By Roy Mathur, on 2024-05-19, at 22:59:59 to 00:22:19 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
It lives! (Again). 523 saw the life, death, life, and death again of my journal, a continuation of diaries kept since childhood. I decided I had no need for it, due to multiple other forms of record keeping. For posterity, I published it in the shownotes, then forgot about it. The problem is, those other methods captured the mundane more than the memorable.
Thus, have I raised the journal from the dead! Stripped down and offline, it's now an aide memoire that I can refer to while rattling off personal items, when I fly off into the outer reaches of tangent space.
The Roynomicon lives!
I recently bought a few Le Carre books (mentioned again later) and a genre anthology from World of Books.
They were worth the price, but I don't think WOB understands what "Very Good" condition means. The spine of one was cracked, though not badly, and another had a few badly mauled pages. I.e., they were "Average" at best.
This isn't the first and I doubt it will be the last cock-up I experience buying books. I suspect carelessness due to the volume of trade they are doing, but I wish they would try harder. Specifically, they should pack carefully and pad their packages, not just shove them into plastic wrap. I'd never send an eBay parcel that way.
A literary agent and filmmaker recently pitched me to guest on my show.
Grateful though I am, I am unfortunately too busy to accept such offers, except under exceptional circumstances. For example, oh, I don't know, the Universe decides to explain itself. A less glib answer is that time is precious and I am trying to finish my own work.
Brace yourselves, here's some follow-up of follow-up. In 532, I briefly reviewed Dune: Part Two seen at Tottenham Court Rd Odeon. I said, if I lived in that universe, I'd like to be Dune smuggler. In 535, I retracted this, when I heard in another podcast that the smugglers are killed in the movie by the Fremen.
In 535, I also mentioned the movie had been leaked. Since then, I have rewatched the leaked film. On rewatch, I saw that the smugglers are taken captive, not murdered. And so, I now retract my retraction.
Isn't this the perfect example of unreliable eye-witness testimony?
Sony's 2024 superhero movie is difficult to talk about. Part of the trouble is that I have no connection with the Marvel's extended Spiderverse. But even so, this had a terrible script and direction, lacklustre effects, and an unbelievablely stupid, tone deaf ending. No one is happy to be suddenly struck by paralisis and blindness. Maybe building a rewarding life afterwards is possible, but surely that takes time.
The acting was okay, as paramedic Cassandra Webb discovers psychic her powers and fights to protect teens from spider-themed villain Ezekiel Sims, and I enjoyed Dakota Johnson's charisma up until that ending. Though to be frank, Orson Welles could not have sold a dimwitted denouement like that.
I re-re-re-etc.-rewatched StudioCanal's 2011 film and, boy, does it stand rewatching with so much going on so quickly in the cult mole-hunt spy thriller.
I wasn't convinced by the hairpieces, the over-stylised set dressing (the UK Civil Service is, or was, scruffier), and it's lack of diversity and greyness made Tomas Alfredson's (Let the Right One In) adaptation set in 1973 seem like 1953.
However, it immediately made me finally buy my own copies of the John Le Carre's George Smiley Cold War spy trilogy. Imagine Sherlock Holmes, but where the point is not arrest, but leverage. Imagine also, what a complete hash a bunch of Oxbrige chums made of the mole-riddled SIS and the ensuing cover-up. The books can even help you in your career choices. I recently read an article in which an American student decided against a miserable career in the CIA thanks to reading them.
I hear there's a TV series in the works, which should provide a solution to the terribly compressed timeline of the film.
I recently saw Old on 4OD. The Universal film is M. Night Shyamalan's 2021 science fiction horror about a beach that rapidly ages you.
An effective and frightening metaphor for ageing---both good and bad---and perhaps sunburn, with a mundane twist.
The decent writing and filmmaking is sullied by Shyamalan's usual vain and overly involved cameo. If he wants to act, he should audition for films he doesn't make himself.
In this 2024 Universal film, kidnappers snatch a little girl, who then turns the tables and goes Home Alone on them. While Culkin is ingenious, Abigail is a vampire; no surprise as the absurd trailers spoiled the film beforehand. Fun ensues as the kidnappers try escaping her locked mansion. One has to admire a blood-thirsty predator that takes the time to pirouet, while chasing its prey.
"I like the playing with my food", is an actual line in the script, which tells you all you need to know about this mildly enjoyable film. The shock-horror moment when they discover "tiny dancer" can fly and when and gore-splattered, traumatised, and exhausted Melissa Barrera staggers away saying "What as fuck?" cracked me up.
Alisha Weir (Abigail) does creepy so well, I see great things ahead for her. A few days before watching, I randomly wondered what Downton Abbey, The Guest, and Legion's Dan Stevens was up to these days. Well, he's in this and, in fact, he's all over IMDB, so apparently he never stopped working. Was thinking about Stevens just before seeing him in this forgotten recollection, weird coincidence, or psionic powers? Don't know, don't care. The important thing is the precise moment in the film when he looks like Cassidy from Preacher.
