The Americans

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 Return of the Mac, The Good Fight, Imposters and Doctor Who

18 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.

I’m back. <INSERT PERTINENT DOCTOR WHO QUOTE HERE>. 

Oddly, I haven’t missed much in my absence, since not many new shows have started, while plenty have wound up or have taken an Easter break. In fact, I’ve had the time to rewatch all of Marvel’s Iron Fist, as well as an episode of The Champions. 

Iron Fist actually held up quite well on a second viewing, although it turns out not to have any hidden depths at all that I missed and the fight scenes do often look quite bad on a bigger screen. But it’s still hugely enjoyable, the soundtrack’s truly marvellous, and it and season 1 of Daredevil are so far the only Netflix Marvel shows that I’ve even been inclined to rewatch.

Next up, of course, is Marvel’s The Defenders, which will be arriving in August during TMINE’s annual break. I presume it’s because they don’t want me to comment on the fact that Daredevil is wearing Iron Fist’s costume in the teaser trailer. Too late, boys. Too late.

As well as the regulars, I’ve also had time to play catch up on a few shows that I’d got behind on. That means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the final episodes of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Good Fight and Imposters, as well as the latest episodes of The Americans and The Magicians, the return of Doctor Who and the back end of the second season of The Man in the High Castle.

Fortitude I’m now working on so I should have a round-up of the final episodes next week. I’ll also be a lot further along in Midnight Sun, which I’d probably have watched already if the upgrade to the Sky Go iOS app hadn’t resulted in the download rights on the whole series being revoked for some odd reason, meaning I couldn’t watch any of my previously downloaded episodes while I was away.

The Prison Break revival started while I was away, I know, but frankly, I suspect the show’s time has gone and I’ve had enough Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell of late on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, anyway.

Some time in the next few days, I’ll be taking a look at ABC (Australia)’s Hugo Weaving-starrer Seven Types of Ambiguity, which rather than being a documentary about literary criticism is a sort of Rashomon-ish look at a child abduction from the different points of view of all involved. However, awkwardly, as well as being only six rather than seven episodes long, each episode is from a different character’s perspective (I think), so I’m unsure whether I have to watch the whole thing or not.

I did try to watch The Son, AMC (US)’s mini-series Western that stars Pierce Brosnan. Potentially, it sounded quite interesting, with Brosnan playing an old Texan cattle baron during the First World War, while we get flashbacks to his life growing up among the Comanches as a boy after they kill his family. However, it’s AMC, so amazingly slow and boring, so I didn’t even make it through the first episode.

I also gave one other show a try:

Return of the Mac (US: Pop)
Yet another one of those TV shows in which celebrities play ‘themselves’ with hilarious results (cf Lopez, Donny!, et al), this sees former New Kid on the Block Joey McIntyre playing a version of himself who wants to do serious acting. Unfortunately, no one else wants him to do serious acting, so when he pitches with his agent to a female-led network, apart from the drooling by the 30- and 40-somethings who used to worship him when they were young, he has to endure the fact they only want to offer him a late night talk show. Can you imagine?

Produced by fellow New Kidder Donnie “Not Mark” Wahlberg and Jenny “Vaccines are Evil” McCarthy, who also cameo as “themselves”, the show struggles to do much beyond set up very easy jokes about reality TV, celebrities, McIntyre and his career, without coming close to even Donny!‘s low bar in finding a remotely interesting gimmick to supplement these low balls.

About the only thing it does well doesn’t even involve McIntyre, as it’s all about his wife’s work with a gloriously over the top stylist. January Jones cameos for all of a minute and is better than everyone else in the cast, despite being January Jones. That should tell you something.

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What have you been watching? Including Imaginary Mary and Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them

3 April 2017 Rob Buckley 2 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.

The last WHYBW for some time now, since I’m off on vacation for a week from Wednesday and then there’s the double Bank Holiday weekend that is Easter directly after that. Maybe I’ll try to squeeze it in on the 13th or 18th, although I’d actually have to watch TV while on holiday to manage the former, which just ain’t happening; maybe it’ll even be the 24th. But WHYBW will be back, I promise.

