Film

An archive of blog entries about films and film production.

What have you been watching? Including Terminator: Genisys, Man of Tai Chi, The Last Ship, UnREAL and Westside

10 July 2015 Rob Buckley 12 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.

I’m not exactly behind on my TV viewing, so much as watching certain shows at Mrs TMINE’s pace and she’s been very busy of late. That means I still haven’t seen the latest two episodes of Strike Back or this week’s Humans. And as ABC Australia only aired the first episode of its new supernatural chiller Glitch last night, I’ve not yet had the time to watch it, which means I’ll review it on Monday or Tuesday next week.

All the same, this week, I’ve passed third-episode verdicts on:

And after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of the usual regulars: Dark Matter, Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal, The Last Ship, Suits, Stitchers, True Detective, UnREAL, Westside and The Whispers.

I’ve also watched a couple of movies.

Terminator: Genisys (2015) (in cinemas)
Probably the first proper sequel to the first two Terminator movies, this does for the franchise what JJ Abrams’ Star Trek did for Paramount’s space epic, effectively recasting and rebooting the whole series while still maintaining continuity.

Here, the idea is that the timelines are being altered again, with more Terminators being sent further back in time to both protect and kill Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones) that by the time 1984 rolls round and Kyle Reese goes back to save her, she’s not in need of saving, having been raised by an ageing Terminator (Arnie) to be a warrior. The question is: can Reese, Connor and daddy Terminator now stop Skynet from taking over the planet and nearly exterminating humanity? And what will Skynet do to stop them?

The first half hour or so is actually very good, with not only some good ‘future shock’ scenes, but near frame-by-frame recreations of key scenes from The Terminator that even give us a young Arnie v old Arnie fight. We also get Lee Byung-hun (Red 2, GI Joe) as a T-1000 and Jason Clarke (Brotherhood, The Chicago Code) as John Connor.

The trouble is that the rest of the movie suffers from ‘CGI weightlessness’ – while the CGI is impressive, it also gives us physically impossible physical effects that rob the action of impact and any sense of tension. It’s basically just computers plastering the screen with pixels, for all the emotion that’s conveyed.

All the same, much better than it has any right to be, quite funny in place and although it often feels like fanboy homage to the original, it never feels slavish and often innovates and takes the story in unexpected directions. Blink and you’ll miss Matt Smith, by the way.

Man of Tai Chi (2013) (Now TV)
It’s a Matrix reunion for Keanu Reeves’ directorial debut, with this Chinese-set, half-Mandarin, half-English martial-arter that stars Reeves’ Matrix martial arts instructor and bestest friend Tiger Chen as a T’ai Chi student who wants to show the world the power of T’ai Chi in conventional tournaments. However, Reeves’ evil billionaire wants him to star in underground fight movies and tries to corrupt Chen.

With fight choreography by The Matrix’s Yuen Woo-ping, naturally everything’s dead exciting but littered with wire work, and although my six months of T’ai Chi at university doesn’t exactly make me an expert, I didn’t notice an awful lot of T’ai Chi on display (“What sort of T’ai Chi is that?” “My own style.” You betcha), beyond a couple of scenes with Chen’s sifu. The plotting is pretty much exactly what you’d expect, with only a couple of twists, and unfortunately, despite his presence towards the end, The Raid/Star Wars 7’s Iko Uwais doesn’t get much screen time.

All the same, enjoyable enough, some good locations and with enough variation from the standard formulae that you’ll never be bored.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Terminator: Genisys, Man of Tai Chi, The Last Ship, UnREAL and Westside”

News

News: Doctor Who, Sherlock, Homeland, Damien trailers, more Agatha Raisin, US acquisitions + more

10 July 2015 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Victorian Sherlock

Doctor Who

Film

  • Ben Affleck to direct and co-write Batman film with Geoff Johns

Film casting

Trailers

  • Trailer for The Diabolical, with Ali Larter

Internet TV

UK TV

US TV shows

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

Film

There’s been an Ant-Man premiere for ants

7 July 2015 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Ant-Man for ants

No, really. There has.

Today Empire Cinemas threw the world’s first ever film premiere for ants with a screening of Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man for the leafcutter ants at London Zoo. Bringing the action to the ants with a miniature screen, two speakers, eight seats, branding board, red carpet and popcorn; London Zoo’s leaf-cutter exhibition was transformed into a small-scale cinema for this special unique event.

The leafcutter ants, which can grow up to 1cm in size in their lifetime, attended the film in true premiere style and posed with their leaves for photos in front of the brilli-ant Empire Cinemas miniature branding board and red carpet. The hard-working insects then proceeded to crawl over the seats, popcorn holders and even the screen before the film began. No ants were harmed at the premiere.

Ant-Man, with its stellar cast including Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and Judy Greer, tells the story of a con man with the ability to shrink in size but grow in strength, who must help his mentor protect the secret of his Ant-Man suit and pull off a heist that will save the world. The film, which screens in Empire Cinemas from July 17th (available in IMAX 3D format in Birmingham and Basildon), was produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Disney.

