2.6 Frenemy. That victim is Danny, Jackson’s best friend and the only person who may know Jackson’s secret outside of the core group of werewolves and hunters. Why would Jackson want to hurt his best friend? That’s a very good question, and one Danny better hope everyone else can answer before the pile of paralyzed gay men left in the wake of the kanima becomes a pile of dead gay men....
5.13 Codominance That’s what the bulk of the relationships studied this week involve. On one hand, you have Kira, who is trying to control the darker aspects of her power and the kitsune inside her, and to learn how to control the darkness, she and her mother turn to some other historically dark creatures: skinwalkers. They’re there to either train Kira to control herself or they’re going to make her one of them, permanently....
It doesn’t start so tweely, though, as The Angels’ Share opens with a bunch of Glasgow ragamuffins, sentenced to community service after an assortment of misconduct, from shoplifting to assault, from drunken-and-disorderly behaviour to dicking about on a train station platform. While we are at first introduced to this bunch as an ensemble, Loach soon homes in on young Robbie (Paul Brannigan), a lad with a temper who is given one last chance to get his life back on track....
For any writer coming in to writing a legacy character it can be daunting. How can you possibly catch up on that much material? What happens if you violate continuity in an issue from forty years ago? “If I got an assignment for Aquaman, I thought I had to go buy 500 back issues of Aquaman and read them,” DeMatteis says. “Although it was really just an excuse to buy more comics....
In its opening text crawl, The Conjuring claims to be based on a true story, though it probably doesn’t matter too much whether you believe that. Its main characters are Ed and Lorraine Warren, and they’re definitely real people: they’re paranormal investigators, best known for working on the case that would become known as The Amityville Horror. The events of The Conjuring take place before that, though, back in 1971....
But I digress. Indeed, Kirk Thatcher is the man who helmed the last Muppet installment, but it would be unjust to label him a mere Kermit jockey. This man has worked in numerous capacities with all sorts of strange cinematic creatures over the years, from the denizens of Jabba the Hutt’s palace in Return of the Jedi to the riotous mob of slimy, spiky-toothed hell raisers in Gremlins 2: The New Batch....
In 1974, the director decided that he would follow his surrealist western The Holy Mountain with a big-screen retelling of Herbert’s story of rival families and warring empires in a distant galaxy – a decision he made without even having read the book. He was attracted by its themes of messiahs and emotional dislocation, he later said, and readily agreed to producer Michel Seydoux’s proposal to adapt it (“I needed to support my family,” Jodorowsky explained in a later interview)....
The Flash Season 2 Episode 19 I kept waiting for something in “Back to Normal” to matter. After last week’s episode (the one where the whole internet lost their minds at the Flash creative team), I assumed we’d get a filler episode, but I figured there would be one or two moments or revelations to make it worthwhile. This show doesn’t really do throwaway villain of the week episodes. There have been insubstantial episodes before, but they’re usually planned and scheduled better, and there’s usually something that makes it worthwhile in the overarching story....
2.13 The Reaping Throughout the season, The Following has been building to something. Basically, they’ve been threatening a clash of cults. Joe’s cult versus Lily’s cult versus the FBI and Ryan’s little cult of followers (Max and Mike and sometimes Claire). It’s been teased, hinted at, and outright planned by certain parties on the show, but it has finally come to fruition, and it’s as bananas as you would expect from this particular show....
2.5 Reflection Lizzie Mickery’s script has Joe directly say that he doesn’t want to be controlled by Lily, and it’s clear that he refuses her gift and doesn’t quite buy the way she says it’s more her way of curating his art rather than feeding a pet, yet Joe goes downstairs and dutifully kills the drugged girl in the birdcage anyway, because he doesn’t seem like he can help himself....
Anyway, last night ITV repeated the exercise again, and once more the people of Britain (or at least those who had any inclination to head off to the relevant website) chose their favourites. And it has to be said that they did so with more wisdom than they did last year. The winners – and don’t read these if you don’t want to have the transmission of said awards spoiled for you – run thus:Best SuperheroTHE DARK KNIGHT Best Action/AdventureINDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL Best ComedyJUNO Best Male PerformanceJOHNNY DEPP (Sweeney Todd) Best Female PerformanceMERYL STREEP (Mamma Mia) Next year, we predict that the winners will be Harry Potter for whatever they call Best Film next year, Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe for Best Actor and Harry Potter’s Emma Watson for Best Actress....
