But I was wrong, and in a curious way I’m glad. It was part way through Raising the Bar that the face of public defence lawyer Jerry Kellerman suddenly rang its own bell in my sub-conscious. The actor in question is Mark-Paul Grosselaar, the same unbelievably smug Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell, and you might not actually believe me, but in this he can act! No, really, he’s good....
In other words, the more chaos there is, the funnier it becomes – and this is no-where better illustrated than with BBC 1 sitcom Reggie Perrin, which has now reached the half-way line. Though the show is never laugh-out-loud hilarious – except to the over-excited studio audience who, by the evidence of the laughter track, must have been in full giggle mode by the time they took their seats – it is consistently entertaining....
A bus draws into Sunnydale bus station, and a nervous-looking girl gets off, finding herself quickly alone in a dark, deserted, grotty-looking part of town. But she’s not alone for long, because soon the eyeless-wonders in the black robes have surrounded her, brandishing their knives in a way that would seem more menacing if they could see what they were doing with them. Happily for the girl, not so happily for the Bringers, Buffy shows up and kills ’em all....
In another ingenius getting-them-out-of-the-house manoeuvre, Giles is preparing to take the Potentials out into the middle of the desert for a “vision quest”, like the one Buffy went on in season 5. The fact that Giles isn’t touching anything has become ostentatious, now, like when he asks Dawn to take a notebook out to one of the Potentials in the car. Okay, guys, we get it. You can stop now....
4.13 Devil’s Due With a mob holding most of the science team hostage, Picard beams down and gets his negotiating pen out. As he attempts to quell the superstitious crowd’s fear, Arda appears, announcing that “Time’s up.” In an attempt to convince everyone that she is who she says, she briefly takes on the form of the Klingon “devil” Fek’lhr and then produces legal documents for the planet’s leader, Jared, to sign....
This review contains spoilers. 4.22 Half A Life Lwaxana Troi accompanies Captain Picard to meet a visitor from the planet Kaelon II, where the Enterprise has recently arrived. The man – Timicin – is a scientist seeking the Federation’s help in restarting his system’s dying star. Unfortunately, Lwaxana Troi is more interested in restarting Timicin’s dying libido. Like all attempts to play God, the plan to restart the star backfires in Timicin’s face and it blows up, while the real God looks on and laughs....
2.22 Shades of Gray Which brings us to the big question: where were YOU the first time you felt so much contempt towards Shades of Gray that you switched your TV off in disgust and went to do something else with your life instead? The episode begins with Riker and Geordi on the surface of an alien planet. Riker has just been spiked in the leg by something, and they’re worried the wound might be full of alien crawlies....
3.1 The Rickshank Redemption So, maybe you’ve heard… Here in the US, Rick And Morty aired its season premiere this very April Fools’ night, like fifty times in a row, to boot. It streamed for a few hours on Adult Swim’s website and played on loop on Cartoon Network, in place of all the other scheduled programming. Samurai Jack and Dragon Ball Super fans were upset. But everyone else got a totally awesome Rick And Morty season 3 premiere!...
Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot is the story of burgeoning love between two pensioners – the shy and quiet Mr Hoppy (Dustin Hoffman) and the outgoing-but-dim Mrs Silver (Judi Dench). Mr Hoppy is far too reserved to express his feelings for Mrs Silver, who appears to only have eyes for her tortoise, Alfie. But when Hoppy hears the object of his affections expressing dismay at Alfie’s lack of growth, he concocts a cunning plan to make her happy and win her heart… It’s a bold move to try and add to Dahl’s canon, and unfortunately several of the additions to the film only serve to detract from the main story....
I think I finally get boxing. Endurance, tactics, grudge matches, underdogs coming back from the brink of failure to pound opponents into paste after their drive motor fails and they start venting CO2… No wonder Stallone made all those movies about it. The final had a touch of the sports movie genre about it. The seemingly undefeatable champions—Team Carbide, who built a robot so tough it didn’t only tear through its competitors like tin cans but also through the arena’s much-vaunted steel walls—was bested by a plucky flipper....
