Westworld Season 1 was all about the puzzle. What’s in the center of the maze? Who is a secret robot? How is there a third Hemsworth brother? William grew up to be something terrifying: Ed Harris. More specifically he grew up to be the ultimate black hat – an ultra-capable game-obsessed survivor who is as familiar with the Westworld landscape as he is the back of his own, scarred hand....
“For the most part, that’s very rare in film, [but] it’s every day in television. That relationship becomes integral. We put material out there and see what comes back… Here, you get to play endlessly with it.” To use the well-known overlap of another Michael Crichton adaptation, Jurassic Park, season 1 was all about welcoming the visitors to the park while sweeping John Williams music boomed (or at least an out-of-tune player piano’s rendition of Paint It Black); the first half of Westworld Season 2 is, meanwhile, all about the fences being down and the T....
The Usos vs. Chad Gable & Shelton Benjamin for the SmackDown Tag Team Titles It doesn’t feel like it’s time to take the titles off the Usos, but there are some outside factors at play. Specifically, Jey Uso was arrested for DUI earlier this month and WWE has been prone to punish wrestlers who get in outside trouble (for good reason). However, the team of Gable and Benjamin just hasn’t gained any traction....
Now two days later, they’re ready to blow off the Owens-Zayn partnership in one show on SmackDown Live. Blowing up the Owens-Zayn partnership is fine, even though I’d like to see it play out more. My issue is that they’re doing it so quickly. Two days ago these guys were fine. Last week, these guys were totally on the same page. Now one little hiccup and that’s it? They’re done?...
For the last several weeks on Monday Night Raw, there have been a battle of promos pitting Triple H and the Undertaker against each other. Two weeks ago, Shawn Michaels was introduced into the mix and it now appears that Michaels might return for one more match, even if its a tag team match. eThis likely leads to the Crown Jewel show, which WWE announced for Saudi Arabia in November....
Z Nation Season 3 Episode 3 After last week’s Season 3 premiere of Syfy’s Z Nation bent over backwards to establish new factions within the roughly six-year-old zombie apocalypse that the characters reside in. The latest episode took things a step further by laying some pretty overt character groundwork, while still peppering in the perfunctory villain of the week. OK, I’m willing to buy that Murphy wants to set up shop in the Museum of Progress and that he’s in love with Spokane....
Thankfully, the neck-cracking glory of Gerard Butler in Olympus Has Fallen proved that old school brutality and one-liners could still make for fantastic entertainment, and it’s alongside that film that 2 Guns deserves to stand. If Olympus Has Fallen gave a new generation a taste of Die Hard, then 2 Guns delivers one of the best buddy cop movies since Lethal Weapon. The formula for a successful action movie should be fairly straightforward – put good, preferably witty people in peril, stack the odds and numbers against them and watch until they prevail – yet more often than not, Hollywood fails to execute the concept well....
More often than you might think, scenes that appear in movie trailer don’t turn up in the finished film. This can leave trailer-loving audience members confused as the credits roll, wondering if they dropped off and missed something important. The marketing people and the folk in the edit suite are bound to prefer different scenes sometimes, leading to slightly misleading trailers and somewhat bemused fans. Take these 41 instances, for example…...
You people? You are AMAZING! We LOVE YOU! We are absolutely not doing that annual Christmas thing where we butter you up, to try and excuse the fact that we’re not going to be around so much over the next week or two. The basics are this, chums. After today, we’re not quite downing tools, but we are moving to a much lighter posting schedule for the next week or two....
The first fifteen minutes or so of “Protect the Coven” are dedicated to explaining exactly what drew Delphine to her torturous hobby. If you’re into seeing more blood and mutilation, then this probably excited you, but from a story standpoint, it seemed like a waste. Did we really need to create a backstory for Delphine’s murderous impulses, or was it scarier leaving the whole thing unexplained? An even better question is whether or not this backstory is even any good....
First off, there are absolutely no stakes, and before tonight, there was no real main conflict. It’s hard to feel any real terror for any of the main cast when everyone keeps coming back from the grave. No one can stay dead, and even the one’s that do, like Spalding, inexplicably pop back up as ghosts who somehow have the ability to administer medicine. Why should I be worried about anyone?...
6.1 Roanoke So, from the first appearance of the graphic for My Roanoke Nightmare showed up, I had a huge, dumb grin on my face that didn’t go away. Whenever it started to fade, American Horror Story would throw in something to appease me, like a warning that the show is based off of true events or an advisory about graphic content. Just like a real ghost reenactment show, every time we cut to commercial, there was an awesome music stinger and a cool animated graphic to announce the return/departure of My Roanoke Nightmare....
Starting the show is Daniel and Nathan, the staple of the show. The opening scene is a hard one not to find really funny. Nathan has developed a habit of showing his nuts in every photo taken of him, and Daniel goes through a slideshow of pictures where Nathan is sneakily, in the back, holding them out. While the humour in the episode comes from the twins, we see Blake getting himself into a fair amount of trouble after a friend recently out of prison visits him....
1.12 Vertigo The man behind their troubles is The Count, inspired by the comic-book nasty Count Vertigo. It may be the closest Arrow ever gets to a Joker-esque baddie, and the final revelation that The Count isn’t dead, just much crazier, makes me think that we haven’t seen the last of him. That’s a relief, to be honest, since the rate in which this show kills off its villains is starting to alarm me....
1.9 Year’s End There aren’t as many revelations in this episode as I predicted, however, so it looks as if the show is holding onto its cards for a few more months. A mysterious dark archer is running riot in Starling City under Oliver’s confused nose, tracking down and killing those on his list that The Hood had already dealt with. We know he’s a skilled archer, and he gives Oliver a good kicking near the end of the episode, but I wasn’t expecting the final reveal of his identity....
4.18 11:59 A lot of people dislike Laurel, which is an improvement on near-blanket hatred during the first couple of seasons of the show. But for three years the writers stuck with her, they developed her and they pushed her towards becoming the Black Canary 2.0 with admirable patience. But there was always a sense that she was one of the audience’s least favourite members of Team Arrow and, once Sara had been resurrected and Laurel had become comfortable with her new crime-fighting identity, the producers lost interest....
Arrow Season 5 Episode 18 After last week’s psychologically thrilling romp, the gang on Arrow dealt heavily with the consequences of their leader’s mental manipulation. In the ongoing battle for Oliver Queen’s soul, it was a tug-of-war between the hero’s best friend and his fifth greatest enemy yet. After Adrian Chase, also known as Prometheus, captured Green Arrow and got him to confess to being nothing more than a murderous animal, the hero thought things were over....
1.3 Meet the New Boss First though, it was dishing out plot twists before we’d even got to those impressive opening credits. A note on this title sequence is that the snapshots that make it up are now even easier to appreciate as we get to know Banshee’s range of characters. They relate to certain things about them. It now makes sense when Ivana Milicevic’s name is accompanied by a shot of a Coney Island fairground, thanks to this week’s opening scene....
3.12 House Hunting The plot of this episode is pretty simple: it is revealed that Ramona was offered as a sacrifice by her parents to the demon Paimon and is not actually a ghost, but rather the physical embodiment of evil in the house. And as the gang attempts to move on into their post-murder house lives (Josh and Nora into Nora’s apartment, Aidan and Sally into the werewolf camper), Ramona laughs her evil laugh and proceeds to psychologically torture all of them into a giant murder-suicide pact that they don’t quite manage to escape; Aidan ends up staking Kenny, who uses his last few moments of life to tell Aidan that Josh has destroyed Sally....