Don’t you hate it when visitors turn up unannounced and expect you to feed their entourage of holy men? Especially when there are still twelve-odd centuries to wait before the invention of the twenty-four hour Asda. Uhtred and Gisela—three years into marriage and going strong—coped admirably with this week’s surprise visitors to their home. First came Aethelwold (isn’t Harry McEntire great in that role?), unusually sober for once but telling a decidedly drunk-sounding story about a dead Dane called Bjorn who’d risen from his grave to prophesy that he and Uhtred were destined to be kings....
Jinora finds herself back where she started and, with the help of Furry Foot, one of her spirit friends from last week’s episode, she happens upon the great Spirit Library of Wan Shi Tong. Being the adorable little bookworm she is, she immediately recognizes it from her studies, recognizes Wan Shi Tong and dazzles him with some knowledge, earning her permission to look around. Hector Elizondo reprises his role from Avatar as bitchy knowledge spirit Wan Shi Tong, and I love every second of it....
This review contains spoilers. “I’m the Avatar! You gotta deal with it!” With those words, Avatar Korra announces her arrival. It’s an excellent introduction to the character, but it’s also a statement to the audience: Korra is the Avatar now, and we have to accept that. As Katara states later on in the episode, the time of Aang and his friends has passed. It’s time for a new generation to take over....
This review contains spoilers. It’s a well-known and oft-repeated wisdom that time is of the essence in missing persons cases and The Loch takes that to heart by picking up shortly after Jonjo is declared missing. But the episode’s sense of time feels fractured. It’s clear that everything is building to the reveal of Jonjo’s body in the evening, but before that, the editing makes it somewhat confusing as to where everyone is....
Fawcett’s obsessive nature, and the impact it has on his longsuffering wife Nina (Sienna Miller) has perhaps unintended parallels with Peter Weir’s underrated 80s drama Mosquito Coast, in which Harrison Ford’s inventor drags his family halfway across Central America on a quixotic mission of his own. In this regard, we can’t help but feel more than a little sorry for Nina, who’s left in stuffy old England raising the kids while Fawcett dodges arrows, or the various other adventurers, guides and other odd characters who assist Fawcett down river and wind up with all kinds of ugly injuries and maladies....
Matt Damon is the lone lifeform on the surface of Mars – astronaut and botanist Mark Watney, presumed dead and left behind by his crew when a violent storm forces them to abort their mission. Waking up alone with only a few meagre supplies and a flimsy base to call a refuge, Watney faces years of loneliness and almost certain starvation. That is, unless he can use his skills and knowledge to figure out a means of survival – or as Watney says of his situation, “I’m gonna science the shit out of it....
John McTiernan’s original Predator (in which Black was a member of the cast) was a taut exercise in genre-crossing, blending action, horror, and sci-fi into a polished B-movie featuring one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best and most engaging early performances. While the premise sounds silly on paper (mercenaries vs. monsters in the jungle), McTiernan’s pacing, the chemistry of the cast, and the careful doling out of information and even glimpses of the memorably conceived Predator itself (whose face we don’t see until the film’s final few minutes) gave the movie a relentless and suspenseful forward momentum that has kept it and its title creature in the zeitgeist for decades....
Being the ignorant youngster that I am, I thought that sketch shows were an invention of the more modern television producers, but I see I was sadly mistaken. The sketches that Barker does in Hark at Barker 1 and 2 are pure genius and, considering the level of today’s comedy sketch-shows, far beyond their time. Hark at Barker was a 1969-1970 British sitcom that was made for the ITV franchise London Weekend Television and is a mixture of sitcom and sketch material which starred Ronnie Barker as Lord Rustless, hereditary owner of Chrome Hall, and seems to be an expert on whatever takes his fancy....
