As expected, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull absolutely killed at the holiday box office, with a three-day total of $101 million dollars and a four-day opening of over $126 million. With a worldwide opening of $272 million, it’s pretty safe to say that the Indy franchise has a surprising amount of leg left, considering the last movie in the series came out almost exactly 19 years ago (May 24, 1989 versus May 22, 2008)....
2.9 Devil In A Blue Dress The Bliss that Anna uses to control the Visitors causes violent pain to the humans. However, thanks to Ryan’s baby, Anna knows that there’s a certain frequency of Bliss that doesn’t cause humans to thrash around and shriek, even though it’s nearly fatal for her to use it. Of course, that’s not going to stop her from expanding her plans, but she’s got someone she needs to Bliss up first before she takes on the rest of the world, and that’s Tyler....
Veep is a comedy of bad manners masquerading behind back-door, back-stabbing deals that pass as diplomacy. Veep is politics in a nutsack. Selina Meyer comes back to DC this week to make The Choice. The Choice is pro-choice or pro-life. The only thing Selina won’t do is speak “as a woman.” Unofficial polls have found that four out of five women hate women who speak “as a woman.” Selina’s not putting all her eggs in that basket....
This Vinyl review contains spoilers. The Nasty Bits bit is beginning to get on my tit. Vinyl is mainly about the birth of punk and they’re laying it all on nasty Brits when punk is an American original. The New York Dolls took their licks for dumbing down music and they were taking their cues from The Stooges out of Detroit. Yes, David Bowie’s “Hang On To Yourself” would have come alive with the heavy punk downstrum that Johnny Ramone of The Ramones patented....
Limit the use of CGI Personally, I’ve never, ever been convinced that CGI is better than real-life, and it certainly isn’t scary. So, if the Wolf Man can do without computers, then so can Silent Hill. Bring back the nurses The zombified nurses in the first film are a genius creation of rotting sex appeal, and would rank very highly on my “favourite screen monsters of all time” list. I absolutely loved them, and so they should feature in at least one scene of the new film....
Westworld Season 2 finally heads to Shogun World this week and introduces us to some fascinating characters including Akane, played by Rinko Kikuchi. It also teaches us something rather important about the nature of the hosts, themselves. For starters, one thing we learn in “Akane No Mai” is that Lee Sizemore is a hell of a writer. He catches some grief early on when Maeve and her crew arrive at the small Edo period Japanese village that serves as Shogun World’s equivalent of Sweetwater....
But now, 10 years and $5.9 billion in worldwide box office later — after the MCU was born with the release of Iron Man in 2008 — that universe is here to stay and has changed the landscape of the motion picture industry. That first decade culminates this week with Avengers: Infinity War, a colossal experiment that pulls together nearly every character Marvel has introduced in its previous 18 films, including the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, to stop the mega-villain Thanos from murdering half the universe with the power of the Infinity Stones....
Lately episodes trend to center around Tim’s personal life and his many demons. While Tim might use the program as a soap box or means to increase his public image, Gregg is purely interested in spreading his joy of cinema and keeping things focused on the art of the silver screen. Due to Tim being preoccupied over the issue of his decaying flesh, it seemed like an appropriate time to get some one-on-one time with Gregg Turkington where he’s allowed to dish untethered on film without anyone stealing focus....
He’s come back to the topic of the film in a new interview with Empire magazine, in its current issue. Quizzed as to whether he’d ever felt that he wasn’t getting the material while shooting a film, he admitted that “I’ve made a few films like that.” “I felt like a fish out of water making Hook,” he continued. “I didn’t have confidence in the script. I had confidence in the first act and I had confidence in the epilogue....
The Who-iverse doesn’t have good form with me. Reviewing the last series of Doctor Who got me so annoyed with the programme that I vowed never to watch it again. But Torchwood has the trump card over me that I found the first series both ridiculous and tepid at the same time, so I can’t turn against it so much as simply continue a curmudgeonly grump about the whole affair....
