Video Village

This week, Jordan and I (Sam) conduct our typically Doughy 101 in decidedly unhushed tones regarding QUIET ON SET: THE DARK SIDE OF KIDS TV, chart the outer reaches of vexation with BORDERLANDS, swing by THE LAST STOP IN YUMA COUNTY for a quick critical brew, navigate the concerted mechanisms of M. Night Shyamalan’s TRAP and turn Pixar’s latest child-brain brainchild INSIDE OUT 2.

This week, Jordan and I (Sam) whirl fatly around the throwback vortex with TWISTERS, scrutinise the blazing Boredchurch of THE JETTY from our displeasure vessel, trail the glossy MAXXXINE along Hollywood Boulevard in a non-criminal fashion, make a potentially botched attempt to extract enjoyment from THE INSTIGATORS (don't get us started) and team up to take on the question: is DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE merely sanctioned satire with as much meaningful f*cking irreverence as this sh*tting paragraph? Or... not? You c*nts.

Reviews of A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE, KINDS OF KINDNESS, BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER S1, THELMA and LONGLEGS.

You are now entering Video Village. Well, at the moment, you're plonked outside the limits, staring at the welcome sign. It's uncommon for villages to have mottos, but ours does. You squint to discern it, printed as it is damn near illegible in Edwardian Script. You wonder why. An attempt to mask the meaning? A grandiose Elder with ideas above his station? A local councilperson engaged in administrative hostilities with the locals, a struggle playing out in the theatre of low-level upkeep?

You edge a mite closer, careful not to cross the invisible threshold lest that signal a kind of commitment. Finally, you clarify: "Praise, Disgust, and all Betwixt." The Oxford comma and archaic closer confirm that this is indeed the work of some bombastic honcho. Next to strike is the judgment that the village remains a mystery, besides some gratuitous pledge to reflect the universal range of human response. Surely this is axiomatic?

Desperate, your eyes dart to some graffiti adorning an abandoned wagon on the opposite side of the road. The doodlings would have slipped your notice (accustomed as you are to "the city") but your curiosity is hungry and there's a wagon there. In blood-red it reads, "PODCAST (FILM AND TV)". You are flooded with grateful lucidity, and the accompanying notion that whoever sprayed it might also harbour some haught. What vandal perpetuates parentheses? What vandal!

But now you have some idea where you are. Of where you could be. Dare ye enter? Or will you drive in the other direction?* It was presumptuous and, let's face it, inaccurate of me to narrate your own experience to you when we both know you probably didn't even see the sign. I'm probably not even talking to you, am I? It's Sam, by the way.

Aye, Sam and Jordan, here we are. New face. Same soul. (For the sake of this, we have one face and soul cos the podcast is a unitary thing. Don't you go thinking we're indistinct beings.) We are the Mickey Rourke (but hopefully for the better) of comically obscure podcasts. Join us!

*Scrolling is the metaphor, I'm doing a whole thing.

From the Shorthand Effusions of Jeremy Kettle, Date Unknown, Motives Inscrutable:

"All things must pass. Yet, lest you sustain a dogged certitude in a Great Unknown*, 'tis a common failing to mistake passage for passing, especially if you're on a P&O cruise. Does anything end? Or does it merely change? Such questions have busied brilliant and bored minds for aeons. Change is the only rigid dimension, unless, that is, you still live in your hometown with its charity shops and family ties and haven't moved somewhere a bit more happening where nobody knows your name and if you deign to stay in touch, there is an inescapable chill that your relocation has engendered, privately regarded as it is by your kin as tacit contempt for their choices.

I'll be honest, my attention was seized by the footnotes and breakfast has made me sluggish. Change...

To be resumed tomorrow.

*A contradiction in terms, one supposes. Yes, it's true that one spontaneously introduced the clause, but one feels it would be priggish on your part to take umbrage, chiefly because you must admit that the variance has accidentally/astutely delivered an Olbas-like sniff of Truth and penchiefly because had I elected not to painstakingly EXPLAIN MYSELF AGAIN, you'd conceivably have proceeded ignorant of the (arguably, if you're like that) sloppy writing or otherwise convinced of its wit.

It was an accident. I don't think more words will convince you out of thinking that it was an accident. I explicitly alluded† to its accidentality. Sure, I COULD have re-written it and avoided all this finger-pointing and snickering to my notional face. But I believe drafts to be a form of duplicity, a philosophy that I will allow has delivered unto me an oppressive hateload of grief, be it a Tripadvisor review - a forum whereupon it would appear "advice" is in fact unwelcome, nay, litigated - or a birthday card. It was an accident, what of it? Penicillin was an accident. We shouldn't use penicillin now?

†Another contradiction? That is for the scholars to unpack. How many inconsistencies must one unconsciously bequeath until oxymoron is recognised as oxygenius?”

Jordan and I find ourselves in what was once a forest, framed by the charred corpses of organia. Before us looms our Oak erection which, yielding to precedent, is in acute decline. The Moirai schlep our porcine persons t'ward the wilted trunk, Atropos routinely glancing back over her shoulder with a wicked grin and making the "snip-snip" motion with her fingers. Her nails (predictably, on reflection) are a manicured, sultry red.

