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...