We praised the Impact move last week, and it’s smart business. That being said, the execution was terrible, to the point that loyal viewers could have easily forgotten about the change. I forgot, and I watch the show every week. It was sitting on my DVR this morning before I said to myself, “Oh yeah, Impact was on last night.” They needed to do a better job educating their audience, and not rushing the move would have helped....
Based on the book of the same name by Jenny Han, To All the Boys I’ve Loved follows shy romance novel fan Lara Jean (Lana Condor, who was Jubilee in X-Men: Apocalypse) as she navigates high school after her love letters are mysteriously sent to all five of the crushes she’s ever had. Like Set It Up before it, To All the Boys joins a growing family of Netflix original rom-coms that are strong enough to appeal to more than a lovesick tween audience like that of The Kissing Booth, or the semi-ironic hate-watchers of A Christmas Prince....
Well, that’s blown out the window. Apart from Gwen having man’s hands, as that’s not going to change any time soon. Instead, we got to see the programme exploit its limits to its emotional potential – namely, kill off a character and see him die instantly, then slowly, then quite possibly not at all. It’s quite useful being able to bring dead characters back. We can watch the rest of the cast say goodbye at least once a week, creating an avalanche of emotion....
After Sookie’s brush with the fang banger killer last episode, she and Sam decide to play detective and track down the girl Sookie saw in the killer’s mind – ever the practical psychic, she wants to find the killer before he has a chance to get to her again. After working her mojo in a beautiful way on the Hicksville sheriff, he agrees to fax a photo of Drew Marshall to his counterpart in Bon Temps....
The Sunday night/Monday morning blood fest continued in our third trip to Bon Temps this season, which saw Sookie mauled yet again, but this time not by Bill. No, this mauling was the very deliberate and non-consensual result of an attack by a… beclawed beast. With poisonous claws. Whatever his reasons, Eric releases a wholly unrecognisable Lafayette after a brief and entertaining negotiation with Sookie, who will now accompany him to Texas and help investigate the Sheriff’s disappearance....
4.2 You Smell Like Dinner Poor Jason. Barely a week goes by when he’s not being taken, often literally, for a fool. Or a slave. Or in this case, a sperm donor. Having been imprisoned by Crystal’s redneck shifter family, it transpires that said rednecks are in need of some new blood, and some new genes. Desperate, though Lord know s why, to perpetuate their shifting blood line, Crystal decides the only way to get knocked up and keep Jason is to forcibly turn him into one of them, before presumably raping him at gunpoint until he’s served his purpose....
True Detective Season 1 Episode 7 True Detective ended last week on the side of a road. A car and a pickup truck, each driven by one of our true detectives, on the outs with each other for over a decade, idled after miles of hard road. Dust hanging in the air. You could almost smell the gravel. Rust Cohle invites Marty Hart to buy him a beer. Marty checks the chamber of his gun to make sure he’s loaded....
In a post-apocalyptic 1997 (yes) a young scavenger – The Kid (Munro Chambers) – lives alone in a bunker full of Eighties toys (yes), and barters his findings for fresh-ish water. In this world there’s little fuel, so most people ride bikes to get around. This means that there are sections that resemble the ‘Apes of Wrath’ episode of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (yes). The Kid also has a fondness for Seventies’ style comics featuring ‘Turbo Man’ where the hero fights against robot invaders (yes), and cycles around carrying a hand-drawn map and home-made defensive weapons (yes)....
Turn Season 3 Episode 7 The women take the reins in the latest episode of Turn: Washington’s Spies. Although the undercover agents and military officers of both Continental and British armies continue to scheme and maneuver as if they can control events, those men are really just scrambling to keep up. Tallmadge soon has a much bigger headache—or heartache. Sarah Livingston (Elizabeth Blackmore), the widow with whom he had a brief affair a few episodes back, is in the Continental camp at Middlebrook, New Jersey....
It’s the conundrum facing Megan (Analeigh Tipton) and Alec (Miles Teller), who discover they don’t particularly like each other, once they’ve rumped, pumped and trumped. It’s Megan who’s the catalyst for the film’s narrative, as it’s she we see setting up the quickie online following the ending of her relationship with her fiancee. She merrily trots over to Alec’s place, and what we then get is a film that’s effectively a single-location stage play for the vast bulk of its running time....
Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is a young mother living in 1980s Tehran, trying to hold her life together as the Iran-Iraq war destroys everything around her. Once a promising medical student, Shideh was forced out of university by Iran’s Cultural Revolution; having taken part in leftist political rallies, she’s effectively barred from finishing her degree, which leaves her little option than to stay home and look after her daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi)....
Veteran railroad engineer Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) and newly qualified conductor Will Coulson (Chris Pine) take it upon themselves to chase down the runaway train and save it from decimating the town in which they live. At the start of the film you’re greeted with the announcement that it’s “Based on real events”and it would seem, from reading up said events after viewing the film, it’s rather more loosely based than it would have audiences believe....
This review contains spoilers if you haven’t yet seen the episode. So what happened? Well, Caroline wakes up a confused and newly created vampire, craving some blood. Luckily for her she’s in a hospital. We’re then taken to school, where Stefan teaches Jeremy how to properly guard himself from vampires. Meanwhile, Elena is trying to focus on having a perfectly normal day away from all things paranormal. Unfortunately for her, things are about to get messy because poor Caroline is struggling with her new found vampire nature....
1: The Novel: ‘The Body Snatchers’ – Jack Finney, 1955…presents the apparently insane narrative of small-town doctor Miles Boise Bennell, for whom the welcome return of his high-school sweetheart unexpectedly coincides with a bizarre outbreak of mass-hysteria in Santa Mira. Having escaped as a youth and now returning as a divorcée, Becky Driscoll quickly becomes both Miles’s renewed love-interest and fellow investigator as they uncover a string of cases where people they have known all their lives declare, rationally but with unshakeable conviction, that their loved ones are not themselves....
It isn’t until the very final minute of episode four’s Westworld that it all fell into place. “Grace,” as we’d come to call Katja Herbers’ runaway Raj guest who’s wandered into Westworld, descends from the golden hue of dawn’s earliest morning glory. Haloed by a sunrise and accompanied by Ramin Djawadi’s most sensitive of piano ballads, a bomb is dropped in the William/Man in Black narrative for season 2: His daughter has gone West, young man....
According to published reports, Larry Storch has joined Abe Vigoda, Paul McCartney and Generalisimo Franco in death rumors. But as Mark Twain said, rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated. After an erroneous wikipedia entry, rumors started in the close-knit New York City comedy community that Larry Storch, Corporal Agarn from F-Troop, was dead. It took Drew Friedman, a close and personal friend of Storch, to stem the rumors with a personal post....
Burton left in part because the studio was hoping for a more commercial affair than the disturbing Batman Returns. Keaton, however, didn’t leave when Tim Burton did. In fact, he was still attached to Batman Forever as the Joel Schumacher era dawned. What drove him away? Batman Forever‘s awful script, of course. No, don’t worry, Mr. Keaton. You aren’t boasting. Batman Forever is a shrill nightmare of a movie, and reducing its problems to cute buzzwords like “neon” or “bat nipples” is a disservice to how truly nonsensical its script is, not to mention the impossibly irritating performances by its two key villains....
But even the most enjoyable elements of any series can get stale if there aren’t fresh challenges for them to face and new people for them to meet, and I think the many characters who only appear once in any Asterix title are the reason why the books have continual appeal. They add new paths of humour or drama, and every one of them has some unique characteristic that keeps these minor characters from blending together....
Ever since Secret Wars in the mid-1980s, Marvel has been churning out these sprawling epics with varying degrees of success. Secret Wars itself succeeded on novelty value alone, while the original Mutant Massacre crossover for all the X-titles proved there was money to be made out of encouraging readers to buy as many titles as possible. Last year, we had the Civil War – heroes turning against heroes – in a fairly blatant analogy of America’s political climate....
Z Nation Season 3 Episode 4 Here we are at Season 3, episode 4 of Syfy’s Z Nation and already it’s clear that the high-concept zombie series is having a bit of trouble getting up and running for a third time. After an impressive TV movie and a stage-setting premiere, “Escorpion and the Red Hand” was the second low-stakes, yet perplexing, adventure for the members of Operation Bite Mark. Escorpion (A....