2016 horror film about a sociopathic teen, who discovers that his neighbour (Christopher Lloyd) is a monster.
The X-Files vibe, but too slow paced and dull to hold my interest. I bowed out two thirds through.
ITVX 2024 police thriller in which copper does an Daedalus and his partner goes on the lam in this, things are not what they seem thriller, that actually seemed quite a lot as they seem.
ITVX 2024 spies on a plane thriller in which I appreciated Jing Lusi getting her lumps in.
I managed only a few episodes of ITVX's 2024 series about a traumatised teacher investigating the death of her young son by a hit and run driver.
The thriller caught my eye because it shares its title with the cult 1974 werewolf horror film. I stayed longer than I thought I would because Cush Jumbo is a compelling and the Isle of Wight setting was a frequent childhood day-trip destination.
Paramount's 2024 Season 5 is classic Doctor Who's Key to Time space travelogue (covered in 2021) or any Indiana Jones MacGuffin hunt. Though, to be fair, they are tackling Star Trek's Preservers/Progenitor panspermia lore.
Too touchy feely, especially Sonequa Martin, even for a softy like me, I dislike Wesley Crusher 2 (Adira), and the Breen are barely comprehensible and have shower hoses attached to their helmets. But there's also an amazing space library (Labyrinths) I'd like to visit run by faintly sinister elves (filmed inside the equally amazing University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library), a soupcon of David Cronenberg, and Saru is about to get hitched to a nice Vulcan. Congratulations, Mr Saru.
Apple TV+'s 2024 adaptation of Blake Crouch's 2016 parallel universe novel, not the 2012 comic book (pod 54), which also has a TV series (pod 88).
A lecturer's evil alternate from another universe, swaps places with him to get his wife, a women he lost years ago.
Low budget and unoriginal, and yet another creation suspiciously similar to Bob Shaw's brilliant The Two-Timers (1968).
2024 sci-fi series on Amazon Prime Video, adapted from the Interplay, and later Bethesda, titular video games set in future, post-nuclear apocalypse, America.
Underground communities and breeding programmes immediately bring to mind A Boy and His Dog.
Violent, gory, though light in tone, which is quite the feat. Still, dystopia can go fuck itself. I'm out.
Disney+ 2024 continuation of Fox's 1992--1997's X-Men: The Animated Series.
I remember the old series and its theme music, but don't have nostalgia for it. Nothing against cartoons, but I'm a comics person. The last Marvel animation that I enjoyed with any regularity was Fox's Spider-Man (1967) (the one with the even more iconic song).
I said I wouldn't be covering New Who, but because I'm watching each episode, it would behove me to write a mini-review that I can refer to later for the wrap party planned at the end of Ncuti's first season.
Boom is story 307, written Steven Moffat in which the Doctor steps on a landmine and Ruby is almost murdered by an ambulance in a perpetual war created by an arms dealer. People die and the Doctor escapes, kisses a human sausage, in time to save Ruby by convincing an AI to be a better dad.
I thought it quite ordinary. Come RTD, pull out all the stops.
Though I don't give a hoot about others' reviews or opinions, it did not escape my notice how contentious Russell T. Davies return to Doctor Who has been, given the mixed response to the recent 2023 specials, Space Babies, The Devil's Chord, and Boom.
I found Space Babies "light and funny", The Devil's Chord "very weird" (a compliment in my book), and Boom "quite ordinary". None were unmissable. Like Mark Gatiss's insipid Robot of Sherwood or the caterwauling of Neil Cross's The Rings of Akhaten, I found them humdrum. I often find myself in the same boat covering the classic series, which has stories that would try the patience of a saint. Though in both old and new, I will always find something of value. Perhaps that's because, as a survivor of the wilderness years of the BBC cancellation, I don't take the series for granted.
However, with the global Disney+ deal, there's no place for complacency in the production. Never say never, but I think the stakes are too high for it to tank. So, brave heart, Whovians, better New Who stories will materialise.
Pep talk concluded, on a lighter note, I hope they bring back Ncuti's cool battered leather trench coat from The Church on Ruby Road.
I found this cool map, The London Of Doctor Who, Mapped, from the Londonist, "Mapping the key London scenes from Hartnell to today". The article also says, "London seems particularly important to the Doctor... The show's very first episode An Unearthly Child, had the doctor pitching up at a Shoreditch school... Jodie Whittaker's regeneration episode was partly set in the Square Mile, with... UNIT... in a skyscraper beside the Gherkin."
Can you guess which landmarks I have walked past on my monthly London walks?
I voted, had painful minor surgery, saw a rabbit, complained about agressive cabbies, walked around London again, discovered my brain isn't toxic, and biked a bit more (60 MPH today).
For you, vintage British horror fans, I will soon begin the final leg of my Hammer House of Horror revisit. The last five episodes are Carpathian Eagle, Guardian of the Abyss, Visitor from the Grave, The Two Faces of Evil, and The Mark of Satan.