MSU

The islander I'd like to couple up with is ... [pregnant pause] ... [camera cuts three times around the firepit] ... [bit more of a pause] ... the only c**t left standing. [music swells of a remix of a Westlife song from 20 years ago] [Iain Stirling says something unrelated about Charlie being posh or something]

They can do that? Win as a couple and as a final pie steal the cash. like Goldenballs?

No, they're all awful. Danica, so desperate to be in a couple and get some validation, falling over herself to agree with everything that newbie was saying to her, interrupting to agree with a point that hadn't been made yet. Really disappointed in Adam, unless he has a secret masterplan. He was put in there to cause commotion and wind people up and gets rid of Jacques on the first day but since then he's done nothing and now wants to be exclusive with Paige after a week. This was not your mission, Bond. I saw Coco suggest that some of the blokes in the villa had described her as being a 4/10. Leaving that there without comment.

I don't think Schweikart & Cokely exists in the BB universe outside of BCS.

She's been pied off by five men which has inspired, as far as I can tell, zero seconds of introspection from her. Getting that up to seven men would be delightful.

Bloody hell. So he had a heart attack in a scene where it was conceivable that Saul would've had a heart attack?

Danica is too much like hard work. And whoever said she constantly sounds like she's commentating on Brentford vs Wolves was spot on.

I saw...

What a season this is turning out to be! In other news, I visited Gus's Superlab Laundry in Albuquerque last week. Sadly, it's in a part of town that didn't make me feel comfortable getting out of my car, or even stopping my car, to take a photo at 10 o'clock at night, and three cop cars parked across the street just made it worse. The car wash from BB is still a car wash (Mister Car Wash, imaginatively enough) but they've put a wee museum in the waiting area with cast cards and a replica of the vending machine. Walter White's house has a fence around it and sign basically telling people to f**k off if they're thinking of throwing a pizza slice on the roof.

it's definitely the best 3/10 movie I've seen this year.

These c***s are sober throughout all this, right?

076 -- 20th Century Women (#45 in the A24 series) You can tell it's based on a true story by the way the characters contradict themselves. Prime suspect of this is Annette Benning's, Dorothea Fields who manages to be a proud divorcee and free spirit one minute and then a confused mess the next. She is mother to Jamie, Lucas Jade Zumann, and runs a boarding house of waifs and straifs in Santa Barbara in the 70s. She asks 17-year-old Julie, Elle Fanning, and cancer patient Abbie, Greta Gerwig, to help raise her 15-year-old son. The story really is a meandering walk through this brief period in their lives where Julie and Jamie deal with their non-sexual relationship and Dorothea learns how to live in a changing world. There isn't much more meat on the bones than that, but Benning gives a great performance, and Julie and Abbie's attempts to raise a rebellious Jamie as a feminist bring plenty of touching and funny moments, and with the setting of fifty years ago, gives the movie a sense of being ahead of its time. 7/10 077 -- Trespass Against Us (#46 in the A24 series) Imagine the police and villagers in Hot Fuzz, but imagine it played for reals. It's sad but true that the Dorset accent just doesn't work in terms of tension building or emotional heft, because it all sounds kinda funny. Brendan Gleeson and Michael Fassbender play father and son in the Cutler family, a band of criminal travellers. Fassbender's Chad character is keen to break free for the sake of his own kids, wanting to bring them up in a more stable environment, but Gleeson's Colby refuses to allow him to cut the strings. They get involved in a number of capers, end up with the police, ably represented by Rory Kinnear, in pursuit, and for an hour and a half everyone swears at everyone else in an amusing accent. What it really misses is Olivia Colman to find double entendres in other characters' lines and for someone's accent to be so thick it is incomprehensible, and I'll never forgive it for that. 3/10 078 -- Where the Crawdads Sing. It's the movie adaptation of what seems to be a very popular book. The movie follows two threads in the life of Kya who was abandoned at an early age to fend for herself in the marshlands of North Carolina, and who in her early twenties she's suspected of murdering one of the boys who takes a fancy to her. It's quite beautiful to look at, but the story is really imbalanced between the two threads and the tone is a confused mess between a murder-mystery, a coming of age drama, or a romance, and it ends up being none of those things. And for taking care of herself in a swamp for ten years or so, Kya's teeth are never short of perfection. Got to imagine the book is much better. 4/10 079 -- Girl in the Picture. From the makers of Abducted in Plain Sight, which tells you quite a bit in terms of how fucked up this story is. Starts with a young woman killed in a hit and run and it's just the tip of a very nasty iceberg when it's revealed that she's not quite who people thought she was and her husband wasn't exactly her husband. Fascinating true crime documentary but there's more than a little of the freak show about it that makes you want a shower afterwards, much in the same way as Abducted in Plain Sight did at *that* bit. 7/10

