Disenchantment looks a lot like a medieval Futurama, but it’s more accurate to say it falls somewhere in the middle of that series and The Simpsons. Futurama embraced its Star Trek parodyness, sending the Planet Express crew off on adventures away from home in more episodes than not. Disenchantment typically keeps its plots anchored to its home base, the castle and kingdom of Dreamland, making it feel closer to a conventional sitcom than a D&D campaign....
It’s no mean feat, Asylum Of The Daleks. The last series of Doctor Who kicked off with a two-part story, that gave the room to set up threads that would run right the way through the sixth series of the show (since it was revived). Here, it’s a standard-length standalone instalment instead, in the spirit of the series ahead of us. That means there’s less obvious longer-term seeds being sown, but instead an intense focus on delivering a cracking 50 minutes of television....
As part of the promotion for the book, we got to fire some questions at co-author Benjamin Cook. And here’s how it went… The correspondence was supposed to last a few weeks. A couple of months tops. It was supposed to be a magazine article, and cover the writing of one of Russell’s TV episodes – Voyage Of The Damned or Partners In Crime. Two-and-a-half years later, we were still e-mailing!...
If nothing else, Documentary Now! is an extremely meticulous show. There are so many jokes going on at once that deal with production design and style that are surely getting overlooked on the initial watch. “Globesman” is one of the better examples of this, as the ‘60s setting allows for a number of careful, specific touches to be made, like the mild echo in the episode’s audio track due to the era’s inferior audio equipment....
Welcome back to Downton, a place where, like a D&D ‘Jazz-Age Toffs’ Expansion Pack, every character comes with their own alignment card: Good, Evil, or Gormless. This week saw kindly acts from the Good (Anna, Bates, Isobel, Mrs Hughes and Carson), dastardly plotting from the Evil (Edna and Thomas), and gullibility from the Gormless (Mr Molesley the Younger and Lady Cora, who really should have seen through Barrow by now, even if he did help her to oust wicked Nanny West last week)....
I don’t think Downton Abbey wanted to go. The series four finale seemed loath to say goodbye, returning ad-break after ad-break to dish out a bit more plot and then a bit more, like a toddler slowly and solemnly distributing Lego to a group of tolerant but bemused adults. Its never-ending story took in two secret missions, five budding romances, three marriage proposals, and quite possibly, a murder. The big news was that rapist Green is no more, him having gone the way of a used chip paper and ended up wrapped around the wheel arch of a Piccadilly bus....
Dragon Ball Super Episode 29 Dragon Ball Super continues to move full steam ahead—well maybe half steam ahead is more appropriate—with the centerpiece of its newest arc, a fancy martial arts tournament. Champa and Vados continue to shack up in Universe 7 as the logistics of this multi-universal gamble are hashed out. After agreeing to the tournament, the first order of business is naturally to decide on its rules. The fights will take place on a neutral planet that’s equal distance between universes with each universe having a team of five warriors at their disposal....
DuckTales Episode 23 This finale was a nonstop high stakes adventure that not only captured the feelings you remember from the original series (but better than they ever could be) but could have easily been a theatrical movie with little tweaking. It’s very quick but incredibly powerful character moments. Throughout these twenty three episodes DuckTales has taken a series that could have just been a zany comedy or thrilling action series and gave it a lot of heart and soul....
The Skeleton Twins sees Wiig and Hader play twins – Maggie and Milo – whose lives have not worked out as they’d hoped. After seeing each other for the first time in ten years, they rekindle their bond and try to support each other as their lives continue to fall apart. Due to their years of working together, Wiig and Hader’s relationship as brother and sister is hugely plausible. Aided by their comic abilities – and a little improv – the script (by Black Swan‘s Mark Heyman and director Craig Smith) is consistently funny and moving, revelling in the grey areas and complexities of the characters and laughing morbidly at the darkness that ensues....
In this case, there’s an unseen tragedy that’s the catalyst for bringing Mary Katherine – MK – back into the world of her father, Professor Bomba. The death of MK’s mother leads her to the home of her dad- a place that looks like “termites holding hands” – where she discovers that he’s just as engrossed in his work as he always was. It’s not that the central relationship doesn’t feel like it matters, though: it’s decently laid out, and convincing enough....
5.2 Hunger Pains The survivors are still holed up in their rubble-strewn camp when a mass of feral skitters comes tearing down Main Street right towards them. Cue the firefight, with every face character on the wall firing a weapon, as well as some vaguely-familiar extras. The first wave is beaten back, but there’s a cost: during the fighting the food stores building got blown up by a stray rocket of some sort....
For all of the love that the cinema has for outer space, there strangely enough aren’t that many conventional Western animated shows set deep in the cosmos. There are countless anime that go there, but outside of Futurama (Rick and Morty also leaves the Earth’s atmosphere a bunch) you need to look all the way back to fodder like Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars from the ’90s (which is in dire need of a reboot, by the way)....
After watching this episode I was drawn to conclude that all the characters in this show fall into two neat categories: those you can care about and those you just don’t. Aaron so far hasn’t been an inspirational character, as he’s far too caught up in his own little world to be a plausible support system for Mark’s drink issue. But in this story they try really hard to resurrect him by creating a backstory about his and Tracy’s past....
Footloosers everywhere will be jumpy. As well as making Bacon a poster boy, the original movie delivered an iconic soundtrack stuffed with fist-pumping cheese, turning Kenny Loggins into a legend and inspiring impressionable teens to do strange things on living room carpets. Anyone who rooted for Bacon as dance dork Ren McCormack, a city kid who moves to a small town where dancing has been outlawed, will doubt that anyone else could fill his fine and funky footwear, and may consider this remake a naff shoe shuffle on dodgy ground....
1.15 The King Of Columbus Circle Starting with an old man asking for a visa to return to his country of birth, a lyrical narrative was formed where he was previously connected to Henry as a young boy with acute appendicitis. This show works well when referencing the past, even if sometimes the details aren’t as well researched as they could have easily been. (I suspect the Orient Express carriages should have been dark blue, and the width of the entire train was just 10....
1.2 Look Before You Leap What we really wanted to see was the relationship between Detective Jo Martinez and Dr Henry Morgan to develop, but it just didn’t. Jo simply sees Henry as a fast track to detecting results and drags him around like her favourite accessory. It didn’t help that they introduced a new superior for Jo in the form of Lt. Joanne Reece (Lorraine Toussaint), who was the same needing-to-be convinced character we’ve seen in a million cop shows before....
Nazi Germany gave us a visual shorthand for evil, huge scope for horror film makers, and Fanta. There’s a fair spurting of blood though. The plot, which to be honest is the least of your concerns here, consists of a Russian reconnaissance team moving into Eastern Germany while being filmed by Alexander Mercury’s Dmitri for propaganda purposes. Their radio is being jammed, but then they receive a distress call from another squad, and move into an abandoned village to answer it....
Last week’s opener introduced Heather, the piggy in the middle between Josie and Kingsley who has somehow become a stalker in the preceding seven days. Well, she is according to Howard while he and Kingsley watch her from a distance under the cover of night. Vod meanwhile is taking responsibility for the money she owes by taking on some temporary work despite being a bit over-confident by asking to be the CEO of the Discovery channel....
Considering the audience had already sat through two and a half days worth of torture, beating, killing and hard gore, you’d think they’d be immune to such themes but the difference is in the presentation. Whilst many of these films present their violence in an exploitative manner, aiming for shock and/or titillation, Seed takes a far more clinical approach. There’s almost no humanity whatsoever in the film. There is intentionally rudimentary characterization....