Jon Nutton, Marketing Director of Empire Cinemas said, “It’s been fantastic working with London Zoo to create the world’s first ever film premiere for ants. With the nature of the film, we wanted to do something special for its launch and we hope the ants enjoyed the premiere as much as our customers enjoy the film in the cinema and in IMAX.”

ZSL London Zoo’s Head of BUGS, Dave Clarke said: “The leafcutter ants here at ZSL London Zoo, of which the soldiers can grow up to 1cm in length, use their amazing strength to transport cut pieces of leaf and flowers to turn it into mulch for their nests. Their behaviour is exactly the same as in the wild where their custom-built exhibit features a rope course to take them from station to station, but the ants also got to explore a new habitat in the form of the miniature cinema. They told us they are hoping the film is brilli-ant, and not an ant-i climax….”

PR stunt it may have been, but I bet it was 1,000 times better to watch than Zoo.

Ant and popcorn

News: UnREAL renewed, Warren Ellis’s James Bond, BBC licence fee shocker + more

7 July 2015 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Film casting

Comics

UK TV

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

  • Trailer for TNT’s Public Morals

New US TV show casting

  • Anna Camp, Ron Livingston, Ray Stevenson et al to star in National Geographic’s Saints and Strangers
  • Jeremy Sisto and Evan Ross replace Adam Rothenberg and Darrel Brit Gibson on ABC’s Wicked City
  • Adan Canto joins ABC’s Blood and Oil
  • Domenick Lombardozzi joins Fox’s Rosewood

What have you been watching? Including Scream, Mr Holmes, Ballers, True Detective and Mr Robot

3 July 2015 Rob Buckley 24 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.

Summer schedules are here, so another week, another batch of new programmes to review. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed most of the new shows, I think:

I’ve also passed third-episode verdicts on:

I haven’t watched this week’s episode of Strike Back, which I usually watch with my wife, but she had better things to do this week. So that means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of the usual regulars – Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal, The Last Ship, Suits, Stitchers, True Detective, Tyrant, Westside and The Whispers – as well as newbies Ballers, The Brink, Killjoys, Mr Robot and UnREAL. At least one of them’s for the chop.

But I’ve watched one other new TV show, as well as a movie…

Scream (US: MTV)
I was umming and ahhing about whether to review Scream, given that

  1. It’s MTV so aimed at ‘those young people’
  2. I never really liked the Scream movies
  3. I have a big workload next week so might not have the time
  4. I’m slightly boycotting anything associated with Kevin Williamson, as a result of the evil that is The Following and Stalker.

But as I had nothing else to watch this lunchbreak, I decided to watch it anyway. And frankly, I was bored. Scream as a movie was moderately interesting, critiquing and subverting the horror genre with characters making explicit analysis of the tropes of horror movies, so that these could then be undermined.

The TV Scream wishes it was even half that clever, though. Not truly a sequel, given it doesn’t really follow on from the original movies or feature those characters, as far as I can see, it does however feature a ghost-masked killer who’s always on the end of a phone (or social media interaction), talking to his victim. It also starts off by doing the exact same thing as the original Scream – killing the most famous cast member in her own home while she’s on the phone to the killer.

All the same, that’s where the similarities really stop, since the rest is tedious. The show spends most of its first hour boring us witless with a bunch of cookie-cutter teens and their cookie-cutter relationships, which are so tediously unoriginal, the show tries to be clever by pointing out how tediously unoriginal they are at the end. It also tries to ‘Scream’ TV shows, name-checking the likes of American Horror Story, Hannibal, The Walking Dead et al, without adding even an iota of insight or analysis to them.

Even halfway through, I was desperate for my lunchbreak to end and the sweet relief of work to begin. Surely that’s not the way it’s supposed to be?

Mr Holmes (2015) (in cinemas)
Sir Ian McKellen plays a 90-year-old Sherlock Holmes, retired and looking after his bees, while slowly losing his faculties. At the same time, he thinks back 30 years to an old case that Watson fictionalised and whose solution he can’t quite remember.

Those going in expecting a ‘Sherlock Holmes story’ will be disappointed as there’s only two minor mysteries for Holmes to solve in the entire piece and they’re not the hardest to crack. But while it’s still definitely a story featuring Sherlock Holmes – in various forms, including the Strand magazine Holmes and Nicholas Rowe’s Holmes, Rowe having starred in Young Sherlock Holmes – Holmes here is a proxy for intellectuality without emotionality/spirituality and how it’s ultimately no comfort if you’re human and mortal.

I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it’s something that definitely leaves you thinking about it for some time afterwards, and McKellen is superb at both ages.

Also features a slightly odd excursion to Japan with Hiroyuki Sanada (Helix, The Last Samurai, Ring, Lost).

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Scream, Mr Holmes, Ballers, True Detective and Mr Robot”