Silicon Valley

What have you been watching? Including Dear White People, Great News, Doctor Who and Silicon Valley

9 May 2017 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

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.

Slightly later than normal this week thanks to everyone and their auntie suddenly thinking Sunday nights are the best time to broadcast TV shows. Monday nights? Not so much, so here we are on Tuesday, perhaps for a little time, perhaps for one week only.

Earlier this week, I reviewed the first episode of American Gods (US: Starz; UK: Amazon) and the first three episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale (US: Hulu; UK: Amazon). But time and time wait for no man, not even me, so I’ll be reviewing the second and fourth episodes of those two respective shows after the jump, along with the usual regulars: The Americans, Doctor Who, The Flash, Great News, Lucifer and Silicon Valley.

But I did try to watch something else as well. Albeit a tad unsuccessfully.

Dear White People (Netflix)
Follow-up TV series to the massively successful movie that explores the modern day nuances and mores of race, class, race again, sex and race (again). Set on a modern day US Ivy League college campus, it looks at what happens when a humour magazine organises a black-face Halloween party. The ‘Dear White People’ of the title is the name of a college radio show run by Logan Browning (Powers, Hit The Floor) in which she tries to explain to white people what they’re doing might be racist, while they in turn phone in to explain to her how racist she’s being.

And that’s all I got.

The first 10 minutes were actually quite funny – astute critiques of what forms racism can take in an age in which accusing someone of racism is seemingly worse than their actually being racist, as well as insights into how racism changes depending on the classes of both those being racist and those targeted, and even how what constitutes racism can vary from one person to another.

I’d like to have carried on watching, but then came a point where I realised I literally had no idea what people were saying. The words didn’t mean anything to me. I am old and white and British, and the cast are predominantly young and black and American, and I simply couldn’t understand their lexicon and references, or when I did, it was five to 10 seconds after the line had been delivered.

What I caught was very good, though, so I may come back to it – with the subtitles turned on and tablet in hand set to the Urban Dictionary so I can work out what’s going on and maybe learn a little, too.

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What have you been watching? Including Saving Mr Banks, Lucifer, Doctor Who and The Flash

2 May 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

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.

Easter’s over, we’re entering May and while Captain Squarejaw might be depressed about the whole thing, TV networks around the world are waking up, filled will the joys of spring, and starting to send us a whole batch of new shows to enjoy.

Elsewhere, I’ve already reviewed the whole of Seven Types of Ambiguity (Australia: ABC), as well as the first episodes of Great News (US: NBC) and Genius (US/UK: National Geographic). Later in the week (I’m guessing Thursday), I’ll be casting my eye over the first few eps of The Handmaid’s Tale (US: Hulu) and American Gods (US: Starz; UK: Amazon), but there’ll probably be a few other shows I haven’t noticed yet that I’ll try to review as well (eg Dear White People). 

After the jump, though, I’ll be reviewing the usual regulars: The Americans, Doctor Who and Silicon Valley. Joining that list are the returning The Flash as well as the long-absent Lucifer. Hoorah! I’m assuming that’s what I heard you all saying just now, anyway.

I also watched a movie over the weekend.

Saving Mr Banks (2013)
Dual biopic about the making of Mary Poppins, in which a reluctant ‘PL Travers’ (Emma Thompson) is convinced to give Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) the rights to adapt her famed book. Coming over to Hollywood, she then has to deal with the fact the movie will be a partially animated musical that’s less than identical to the book and characters as she envisioned them, with the likes of Bradley Whitford and Jason Schwartzman having to show her just how supercalifragilisticexpialidocious it’ll all be if she just lets them to their thang.

Meanwhile, a second parallel plot flashes back to Travers’ upbringing in Australia with her delightful but chronically alcoholic dad (Colin Farrell), suicidally depressed mum (The Affair‘s Ruth Wilson) and suspiciously Poppins-like aunt (Rachel Griffiths), so that we can see what meaning Poppins might have had to Travers and how it made her so precious about her creation.

Obviously, you have to know Mary Poppins quite well to get the most out of everything, with Amadeus-like scenes depicting prototyping of characters and songs that require you to know what the final result should be like in order to see the difference. There are some very weird accents in the Australian portion of things, while Hanks’ performance is less than sparkling. The ending is also a bit of a fudge, since Travers still hated Mary Poppins when it came out.

Yet, the film, despite playing around with time, place and people, still gives us a Disney who isn’t whitewashed and Thompson’s Travers is marvellously acerbic (Travers insisted on having everything recorded, so much of the dialogue is what she actually said, not just conjecture). The recreations are also quite lovely, while Travers’ childhood is heartbreaking. If you have an interest in classic movie production, Saving Mr Banks is far more interesting than the average documentary and is full of laughs and pathos.

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What have you been watching? Including Girlboss, Doctor Who, The Magicians and Fortitude

24 April 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

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.

You can definitely tell we’re between seasons at the moment, can’t you? Some new shows have started up (such as Famous In Love) and there are a lot more on the way, but this week, there have been very few of the regulars to watch, just The Americans, Doctor Who and the season finale of The Magicians, all of which I’ll talk about after the jump, as well as the return last night of Silicon Valley.

