Film reviews

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

What have you been watching? Including Hand of God, Betas, Doctor Who, Legends and Lucy

8 September 2014 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.

Thankfully, it’s still all little quiet on the TV front at the moment, allowing me to combine blogging and work without killing myself. Perhaps too quiet though, because I’ve been forced to watch some of Amazon’s TV pilots. I’ve already covered The Cosmopolitans elsewhere, but on top of that, I’ve watched two others:

Betas 
Take Silicon Valley. Remove the laughs, insight, dialogue and cast. Add a couple of female characters for ogling purposes. Voila. Now you have Betas. I’m not joking about this, BTW — it’s almost absolutely identical to Silicon Valley in concept, at least. It’s just not good. Which is a charitable way of saying it’s bad.

The Hand of God
A cross between Eli Stone and Boss, this sees corrupt judge Ron Perlman go a bit loopy, become convinced he’s become the right hand of God in order to bring justice to his fair city and starts doing some very odd, usually nasty things indeed. Except perhaps he really has been sent by God, what with that speaking in tongues, the visions that turn out to be true and so on. 

Perlman’s his usual reliable self (although not quite as good as Kelsey Grammer), Dana Delany is fab as his calculating wife, Andre Royo is a bit miscast as the city’s mayor and Garret Dillahunt is downright scary (scarier even than when he was a Terminator) as Perlman’s helper monkey. Unfortunately, despite its good qualities, it’s about as enjoyable as Boss. 

I’ve also squeezed in a few movies.

About Time (2013)
Richard Curtis tries to do a heartwarming version of Four Weddings And A Funeral, with Domhnall Gleeson learning from dad Bill Nighy that he can travel back in time and fix moments in his past that have gone wrong – a talent he uses to try to woo Rachel McAdams. Largely a pale imitation of everything Curtis has done before, with all the same criticisms – minimal development of female characters, lack of diversity, everyone paralysingly rich and posh – plus a few others, it largely fails to shine until right at the end, which has some real tearjerking stuff. 

Lucy (2014)
In the first of my “Random Scarlett Johansson” double bill, this week, we start if with something that is in absolute terms quite weird, but compared to its companion movie, is only a little bit weird. Here we have Johansson is an ordinary woman who unwittingly ends up being forced into being a drugs mule, except when the drugs burst in her stomach, they actually turn her into a superhero who can use increasingly large percentages of her brain to change herself, others and even reality. Despite being billed as an action film and having Luc Besson directing, there’s only minimal amounts of the movie devoted to fights and car chases, the majority instead being devoted to strange voiceovers, pictures of animals and more ‘artiness’ (or Luc Besson’s attempt at artiness). You think you’re going to get The Transporter; instead you get Altered States. Worth watching just to see Johansson hold her own and show she can now be relied on to be the star of a major movie that you might actually want to see. But if you’re not into left field stuff, I’d probably give this one a miss. 

Under The Skin (2013)
An even weirder film from Scarlett Johansson in a somewhat loose adaptation of the novel of the same name. A mixture of the extremely naturalistic – Johansson actually drove a transit van around Glasgow with hidden cameras, interacting with members of the public – and the incredibly stylised, Under The Skin is a musing on a lot of things, including sexuality, what it means to be human and predation, with Johansson an alien who goes around picking up lone men to do something to them when she gets them back to her place, but who slowly starts to feel pity for the creatures she’s hunting. Despite only minimal dialogue and plot, it’s highly disturbing, with some superb cinematography and music design, and images will linger with you for a long time afterwards. With more than a few hints of The Man Who Fell To Earth, this is truly film as art rather than mere storytelling. It’s not 100% successful by any means, but it is more than worth a watch. It’s certainly a brave choice for Johansson, who mesmerises as the Bowie-esque alien.

After the jump, the regulars, including Legends, Doctor Who and You’re The Worst.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Hand of God, Betas, Doctor Who, Legends and Lucy”

What have you been watching? Including Legends, Forever, Outlander, A to Z, Selfie and Intruders

1 September 2014 Rob Buckley 69 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.

Okay, I’ll admit it – I hadn’t intended to leave it quite as long as a month before I started blogging again. But what with work, August, bank holidays, etc, I actually didn’t have the time – until now.

But now I’m back and I can cast my eye back over August’s viewing, making it look like an almost deliberate decision. After the jump, I’ll look at the few recurring shows I’m still watching, as well as those that finished their seasons while I was away.

