Sitting in the screening room waiting for The Last Stand to start, it was nigh on impossible not to be flooded with endless memories of how much of my youth was affected by Arnold – from the joy of seeing Predator on VHS at a birthday party having just hit my teens, scribbling endless drawings of him on the covers of my school books, to Total Recall marking the first 18 certificate film I snuck in to see at the cinema....
Ashley Pharoah, the creator of The Living And The Dead, made his name writing genre TV with a twist. He and Matthew Graham added a time travel mystery to the police procedural in Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes, then spliced the supernatural with court drama in Eternal Law. Pharoah’s new series The Living And The Dead plays the same game. It’s a traditional Victorian ghost story with Something Else Going On....
Cinematic spin-offs of popular BBC wireless shows had appeared as early as the 1930s with big screen versions of Band Waggon but although Hammer adopted BBC TV’s 1953 classic The Quatermass Experiment for the cinema in 1953 the sitcom spin-off remained a rarity until the end of the 1960s. There were exceptions of course – there was a 1958 version of ITV’s The Army Game, The Larkins was filmed as Inn for Trouble in 1959 and Whack-O!...
I’m obviously not the only one who thinks that. The Lucky One is a movie built around Efron the movie star, right from the opening voiceover where he gets to say something deep while the camera pans across a scenic landscape. His character, a Marine of few words and lots of buttoned up emotions, can play piano, fix a boat engine, spruce up a bedroom, has a dog as a best friend, and doesn’t flinch when there’s a gun pointed at his head....
A commonly criticized aspect of The Magicians book series is that Julia loses her shade, commonly understood as more or less her soul or her connection to humanity, due to Reynard the trickster fox god raping her. However, the television version of The Magicians diverged from this plot point, keeping Julia’s shade intact until the most recent episode, when she lost it while undergoing an abortion. While the portrayal of abortion on television has certainly come a long way, coupling Julia’s abortion with literally losing her connection to her humanity is deeply troubling, especially for a show that already has occasionally treated women and survivors of sexual violence as second rate....
2.1 Come Home Over the course of the hour I totted up three time periods, four countries, two abductions, two missing babies, two suspects, one affair, at least one suicide, a mysterious fire and a funeral. Best add paracetamol to your Wednesday shopping list for the next seven weeks. Haircuts turned out to be key. If Keeley Hawes had a bob, it was the present day; if not, it was two years ago....
3.2 The Hunger After a very encouraging, if not slightly overstuffed opener, we’re now onto the story proper as the reintroductions and in the case of the villains, introductions, have all been done. What I wanted from The Hunger was something to take the promise of that opener and really throw the Musketeers against the wall, preferably so hard that we start to get what the showrunners promised, a sense of real peril and danger to our heroes....
2.6 One Step Too Many When we left Will McAvoy, he was reeling from hearing of the death of his father while his show was on the air. This episode picks up a little while later, and is notable for largely keeping Will apart from his usual support network at ACN. They’re not blanking him, but as the team’s investigation into Operation Genoa picks up steam, it’s decided that Will should be the fresh eyes on the story before broadcast, if it gets that far....
1.12 Dance Back To The Grave Davina’s permanent death has already been contested, for one, with Marcel deducing that the four sacrificed can be resurrected as soon as they deal with the four new adversaries that hijacked the Harvest. I like that our gang (with a little extra help from Sophie) have already figured out how many new threats have entered New Orleans, if not that Celeste is the one behind it, as it eliminates a lot of the tedious surprise over the coming weeks....
After following the men over the course of the war in the Pacific, and their often harrowing experiences, it felt right that we should bid goodbye to them in this fashion. Each of the three leads got their moment and sense of closure, and, of course, it was all wrapped up with a ‘what happened next’ section. Even for those characters you could barely remember. Anyway, I digress. Meanwhile, Bob Leckie reappeared after several episodes’ absence....
