Month: January 2016

What have you been watching? Including Room, Marvel’s Agent Carter, Arrow and Endeavour

23 January 2016 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently 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 “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever. And if you want to know when any of these shows are on in your area, there’s Locate TV – they’ll even email you a weekly schedule.

It’s been another huge week, full of new shows, continuing shows and returning shows. I’ve struggled manfully with them, but despite delaying WHYBW to Saturday to give me a little extra time to get through everything and then write about them, I’m still to cover three new series:

  • Mad Dogs (Amazon Instant Video): Shawn Ryan’s US remake of the Sky 1 original brings back Ben Chaplin in a different role but none of the other cast for this relocated show about a bunch of old friends (in both senses of ‘old’) who reunite for a plush holiday in the middle of sunny nowhere. Before you know it, everything ends up going a bit criminally pear-shaped and holiday heaven becomes holiday nightmare. I haven’t even watched the pilot of this, which has been sitting on Amazon for a while now, but given the original didn’t overly impress me and I gave up after about three episodes, I’m not sure I’m going to be in much of a rush to watch this version either. I do hope they explain why it’s called Mad Dogs, given the lyrics are ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun’.
  • Baskets (US: FX): Co-created by Louis CK, Zach Galifianakis and Jonathan Krisel, this sees Galifianakis playing dual roles as twin brothers, one of whom aspired to clown school in Paris, but who ended up becoming a rodeo clown. It’s apparently a bit Marmite, but I’ll try to review it in the first half of next week.
  • Stan Lee’s Lucky Man (UK: Sky 1): Marvel’s Stan Lee gives us James Nesbitt as a Brit cop, down on his luck, who gets a magical bracelet that reverses his fortunes. It’s Stan Lee, so could be fun, but it’s also Sky 1 so could be stupid/mediocre beyond belief. Again, first half of next week for this one.

Despite those three failings, I have managed to cover rather a lot this week already, with reviews or previews of the first episodes of:

As well as a third-episode verdict on Cooper Barrett’s Guide To Surviving Life (US: Fox).

The meat of the week’s viewing has, however, been continuing and returning shows, so after the jump, you’ll find reviews of the latest episodes of (deep breath): 100 Code, American Crime, Arrow, Billions, Byw Celwydd (Living A Lie), Colony, Endeavour, The Family Law, The Flash, Grandfathered, Limitless, Man Seeking Woman, Occupied (Okkupert), Rebellion, Second Chance, Les hommes de l’ombre (Spin) and Supergirl. Oh yes, and the two-hour premier of the new season of Marvel’s Agent Carter. Pardon me if you were hoping I would carry on with Idiotsitter, but no thank you.

I’m pretty sure something’s going to have give on that list soon, but I’m not quite sure what yet. Pity the first show to turn in a duff episode.

This week, I also moseyed on down to the cinema to watch a movie:

Room (2015)
Adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s book of the same, which sees five-year old Jake (Jacob Tremblay) discovering that the small room he’s lived in his whole life may not be the extent of the universe and that his mother (Brie Larson) has been keeping some important and very disturbing details from him. While that scenario (inspired by real cases) doesn’t sound like a very enjoyable subject matter, both the book and the movie quickly switch things around and give us a genuinely moving tale of parental love, the adaptability of children and finding hope in extremis, so if you think it’s not your thing, you might find you’re completely wrong.

Not quite as initially claustrophobic as the book, the movie is still a magnificent piece of work, with Larson and Tremblay justifiably getting all kinds of award nominations. William H Macy appears for almost no good reason, except to remind you of all the roles he used to get before he ended up doing Shameless (US). Recommended – you won’t even be able to watch the trailer again afterwards, without wanting a cathartic little cry.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Room, Marvel’s Agent Carter, Arrow and Endeavour”

US TV

Review: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow 1×1 (US: The CW; UK: Sky 1)

22 January 2016 Rob Buckley 10 Comments


In the US: Thursdays, 8/7c, The CW
In the UK: Thursdays, 8pm, Sky 1. Starts March 3 (TBC)

Well, here it is. Finally. After months of cameos and dicking around with the storylines of both Arrow and The Flash, we finally have DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. 

For years now, these two shows has been building up a guest roster of superheroes and villains. That’s inevitable in TV programmes adapted from comic books that mass up a couple of dozen episodes a season, particularly since fans always want to see how their favourites shape up on screen. This process was initially organic. On Arrow, we had a whole season of former ninja assassin turned good, Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) aka ‘The Black Canary’, before her eventual and much lamented death at the start of season three. We similarly got a whole season with Superman Returns‘ Brandon Routh getting a second shot at superherodom as Ray Palmer aka The Atom, a man who wants to be a superhero so builds himself a shrinking, armoured exo-suit.

Meanwhile, over on The Flash, we got first Wentworth Miller as Flash nemesis Captain Cold (he has a gun that makes things cold) before, in a nifty bit of casting, his Prison Break brother Dominic Purcell turned up to play Captain Cold’s partner in crime Heat Wave (he has a gun that makes things hot). And on the superhero front, we got Victor Garber (Alias, Legally Blonde, Justice, Eli Stone, Charlie’s Angels, Deception) as one half of the nuclear-powered Firestorm, with Robbie Amell (The Tomorrow People) as his other half.

