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Ice Cold Catch (2022– )
8/10
It reminds me of my friend
22 August 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Matt Walsh asked, "What is a woman?" And still apparently hasn't figured it out. Ice Cold Catch made a series but let me give an alternative title to this Ice Cold Catch series. "What is a strong person?" And they answer it. Caitlin Krause is a strong person.

So it looks on face value like a fishing show where they get to wow you with the dangers of an exotic job with no WHS rules and a bunch of cowboys racking up cash and blowing it on fun. It has a twist where they have apprentices "greenhorns" who are put on the ship to try their hand at it. We are used to these scripts and can usually predict how they go.

Enter Caitlin Krause (Caitie), she's a 5 foot nothing late 20's pommy who has a damaged body from a car accident when she was younger and has just finished working on exotic yachts as a service attendee. Caitie is likable from the get go and you want to cheer for her but you know deep down that she just won't be able to do it.

There are other greenhorns but it does feel like this was Caitie's story and the others weren't as much main characters as much as they were a benchmark to measure Caitie against. The crew and captains on the ships were equally as important as the other greenhorns in terms of making the series work but without Caitie... It never would have made the screens.

The series gives us that feeling that we used to get form the big catch shows, it makes us appreciate the scenery of Iceland, it makes us really like the culture of these ships and how they do such difficult things. Then it gives us something deeper, I liked seeing some of the bravest and strongest people do seemingly impossible things without any screaming, flexing, chest pounding or testosterone screaming antics. Don't get me wrong, some of these brutes look like true Vikings, but even those guys are mingling the same way with some really small and actually disabled colleagues. The disabled colleagues equally able at the job. They have a way to show how tough they are by not showing how tough they are. It shows that life is mental and physical and both are equally important. I think that if I had more time to think about this then it would come down to ego. And family. And what is strength. And how to use pressure or stress or trauma to your advantage.

As the series goes on, we get to see how the culture on these boats is very family orientated, the crew have family ashore bit also on board. To be in this boat family, a lot is asked and most don't have what it takes to join. The crew are very patient with the new recruits because they were there once and it will be a painful experience for the applicant, who is more likely to fail than not. The high point is that we get to watch Caitie push and push and push and against all pre conceptions, the people on the boat actually start to see her as one of their own and they need to keep pushing her, but you can see, they are cheering for her. Watch for yourself to see what happens, the spoiler is that Caitie is a strong person, that's why they see her early on for what she is. Just like my friend Morgan, we see her for what she is.
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Katla (2021)
8/10
Good grief
13 August 2023
Grief. A blanket of dark, smothering muck that sticks to everything. Just like the volcanic ashen scenery of this haunting, the themes of grief are stuck to our characters like the ash on their roof tops.

The writers let you fill in a lot of the gaps in understanding this movie. It's probably less about getting a supernatural explanation as it is about exploring the way that holding on to past pains have destroyed the characters lives. The supernatural component is how the volcano grows and sends people from the past to visit the grief stricken either to haunt or help them. Which of the two is debatable.

It's a slow build, but enjoyable as it builds, then it quickly wraps up a few of the technical questions and then very quickly wraps up the story arcs and leaves you a little stunned like it finished a bit too soon or something.

It's not on the same level as Lost in terms of mystery, not up there with Dark in terms of complex brilliance and not in the same competition with Hill House for the haunting. Having said this, it is very entertaining and I really enjoyed some of the characters. Some of the standouts are the devilish Michael and his little box cutter and the Grima conversations that she has with herself towards the end of the series. My heart breaks for dear Asa, the poor lost soul and if I'm being honest, I'm still a bit emotionally damaged from the whole thing. Kind of in a good way though.
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Candy (2006)
9/10
Oh, the pain. Fantastic movie.
13 August 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Candy, not quite a play on words, but you're meant to think about it, I get it, sweet, enticing, addictive but not so good for you. Both the person and the drug share this in name and reality for Ledger. My autism doesn't like this though, such a great Australian film with Heath Ledger (Dan), Noni Hazlehurst (Mum), Abbie Cornish (Candy), Geoff Rush (enabler) and Tony Martin (Dad), an iconic Aussie cast like this using a big old American word as the title? What's worse is that Rush's role as the father figure and enabler for Ledger came across creepy as all hell! I can picture him offering candy to little kids in my imagination. Obviously Lolly would not have worked but maybe a reference to Adam and Eve would have worked better? Apple maybe?

Anyway....

Broken into 3 scenes, Heaven, Earth and Hell, Candy is the story of two fallen angels, Ledger (Dan) and Cornish (Candy) and their love triangle with another type of candy, heroine.

