The Medium is Not Enough

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 been a slightly busier weekend than I was planning, thanks in part to the arrival of my new nephew, Charlie (welcome to the world, Charlie!). That means I didn’t quite manage to watch all the new shows I wanted, but I’m otherwise pretty much up to date. I’ve already reviewed the first episode of Shut Eye (US: Hulu), but that’s as far as I’ve got – third-episode verdict later this week, though. I’m five minutes into Netflix’s Medici: Masters of Florence and it’s got a worrying Borgia-quality to it, so I’m not in a rush to get any further with that, but I’ll try.

However, I’ll definitely be previewing Swedish Dicks (Sweden: Viaplay) this week and hopefully working my way through 3% (Netflix) and anything else that looms large, too.

That means that after the jump, thanks to last week’s minor purge and the December break, I’ll be looking at the slightly reduced list of current regulars:

Canada
Travelers

US
Chance, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Falling Water, The Flash, The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, Shooter, Son of Zorn and Timeless.

I’ll also be looking at the season finales of Ash vs Evil Dead and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

I did manage to watch a movie this week, too:

Jason Bourne (2016)
Disappointing return of the now-venerable franchise, with both Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass returning after the brief Tony Gilroy/Jeremy Renner interlude of The Bourne Legacy. Trying to take in the developments in world espionage since the The Bourne Supremacy, Jason Bourne brings Damon out of retirement to help Julia Stiles with her Snowden-esque activities, only to discover that his own dad might have had a hand in the Treadstone programme that created ‘Jason Bourne’. Meanwhile, Alicia Vikander is helping CIA director Tommy Lee Jones hunt down Damon and Stiles, while covering up his guilty secret, which involves Mark Zuckerberg-alike Riz Ahmed; Vincent Cassel is their asset out in the field, trying to kill Damon and Stiles, but not just because he’s following orders.

The plot and pretty much everything else is a poor retread of the best and worst bits of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, offering nothing new, while sacrificing one of the things that made the first few movies so refreshing: a reasonable attempt at mimesis. Here, the technology is just nonsense – “I’ve embedded malware in the files. As soon as she accesses them, I’ll know where she is” – the fights and inevitable car chases are poor and implausible, and even locations are glossed over, with the Canary Islands standing in for Athens at one point.

Should have stayed off the grid, guys. Or asked Tony Gilroy to help out again.

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