Category: TV and Film
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🍿 A Complete Unknown (2024) - ★★★★☆
I really enjoyed this take on Bob Dylan’s electrifying personal highway to rock ’n’ roll superstardom hell amidst the increasingly furious shaking heads and would-be axe-wielding cable choppers of the folk establishment and elder guitar heroes.
Probably helps if you’re a Dylan fan. If you’re not, or you’re easily bothered by historical/factual inaccuracies in a “it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen” style movie then you should probably give it a miss.
Superb cast with highlights being Timothée Chalamet’s perfect portrayal of the obsessively creative introverted asshole Dylan and Monica Barbaro’s sensitive counterpoint as the already-a-superstar, slightly uptight but all-too-forgiving and exploited Joan Baez.
📺 Secret State (2012) - ★★★★☆
Inspired by the book, this is a very different take on A Very British Coup. I enjoyed the gritty reality of 80s’ Harry Perkins, but the New Labour version with “Tom Dawkins” was so well done it made me want to throw up (in the scene-setting first episode, at any rate). Second and third episodes were much better and looking forward to the finale tonight. Featuring Gina McKee from Our Friends Up North in a strong cast.
🍿 Ex Machina (2015) - ★★★★☆
I’m guessing this enjoyable sci-fi thriller was intended as a warning against the perils of AI becoming evil and turning against humanity. The humanity in this case, is a narcissistic, megalomaniac, alcoholic social media billionaire recluse and modern day Dr Frankenstein, so I was rooting for the beautiful female robot long before the end. That “she” could plot her escape by out-manipulating and out-murdering “her” creator means “she” passed the Turing Test for being indistinguishable from a human. “She” also left for dead the amiable and sympathetic protagonist she played for a love fool and stole his helicopter ride out of the insane asylum/laboratory/abattoir back to normality and observing humans at traffic intersections (where the poor lovesick fool had agreed to go on a date with “her”).
I couldn’t help feeling that if “she” had really achieved humanness “she” would, at least, have saved her wannabe boyfriend, and they could have lived happily ever after, but maybe that was the whole point?
A Very British Coup.
Watched the first two (of three) episodes of A Very British Coup (also available on YouTube) last night.
First broadcast in the summer of 1988, when socialist Tony Benn came close to being elected as deputy leader of the Labour party, then in opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government.
Radical socialist and Sheffield Wednesday fan Harry Perkins becomes the UK prime minister, with financial backing for his government’s economic policies from the state bank of Russia after the US, CIA, Labour “moderates” and the British establishment conspire to subvert the democratic will of the people.
Plenty of echoes in today’s political environment, and great acting from Ray McAnally, Keith Allen and others. Doesn’t seem dated at all.
Some things never change.
Wolves match report
We watched Wallace and Gromit this afternoon, which everyone enjoyed, little kid was particularly excited.
After that, despite protests from the kids, I watched United at lowly Wolves. I’d been convinced beforehand that this was a game the new Portuguese manager must surely win. At half-time it was 0-0 and I thought it was hard to see either team scoring (or not conceding).
Within a couple of minutes of the restart Bruno stupidly got himself sent off for fouling the Wolves right back in the Wolves’ half. Needless, and it left the ten men looking bereft without their leader, talisman, only creative outlet and most likely goal threat.
Wolves soon capitalised and deservedly went ahead. I thought United looked a little better when Casemiro and Eriksen replaced the ineffectual Mainoo and Ugarte in central midfield late on, but even then United looked like they did under Ten Hag - lost.
Yes, we can see what the new manager is trying to do. 3-4-2-1. But it doesn’t work, for whatever reasons. And like Ten Hag, he has no Plan B. Can he have lost the dressing room already? He seems to have alienated Rashford and Casemiro, and while both have their faults, both could be important players, too. Their replacements are worse.
Wolves scored a second with virtually the last kick of the game, and their new Portuguese manager recorded his second win in two games playing 3-4-2-1.
In my opinion, United should be playing a counter-attacking 4-3-3 and playing to our strengths (fast wingers), which would secure our perennial weakness (central midfield), and protect our defence. Instead we’re playing a new system, which no one seems to understand and that seems to play to no one’s strengths.
Of course, maybe we just need more patience and in another ten games it will all look different. Or we could be looking over our shoulders at the bottom three.
Got Carter
I started watching Person of Interest almost three months ago thanks to a recommendation from Hippy Steve. Obviously I’m about thirteen years after everyone else, as it first aired in 2011. At that time, I was busy singing songs about one J Carter….
Person of Interest is a post 9/11 surveillance thriller, although I still think my initial impression of the first episode - Minority Report meets Police Squad! wasn’t far off. After watching two and a half seasons, I’d add a good old dollop of Reservoir Dogs into the mix.
Luckily for me, the whole five seasons was free to watch on Amazon Prime, with just a thirty second ad break halfway through each episode.
The basic premise for the show is that we are surrounded by cameras recording our every move. The US government wanted to create an automatic means of harnessing all this information for the greater good - preventing terror attacks on its territory.