However, before that, let’s have a look at some of the new shows that popped up in August that I was able to take a gander at. There’s a few I missed out on (e.g. Garfunkel and Oates), but not that many, fortunately, so here’s pretty much all of August’s new TV rundown as well as some previews of some new shows that have already slapped their pilots on the Internet.

A To Z (US: NBC. Starts October 2, 9.30/8.30c)
A relatively benign and almost fun romcom that chronicles the relationship ups and downs of the implausibly named Andrew and Zelda (hence the title). To flip the format slightly, Andrew is the romantic one who believes in fate, Zelda is the uptight lawyer. To not flip the format at all, there are also a couple of best friends who don’t really do anything unexpected or different.

On the whole, though, it’s not bad. It does, however, shoot itself in the foot almost instantly by having narrator Katey Sagal explain that the series covers the whole x number of days of the relationship, dooming the relationship from the beginning. And while there is an easy get out (they break up then get back together again), it puts a significant downer on what actually might have been quite a nice, feelgood show. It also doesn’t help that Cristin Miloti plays Zelda, because she was the mother in How I Met Your Mother. And died in that.

Immigration summary: Lenora Crichlow (English) plays Zelda’s best friend. Otherwise, surprisingly all-American.

Forever (US: Starts September 23, 10pm, ABC; UK: Sky 1, October 2014)
Ioan Gruffudd is a New York chief medical examiner… who also happens to be immortal. Whenever he dies, he wakes up in a nearby watery mass (e.g. river, lake, sea). He’s a bit fed up of living, despite having acquired hundreds of years of expertise in languages, science, medicine, etc, and a deductive skill that puts Elementary’s Sherlock Holmes to shame, so spends his time with the dead, trying to work out a cure for his immortality. Along the way, though, he helps to solve crimes.

Obviously, this is Highlander without the sword fights. Well, I say ‘obviously’, but right at the end of the first episode, there’s a massive Highlander reference (spoiler: someone is found dead with a Masamune katana in their chest, just like Connor MacLeod’s). This comes right down to the show having its own Rachel in the shape of Judd Hirsch, constant pining over a long-dead wife and a potential new love interest who’s a NYPD cop. But there’s also a bit of humour and although it might seem like a procedural as well, any show that has one of its chief suspects arrested and his house searched and then allows him to continue investigating the crime and examining the evidence is clearly not going for mimesis.

Gruffudd is good, Hirsch is Hirsch and everyone else is just okay. There’s a bit of promise with a series arc that involves a potential adversary/friend for Gruffudd. But it’s not inspiring or compelling, so I doubt it’ll last that long.

Immigration summary: Ioan Gruffudd is all-Welsh, of course; Lorraine Toussaint is from Trinidad; Donnie Keshawarz is American-Canadian-Afghani. Otherwise, all-American for a change.

Intruders (US: Saturdays, 10/9c, BBC America; UK: BBC2, Autumn 2014)
BBC America appears to be confused here in that they seem to think that they should be making programmes that are BBC programmes, just in America. So we have a largely all-Brit cast, including John Simm and James Frain, faking American accents (badly) in the kind of poor sci-fi/fantasy that BBC1 seems to do so well these days (eg Outcasts, Paradox). Here, we have a secret society that seeks immortality by hiding inside other people’s bodies, which might seem an interesting idea at first, but instead gives us some rubbish devil worship scenes and Simm meandering around feeling sorry for himself. Almost lone American Mira Sorvino is wasted.

Immigration summary: Simm and Frain – both Brits – as is Millie Brown, who’s a possessed kid. She learnt her American accent watching the Disney Channel, apparently: beat that, American child actors!

Legends (US: TNT. Wednesdays, 9/8c, TNT)
Sean Bean is an undercover FBI operative who can psychologically transform himself into another person for each job. Unfortunately, not only is he starting to find the lines between himself and his false identities are blurring, there’s the distinct possibility he might not even be who he thinks he really is. Oh dear.

Unfortunately, this promising idea gets squandered a lot, thanks to TNT’s efforts to turn the show into a sort of NCIS, with a tedious backroom staff watching and listening to Bean’s every move and arranging hacks of banks and official records in mere seconds, as the case needs it. As a result, Bean’s superb versatility and Ali Larter, who plays Bean’s ex-girlfriend/FBI handler, are the only reasons to watch the show. Having said that, the third episode almost managed to register as “not bad”, rather than “terrifyingly awful”.