Given that they've had a relationship outside and she probably has a better idea of Jacques' mental health than anyone on the Island, Gemma deliberately threw petrol on the fire by cliping to him about what Adam said, knowing exactly how he was going to react. Then there's the surreal spectacle of a man crying in his swimming trunks as he pledges his soul and declares his love (almost) to a woman who notably doesn't return the compliment. What a beamer.

074 -- Monster (#44 in the A24 series) See if you can guess what the monster *really* is. Zoe Kazan and Ella Ballentine star as a young alcoholic mother and her daughter. Lizzie has had enough of living with Kathy, her mom, so the two set off to Lizzie's dad so she can live with him and his new partner. On route, they hit a wolf in the road and total the car. On closer examination, they discover that something else killed the wolf and whatever it was, it's still out there. It's a small cast and I think primarily physical effects that use the most of the dark setting, but the story is dull and despite a couple of jumps it's pretty unsurprising. The metaphor couldn't be more obvious if it tried. 075 -- Official Competition. Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas star in a bit of a meta look at the nonsense involved in making a movie. It reminded me a bit of Living in Oblivion, but it has more of an obvious plotline and is in Spanish so maybe it isn't too similar. Cruz is the maniac director with crazy methods. Banderas is an aging box-office star of popular but lowbrow efforts while Oscar Martinez's Ivan is more of an actor's actor and the whole movie is pretty much about how the three of them piss each other off. Funny in places, but pretty predictable. Cruz's hair got its own dressing room.

This is my first year watching…is it always like this? Andrew downgrading his own confession of “sucking her tits or whatever” to “licking her tits or whatever” made me laugh more than anything else on TV this year.

So far the vast majority of them have been on Amazon Prime Video. I think I had to rent one of the earlier ones from Apple.

070 -- The Sea of Trees (#40 in A24 series) The overarching subject matter of Aokigahara, the Japanese Suicide Forest, is fascinating in a grim kind of way, and the cast is good, so this should be at least decent. Following a personal tragedy, Matthew McConaughey's character, Arthur, travels to Japan, to the suicide forest at Mount Fuji, to kill himself. Once there, he sees and rescues a Japanese businessman, played by Ken Watanabe, but the two of them become lost and soon rather than ending their lives, their focus shifts to survival and over the course of a night, they learn about themselves, each other, love, life, the universe, and everything. Cloyingly sentimental in its approach, there's a horrendous twist in the tail. 2/10 for the shots on the forest. 071 -- American Honey (#41 in the A24 series) Andrea Arnold isn't the most cheerful of film makers. This comes somewhere between Red Road and Cow, the depressing movie I saw earlier in the year about a dairy cow. Star is a young woman in her late teens, already lost in life, looking after her mother's kids, and living in fear from her abusive father. She meets charismatic Jake, Shia LaBeouf in his most Shia LaBeouf role, at a K-Mart and abandons her life to embark with him and a bus load of other young adults as they tour the midwest selling magazine subscriptions by any means necessary and getting up to exactly what you'd expect them to do. It's a movie that has you itching in the first fifteen minutes and it never really relents. With a handheld camera and what appears to be more ideas than a plot, Arnold employs a Cinéma Vérité style as this cast from a modern-day Oliver Twist moves through wealthy suburbs to slums to oil fields to Badlands, and along the way, maybe Star learns a few things about herself and life. At nearly three hours, it's the longest movie in the A24 catalogue and that's an awful lot of Shia LaBeouf. Would've been easier to like had it been an hour shorter. 6/10 072 -- Moonlight (#42 in the A24 series) The fact that La-La-Land was very briefly the Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards is made all the more ridiculous by how good Moonlight is. It's an extraordinarily good film with note-perfect performances throughout, an amazing score, and such an emotional experience. You watch it and for a moment or two, you feel a better person having seen it. 10/10 073 -- Supersonic (#43 in the A24 series) Two arsehole brothers start a band and as the band becomes bigger, they become bigger arseholes, until being massive arseholes is more important to them than being in the band. I like Oasis's music well enough, but I've never really fallen for the mystique of the Gallagher brothers, or agreed for a moment with their own sentiment that they were the biggest band in the world, so this insight into their lives and careers and one drug-fuelled fight after another became a little tiresome, but there were many cool moments, some light-hearted fun at a drummer's expense, and footage from rare performances so the attention isn't allowed to wander too far. 6/10

