Month: June 2012

It’s “What did you watch last fortnight?”, my chance to tell you what I watched last fortnight that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.

The usual recommendations from the first-run shows are (summer has truly arrived): The Daily Show, Mad Men, and Prisoners of War. Hunt them down. I’m also adding Continuum and Playhouse Presents to the recommended list, so hunt them down as well. Royal Pains has returned as well, but it had such a fundamentally lazy, uninspiring first episode that I can’t really recommend it any more.

Here’s a few thoughts on what else I’ve been watching, though:

• Tron: Uprising – from the people who brought you Tron: Legacy comes pretty much exactly the same, mildly sexist, entirely uninspiring scenario but done as a cartoon that unlike the movie actually has Tron in it and a bunch of dull programs who are basically modern teenagers. Entirely missing the point of Tron, it does at least have an excellent voice cast, including Bruce Boxleitner and Lance Henricksen.
• Cougar Town: A nice enough season finale that entirely failed to do anything surprising, beyond having well known showbiz reporter Michael Ausiello cameo for 10 seconds as a waiter with one line.
• Sebastian Bergman: an intelligently written first two-thirds or so, albeit with Bergman being a massive cock, followed by a standard Hollywood ending done badly. Disappointingly average compared to other BBC4 Nordic Noires.

And in movies:

• Haywire: And I have a new crush – Gina Carano, officially “the woman who should play Wonder Woman if they ever get round to making a movie”. Not necessarily the best actress in the world, but does a great job as the action heroine in this Steven Soderbergh production filled with big names like Ewan MacGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonia Banderas and Bill Paxton. Essentially The Bourne Identity with the look and feel of Ocean’s 11, with Carano taking on the Jason Bourne role, it’s not a brilliant movie, but it has some surprising moments, has a few nods to Carano’s MMA career, is fun enough and hopefully should catapult Carano into bigger and better things.

“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?