The rest of the time, I’ve been playing catch-up on Fortitude, which I’ll also talk about in a minute, as well as watching Seven Types of Ambiguity. I’m four episodes into that now, so I’ll a do a full season review later in the week once I’ve watched the remaining two, along with National Geographic’s Genius.

I did, however, take a glance at one other new show over the weekend:

Girlboss (Netflix)
Based on Sophia Amoruso’s book of (almost) the same name (#GirlBoss), this is a ‘loose… real loose’ reimagining of Amoruso’s climb from rags to riches in which Britt Robertson (Life Unexpected, Under The Dome) is a girl so down-and-out that she sleeps with men so she has somewhere to stay for the night and gets repeatedly fired from jobs because she doesn’t want to work for anyone. But what does she want to do? She doesn’t know, until one day she discovers she has a gift for spotting expensive second-hand clothes being given away for next to nothing. Before you know it, she’s setting up her own eBay fashion business, which will go on to be worth millions.

I actually already knew about Amaruso already, because her book was the subject of some Greek translation I had to do once, Amoruso being Greek/Italian-American (“Sofia often stole from shops, which Americans call ‘shoplifting’, for which we don’t have a specific word”). Turning Amaruso into the daughter of a rich WASP (a minor reunion for Robertson as it’s Breaking Bad/Under The Dome‘s Dean Norris) robs the story of some potential variety, as does shifting the action from the early 90s to the mid-00s. However, it still manages to maintain the main highlights of Amaruso’s career and (loose) dedication to anarchism, and be a moderately interesting story about a young woman’s journey to try to discover what she wants to do with her life and then learn how to start and run an ultimatly hugely successful business.

But it’s not great. Enjoyable enough, a different sort of story for young women from the standard current ‘handsome prince’ tales (eg Famous In Love) and Robertson is still very watchable, but neither bad nor great in its telling, just a bit average.

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News: BBC One’s gunpowder plot; Brian Pern tribute; new Stephen King drama; + more

20 February 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

New UK TV shows

New UK TV show casting

  • Julia Ormond, Philippa Coulthard, Joseph Quinn et al joins BBC One’s Howard’s End

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

New US TV show casting

The BarrometerA Barrometer rating of 3

Third-episode verdict: Powerless (US: NBC)

17 February 2017 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

In the US: Thursdays, 8.30/7.30c, NBC

You always have to give a show that’s had a revamp a little time to settle in. A little.

When Powerless was commissioned, it was a slightly different show from the one we have now. Set in the world of DC Comics, it featured a slightly dodgy insurance agency run by a supervillain that was trying to make money off the poor folks trampled by superheroes in their fight to stop the bad guys.

But twixt pilot and series, there was a bit of retooling. By the first aired episode, cynical old Vanessa Hudgens had turned into a dewy-eyed optimist wanting to make a difference in a branch of Wayne Industries run by Batman’s incompetent narcissist cousin (Alan Tudyk). Trouble is she has a bunch of people rejected by Better Off Ted working for her, including Danny Pudi and Ron Funches, all of whom can do little more than copy Lexcorp’s inventions. Can Hudgens turn the division round, save everyone from getting fired, help the little people and meet lots of her superhero idols, all without a single superpower to her?

Watching the first episode, the answer seemed to be “Who cares?”, “Why aren’t there any proper superheroes in this?” and “When do the jokes start?”

The second episode actually proved worse, since the first episode raised the occasional titter, whereas the second was practically soporific, beyond a nice joke about training videos being like The Shining.

Still, there’s a reason that I do these as third-episode verdicts, not second-episode verdicts. You have to give things time. And while episode three wasn’t exactly an exercise in hilarity, it was at least a reverse of the previous episode’s trajectory and I was able to watch the whole thing with a slight grin on my face, at least. The show featured a superhero I’d actually heard of, although it was The Olympian, so I wouldn’t describe that as a mainstream pick by the writers. There were a few in-jokes for comic book fans, with Gail Simone and Marv Wolfman getting name-checked. There was also a halfway decent attempt to tie the show a bit more into mainstream community by making Funches Atlantean (“Atlantis: home of Aquaman and character actor William H Macey”), allowing copious references to Aquaman. Corbin Bernsen’s arrival as Tudyk’s dad seemed to make everyone up their game. And the opening dialogue among the characters about racism (“I thought you said you were from Atlanta” “No, that’s Donald Glover, but it might be racist that you heard that”) almost made me laugh.

Almost. Because we’re still not exactly in Silicon Valley or Man Seeking Woman territory here. But the show is at least finding its feet now. I doubt, given that we’ll be at episode four next week, that the show will ever drag itself out of its z-list superhero obsession or become even laugh-out-loud funny. Not giving Danny Pudi any decent lines is a Category A disaster. But you can at least watch it and not feel like Superman near Lex Luthor’s kryptonite ring any more, which is a definite improvement.