Film reviews

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

What have you been watching? Including Spotlight, The Americans, Second Chance, The Magicians,

21 March 2016 Rob Buckley 7 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. 

Can you feel it? It’s springtime, everyone, and that can only mean a changing of the TV seasons. Some current shows are finishing their runs, while others are just starting, and there are more on the way. Others are just lounging around, eating chocolate eggs.

This week, I’ve reviewed Underground (US: WGN America) and Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders (US: CBS; UK: W), and if you cast your minds back to last year, I previewed Crowded (US: NBC), which has just started airing in the US. In the next couple of days, I’m going to be reviewing the entire second season of Daredevil (Netflix), which I somehow managed to binge-watch over the weekend, as well as anything else new that comes my way. Either that, or I’ll be toasting my eminent good sense in not bothering to watch ABC’s Of Gods And Prophets, given it was cancelled after a mere two episodes of Wicked City-bad ratings.

That means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of 11.22.63, Billions, Damien, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Flaked, Limitless, Lucifer, The Magicians, Okkupert (Occupied), Second Chance, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, Supergirl and Vikings. One of those is probably not long for this world, one is getting a demotion, but surprisingly, two that had surprisingly awful beginnings are getting promoted to the recommended list. Can you guess which ones?

Oh yes. The Americans is back, too.

But first, a movie!

Spotlight (2015)
Journalism always seems exciting to outsiders, but if you actually look at what it involves, even if the results can be exciting, to be honest, the actual process is pretty monotonous. I use Excel in my day job just as much as I use Word – that should tell you something. Certainly, the most realistic movies and TV shows about journalism point out that it mostly involves endless note-taking, fact-checking, research, dead-ends and meetings, with even All The President’s Men being a major snoozefest most of the time – I think only the TV version of State of Play has ever managed to be both fun to watch while depicting something that a journalist would recognise as been similar to his or her day job. 

So it is with Spotlight, a meticulously exacting recreation of how the Boston Globe‘s investigative journalism department revealed in 2001 that nearly 100 local Catholic priests had abused as many as 1,000 boys and girls in their charge over the years and the church had covered it up. Featuring a star-studded but unflamboyant cast (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci), the almost pre-Internet story largely consists of Ruffalo, McAdams and Keaton setting up spreadsheets, looking in books, sifting through legal documents and trying to find evidence, all without a gunshot, car chase or even fist fight (it is Boston) along the way.

The film just about manages to keep the viewer’s attention, helped in part by the sheer horror of the story, but also by the attention to location, the period details – yes, it really does feel like a period drama – and the exploration of the politics of the situation, with powerful pressure being applied to the paper and its journalists through subtle means, as the social interconnections between the paper, the church, the police and other institutions worked to try to prevent anyone rocking the boat. But there were times when even my desperate need to nitpick the movie’s accuracy (I couldn’t) wasn’t quite enough to stop my attention from wandering.

Don’t get me wrong – this is undoubtedly not only the second best journalism film ever made, but the second best film about a member of the Bradlee clan (Mad Men‘s John Slattery plays Ben Bradlee Jr). It’s also marvellous to have a grown-up film, telling a grown-up and important story, in which journalists are the good guys for the change. It just would have be nice to have a car chase, too.

PS It’s coming up to the Easter double holiday here in the UK, which means this will be the last WHYBW until 1st April. Or maybe the 2nd. Or maybe, just to be wacky, 30th March. It’ll just appear at some point around then, anyway.

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What have you been watching? Including Flaked, The Intern, Lucifer and Billions

14 March 2016 Rob Buckley 21 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*. 

As you might have noticed, things are hotting up in the tele stakes. In the past week, I’ve reviewed the first episodes of:

But that’s by no means all the new shows. In the next few days, I’m hoping to give Underground (US: WGN America) a look over, as well as – assuming it’s not cancelled before then, given its ratings – Of Kings And Prophets (US: ABC), which sees one ‘Ray Winstone’ playing King Saul of Israel, who has to deal with some bloke called ‘David’. Careful – no spoilers, please.

