Unfortunately, I soon woke up for real and the truth about New Wave Thanksgiving hit me like ten pounds of frozen breast meat: this record didn’t exist, primarily because little to no Thanksgiving music has ever been recorded (aside from traditional Pilgrim jams, that acoustic nonsense Adam Sandler wrote, and fellow “SNL” alum Jim Breuer’s fictional heavy metal ode “Devil Turkey”). This was almost as bad as the time I dreamt a leprechaun gave me a Mickey Mantle rookie card for my twelfth birthday (HEY GUYS, I’M FROM THE STATEZ – SORRY LOL)....

A whole lotta rock n’ roll bullshit went down this year. Here now, the ten most inexcusable instances of musical dickery, chicanery, absent-mindedness, and flat-out new jack stupidity. 2. Bellygate Sexism is alive and thriving at Roadrunner Records, where cabaret punk Amanda Palmer faced a head-slapping row over her “Leeds United” video. The label wanted to edit/alter a few shots of Palmer’s stomach they felt could “be more flattering.” Ironic, considering the fact that most of the dudes in the metal bands on Roadrunner are so fugly beyond Thunderdome that even the most EXTREME EXTREME makeovers couldn’t bring them within half an hour of flattering....

The Exorcist Season 2 Episode 6 The devils finally show their collective faces this week. And why not? This is episode 6 of the second season of The Exorcist. If you watch episode 6 three times on a large-screen TV, a demon will actually appear in your living room. If you mention episode 6 three times in a review, “Darling Nikki,” actually appears to proofread it for you, though she’s actually just making sure we only say good things about her....

1.20 The Trap The entire first season of The Flash has consisted of one long con by Eobard Thawne, and now the game is up. At the end of the episode, Thawne is really still the only guy with the upper hand, and all Barry and co. can do at this point is keep everyone alive until the inevitable time travel trip back to his mother’s death scene. After last week’s delightful holiday from the angst, The Trap was yet another brilliant showcase of how good this show can be even in the lead-up to something big....

2.1 Resurrection The Following wasn’t the most interesting drama on television last year, or the best executed. It could be a little sloppy, a little dumb, a little strange… there were any number of adjectives you could use to talk about writer/creator Kevin Williamson’s show, but consistent wasn’t one of them. However, The Following also had one of the best first epsiodes of 2013, and it ended on a really high note with a pretty stellar run of episodes for the final three of the season....

3.10 Evermore Joe, who we last saw making a shank out of a pair of sunglasses he pried off the dead body of Theo’s mouthpiece, is facing his execution. The guards take him into the preparation room, he has a brief meeting with his lawyer, a governmental aid, and the prison physician, all with the purpose of supervising Joe’s execution. A quick shank to the neck of one guard, a taser frying to the eyeball of another guard, and a locked door means that Joe Carroll is now in control of his own fate, thanks to three valuable hostages....

The Gifted Episodes 12 & 13: xTraction & X-Roads The Giftedhas had a rough couple of episodes heading into this week’s two-hour season finale. It seems like the writers took every bad tic that had been spread out in the first 2/3 of the season and crammed them into the previous two episodes. I was, coming into this week’s finale, very concerned that a show that started out with such promise, the X-Menniest (X-Manliest?...

This review contains spoilers. All of which goes to explain the sensuous delight Offred finds in those Scrabble tiles. An assistant publisher in her pre-Gilead life, she’s been deprived of letters and the written word since she was caught. She and former university lecturer Ofglen are so starved of stimulus that right now even a nine-volume history of falconry sounds riveting. Being permitted to use her brain and words other than the performative phrases that masquerade as communication is a rare pleasure for Offred....

Everything was on display: from how to make a ‘superstar’ even more super to how to colour comics! It was fascinating to watch the images unfold via the wonders of this new technology we are already taking for granted. But I have to confess that I was horrified at the amount of time it took to produce the work! One particular ‘how to’ site for comic colouring showed the application of skin tones and shadows, with the artist saying it only took about an hour to do the face!...

As far as things go, High School Musical is basically Grease garishly repackaged for the 21st century and stripped of any trace of grit. A perky bunch of personality-free, pretty teens flounce about playing jocks and totally-non-nerdy-nerds, warbling out wearying tweeny-bop songs such as “Breaking Free”, audibly informing viewers that they can “Start Something New” and “Bop to the Top” with toothy grins. “We’re All in this Together” eh? High School Musical happily applies itself as empowering, uplifting material whilst subconsciously re-enforcing all-American values and all that is mainstream and mundane....

