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.
So I got a bit snowed under with work on Friday and then went out for the evening, which meant ‘What have you been watching?’ didn’t happen. Sorry about that. Fingers crossed, things will be back to normal by the end of this week.
Anyway, here it is now. Unfortunately, I’ve not yet had a chance to watch last night’s Quantico, Blood &Oil, and Y Gwyll, but never fear third-episode verdicts of the first two will be arriving in the next few days, as will a third-episode verdict on The Player and a review of BBC America’s new Vikings v Saxons show The Last Kingdom.
However, the delay does mean I’ll be able to provide my thoughts on Friday’s Dr Ken and the last ever Continuum, as well as Saturday’s Doctor Who. You’ll find them after the jump, snuggled in the warm embrace of reviews of the latest episodes of: 800 Words, Arrow, Blindspot, Code Black, The Flash, Grandfathered, The Grinder, Scream Queens and You’re The Worst.
Just in case you think I was slacking, though, elsewhere I did manage to review the first episodes of new shows This Life (Canada: CBC) and Dr Ken (US: ABC), as well as provide third-episode verdicts on Blindspot (US: NBC; UK: Sky Living), The Muppets (US: ABC; UK: Sky1) and Limitless (US: CBS; UK: Sky Living).
And, I went to see a movie, too:
The Martian (2015) (in cinemas now) Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestselling ‘MacGyver in space’ novel, in which an astronaut is accidentally left behind on Mars and must use his advanced knowledge of science and engineering to survive, re-establish contact with Earth and then somehow get home again. Despite being very faithful to Weir’s original plotline and dialogue, it’s neverthless a different beast to the book, which was originally published online a chapter at a time, presenting a different scientific or engineering challenge with each installment. Most of the science and a lot of the tension have gone, to the extent that huge chunks get replaced with a ‘seven months later’ caption, although you can still see some of it left behind in various places.
All the same, it’s different, rather than inferior to the book – a cinematic experience rather than a literary one that’s more about survival than solving problems single-handedly – and is easily Scott’s best work in years, as well as probably his funniest ever. A great cast in a movie that largely tries to get science right, doesn’t pick sides and actually looks great in 3D for a change.
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.
I always forget. I always go “Look how much I’ve done!” in the first week of each new Fall season, then forget that in the second week I’ve got to watch all the new programmes that start airing that week as well as the ones that began the previous week.
My, what a lot of tele I’ve watched this week.
Still, unbelievably, I’m actually up to date. This week, I reviewed the first episodes of the following new shows:
And after the jump, you’ll find reviews of the latest episodes of: 800 Words, Blindspot, Continuum, Doctor Who, Heroes Reborn, Life in Pieces, Limitless, Minority Report, The Muppets, The Player, Rosewood, Scream Queens, Y Gwyll and You’re The Worst. Some of them won’t be making it to a third-episode verdict, particularly since the Barrometer is currently in a tanning salon somewhere in the Gorbals so too busy to pass judgement on anything, but you can find out which after the jump.
On top of all that, I also managed to watch the first episode of another new show, this time from the UK.
You, Me and The Apocalypse (UK: Sky1; US: NBC) As with most US/UK co-productions, particularly those involving Sky, this is a lukewarm affair that satisfies no-one, perhaps best evidenced by the change in the show’s title from Apocalypse Slough. It sees a comet approaching the Earth, meaning that everyone goes a bit whacky at the prospect of the coming Apocalypse that will result when it hits. However, the action of the first episode is all set in the lead-up to the lead-up to the comet, introducing us to several different groups of people from around the world who are going to all end up together at some point. These include Mathew Baynton, Joel Fry (Plebs), Pauline Quirke (Birds of a Feather), Rob Lowe (like you need to know who he is), Paterson Joseph (Peep Show), Jenna Fischer (The Office US) and an almost unrecognisable Megan Mullally (Will and Grace). Unfortunately, it’s all a bit weak and pathetic, not really knowing who its audience is, despite the occasional choice joke. The only exception to this is Rob Lowe’s bad minded Catholic priest who is the Vatican’s Devil’s Advocate. Otherwise, eminently missable.
But if you think after all that I had any time to watch any movies or go to the theatre, you have a higher opinion of me than I do.
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.
Can you feel it? Can you? It’s coming. It’s nearly here. It’s the Fall 2015-16 US TV season! Hoorah!
But not until next week. Not properly, anyway, which is why the only new US TV show I’ve reviewed this week is FX’s The Bastard Executioner and the only regular US shows I’ll be examining after the jump are the season finale of Impastor and the latest You’re The Worst. In desperation, I even went back a few weeks to give Patrick Stewart’s new August-debuting series a go, too.
