Normally, this is the bit where I give the latest Wonder Woman news, but there ain’t any, unless you count the new picture above. And I don’t think Supergirl teaching the Live with Kelly crew the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman twirl counts either:
Oh, the prices of a whole bunch of DC Rebirth comics are going up by a third soon, including Trinity. But not of Wonder Woman, I don’t think.
So without much – or indeed any – ado, let’s head off to the reviews of Trinity #5, Justice League v Suicide Squad #5 and Justice League (Rebirth) #13. Spoilers: at least two of them aren’t any good.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
I know there are a lot of new show coming soon. They really are. They’re just not here yet.
That means that in the past week, I’ve only reviewed Six (US: History) and passed a third-episode verdict on Emerald City (US: NBC; UK: 5*). I’ll be deluged again soon and complaining about it, I know….
Anyway, a few oldies are back in the schedules again, which means that as well as The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, Man Seeking Woman and Son of Zorn, I’ll be covering Lucifer and Timeless and the season finale of Shooter. I also managed to squeeze in a few episodes of The Man in the High Castle. And I watched a movie.
The Magnificent Seven (2016) Antoine Fuqua’s insipid remake of the classic 1960 Western, in which black-clad gunslinger Denzel Washington puts together a group of similarly iconic gunslingers to help protect Haley Bennett’s village from powerful rich guy Peter Sarsgaard.
The film goes through most of the same motions as the original, from the introduction and recruitment of each of the remaining seven (Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Lee Byung-hun, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Vincent D’Onofrio and Martin Sensmeier) through the training of the villagers to the eventual battle with the baddies, but without ever really making you care about any of them, beyond the fact they’re Lee Byung-hun, Chris Pratt and Vincent D’Onofrio. Indeed, unlike both the original and the film’s ultimate antecedent, Shichinin no Samurai (The Seven Samurai), the film only really comes alive when it’s an action scene, the characters proving otherwise unendearing or even interesting.
A few lines from the original (“If God had not wanted them shawn, he would not have made them sheep”) manage to sneak in, but they only sure up the rest of the script’s ultimate emptiness, and the frequent clichéd homages to Westerns in general only serve to make the movie look hackneyed.
As we all hopefully know, the rather excellent spy drama The Americans is set in the 1980s. This in and of itself isn’t too remarkable, since practically everything is set in the 1980s these days.
But to a lot of viewers my age, it’s a bit surprising to remember that’s not five or ten years ago (sounds about right, no?) but more than 30.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. No, how can that possibly be correct?!
But it is. And for people who aren’t my age, that’s a bit hard to deal with, even for the show’s stars:
…And even some of the younger PAs on the set who are 18, 19 – I still blink hard when they say, “Well, we’re doing this period drama.”
Yes, that’s right. ‘A period drama.’ Gah!
It’s just got worse, though. Amazon has a slightly different classification for it.
Yes, lumped in under ‘historical TV shows’ with Copper (set in the 1860s) and Turn (setting: 1770s) is The Americans.
Jaunt developing: The Lawnmower Man TV series; abandoned lunar base action-thriller Luna; politics and immortality series The Enlightened Ones; stoner comedy Bad Trip; and robot hero quest Miss Gloria
ABC developing: adaptation of Channel 4’s Raised by Wolves