Now, with a sharp regard for the tortured relationship between a shady White House and a bullied, increasingly adversarial press, Spielberg’s The Post is so timely that its ironic, nearly 50-years-ago-setting chills to the bone. For here is a story juxtaposed during the reign of President Richard Nixon. Casting deep shadows with an even deeper camera focus on a paranoid Republican president paces his isolated West Wing cage, we glimpse a politician who struggles with facts and transparency, and who is never fully captured by Spielberg’s lens....
The Simpsons: Season 27 Episode 19. The Simpsons’ “Fland Canyon” is a flashback episode to the good old days before Homer accidentally killed Maude Flanders and we are reminded why we didn’t miss her all that much since she’s been gone. Certainly not as much as Ned’s rebound date, Mrs. Krabappel. Once upon a time, Homer tells Maggie while trying to bore her to sleep, two feuding families attempted to bury their differences by going on a pilgrimage to a great American tourist trap, the Grand Canyon....
The Son Episode 3 “Second Empire,” shows that, while Texas oilmen don’t always get what they want, they can get what they need. The first son of Texas is building his second empire out of the blood of old dinosaurs the way he built his first out of the blood of his old enemies. Most of his old enemies, the ones who survived, now number among his oldest friends. They know his history and, while they may not have forgiven it, it’s taught them not to repeat mistakes....
3.1 New York Strong Well, the season three premiere holds true to form as the plot barely ticks forward while we get to revisit most of our major players from the sides of darkness and light. While the episode was loaded with action, it was a pretty generic way to kick off the season. Appropriately, we start things with Doctor Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll), who is still mourning the abduction of his son Zach by his vampire ex-wife Kelly (Natalie Brown)....
Okay enough’s enough. It’s time to stop messing around with seemingly pointless secondary characters and for The Tunnel to get down to the heart of what this has all really been about – a deeply personal revenge mission. The past is coming back to haunt Detective Karl Roebuck after the revelation that his long-dead colleague Kieran Ashton is alive and kicking, and a decent fit for the profile of the Truth Terrorist....
5.18 Resident Evil There’s another dead only guy with a mysterious evil plan in Mystic Falls? It must be Tuesday (or Thursday, whatever). Yep, The Vampire Diaries is back from its hiatus and ready to get going on yet another fight for survival between our gang and whichever unkillable beastie has decided to take up residence in their town. This, of course, is balanced with a lot of chatter about love, friendship and letting go with some false finality for fans in both sides of the shipper war, as well as a week where both Matt and Tyler get something useful to do – novel....
6.1 I’ll Remember We obviously can’t be sure that this will always be the case – the last scene of the episode obviously indicates that all was not what it seemed last year – but it was still a nifty narrative move that has injected a small amount of peril back into the show. In it’s sixth year, it really needs some stakes. Not that Vampire Diaries has ever been particularly interested in peril, and I’ll Remember was pretty standard in terms of action levels and emotional hand-wringing....
For the medium of television, the Internet is the elephant in the room. Over the past two decades, the web has grown into the most important and widely used form of communication, with over two billion earthlings chatting, tweeting, blogging, buying and selling at any given moment. The Virtual Revolution is the BBC’s belated attempt to document the rise of the Internet in a lavish, four part series presented by Guardian tech journalist Dr Aleks Krotoski....
3.4 The Killer Within The show’s decided to take on a delicate balancing act with its two story lines, matching up the prison with Woodbury officially. This might be the first episode where we’ve split the two down the middle, and for a first attempt, it was very successful. There’s a nice contrast between the idyllic status of the Governor’s miniature kingdom and the absolute chaos that erupts in the prison after a fairly routine morning of dragging out dead bodies and moving cars around....
That’s the first and last part that drugs play in this episode. There are a couple of short scenes to remind us that Bubs is still around, that McNulty has a home life of sorts with Beadie and Dennis Wise is working away in his gym. Out of sight is truly out of mind. Davis is shown as a desperate man who sees his options evaporating before his eyes but it’s hard to see why his story matters....
