Daddy Issues

The good news is that the two big streaming services' flagship shows both seem to have weathered their recent brushes with the Great Awokening. Stranger Things remains the gold standard for online drama, and the Drinker for one sums up its bounce-back from a tonally uneven Season 4 reasonably well. It still has too many characters and it's become less and less imaginative as it's gone along. But what there is is now pretty good, and it's as watchable as ever. And The Boys too has turned a corner, has ditched the anti-"Far-Right" nonsense of Season 2, and is once again at its most enjoyably fucked-up. And for what it's worth even The Umbrella Academy, albeit very much in third place, finally feels as if its sailing on an even keel.

Interestingly enough all three series have taken as their theme for the year the relationships between their protagonists and their father figures. Brenner in Stranger Things and Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy have both been resurrected and, to a certain extent, rehabilitated as "interesting", morally complex characters in their own right, and in The Boys the relationship between Homelander, his own son, and (spoiler alert!) his newly discovered biological father, has become the dramatic crux of the series. (One can predict that the struggle for the soul of the kid will be foundation for the plot of Season 4.)*

Let's face it, MBB was the standout find of ST. So having Papa take a moral stand against Eleven is surely a career-defining performance for Matthew Modine. Alas though that Eleven's abandoning her "Papa" after he tried to save her life feels like a simple, straightforward dramatic and moral failure! One can only presume there'll be an eventual reckoning between them in the show's fifth and final season.

More regrettably, what has bogged down all three series though has indeed been each's extraordinarily tedious "messy bitches" subplot. Winona Ryder is largely wasted in ST, as is Starlight in The Boys. But the standout collapse of a character into a racist sexist stereotype is Allison in UA. Whatever one may say of their treatment of straight white old guys, Hollywood's treatment of women of colour (or is it Silicon Valley?) still has a long way to go.

*Obviously though, this shift in interest hasn't pleased everyone... 

Notes on The Umbrella Academy 'Season 3'

 So... 

• The Sparrows are like the Umbrella Academy only more diverse, more boring, and more obnoxious? So much for likeability and shades of grey! (And imagine if the black boy had also been called Luther. Ah well!)
• We don't get the title until 20 minutes into the first episode. Starting to feel Pythonesque! (Deliberately?) How stupid exactly is the Rumour supposed to be? (Black chicks never watched Back to the Future? Are girls generally too up themselves to notice when things have changed? I'm not saying this is grossly racist and sexist*, but...)
• Doesn't the gay one like men's underpants? Why does he freak out just because they belong to a man that he has lived with all his life?
• Crimefighters who have their faces on billboards can get away with shoplifting? Are we going to find out how that works?
• Hmmm! Violent Amish? Didn't you guys see Witness? (C'mon! It got a shoutout in the first Stranger Things.)
• And Luther gets off with a girl. I mean, I'm pretty puritanical about such things. But for the first time in the entire series one sort of feels good for the guy. He's big, he's dumb, and now that that's finally "priced in" he's starting to feel like a proper character in his own right - rather than just the token white jock dude. (In Episode 5 Luther even gets to be sassy, which is a nice change-up for the character.)
• It's actually a recurrent problem that the female characters stand about worrying about their feelings when there are mysteries and universe-threatening problems to be solved. (And oddly enough it's Ben who comes up trumps when he's the first person actually to put the appalling "messy bitches" officially in their place.)
• Black females, on the other hand, are of course allowed to murder people now. That's a thing. Apparently! (And tranny "boys" are allowed to hit them? Whatever!)
• On the plus side, the relationship between Klaus and Hargreeves is absolutely boss. And we've moved on from Doctor Who to Torchwood - except that Captain Jack's reanimation powers were never played for laughs.† (When obviously, if you think about it, they should have been.)
• When the actress who plays the mom-bot with one eye blinks she blinks completely naturally but with just one eye. That's good acting. And it's good sci-fi. Every now and again one comes across artists who are masters of their craft, and in genre this is what it takes.

*And Ellen Page is still playing a female - for some reason. (But then of course she gets a haircut and changes her name to 'Victor'. Because apparently that's all it takes.)

†Or maybe they were. After all, most of Torchwood was unwatchable, brainless filth - which I didn't watch.

Craig Hunter

Photographed (apparently) by Simon Barnes

'What next for Ukraine's captured soldiers' says the BBC. (Was that supposed to be a question?)

Well, I for one cannot believe the "neo-Nazis" of the Azov Battalion are going to be treated very much better than the Russian soldiers who've been captured by the Ukrainians.

But at least the Ukrainians are upholding the Geneva Convention. Right?

Why is grooming OK if you're gay?

Why are gays allowed to get away with grooming?

If this pervert had been straight the police would have woken up to what he was trying to do, gone round to his place, kicked his front door in, ransacked his home, and confiscated all of his hard drives "as evidence"*. (They then wouldn't have looked at them for at least six months, but that's not the point. Let's face it, just the opportunity, every now and again, to rough up a suspected nonce is the reason most coppers sign on. After all, it's easier than trying to catch burglars and murderers.)

