Film reviews

An archive of The Medium is Not Enough’s film reviews

What have you been watching? Including Imaginary Mary and Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them

3 April 2017 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

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.

The last WHYBW for some time now, since I’m off on vacation for a week from Wednesday and then there’s the double Bank Holiday weekend that is Easter directly after that. Maybe I’ll try to squeeze it in on the 13th or 18th, although I’d actually have to watch TV while on holiday to manage the former, which just ain’t happening; maybe it’ll even be the 24th. But WHYBW will be back, I promise.

The airwaves have been a little quieter of late, but I’ve somehow not managed to watch any of Shots Fired, which means I doubt I’ll ever get round to playing catch-up. Midnight Sun I’m going to try to binge-watch somehow, since it got better after last week’s ep-and-a-half review. If I find the time, I might play catch up on Fortitude, too, and I really will try to watch You Are Wanted.

Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed Nobodies (US: TV Land), which means that after the jump I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of The Americans, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, The Good Fight, Imposters and The Magicians, as well as the season finale of Legion. But I have watched one other new TV show and a movie, too.

Imaginary Mary (US: ABC)
I love Jenna Elfman. I really do. Okay, the scientologist thing is off-putting, she’s really fun, really charismatic and really watchable. So why is it that everything she’s been in since Dharma and Greg and Keeping The Faith has been just heinous? Growing Up Fisher, 1600 Penn, Accidentally On Purpose – she was great, they weren’t. And neither is Imaginary Mary.

The show is basically what happens if you have one idea and precisely one idea only. Here, the idea is that sports PR woman Jenna Elfman’s childhood best friend comes back to help her in her adult life, when she finally starts having to deal with kids, a grown-up relationship et al. But that’s where the ideas run out.

The work of three men, it feels like the closest they’ve come to ever meeting a woman is to read a book on Greek myths to learn that Artemis is a perpetually adolescent goddess so they could name Elfman’s PR firm “Artemis PR” – that’s the level of subtlety we’re dealing with here. Elfman’s character has apparently never even met a child, let alone spent time with one, but then again, the writers don’t seem to have met any children either, since they’re all the sorts of moppets that can be assembled from tropes in other TV shows.

I mean, do you think, even for a second, that the teenage son of Elfman’s new boyfriend would ask her for advice on how to be popular with other teenagers, a mere five minutes after meeting her, while simultaneously confiding to her that he has a folder on his laptop that contains… “pictures of boobs”? Would that ever happen?

It’s also unclear exactly what the idea is behind Imaginary Mary, who just reappears unprompted after disappearing from her life when Elfman was 18 and started having sex. Yes, that’s right 18. And now she’s back, and after a brief double-take from Elfman, everything carries on as before. Elfman doesn’t go to a doctor or a psychiatrist now she’s started hearing and seeing things, even though ‘Mary’ carries on talking and appearing in full view of her wherever she is, making it impossible for her to do other things (do the writers even know how an imaginary friend works?).

And what does Mary do? Not much. She’s just there, being a bit furry and wacky. No real commentary, nothing daring, no real attempt to expose Elfman’s subconscious or animus. just “Look, I’m back”.

Bar Elfman, it’s almost unwatchably bad. Steer very, very clear.

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016)
Dull entry to the Harry Potter universe set in the US in the 1920s that misses pretty much all the opportunities to do something more grown up and interesting in favour of more of the same but with some cute magical animals. It unlikeably stars mumbling Eddie Redmayne as an animal-helping wizard who travels to the US to be nice to some different animals, where he gets caught up in the current anti-animal prohibition and has to deal with ‘no-mags’ (aka Muggles) who want to get rid of wizards.

Yet despite the opportunities for fun and variety, as well as some scary-level magic, it’s really unfathomably dull. Redmayne’s wizard is just plain annoying and unheroic. The other characters don’t have a tenth of the qualities of Hermione and co that might make you want to spend time with them. All it really has going for it are those fantastic beasts, which are great fun.

Boring.

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What have you been watching? Including Arrival (2016) and The Americans

13 March 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

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) Interstellar.

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Streaming TV

What have you been watching? Including The Magnificent Seven, Shooter, Lucifer and The Man in the High Castle

23 January 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

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.

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What have you been watching? Including The Mick, Sherlock, Mechanic: Resurrection, The OA and The Bureau

3 January 2017 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

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. 

