3.12 Chuck Versus The American Hero The adventure starts with Chuck visiting General Beckman in DC, to be allocated his first assignment and told to go select his team of agents. With Sarah on his mind, he heads back to Burbank in an attempt to convince her to be with him. This is the lightest part of the proceedings, where he recruits Casey, Morgan and Awesome to help him get Sarah back, who isn’t responding to Chuck’s overtures of love....
4.21 Chuck Versus The Wedding Planner After the outright insanity of the previous Family Volkoff story, the pace was somewhat more sedate in this week’s Chuck, I thought. The idea behind Chuck Versus The Wedding Planner was simple enough: to reintroduce Sarah’s conman father into the frame before she and Chuck tie the knot. What I did appreciate was the subtle, but well crafted nod they created to the classic Tatum and Ryan O’Neal, Paper Moon, where a father and his young daughter run aneffective con collaboration....
4.9 Chuck Versus Phase Three Having watched and reviewed this show from the outset, I’ve noticed that it goes through creative cycles where the writers try to breathe new life into it. If last week was a jarring pothole on the road of entertainment, then this one saw a welcoming stretch of freshly laid asphalt. I’m not going to talk about the plot as such, because it’s not a major component in what makes Chuck enjoyable generally, and the one here was more about resolving the abduction of our hero from the clutches of the titular Richard ‘The Belgian’ Chamberlain....
This review contains spoilers. 1.5 Brave-ish Heart I was dead wrong. Corakinus’ warrior spirit didn’t waver because of April’s heart’s humanizing influence. She simply defeated him using the power of gritted teeth and emphatic line delivery. The failure wasn’t in story but tone. Keeping emotions running that high without skidding off into histrionics is a delicate balance, and one Class didn’t quite pull off here. The knowing, self-aware style it arrived with in episode one promised to be an antidote to the fantasy genre’s tendency to ponderous bombast....
But what about the movies that don’t ever make it to the screen? These leave behind the most interesting myths, fuelled by our own imagination of what might have been, and here’s where David Hughes’ book comes in. He pieces together the scripts, the storyboards, the costumes and the characterisations by interviewing the key players (whose stories very rarely agree) and shows us the projects that might have been something special....
For much of the US filmmaking establishment, Corman is ‘King of the Bs’ – a director and producer of low-budget trash. But what filmmaker Alex Stapleton’s documentary Corman’s World demonstrates is that, as cheap and swiftly made as Corman’s movies are, they’re varied, imaginative, and contrary to common assumptions, aren’t all exploitative trash. Often produced in a matter of days – which included writing the script – the sheer speed with which Corman directed or produced meant that the results inevitably varied, but there was an unbridled sense of anything-goes fun in his movies, and that’s something perfectly captured in Stapleton’s documentary....
Damnation Episode 7 Tonight’s episode of Damnation, “A Different Species,” toggled between the moneyed industrialists that orbit Tennyson Duval, and scientists destroying lives rather than creating remedies and furthering science. At the conclusion of the episode, I didn’t know if the two worlds were connected or would eventually intersect. This is problematic seven chapters into the first season when more than half of the show’s puzzle ought to have been revealed....
The plots are familiar – a kidnapping, a ransom, a city in the grip of gangs and corruption with one cop launching himself into the task of bringing it to rights. The difference here is the setting. Mexico City is stunning, both in terms of visuals and its population. The film opens with a voice-over, followed by zooming, vertigo-inducing helicopter shots of the city. It’s like Peter Jackson decided to remake End of Watch while addicted to carnitas....
In the midst of the riots that left parts of the Michigan city capital ablaze in 1967, three cops barge their way into a low-rent hotel and terrorise the largely black guests inside. They’re ostensibly looking for someone who fired shots out of a top-storey window – actually a prank involving a starting pistol – but in reality, this is a pretext for a sadistic, racially-motivated bout of violence, intimidation and ultimately murder....
