Again, when we begin the episode (after the teaser with the unfortunate 300-pound man getting an impromptu monster-based liposuction), Dean gets some fancy camera work staged around him. This seems to be a theme in recent episodes. Intentional, or does it just look cool? And I want to mention how happy I am that Dean says “So we’ve got a Thinner situation?” Mostly because I made that reference at the end of my review last week....
9.18 Meta Fiction The conceit of Meta Fiction, as its title makes evident, is just that: metafiction. Supernatural is already one of the most metafictional TV shows ever made – it’s written not only itself, but its own fandom, into the show itself, and featured episodes with fans reading fan fiction about its own characters. But it’s done more than that: a few seasons ago, it extended that conceit to its epic, seasonal story arcs....
5.3 Dreamcatchers Take, for example, the character of Tracy. She’s already been the menaced callback-to-the-fourth season character type, when The Mute struck down Sean the wendigo. Now she’s taking on a very familiar set of characteristics for those of us who have watched the show from the beginning, developing lizard scales on one side of her body along with some talons, crazy eyes, and a barbed, venomous tail. That’s right, Tracy is apparently becoming a kanima, and that means trouble, but she doesn’t seem to be bound by the kanima rules....
Not all delinquents are created equal, though. Take Clarke Griffin, for example (played by Eliza Taylor). Our heroine is the practical, protective one, whose detention was political. And you know she’s soulful because she pines for open skies and “the ground.” Then there’s Finn (Thomas McDonell). He’s a wild kid with a heart of gold—his unauthorized spacewalk cost the station a month’s worth of oxygen. Rounding out the main cast are Octavia Blake (Marie Avgeropoulos), whose only crime was being born into a society with strict population control, and her older brother, Bellamy (Bob Morley), who is masquerading as a guard....
1.12 We Are Grounders Part 1 When season finales are stretched out over multiple weeks, it can go one of two ways. Either the show is reluctant to pump in more filler prior to those episodes and the show comes out looking tighter and with added momentum, or the episodes don’t have enough story to sustain themselves and end up ruining both parts when one would have sufficed. The 100’s first season has been a big surprise to most, coupling typical CW melodrama with Lost-style mystery and thrills and, judging by part one of We Are Grounders, it falls firmly into the prior category....
1.1 Pilot & 1.2 Earth Skills Judging only from the first two episodes, which chart the journey of a hundred juvenile delinquents to a future Earth thought inhabitable, The 100 certainly isn’t going to change the face of television, but it’s pleasingly harsh and surprisingly dark despite the CW-esque young cast and focus on romance. The pilot is economical in setting up the situation of these people, with the show set 97-years and three generations after the aforementioned apocalypse where supplies are running low and oxygen running out....
The Affair Season 3 Episode 3 “I believe that love is never boring.” With all of The Affair’s characters receiving their fair share of re-introduction time over the course of this season’s first two episodes, I was genuinely curious to see which path this entry would end up following and who would be steering things forward. That’s why it’s so surprising when the episode throws the welcome turn at the audience by presenting Juliette’s story, rather than any of the four core cast....
8.23 The Maternal Combustion And this episode gives us something even better – both mothers in the same room at the same time. They might appear like the mirror images their children (one brilliant; one sweet and simple), which is very much how they’ve been portrayed when flying solo, but it’s a (reluctant) testament to the writing that their interactions here were very much steeped in their own characters, rather than anything taken from Sheldon and Leonard....
So, yeah, The Cabin In The Woods looks very, very familiar. But it’s relying on the fact that you know that. This is a film that loves horror movies; it knows them inside out, and it expects you to have done your homework, too. It’s a gleeful deconstruction of the horror genre that takes an enormous amount of pleasure in holding up the most common tropes of the genre for you to recognise, and then very deliberately piling one of top of another until the whole thing threatens to topple over, Jenga-style....
The Death Of Stalin centres on – spoiler alert – the death of Joseph Stalin. The film opens shortly before the dictator’s demise in 1953, finding the funny in a regime where pissing off the wrong person means getting your name promptly put on a death list. Paddy Considine and Tom Brooke (Wiggy from Sherlock) sizzle in a rib-tickling opening sequence that subverts this bloody backdrop with some terrifically mundane humour....