I still haven’t got round to watching Netflix’s Love, but I did manage to watch a couple of episodes of…:

Flaked (Netflix)
Will Arnett is Chip, a furniture store owner in Venice Beach, California, who spends a lot of his time:

  1. Hanging around at AA meetings
  2. Cycling everywhere, because he’s been banned from driving, having killed someone while on drugs
  3. Having sex with/fancying much younger women on popular types of mattresses
  4. Lying about pretty much everything

And that’s about it, really. Just as Master of None didn’t have much plot and was really just a series of character moments, so Flaked is really a character study of a complete tosser who screws over everyone he meets, albeit in very small ways, for his own selfish needs. There also aren’t many jokes, either.

Despite that, it’s actually quite watchable, in part thanks to Arnett, in part because it’s smarter than this otherwise standard ‘edgy’ comedy format would suggest. The Venice Beach location is different from the usual standard settings for sitcoms, too.

There’s also a certain knowingness about the show similar to Arrested Development‘s (perhaps because of exec producer Mitch Hurwitz) that makes it less of a male fantasy: Arnett may be sleeping with hot young women a lot, but his unattractive male friends aren’t, and even Arnett is finding it all a bit empty and pointless, having nothing culturally in common with the woman he professes to love. 

I’ll try to watch the remaining episodes this week – Daredevil season two is on the way, very soon, so I’m going to need to clear the decks – and let you know how the rest of it goes. If you can’t wait, don’t go into it expecting big laughs. Instead, just expect to enjoy a lot of Will Arnett hanging out with a bunch of people and having a little sex.

I haven’t managed to watch any more episodes of Ófærð (Trapped), unfortunately, but after the jump, the regulars, including a couple of season finales and some double-episode rundowns: 11.22.63, American Crime, Billions, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Doctor Blake Mysteries, Limitless, Lucifer, The Magicians, Man Seeking Woman, Okkupert (Occupied), Second Chance, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man and Vikings. At least one of the recommended shows is being demoted – can you guess which one?

But first, a movie:

The Intern (2015) (iTunes)
Four things in the credits made me think this was going to be absolute unwatchable: the title, which in combination with Anne Hathaway’s presence, made we think I was going to be getting The Devil Wears Prada 2; writer/director Nancy Meyers, whose It’s Complicated was so unimaginably bad and dull, I nearly fell asleep in the cinema; and Robert De Niro, who has been working purely for the cash for what feels like decades now.

However, I needn’t have been worried, since it seems like everyone involved induced everyone else to raise their games. De Niro looks like he’s actually putting some effort in as the 70-year-old retired widower who takes an internship at an Internet start-up to give himself something to do and ends up becoming friends with CEO Hathaway. Hathaway is likable and believable as the perfectionist workaholic businesswomen, while Meyers (who, in case we forget, also wrote Private Benjamin, Irreconcilable Differences, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and The Holiday) turns in a surprisingly authentic look at both twentysomethings and seventysomethings in modern business.

The first half of the movie is better than the second, with my lovely wife (who set up and runs her own company) finding a lot to identify with, but the second half adds an unnecessary dramatic twist that ruins a lot of the good, frequently (unpreachy) feminist work the first half develops. De Niro’s romance with in-house masseuse Rene Russo doesn’t quite work and a lot of plots are developed but ultimately go nowhere. The firm’s grasp of business isn’t totally top notch either, such as the question of why Hathaway’s firm needs a new CEO, rather than a halfway competent COO for Hathaway to delegate to.

Nevertheless, frequently moving, frequently funny, with a good range of characters and surprisingly smart, The Intern is that rare breed of movie: one aimed at adults that is entertaining, enjoyable but untaxing. I also think it speaks to my age that I identified far more with De Niro than with any of the 20something man-boys he works with.

  • If you’re wondering where all the references to Locate TV have got to this week, turns out they’re shutting down on Wednesday. Can’t say I’m totally surprised, given the effort v reward potential of the idea, but it’s a shame all the same.