Immigration summary: Sean Bean – apparently, the kind of Brit who can pass as a stuttering West Virginian for up to nine months at a time, when no American could.

Outlander (US: Starz. Saturdays, 9pm ET/PT)
Post-War nurse while off with her genealogy-obsessed husband in Scotland, touches a stone circle and finds herself back in 1743, where she meets a buff Highland lad, fighting the Red Coats. Will she succumb to his charms like that fortune teller said she would?

Largely, if it weren’t for BSG‘s Ronald D Moore behind the scenes and the fact that it airs on Starz so there’s plenty of sex and violence, this would be on The CW, trying to appeal to teenage girls alongside Reign. I did watch this with my lovely wife and neither of us could find anything that appealing or romantic about the show; buff Highland lad seemed a bit bereft of charisma and charm as is WW2 nurse; and her hubbie (Tobias Menzies from Doctor Who, The Honourable Woman, Game of Thrones, et al) was actually quite nice. We never got as far as episode two.

Immigration summary: Literally everyone is either British or Irish. Everyone.

Selfie (US: Tuesdays, 8pm/7pm, ABC)
Loose updating of My Fair Lady for the social media age, with Eliza Dooley (former Doctor Who companion Karen Gillan) coming a viral cropper and recruiting marketing guru Henry Higenbottam (Harold and Kumar’s John Cho) to rehabilitate her image. Instead, Higgins tries to rehabilitate her and make her less self-centred.

Created by Suburgatory’s Emily Kapnek, this is a marked disappointment, although it still displays her usual wit and intelligence in a few places at least. There are few laughs, few decent characters apart from those inherited from the original and only the beginnings of a vestigial romance between Gillan and Cho. I’ll probably watch episode two, but it’s on thin ice.

Immigration summary: Apart from Gillan, there’s also David Harewood (Homeland) as her boss.

Movies

Guess what? I also watched some movies!

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Admirable, joyful addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with an origin story showing how the slightly dickish ‘guardians’ come together to defend a utopia from an intergalactic religious zealot (the wonderful Lee Pace from Halt and Catch Fire). There’s a lot to like about the film, which isn’t quite as good as Captain America 2 (IMHO), but I didn’t love it, possibly because of the characters (except for Groot). It does have the best soundtrack of the Marvel movies, too.

Transcendence (2014)
Scientist Johnny Depp dies and gets turned into an artificial intelligence, where he starts to get both world-changing and human-changing ideas. For about 90% of its run, it appears to be a modern-day, biologically enhanced version of Colossus: The Forbin Project, before the ending flips everything on its head. A real slow-mover, it does feature some very interesting ideas, but is still massively too long. Definitely best seen at home.

After the jump, the regulars, including The Last Ship, Halt and Catch Fire, Suits, Tyrant, Doctor Who and You’re The Worst.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Legends, Forever, Outlander, A to Z, Selfie and Intruders”

What have you been watching? Including The Lego Movie, The Bridge (US), The Leftovers and Halt and Catch Fire

11 July 2014 Rob Buckley 4 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 fourth of July weekend hasn’t stopped American unveiling a slew of new shows this week, so elsewhere, I’ve reviewed:

I also managed to squeeze a movie in this week, too:

The Lego Movie (2014)
Not a 100% slam dunk and the live action bit towards the end felt a bit uncomfortable, but a very funny movie overall, in which an average Lego construction worker (Chris Pratt) must save the Lego world from the oppressive regime of President Business (Will Ferrell). Featuring slews of in-jokes and classic Lego sets (yes, I did have the blue space Lego in the 70s), the best bits are nevertheless the cameos from licensed characters such as Superman and Green Lantern, and especially Batman and certain characters from Star Wars. Definitely worth a watch.

After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Halt and Catch Fire, The Leftovers and Suits, as well as the returning The Bridge (US).

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including The Lego Movie, The Bridge (US), The Leftovers and Halt and Catch Fire”

What have you been watching? Including Belle, Halt and Catch Fire, and Continuum

27 June 2014 Rob Buckley 14 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 heat’s back on again, both in terms of the summer weather and the arrival of new shows, so I’ve not been able to get round to/force myself to watch FX’s Middle Eastern-yet-largely Caucasian dictator and familial rapist show, Tyrant. I’ll try to get round to that by Monday, assuming that all these Dulux swatches I’m keeping my eye on have lost enough moisture that I can compare them accurately. But I have reviewed two new shows:

One was better than the other.

I also managed to watch a couple of movies. Well, one and a half.