Blunt Talk (US: Starz) Patrick Stewart plays a former British marine turned US chat show host whose ratings are on the down turn. He ends up high on drugs and alcohol, and in the arms (and bosom) of a young, transgender prostitute, and is promptly arrested – well, once he’s stopped beating up the cops. What will happen to his career now?
This is a comedy by the way. It’s not one of those crazy old-fashioned things with jokes, but instead mainly seems to get by on seeing Stewart not being a ‘English gentleman’. This might amuse Americans, unused to English people doing such things, but as Stewart himself points out in the show, we’re a bit more used to idiosyncratic Englishmen here.
The only rays of hope in the show are the moments Stewart has by himself with Adrian Scarborough (Gavin & Stacey, Plebs), his former Falklands batman, which are actually pretty good fun, even if filtered through a strange US prism.
Overall, by the end of the first episode, I really wasn’t sure what the point of the show was. It’s not satirising anything, it’s not doing a The Newsroom or a The Larry Sanders Show. It’s just Stewart being a mild-mannered, self-harming dick.
Here’s a trailer.
But that’s it for US TV. Oh well.
However, there’s more to the world than America. Indeed, elsewhere, I’ve reviewed the first episode of Australia and New Zealand’s new 800 Words, and after the jump, I’ll be looking at the continuing adventures of Canada’s Continuum and the return of Wales’ Y Gwyll/Hinterland. There’s lovely, hey?
And as if all that wasn’t enough, I broke a rule and took a look at some Greek TV.
The Island/Το Νησί (Greece: Mega) The reason for my rule-breaking is that this year marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of Victoria Hislop’s The Island, a novel set in the first half of the 20th century on the Greek islands of Crete and Spinalonga. On Spinalonga is a fortress where Greece used to send people with leprosy until a cure was discovered in the 1950s and the story is about various love affairs, some of which involve people who end up on the island, and how that affects their families.
As well as a Q&A with Hislop, the night featured an airing of the first episode of Το Νησί, Greek television’s 2010/11 24-part adaptation of the novel, which despite being made for €4m and a couple of bottles of raki, is actually very lavish and emptied the streets when it aired. Indeed, it has only ever been beaten in the ratings twice, both times by sporting events, one of which was the opening of the Athens Olympics.
The adaptation is pretty faithful to the book, right down to the modern-day London bookending, which features a pre-DowntonAbbey Dan Stevens. It’s all very lavish and well made in Greek terms, too, although equally, it’s very Greek and emotionally drawn out, too. Acting’s pretty good, with Evgenia Dimitropoulou playing a double-role of both the modern day Alexis and her own aunt Anna – as Alexis, she does a good job of playing a British-Greek girl who doesn’t speak Greek that well (hers is about as good as mine, in fact), although she seems to understand an awful lot, even some quite obscure words such as λεπρός (leper), when she winds up in Crete.
The series has never aired in the UK, surprisingly, although I’m sure BBC Four will get round to it some day. However, you can watch all of it on YouTube, albeit without subtitles, if you hunt around.
There were a few celebs among the audience at the Q&A, including Patrick Barlow and Robert Young, but one in particular pretty much stalked me all over Blackfriars and at the Q&A the entire evening. He made his bilingual acting debut in the first episode of the series, which I’ve embedded below – see if you can spot him. I’ll give you a clue – he first appears at the 3m59s point.
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.
I’m back! Miss me? Of course you did. Well, maybe. But I’m back either way and raring to watch some tele.
In fact, I’ve been watching some tele for the past month… past two weeks anyway, most of which was catching up with the previous three weeks I’d missed. So after the jump, I’ll be talking about those shows I managed to watch and in most cases see through to the end of their seasons: Glitch, Halt and Catch Fire, Hannibal, Impastor, The Last Ship, Mr Robot, True Detective and The Whispers. Oh yes, and despite my promises to the contrary, I also tuned in for the first episode of season 4 of Continuum. Humans I’ll get round to once my lovely wife has cleared her backlog of My Kitchen Rules Australia.
But over those five weeks, I came up with a new rule: no new tele during August. If you start airing your new show in August, it’s dead to me, because you picked a very silly time to start it.
That means that although Netflix gave us not only Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp as well as Narcos, I’ve not watched either of them. Or any of Amazon’s Casanova and Sneaky Pete. HBO’s Show Me A Hero? Please don’t. Showtime’s Blunt Talk? Honestly, no. Public Morals? Can stay private, thank you very much.
Which isn’t to say I won’t watch them at some point. Indeed, if you’ve started watching them, let me know if they’re any good so I can prioritise them accordingly. But for now, I’m not in a rush to tune in, particularly since the Fall 2015 season is about to dawn on us with more than a dozen new shows, so I’ve got to schedule accordingly.