Felt like a pointless cliffhanger as it seems clear it’ll be Charlie and Danica getting punted.

Danica just pleased to get a bit of time on-camera.

Luca just went into a shop one day and asked for "some tattoos", didn't he?

There's surely nothing quite as bad in streaming terms as ITV Hub.

074 -- Equals (#37 in the A24 series) How perfect is it that director Drake Doremus seemingly insisted on Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart to be his leads of Silas and Nia in this movie, set in a dystopian utopian future where emotions are a thing of the past? Few couples are better equipped to portray this. And how predictable is it that once Silas and Nia find that they have romantic feelings for each other that it should fall apart so dramatically? Nice to look at but overall a bit too pompous for its own good. 4/10 075 -- Into the Forest (#38 in the A24 series) It's a perfectly serviceable kinda pre-apocalyptic movie that focusses on the micro as opposed to the macro and is all the better for it. Elliot Page and Evan Rachel Wood play Nella and Eva, two sisters in a somewhat future setting who have to cope together when the power goes out and doesn't come back on again. There are a few moments, particularly on the visits into town for supplies, that bare a resemblance to the days at the start of the pandemic which make the movie all the more possible, but overall there are too many sections that lack any narrative drive and the interest wanes, but the two leads are always watchable and believable. 6/10 076 -- Morris from America (#39 in the A24 series) American tween, Morris, moves to Germany thanks to his dad's work, struggles to fit in, finds friendship in an older girl, Katrin, who helps him find the confidence to develop his love for rapping. Craig Robinson is brilliant as the kid's dad but there's something about the relationship between Morris and Katrin that just doesn't work, which is a shame because the movie relies on it. 5/10 077 -- Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe. I remember watching Beavis and Butt-Head Do America at the ABC in Falkirk while everyone else in town was watching Kilmarnock win the Scottish Cup. So that'll be 24 May 1997, then. I loved ...Do America. I laughed so hard during the nuns in the bus scene that I farted. I worried that ...Do the Universe wouldn't live up to that but while I don't think I farted at any point, I thought it was just as good. It has a really weird charm to it, it's heart-felt, and it is somehow really funny that the story always seems to manage to progress while Beavis and Butt-Head aren't paying attention and are busy telling the same half-dozen jokes for an hour and a half. Maybe a bit baggy in the middle, but I laughed out loud throughout. 8/10 078 -- The Black Phone. The film adaptation of Joe Hill's short story is big on atmosphere and setting, and has two great performances from the leading kids, and has at least one scare in it that made the guy behind me donate his popcorn to the floor. A serial child-abducter is operating in Denver in the 70s, kidnaps Finney and throws him in a dungeon in his basement. A black phone on the wall is apparently disconnected but rings when the souls of the kids previously murdered contact Finney to make sure he doesn't suffer the same fate. It's light on scares, perhaps, but too many would be far worse, and there are a few lines of dialog that really stink the place up, but overall I thought it was great, and probably the best horror movie I've seen in the last couple of years. 8/10

A worthy champion (of champions). The winner of the prize task genuinely made me say wow.

Ekin Sue getting Ekin Sued by Jay tonight should be good value for money.

Jay to Ekin-Sue: The girls don't really like you as much as you think they do. Ekin-Sue to Amber: Ma boi's trying to tell me some bull that I'm not that popular with my friends. Isn't that ridiculous? Amber: Well... I lolled.