Check out part two of the interview here… When did you find out where you were going each week in Swap Shop? Er, believe it or not, months in advance. What happened is that it was going to be done as a ten-week series, and that’s it, and they suddenly realised what a storm they had here, and they ran it for three months or more. It must have been an incredible show to be involved with… You know, we only had four television channels in those days, and even I was blown by it, because, you know, you turn up at York Rugby Football Ground, and you announce on the morning that you’re there, and 8,000 kids would turn up!...
“Family Affair” begins with Joe and Mandy driving to meet a woman named Jana, played by Leslie Bibb (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby) in a really interesting role for her; she’s usually confined to static characters in movies like Iron Man 2, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, and Movie 43. The house Jana lives in is expansive, with Bibb doing a perfect luxurious stay-at-home-mom. When Joe cradles Jana’s infant child, we think: He can’t kill a child, can he?...
1.11 Whips and Regret There are probably three storylines where I feel engaged with the characters in The Following. One of them is, of course, Ryan and Joe. And, I suppose, the Claire addition to the tripod. The other one is the open power struggle between Joe and Roderick. I don’t particularly care who comes out on top, though I think at this point Roderick is the more dangerous and driven of the two....
1.15 The Final Chapter For a show that has been pretty brainless throughout its run, it opened very strongly and it ended very strongly, suggesting that the initial ‘movie’ from writer/creator Kevin Williamson suffered from the process to extend it to a full season of television. Indeed, the opening was very good and the show kind of struggled to build from there until the past few episodes when the rising action toward the climax began to build....
But when her estranged father, the community’s rabbi, passes away, she must return to settle his affairs — and reignites her romance with Esti (Rachel McAdams), a woman who stayed behind and married their mutual friend Dovid (Alessandro Nivola). Den of Geek had the chance to speak with Rachel Weisz about making the movie — which she also produced — the issues it raises, doing that scene and her upcoming reunion with director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) on the 18th century royal period piece The Favourite, in which Weisz stars with Emma Stone and Olivia Colman....
Turning the original tale on its head somewhat, that film’s lead, James Corden, only appears briefly near the end. The bulk of the tale is given to the titular Gruffalo Jr, voiced by Shirley ‘Moaning Myrtle’ Henderson, and it’s hard not to adore the character, with her spirit of adventure, and yet also with a vulnerability that brings something new to the story; there’s one moment in particular towards the end that hits an emotional beat not dreamed of by the first tale....
The title is rationalised very early on, as the titular book club’s members are caught after curfew in Nazi-occupied Guernsey, and drunkenly invent the reason for their late night. One year after the war is over, the society comes to the attention of dissatisfied author Juliet Ashton (Lily James), when she comes into correspondence with pig farmer and founding member Dawsey (Michiel Huisman) about one of her early passion projects....
Sticking with two major plotlines this week, we first get the happy news that Jen has become employee of the month, which is all very exciting, considering, as Roy points out, she does not actually do any work and really doesn’t know what a com-pu-ter really is. Still, if it involves a bit of gloating, a plaque and a piece of photocopied paper with your name randomly chosen from Douglas’ bin then that’s all she really cares about....
Maybe I’m not enthused at the arrival of 2012 because I’m bored of the apocalypse. Facing up to what I think is fair to describe as a surfeit of ‘End of Days’ scenarios in pop culture, I predict that when Armageddon really does rear its ugly head and threaten the Earth, we’ll simply shrug indifferently and exclaim, “Pfft, you took your time, didn’t you? And is this all you’ve got?...
We’re all helpless consumers held captive by screens and I fear for humanity, especially when the screens are dominated by karaoke contests, shock-docs, toxic soap operas and news programmes that turn current affairs into a circus. I’m freaking out at the idea that the Pleasantville scenario could occur and that some of us will get sucked into one of these awful TV shows and have to eat maggots or sing tunes from Dreamgirls through tears of fake grief in order to escape....