But a few stories of people and places going over and above filtered through. And we thought we should share them with you. Take a look… Once, a very long time ago, I went to see Back To The Future Part 2 (when it was new; I said it was a long time ago!) and the only other people in the cinema were Christopher Reeve and his family. That was nice....
One of the trailers for Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice is the latest to ignite grumbles about just how much is given away in promos for movies. 25. Jurassic World Director Colin Trevorrow was amongst those who expressed disappointment at this one particular promo for Jurassic World. In it, we see Chris Pratt riding on his motorbike, alongside velcoraptors that surprisingly don’t appear to be eating him. Presented out of context, the scene just looked a little daft....
Agents of SHIELD Season 4 Episode 1 So here we are for the Agents of SHIELD season 4 premiere. It seems like just yesterday that we were all settling back to watch the first episode of Marvel Studios’ first TV series with dreams of Iron Man, Hulk, and Hawkeye guest appearances dancing in our brains. Well, we didn’t get many Marvel movie stars nor did we get a large helping of established Marvel characters....
Rosetta To a degree, this worked, in as much that, by the end, I thought there was more to Gary. Although what that ‘more’ actually was is, as yet, undetermined. The story revolves around an attempt to hunt down the Alpha bad guys, Red Flag, responsible for unleashing the evil Mr Monk on our heroes in the first story. While the two bad Alphas execute their scheme to steal a petrol tanker and use it to attack a pharmaceutical company, Gary spends time with Anna....
2.12 Need To Know At the centre of my problem is the way the characters have now so radically altered that some are almost unrecognisable, specifically Dr Rosen. I accept that Rosen’s character has always been somewhat divisive, but he’s now plotting against his own team purely on the basis that he’s unsure if he can trust them. That’s classic paranoia, and as the professional he supposedly is, even he should be able to see that....
Douglas asked me if I’d like to adapt Life, The Universe and Everything for radio I said no, and that was with Douglas alive and asking. (Dirk Maggs did it, and did an excellent job.) It seemed a thankless task. In the medium of comics, it not unusual to see one character being tackled by hundreds of different writers of their lifespan. No-one gets too upset when their original creators stop telling the story and hand the reins over to someone else – it’s simply the natural order of a periodical medium....
This season of American Dad has mostly focused on Stan so far, which is hardly an anomaly for the show. The character and his job at the CIA have been a deep well of stories, so it’s not surprising to see the show once again playing with the idea of subverting Stan’s status there and his confidence in himself. Meanwhile Roger tries to help out the financial situation in the Smith household (as the weekly pay checks that Stan is now taking in aren’t doing much, in spite of how much they might excite him in their week-liness) by finally opening that bed and breakfast, “The Inn Under the Attic” that he’s always talking about....
1.5 Lemon Scented You The episode begins in a beautiful fashion. The first people cross the Bering land bridge into what will become North America. As they arrive, like the slaves or the Vikings, they bring their gods along with them. The people, hungry and cold and consumed by loss, turn to their god for protection and for inspiration. They survive, they thrive, but their mammoth god is quickly forgotten....
7.3 Neighbors From Hell There’s a rope around the neck of Ally Mayfair-Richards (Sarah Paulson), and it seems that at every turn, rather than try to extract herself from the gallows, she only manages to tighten the noose a little tighter with every episode of struggling. Her business was failing and her marriage was a wreck before she shoots an innocent man in a case of mistaken identity, but after that, things only seem to be getting worse....
2.11 Spilt Milk This was, from beginning to end, the most visually interesting episode of American Horror Story this season, thanks in no small part to director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. There are so many clever edits and tricks this week, from multiple time-jumping match cuts involving the Bloody Face gang to a brilliant tracking shot through the asylum as inmates are being fed their meals of carbs and (especially) the way in which Lana’s escape is filmed that if I started naming all of the great camera work, I’d run out of space....
