It must be the end of days. Or a promotion for Game of Thrones season 3 coming to Blinkbox.
[via]
US TV
Game of Thrones
Monday’s “More Wonderland, Sky Living’s drama casting and a Jacob’s Ladder remake” news
Film
- Jacob’s Ladder remake planned
Film casting
- Rosemarie DeWitt to star in Kill The Messenger
- Terence Stamp joins Big Eyes
- Michael Peña, Djimon Hounsou and Dougray Scott to star in The Vatican Tapes
- Sara Canning, Ian Tracey and Jodi Balfour join Eadweard Muyrbidge indie
- Logan Marshall-Green, Wyatt Russell to star in Turk
UK TV
- Daniel Rigby to star in Dave’s Undercover
- Anna Friel to star in Sky Living’s The Psychopath Next Door, Suranne Jones to star in Lawless, Katherine Kelly and Anne Reid to star in The Last Witch, Russell Tovey to star in Talking to the Dead, and Gemma Fay and Freema Agyeman to star in Rubenesque
- Charlie Cox, Christian McKay, Tessa Peake-Jones join BBC2’s Legacy
- Marcus Garvey and Daisy Beaumont join Gold’s Us and Them
- Victoria Hamilton joins BBC1’s The Game
- Saturday ratings
US TV
- Trailer for season 3/4 of Strike Back
US TV casting
- Pedro Pascal joins Game of Thrones
- Jessica Collins joins Revolution
- Melissa George and Juliet Rylance join The Good Wife
- Five Glee cast members promoted
New US TV shows
- Once Upon A Time in Wonderland getting more episodes
New US TV show casting
- Jayma Mays to co-star on CBS’s The Millers
US TV
Review: Crossing Lines 1×1 (NBC/TF1)
In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, NBC
In France: TF1. No air date yet
Crime, these days, is global. In Europe, which doesn’t have an equivalent to the FBI specifically tasked with investigating ‘federal’ crimes, if you’re a computer hacker in Poland, you can steal money from a French bank as easily as if you were in Paris and the policiers will have a devil of a time bringing you to book. If you’ve killed someone in London and are looking to avoid the police, a quick trip on the Eurostar over to Brussels and even if the Met know you committed the crime, getting the Federale Politie/Police Fédérale/Föderale Polizei to not only talk to each other but find you and arrest you will be far more challenging for them than getting the South Tyneside police to do the same.
My, if only there were some kind of pan-European bunch of cops tasked with investigating crimes that cross EU state boundaries, able to skirt these kind of jurisdictional issues so they can bring to heel criminals who have escaped justice because of lack of co-operation between forces.
Well, there isn’t, but Crossing Lines, a US-French-German co-production, imagines such an elite group of cops, albeit one that needs an American lead for in-story reasons that are a little opaque and for real-world reasons that are far more explicable.
It stars William Fichtner (Prison Break, Invasion, MDs) as a crippled New York cop who’s moved to the Netherlands and become a garbage collector for reasons that are initially inexplicable but become clearer by the end of the pilot. He’s recruited for his deductive powers (and American-ness) by a French detective (singer and occasional actor Marc Lavoine) who heads up an elite team of cops at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The team also includes a British interrogation specialist (Genevieve O’Reilly), a Northern Irish weapons specialist and former traveller (Richard Flood), a German technology expert (Tom Wlaschiha from HBO’s Game of Thrones), an Italian undercover specialist (Gabriella Pession) and a French crime analyst with an eidetic memory (Moon Dailly from France 3’s Commissaire Magellan). Together with the help of an ICC inspector (Donald Sutherland – do I really have to tell you who he is?), the team can investigate crimes other groups can’t touch.
Their first case? Well, given the series was created by one of the show runners of Criminal Minds, despite the shiny international cast, the numerous glossy European locations, relatively high budget and a surprising nose for local cultural differences, would it surprise you if I told you it was a relatively dull, tedious, cliched affair involving an American serial killer? Probably not.
Here’s a trailer:
Rant of the week: it’s time for more realistic violence on TV
Violence is ever present – on our TV screens and on our cinema screens in particular. This is true particularly in the US, where the accidental sight of a nipple during a Super Bowl halftime show will get a TV network a heavy fine but you can have people shot to death, tortured and more during primetime and no one will care.
Some people believe there is a causative link between violence in the media and real-life violence, with proponents seeing violence on TV as creating an environment that makes violence in real-life acceptable to some, perhaps even encouraging them to do it in real-life or to have ideas.
Evidence for this is largely anecdotal and there are counter-studies that indicate, for example, that screen violence can even reduce violence in those who watch it. A more nuanced argument is put out by others, including DB Weiss, one of the show runners of Game of Thrones, which has been criticised for its gore:
“Violence in the real world is awful to witness. But it’s the sanitized versions of violence on TV that are worse because they’re letting kids watch. On network TV, people die in droves in a way that’s clean and easy to watch and fun. It’s more like an old video game.”
The argument here is that showing violence without consequences is the bad idea since it gives people the idea that there’s no issue with violence. So, after the jump, let’s go watch some Banshee. Warning: it’ll turn your stomach. Hopefully.
