The Americans

What have you been watching? Including Scotland in a Day, Red Oaks, Doctor Who and The Amazing Spider-Man 2

22 September 2014 Rob Buckley 5 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.

The deluge is about to begin, with a whole slew of new US shows going to kick off this week, more the following week. Fortunately, I’m braced and prepared, and have got right up to date with all my tele. Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed the first episodes of a few shows that have begun to air:

Also starting this week, but which I’ve miraculously already reviewed is Forever (US: ABC; UK: Sky1), which premieres tonight. But that’s it so far.

I have also watched a couple of other one-offs.

Scotland in a Day (UK: Channel 4)
Timed nicely to coincide with the referendum, Scottish comedian Jack Docherty – you may remember he had Channel 5’s first late night chat show – shows us various famous Scottish actors (e.g. John Hannah, Dougie Henshall) and various famous not-Scottish actors (e.g. Doon MacKichan, Isy Suttie) pretending to be real people in an attempt to be funny that largely falls flat on its face. It’s one saving grace is that Docherty resurrects the marvellous McGlashan from Absolutely for the piece.

Red Oaks (Amazon Prime)
Yet another attempt to do 80s nostalgia (cf The Americans, The Goldbergs), this time giving us a young Jewish guy at college trying to work out what he wants to do in life, so becomes an assistant tennis pro at the Jewish country club where his girlfriend works as an aerobics instructor. Were it not for the occasional Walkman and old car, you’d never know this was set in the 80s, and were it not for the fact it says so on the description, you’d never know this was a comedy either. There’s plenty of Jewish jokes (“A C is a Jewish F”) and bonus points for casting Paul Reiser and Jennifer Grey, but the lack of fun, insight and decent female roles make this a considerable waste of time, and Craig Roberts is incredibly miscast.

Even more excitingly, I watched a couple of movies:

The Amazing Spider-man 2 (2013)
If there was one thing that made The Amazing Spider-Man any good, it was the chemistry between Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield. Naturally enough, Sony wanted to make the most of this so created a 2h20m film that separates them for most of it, filling that run time with not one, not two but three classic Spider-Man villains, all of whom get perfunctory characterisation and storylines. And then right at the end, it stupidly repeats the ending of the first movie. I’m slightly at a loss for how so many elements can have been so badly misused, whether it’s Jamie Foxx as Electro, Paul Giamatti as Rhino (yes, they got one of America’s finest actors to play a Russian in a rhino suit) or both Stone and Garfield. It does look very good, I’ll admit, with some excellent use of bullet time to illustrate Spider-man super agility, but they really needed to spend a lot more time on the script (while simultaneously spending a lot less time on it, if you see what I mean).

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2013)
My sister had really raved about this, as had Mark Kermode on Radio 5, the trailer seemed really funny and the cast seemed epic (Ralph Fiennes, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Ed Norton, F Murray Abraham, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law, Saoirse Ronan, Tom Wilkinson, et al), so I was really looking forward to Wes Anderson’s latest. All those plus points were even enough to convince my wife to watch it. However, she fell asleep halfway through and I was seriously bored. While it looked and felt beautiful, and there were some great individual lines, the big laughs were almost all confined to moments shown in the trailer, and were few and far between in the movie itself. Disappointing, with the exception of Ralph Fiennes who turns out to be a superb comic actor.

After the jump, the regulars: Legends, Doctor Who and You’re The Worst.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Scotland in a Day, Red Oaks, Doctor Who and The Amazing Spider-Man 2”

News: A Walking Dead spin-off, Elizabeth Warren’s Alpha House cameo, Good Omens for radio + more

8 September 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Radio

  • Mark Heap, Peter Serafinowicz, Josie Lawrence et al to star in adaptation of Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens

Australian TV

Internet TV

New UK TV show casting

  • George MacKay to star in BBC1’s adaptation of Sadie Jones’ The Outcast
  • Hermione Norris, Robert Bathurst, Mathew Horne et al join Sky 1’s Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death
  • Samantha Bond and Francesca Annis to star in ITV’s Home Fires

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

New US TV show casting

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 Mr Sloane, Gang Related, 24, The Americans and Prisoners of War

24 May 2014 Rob Buckley 8 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.

A couple of new things this week, although I’ve not got round to watching From There To Here, yet.

Mr Sloane (UK: Sky Atlantic)
This should be must-see TV: Nick Frost, Olivia Colman and Peter Serafinowicz in a comedy-drama set in the late 60s about a Frost’s meek and mild Mr Sloane, how he meets his wife (Colman) and why he ends up trying to kill himself. How could that not be brilliant? Very simply, the script, which is about as funny and compelling as lift muzak. It’s just sort of them, vaguely trying to be funny and establish character, but with lines and moments you’ll have seen a dozen times before in ‘comedies’ about meek and mild men struggling with life. Beyond the occasional impression by Serafinowicz and the general charisma of Frost and Colman, there’s just nothing new or interesting here at all.

