Silicon Valley

Streaming TV

Mini-review: The Cosmopolitans 1×1 (Amazon Prime)

2 September 2014 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

The Cosmopolitans

On the Internet: Amazon Prime

The director of 80s/90s indie darlings Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, Whit Stillman has a very particular voice. Indeed, a friend of mine interviewed him once and wryly observed that Stillman had complained to him with great specificity about America’s prejudice against ‘the upper middle classes’.

And it’s true (perhaps with reason). Shows such as Royal Pains, Suits and Rush may be about rich people but they’re very much on the outside looking in, laughing at the rich rather than with them, and not really understanding them as a group.

By contrast, Stillman is a friend of the Kennedy family, Harvard-educated and a europhile, who’s lived and worked in Spain. He’s very much an insider, possibly a unique one*. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that in many ways, he is the American male Jane Austen of our time, casting his eye over the manners, codes and mating rituals of the American rich with almost the same wit and acuteness that Austen did with the equivalent society of her time.

So it’s no big surprise that The Cosmopolitans, Stillman’s first (Internet) TV project, coalesces the themes of both Metropolitan and Barcelona to depict a group of rich young US ex-pats, desperately looking for love in Paris wherever they can find it, whether that be each other, Canadians, the French or any other Europeans that come by to mock their American ways, the quality of their French or their attempts to become that ultimate accolade – a Parisian.

Stillman has a lovely way with observation and takes dialogue and people in unexpected directions. His characters are as far as possible away from the nerds of Silicon Valley, the gun-toting police of Blue Bloods and the poor underclass of Shameless. They are as East Coast liberal as it’s possible for Americans to get, even those who allegedly come from Alabama.

Yet without this pervasive cultural background to draw on, Stillman is still able to make explicit their rules and dreams as comfortably as Austen’s Lizzy Bennet or Wilde’s Lady Bracknell did, with Chloë Sevigny’s ex-pat fashion journalist, for example, explaining how one doesn’t come abroad merely to date Americans yet it’s never done to date a Frenchman.

Where it perhaps falls down a little – assuming, as with Girls, you can survive a whole episode without wanting to knife the equivalent over-privileged, somewhat fey boy-men that populate the drama – is the characters, who largely are not so much people as a group of pithy social comments and chances for pseudo-Wildean epigrams. Similarly, the Europeans who do show up, both French and Italian, are chances for Stillman to extemporise on either Europeans or Americans.

But The Cosmopolitans is like nothing that’s on regular TV at the moment. Whether it’s your cup of tea or not, do yourself a favour and watch it to see something that isn’t a procedural, isn’t about computer programmers, doesn’t involve middle Americans in middle Americans, isn’t a period drama and is all about people. Just for a change.

And unless I’m hallucinating, you can do that using the video below.

* Lena Durham being possibly the other challenger to the crown

US TV

Review: Murder In The First 1×1 (TNT)

13 June 2014 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Murder In The First

In the US: Mondays, 10pm (ET/PT), TNT

TNT’s an odd network, a sort of in-between house on basic cable between regular old vanilla, commercial, network TV and the no-holds-barred, challenging world of premium cable. With no real identity of its own, it churns out shows that would largely sit very happily on any broadcast network were it not for the occasional swear word: Falling Skies, King & Maxwell, Perception, Memphis Beat, Dark Blue, Leverage, Saving Grace, Trust Me, Rizzoli & Isles, Franklin and Bash, The Closer, Major Crimes – the list goes on and assuming you hadn’t forgotten that pretty much all of those shows ever existed, you’d have been hard-pushed to remember they were on TNT and perhaps even cable. The network’s one truly good show was Southland… which it picked up from NBC then slashed its budget.

At most, you might think of TNT as ‘The Crime Channel’, because of the 13 shows listed above, 11 involve cops, lawyers and/or robbers, and the rest of the time, it’s broadcasting reruns of Law & Order. But you don’t. It’s just TNT. It’s just… there.

I don’t think it’s escaped TNT’s notice that it’s not very noticeable, either. It’s got an ambitious summer schedule of dramas lined up that includes spy thriller Legends, for example. But it’s starting us off gently with another crime drama, except to make it a bit more memorable, it’s gone once again to Steve Bochco, who previously gave the network Raising the Bar (make that 12 out of 14 shows).

Young people might not have heard of Steve Bochco (and let’s face it, they’re probably not going to be watching TNT, since it leans towards a much older demographic, anyway), but together with Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Enterprises, he was pretty much responsible for launching the second wave of great American television that began in the 80s. He started it off with the innovative Hill Street Blues before giving us LA Law, Doogie Howser MD, Hooperman, NYPD Blue and (oh horror) Cop Rock, which I guess was innovative, too, given it was as the name suggests, a musical drama about cops:

Possibly Bochco’s greatest creative achievement, even if it wasn’t a ratings success, was the almost-theatrical Murder One. As with Hill Street Blues, Murder One was unusual for its time in having story arcs – a season-long high-profile criminal case in Murder One’s case. It was filled with a fantastic cast that included Patricia Clarkson, Mary McCormack and the magnificent Stanley Tucci and Daniel Benzali, who presided like a Renaissance Pope over his cadre of lawyers:

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that for his latest show, Murder In The First, Bochco has pitched at that older demographic who liked his previous shows. Giving Murder One a slight Law & Order twist, Murder In The First follows a criminal investigation by San Francisco police into two murders linked to a celebrity all the way through to the trial and (presumably) conviction of the killer. It also adds in a dash of Hill Street Blues, with its focus on the domestic lives and working relationships of the cops.