All of that worked pretty well. Then towards the end of the third season of Arrow and the first season of The Flash, suddenly someone had the cracking idea of assembling these popular supporting characters and a whole bunch of others into a spin-off TV show in which they’d fight a super-super-nemesis. And both Arrow and The Flash would be used to introduce – in just a few quick months – those extra characters and set the existing ones up to leave their current shows in favour of the new show.

That would naturally take some work and more than a bit of plot gymnastics. So on Arrow, we’ve seen the very dead and buried Black Canary dunked in Ra’s Al Ghul’s Lazarus Pit and brought back to life, then try to redeem herself (again) as White Canary. The Atom finds he’s only small fry so decides to go off to do something more worthwhile with his life than be, erm, a charming scientific genius philanthropist billionaire restoring a city to its former greatness.

Over on The Flash, Captain Cold and Heat Wave have been getting a bit fluffier and better motivated – sufficent to wanting, or at least not being averse, to saving the world. And with Robbie Amell not wanting to go long-term for another fantasy series, he gets sucked into a wormhole and replaced by BBC1/BBC3’s Franz Drameh.

That’s not been quite enough for a proper superhero team-up, so we’ve also had an Arrow/The Flash crossover to introduce Hawkgirl (Ciara Renée) and Hawkman (Germany’s own Falk Hentschel), a pair of repeatedly reincarnating lovers from Ancient Egypt who are repeatedly murdered throughout time by Vandal Savage, one of the DC Comic Universe’s Big Bads, who sucks them of their life energy so he can be immortal. 

Why do they all get together? Well, in the future, that Vandal Savage, who’s been organising wars throughout the centuries to distract attention away from himself as he slowly amasses power, finally gets what he wants and brutally takes over the world. A ‘Time Master’ from the East End of London, Rip Hunter, implores his fellow Time Masters to interfere and stop Savage’s reign of terror from ever happening. They refuse, because they don’t want to intervene in the timelines, so Hunter steals a time ship (amusingly, Arthur Darvil who played Rory on Doctor Who plays Hunter. How has there not been a copyright suit against this?) and goes back in time to the early 21st century to assemble our heroes (and villains) into a team who can take on Savage throughout the ages.

The big questions are:

  1. Will they succeed?
  2. What isn’t Hunter telling the alleged ‘legends of tomorrow’?
  3. Has all this effort actually been worth it?

Continue reading “Review: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow 1×1 (US: The CW; UK: Sky 1)”

News: Romeo & Juliet sequel; Wong to play Wong; Sky gets Twin Beaks, Billions; + more

22 January 2016 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Film casting

Canadian TV

Internet TV

  • Walter Presents gets 1m views [registration required]

UK TV

  • Sky Atlantic to be exclusive home of Showtime dramas, including Twin Peaks and Billions

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

Australian and New Zealand TV

Review: The Wizards of Aus 1×1 (Australia: SBS2)

21 January 2016 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In Australia: Aired nightly, Tuesday 19 January-Thursday 21 January, 8.30pm, SBS 2

As we discovered quite recently with The Shannara Chronicles (although, truth be told, we’ve known it in our hearts for quite some time), fantasy is not only a genre that’s very easy to parody, it’s almost self-parodic. Even when it’s being serious, there’s an inevitable difficulty in suspending disbelief, particularly when it starts throwing in pompous dialogue, not bothering to develop characters much beyond their ‘destinies’ and their general unwillingness to embrace them, plots that are largely scavenger hunts but with better prizes, and so on.

So you might ask what the point of The Wizards of Aus is, as it’s a parody of the fantasy genre in which two powerful but rather petty wizards fight their plot-ordained conflict in powerful but rather petty ways. Do we need it? Fantasy is silly already.

It’s a good question and I’m not sure there’s a good answer, beyond “So that Michael Shanks can make some silly and occasionally funny jokes.”

Michael Shanks?

Michael Shanks

No, he’s Canadian. This Michael Shanks.

Michael Shanks

He’s Australian. Or maybe a New Zealander. Or maybe both.

The basic plot is this: Shanks is a wizard who lives in a world of magic and dragons and wizards and knights and warrior women. Except all they do all day is fight and do idiotic, heroic things. So Shanks decides to move somewhere where rationality rules: the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Unfortunately, so do a lot of the other magical beings from his world. Some get regular-type jobs, others continue with their malevolent activities.

Shanks is a sort of halfway point between the two worlds – too smart and rational for the fantasy world, too magical and lack in worldly wisdom for Australia – and the show basically divides the humour into three types:

  1. Flashbacks to the fantasy world
  2. A somewhat lame attempt to satirise Australian racism using magical beings as an obvious metaphor for immigrants
  3. The juxtaposition of the magic world with the real world, with wizards applying for recycling bins.

The first camp is actually quite funny, with Shanks smartly sending up the conventions of the genre. You really wish that was the whole show – a sort of Blackadder of the fantasy world.

The second camp is obvious and rarely makes a point beyond “Look! This is just like how we’re treating the boat people and Asians! Do you see? Do you see?”

And the third camp, despite all kinds of shiny guest stars such as Guy Pearce (Iron Man 3, Memento), Liam McIntyre (Spartacus, The Flash) and Bruce Spence (Legend of the Seeker, Mad Max 2), really seems more like a big, long and possibly quite expensive advert for the Australian digital effects industry than anything actually funny.

Less is more, it seems, even in the fantasy realm.

If it weren’t such a busy month, I’d probably stick with the remaining episodes as although it’s a bit scattergun, there is at least reasonable promise in the show’s mocking of fantasy conventions. Unfortunately, it is so I won’t. YMMV.