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...