Starring Taye Diggs (Day Break), Kathleen Robertson (Boss), Richard Schiff (The West Wing), Steven Weber (Studio 60), Nicole Ari Parker (The Deep End) and Draco Malfoy himself – Tom Felton from the Harry Potter movies – it’s not exactly what you’d call ground-breaking, but is probably going to be a passable piece of summer viewing. Well, better than everything else on TNT, anyway.

Here’s a trailer:

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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

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US TV

Mini-review: Halt and Catch Fire 1×1 (AMC)

4 June 2014 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, AMC

Of all the events in history you might have expected to have seen dramatised on TV, the quest in the early 1980s to develop 100% IBM PC-compatible computers by reverse engineering IBM’s proprietary BIOS chip probably wasn’t one of them. Leave it to AMC, then, to expand the envelope, because here we have Halt and Catch Fire – named after an obscure assembly language instruction – which seeks to do just that.

Starring Lee Pace of Pushing Daisies as Joe MacMillan (the Steve Jobs of the piece), Scott McNairy as Gordon Clark (the Steve Wozniak), it sees former IBM salesman MacMillan go rogue and turn up at a fictitious Texan computer company a year later. There he meets Clark and persuades him to help him build a PC-compatible. Along the way, he’s also recruited a bright young engineer, Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) who’ll help them both to make MacMillan’s dreams a reality.

And actually, it’s very good. While Silicon Valley and the BBC’s similar Micro Men decided to take the comic route to deal with computers, this is as serious and as hardcore as AMC’s Mad Men. Although it’s not based on a real company or people, it draws elements from real events to look at the somewhat overlooked Texas companies that helped to create the PC revolution and recreates the early 80s as convincingly as The Americans, albeit that portion of the 80s that led to Tron, right down to the synthesiser incidental music and theme tune. Lee Pace is compelling as the visionary and ruthless MacMillan, who’s prepared to destroy an entire company to get what he wants. The technical details are impressive and assume a level of knowledge in the audience, whether it’s a discussion of firmware, the use of hexadecimal notation or comments familiar to anyone in IT (“No one ever got fired for buying IBM”).

And although it’s an AMC show, this first episode actually clips along at a reasonable pace. Admittedly, the first 15 minutes or so are a bit shaky, thanks to an Armadillo accident (no, really) and Clark’s sheer lack of charisma next to MacMillan’s overwhelming personality. And Davis’ character is somewhat undermined in that after a cracking introduction that shows how bright she is, that’s initially only to show why MacMillan wants to sleep with her and his near-sociopathy.

But by the end of the episode, it becomes a compelling watch. Definitely one to stick with.

What have you been watching? Including X-Men: Days of Future Past, Game of Thrones and Old School

2 June 2014 Rob Buckley 6 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.

You take a day off and blimey, even in summer, it’s suddenly all systems go at the networks. As a result, still in the viewing queue are the first episodes of NBC’s Undateable and Crossbones as well as AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire. Fingers crossed, I’ll have reviews of them up tomorrow and Thursday – and not such a backlog for my next round-up, which should be on Friday.

I did watch a movie, though:

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Probably the most famous of all the X-Men comic storylines – if any X-men comic can truly be said to have famous storylines – with the cast of the first three movies facing an apocalyptic future thanks to some killer robots called Sentinels. So they get Kitty PrydeWolverine to travel back in time to 1973 where he has to meet the cast of X-Men: First Class and guide them on a different path that doesn’t involve them all dying.

With an amalgam of X-Men writers and directors to match the on-screen melange, this feels like X-Men: First Class crossed with X-Men: the more fun, action-packed storyline and period setting of the former but with the coldness and coolness of the latter. Largely a Mystique/Professor X piece, with a lot of added Wolverine, it still manages to feature cameos from pretty much everyone who was in X-Men and X-Men: First Class, as well a few new ones, even if it’s only for a few moments, and with its time travel element, don’t be surprised by the fact it effectively wipes out X-Men 3 from the canon so that they can have more fun in the next movie, X-Men: Apocalypse, based on the second most-famous X-Men/X-Men: Evolution storyline.

None of it makes a lick of sense, mind, and no more fits into continuity than X-Men: Origins: Wolverine. All the same, the second best of the X-Men movies, thanks to Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender (with a consistent accent for a chance) and Hugh Jackman. In fact, I’m going to see it again later this week.

After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, Continuum, Game of Thrones and Old School.

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