You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen.,But do you recall?The most famous reindeer of all? Then one foggy Christmas Eve,Santa came to say,Rudolph with your nose so bright,Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight? Then how the reindeer loved himAs they shouted out with glee,Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,You’ll go down in history. Unfortunately when he gets there he finds that his family and his girlfriend have been searching for him....
Regaining his creative compass with 1998’s Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out Of Sight, the relative critical and commercial success of that picture – coupled with his potent creative relationship with star George Clooney – found the director propelled back into the limelight. However, since the announcement of his ‘retirement’ from movie making in early 2011, Soderbergh seems to have rediscovered something of his former glories thanks to the box-office success of pandemic thriller, Contagion (2011) and the surprise US smash that was Magic Mike (2012)....
Liv, last seen pulling up her knickers with Nick, was once the only one who would stand by Mini’s side when she was still a megabitch. But all of that’s in the past. Mini’s now eager to make up with everyone and be like totally amazing mates, yeah? Except now, Liv isn’t as eager to stand by her. When the gang come round to make use of Liv’s empty house, she has to get out, to run away from her own guilt at seeing Mini....
Smurfs: The Lost Village has thus landed into the capable hands of director Kelly Asbury, last responsible for the Statham-laden animation Gnomeo & Juliet. He directs a screenplay from Stacey Harman and Pamela Ribon, and between them, they’ve fashioned a decent enough family picture. In the early stages, it does feel a little awkward. We’re introduced – or re-introduced, depending on how au fait you are with The Smurfs – to a village full of male Smurfs, whose names are their character traits....
Like The Force Awakens novel, the sentences in Solo are puffed up with clichés and contradictions. Objects become detached from their sources: Han watches many “feet” pass by his hiding place with no mention of the people to which the feet are attached. Some major scenes, such as Val’s death and the Kessel Run, are rushed. Han’s emotions are detached and simple—“He felt very alone at that moment.” Another one of the movie’s strengths was its visual style: musty Corellia was dark and claustrophobic, the Falcon pristine and white in contrast to its later grime, the storms of Kessel colorful and strange....
Wackadoodle U.S. Marshall proved to be more a hot mess than Tig. Last night, in what was arguably the best scene of the evening, he accidently shot a hooker. While in his skivvies. Then, in what was arguably the second best scene of the evening, he tried to turn two of Nero’s underlings into bottle openers. Fun fact, you cannot use someone’s teeth to pry off a twist-cap. Bobby has recruited four guys from other charters....
4.6 With An X Immediately, we’re back in the warehouse with the Sons, the Mayans, and 29 bricks of Columbian cocaine when there should be 30 bricks. The audience knows that Juice took it, but I don’t think anyone was expecting things to go the way they did in this week’s episode. Juice and the Mayan guy are immediately assumed to be innocent, obviously because they are long term members, which means that the two prospects, Rat and Filthy Phil, are immediately prime suspects....
Certainly my favourite episode of the first season, and one of my favourite South Park episodes ever, this story sees Barbra Streisand arrive in South Park on the hunt for an ancient magical triangle she believes capable of giving her unlimited power, enough to take over the world! Things kick off with the school at an archaeological dig, where Kyle discovers a strange triangle he believes to be worthless, and so discards it....
We don’t get to see every one of the fractured people tucked away in Kevin’s mind, but the ones we do meet include overbearing mother figure, Patricia; Hedwig, a nine-year-old kid who likes hip-hop; and Dennis, a chap who leers through huge spectacles like his namesake, Dennis Nilsen. In his best movies, Shyamalan excels at taking an existing genre and pushing it slightly out of square, so that a supernatural chiller becomes a moving portrait of a psychologist and his young patient (The Sixth Sense), or a drama about survivor’s guilt flips over into superhero territory (Unbreakable)....
With a body count being racked up that would make Robocop impressed and chances of survival for members Grid being like that of a red shirts on a Star Trek away mission, the Spooks team’s continual shift in character, and feeling that nobody is safe, shows that Spooks is one of the most compelling and addictive bits of television on at the moment. Although the meeting is ‘off the radar’, a Russian delegate Leon Gevitsky has his niece Nina stopping with him while in London and, unknown to him, this wry and doting Nina is actually a mole and working to bring down her billionaire uncle from the inside, being the way in for a group of global-terrorists to find and eventually gatecrash the secret meeting....