One of my favourite scenes is with the big 4 actors together, Candy is telling Dad that she is pregnant and the two break down crying together in a nicely filmed uncomfortably long embrace. Dan is doing his best to keep everyone playing along with the charade that everything is fine and there's no elephant in the room. In the same scene, Ledger uses some great minimalist acting to tell the story of his family simply by a facial expression and a shake of the head as he refuses to talk about them.

It's a dark and frustrating journey and thankfully there is no such thing as smell-evision yet because the detox scene would be stomach turning. Still, possibly the two most attractive drug addicts ever to live, even in their lowest moments, I look worse on a mild hangover.

I loved that there was no budget for special effects but a healthy budget for quality acting and cinematography. I really felt like a fly on the wall. I also loved the utter hopelessness and despair, there was no glorification of drug use in this film. Thirdly, I love that the story was able to be told without Hollywoods cheap form of viewer candy, violence.

The main characters are believable and likeable, you want to cheer for them and are desperately hoping against but waiting for a tragedy. I think we are able to like them so much because on reflection, there are not actually any good guys in the movie. Just shades of hopeless and fringe dwelling lowlifes.

One of the first scenes where Candy injects for the first time and essentially dies in the bath tub then comes back to life troubles me still. Such a scary scene, with the viewers response being so shocked and her just being like the little Kirsten Dunst vampire "I want some more".

The dark tale is tactfully told with just enough giggles, light moments, glimmers of hope and likeable characters that it doesn't leave you feeling like swallowing a bottle of Valium after watching it (for the record, I recommend exercise over Valium) it left me disturbed but not broken.

A must see movie for every human over the age of 14. Good for another viewing every four years or so.
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8/10
Oh my, how very cleaver and violent.
13 August 2023
Warning: Spoilers
During an interesting time of religious change on our planet, Odin takes a walk..... after enjoying executing some very brutal killings. I think he may have been saying goodbye to this world in human form as the old gods and traditions were being stolen and replaced. With his gift of vision, he may have seen his own demise. Except for the odd cameo in marvel films.

He has the social skills of an autistic computer programmer but attracts lots of friends and followers none the less. He is mistaken for a gift from God and leads some bumbling Christians to Hel, they stake claim to it and name it Hell.

True Innocence, hope and goodness are represented in a young boy, who Odin protects from the Christians. Everyone takes some psychodelic drugs and is shown some of their their inner truths. There is lots of death.

There's a counter story running parallel to this of Christians being punished for following false idols. There are a multitude of references to Christianity and the bible story. It could actually be shallowly interpreted in entirety as Jesus going for the walk. For me, that's the most clever thing.

There are very few words and I think it could have been done entirely in silence if they wanted to. Maybe with Trent Resnor or someone doing some magic with the sound track.

Looking back at it, there are many light hearted and funny moments and the whole thing is actually quite a black comedy.

I need to watch it again to admire it for what it is. I clicked on it on Netflix expecting to see a Vikings rip off. I realised it wouldn't be that after 20 minutes and started waiting for a plot.... It took me half of the film to realise that I just needed to relax and enjoy each sequence in the moment and allow my brain to play with it for the next week.

I loved it, very special and very clever. Probably too clever for me and full of little Easter eggs that only select few would ever pick up. I can see a lot of people absolutely hating it though, not because of their low intelligence, just because it's not everyone's cup of tea. It breaks a lot of rules about how we expect to be fed our moving pictures. It has extreme violence, leaves you feeling somewhat violated and stamps heavily on ground that certainly would not be taken too kindly in Christian schools. It had something to say and it said it. Lots of it. With a bowl of death on the side.
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9/10
Ghost stories don't come any better than this
13 August 2023
Stephen King ranted about Shirley Jackson's original book the haunting of hill house 1959. In Dance Macabre, King isolated Dracula, Frankenstein, wearwolf and hauntings. He also spoke a lot about the fact that a good horror needs to be relevant to the times. For example, the Star Wars bad guys didn't accidentally look like German soldiers. More recently, black mirror has us all panicking about the rise of technology, big brother and privacy. Based on this, one would surmise that both King and Jackson would be delighted with the Netflix reboot of haunting of hill house 2019.

Themes of mental health, trauma, attachment, dysfunctional families, secrets, love and passion and generally maladaptive coping strategies in difficult times are key elements. These higher order messages pair nicely with a good share of things that go bump in the night, boo scares and grossness.

The parallel storyline's of past and present allow the story to be told and the plot to unravel simultaneously. Time is irrelevant with trauma and as Nessie says, I am like fresh snowflakes across all of your life. "There's no without, I am not gone. I'm scattered into so many pieces, sprinkled on your life like new snow."

Fantastic cinematography allows for long, purposefully uncomfortable scenes that almost bring the viewer right into the house to share the discomfort. Unlike some other recent binge watches, (walking dead, handmaids tale), the discomfort is pleasantly scary rather than boringly annoyingly reliant on , long boring shots of over done face acting.

