Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple column the 45th of its kind coming to you from a place of almost utter desolation and grief based on the fact that we only have one more episode of The Last of Us on the telly! Theme tune!
(click audio button, natch!)
I want to start this week by talking not about The Last of Us but ANOTHER TV series to do with videogames which I started watching as I was killing time before this week’s episode of The Last of Us and tore through half of the first season – it was that good.
The Consultant is a show about a weird guy who is brought into a cellphone games company after their owner dies in just about the worst way you can imagine. I won’t spoil it.
He is played by Christoph Waltz who got that Oscar for his top evil Nazi-portraying-action in Inglorious Basterds, one of the greatest war movies of all time as far as THIS guy is concerned!
(I’m pointing at myself just now. With two thumbs. How can I still type? Because I am THAT special and I’ve been in this game for a long time.)
Why is Inglorious Basterds so special? Well A) the whole point of the movie is to kill as many Nazis as possible and B) in amongst all of this violence Tarantino actually gave a part to “Least Violent and Funniest Ever Canadian” Mike Myers. Which I thought was an exceptionally cool move I never saw coming. As a result Inglorious Basterds is one of the few examples of bad spelling I will give a pass to.
So why IS it spelled Basterds rather than Bastards?
Originally Tarantino refused to explain other than saying that it’s spelled like that because that’s the way the word sounds. Then he enlarged upon on that, but not much, on a David Letterman appearance by saying, “it’s a Tarantino spelling.”
This is precisely why I love Tarantino. He is the most passionate, the most committed and the most uncompromising film maker ever. He doesn’t give a damn..
Neither does Christoph Waltz’s character in The Consultant. On his first morning he has an all staff meeting and gives everyone working remotely one hour to get in otherwise they will get fired.
On the stroke of the hour he goes to lock the door and shuts a just-arriving employee, Lois, out saying, “It’s not as if she didn’t have transport”.
Lois is in a wheelchair.
Just when you think that is terrible? In the next scene two characters are talking about her firing and one says, “Wheelchair Lois or cleft palate Lois?”
If you google this show it says it is a comedy. A dark comedy to be precise. But I think it’s not. It’s a sick, dark drama with the odd gag. But not “setup then punchline” gags. More a case of wry comments from characters such as:
“I spent the last five months getting paid $5800 to mo cap shitting cats and I finally made peace with that.“
Amongst that there are some pretty brutal scenes. Really brutal. One thing in particular that is quite hard to watch.
It’s basically a mystery. The mystery being who the hell IS this consultant? Or… what? My wife thinks he is AI. I think he is Satan. Let me know what you think in the Domments section, but I am only up to episode 4 so don’t spoil it for me if you have the reveal. Anyway seeing as we will all be looking for a new videogames/tech TV show to watch once The Last of Us ends on Sunday I would recommend giving this a view. I watched it on Amazon Prime over here in Canada but lord knows how some of you dodgy sorts out there in the real world will get your eyes on it.
And on that bombshell that’s the end of this week’s free teaser. Become a PAID PAL if you want, it helps keep me being able to do this amongst the stresses of the day job and that other one I have which is being a sub-par parent to grumpy teens.
Also, next week… there will be no free teaser! Just the full version for PAID PALS to give them even more added value because THAT’S how much I love them.
I am approaching the ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of this column podcast colcast thing so I am considering different options and models and formats and experiments for it moving forward. So, see you in the free seats in 2 weeks’ time. See you PAID PALS after the jump. Cheers.
Dominik Diamond's Little Old Purple Column #45 FREE TEASER