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.
I promise it’s not deliberate: “What have you been watching?” has not gone fortnightly. But work got a bit silly on both Friday and Monday and I couldn’t string two sentences together by the end of the day, so WHYBW had to take an enforced break.
It’s back now. You can exhale.
I’ve been doing my best to catch up with all the new shows, although I’m afraid to say that a certain ‘can’t be arsed’ feeling has permeated my viewing schedule. I have at least reviewed the following new shows in the past two weeks:
I’ve also passed a third-episode verdict on TV Land’s Lopez. However, I really just couldn’t be arsed to watch:
Dice (US: Showtime; UK: Sky Atlantic) The new eponymous Andrew Dice Clay comedy, because it stars Andrew Dice Clay
The Path (US: Hulu) This cult drama (no, not like The Tripods) has managed to air four episodes so far and I got through a minute of it before I decided to do more enjoyable things and gave up.
The Girlfriend Experience (US: Starz) This may be a beautifully directed drama produced by Steven Soderbergh and based on his film of the same name, but it’s still on Starz and it’s still about New York escorts, so is basically going to be porn, isn’t it? I managed 5 minutes of internship interviews at various attornies (oh, how will she make ends meet?) before giving up.
The Ranch (Netflix) Ashton Kutchner stars as one of two brothers trying to run a business together on a Colorado ranch. It looked potentially interesting until it turned out to be a multi-camera comedy with an audience, at which point I gave up.
The Durrells (UK: ITV) Keeley Hawes takes her family of future authors to live on Corfu in the 30s. I gave up, mainly because of Keeley Hawes. However, I might come back to it at some point.
Watch those trailers (or even an episode) and tell everyone if you could be arsed, why don’t you?
I also couldn’t be arsed to watch any more episodes of:
Blå Ögon (Blue Eyes) (Sweden: SVT1; UK: More4) As I said in the previous WHYBW, the show has two plot threads: a conspiracy thriller and a right-wing terrorist drama. The latter is great, the former is bobbins. Unfortunately, the third episode was 75% of the former, only 25% of the latter, so I gave up after 15 minutes.
The Catch (US: ABC; UK: Sky Living) I almost can’t remember what the episode was about, but the desperate attempt to do Ocean’s 11 with a cast desperately under-equipped for the challenge was more than I could bear.
That means that after the jump, we’ll be looking at the final episodes of 11.22.63, Billions and The Magicians, as well as the latest episodes of Arrow, The Americans, Banshee, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Limitless,Lucifer and Supergirl. We’ve also had the return of both 12 Monkeys and The Tunnel(Tunnel) – how well will they hold up in their second seasons, I bet you’re wondering.
Before that, though, a movie, and I should also offer as a side-note that Netflix has acquired RTÉ One’s Rebellion, which makes my decision to review the first few episodes not quite as insanely stupid as it looked at the time, hey?
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) (Amazon Instant Video) The movie that almost killed off director Edgar Wright’s Hollywood career before it began – the fuss behind the scenes over Ant-Man eventually did that – is a comic book adaptation that has so many things going for it yet ultimately never quite works. A fusion of comic book and gaming logic and visuals with the real world, it sees nerdy inadequate college student Scott Pilgrim (Arrested Development’s Michael Cena) wanting to date new girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) but finding he has to fight her seven evil exes first. Literally.
We did try to watch this a couple of years ago, but we switched off, bored, after the first 40 minutes or so. Giving it another go last weekend, I have to say that wasn’t an entirely incorrect decision, but it does get a lot better in the second half. It has many individually visually beautiful moments, dozens of nerdy heady nods to the expected and the unexpected (Flash Gordon), and is frequently hilarious, but stuck together, none of it quite works – the narrative falters like watching all the narrative scenes from a video game stuck together.
All the same, six years on, it’s fun to see not only its influences (I’m pretty sure The World’s End owes a lot to it) but also what a marvellous supporting cast it had, with people who were already quite big to start with or who went on to many big things later on (Alison Pill, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Mae Whitman, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Thomas Jane).
My wife’s been vegan for the past few months and this clip is now her new favourite thing, too – I’ll make sure she doesn’t drink any half-and-half, don’t worry.
In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, NBC In the UK: Not yet acquired
For some time now, I’ve been banging on about how Turkey was the new hot country for adaptations in the US: Son, The End and The Edge were all being worked upon for US TV just a couple of years ago. Of course, you must have been thinking I was barking mad because there have been literally no US adaptations of Turkish TV shows since then.
But look! Here’s one! I was right! I was right! I’m not crazy at all!
Game of Silence is based on Show TV’s multi-award winning 2012 show Suskunlar, which ran for 56 episodes over two seasons. It, in turn, was based on the true story of four boys who were sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison for (allegedly) stealing baklava. Yep. Kids. Nine years. Baklava. That’s a pudding, in case you didn’t know, and that’s Turkey for you, in case you don’t remember Midnight Express.