Continue reading “Rant of the week: it’s time for more realistic violence on TV”
What did you watch this week? Including The Fall, Up The Women, Family Tree, Game of Thrones, Wreck-it Ralph and The Iceman
It’s “What did you watch this week?, my chance to tell you what I movies and TV I’ve watched this week that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.
First, the usual recommendations:
- Continuum (Showcase/SyFy)
- The Daily Show (Comedy Central)
- The Fall (BBC2/Netflix)
- Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living)
Still in the viewing queue: last night’s Graceland and I’m toying with watching Channel 4’s The Returned, even though I normally can’t be arsed with zombie shows, even French zombie shows.
Here’s a few thoughts on what I did watch this week, though :
- Continuum (Showcase/SyFy): After last week’s improvement, yet more signs of recovery, with the various first-season story arcs starting to come back to life again at last, joining the new ones from this season. As well as some things that made precisely no sense, we did get a whole collection of great moments, mostly involving Carlos and Kiera. I think it’s clear where a lot of this is going but there’s enough surprises still coming that it still feels quite fresh and exciting.
- The Daily Show (Comedy Central): John Oliver’s first week on the job and although he’s obviously not as comfortable in the job as Jon Stewart – give him time – it’s actually been a pretty good run so far. To a certain extent, he’ll need to find his own voice as a host to differentiate himself from Stewart.
- The Fall (BBC2/Netflix): Ah! A notorious finale. Haven’t had one of those in a while. Not so much a conclusion as a slight pause in the story. To be honest, the fact it’s been renewed for a second series actually makes this a less impressive finale than it should have been, since it’s quite an original thing to do (spoiler alert: let the criminal get away). Now it just looks like they were setting everything up oddly for a second series. Maybe they were. Nevertheless, despite this being the least impressive of all the episodes, it was probably the best British drama I’ve seen in a long time, so yay to a second series.
- Family Tree (HBO/BBC2): I think I’m going to give up after this one. It’s giving me wry chuckles but that’s about it. Well observed, well acted, even Nina Conti and Monkey are tolerable, but it’s just not very funny.
- Game of Thrones (HBO/Sky Atlantic): So I finally made it through to the end of the third season. I think most of my comments from last week hold, particularly about the second season, although the nudity did drop off again in the third season, thankfully. I imagine that this is a show that’s going to be best appreciated as one massive box set binge one day, because there’s a lot going on that’s frustratingly close to great but never actually gets there: you can see that everyone’s eventual stories are going to end up being great, it’s just we’re in the middle of them as they head towards that greatness, and it’s not going to be for another two to three seasons that we actually get to see it. Still, a lot to commend about it and I’m probably going to be glued to my set when the fourth season comes round. Perhaps Stephen Dillane and Patrick Malahide will meet again. PS The red wedding? What was all the fuss about?
- Hannibal (NBC/Sky Living): My hat’s off to Bryan Fuller and co, as always, as the show hits its penultimate episode, revealing just how tightly written and architected this first season has been. What the finale will bring us is anyone’s guess, but this has been one of the most consistently excellent first seasons of any show I’ve watched.
- Up The Women (BBC4): Already renewed for a second series, for which it will transfer over to BBC2, this studio comedy about suffragettes in 1910 features a great cast – Jessica Hynes, Rebecca Front, Adrian Scarborough – and some clever writing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feature any real jokes. Well, not that I found funny. There’s probably a few people who’ll laugh at a joke in which a man shows he knows less about a light bulb and how it works than a woman does, but they’ve presumably never seen comedy shows before and this will all be new to them. If, however, you have seen a comedy show before, then the most you can do is hope it does better and wish it well, since its heart is in the right place, at least.
And in movies:
Wreck-It Ralph
Bizarrely, it’s Pixar does Tron. A villain in an 80s arcade game decides he wants more from life so goes exploring other video games, messing not only his own game up but those he encounters along the way. Weirdly, the first half is probably going to be unfathomable to anyone under the age of 30, with clever references to Pac Man, Streetfighter and any number of games that a child of the 80s would love and remember. The second half on the other hand is probably going to be unfathomable to anyone over the age of 40, since it’s largely references to modern console games, particularly Super Mario Kart on the Wii. It’s all very precise and very clever, and there’s great vocal work from John C Reilly (Ralph), Alan Tudyk (the evil King Candy), Sarah Silverman (Ralph’s new friend in the superbly imagined Sugar Rush) and Jane Lynch (a heroine from a first-person shooter) among others. But the fun-density isn’t quite as high as it should be, with big chunks that just sort of amble by. Some of the sexual politics are a little debatable, too, but only a little. Enjoyable but not a true classic.
The Iceman
Given a choice of Michael Shannon movies to watch last night, I chose to watch The Iceman rather than Man Of Steel: I’m watching that tonight. I’m not sure Shannon could be better in the latter though, since he gives a spot-on performance as the real-life Iceman, a mafia hit-man who killed probably more than 100 people from the end of the 60s through to the 80s, somehow managing to keep the terrible truth from his family. Surprisingly, it’s a film of good performances from the unexpected likes of Ray Liotta, Winona Ryder, Chris Evans (practically unrecognisable as another, rather hirsute killer) and, incredibly surprisingly, David Schwimmer from Friends. Perhaps a little slower and flatter than in needed to be, it’s nevertheless a thoughtful insight into the mind of a sociopath who needs to kill people in order to preserve his marriage. Yes, that does sound weird.