Well hello. How are you today? Have a nice break away from it all? That’s what I like to hear.

Right, that’s the small talk done. Let’s talk telly.

So, I didn’t watch an awful lot over the Christmas break, since I was actually in Germany and if you’ve ever watched German TV, you’ll remember what a mistake that was (more about that tomorrow). But after the jump I’ll be talking about the regulars I did watch, including the return of Doctor Who (briefly) and Sherlock (less briefly):

Global Internet
The OA 

UK
Doctor Who, Sherlock

France
Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau)

US
Shooter

However, New Year’s Day was on Sunday and Americans being quite efficient, there have already been two new shows to grace the screens. I’ve already reviewed Ransom (US: CBS) but on top of that there was:

The Mick (US: Fox)
A gender-swapped, race-swapped Uncle Buck that sees It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia‘s Kaitlin Olson playing the white trash grifter sister to a billionaire’s wife who gets lumbered with looking after the kids when the rich couple go on the run following fraud investigations. If she sticks around, she gets to enjoy the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But she’ll also have to deal with the bitchy neighbours, the bitchy daughter and the entitled son.

The show’s created by John Chernin and Dave Chernin, the creators of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, so you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear that it’s funnier than you might think, more accurate about being poor than you might think and also based around people being mean too one another verbally and physically in order to get one up on everyone else. Olson’s very good as the Mick(ey) of the title and everyone is marvellously bitchy, too.

Except that’s not my idea of fun, so I probably won’t stick with it.

I also watched a movie.

Mechanic: Resurrection (2016)
Sequel in name only to the actually not that bad 2011 Jason Statham remake of the Charles Bronson/Jan-Michael Vincent actioner, The Mechanic. Here, Mechanic: Resurrection throws pretty much all the first movie’s nuance aside in favour of a sort of melange of The Transporter, The Transporter 2 and The Internecine Project. No longer the meticulous hit-man planner of yore, Statham is retired in Brazil until fellow East End child army survivor (don’t ask) turned billionaire bad guy Sam Hazeldine (Peaky Blinders, Resurrection) blackmails him into returning to his old life by abducting new girlfriend Jessica Alba. Only if Statham kills three of Hazeldine’s impossible-to-reach rivals in ways that look like accidents will Hazeldine release Alba. He says.

Foresaking The Mechanic (2011)’s character building and steely professionalism, Mechanic: Resurrection is an insultingly stupid piece of work that tries to give us glossy backdrops, non-stop Statham fight scenes, a bit of ultraviolence and a bit of casual racism as a substitute, hoping we’ll like it better. Certainly, the stars seemed to have liked it, because Alba’s former Afghanistan soldier turned teacher of Cambodian children is an insult to women, but she does get to go to lots of tropical islands; Tommy Lee Jones gets more of the same travel action, but perhaps was also swayed by the chance to play a socialist arms dealer with a James Bond-style underwater base and submarine using all the subtlety he deployed in Under Siege; Michelle Yeoh was purely there for the tropical islands and not to have to do anything athletic for a change, as far as I could tell.

To be fair, most Statham movies take the piss a little bit and Statham is as aware of that as anyone. Certainly, the fact he takes his shirt off in almost every other scene can’t be accidental and I refuse to believe that the FX shots were anything other than deliberate tributes to Derek Meddings’ model work in 1970s James Bond movies. There’s a certain amount of tongue going into cheek here.

But the writing is still terrible and worst of all, almost none of the murders Statham is supposedly hired to make look like accidents would pass as such for more than a minute. Terrible.

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What have you been watching? Including Rogue One, Nobel, The OA and Chance

19 December 2016 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

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. 

It’s the final week before Christmas and TMINE’s usual end-of-year break, so this is going to be the final WHYBW of 2016, unless I do another one on Thursday and Friday to mop up a few concluding shows.

As usual, American TV has just about wound down in readiness for Crimbo but this year, Internet TV has started arming a flotilla of box sets for everyone to settle down with once the turkey has subsided and no one can move any more. I’ll be looking a couple of those in a mo, but there’s too many for me to deal with by myself, so if you’ve already watched season two of The Man in the High Castle on Amazon or season one of Une Chance De Trop (No Second Chance) or Cannabis on Netflix, feel free to let everyone know what you thought of them in the comments section.