Anyway, all manner of horrible things happen to the kids while they’re in prison, including a whole bunch of things they don’t want to tell anyone about. Then a couple of decades later, one of them comes across one of their abusers in the street and before you know it, kills him. He’s arrested and so he and his friends call their errant upmarket lawyer friend to defend him. Except it turns out that the dead man had all manner of criminal friends and… well, you can guess the rest.
Here’s a trailer for Suskunlar:
Relocating the action to Houston, Game of Silence is pretty faithful to Suskunlar, giving us the same format of three poorer boys/men (Michael Raymond-James, Larenz Tate, Derek Phillips), one lawyer boy/man (David Lyons from Revolution and Sea Patrol), one girl/woman (Bre Blair from The Unit) they grew up with, one nasty child prison (the daftly named ‘Quitman’) and all manners of secrets catching up with them all in the present day. The boys cause a fatal car crash in the US version that winds them up in the jail, and we get frequent flashbacks to before and after.
But it’s also a modern day thriller, as Lyons tries to persuade his childhood friends when they come to him for help that killing everyone is probably a bad idea and that they need to build a legal case against the former governor of the prison (Conor O’Farrell) and his various cronies. They, in turn, are being chased by both cop Deidrie Henry, who suspects they have secrets, and their now grown-up fellow dormie and criminal gang leader Demetrius Grosse (Banshee, Justified).
Despite all the odds, Game of Silence is pretty good and while it has a few problems, quite a lot of them stem from the bits of the original that don’t quite work in the US – US prisons have a lot of problems, Turkish prisons have a lot of problems, but those problems aren’t necessarily the same. Maybe I’m wrong, but prison-organised fight clubs, murders and child abuse parties with local dignataries probably weren’t going down in the late 80s, even in Texas.
That aside, I did enjoy the slow pace of the show, the insistence (at this stage) of not going revenge-happy but sticking to the characters’ beliefs, the nostalgia-tinged, almost Stephen King-ish flashbacks to the 80s, complete with Depeche Mode et al soundtrack. I also like the surprising daring of the show – sure, it doesn’t show everything happening, but it really doesn’t pull any punches in terms of what it implies. Indeed, it’s almost a 15-rated Sleepers:
The trouble is that there’s not much about it that’s enjoyable. Everyone’s miserable. Fair dos – who wouldn’t be? But unless your idea of fun is a joyless revenge thriller about childhood abuse, with subdued, non-descript, traumatised characters, Game of Silence is going to be a hard slog over numerous hours of TV, rather than just a single movie. Still, as joyless revenge thrillers go, this is definitely one of the better ones.
In the US: Wednesdays, 10/9c, TV Land In the UK: Not yet acquired
As we learned from its first episode, the latest of George Lopez’s eponymously-titled shows is a lot better than many other eponymously-titled shows that aren’t named after George Lopez. Indeed, Lopez, created by John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, who also co-created Silicon Valley and King of the Hill, is a surprisingly warm-hearted and smart look at modern celebrity from the viewpoint of someone who isn’t quite a celebrity any more, except among certain ethnic and age demographics.
After a first episode that sees Lopez having to deal with everyone from neighbours to Twitter followers, with varying degrees of social anxiety about how he should treat them, the second episode has him exploring the difficulties of modern dating as a Latino celebrity – can he use Tinder? If so, how? And can he be sure that whomever is dating him is dating him because of who he is, rather than because he’s famous? And what happens when they discover he’s a comedian?
Of course, as the show is set in LA, the answers aren’t necessarily what you’re expecting.
Surprisingly for a show that started off as almost a set of sketches of Lopez’s life, the show’s since evolved more of a narrative, with subsequent episodes taking on various story points and expanded them. It also doesn’t try to make Lopez’s experiences more universal – not only is much of the comedy about social mores and being Latino, including how that ‘ranks’ in the US compared to black, white and asian men and women, it also frequently targets LA and Californian life, with episode three mainly concerning the reaction in LA to Lopez watering his lawn during a drought (“you grasshole”… “brown is the new green”) and what he has to do on social media to counter the adverse reaction.
Slightly problematically, that means the humour doesn’t transfer quite as well over the Atlantic, particularly – if like me – you’ve never seen Lopez in anything before (despite his first sitcom airing for six years on ABC). All the same, for a TV Land sitcom starring a not especially famous person as himself, Lopez is funnier, cleverer, more tuned in to modern culture(s) and just downright nicer than it has any right to be.
Barrometer rating: 2 Rob’s prediction: Clearly the best comedy on TV Land at the moment, it deserves to run for at least another season, although its appeal might be too specific for its own good
