Silent Runner

New trailer that gives away a lot more of the plot. I think this looks pretty great.

I'm about halfway through the new one by Alastair Reynolds, Eversion. It's a strange mix of the exploration bits from At The Mountains of Madness and a Star Trek timeloop episode. It starts out on an 18th Century sailing ship exploring the ice north of Norway looking for an unspecified object. Tragedy strikes and the story starts again with the same characters except it's now the mid 19th Century and we're on a steam-powered ship off the coast of Peru looking for a structure of some kind. Tragedy strikes again and the story picks up the same characters in a new vehicle in a new time period. In each period characters remember little details from the previous one but are never sure if they're dreaming or imagining things. I'm really enjoying this. It's nicely paced so you're not waiting for the story to move on, the characters are well written and the central mystery is compelling.

First concert tonight in a few years and finally got to see Lorde live. It was cold and wet and muddy and people were jumping on me and I loved every second of it. Got a bit emotional during Liability and felt this overwhelming joy and love for everyone alive during Teams. Pure magic.

I thought Dashcam was a blast. My only issue was not really knowing what was happening but I guess that was kind of the point. Still thought it was great though.

Under The Banner of Heaven Finished up this 7 part series tonight. It's based on the real life murder of a young woman and her baby in Utah in 1984. And the involvement of the Mormon church. I thought this was really excellent. The cast are all top class - Andrew Garfield, Daisy-Edgar Jones and Sam Worthington are the big names but the support are all good as well. It looks great and really captures the blandness of the mid-80s but mixed with some beautiful landscapes. It's well paced and the 7 episodes is enough to cover the story and not feel bloated, even with a 90 minute last episode. There's some shocking moments and some good twists. But reading a bit about the real case it looks likes the writer of the book it's based on took a few liberties with the facts. And the TV show has invented a few characters to make events more dramatic but that's only a minor criticism. There are a lot of flashbacks to Mormon history which I found a little pointless at first but they all tied in with the contemporary crime by the end. Hulu in America so piracy only here for a while I think but definitely recommended. 4.5/5

Over the last few days I read Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian Mcallister. A high-concept domestic thriller about a woman traveling through time trying to solve a crime that already happened. It starts with a couple waiting up for their teenage son to get home from a night out - as he gets home he's confronted by a stranger and then murders him. After doing all the police station stuff the couple go to bed but when she wakes up it's the day before the crime. When she goes to bed that night she wakes up 2 days before the crime. This was pretty good. The concept was interesting, sometimes the protagonist would travel 1 day into the past, sometimes months. The problem I had was that it was clear that nothing she does in the past affects the present so her actions are kind of pointless. It's well written and an interesting mix of genres (crime mystery and time travel) but I saw most of the twists coming and by the end I was flipping through the pages without really reading them just to get to the end. Maybe recommended for a beach holiday read.

A lot of recency bias in my list for sure and a few heavy-hitters didn't make the cut. Is The O.C a better show than The Wire? Probably not but I know which one I'll fire up next time I'm waiting at an airport or whereever. Not a perfect metric but there's a lot to be said for pure entertainment. 1. Utopia 2. The Shield 3. Love/Hate 4. Euphoria 5. Trailer Park Boys (1999?) 6. Breaking Bad 7. Normal People 8. Evil 9. Arrested Development 10. Luther 11. Psychoville 12. Watchmen 13. I May Destroy You 14. Succession 15. Archer 16. The Killing 17. Barry 18. The OC 19. The Leftovers 20. The Americans

Finished this up tonight and thought it was a tremendous piece of work. And even though it's a true story there was some real shocks in the last episode. An excellent, low-key companion to The Wire that didn't overstay it's welcome over the 6 episodes.