Belle (2013)
Jane Austen but with a black woman and slavery. Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Undercovers, Bonekickers (yikes), and Touch, but best known as Martha Jones’ sister Tish in Doctor Who) excels as the daughter of a slave whose aristocrat father places her with his uncle to look after – his uncle being the highest-ranked judge in England (Tom Wilkinson). Based on a true story, it’s a two-threaded piece, on the one hand examining the place of black and mixed race women in 18th century society, with Belle too high-born to eat with servants yet because of her skin too low-born to formally eat with her own family. She may have a £2,000 income a year, unlike her impoverished, equally-illegitimate white cousin, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to marry her either. Contrasted with that is a case being examined by Wilkinson in which slaves are thrown overboard a ship and the ship’s captain tries to claim on the insurance for loss of cargo. The two threads mirror each other, with Wilkinson’s growing awareness of Belle’s station informing his opinion on the case and vice versa. The cast are fabulous, with Penelope Wilton, Miranda Richardson and Emily Watson shining, too, although Tom Felton (Murder in the First, but best known as Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter) is horribly typecast as an evil racist aristo. Some tear-jerking moments and a lovely romance, but a little too gently paced and in need of trimming in places.

Monuments Men (2013)
Another film based on a true story, this sees George Clooney, Matt Damon, John Goodman and others as somewhat past-it art experts at the end of World War 2 flying out to Europe to try to rescue whatever art they can before the Nazis steal it or destroy it – or the Allies bomb the hell out of it. That’s the first half-hour anyway, but we gave up after that because pretty much nothing much happens. There’s no good dialogue, the direction is limp, there’s no action, no scenes of note: there’s more excitement in a Pathé newsreel.

After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Continuum, Enlisted, Halt and Catch Fire, Old School, Penny Dreadful, Suits and Undateable.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Belle, Halt and Catch Fire, and Continuum”

What have you been watching? Including The Night Shift, Godzilla, Penny Dreadful, Enlisted and Silicon Valley

6 June 2014 Rob Buckley 9 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.

After letting things slide a bit last week, I feel a bit chuffed with myself because this week, I’ve managed to watch everything in my viewing pile except for one episode of Prisoners of War and today’s episode of Old School. I’ve even put up some proper reviews of new shows:

Yay me! I even remembered that I’d watched NBC’s Night Shift last week but forgot to review it. Because it’s so bad (as one reviewer put it, it’s for people who couldn’t cope with the intellectual rigour of Chicago Fire)

Night Shift (US: NBC)
A summer medical show, in which all bunch of tedious human beings try to outdo each other at how great they are as doctors, nurses and paramedics. Literally every scene involved a new character arriving, someone flailing at medicine, and then Johnny New Arrival showing some technique he or she had learnt in Iraq, volunteering with underprivileged children in Zimbabwe while recovering from chemotherapy and the like, and then rubbing it in the face of everyone else. Bizarrely, it features Jill Flint who gave up a decent job playing an efficient hospital administrator in the enjoyable Royal Pains to play an efficient hospital administrator in this steaming pile of offal.

Even more excitingly, I’ve watched another movie:

Godzilla (2014)
A frustrating, tantalising piece of work that sees Bryan Cranston trying to work out what destroyed the Japanese nuclear power plant he worked in with his wife (Juliette Binoche), while his body-disposal expert son Aaron Taylor-Johnson tries to get back home to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen). Except it turns out that dinosaurs still roam the Earth and they really don’t care what cities stand in their way.

In many ways, a lovely tribute to original with some of the scenes recreations of scenes from the original Toho series of movies but made to look truly realistic and devastating. Some thought’s gone into making the bad monsters, why Godzilla wants to save us from them and why some giant cockroaches would even need to be able to create electromagnetic pulses (when you spot it, you’ll kick yourself). But despite a full hour of work by director Gareth Edwards (Monsters) to make you care about the humans before the fights properly start, you still don’t give a toss about them and ultimately, you’ll just want to see Godzilla punching some big monsters – except largely Edwards cuts away to a news broadcast whenever anything gets too close to being exciting. And there are whole bits that are absolutely irrelevant. The final fight is great, though, with some truly whoop-worthy moments, and the HALO drop almost atones for the lack of action in other places.

After the jump, yet more, with a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Enlisted, Penny Dreadful, Prisoners of War and Silicon Valley

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including The Night Shift, Godzilla, Penny Dreadful, Enlisted and Silicon Valley”