It’s entirely coincidental I’m sure, but every TV show I’ve seen this week has been about forms of mental illness and insanity. Chuck was ‘mad-dog’, John and Sarah Connor visited the therapist, and Fringe is just plain nuts anyway. But after watching the latest Heroes season three episode entitled Dying of the Light I began to wonder if it was me with a screw loose for watching this rubbish. But hell, let’s recap this week’s super-lunacy on Heroes....
In a lot of ways, Hot Streets feels like a series that mashes together sensibilities from both Adult Swim’s original programs and its current slate. There’s an improvisational, rough around the edges feel to this show that simultaneously pairs its minimalist nature to layered, Dadaist storytelling like you’d find in Venture Bros. or Rick and Morty. Hot Streets is a deeply fascinating animated series. It’s impossible to predict and it turns overdone clichés into inspired, unique narratives....
The story finds young American girl Daisy, played by Saoirse Ronan (Byzantium, Hanna), who has been sent to her cousins’ home in the beautiful English countryside (though actually filmed in equally beautiful Wales, fact fans). Her real name is actually Elizabeth but chooses to name herself against her given title, in an act of rebellion that is typical of her spiky nature. Director Macdonald even refers to her character as a “difficult little cow,” though one would think “teenager” would suffice....
2.5 Dead Head This episode opens with Chance and Winston sitting at a cafe waiting for an anonymous client to show up. When a car bomb explodes in the cafe’s car park and they save the driver from the car, the team have found their new client. After him to the hospital, they find that he now has amnesia. A John Doe (Roger Bart), or J.D. as Ames labels him, is signed out to the custody of Ilsa without her knowledge and this brings the police knocking....
Michael Pitt plays Dr Ian Gray, a scientist who’s set himself the task of charting the evolutionary origins of the eye. A staunch atheist (we know this because he reads Richard Dawkins books) Dr Gray aims to prove that the eye isn’t the product of a divine being, as creationists believe, but rather the result of billions of years of evolution. While Dr Gray’s still a young scientist studying and researching in mid-2000s New York, two women happen to appear in his life....
There’s a family move to a new house, but as it turns out, the Lamberts’ problems don’t stay at the old residence. There’s a little issue with their son, Dalton. He’s not in a coma, he’s a body without a spirit, thanks to a little problem Dalton has with astral projection. Fortunately, grandma, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), has had some experience with this sort of thing and she knows just who to call....
On the eve of the disc’s release, he spared us time – presumably between travelling from gig to gig – for a chat about it… Yeah. The difficult thing is writing the show. Once you’ve got the show written you might as well take it everywhere. Because once you put it on DVD, you can never perform it again. So I take it everywhere, and then I like to do a new show every year....
Into The Badlands Season 2 Episode 4 Well, this was a pleasant surprise. I’m not saying this episode is perfect. Characters (especially those who are newly introduced) still take on the laborious and unrealistic task of providing infodumps about their backstories to give the folks at home an idea of where they fall on Into the Badlands’ large and mostly grey character spectrum. Case in point, Baron Chau, someone who has the potential to become a fan favorite....
If you remember way back to the fourth ever episode of the series, Charlie fakes having cancer to get a shot at sleeping with the waitress. We all know how the saying goes. Karma is a bitch. Now his mom has cancer and the healing process is a fickle one. At the heart of “Charlie’s Mom Has Cancer” is the idea that faith comes in different forms. Dennis is in complete opposition to faith, believing the church scams the people who come through its doors for guidance....
As usual, we begin with the weird happenings and then move swiftly to the mystery surrounding those events, except with only this and the next story left this year, the story is decidedly big and story arc orientated, intrinsically linked to the unseen William Bell. Yes, the founder of Massive Dynamics and previous scientific partner of Walter Bishop. They actually keep his identity secret, but I can assure you that people will be blown away when they find out who it is next week!...
