Category Archives: Crime

Fawlty Towers – leave it alone!

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The current liberal/woke/SJW mission – they are in the tentative throes of an unofficial alliance these days – is their war on the past, their need to chop and change, to ‘fix’ that which does not conform to their present-day ‘world view’, to erase artefacts from another age which were celebrated in that age. Their fascistic ways are influential: we have it here with the latest act of cowardice by BBC-owned UKTV in their pulling of Fawlty Towers episode The Germans, an iconic staple of British TV originally aired in 1975 yet now derided by the aforementioned Axis of Intolerance. It has since been reinstated following counter-protests by what must be, and I hate to appropriate a Nixonian term, the Great Silent Majority.

Someone is offended! Phone the police! This war on … everything is the modus vivendi of hysteria culture. In the middle of a pandemic we now have folk trying to tear down statues of slave traders, these protesters (or whatever) wearing clobber made in Indonesia by slave children. The lack of self-awareness is almost funny.

I expect the following will soon appear on their proscriptions: anything Nazi-related, lauded TV series The Wire, the Crocodile Dundee movies, motion pictures featuring cross-dressing, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) because Buffalo Bill likes to put his willy between his legs, and Gone with the Wind (1939). Oh, wait a minute ….

What a horrible time to be alive. Plonkers.

Further reading/viewing:

https://news.sky.com/story/fawlty-towers-episode-pulled-over-racial-slurs-to-be-reinstated-by-uktv-12005814



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Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

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I am fond of the cheese that is alliteration – the bombast of these doc titles grabs my attention. You are usually guaranteed a slice of the surreal, and Tiger King features some of the oddest (real-life) characters Netflix has ever plucked from the fringes. One baffling subplot after another shocks as it entertains, and there are moments that are so … frankly nuts one questions the verisimilitude of it all. The resultant memes have been off the scale.

And this song is an addiction:

Further reading:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/tiger-king-netflix-joe-exotic-carole-baskin-theories-a9421711.html

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a31925589/tiger-king-netflix-tweets-memes/

https://www.gamesradar.com/tiger-king-netflix-true-crime-documentary-joe-exotic/

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Safe – relishing the ridiculous.

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More highly addictive utter trash binged on Netflix again, this eight-episode thriller a cross between a ’90s peak Joe Eszterhas number and those seedy Hollyoaks specials that were broadcast after the watershed. The appeal of this kind of show is in its cliffhanger formula; every chapter has a spanner chucked in the works or a new revelation.

Unadulterated rubbish it may be, but the sordid spectacle is worth it for trying to pinpoint where the fuck in England Michael C. Hall’s ‘accent’ is meant to descend from. It’s eight different counties mixed in a verbal blender, Owen Hargreaves meets Gillian Anderson.

Bizarre.

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Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer.

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Watching this was a regret – I hated every minute of it but was compelled to witness the ghastly proceedings unfold. I usually have a weekday curfew of 11:00 p.m. but here I was lucid way into the wee hours with a WhatsApp cat topic frenzy on the go. Lesson learned: Do not ever Netflix (verb) when it’s dark.

The Internet is the Digital Frontier and all that, and now it appears to be the case that the apotheosis of human endeavour is an outlet for almost every single looney with a vengeance; the World Wide Web and the sociopath are meant to be.

The online sleuths in the three-episode show are more competent than the cops meant to be doing the basics of their jobs as professionals, which says rather a lot. The only reason I kept on watching was how in the fuck they managed to uncover the things they did. It is must-see detective work.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/on-demand/0/luka-magnotta-dont-f-with-cats-netflix-documentary-true-story-killer/

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/dont-fuck-with-cats-netflix-luka-magnotta-baudi-moovan-documentary-a9259076.html

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Uncut Gems (2019).

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This was gripping, an Adam Sandler movie that isn’t nails-down-a-blackboard godawful. He has been in some of the most appalling films, yet also the intermittent cracker – Punch Drunk Love (2002), for example. Here he is unrecognisable from his usual goofball act, literally sweating his pores through the travails of a gambling junkie juggling debt, addiction, and avoiding some rather dodgy small-time hoodlums/loan sharks. It’s an accurate portrait of the lives many folk live and quite the captivating one.

It has the Ben SEAL OF APPROVAL.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-mesmerizing-chaos-of-uncut-gems

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/uncut-gems-movie-review-2019 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2fgoingoutguide%2fmovies%2fin-uncut-gems-adam-sandler-is-supremely-annoying-thats-why-hes-so-great%2f2019%2f12%2f14%2f9d0ee634-1d08-11ea-8d58-5ac3600967a1_story.html%3f

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The Irishman (2019) is extraordinary.

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I finally signed up for the Netflix 30-day free trial – just for Scorsese. The three-and-a-half hour running time was well worth the two nauseating minutes it took to register. Bloody hell is it sublime. Scorsese pulls out all the stops in his … Scorseseness, yet the movie is something more than a swansong to the gangster epics that have served him so well.

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De-ageing VFX.

Elegiac, somber, the last half-hour is a strong contender for most tragic epilogue of the 2010s. It reminded me a bit of Once Upon a Time in America (1984) but without the sprawling romanticism shaped mainly by Ennio Morricone’s iconic score. De Niro here gives his best performance since Heat (1995), which is understandable since he’s spent two decades being Dirty Grandpa or Paul Vitti or tormenting a pratfalling Ben Stiller.

More importantly, Joe Pesci is back and he is majestic. You need to see him in this. You need to see this film.

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Newcastle – in search of Jack Carter.

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I was in Newcastle this week. The city is a bit of a toilet and their football fans quite possibly the most delusional on the planet. I fondly recall Michael Caine’s Jack Carter uttering the immortal line, “Listen, the only reason I came back to this crap house – was to find out who did it. And I’m not leaving until I do.” That’s Newcastle in a sentence.

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It has its wee charming attributes, though, as do most post-industrial northern dwellings. It’s Hovis advert territory but with tracksuits. I spent my time here wandering about like a wee numpty in search of locations featured in the movie. I didn’t find any, although I did locate a hostel kitchen that had no sink.

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Further reading/viewing:

https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Get-Carter-1971.php 

https://www.getcarter.xyz/locations/arriving-in-newcastle/

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/former-get-carter-pub-re-opens-8285847

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Mindhunter is a must-see.

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Mindhunter is cracking. Set within the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico when criminal psychology was in its infancy, the show’s FBI special agents interview the whole gamut of notorious serial killers in order to glean patterns of behaviour, applying this to ongoing cases. It’s got David Fincher all over it, the chap serving as executive producer and helming seven episodes.

It’s gripping stuff, as a time capsule and insight into a grisly world very few of us will thankfully ever even glimpse. Netflix addiction strikes again, though in my case generously bequeathed episodes from a questionable benefactor. I can’t help but picture the British spin-off were this to happen. In the show they remove the chains of the convicted mass murderers in order to make them feel more comfortable during questioning, to even help generate a bond for the ‘interrogation’. Imagine Scotland Yard doing that to Charles Bronson (not that he’s killed anyone).

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I also have a picture in my head of Lord Longford, absolute weirdo that he was, helping Myra Hindley escape through a window during their interview, the former wielding bolt cutters or a blowtorch, zany hair flying everywhere.

Interestingly (for me), I clocked the actor who plays Bill Tench straight away. Holt McCallany wound up in two of the best movies of the late ’90s in Three Kings (1999) and Fight Club (1999). He even initiated the whole ‘His name is Robert Paulson’ recital. I hadn’t seen him in anything else until this.

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