Funky_Gibbon

There's also the elephant in the room that is inflation. It's not something that's being talk about but inflation is taking a huge bite out of every public service just as it is every family. The Government gave local authorities sometime like a 4% increase on the previous year for their financial settlement in April but inflation is at least double that and predicted to go much higher so effectively the budget has been cut and there's less money available to spend. The increased energy costs for social care alone are going to be huge. On top of that there's also the Government announcing that most public sector workers would get a pay 'rise' (4% for council staff) but they didn't provided money to pay for the increase so the money has to be taken out of the existing budget. These things are mandatory costs. The council themselves have no real say in whether they pay them or not.

What's he dressed up as this time? Arkwright?

The Man Standing Next - 5/10 Korean political thriller about the events leading up to the assassination of South Korean dictator President Park Chung-hee in 1979 by his own intelligence and security chief .

Frankly the things are missold as being something that saves customers money but they don't actually do anything themselves. Their only real purpose is to allow for real-time monitoring and managing of the demand on the electricity grid, to allow the industry to get rid of staff who were employed to read meters and to maybe nudge a few people into using less energy. The only way we save any money is if we stop using as much gas and electricity. If it took a small box telling you how much you used to figure that one out then fine but even the Government's own most optimistic prediction was that at most 1/3 of people would save any money at all. The vast bulk of the savings that are supposed to come from installing smart meters go directly to the energy companies through employing fewer staff for meter readings and telephone inquiries, debt management and reduced theft. There's also supposed to be saving from smoothing out the difference between peak and off-peak usage and the way they're going to do this is by using the every 30 minute updated monitoring of usage to bring in 'time of use' tariffs where they charge a higher rate in any 30 minute period where the start meters are telling them more people are using energy and a lower rate when they aren't. The theory is that this will encourage some people to move their energy intensive activities to other times of the day but most of us don't live lives that allow that because we're either asleep or at work during those hours so we'll just pay more at the only times of day available to us to do these activities.

$200million apparently. And it's been watched by 44 million people so far, which sounds impressive until you find out that other Netflix films like Red Notice and The Adam Project were seen by even more over the same number of days. I have no idea how their business model works and whether films like this are supposed to bring in more subscribers to their service or simply stop them from leaving for another service, only that it's been good enough that Netflix have already greenlit two more movies; a sequel (by the Russo bros again) and a a spin-off (by the people who did Deadpool).

The Gray Man - 7/10 Good action set pieces but feels a little lightweight on character development and plot IMO. Watchable but not memorable.

As of today BBC Weather is now prediction 40°C on both Monday and Tuesday. which means it'll be something like 44°C in my flat as it's generally 4°C hotter than the outside temperature. 🥵

Part of it is down to the increased and better funded US/UK services outbidding terrestrial channels for the premium TV content (sports, big name TV series, lives events etc) and popular TV personalities who attract viewers, part of it (certainly for the BBC) is down to deliberate Government intervention to both cut the amount of funding they have by 25% compared to 2010 and to dictate how some of the remaining funding is spent, like forcing them to fund the Government political policy for free TV licences for over 75s out of the BBC budget. The result is that terrestrial services have less money to spend on content but still have to fill the same number of hours. They have much less to invest in big 'event' tv but have to pay more for it as they still need it in order to attract viewers so we get more repeats to fill up the schedules, more dirt cheap but unfathomably (imo) popular TV shows like all the Great British Whatever shows and reality TV pretending to be documentaries and a lot less new and original drama and big prime-time films etc.

Spoilers... 😉 It's a decent film but I found the traditional noir narration to be a bit grating at times, as was Clive Owen's character... although that was probably a deliberate choice.

Tokyo Vice season 1 Loosely based on the real life of Jake Adelstein, the American journalist and author who has spent most of his career in Japan. The series follows him from his first days of idealisms after getting a job working for a major Japanese newspaper and the disillusionment as he comes into contact with the violence of the Yakuza gangs and the corruption of the police and journalists who turn a blind eye to it in order to keep the peace.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - 8/10 Nic Cage sends himself up brilliantly in this meta action-comedy about an actor called Nic Cage.

