Seventies sauce, humorous horror, and seeing how far the rabbit hole goes is just some of what's been setting the tone of my July & August 2024...
Click "READ MORE" below to see this month's looks, sounds, vibes & flavours...
LOOKS:
The Boys: Season 4 - so that's the penultimate season wrapped up, and while I'm still enjoying the characters and story, this season has undoubtedly been the weakest. Just because a handful of numpties out there think Homelander is the real hero, the showrunners have decided to go all-in on self-indulgent political single-entendres. Considering the fractured state of politics globally, but particularly in America, this sort of self-pleasuring does nothing constructive whatsoever, it merely adds to the increasingly bitter and violent rhetoric swirling around our daily discourse. We're drowning in it day-in and day-out, so to be greeted with yet more of it in a TV show just gets the eyes rolling. There most assuredly is plenty to poke fun at regarding the ludicrous hard right, but there's just as much to be sneered at coming from the hard left, also - two rotten sides of the same vile coin that needs to be thrown away.
Indeed, copy/pasting real-life political memes and events one-for-one highlights a distinct lack of creativity unto itself, and this same approach has also lead to a rather meandering and fairly directionless feel to the overall story. Season four of this superhero action comedy drama couldn't leap a tall building, and it can barely be arsed to dawdle down the street for a chippy. It's only in the last couple of episodes that it finally remembers that time is of the essence and things get moving forward again. Season 5 will, apparently, be the final chapter, and I dearly hope they buck up their ideas because - even coming from someone who cannot stand the cult of personality that is the Trump delusion - this vulgar, petty, and one-sided slew of self-congratulation has been, quite honestly, a pathetic display that tramples all over the good bits that have been overwhelmed by the dreck.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners - further down the rabbit hole I went, with the Netflix anime series tie-in to CD Project Red's utterly compelling FPS RPG videogame "Cyberpunk 2077". A little more animation within the frame wouldn't go amiss on certain occasions (rather than the same two or three almost entirely static images with a simple pan movement), but when things ramp up it's a real jolt to the system. It's also an awful lot of fun to see locations from the game or, indeed, to visit locations from the anime while in-game - and to even wear the jacket of the show's protagonist.
Homicide: New York / Los Angeles
Cobra Kai: Season 6 Part One - considering the sorely disappointing fourth season of The Boys, it's so refreshing to see the return of Cobra Kai, a show which extolls the virtue of people putting their differences aside to find common ground and work together - and yet the show still manages to find ways to test their resolve and seed doubts. We see so much division on a daily basis, and have been seeing it under a searing, red-hot light since at least 2015, so for so many once-divided characters to not only bury their respective hatchets and come together for one purpose (while also seeking out self-improvement and emotional enlightenment), it just goes to show how unusual such a 'message' is in the current era.
The previous season maybe felt like it was going around in circles, but with this being the final outing the show seems to have recovered a sense of purpose as it moves towards a definitive ending. The mid-way finale certainly gets you amped up for the final batch of episodes due out in a few months time.
Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy - two-part documentary from Channel 4 about the raunchy comedies which came to dominate the British film industry during the 1970s. At a time when there was great competition from television, with local film productions struggling, and many cinemas under threat of closure, along came the 'sex comedy' to save the entire British film and cinema industry. You couldn't get nudity on TV, and the natural British sensibility is to make a farce out of things, so that's how we ended up with 'sex comedies' - which were also a vibrant part of the Italian film industry during the 1970s, it should be noted.
This documentary is jolly good fun, although there's the token moments of po-faced guilt-tripping from the sorts who secretly fancy themselves as 'recontextualisers' of Mary Whitehouse, the censorious old biddy who would crow about films she never dared to watch herself, mobilising her pearl-clutching Christian compatriots like a mob of self-righteous moral guardians. What's funny, though, is despite some truths about grubby casting couch sorts of the era, the majority of the interviewees express not only having thoroughly enjoyed making the films, but that they also did so entirely willing. They chose to do them and weren't some poor, tricked little innocent.
Despite a few dodgy practises, such as splicing-in hardcore inserts for foreign versions of the films (seeing as 'hardcore' smut wouldn't be legalised in the UK until the absolute arse-end of the 1990s), what's most interesting to see is the contrast between the sexual liberation and free-love attitudes of the 1970s, with its comedy-infused innocence and softcore limitations, versus the hand-wringing cancel culture and social media-fed moral grandstanding of today, in an age where, quite conversely, there is easy access to a flabbergasting variety of sexual satisfaction both online and in the real world.