While alluded to early on, the larger story arc about the alternate dimension has been woven subtly into the individual narratives. But the final story, There’s More Than One Of Everything, is entirely about The Observer, the other dimension and Dr. Jones’ attempts to get there. It starts where the previous episode ended, with Nina Sharp who’d been shot. She’s not dead due to her modified physiology. This wasn’t a revenge attack or a random incident; those that attacked her wanted something hidden in her artificial arm, which they took....
But the latest episode, The Equation, has entirely calmed my nerves, as it takes the characters into an entirely weird world, locks the doors and throws away the key. But in typical Fringe style, this is the first abduction, and previous victims have usually come back certifiably insane! The trail leads back to the mental institution where Walter had previously resided, and a fellow resident, Dashiell Kim might hold the key to finding the boy and solving the puzzle....
For the most part, yes. It’s at least as violent and satirical and funny as the original, and at times it’s actually more shocking. But rather than just remake the first film, Wadlow has done something a little different with Kick-Ass, producing a film that’s far more character-focused. It’s a risk, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s also necessary: Kick-Ass was a firework of a movie: bright and fast and ending just at the moment you were most impressed....
With Kotoko, Tsukamoto switches from tech-noir sci-fi horror to drama, but brings with him all of the narrative imagination of his earlier movies, their hallucinatory imagery, and more than a little of their horror. Cutting herself in moments of depression, yet sometimes swept up in rapturous emotional highs brought about by her singing, Kotoko is a lead character who’s both sympathetic and terrifying. It’s difficult not to warm to her gentle and creative side, as she appears to improvise songs on the spot and displays a genuine flair for making paper-and-string animal dioramas....
“I have a haemorrhoid that’s almost 32!” declares Archie. Your reaction to that joke will determine whether you’ll like Last Vegas or loathe it. After all, it’s hardly treading new ground. In fact, Jon Turtletaub’s film makes a point of treading old ground, taking The Hangover‘s formula and geriatrifying it for an older audience in what seems to be a risk-free move. Married man Sam (the Oscar-winning Kevin Kline) completes the antiquated quartet....
It’s probably best to start with the obvious question: how did you go about shaping the show for the DVD release? I only ask, because you cut my favourite joke of the tour out! [a joke about R White’s lemonade, of all things] I figured that got the cut because, when I saw it on tour, only around half the audience seemed to get it! And that didn’t stay in the DVD?...
Unfortunately, any and all hype about Postl playing the Leprechaun is completely misguided. He “stars” in this movie almost as much as Bela Lugosi “stars” in Plan 9 from Outer Space. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Leprechaun: Origins sounds like it’s a prequel to the 90’s movies, but it’s actually a reboot. In fact, it has very little to do with the original version anyway, especially in tone. Rather than go with an Irish Nightmare on Elm Street comedy horror, director Zach Lipovsky went with a more serious, grounded style....
Lethal Weapon: Season 2, Episode 9 “Why don’t you just eat the pork chop the way that it’s intended to be eaten?” Conspiracy theories contain a certain hyperbolized energy where they’re allowed to be over the top. This recipe often means that conspiracy theories are the fuel for some of the most satisfying episodes of television shows, whether it be Community or Delocated. Lethal Weapon has come off of a strong string of episodes and even though “Fools Rush In” is a minor step back in quality, there’s still plenty for the conspiracy theory genre to be proud about here....
This brings us to Life, a space horror film which feels like an unholy amalgam of Alien, Gravity, plus a dash of Prometheus, John Carpenter’s The Thing and Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Xperiment. Life’s individual parts aren’t unique, but the way they’ve been put together – and the slickness of their execution – makes the movie something more than a straight genre mash-up. Aboard the confines of the ISS, however, the celebration soon quietens down as the organism – dubbed Calvin – begins to grow at a startling rate....
Forward-thinking comedians Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel realized Adam West’s kitsch potential much earlier than that. In 1991, they wrote and produced “Lookwell,” a television pilot for NBC. In the vein of “Police Squad!” and “Get Smart,” “Lookwell” was a half hour spoof that starred West as a washed-up TV detective who arrogantly believes he can lend a crime-solving hand to the real authorities in his city. Hindering Lookwell considerably in his endeavors is the fact he’s a complete idiot....