Release Date: August 23, 2016Platform: XBO (reviewed), PS4, PCDeveloper: Eidos MontrealPublisher: Square EnixGenre: RPG There’s a moment several hours into Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that finally grabbed me and never let me go again, despite its graphical flaws and its lack of a unique identity, and it’s all due to the spectacular writing that reminded me why this franchise is still one of the best in sci-fi gaming. I am Adam Jensen and I’ve broken into Picus, a bank with tons of secrets hidden within its vaults....
6.2 Once Upon A Time… After a mercurial opening story, Dexter’s life falls into a more predictable pattern this week. Having said that, this was an excellent example of the maturity of the show, where the depth of the characters, even Vince, becomes an ample resource that smartly drives forward events. There are two major story threads presented in Once Upon a Time…, one involving Dexter and the other focused on Debra, or should we say Lt Morgan?...
Okay, maybe not. However, it is the premise for Diner Dash, and it’s actually enjoyable. In fact, it’s utterly compelling. You take the role of a young waitress, starting off in a relatively quiet café. As customers come in, you find them a seat (taking into account the size of the group, so they get a big enough table), and wait for them to order. Once they’ve done that, you put their order through to the kitchen, wait for it to be ready and take it over to their table....
Disenchantment Episode 4 Maybe it’s a bit too Fry x Leela for its own good, but the Elfo and Bean relationship is one of the easiest for the writers to mine for character development. Luci is a comic relief jerk from Hell so there’s not much emotional depth to be found there, at least not at this stage in the series’ life, but bouncing Elfo and Bean off each other is an obvious way to explore the good and bad of both of those characters....
Doctor Who might only be 49 years and 11 months old, but its 50th anniversary celebrations have now kicked off with the early release of Big Finish’s classic Doctor audio special The Light at the End. As you might expect of a multi-Doctor story – especially one with no fewer than eight of them – there is an awful lot for the special to manage, and writer Nicholas Briggs kicks the story into gear very early on....
10.3 Thin Ice Thin Ice, from Sarah Dollard, last responsible in Who for Face The Raven (sort-of-killing Clara in your first Who script isn’t a quiet way to start!), picks up immediately from the dropping off point of last week’s. Thus, there’s a frozen River Thames, a frost fair, a big elephant, and disappearances. Arriving where he didn’t expect, this, in turn, gives the Doctor an opportunity to explain a little more of the erratic nature of the TARDIS (which has gone from landing pretty precisely over the past two weeks, to misbehaving itself)....
The wonderfully eccentric idea of a ‘library planet’, where the biography wing alone occupies a continent, could be seen either as a cheap way of shoe-horning a spooky setting into a science-fiction show in need of greater spectacle, or as a delightful Douglas Adams-style blast of invention, and in fact it works either way. The episode opens with a little girl in some kind of retro-present-future environment (the phones were out of fashion even in the late 70s) apparently undergoing psychotherapy with moody shrink Colin Salmon, and dreaming of floating over the astonishingly well-realised cityscape of the abandoned, 51st-century library-planet....
For trust me on this one: this is one series opener that you don’t want spoiled for you. And I’ve no intention of doing that. I do appreciate that few come out of an early preview of Doctor Who saying it’s rubbish. But this is the real deal: if you want proof that Britain can produce world-class science-fiction television, it’s right here. And it goes out to a family audience at Saturday teatime....
8.8 Kill The Moon It seems a shame to start with something a little downbeat, given that Mummy On The Orient Express was really quite good fun. But after that ending to Kill The Moon, we can’t have been the only ones hoping for things to be picked up more directly than they were here. Just seven days ago, Clara sent the Doctor away and was bellowing at him, fed up with his patronising ways and treating her as a regular human, who just makes the same choices as everyone else....
“Julian! Come in, have a seat. First of all, Mr Fellowes, let me just say that everyone here at ITV is such a fan of the series four scripts. All this stuff on rural economics and tenant farming? Just golden. And the taxation bill storyline? Wowee. There is one thing though. We’d like to do something to really shake things up. Put Downton back on the front pages, so to speak....