We don't know how we ended up here. There is the sense of an absence of a memory of a "why", but its inaudible squawks are stifled beneath a landslide of inattention and unpardonably byzantine prose. Camouflaged as we have been, concealed from the sweet, tempering sunshine of others' gaze, with naught but the Spooky Puppeteers and, inescapably, each other for company, we have succumbed to a climate of grotesque permissiveness.

A calendar governed not by heavenly bodies but by earthly vagaries. An oral system unmitigated by normal human limits. Writings suggestive of an omni-cibarious yogurt parfait, where digging through each layer brings not nourishment but simply more. Somewhere along our sylvan traipse, yes, we grew unable to see the wood for the trees.

We are IN the wood, though. To be fair, like.

But perhaps escape is possible...

On this quasi-penultimate episode, Jordan reviews the first season of MR. BIRCHUM (with none of the presumptuousness that "first" implies), the second season of SMILING FRIENDS (but the whole thing, really), GAME CHANGER (the whole thing, really) and the first season of DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON (an uncontroversial "first".) Otherwise, he kindly invites me to participate in the podcast with evaluations of the ninth and final series of INSIDE NO. 9 (with allusions to the whole thing), FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA, HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS and IN A VIOLENT NATURE (hol fings), the first season or fourteenth series of DOCTOR WHO (depending on your orientation to the universe) and WINNIE-THE-POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY 2 (yes, the whole. Damn. Thing.)

...Winnie the-

-Oh God, is this the Hundred Acre Wood..? Not gonna be Milne's, though, is it? It gonna be Frake-fucking-Waterfield's.

Oh, smother.

Today, I have been GRIPPED by the urge to talk about cereal. Coincidentally, cereal is the focus of one of the films we review (it's not a coincidence).

In an attempt to curb option paralysis, I am gustatorially unadventurous. But when I consider the myriad cereals on supermarket shelves, I can with confidence claim to have sampled the vast majority. Lit and watered by its nostalgic roots, cereal outgrows its edi-bedfellows. I han't and won't nibble upon such transatlantications as Count Chocula and the Froot Loop. Some of the products I soon mention will be American, but these FEEL American and a residual nationalism casts doubt upon their virtue.

As red is the protagonist of the colours and the apple the principal of the fruits, the cereal Don to me will always be Coco Pops. It's been over a decade since our last acquaintance and I weep for all that is lost. It was touched by milk. So milk it too touched. Rice Krispies - the underboss, a worthy second whose wings are clipped by choclessness. Frosties - the third leg of that elementary triumvirate, Tony long since usurped by similar beasts (Crunchy Nut).

METAPHOR SHIFT

Corn Flakes - the granddaddy, the soggy stalwart and what a vile procession of words. Bran Flakes & Special K - the boring and fun parents, respectively, rightly concerned with the movement of one's bowels. Cheerios & Shreddies - good kids but nobody's favourites, are they? Shredded Wheat - the "different" cousin of whom we are nonetheless fond.

METAPHOR SHIFT

Weetabix - a wonderful teacher in the rewards of patience. Weetos - a lover whose time in one's life is certain to be short-lived. Because you love her so much. It can't be good for you. And good things like this don't last. Not for you... not for you. And Sugar Puffs - a relic of HOME, a place long gone but forever nestled behind our lives, that place we privately mourn, that pl-- I just found out that Sugar Puffs are now called Honey Monster Puffs. What the FUCKING FUCK?! They come for it all, don't they?

METAPHOR COLLAPSE

I'm hobbled by the character limit but believe me, I have more to say.

On this ep, Jordan and I discuss ERIC, UNFROSTED and uvvers.

This is a true story.

In the year 2000, my parents took me and my cousin on holiday to Magaluf. I was five. By that time, I was already a voracious reader, as far as voracity can apply to the habits of a nipper. Thus, in the breaks between swimming, mocktails and ice cream, I turned my attention to penning my first work of fiction. A haunted house yarn, it amounted to an austere roll call of horror archetypes - the vampire, the ghost, the mummy... it isn't humility alone when I say that the piece lacked accomplishment. Nevertheless, when I ponder the birth of the bug, this is the provenance at which the train of recall halts. The tracks may persist rearward, my Bic may have earlier met paper, but such things have been lost to the fog of infant amnesia. And so, be it history or mere story, accounting for the blur betwixt the two and the value of myth, I consider this my creo-genesis.

But this emergence wasn't the only salient feature of the vacay. I also remember a pirate-themed stage-show, during which my adolescent cousin drunk himself into paralysis. I remember my continued insistence that we patronise the local Burger King in the hopes of completing a kids-meal toy collection. I remember the friendly server swapping out the trinkets already in my possession for fresh plastic trophies.

I remember the elderly man pawing at a payphone so that he may scavenge coins. I remember, trailing behind my family as I was, stopping to study this strange spectacle. I remember the man's fixed gaze as his arm extended outward, grabbed my shirt and began to violently drag me into an alley. I remember my father running back to us, tackling the stranger to the ground and restraining him until the police arrived. I remember being told much later that the stranger, now known to me as Camilo Muñoz, had subsequently been jailed for his role in a string of attempted child abductions.