One possibility of course is that under the sacred rainbow umbrella it's still the case that pretty much anything goes. It's a politically and culturally sensitive area, and so unless you're a Tory/Muslim/MP/all of the above, they're likely to give you a wide berth. No cop with brains and ambition wants to be accused of "homophobia" in 2022, and any super with brains knows it.

I suspect the "deeper" answer though is that "it's different for men" - which of course means it's different for boys. Men, so the implication goes, cannot be victims of sexual assault in the same way that women can. Touch a woman's knee on the Underground and you're done for. Touch a man's and no one will bat an eyelid: commuters in 2022 don't like being called "homophobes" any more than the rozzers do and, more to the point, men are supposed to be able to look after themselves. (Even more to the point, we're talking Marxist power dynamics here: white people can't be victims of racism†, men can't be victims of sex crimes††.)

Quite simply, it's the old Victorian double standard alive and well. Pace L P Hartley, the past is not a foreign country. As far as sex crimes are concerned it's still very much with us.

And it's coming to your little boy's Catholic school any moment now.

UPDATE: He's also an anti-Catholic bigot. Quelle suprise!

With @Thejfschool saga continuing, time to take a closer look at the author at the heart of it all: @simonjamesgreen. Was his sexually graphic rewrite of the Lord’s Prayer just misunderstood? Should Catholic schools have to promote his work? Must @RC_Southwark apologise? A 🧵 1/

— emitte lucem tuam (@elt01461) May 18, 2022

(And a sicko! Meh!)

*And in all probability they'd have found it too. There's rarely any smoke without fire.
†Tell that to the Poles during WWII - but bearing in mind that as far as Whoopi is concerned even "the Holocaust" wasn't "racist". (It wasn't about "her people", so it wasn't really a thing.)

††Most rapes take place in men's prisons: most rape charities are run by women. Don't ask me how that makes sense.

All Right on the Knight

Seen it all before? Maybe! Light then dark then light - like the Bonds? I suppose so. But you didn't realise that angry Batfleck (of the Snyderverse, no less) was the light version until what came afterwards. (Ditto Brosnan! Everyone thought he was a "serious" Bond until Craig came along.)

Batman as Zorro? Bit odd! Thomas Wayne as villain? Ditto! But at least there's a sense here that Hollywood is now coming down from its (anti-Trump) woke high of a couple of years ago. (How exactly you make feminist fantasies like Aliens and T2 even more woke-feminist was never clear - and it wasn't a good idea.)

Gordon's been race-swapped, which makes him feel at worst like the black Felix Leiter from the Craig Bond films and in practice no worse than Danny Glover in the Lethals. And so the handsome rich English public school boy World's Greatest Detective gets to whitesplain batsplain things to the poor black gumshoe. If this is woke, I suspect they didn't think it through. 

And Catwoman is now black too, again! But then no one minded Eartha Kitt back in the '60s, and this one more than exorcises the memory of Halle Berry. (And obviously one minded Harvey Dent being black in the Tim Burton Batman, but then that was probably because he was played by Billy Dee Williams - proof that back in those days race-swapping could actually make you cooler.)

All-in-all, it's good to see the Caped Crusader back on form. Most of the boxes get ticked, the grunge-emo look works well (and the sound!), and the moral complexity of Joker has survived into a "mainstream" series. Yes, there are disappointments. (No Justice League! No Wayne Manor! No Robin - duh! And de facto no Alfred either!) And the chances are that after all the Schubert and the Fauré (not to mention Vengeance's own "Fasolt and Fafner"-type leitmotif), as well as the beautiful night-time visuals, you'll be nodding during the last half-hour (when - spoilers! - Bats singularly fails to stop the villain's dastardly plan to flood Gotham City and turn it into a literal crime-infested swamp).

But it could have been sooooo much worse.

Aliens and Dead People

There's no real doubt that the Democrats won the 2020 election by fraud. The COVID-1984 scam allowed them (and various other anti-Trump conspirators) to change the rules and massively increase the number of postal ballots. The rest was simply a well funded harvesting operation, so that once again the familiar American order was able to re-establish itself. In other words, the money won. Again.*

The bad news is that they have no intention of doing it just once. If they get their way, voter registration will become automatic, including for illegal aliens and dead people. State oversight too will become a thing of the past, and ballot-harvesting will become a permanent norm. (And any attempt to return to an even vaguely fair and open system of representative government will of course be shouted down by the MSM as "voter suppression".)

On the one hand, a party composed of extraterrestrials and zombies would help to explain politicians like Al Gore and Joe Biden. In truth though it's a pretty bleak outlook for the western world, as politicians become ever more detached from reality and any possibility of arresting the decline of our culture through constitutional means is removed.