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What have you been watching? Including The Man From UNCLE and Sicario

14 February 2016 Rob Buckley 6 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 if not a bumper week for TV, one that’s certainly full. Elsewhere, I’ve passed verdicts on:

After the jump, the regulars: American Crime, Angie Tribeca, Arrow, Billions, The Flash, Limitless, The Magicians, Man Seeking Woman, Marvel’s Agent Carter, Okkupert (Occupied), Second Chance, The Shannara Chronicles, Supergirl and The X-Files, as well as the return of The Doctor Blake Mysteries. At least one of those is for the chop, one of them earned a last minute reprieve and another could be departing soon.

I’ve a few new shows from Thursday night onwards that I haven’t had a chance to watch yet, but which hopefully I’ll be able to let you all know about this week: Wanted (Australia: Seven) and Those Who Can’t (US: TruTV). Otherwise, I’m bang up to date.

In fact, I’ve had a go at a few movies, too.

Sicario (2015) (iTunes)
Emily Blunt is an FBI agent drawn into the moral greys of the drugs war, as she joins an inter-agency taskforce with Mexican drug dealers in their sights. Despite some lovely cinematography, and a good cast that includes Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro and Jeffrey Donovan, it’s something of a yawn fest that thinks it’s saying something clever about the lengths good men must go to to fight evil. Except it’s all been done before. There are two excellent, tense sequences, but otherwise it’s a yawnfest, and Blunt’s neophyte is practically superfluous requirements – had it simply about our ‘grey areas’ friends, it would have been a much leaner and more interesting movie.

Fantastic 4 (2015) (iTunes)
Yet another origin story for the Fantastic Four, in which plucky scientists and their friends and relatives get given special powers through a cosmic accident. This version is probably the worst so far, however, despite taking more than a few liberties with the original story, swapping out cosmic rays in favour of some inter-dimensional travel experiments. The lovely wife and I tried to watch this a few months ago, but quickly gave up through sheer boredom. This rewatch revealed it was a full hour and 20 minutes before anything that could be quantified as ‘mildly exciting’ happened in the movie – that being the 10 minute final battle between the Four and evil hacker/scientist Victor Von Doom. An excruciatingly painful bit of movie-making that proves that everything Marvel is not gold and that superheroes need to have both personalities and fun to be worth watching.

The Man From UNCLE (2015) (iTunes)
Guy Ritchie’s reboot of the 60s TV series attempts to do what Sherlock Holmes did for Sherlock Holmes. Here, we get an origin story of sorts – how CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB agent Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) end up working together to defeat a greater enemy, with the help of Mr Waverley (Hugh Grant). The first 15 minutes isn’t half bad, as we learn a lot more about Solo than we did in the TV series (he’s a former war profiteer who agreed to join the CIA to avoid prison) and get a decent version of post-war Berlin to enjoy. Unfortunately, the intellectual, cool Kuryakin of the TV series here is yet another stereotypical Russian, ex-Spetsnaz soldier, and there’s almost zero cameraderie between the two of them.

At least for the first half, after which I turned off because it was just so astonishingly boring.

Fast and Furious 6 (2013) (Channel 4)
Seeing as both Gina Carano (would have been good as Wonder Woman) and Gal Gadot (fingers crossed, will be good as Wonder Woman) were in this, I thought I’d tune in for this, having studiously avoided all the previous installments of this ‘fast cars, fast criminals’ movie franchise. Unfortunately, it was just as awful as I thought it would be, with no trace of acting skill displayed by anyone, characterisation that’s beyond insulting and almost zero grasp on reality. I didn’t even make as far as any of the stunts. Oh well.

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What have you been watching? Including The Hateful Eight, Byw Celwydd, Rebellion and Endeavour

15 January 2016 Rob Buckley 10 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.

Well, you can’t say I haven’t been keeping you up to date on all the new shows around the world. Or at least trying to. This week I think I’ve hit a personal record for number of new shows either previewed or reviewed in a week, since I gave you the lowdown on the following:

Which ain’t bad. Idiotsitter I previewed last week, so that doesn’t count.