Early on in the piece, there are scenes where people openly acknowledge seeing the same ghostly vision, which means that you need to believe early on that ghosts exist. They also acknowledge that certain supernatural powers exist. Even with this, there is a compelling counter arguament about mental health with genuine mental illness and drug abuse running parallel to the haunting. Is the haunting supernatural or psychological?

The plot tells a story where the house follows and haunts people as they grow older. Leaving the house doesn't fix things but returning to it risks death. Unfinished business seems to be the narrative.

Interestingly, other ghosts in the house aren't there to haunt you. Although the mischievous ones can if you let them. They are there in their own journey.

There are plenty of Easter eggs to be searched for, from figures in the background and carvings on the wall to the character resemblance from the original version.

Love and passion right or wrong, Hugh talks about arguing with passion. The house is much the same, initially causing malice but as things progress, you begin to see the love within the walls of the house and you can see some goodness from its standpoint. Perhaps the source of the trauma may not embody the evil but just be a piece of the bigger knot

When the Forever house's footprint is drawn into the master blueprint for the house, the real horror is named. Our biggest fear that we will become trapped in our forever house with it being not what we dreamed of. The house is a metaphor for the haunting of our life, work and marriage. We are haunted by our past and present and future as well as integenerational traumas. Our responses are the same as ghosts and whether avoid, ignore, dissociate, abuse drugs and alcohol, enable or suppress it.
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1/10
The Matrix or the Marxtrix?
13 August 2023
Warning: Spoilers
A merry band of blue haired, furries, non binaries, gender neutral, him her zee zei's and binary coded bot minority creatures romp their way through this blatantly extreme left mess of a movie. Set further into the Matrix franchises future than we've ever seen before, a painful monologue from the feminist leader of the rebels explains why Morpheus' failed Zion plans lead him to a bitter end. That's what he gets for being a man anyway.

Our merry band of misfits find themselves at odds with the notion of the treaty between the right (computer AI bot people) and the left (the rebels). Rather than coexisting and tolerating each other's differences, our protagonists say 'stuff you I won't do what you tell me' as they set out to destroy the status quo. To do this, they must free a very tired looking Trinity from the shackles of her traditional family unit. Successfully ditching the pesky husband and kids, Trinity is free to find her true self. Not surprisingly, the true self is an all powerful super being, dwarfing the power of Neo. Super Trinity makes plans to press the big red reset button and I kid you not, at one point actually threatens Trump, oops, I mean threatens agent Smith that she might paint the Matrix in rainbows. She also uses her magical powers to cancel people by doing that Matrix skin over the mouth trick so that they can't upset people on twitter anymore.

The movie was absurd to the point of being it's own satire.

Apparently the target audience didn't pick up on what they were putting down, maybe this was supposed to be the movie that was a call to arms and "made sense" to the lost soles of our confused youth but it's ratings say otherwise. Nobody liked this. Not even the Furries.

In totality, it was nothing short of an abomination, a blatant Marxist critical theory propaganda film that says "stuff you" to the hard people who made easy times for these privileged people. Let's just hope that they aren't tempted to give it another go, It's time for the Matrix to cancel itself.
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Logan (2017)
10/10
Masterpiece on complex trauma
13 August 2023
This isn't a PG movie about superhero's and villains. This is a movie about trauma, about pain and suffering and despair. It's an R rated picture of intergenerational dysfunction, insecure attachment, dementia, addiction and broken families still being families together. It's a peak behind the scenes of what some of our real world war veterans live through and how society treats them. Its our sporting hero's after their 15 minutes of fame. It's uncomfortable and deflating to watch, and it should be.

The storyline plays out while a constant internal battle occurs for Logan. This is evident in Logan's self loathing, the fact that Logan's body is killing itself and the fact that there is an actual second Logan trying to kill everyone. He really is his own worst enemy. These metaphors and more are riddled throughout the movie.

The strength of well developed characters, with real emotions and strong bonds that we can all identify with helps offset some of the pain but also brings it closer to what we can empathise with. The characters are set out with the grandfather figure, the uncle or brother who has a strained relationship with Logan, a new generation in Logan's daughter and Logan himself. The inference of this family unit resonates with the viewer and it's these relationships that we are hoping and cheering for, not the battles with giant robots or aliens like in most super hero movies.

It has huge success of really showing the despair, desperation and helplessness that stem from complex trauma. The impossibility of the struggle and complexities of stigma, financial hardship and broken health care systems reflect today's society really well even though the movie is set in a backdrop of the future.

I don't know who they worked with to get this clinical insight but they really have succeeded in making a masterpiece that 90% of viewers will never appreciate for what it really is.

It's not much of a popcorn popper but get a box of tissues, dim the lights and embrace the pain of one of the best education sessions about trauma and attachment on the market. It just happens to be hidden inside a comic book.
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