough to be entertaining in a slightly different way from all the other french comedies that you may, or may not, have enjoyed in the past.

Nothing amazing, but quite fun.

Unpaid balance on your AdSense account

 The reason I removed ads from this blog (years ago) was that after several years of posting I still hadn't received enough revenue to get paid and it annoyed me a bit that Google were just sitting on that money. It wasn't much to me, but if there were thousands or millions of people in the same situation then Google were benefiting hugely. So I cancelled my AdSense account and expected to get the £20 or so sent to me. I expected it to take a while. But, 4 years later, after forgetting about it completely, I got this on March 31 2022:

Hello,
As a part of our internal audit we have identified an unpaid balance of 20.55GBP on your AdSense account pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX that is owed to you.
If you wish to receive your payment, you will need to log into your AdSense account at google.com/adsense, and take the following action in order for us to process your payment. If you have trouble logging in, please use this troubleshooter.

 What? So they just realised that they didn't pay me, admit that they owe me and now want me to log into the account that I closed 4 years ago to "fix" the problem. This is just another scam. They know I can't log into the account, because it is closed. They know I already did all the things they listed as "reasons why I might not have been paid" because those were pre-requisites for closing the account with a refund.

I bet there is a report somewhere where some Google exec says "We always pay our content creators; unfortunately a small percentage fail to provide all the details we require (so we keep the money)".

Google still owes me £20.55

Travelers (2016)

 I have just rewatched all 3 seasons of Travelers back-to-back. Originally I think I watched the first 2 seasons when the second one came out and then the 3rd later. This time it was a real binge from start to finish.

The story establishes quite quickly that there are no "do overs" because the future cannot send information back in time beyond the last destination used. That is crucial because without it you would always be thinking "just go back and do that again, better". I also like that it is only information that can be sent back in time - somehow that seems more believable than actual objects and people traveling literally.

Whilst the missions (protocol 1) are often quite exciting and string together into a web of intrigue, it is the struggles of the travelers with their 21st century lives (protocol 5) that I really enjoyed the most. As with many shows, the peculiarity of our lives as seen by others is amusing and enlightening.

As the episodes roll by we get a lot of character development and a steady drip of information about the future. But as the future is constantly changing, due to the travelers actions, there is no was of really knowing what the actual future is "now" at any point, so to speak.

I loved the main characters and some of the supporting ones. It was a shame when it ended. They could, and still can, do a lot more with it. Protocol omega...