The creator of this artificial intelligence - known as The Machine - now has sole access to it. And he is using it to prevent not just terror attacks, but also everyday attacks on ordinary people. People who the government were never interested in because they were irrelevant to national security.
Finch, who is obviously the brains of the operation, hires some brawn - Reese - to do the dangerous work of physically intervening to prevent daily murders. In fact, Finch rescues Reese from whisky-fuelled vagrancy after his former life as a CIA special agent has fallen apart, and offers him redemption. He’s still a hired hitman, but he doesn’t have to kill anyone anymore, just save them from murder.
Luckily there’s only one murder a day, and Reese is just as capable sloshed, slashed, shot, and tied up. He’s the human embodiment of The Machine - Superman, infallible, with all the (ir)relevant information fed to him by Finch via an earpiece and every conceivable weapon, perfect timing and lucky escape available to him, along with miraculous recovery from injury.
Between them, they are all-seeing, all-knowing, and omnipresent, and the recipient of mysterious cryptic phone calls revealing the social security number of the next murder victim or perpetrator.
Soon we start meeting new regular characters. The would-be mob boss working undercover as a shy, socially conscious high school teacher in the toughest area in town. The police homicide detective (one J Carter) looking for “The man in the suit” - Reese - who keeps being seen at the scene of the incredible deaths of various villains. The corrupt police officers (dirty cops known collectively as HR) who protect and serve themselves and their criminal and mob friends. Including Fusco, who is assigned to work with Carter, and recruited by Reese as an inside source and dirty worker.
You can’t run from the past forever, but love is real
Season Two is definitely a cut above Season One. The characters are more rounded, there are more of them, their interactions and back stories are playing out and getting entangled. Finch and Fusco have, or had, love lives. Reese is looking out for Carter even though she’s still officially hunting him. Reese acquires a killer Dutch dog called Bear and keeps him as a pet to protect Finch from the mysterious and powerful root who has been watching everything he does and who wants access to The Machine.
Then, out of the blue, halfway through S2, I can’t watch it anymore! Not without parting with £17.99! But by now I’m hooked, watching an episode almost every evening. £17.99 gets me the information that it was Finch who ordered Reese and his duplicitous CIA partner to be killed in China, and sociopath Shaw joins the team after her old boss Control tried to kill her. My old boss’s doppelganger turns up in one episode as a serial killer identity thief in a good old-fashioned Columbo episode where everyone is stuck on an island in the middle of a hurricane, and everyone except the killer is a suspect until it’s (almost) too late. Fusco killed his old dirty cop partner Stills and buried him in the woods.
Carter and Bear dig up Stills’ body to save Fusco’s ass
Finch gets captured by root. She wants to set The Machine free. It turns out Finch programmed The Machine to forget everything at the end of every day in an act of self-deletion. root seems to have some kind of connection with The Machine and sees it as a living organism.
In Season Three, Carter brings down HR, including HR’s chief henchman and all round bad guy Simmons. Or does she? No, she doesn’t. He’s somehow still alive. It’s getting silly.
Reese’s number is up. By now, he’s in love with Carter, and she’s in love with him. She dies in his arms, shot in the chest by the evil Simmons, who escapes yet again. Simmons brutally tortures the now extremely likeable Fusco, breaking three of his fingers before sentencing both Fusco and his young son to death. Shaw manages to save Fusco’s son, but she can’t be in two places at once….
Dirty cop turned hero
Somehow, Fusco manages to free his ties and garrote his executioner before he can pull the trigger. Then he finds a strangely unarmed Simmons before he can fly to safety. But instead of shooting him, or even arresting him, he first decides to fist fight him with three broken fingers. Bear in mind that Simmons is hard as nails, and Fusco is short, fat, and a bit of a softie at heart.
Against all the odds, Fusco wins and takes cop-killer Simmons in.
After Carter’s death, Reese goes AWOL and back on the bottle. Fusco finds him out west and they end up in a slapstick brawl in the rain. Meanwhile, Finch and Shaw are captured by the evil Control and her evil Odd Bod henchman Hersh, but miraculously saved by root (who by now had been captured and caged by Finch).
I got bored
Halfway through S3 I gave up. Reese and Fusco miraculously saved Finch and Shaw, who were themselves captured by Vigilance (a violent pro-privacy campaign group), then Hersh. root was captured by Control and brutally tortured, but somehow managed to escape, turn the tables and then save everyone.
I haven’t mentioned the mysterious, sinister and extremely evil elderly Englishman who seemed to be running the whole show (actually the show’s creator’s grandfather in real life), who managed to look like death and worse than Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective.
If you like guns, shooting people, torture, (mock) executions, (child) kidnapping, (attempted) murder, blackmail, gambling, Russian Roulette, cyber-stalking, identity theft, mob rule and police corruption, you’ll probably like Person of Interest. I was into it for around fifty or so episodes, but it became too much, too repetitive, too cliched. They killed off the only J Carter, and I can’t have that, even if J Bezos has another £17.99 from me.