*Of course, the fraudulent winners were ably aided and abetted by the spectacular incompetence of the losers, but that was only to be expected. Never underestimate the Stupid Party's capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Varoufakis can fak off

No, I haven't changed my mind in the last two years that Varoufakis is basically just a ridiculous Marxist conman. He never cared about his country. He rolled over and let the EU do whatever they wanted to Greece. In Germany (a country not know for its subtle, sophisticated humour) he was treated as a joke. And quite rightly too!

And the great man hasn't changed either. He still loves the EU, despite what it did to his country, and he condemns liberal "warmongers" without even conceding that the era of liberal "imperialism" is now well and truly over - because Ukraine is now fighting a defensive war, as is the West generally because it has now been so thoroughly poisoned by liberalism that it no longer believes in its own heritage.

And Varoufakis is indeed a very good example of a de-westernised westerner. His country gave the world Homer and Herodotus, but he prefers to pose like an ageing James Dean - not because he has any love for American values (constitutionalism, limited government, individualism, etc.) but simply because pratting about like an American pop-star is cooler than being a Greek.

(Tony Blair, for what it's worth, thought the same thing - only in all probability he genuinely believed in the American Dream, whereas Varoufakis very obviously does not.)

Looking shady!

Hadrien Pierre Mazelier, probably photographed by Jannis Tsipoulanis, and doing his bit for transatlantic goodwill

Afterthoughts

Perhaps I should have called this post 'Laughterthoughts'. Unfortunately though, there aren't that many laughs in the new Ghostbusters soft reboot - although OTOH it could have been much, much worse. It is scary, in parts, but with the honest exception of Paul Rudd's performance it's not really funny.

The decision to go full Stranger Things was brave and mostly worked. Wolfhard now plays horny teenage everynerd more or less pat, though his character is underwritten and underused. He's basically the new Peter Venkman except that he fails to get into the girl's knickers. And of course he's not funny either. His consolation prize - and it's a fairly meagre one, given that he's the only one of the "kids" who can feasibly do it - is that he gets to drive the Ectomobile. (Having him as an anaemic Michael Taylor at least meant we were spared a Short Round.) The younger children are also OK. The girl is better than the boy: she's Spengler's granddaughter and a reasonable stand-in for her grandpa, and the boy just about captures Stanz's slow-witted, well-meaning enthusiasm. Only the token black girl - who by process of elimination is there to be a female Zeddemore* - really lives down to expectations.

In theory of course Ghostbusters as a concept should work just as well with any group of early middle-aged, middle-class white men (and their token black friend) who are down on their luck (sacked academics dressed like plumbers going into business in the real world) but make it big by doing something whackily fantastical in a relatively cool, deadpan, Noo Yawk sort of way. In practice though, the camaraderie between Egon, Ray and Venkman was something special, and the real-life friendship between Ramis and Murray was extra special. (Murray's double take at the end of Afterlife when Venkman sees Spengler's ghost is funnier and more emotional than anything else in the whole film.) The first film was originally envisioned for Belushi and Eddie Murphy, and it would no doubt have been perfectly good with them. But without Bill Murray it would only have been half the film it turned out to be, and even today Murray could almost certainly improvise his way half-way through a Ghostbusters film without breaking sweat.

Including the original Ghostbusters at the end was the right decision. Unfortunately in just a couple of minutes they demonstrate what was lacking in the movie - which was, of course, them. Murray in particular proves quite how much of the original film really was just him, and manages to improvise in the space of a few lines more humour, charm, pathos and excitement than the rest of the cast does in the previous hour and a half.

And of course the real ghost elephant in the room is Melissa McCarthy. There's a real sense of Ghostbusters: Afterlife's being really just a franchise palate-cleanser, and as such it was certainly worth it. 

*Winston Zeddemore was originally supposed to be ex-military. By the time of the videogame he's got a PhD. In practice he arrives only just in time to be the straight man (i.e. just before Sigourney Weaver becomes a dog), albeit only narrowly avoiding being the "comedy stupid one" (and let's face it, that's more or less what he is in Ghostbusters II).

This encapsulates so much. Well done @RoryStewartUK pic.twitter.com/c2fSmw5vWZ

— MilitaryGeek (@Dettingen11) August 20, 2021

"Pro-authoritarian" libertarians?

Of course, the claim that Canadians who are sceptical about the war in Ukraine are "pro-authoritarian" is deeply weird. Canada currently has the most authoritarian government it's ever had, and it's far more likely that "the Unvaccinated" are pro-libertarian than authoritarian - sceptical about the Government's claims about "the vaccines" and equally sceptical about the military-industrial complex's expansion of NATO.

Conversely, those who trusted the Government over the jabs are now trusting them over foreign affairs - and that includes war! So whether Putin wins or loses, the West is becoming a darker, bleaker place, more paranoid, more willing to resort to military and/or paramilitary options rather diplomatic ones, and less able than ever before to see the other side's point of view.

Déjà vu... all over again!

Vladimir Putin turns out to be stark staring mad. Aggressive war is a crime. Nothing excuses it.

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) February 24, 2022

Thor Bulow

Thor in the Union Jack pants is a picture that appears to have been entirely memory-holed from the Internet. (Strange but true?)