I get a huge kick out of the movies that siblings Ethan and Joel make. Their features are stylish, sophisticated and always come together incredibly as strong compelling narratives. It doesn’t matter which of their masterpieces I catch a moment of, seeing a single clip of a Coen creation can leave me mesmerised and mulling over said film for days. I and a great many other film fans love the Coen Brothers (some so much that they occasionally give them awards or host Lebowski Fests), but do they love us?...

You dirty bird. The cop who was helping the weasely administrator procure prostitutes solicits a young black woman, offending her and her beau. The beau stabs the cop. The cop dies at the Knick. The cop’s family instigates a race riot and any black person on the street becomes fair game for a brutal beat down, stabbing, what have you. To my absolute surprise, Thack immediately runs out into the street and starts rescuing people from the mob....

Meanwhile, the Red Lotus deliver Mako and Bolin to the Earth Queen in exchange for an audience with her. They convince her to release the Avatar into their custody once she arrives, but their impatience combined with the Earth Queen’s royal diva attitude prompts Zaheer to speed up the plan and “liberate” Ba Sing Se. This ep wasn’t bad. The chase with the sand shark was cool, and the plot made good use of all the characters (except, of course, Tenzin’s group, though I’m expecting them to come back in a major way by season’s end), but this really felt like more of a bridge episode than anything else....

Since the classic Hammer-style opening minutes of episode one when a young Victorian girl in a white nightdress walked along a dark corridor lit only by candlelight, The Living And The Dead has been a tasteful thief of the horror genre. It’s chosen carefully from the established bag of tricks, making skilful use of scares and shocks to build a beautifully eerie, quite distinct atmosphere. It all felt needlessly complicated, as if clever twists were prioritised over satisfying storytelling....

The tradeoff in the boardroom of the Justice Department was a microcosm of what this truncated final season has been: watchable but unspectacular. We’ve talked about the show’s inconsistency ad nauseam in the previous seasons but we can’t say that here. To Sorkin’s credit, he’s mostly kept the focus on two strong arcs. The newest twist in the Atlantis World Media hostile takeover is the possibility that the Lansings can only keep the company if they sell off one of its shiniest trophies, ACN....

2.5 News Night with Will McAvoy Now, this is more like it. Here’s an episode that takes place in real-time, depicting several major developments in the characters and their workplace, with a sense of coherence and emotional investment that has perhaps been lacking in the previous four episodes of the second season so far – and it reminds you why you became interested in this show to begin with. Simply named after the series’ own news programme, News Night With Will McAvoy follows one tumultuous evening in the newsroom, with our News Night team confronting problems both on and off-air....

However, the first half of the episode gives little indication of what is to come. After a quick opening sequence catching up with Basilone and his newfound celebrity status back home (and all the perks that entails), Eugene Sledge finally enters the show proper, after several weeks of cameo appearances at boot camp. And in doing so, effectively resets the show, as previous star Leckie takes a backseat to the main narrative drive....

Over the next few weeks, with help from BookBeat – who we thank very much for their support – we’re trialling a book club series of features, where we look at books, how they translate to movies, how they work in audiobook form, and just generally chat about a certain title. You can get a free trial of BookBeat – a sort-of Netflix for audio books – right here. Den Of Geek readers get a full month free trial, as opposed to the usual two weeks....

Before I utter its name, if you are about my age, find something else to do, don’t read this as it might bring a suppressed traumatic memory to the surface. You’ve been warned… The Singing Ringing Tree…there…I said it. But I’ll call it TSRT from now on, if you don’t mind. If you missed 1960s TV, then you were spared this 1957 East German ‘fairy tale’, which the BBC showed under the quaint series title of ‘Tales for Europe‘....

The opposition were visiting the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship to discuss plans with senior civil servants about what they would do if – or, rather, when – they take office. (Ever noticed how there are never Tories in the programme, just some posh opposition? Hmmmm.) So who are the new team we could see take office? Mannion seems to be the first politician in the show to have enough nouse to handle whatever political crisis is threatening to engulf him, something that is made all the more noticeable in an episode where current minister Nicola Murray continues to fall apart as her daughter attacks a classmate’s hair with hair straighteners....