He’s an underachiever, lugging around his collection of short stories (titled, with oh-so-profound laziness, Things People Do To Each Other) on a road trip reading tour, progressing through the southern States from university cafe to cosy book nook in a beat up old car. His companion on this adventure is his brother, Sean (Kel O’Neill), who, fittingly, is his exact opposite. He’s brash, crude, wildly charismatic and, integrally, a hit with the ladies....
I loved this week’s central case, it was gory and layered, and wonderful, and much, much, much more engaging than the hot mess that was last week’s plagiarized map ordeal (good God, has it really been a week already?). My expression of affection makes me sound like a monster. It’s not that I exclusively enjoy stories about corpses being melted (though I do), it was how well the trio of Sherlock, Watson, and Kitty worked together on the case....
If you want an illustration of how good a filmmaker Neill Blomkamp is, look no further than its opening. Where most directors would spend about half an hour establishing their future world, Blomkamp manages it within two minutes and a handful of shots. Like District 9, Elysium is a mix of social commentary and action. And in case you were worrying that an expanded budget and starrier cast may have blunted Blomkamp’s fearsome edge, fear not: Elysium is almost – but not quite – as blood-splattered and violent as District 9 was....
Jennifer’s Body From the outside in, it looked as if Megan Fox had played a blinder in choosing her first major movie headline role. Granted, she’s already shot to superstardom, and Michael Bay’s camera certainly enjoyed giving her career extra exposure in Transformers 2, but this was a chance to see if she could carry a movie off her own name. She couldn’t, but dammit, she played the Google search term game bloody well....
5.12 Liberty & 5.13 An Enemy Of Fate I wasn’t expecting it to be Shakespeare, or even the best TV ever, but the two final stories of the Fringe era were certainly designed to be a love-letter to those who have watched from the outset. Where other end-chapters have a single returning character, or some other acknowledgement, both Liberty and The Enemy of Fate were fully-loaded with all manner of references, nods and reappearances....
3.10 The Firefly But unbowed by being treated in this fashion, The Firefly is one of the most interesting stories they’ve done on this show, and forms part of sand building exercise for the end of the season (and possibly the show). The premise it explores is a common science fiction subject, best described by the ‘butterfly effect’, where small, seemingly insignificant events can have massive downstream consequences. The event that has these effects is the saving of Walter and Peter from the icy lake by the observer 25 years previously, and the story works around this point in time and the changes saving them ultimately caused....
4.12 Welcome To Westfield Fringe on occasion has been twinned with X-Files, the show that dealt with odd events and the FBI Agents who investigated them. Except this week didn’t remind me of X-Files, but more of classic The Outer Limits or, for the slightly younger viewer, The Twilight Zone. In search of rhubarb pie, the team blunders into the sleepy town of Westfield, and discover that as a destinations, go it’s a remarkably hard one to leave....
In what’s been an inconsistent Fringe season so far, this was probably the best story yet. It was very well paced, although in terms of narrative, it was mostly running around and shouting, rather than the usual introspective stuff the show does so well. But it was plot critical to extract some items from the vault for later use, most notably an ‘ambering’ device and the toxic gas that David Robert Jones created in the “Ability” episode which causes rapid tissue growth, asphyxiating the victim by covering their mouth and nose....
That’s because Game Night is a comedy encased in the shell of a thriller, from the tense musical score by Cliff Martinez to the off-kilter compositions by directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (who also highlight the movie’s surreal vibe with establishing shots that make cars and buildings initially resemble pieces on a game board). The cast is engaged and doesn’t spend a lot of time going off on riffs when there’s a decent little script — by Mark Perez, with some reworking by the directors — to follow along like a nice, clear instruction booklet inside a board game....
Winter Is Coming At once, we must immediately be grateful that HBO saw the potential in the series and chose to invest in it. With its adult themes, gratuitous violence, sex and supernatural horror elements, it could have easily been made into a lacklustre film (with most of the storylines omitted) or a bland TV series on any other network. Instead HBO has chosen to make its new fantasy series without a vampire or werewolf in sight, and it looks to be one of the best moves it’s ever made....
