Month: July 2006

Watch some shows for free over on Sci Fi Pulse: Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, The Amazing Screw-On Head

14 July 2006 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

US cable network The Sci Fi Channel is giving us all (for some reason, they haven’t banned British viewers like they normally do) the chance to watch a couple of TV shows streamed over the Internet in not very high quality. Hoozah.

The first is Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, a Channel 4 series that starred Richard Ayoade of The IT Crowd among others. It’s a parody of just about every 80s sci-fi/horror anthology series and serial going, with references to The Twilight Zone and The Ray Bradbury Theater in the opening titles alone, although the likes of Stephen King and Shaun Hutson are the main victims.

It’s not actually very funny though. It’s like something a bunch of students put together to show how clever they are (I, erm, wrote similar things when I was 16…): yes, you can see exactly what they’re satirising, but it doesn’t make you laugh, only go “Oh yes. Very clever.”

Also appearing in stream-o-vision is The Amazing Screw-on Head, a pilot for a new animated series based on a comic book of the same name. Not too great either, but you can vote on it at the end to decide whether it should be made into a series.

While you’re about it, if you decide to watch anything on the site, you’ll get the SciFi video player and be able to watch interviews with the Doctor Who team. It has Eccles-cake in full humourless mode, sucking the fun and joy out of the atmosphere. But it’ll make you all nostalgic for 2005.

Comments feed

13 July 2006 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Little bit of a housekeeping message here, rather than anything that’s potentially interesting.

If you want to keep abreast at all times of what everyone’s saying on this blog (which you might do. I don’t know), there’s now a comments RSS feed you can subscribe to. It’s for the entire blog, not just the latest entry, so you can be sure of knowing exactly what’s up at all times, particularly if you subscribe to the entry RSS feed as well.

Here ends the customer service message.

UPDATE: I should mention that if you don’t know what an RSS feed is and how useful it can be, there’s a fine explanation on the SixApart web site.

US TV

Review: Brotherhood

13 July 2006 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Jason Isaacs in Brotherhood

In the US: Sunday, 10 pm ET/PT, Showtime

In the UK: Not acquired yet

Jason Isaacs likes to do hard. His first big UK role was in Civvies, Lynda La Plante’s everyday story of former paratroopers trying to get jobs that don’t involve breaking and entering. He’s over in the US now in Brotherhood, a Showtime drama about two brothers, one on the right side of the law, the other on the wrong side.

Guess which side Jason’s on.

At first glance, Brotherhood isn’t particularly inspiring. Isaacs is a serious crim who’s been missing for seven years. Australian actor Jason Clarke plays his brother, who’s now a respectable politician. Brotherhood ostensibly looks at how you can have a family member you want to love but who will ruin everything you’ve done if you allow them to get close to you.

But there is a slight twist to this. Clarke isn’t actually very respectable. His vote is buyable, he’s in league with all sorts of bad elements, including corrupt unions (oh what a surprise. A US drama series where a union is corrupt). He only wants Isaacs out of his life so that people don’t realise he’s actually about as criminal as they come, too. The show’s most interesting moments deal with the corruption of the political process.

Isaacs’ character isn’t as evil as everyone thinks though. Although a ‘three-in-one’ hit man (judge, jury and executioner), not adverse to extreme amounts of brutality and mutilation, he’s all doing it with the best intents: he takes action against a man who threatens to rape a woman by cutting of the man’s ear and sending it to her as a gift along with some new earrings (it’s supposed to reassure her); instead of killing people, he pays them to disappear so he won’t have to.

And the ‘brotherhood’ of the title doesn’t just mean the two Jasons’ brotherhood; it also means the brotherhood between criminals in the same gang.

At the moment though, Brotherhood is pretty unappetising. There’s none of the great writing of The Sopranos. There’s no character – major or minor – who isn’t criminal or unpleasant in one way or another, right down to Clarke’s nine-year-old daughter.

It’s heavy going and not especially enjoyable. The strength of Isaacs’ and Clarke’s performances make it an interesting character piece, but there’s going to need to be more plot and development to make it more than just a tale of two brothers – something we’ve seen many times before.

Film reviews

Fearless: fun but I’ve seen it somewhere before

13 July 2006 Natalia Romanova Post a comment

Last night, it being Orange Wednesday and all, I went to see what is promised to be Jet Li’s last martial arts movie: Fearless. How could I resist?

Fearless is set in Shanghai at the turn of the 20th Century. Li plays Huo Yuan Jia (the film’s Chinese title), founder of the Jin Wu Sports Federation. A martial arts master, Huo Yuan Jia ends up fighting Westerners and Japanese in a demonstration contest to prove that the Chinese are not “the weak men of the East”, as the Westerners suggested. But most of the movie is a flashback to his life, showing how he became a famous fighter, how his life fell apart through poor choices and mistakes, and how he was able to pull himself back together again.

There are essentially three intents of Fearless:

  1. To prove Jet Li can act and therefore should be considered for future dramatic roles that don’t involve wu shu
  2. To prove that China was a mess in the early 20th century and that the People’s Republic of China was therefore a very good idea indeed
  3. To recapture some of the things that made Jet Li’s earlier Hong Kong films so good in order to give him a good send-off.

Continue reading “Fearless: fun but I’ve seen it somewhere before”

Garth Ennis and John Woo unite!

13 July 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

New comics publisher Virgin Comics is to launch a “Director’s Cut” series of comics. The idea is that famous directors will come up with their own comics, the first in this line of mighty story-tellers being John Woo. Garth Ennis, famous for various things including Preacher, is going to be scripting “Seven Brothers”, as Woo’s comic will be called.

I checked the Virgin Comics web site and I have to say the rest of their stuff looks like arse, so this is going to be a blessing for them I suspect. And yes, Richard Branson does have something to do with it. As of yet, the web site has nothing on the new range.