The airwaves have been a little quieter of late, but I’ve somehow not managed to watch any of Shots Fired, which means I doubt I’ll ever get round to playing catch-up. Midnight Sun I’m going to try to binge-watch somehow, since it got better after last week’s ep-and-a-half review. If I find the time, I might play catch up on Fortitude, too, and I really will try to watch You Are Wanted.

Elsewhere, I’ve reviewed Nobodies (US: TV Land), which means that after the jump I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of The Americans, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, The Good Fight, Imposters and The Magicians, as well as the season finale of Legion. But I have watched one other new TV show and a movie, too.

Imaginary Mary (US: ABC)
I love Jenna Elfman. I really do. Okay, the scientologist thing is off-putting, she’s really fun, really charismatic and really watchable. So why is it that everything she’s been in since Dharma and Greg and Keeping The Faith has been just heinous? Growing Up Fisher, 1600 Penn, Accidentally On Purpose – she was great, they weren’t. And neither is Imaginary Mary.

The show is basically what happens if you have one idea and precisely one idea only. Here, the idea is that sports PR woman Jenna Elfman’s childhood best friend comes back to help her in her adult life, when she finally starts having to deal with kids, a grown-up relationship et al. But that’s where the ideas run out.

The work of three men, it feels like the closest they’ve come to ever meeting a woman is to read a book on Greek myths to learn that Artemis is a perpetually adolescent goddess so they could name Elfman’s PR firm “Artemis PR” – that’s the level of subtlety we’re dealing with here. Elfman’s character has apparently never even met a child, let alone spent time with one, but then again, the writers don’t seem to have met any children either, since they’re all the sorts of moppets that can be assembled from tropes in other TV shows.

I mean, do you think, even for a second, that the teenage son of Elfman’s new boyfriend would ask her for advice on how to be popular with other teenagers, a mere five minutes after meeting her, while simultaneously confiding to her that he has a folder on his laptop that contains… “pictures of boobs”? Would that ever happen?

It’s also unclear exactly what the idea is behind Imaginary Mary, who just reappears unprompted after disappearing from her life when Elfman was 18 and started having sex. Yes, that’s right 18. And now she’s back, and after a brief double-take from Elfman, everything carries on as before. Elfman doesn’t go to a doctor or a psychiatrist now she’s started hearing and seeing things, even though ‘Mary’ carries on talking and appearing in full view of her wherever she is, making it impossible for her to do other things (do the writers even know how an imaginary friend works?).

And what does Mary do? Not much. She’s just there, being a bit furry and wacky. No real commentary, nothing daring, no real attempt to expose Elfman’s subconscious or animus. just “Look, I’m back”.

Bar Elfman, it’s almost unwatchably bad. Steer very, very clear.

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016)
Dull entry to the Harry Potter universe set in the US in the 1920s that misses pretty much all the opportunities to do something more grown up and interesting in favour of more of the same but with some cute magical animals. It unlikeably stars mumbling Eddie Redmayne as an animal-helping wizard who travels to the US to be nice to some different animals, where he gets caught up in the current anti-animal prohibition and has to deal with ‘no-mags’ (aka Muggles) who want to get rid of wizards.

Yet despite the opportunities for fun and variety, as well as some scary-level magic, it’s really unfathomably dull. Redmayne’s wizard is just plain annoying and unheroic. The other characters don’t have a tenth of the qualities of Hermione and co that might make you want to spend time with them. All it really has going for it are those fantastic beasts, which are great fun.

Boring.

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News: Wolf Creek renewed; Iron Fist trailer; Nathan Fillion to play author-detective; + more

8 February 2017 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Global Internet TV

  • Yara Martinez promoted to regular on Amazon’s The Tick 
  • Trailer for Netflix’s Marvel’s Iron Fist

Australian TV

US TV

US TV show casting

New US TV shows

  • ABC developing: adaptation of Luvvie Ajayi’s I’m Judging You: The Do Better Manual
  • NBC green lights: pilot of Charlaine Harris spy drama Redliners
  • CBS green lights: pilots of meddling families comedy Distefano…
  • …and adaptation of AJ Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically as Living Biblically

New US TV show casting