By Roy Mathur, on 2022-04-17, at 22:57:44--00:00:19 BST, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
Happy Rama Navami (2022-04-10), happy Easter, happy new episode of CRRRaSh! day!
This extra pod has somewhat grown in scope since I announced it, so there might be some topic-wrangling for the rest of the shows this week. Rest assured, however, we are back to a normal two shows per week schedule, after this episode both celebrating my return to podcasting and talking about the today's Doctor Who Special. When Jodie Whittaker's final episode airs, later this year, we will send her off in style as she departs from Doctor Who; something I wished I'd done with the previous Doctors.
By the way, this episode has a lot more than Doctor Who, so hold onto your bobble hats and stand by for a bucket-load of geek!
I've been busy with health stuff. Mine, the family, the computer, the phone, the car, the fence, the house... you name it, it's been sick. Then there was the passport renewal fiasco too, and lest we not forget the Ukraine war and our nasty government, who want to deport anyone who has the utter temerity to believe that the UK is a safe haven, to Rwanda. Of course, being otherwise occupied, I forgot to pay some bills, which added to the overall excitement.
In short, I'm worn out, hence no podding and very few tweets. I would like to say this is over, but let's not put the cart before the horse.
Although money and fame is not my motivation for any creative thing I do, it would be nice to get some recognition and support. If you like the show, get in touch because I could do with the encouragement right now.
I watched the first half of this film by Nicholas Ashe Bateman, the talked about it in 415 from 2021. I only just finished watching it recently. As Douglas Adams says, "Time is an illusion." Though he was talking about lunch. Mmm... lunch. Where was I? Initially executively produced by Shane Carruth, who has since sadly gave up filmmaking (watch his excellent, dreamy, and weird, Upstream Color, then listen to pod 22 from 2014).
It is a low-budget sci-fi film set on a colony planet, where a young woman is a resident of a world divided into the haves and have-nots. She is one of the have-nots, hoping to follow the annual export of horses, to a distant, prosperous city.
Technically, it is sci-fi, but I saw precious little of the sci, and it did not make me want to emigrate to Mars on one of Elon's wunderships for, "a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure." (Can't resist the stab).
Though beautiful to look at, it looks budget, there's not enough going on to hold my interest, even the dialogue is too terse; something I never usually say, and it has a damp sqib ending.
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) fowls up Doctor Strange's forgetting spell (to reverse his unmasking in Far from Home), sending the multiverse spinning into chaos, and bringing back his old arch-enemies. But help is at hand from the other Spider-Mans (Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield)! Wait, where's Miles Morales? No, he's no here, and only theorised by Electro.
It's not bad; I mean I watched it twice, so that's good, isn't it? Look, it's alright, and I'm always happy to see Spidey, and a sequel is also confirmed. I must admit, I enjoyed Doctor Strange's presence, which whetted my appetite for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (UK release 2022-05-05), but man, did you see the state of Benedict Cumberbatch's syrup? It should have a casting credit all of its own.
The 2022 film is a sequel/reboot/"requel" (a term I learned from this movie) of the late, great Wes Craven's original deconstruction of the teen slasher franchise.
The movies have always been meta, so when I watched the latest installation (2022-04-15 c. 24:00 at Castle Royenstein), I thought I'd hate the meta-arty nonsense, and yet I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.
It was about so much. Of course, we have the continuing Woodsboro serial killer plot, the copycat murders, and here is the usual comentary on teen slasher movies, but we also see Sidney and Gale passing the torch (okay; phone, knife, gun) to the younger Sam. It also addresses toxic fandom---very obviously Star Wars (though it isn't directly named)---while managing to even exceed the exceptionally bloody violence of the series.
If you want more Scream content, I've talked about the franchise often enough on this pod, and have even devoted CRRRaSh! 340 to the preceding four movies.
Ben Stiller's Kakafaesque science fiction Apple show about office workers trapped in a weird, pointless, repetitive existence.
Too many stars, specifically John Turturro and Christopher Walken, means hamming it up; unconciously outdoing each other, in much the same way that Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi did in the abysmally smug ITV sitcom, Vicious.