I haven’t had a chance to watch last night’s The Family Law (Australia: SBS) yet, but I’ll get round to that over the weekend, fingers crossed, and let you know about it (and anything else that debuts or that’s escaped my radar) on Monday.

After the jump, I’ll be looking at the regulars, as well as those shows I thought promising enough to keep in my crowded schedule: American Crime, Byw Celwydd, Cooper Barrett’s Guide To Surviving Life, Endeavour, Grandfathered, Man Seeking Woman and Rebellion. Those keeping score will notice that I couldn’t be bothered with the second episodes of Shades of Blue, Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands or Angel From Hell, but 100 Code will be getting a look in over the weekend, too. Probably.

But first, a movie!

The Hateful Eight (2016)
Quentin Tarantino’s latest is a Western that assembles many of his usual tropes and uses them as a framework for him to mash up Reservoir Dogs, The Thing and 10 Little Indians, into a lovely morality tail about how adversity can help men overcome their racism so they can join together to be misogynistic.

Set just after the civil war, the film sees bounty hunter Kurt Russell is taking in fugitive Jennifer Jason Leigh when a blizzard forces them – and fellow bounty hunter Samuel L Jackson and local sheriff Walter Goggins – to take refuge in a shop on the side of a mountain in Wyoming. There they meet various other characters (Tim Roth, Demián Bichir, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern), one or more of whom could be secretly in league with Leigh. As the snows set in, the bodies start to pile up…

It takes a good half hour for the film to reach the shop, that half hour being so dull I actually fell asleep for 10 minutes. However, the remaining two and a half hours (including interval) are considerably better. While the film owes an epic debt to The Thing, even poaching some of that film’s score, it’s also its own beast. But while it doers innovate, constantly surprises, plays with audience expectations, and looks fantastic in Panavision Ultra 70mm, it never does anything quite as exciting as Tarantino’s previous efforts, particularly Inglorious Bastards. 

Funny, but mostly from its gross-out humour; tense, but mostly thanks to The Thing; a decent enough viewing, but mostly full of plot loopholes and missed opportunities. Nothing to go out of your way for.

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What have you been watching this Christmas? Including Elf, The Force Awakens, Doctor Who and Kung Fu Killer

4 January 2016 Rob Buckley 6 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.

The Christmas holidays/Saturnalia are a time for revelry and fun, followed by bloated lounging around watching TV. At least, they usually are. This year, good TV was slightly harder to find, so after the jump in this Christmas viewing round-up, the only Christmas specials I’ll be looking at are Doctor Who and Sherlock, as well as the slightly unexpected and un-Christmasy Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes. Several of the regular shows also finished their runs over Christmas, so I’ll be taking a gander at Ash vs Evil Dead, The Bridge and Legends, and I finally finished the first season of The Man In the High Castle, too.

That doesn’t sound like much viewing for two weeks, and you’d be right. I also watched a few movies and even went to the theatre:

Elf (Dominion theatre, London)
A stage adaptation of the delightful Will Ferrell Christmas classic movie, in which a Christmas elf discovers he’s really a human and ventures south to New York to find his children’s book-publisher father (James Caan), only to discover that daddy is in Santa’s naughty list. He gets a job at a department store, where thanks to adorable co-worker Zooey Deschanel, he discovers the human thing called love, and manages to restore Christmas cheer to the world.

Initially tediously slavish to the original, right down to the New York setting requiring the entirely British cast to put on US accents, this musical version starts to get better only when the story begins to diverge halfway through. The show is also more knowing than the original, losing some of its innocence and adding jokes that only the adults in the audience will get.

