Director Chris McKay didn’t have to employ much persuasion to bring Balfe into his project. “When I first got approached about the film,” explains Balfe, “the first thing that Chris, the director, said to me — what he was trying to make was a film that was a cross between About a Boy, the Hugh Grant film, meets Michael Bay. And as soon as I heard that, I thought, ‘Well, I want to be a part of this....
3.1 Spoils Of War Although new showrunners Simons Allen and Ashford have promised a much darker season for the Musketeers, it’s difficult to tell on this one episode alone, but there’s certainly promise with the introduction of two new villains. Matthew McNulty’s Lucien establishes his presence from the off, lurking in shadows and being generally very nasty to everyone. This is very much a person with whom not to play Thumb War....
The Purge Episode 1 One of the smartest things any marketing department can do is get a movie property associated with a holiday. Half the reason I saw Independence Day on release weekend is because it was THE July 4th film of that year. The Saw movies are memorable for two things, Billy the puppet and the slogan, “If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw.” With Fourth of July over, Labor Day is a great time to unleash The Purge, the ten-episode limited season from creator James DeMonaco and the USA Network....
Vice Magazine journalist Sam (AJ Bowen) heads to Eden Parish to find out the story behind the commune. He’s joined by his faithful cameraman Jake (Joe Swanberg), and a photographer, Patrick (Kentucker Audley), whose sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz) joined the collective in order to get over a nasty drug habit. When the group arrive, they find what appears to be a utopia. Food and water seem to be plentiful, everyone looks healthy, and nobody has a bad word to say about their pastor, who they fondly refer to as ‘Father’....
The Simpsons: Season 27 Episode 12. Most characters have gone through major adjustments and been readjusted back. Fat Tony became Fit Tony when the character died, but gained weight so he could take his brother’s place and no one had to remember a new name. Principal Seymour Skinner was actually run out of Springfield on a rail when he returned to his mother and the soldier in his platoon who took his identity....
And now, across the channel, the first few reviews of the film are beginning to trickle through, courtesy of one of the first screenings of the film. It seems that full reviews are under a PR embargo, but the sites concerned have been given the greenlight to share their views on the film. And the consensus? We might just be looking at one of the best films of the year....
Fresh off the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and around the same time he delivered another masterpiece in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Kubrick also developed what is perhaps one of the greatest movies never seen. Years of research, pre-production, and location scouting went into Napoleon before the box office failure of a similar themed subject, appropriately called Waterloo, crashed and burned in 1970. For Napoleon, Kubrick envisioned a far-flung biopic about not just the downfall of the French emperor, but a complete canvas of his inner-circle and domination of the European continent....
One of von Däniken’s major pieces of evidence for his theory, originally presented in his bestselling book Chariots Of The Gods, was the a remarkable clockwork device that was dredged up just off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900. Created some 2000 years ago, this anomalous, ancient machine – whose intricate mesh of cogs predated the earliest clocks by centuries – was von Däniken’s proof that aliens were abroad in the ancient world....
1.4 Kill or Be Killed It goes without saying that because John was so easily taken in by Jed and Ultra, and was apparently very loyal to them while he worked for them, there must be some other issues at play. Would you believe it if I told you that John was a troubled kid? And that, rather than being the son of a single mother with an absentee father like Stephen, he’s actually an orphan who was taken in and raised by an abusive, alcoholic foster parent who only kept the kids around for the financial rewards?...
2.7 Masquerade The gang is all assembled, minus Elena, arming themselves with stakes. Stefan is determined to get rid of Katherine so that he can have Elena back in his life. There is one kink in this plan: Katherine. Speaking of Katherine, she has a witchy friend in town. Katherine has brought her along so that, when she gets the moonstone back, her friend can break a curse. I wonder what curse that is?...