Elsewhere, I’ve (p)reviewed Swedish Dicks (Sweden) and passed a third-episode verdict on Shut Eye (US); after the jump, the regulars:

  • Canada
    Travelers
  • US
    Chance, Falling Water, The Great Indoors, Shooter, and Timeless.

But first, a couple of newbies:

Nobel (Norway: NRK1; UK: Netflix)
Aksel Hennie (The Martian) is a Norwegian special forces officer just back from Afghanistan who is ordered to investigate when a former Taliban target turns up in Oslo. Hennie ends up killing him, but begins to learn that maybe his orders weren’t as legitimate as he first thought. Who’s responsible, will he get found out, has it anything to do with the Nobel Peace Prize committee and what happened back in Afghanistan anyway involving the target’s wife?

Something of a leap up in quality from previous Norwegian efforts such as Okkupert (Occupied) and Mammon, Nobel is a geopolitical thriller that juxtaposes the individual with realpolitik, examining the decisions individual soldiers have to make on the ground, the effects of war and the little bit people who get caught up in big decisions, while looking at the alliances needed and compromises made to end war, where even a $60bn deal can be threatened by the wrong person turning up to a party at the wrong time. It all feels nicely realistic for a change, even if some of the nuances of the language and culture passed me by (eg a translator appears to be speaking Norwegian with everyone else and then someone says to her “six languages and you still can’t speak Norwegian”. What language is she speaking then?!), and Hennie makes for a very plausible special forces operative.

I’m only two episodes in but this looks like a keeper.

The OA (Netflix)
Netflix has started to develop a habit of covertly producing very odd but wonderful little series with no publicity that it puts out of a Friday as a boxset and surprises everyone. The OA is such a show, a genre-defying piece created by and written by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, directed by Batmanglij and starring Marling (as well as a certain Jason Isaacs) that’s almost impossible to categorise – the best comparison I can come up with is if Neil Gaiman and Hal Hartley sat down together and decided to mash up Stranger Things, Room and Anastasia.

It starts with Marling jumping off a bridge. But when her parents come rushing to her hospital, they reveal she’s been missing for seven years – however, before she disappeared, this fully sighted girl was blind. Returning to her home, she’s soon shaking up the town with some special powers she seems to have acquired. But she needs five “strong and flexible” people to help her rescue someone, perhaps from that mysterious other realm she once visited…

Full of strange authorial decisions from Marling’s insistence that everyone now call her ‘The OA’ through to only starting the title sequence 45 minutes into the episode once she begins to retell her story of actually being a reincarnated Russian oligarch’s daughter, it’s a properly auteured piece of work that needs to be watched if you’re to stand a chance of knowing what it’s like. Visually beautiful, it is by turns upsetting, bewildering and heart-warming, and most frequently like a fairy tale – but even that’s a classification it eludes.

I’ve seen one episode so far and it never once did any of the things I suspected it would do and did many things I’ve never imagined. I’m going to watch more just to see if it’ll blow my mind any further, but it requires a good deal of patience and I suspect it won’t be to everyone’s tastes.

I also watched a movie this week!

Rogue One (2016)
An almost immediate prequel to Star Wars, Rogue One reveals the full details of how those plucky spies mentioned in the first movie’s opening introduction were able to retrieve the plans for the Death Star and ultimately help to stop the Empire’s plans for galactic domination. Directed by Gareth Edwards and co-written by Tony Gilroy, the film is more like a proper war movie than any of the other Star Wars flicks, echoing The Dirty Dozen and The Seven Samurai, as plucky crim Felicity Jones puts together a band of warriors that includes Donnie Yen and Riz Ahmed to track down the man who designed the Death Star – her father, Mads Mikkelsen.

Operating resolutely in the vein of Edwards’s previous blockbuster, Godzilla, it’s a game of two halves. The first is a slow, character-builder that shows off the Star Wars universe with some spectacular location filming. The second is then a giddy, action-packed pay-off that surprises with an oddly large number of heroic deaths. On top of that, you have the return of a number of original Star Wars characters and actors who appear as their young and/or not-dead selves through the power of CGI, the movie effectively spelling out why the Empire was so fearsome, why everyone was properly worried of the Death Star and by the end, precisely why everyone was right to cack themselves as soon as Darth Vader entered the room.

All in all, a movie that gets better in the memory and which finally does something new and worthwhile with the franchise. It’s also best to watch Star Wars afterwards to see how it almost exactly matches up with everything we see in that.

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