That wasn't a true story.

Well, some of it was.

But enough about BABY REINDEER. Almost enough. Just enough more to say that Jordan and I talk about it. That, along with the first season of FALLOUT, the KNUCKLES miniseries, LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL and a whole bunch more.

Tuck in!

There are advantages to being late to a party.

People are likelier to take notice of you, if you're into that sort of thing. It is easier to avoid falling into a maelstrom of sloshed groupthink and social inducement, sidestepping behaviours you may bemoan or words you may bewail. If anthropology or sociology or psychology tickle your pickle, the scene of the good time is laid out squarely for your observation. As an arson investigator might survey a charred dwelling, so might you examine the somatic rubble of mortal desolation.

Who likes parties anyway?

DUNE: PART TWO may have disappeared from your feeds as the algorithm continues to adapt into the void (and us along with it). The eponymous GLADIATORS of the Saturday night smash hit may have migrated into other media spheres as a result of their popularity. I.S.S. may have slipped so comprehensively through the cracks of culture that you never even knew what it was, let alone that it had been released in cinemas. ROAD HOUSE may have already found sufficient success to be commissioned for a sequel. And YOU'LL NEVER FIND ME may not have even registered as a blip on your radar at all...

However...

To translate and address the whole "party" metaphor point by point (and in reverse order to suit my purposes)... with the benefit of time, Jordan and I are afforded a perspective on the critical community and its myriad responses... we have the privilege of distance to discern the shape of a piece's place in the cultural landscape... were we susceptible in the first place, we can more readily rebuff the seductions of consensus... but no, nobody listens still. That's where the thing falls apart really, and I'll leave whether that "thing" is simply the analogy or a larger sense of personal purpose to you.

But yes, there are advantages to being late.

Rather not be though tbh.

Imbibe!

Around two hours ago (at the time of typing), I sat down to rollick in the glorious Providence of Inspiration, invoking Its sacred hover with a can of zero-caffeine Coke Zero, a bit of a headache and the apparent disinclination to do anything about that.

And that was two hours ago. Still I now sit, the water droplets from the Coke can having formed a gentle ring on the coaster. The headache has passed, though it's tricky to isolate whether that's from the curative properties of time and the body or a practiced desensitisation to pain, both physical and meta- (honestly, if I start to FEEL anything nearing REAL, some OBSIDIAN MECHANISM* kicks in to sabotage the engine and confine me to the desert remand of vague somethings).

It seems that I have lost time. Possible though it is that I called the wrong devotional number and instead reached the God of Going Nowhere (frankly a commonality given ∅'s place in speed-dial), it's likelier something to do with my generation, mental health and the effect of the Internet, etc.

So to fill the space hereforth, we're just gonna do some free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness associations.

This is our 75th episode... 75th equals platinum... the chemical symbol for platinum is Pt... "PT" can refer to the Palestinian Territories aaand we'll stop there.

This is our 75th episode... 1975 saw the Fall of Saigon... Tim Robbins played a Vietnam vet in Jacob's Ladder... the Biblical Jacob was later given the name "Israel" aaand we'll stop there.

All roads, huh? Little parable there.

On this... "landmark" feels conceited... map-spot episode, Jordan and I, in a subjective fashion, delineate the merits and demerits of AMERICAN FICTION, DAMSEL, DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, IMAGINARY, THE IRON CLAW, MADAME WEB and THE ZONE OF INTEREST, at least.

*Otherwise referred to by me as "The Callous Callus", but it feels tacky to start plugging my autobiography this early unless it's in a footnote.

The looming axis of China, Russia and Iran threatens to destabilise the global order, such as it is. Populations across the world are continually immiserated under tyrannical regimes. The impending race for leadership of the free world orbits a pair of hoary ignorami whose antiquity and indeed place in history may best be described as "antediluvian". The abiding "we don't know" around artificial intelligence accommodates the calamitous continuum of widespread unemployment to total nuclear holocaust. Social media pollutes the mind, body and soul of what approaches an entire species. The cost of living condemns a generation+ to treadmillity. And nuance, conversation, art, tolerance and intellectual maturity are generally plunging into obsolescence.

And so it's never been more acutely vital that you care about what Jordan and I think about the 2023 Doctor Who specials. Otherwise, "they" win. We used to agree on who "they" were, whoever they were. That is no longer the case. So just pick your side and whatever antagonises it... that's the "they". And they will win in the face of stark, unclicking indifference.

And fear not, the content of the 'cast isn't as dour. It's pretty overcast as I'm writing this and were the Sun to peek out from behind a cloud for a couple of minutes, I'm sure I'd sing the praises of something I like in this world if I could summon the energy to ponder the matter for a good while.

On this episode, Jordan and I discuss the fifth season of Fargo, The Holdovers, Poor Things and Doctor Who, and debut a new segment that isn't really too dissimilar from what we usually do. Enjoy!