Gang Related (US: Fox)
Crack LA police unit tries to deal with gangs of all ethnicities, using agents of all ethnicities. But despite the missing hyphen in the title, there’s a double meaning and it turns out that one of the police is actually a member of one of the gangs. This is largely a mess of cliches that occasionally dares to be different, but usually doesn’t. While it’s nice to have a diverse cast (Ramon Rodriguez, Sung Kang, RZA, Jay Hernandez, Inbar Levi, et al), with New Zealand’s Cliff Curtis bizarrely chosen to be the head of the Latino mob, the whole unit is naturally headed up by an old white guy, although thankfully it’s Terry O’Quinn (Lost), there’s some crappy soapiness (the hard-nosed IA cop is his daughter) to deal with and the pilot’s efforts to exploit the singing profile of RZA (one of the co-founders of the Wu Tang Clan) is only partially successful. There’s only one female cop (Levi) and she’s mainly there to be a potential love interest, add sexiness and do sexy things, rather than because she has any well-defined character of her own.

And I watched a couple of movies…

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Parts one and two (2010/11)
I’d seen the first six Harry Potter movies, read all the books, but somehow it’s taken until now (and being given free copies when I bought a new Blu-Ray player) before I watched these two final ones. Directed by David Yates at the same leisurely pace as the previous two, the movies stay faithful to the books while losing an awful lot of background material. It comes tantalisingly close to some really excellent moments, drawing on everything from Threads to war movies to suggest a country riven by Voldemort and his wizards, making it – as with the books – the end point of a more progressively adult franchise. Largely where it works is down to the original material, rather than anything Yates does, and the ending is particularly effective and tear-inducing (at least to us older folks), thanks to its message that kids, your parents may be old but they probably had all sorts of adventures you don’t know about when they were young. But more a conclusion to the franchise, rather than an exceptional couple of films in their own rights.

After the jump, a round-up of the regulars, with reviews of 24, The Americans, Game of Thrones, Hannibal, Prisoners of War, and Silicon Valley.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Mr Sloane, Gang Related, 24, The Americans and Prisoners of War”

What have you been watching? Including Bosch, 24, Agents of SHIELD, Hannibal Rising and Prisoners of War

10 May 2014 Rob Buckley 4 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.

Thankfully, there wasn’t much new on this week, so I haven’t been able to play catch-up on a few shows, and in fact I was able to watch one new show:

Bosch (Amazon Prime)
Based on the Michael Connelly series of books (which my mother in law likes so they must be okay), this stars Titus Welliver (of numerous shows but particularly Lost) as LA police detective Hieronymous Bosch. No really. That’s his name. Apparently co-starring most of the cast of The Wire, including Lance Reddick and Jamie Hector, it sees Bosch dealing with a civil suit in which he’s accused of shooting an unarmed man while also dealing with the discovery of the body of a long-buried child. But there’s no resolution to any of these stories, since this is just the pilot episode and a series is now on its way. It’s above average as cop shows go and there’s a definite air of authenticity to everything, but fundamentally it features a preposterous lead character who is also simultaneously very ordinary – it’s not like he’s writing poetry or doing brass rubbing for a hobby but is off listening to jazz and drinking while having a silly name. Worth a glance, but nothing special.

I also watched a movie!

Hannibal Rising (2007)
Given it’s the one Hannibal Lecter story I’d neither read nor watched, I figured it was about time, despite the bad reviews, to give it a go. And it’s an odd little piece, a prequel story that gives us a teenage Hannibal Lecter escaping cannibalism in wartime Lithuanian to find refuge in France. It’s interesting as it both informs and is informed by other Lecter pieces, giving us a reasonable explanation as to why Hannibal’s Hannibal is so handy in a fight, for example, while also giving us some piggy foreshadowing for Hannibal (the movie). It’s also got a good cast, with Dominic West as a dodgy-accented war crimes investigator, and Rhys Ifans and Kevin McKidd as the naughty war criminals who ate Hannibal’s sister. But its low budget, poor French lead (Gaspard Ulliel) and equally French setting make this feel like an international co-production B-movie along the lines of Mr Frost, rather than any of the preceding blockbusters, it uses the same technique as Hannibal to try to make Lecter look a hero by giving him an even worse enemy to deal with (although as the name suggests, he does become monstrous towards the end) and it can’t be said to be scary or horrifying in any real sense. One for completists only.

After the jump, the regulars, with reviews of 24, Agents of SHIELD, The Americans, Arrow, The Blacklist, Continuum, Elementary, Game of Thrones, Hannibal, Prisoners of War, Silicon Valley and Surviving Jack.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Bosch, 24, Agents of SHIELD, Hannibal Rising and Prisoners of War”