It's too quirky, even for my taste. The story is already odd, add eccentric behaviour, and it all becomes a bit too much. That's a pity because paranoid sci-fi of the Philip K. Dick variety is exactly my kind of thing. It should have been played straight and the filming could have done with more atmosphere. I'm sure they thought the lightness of tone would contrast jarringly with the sinister plot about identity, but it doesn't. Instead it downplays the drama.
The show enters it's final season, thank god. We see a lot of loose ends getting tied up, both inside and outside of the Commonwealth, but I'm most focused on nerdy Darryl's journey. I'll talk aboiut it again when the season ends.
Picardbot is back! And, even as an elderly robot, can't copmmit to having a girlfriend. Forgodsake, Robotman!
Why dig up that awful, dated Star Trek science of the "galactic barrier"? Why is this just a rehash of The Voyage Home? What's with all the musical numbers?
Why am I still watching it? Because I love Star Trek on an almost genetic level, but for god's sake, up the hard science content.
The accent is still bad, but not as bad as Karl Urban's attempt at cockney in The Boys.
That scene, when Khonshu turns back time to read the nioght sky of the distant past, was ridiculous, given that astronony programs, like Red Shift, have been able to do this for decades. I've probably even talked about this on the pod years ago.
But I'm tolerating the show. Some of the enjoyable bizarreness, like that icecream van fight, reminds me of Legion (which I still haven't finished, sorry).
Jodie Whittacker's penultimate outing as the Doctor has pirates and monsters! Well, okay, not monsters, not really, but an aquatic species of Silurian (listen to CRRRaSh! 273 Doctor Who: The Sea Devils (1972) from 2019).
In this adventure, our friends team up with old earth Chinese pirates to take on a renegade Sea Devil with a flying ghost ship. By the way, the pirate captain was based on the real Zheng Yi Sao or "Madame Ching" (1775--1844). She was an amazingly successful pirate, who led more than 1400 crew on 24 ships.
The burgeoning relationship between the Doctor and Yaz comes to a reasonable denouement, when the Doctor explains why it cannot be by saying, "because at some point, it always ends". That's lovely and sad---exactly what I would expect from the Doctor---and what I have said many times before, when explaining what I think is going on inside that giant pompous brain of her's. What I don't get is why the Doctor, if she actually desires it, doesn't seek romantic entanglement from a longer lived species? Sure somewhere in that big universe there's someone for her?
By the way, I thought this was Jodie Whittaker's last hurrah. Apparently not. So much for my extensive research. One more adventure to go until regeneration and, of course, we'll be there to witness the event. From what we see in the post-credits trailer, we can expect Ace (Sophie Aldred), who I interviewed in episode 99, back in 2015, under slightly trying circumstances, i.e. the sound of sniffing and carrot chopping... Sophie! There will also be Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding), the Master (Sacha Diwan), Daleks, and Cybermen. I don't know the title or the release date, though RadioTimes.com states it will be a longer programme broadcast as part of the BBC Centenary festivities.
I updated a few of my desktop apps recently. I jumped several versions of NetHack. I'm sure there're differences under the hood, but I can't see them. I also jumped 40 versions of Thunderbird. The coloured folders are gone and it looks drab (why do most updates come with a sting in the tail?), but it seems more stable. I also updated FireFox, but that's almost a daily occurance.
Elon Musk may or may not take over Twitter. I literally don't care. What I do care about is his bloody satellites that are further buggering up the already heavily light polluted night skies.
I live in an urban area of high light pollution, thanks to my demented council's waste of tax scheme of upgrading the lamp posts to brain-searing LED banks. The last thing I want is more light up there ruining the rest of the planet.
I moved my pod to archive.org on 2021-01-23 23:03:26. Since then, I have had about 12,000 accesses to my mp3 files on that one site. I also have about 1300 subscribers on 9 of the 68+ platforms I am syndicated on.
That sounds good, but I've been doing this for almost 10 years, so anything you can do to help me get the word out that I have a pod worth listening to would be appreciated. How? Well, listen until the end.