Month: February 2012

Tuesday’s “Orlando Bloom to star in Zulu, Lucy Lawless in Top of the Lake and HBO’s Girls” news

21 February 2012 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Film

  • Jim Caviezel to star with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Tomb
  • Orlando Bloom and Djimon Hounsou to star in Zulu

Radio

British TV

  • Martin Csokas to star in Sky Atlantic’s Falcón: The Blind Man of Seville
  • Call The Midwife most successful new BBC1 drama series for over 10 years
  • Francesca Annis and Alfred Molina to star in Victoria Wood’s Loving Miss Hatto
  • Lucy Lawless joins Top of the Lake

US TV

US TV

Preview: Awake (NBC) 1×1

20 February 2012 Rob Buckley 10 Comments

Awake

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC. Starts March 1
In the UK: Not yet acquired

Hello to Jason Isaacs! Welcome back to the blog.

Yes, Jason Isaacs has himself a new US TV show, this time on network TV instead of cable. In it, rather than a member of the Rhode Island Irish mafia, he’s a cop.

No, don’t turn off. The cop bit is the least interesting part.

He’s a cop, but he’s a cop who has a car accident in which his wife dies, leaving him to look after his teenage son.

Except when he goes to sleep, he wakes up in seemingly a parallel world in which his son died and his wife survived. And when he goes to sleep at the end of the day, he returns to the first reality.

I say reality because he doesn’t know which one’s real and which one’s a dream. They both seem equally real. Both his therapists want to help him, but will he give up on his wife or his son, assuming he can? Because for some reasons, the cases he investigates in the two realities are linked.

Here’s the first seven minutes of it for you to enjoy:

Continue reading “Preview: Awake (NBC) 1×1”

What did you watch this week (w/e February 17)?

20 February 2012 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

Time (well, let’s pretend it is) for “What did you watch this week?”, my chance to tell you what I watched this week that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case we’ve missed them.

First, the usual recommendations: Archer, Being Human (US), The Daily Show, House, Modern Family, Happy Endings, Portlandia, Ringer, Royal Pains, Shameless (US), Southland, Spartacus, Suburgatory and 30 Rock. Do watch them (if you can and they happen to be on TV this week).

  • Archer: Back on form this season
  • Modern Family: A very good episode this week. Worried that lovely wife and I are now this close to being Claire and Phil.
  • Modern Family: Access All Areas: A Sky exclusive documentary. Interesting only to hear what everyone sounds like normally. Otherwise, cringe-making awfulness.
  • Royal Pains: Ooh. Surprising ending. Normally the show’s so fluffy. And it’s good to have Boris back after all this time away. Not sure about that ‘Swiss French’ accent and unless Boris was making a racist joke, Campbell Scott’s pronunciation of Frankstein needs some work.
  • 30 Rock: Funny again! Yay! And good Batman episode too.
  • Southland: I think we can conclusively assume now that everyone in the last three seasons who wasn’t a patrolman or Regina King has been fired so the producers can afford Lucy Liu. Also a very sensitively handled ‘coming out’ episode for Cooper.
  • Spartacus: Far less attention-grabbing than before and it’s hard not to imagine every scene improved by Andy Whitfield.

And in movies:

  • Inception: Still awesome
  • Heat: Still awesome
  • The Dark Knight: Better than I remember.

“What did you watch this week?” is your chance to recommend to friends and fellow blog readers the TV and films that they might be missing or should avoid – and for me to do mini-reviews of everything I’ve watched. Since we live in the fabulous world of Internet catch-up services like the iPlayer and Hulu, why not tell your fellow readers what you’ve seen so they can see the good stuff they might have missed?

The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: The Almighty Johnsons (SyFy)

20 February 2012 Rob Buckley 15 Comments

In the UK: Thursdays, 10pm, SyFy
In New Zealand: Already aired. Season two coming soon

I have to say this is a borderline one for me. It’s a nice, amiable show in which a bunch of semi-dickish brothers turn out to be Nordic gods. The youngest is Odin and he has to go on a quest to find Frig, his wife, so that they can all become full gods; if he doesn’t, they’ll all die and so will big chunks of the population of New Zealand. Opposing him/them are a bunch of goddesses who want to run the world and don’t want a bunch of almighty Johnsons to be running it instead of them.

Cue the metaphorical and literal battle of the sexes.

And it’s all right. The first episode was fine. The second episode was a bit better, had a little more depth and fleshed out the other brothers and the supporting characters. The third rounded off the plot and let us get to know the goddesses a little better, too.

But it’s not much better than all right. It’s kind of fun. It doesn’t have a great attitude towards women, although the men fare little better. There’s a lot of pseudo-myth floating around but not really being capitalised upon. There’s the occasional fight scene, which isn’t bad.

So it’s okay. I’m tempted to drop it, but it’s amiable and different enough from other shows that I’m going to stick with it, despite its 3 on the Carusometer. Your mileage may vary.

Carusometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Well, it’s already on season two in New Zealand, so it’s clearly got a future.