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.
Grrr. Aargh. Sundays. They really make this whole thing harder. As of last week, there was already The Good Fight, Billions, Time After Time and Making History, but now American Crime is back and there’s The Arrangement to watch, too. So, given I do actually have a day job and the whole of Marvel’s Iron Fist is coming out on Netflix this Friday, let’s face facts and accept I’m going to be a week behind with everything that airs on Sunday from now.
Soz.
All the same, Time After Time will be getting a third-episode verdict later this week, seeing as I reviewed the first two last week; and I’ll be casting my eyes over the first two episodes of The Arrangement (US) as well, so there is at least hope in sight.
Elsewhere this week, I reviewed the first episode of Making History and passed verdict on The Good Fight, which means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of: 24: Legacy, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, Imposters, Legion, Lethal Weapon, The Magicians, Powerless and Taken, as well as the season finale of Man Seeking Woman. The observant will notice I haven’t watched Fortitude or Prime Suspect 1973 this week. Sorry about that, although it probably says something about both them that I haven’t pushed myself to watch either.
However, I did watch the first episode of the new season of The Americans, which I’ll also be covering after the jump. And in other news, I’m going to drop not one but two regular shows this week. Can you guess which?
I also managed to watch a movie at the weekend, mind.
Arrival (2016)
Mysterious aliens ‘the heptapods’ arrive on Earth, but they don’t speak Earth languages. It’s the job of linguist Amy Adams and theoretical physicist Jeremy Renner (a ‘Christmas Jones’ on the plausible casting scale) to try to learn how to communicate with them and find out what they want.
Arrival was heavily hyped as the new 2001 of intelligent science-fiction movies, so we went into this with high expectations, particularly given what language nerds lovely wife and I both are. Disappointed we were. Disappointed.
While there was a little bit about the difficulties of learning any language, this was a bowdlerised version of the original book’s linguistic intrigue…
The heptapods have two distinct forms of language. Heptapod A is their spoken language, which is described as having free word order and many levels of center-embedded clauses.… Unlike its spoken counterpart, Heptapod B has such complex structure that a single semantic symbol cannot be excluded without changing the entire meaning of a sentence.
…in much the same way as The Martian changed the original book’s constant Macgyvering-in-extremis into a far simpler tale of surviving against the odds.
Even so, despite some beautiful visual direction, Arrival is largely a film in which Renner and Adams repeatedly go into a room, see some circles, then go away again, interspersed with Adams thinking about her dead daughter. Tension and excitement there are not.
That said, there is a point in the movie when Adams finally learns the aliens’ language where Arrival comes together, everything becomes clear and the movie becomes a much more interesting piece thanks to a couple of properly genius ideas. There are a couple of scenes that probably will linger for a long time in the memory, too.
Not so much the new 2001, then, so much as the new (spoilers, because they’re very, very similar)
Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Arrival (2016) and The Americans”