Ben Forster (winner of ITV’s Superstar), who’s got a cracking set of pipes on him, plays Buddy the Elf a bit closer to Jim Carrey than to Will Ferrell, while Girls Aloud’s similiarly pipe-equipped Kimberley Walsh (I’d misread that as Kimberly Wyatt from Sky 1’s Got To Dance, so was a bit disappointed when I realised my mistake…) foregoes Deschanel’s hipster quirkiness in favour of being just a cynical woman embittered by too many of life’s disappointments. More interestingly – again for the adults – is the presence of 80s/90s stars Joe McGann (The Upper Hand) and Jessica Martin (Doctor Who, The Bobby Davro Show) as Buddy’s human parents.

It’s a lavish affair with a good cast that’s still very entertaining and that eventually finds its feet, but it’s better if you’ve never seen the original and imagine it’s all set in London – they missed a trick there.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) (iTunes)
Every Mission Impossible is a bit different but this time we do get something a bit closer to the first movie in the series, with an attempt to do proper spy stuff again. Senator Alec Baldwin is trying to shut down the Impossible Mission Force, just as Tom Cruise cottons on to the fact that rogue agents from other countries’ spy agencies have clubbed together for nefarious purposes, forcing the team to go on the lam. Can Cruise, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner and generic token woman Rebecca Ferguson (The White Queen) stop the ‘rogue nation’, even though its agents are supposedly every bit as good as IMF and wise to how it does business? 

You betcha, but the fun is in finding out how. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie gives us some occasionally thrilling, mostly too-CGIed action set pieces, as well as some surprisingly funny moments and the traditional con jobs, although an attempt to create parallels to Casablanca are ill judged, Renner is confined almost entirely to chatty scenes in Washington and London has about 1,700 red telephone boxes for no good reason. Also amusing for UK viewers is that the British government appears to be entirely composed of the cast of Rev.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (20150 (in cinemas)
Simultaneously answering the questions “What if it had been Princess Leia rather than Luke Skywalker left on Tatooine?” and “What must it be like to work for the Empire?”, this new Star Wars movie has newcomer Daisy Ridley as Rey, a scavenger on a desert planet waiting for her family to return to pick her up. Into her life come a comedic stormtrooper-with-a-conscience sidekick (John Boyega) and a droid looking for an old jedi. Together they have to escape the revamped Empire, find the rebels, meet Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon and destroy the Empire’s new, definitely-not-the-Death-Star-oh-no superweapon.

JJ Abrams gives us the first decent addition to the Star Wars series since the 80s through the simple measure of giving us Star Wars again, but with modern special effects and a few character/relationship switches just to obfuscate the fact it’s the same movie as the first one. But it is a very decent remake-sequel, reminding you of just how good the original was, being genuinely thrilling, funny and enjoyable throughout, not invoking any of the tedious cruft that Lucas added in the prequels, and giving us a decent new cast and a return of the old cast. And it’s great to have one of these things about a girl rather than a boy for a change, too.

The big question, given where the film ends, is whether the next one is going to be a simple retread of The Empire Strikes Back or whether there are still new stories to be told in the franchise.

Kung Fu Killer/Jungle (2014) (Netflix)
Top martial artist Donnie Yen’s in Hong Kong nick for murder, when other top martial artists start getting killed off, forcing the police to recruit him to stop the murderer from killing anyone else. But does Yen know more than he’s letting on and can he stop the killer before he gets to his girlfriend?

It’s a largely unremarkable plot, but what lifts Kung Fu Killer are its fight scenes, direction and cast. Featuring pretty much a who’s who of the Hong Kong martial arts industry, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera (stick around to the end to see if you spotted everyone), the movie is often a Chinese travelogue and has some directorial flourishes that nod to a diverse range of movies, including The Bourne Supremacy, although its CGI is a bit weak and the wire work a bit too obvious. The best fight is saved for Yen and till last, but the movie fills its runtime in an almost Game of Death-style deconstruction of kung fu, each scene showing a different aspect of Chinese martial arts.

Worth watching if you want to see what a modern Hong Kong martial arts movie looks like and to see Donnie Yen on good form.

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