Boy Kills World (Blu-Ray) - written by Tyler Burton Smith, Arend Remmers, and Mortiz Mohr (the latter of whom also directs), this blood-soaked dystopian action flick comes with a chaotic sense of humour and a brash visual style. Watching the film I was reminded of how Evil Dead Rise completely fumbled the horror movie use of a cheese grater, because one is used to wince-inducing effect during one fight scene in BKW. It's a fun ride and definitely worth checking out.
Rhys Darby In Japan
The Fall Guy (Blu-Ray)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Blu-Ray) - the Red Letter Media guys summed it up pretty well when they said that Mad Max Fury Road is like Kill Bill Volume 1, whereas Furiosa is like Kill Bill Volume 2. It's a different kind of film to its predecessor in terms of the pacing, the vibe, the storytelling, and even the look. An unfortunate element is that Furiosa had a considerable amount of footage, or even just elements of shots, filmed on sound stages under studio lighting, which then doesn't look 'real' enough for the scenes taking place outdoors in supposedly harsh sunlight. Re-watching Fury Road after Furiosa made that issue abundantly clear as so much of that movie was shot outdoors under the harsh direct sunlight of the Namibian desert.
There were 2,000 VFX shots in Fury Road, it should be remembered, but the CGI was better deployed and considerably benefited from the 'live action elements' being shot under real sunlight. However, despite the slightly disappointing look to the CGI in the film, Furiosa is still a damn good movie with a lot to offer the audience, and I'm already looking forward to watching it again. Does it best Fury Road? No. Does it match it? No, but it comes admirably close, and that's a hell of a lot better than far too many films (and shows) these days.
The Walking Dead Daryl Dixon: Season 1 - a re-watch of this very successful and entertaining spin-off series. By far and away this is the best of the spin-offs, no doubt about it, so fingers crossed that the upcoming second season can maintain the quality.
SOUNDS:
Marcin Przybyłowicz, P.T. Adamczyk, and Paul Leonard-Morgan "V" and "The Rebel Path"
Samurai "Chippin' In"
Richard Reed Parry & Little Scream "Live That Way Forever"
Gunship (ft. Carpenter Brut & Gavin Rossdale) "Doom Dance", Gunship (ft. Milkie Way, Dave Lombardo, & Tyler Bates) "Monster in Paradise", Gunship (ft John Carpenter & Charlie Simpson) "Tech Noir 2", and Gunship "Send Me An Angel", "Taste Like Venom", and "Woken Furies"
Sierra (ft. Carpenter Brut) "Power", and Sierra "Never Right" and "Gone"
Korn "Falling Away From Me: The Best of Korn" (album) and "Freak On A Leash"
Harold Faltermeyer "Racetrack"
Jocelyn Pook "Masked Ball"
Gyorgy Ligeti & Dominic Harlan "Musica Ricercata II"
Shostakovich "Suit for Jazz Orchestra No. 2, Op. 50b, No. 2 Waltz"
Fountains of Wayne "Stacy's Mom"
Semisonic "Chemistry"
Green Day "Favorite Son"
VIBES & FLAVOURS:
"Calvin & Hobbes: Something Under The Bed Is Drooling" by Bill Watterson
"Incarcerat" by Garth Marenghi - following on from the first installment ("Terror Tome"), we now find horror author turned 'sole survivor' airline pilot Nick Steen dragged into the clean, corporate medical research corridors of Nulltec as his 'mind leak' continues to trouble the town of Stalkford and the wider county of Stalkfordshire. The second of three interlinked tales leans into classical gothic horror (but with added cress sandwiches and explosive bouts of 'the double squits'), and makes for an amusing read in-part because of it's Inception-like levels of authorship: Matthew Holness writing as Garth Marenghi, who has written a story about a horror author called Nick Steen, who features in his own imaginary tale of a horror author by the name of Nick Stein.
There are subtle levels to Holness' humour here, intertwined with the persona of Gareth Marenghi. Sometimes the joke is coming from Holness, while other times it's coming from Marenghi (through the deliberately crass writing of a dodgy horror author), and yet the quality of Holness' writing always shines through. There are passages that could use a little tightening up here and there (the gag of characters over-explaining things is used too often), and a broader range of gags wouldn't go amiss, but the juiciest morsels are found in the subtleties, often born from Marenghi's small-mindedness (e.g. the character of The Welchman, a 'powerful simpleton' character written from a condescending perspective). The fun is in tracing the source of these sorts of views (be they xenophobia, chauvinism, et al) back to their source in the Marenghi character - the joke's on him, but also on over-the-top horror fiction written by people who think a bit too highly of themselves and too lowly of everyone else.
"Calvin & Hobbes: The Essential Calvin & Hobbes" by Bill Watterson
"Calvin & Hobbes: Yukon, Ho!" by Bill Watterson
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