5.11 500 Years Of Solitude The focus of the episode was Katherine’s apparently imminent death, which lingered on right until the final moments and provided us with lots of group bonding moments and flashbacks to the character’s unfortunate beginnings. It was useful to get another look at those scenes given how much more we know Klaus, and that Nadia is now an integral part of the show, and having Damon and Stefan take it in turns to crash in through her fragile mind was fantastic....
The transition in and out of the prisoner scene is shown through hollow black rectangles filling the screen with the characters inside. Key objects are highlighted by rectangles appearing around them. The prisoner room is based off of (or maybe is) the set from the music video. The episode title and much of Billy Quizboy and Pete White’s interactions with St. Cloud are references to the song. There’s probably even more references to the song that a Duran Duran fan (or anyone watching MTV in 1983) would notice....
In 15 or 20 years, there’ll no doubt be a bunch of aging horror fans sitting around in the post-nuclear wasteland, firing up their e-cigs filled with pure oxygen and fondly reminiscing about an age where Don’t Breathe, V/H/S 2 or Lights Out delighted them on a random evening after flicking through the spoils of VOD. “Not like now, where you have to download the horrors directly into your frontal lobe and decide the fate of the teens yourself,” they’ll opine....
The X-Files Season 11 Episode 7 During its original run, The X-Files was ahead of its time in its depiction of technology. Car Phones became cell phones, advanced computer forensics and virtual reality evolved, and The Lone Gunmen were doing Mr. Robot long before it was a twinkle in Sam Esmail’s eye. There were certainly some episodes that played with futurist concepts–”Kill Switch” and sentient AI come to mind–and alien technology was typically at the forefront of the mythology episodes, but The X-Files often kept its tech grounded in the time period....
First things first: Jason Schwartzman, guys! It’s great to see Schwartzman joining this troupe of weirdos, dipping his toe in this sort of thing, and he does a more than fine job (although not much is requested of him). I hope he continues to work with these guys and this isn’t the last time we see him popping up in their worlds. He definitely has more to offer and wasn’t being used to his greatest potential here....
Timeless Season 1, Episode 7 At one point during this week’s episode of Timeless, Rufus says to his team, “I’m just going to say it: 1754 sucks,” and he’s not wrong; as a backdrop, the French and Indian War was lacking. However, the exposition and character building that came out of “Stranded” made up for the historical interest deficit. As a turning point for the team having just lost a bit of trust in each other, the slower pace was narratively necessary, and each character, as usual, had his or her chance to shine....
Instead, we got more ‘incisive’ analysis of Owen coping with death. The past two weeks have been the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, the programme has been incredibly confident in pushing forward with examining its topic, putting imagination into different shots (Owen jumping in a lake and discovering he is unable to drown), putting music to good use and allowing the actors some scope to act beyond the typically flimsy plotting....
The original animated Clone Wars TV series was a superb body of work. Directed by Samurai Jack helmer Genndy Tartakovsky, his distinctive animation style helped it stand out from the pack. Covering the period between Episodes Two and Three, new characters were introduced, old characters were expanded upon and the action in each episode was pretty relentless. However, the animation appears too complete, too slick and renders the whole thing as being rather underwhelming....
As always, secrets are both the Pfefferman family code and their currency: they can’t help but create their own and tell everyone else’s, absolutely all the time. Music has always played a strong role in Transparent, but this season’s soundtrack is a preexisting one: Jesus Christ Superstar. For the uninitiated, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock and roll musical was supposedly a hip retelling of the life of Jesus of Nazareth when it came out....
Underneath Trust Me’s silliness is a hospital workplace drama with sensible things to say: it’s hard to recruit and retain good people. Mistakes happen, whether caused by bad luck or doctor error. Patients are sometimes difficult. Medical professionals are unrealistically required to be beyond reproach, and few are equipped to handle the trauma and pressure of the job without it taking some kind of toll. All that however, was wasted on a story that didn’t just stretch credulity, it pinged it right out the window, whereupon it landed upon the head of a passing pigeon, who flew it to New Zealand and told the real Dr Ally Sutton what’s been going on in her absence....