The Funhouse https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082427/ Four teenagers visit a local carnival for a night of innocent amusement. They soon discover, however, that there is nothing innocent or amusing there at all. A Tobe Hooper directed slasher from the early 80's about a group of annoying teenagers (who all look like they're pushing 30) who decide to spend the night in the haunted house of a traveling carnival. This was really good. Carnivals are a great location for this type of film and the production designers did some fine work on the sets - they perfectly captured the weirdness of these operations in a way that Del Toro failed to do in Nightmare Alley. The great Rick Baker deserves special praise for his work on the monster who reminded a lot of Gabriel from Malignant. And at 90 minutes there's no hanging about. I had a blast with this. Probably not up there with Hoopers best work but it was good violent, sleazy, creepy stuff. 4/5

Yeah, it's pretty bad - glacial pace, annoying kids and Jimmy Smits talking about trade routes again. Ewan was cool though and I did like the burn Uncle Owen got in on him.

Looked a solid penalty. Not even going to the screen?

Trent AA badly caught there.

VAR fucked that.

Other journos (Jonathon Wilson, Miguel Delaney) were saying it was all down to UEFAs lack of organisation. Same as the UEFA League final 2 weeks ago. Fans in a que for 3 hours and still not getting in.

Kick-off delayed by 15 minutes. Usual UEFA crowd control shitshow.

Real Star Trek 2 vibes off that episode, so good.

Ray Liotta https://deadline.com/2022/05/ray-liotta-dies-67-goodfellas-1235033521/

I read the new Don Winslow, City on Fire, over the weekend. It's the first in a trilogy about Irish-American gangsters fighting with Italian-American gangsters. This was decent enough. The plot was straight-forward but nothing I hadn't read a hundred times before and bits felt like they were lifted from other places. It was all pretty low stakes stuff but the characters are well written and it's easy to read. Winslow has that gift that Steven King, Lee Child and JK Rowling have where you can fly through a hundred pages without realising it but this felt a little insubstantial or something. Not worth getting at full price but if it comes out cheap on Kindle it would be worth grabbing for a holiday read. I'm about 25% into the new Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You (annoying lack of question mark in the title.) The usual SR territory here, post-college middle class people on their way through first jobs, relationships etc. I like Rooneys books and this is decent in parts but I'm finding the characters a little annoying. And when writers start writing about other writers I feel like they've run out of ideas maybe.

This trailer doesn't feel finished - the sound is off or something. Maybe it's not legit...

Episode 3 was the best yet and some classic 'Trek.

The Dry - nothing to do with the excellent Australian book/film from a few years back. This is an 8-part comedy-drama about an Irish woman living in London who returns to Dublin for her grandmothers funeral. She stays on in Dublin to try and re-connect with her family and get treatment for her alcoholism. This was pretty good but probably overstayed it's welcome slightly with 8 parts. The lead woman is excellent, Ciaran Hinds puts in a good turn as her Dad and Dublin looks nice. The story is well told but there are a few sub-plots and characters that go nowhere. Decent enough but not essential. 2.5/5, on Britbox. The best thing I'm watching at the moment is Under The Banner of Heaven. The first 4 parts of this are out in America. It's a true story of the murder of a mother and her baby in the Mormon community in the late 1980's. The cast are excellent, Andrew Garfield in particular. And there's a real True Detective vibe from it. It's 5/5 so far and I'm sure it will keep up the quality right to the end.

The goal came from an Arsenal foul throw. We are an elite outfit.

Not a great half but for all their running about they didn't create anything and kept getting done offside. If Odegaard can get a little clean possession there's always a pass on to Saka or Nketiah. We're very much still in this.

Ramsdale, Tomiyasu, Gabriel, White, Tavares, Elneny, Xhaka, Odegaard, Smith Rowe, Saka, Nketiah. Gabe and Ben White both start, thank God. And Tavares bringing the chaos.

I watched the new Firestarter remake last night. It's super low-budget using just a few locations and a handful of characters. The young girl in the lead role is pretty good and Zac Effron puts in a good turn. There's a good John Carpenter soundtrack but otherwise this is forgettable and probably not worth the watch. 2.5/5