On which subject, I did manage to watch the pilots of a few of those forthcoming shows, including Lucifer, Blindspot and Minority Report – hopefully I’ll be reviewing them over the next couple of weeks.
I also watched some movies and went to the theatre a bit, too.
Walk of Shame (2014) (iTunes)
One of those films that on paper I should have loved since it features Elizabeth Banks, Gillian Jacobs and Willie Garson. Except I really, really didn’t.
It sees Banks play a goody-goody TV journalist who’s just been dumped by her fiancé and turned down for a new job, so decides to let loose and has a one-night stand with James Marsden. Except then she finds out that she actually has got the job after all, provided she can get into work that morning. Wouldn’t you know it? Things go hilariously badly in her attempts to get there on her ‘walk of shame’.
Unfortunately, Walk of Shame is not so much borderline misogynistic and offensive than actually misogynistic and offensive. Iit’s also without any of the redeeming quality of ‘being funny’.
The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009) (Netflix)
Lovely wife and I used our holiday to read some actual books, including a whole stack of journalist Jon Ronson’s, amongst which was The Men Who Stare At Goats. An investigation of the US Army’s post-Vietnam dabbling with psychic powers, the book is largely an account of Ronson’s investigations as he visits one former ‘psychic soldier’ after another to learn what happened as the army tried psychologically to deal with its loss.
We ended up wondering how the book could be adapted as a movie with Ewan McGregor and George Clooney, and the answer is: by fictionalising it. McGregor plays a journalist recently dumped at the outbreak of the Iraq war (the point where Ronson’s book ends) who bumps into a ‘contractor’ (Clooney). Clooney is a ‘jedi warrior’, trained by the US army to be invisible, burst clouds with his mind, walk through walls, stop a goat’s heart goat by staring at it and more. Or try to, anyway.
The movie is then a juxtaposition of McGregor’s learning in modern day Iraq about what it is to be a Jedi warrior (the irony is not lost on the film’s producers. At all) and flashbacks to the foundation of the army’s Jedi warrior movement by Jeff Bridges.
The film is a bit clumsy as a satire, trying its best to weave real world elements from Ronson’s book into the fictionalised journey, but ultimately normalising them, rather than making them as genuinely weird as they were (Bridges’ real-life counterpart was the man who came up with ‘Be All That You Can Be’, back when he thought that wars could be stopped by small children holding baby animals in front of them). It’s better if you’ve read the book, but Clooney is great to watch whether you have or not.
The Bakkhai (Almeida)
The second of the Almeida’s major productions of ancient Greek plays, this sees Ben “Paddington Bear” Wishaw playing the god Dionysus, visiting ancient Thebes to bring his religion to its population of women, and finding resistance from the king, Pentheus (Bertie Carvel from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell).
In contrast to the Almeida’s radical reworking of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, this version of Euripides’ classic text is one of the most traditional productions I’ve ever seen, with the text rarely deviating from the original except for the occasional modern bit of humour, the chorus singing all their lines and the cast being just three men who share all the roles between them. Much is made of the gender-blurring and homoeroticism of the play, as Dionysus grants Pentheus’ desire to see what his debauched female followers get up to by persuading him to wear women’s clothes (Carvel plays his own mother, too). But it’s not until the end and Dionysus reveals his terrifying true nature that the show’s real power and tragedy kicks in.
Probably a bit too traditional for its likely audience, judging by the reserved applause at the end of what are tour de force performances by both Carvel and Wishaw, but well worth it if you’re a lover of Greek tragedy.
In Canada: Fridays, 10e/7p, Space In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, Syfy In the UK: Mondays, 8pm, Syfy. Starts tonight
They say there are no original ideas any more and that everything has already been done before – it’s just a question of how you take elements of what’s gone before to create a new mixture.
If this statement is true, it’s doubly true of science-fiction, where for any given show, it’s almost certainly possible to name a very similar if not identical predecessor. A case in point is the new Canadian-US co-production Dark Matter.
Adapted from their own comic by the brains behind the TV version of Stargate, Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, the show is roughly 90% Blakes 7 for starters – a group of six misfits, four men, two women, wind up on board an advanced spaceship. There they meet the seventh member of the crew, the ship’s artificial intelligence, and come together to fight oppression from a huge federation.
The remaining 10% of the show is pure Andromeda, with the ship’s artificial intelligence having a robotic avatar and the crew having turned good relatively recently, originally being a bunch of criminals until they had their memories taken away. And then there’s the slightly enigmatic woman with funny coloured hair who’s on board the ship but wasn’t one of the criminals and who has strange powers.
So far, so derivative. There’s even a little sprinkling of Firefly on top. The question is – does Dark Matter stick all these components together to create something decent?
The short answer is: not really, but at least it’s fun.