The Fourth Protocol - 8/10 Great Cold War spy thriller starring Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan as an MI5 officer trying to track down a Soviet agent and prevent him from completing his mission to detonate a small nuclear weapon near an American air force base in the UK.

Croupier - 6/10 Clive Owen-starring neo noir about a man who wants to be a writer and takes a job in a casino in the hope that he can use the experience as the basis of a story.

The Cloverfield Paradox - 4/10 A Cloverfield film that started life as an unrelated film script but got retconned into the franchise with minimal effort later. A ridiculously star-laden cast for a movie and script that's so bad they don't even bother to try and explain some of the weirder plot points.

Everything Everywhere All at Once - 8/10 Chaotic LSD-trip multiverse weirdness with occasional martial arts and laugh out loud moments. Utterly pointless trying to describe the plot.

If you want to get angry about land and property stolen from the people you don't have to go back a few hundred years for examples. The last decade has seen massive amount of land owned by the public for the benefit of the public being sold off for a song or just given away for nothing. The most obvious example of this was all the land given away for nothing to those companies that set themselves up as academy/free schools where LEAs were forced to sign over the land deeds wholesale to the directors of the companies set up to run the schools, who immediately sold the school playing fields off to property developers for a nice fat profit. Or the considerable amount of lands, parks, colleges, social housing and public buildings sold off at substantially low prices at the insistence of the Government or by Councils/NHS Trusts etc disposing of assets to try and keeps services running after another year of funding cuts. The stealing from the common people is still going on, they just call it something else these days and tell you that you voted for it.

Haven't they always done this? They always produced the episodes in blocks of 8, had a mid-season break and then returned a few months later with the rest of the reason. For Season 11 and the 24 or so episodes they said they were doing to finish the series they've just broke it into 3 chunks. Andrew Lincoln is going to be back for the movie they're making to finish the story post-season 11 (at least according to IMDB).

Not sure about that. I remember some years ago having to spend months on tram replacement buses between Meadowhall and Shalesmoor. Sometimes this stuff just takes time.

Halfway through James Ellroy's latest, 'Widespread Panic: Freddy Otash Confesses', in which the titular character recalls the prime of his life as an ex-cop, sleazy private eye, blackmailer, pimp and the number one source for celebrity scandal rags in Hollywood as he mixes with the biggest names of the 50s and 60s. Based (probably quite loosely) on a real-life man who was also the inspiration for Jack Nicholson's character in 'Chinatown'.

Spiritwalker (Korean) - 7/10 One part Bourne Identify, one part Memento (ish), one part John Wick. Man wakes up after a car crash, a bullet in his shoulder and no memory. He looks in a mirror and his reflection is someone else. Suddenly he's in another body, in a another place, and he has no idea what is happening but has to try and figure it out.

The Northman - 9/10 Dark, beautiful, extremely violent and gory in parts (how this got a 15 rating I'll never understand) and yet even for that it's an art house film at heart. Based on the legend of Amleth, which was also the inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet.

All The Old Knives (Amazon) - 5/10 A spy 'thriller' that is quite sedentary for a thriller. Two CIA agents (and former lovers) meet to review a terrorist event that happened 8 years earlier. Well made and acted but the story itself is extremely predictable.

The Bubble - 5.5/10 A 'meta' comedy about a group of actors trapped together in a hotel at the start of the Covid pandemic where they'll film the 6th film in a terrible but wildly successful dinosaur action franchise for a film studio that doesn't care about anything but finishing the movie. A bit too navel-gazing and Hollywood in-jokey for its own good but there were some decent laughs. I doubt I'll ever want to watch it again though.

Tolkien - 8/10 I know it's not a completely accurate biopic about the early life of J.R.R. Tolkien and some liberties were taken but I really enjoyed this story about love, friendship and war and the influences they had on his later writing. Nicholas Hoult is great in it.

Mulholland Falls - 6/10 A young woman is found murdered in the desert in mysterious circumstances. An LA police detective called to the scene realises he had an affair with the murder victim. Soon after he is sent a film showing the same woman secretly filmed with another man and wonders whether the same thing happened to him. Great ensemble cast for a neo-noir crime thriller that doesn't quite manage to have enough mystery to work but is entertaining enough.