One of the trends Game of Thrones has developed is the thematic episode. There will be a certain confluence of storylines in which everyone is discussing a similar issue. This week, as you might get by the title of the episode, is honor and its various permutations in Westeros and beyond: honesty, forthright behavior, keeping up oaths, and that sort of thing. For the last few episodes, Dany’s wander through the red wastes and her eye-candy trips to Qarth have been a bit underwhelming....
In this case of this week, so troubling that you’re considering ending your life. The anonymity that the internet affords, and sometimes projects, means that most of us don’t know each other. That’s a very different thing, though, from not caring. If you’re reading this because you’re feeling there’s nowhere else to go, then, in a strange way, thank you. Thank you for pausing just to read our waffle. It’s very much appreciated....
This setup alone speaks volumes, and hints at a narrative of some resonance, picking up on the transition between old and new America, the quirky, homespun folklore that made up its oral history, and the founding legends which define its identity. After all, that 40 year time period brought with it the popular rise of electricity, motor cars, telephones and radio, tools which would supplant the old traditions, and serve the United States well on its ascent to world power....
2.16 Prisoners Holy prison break, Batman! As I touched upon last week, Ben McKenzie’s Gotham protagonist very much deserves to be incarcerated for quite a long time. Jim Gordon is a murderer, and although he was framed as a cop killer last week, that doesn’t diminish the fact that he took Theo Galavan’s life for real back in the mid-season finale. Essentially, then, he’s only half in prison for a crime that he didn’t commit....
Last week saw Special Agent Katz trying to shoot her way out of Hannibal’s basement. That it ends badly for her should surprise no one. Exactly how much combat experience do the forensic scientists have? Clearly not enough. Katz ends up vivisected and neatly pressed between huge plates of glass. Kind of like the slides she would use under her microscope. While the FBI are trying to recoup after this devastating loss, Graham is clumsily trying to hustle his remaining chess pieces across the board....
Who else has handled the various personalities and conflicts with aplomb like him? Bohannon as an unlikely middleweight boxer has toppled Durant and Mickey in previous seasons. The Swede’s thinly-veiled religious fervor is no match for Cullen’s cunning ways of getting the job done. Will the Swede soon be defrocked? If only he weren’t deaf to the slowly beating drums viewers have heard since he murdered the real bishop en route to Fort Smith....
We later learn that the killer is none other than Psycho-mum Niki. Her other self also tells her that she was the one who set up her husband DL, and that there’s a shitload of money hidden in the house. The money was stolen from the mysterious Mr Linderman, who just happens to be the guy blackmailing Nathan Petrelli. Anyway, Niki gets the cash, but DL spots her and they have a bit of scrap....
If you were reading last week you’ll remember I wasn’t too fond of The Eclipse part 1 and to be honest, part 2 didn’t do too much for me either. Predictably, it just tried to encompass way too much and failed to offer any kind of payoff as it either suffered from terrible writing or the kind of twist the Edwardians saw coming. Anyway, it seems the whole point of the eclipse in this part of the world is to put the boot (or in this case, power) firmly on the other foot....
This kind of cinematic snobbery is to be expected, of course, but those who insist on applying it to Almodovar are missing the point somewhat – sure, he’s a gifted, politically conscious film-maker, a keen stylist and absolutely worthy of the auteur label and all that it implies, but he also makes films that are genuinely popular with mainstream audiences. And not just in his native Spain: he has a significant fanbase in Britain and around the world now, thanks perhaps to his metronomic output (we get a new Almodovar film every spring, every two years, as a general rule), while his status as probably the most celebrated Spanish-language filmmaker in a world where a whole bunch of people speak Spanish probably doesn’t hurt....
4.4 To Have And To Hold We should have seen it coming. After all, this unsettling story announced its game two minutes in. “The picture on the box bears no resemblance to the actual jigsaw,” explained Adrian, a middle-aged man seated at his kitchen table, snapping little cardboard pieces into place. The clue was there: what you see is very much not what you get. Not with Adrian, and not with this episode....
