2.3 Every Mother’s Son Every Mother’s Son was one such episode and, after focusing on Kol (strangely absent here) and his role in the Mikaelson clan last week, it’s now the turn of Esther and Finn. That ‘always and forever’ mantra crops up again, this time from the family matriarch (played by original actress, Alice Evans, in flashback), and the show reiterates the cruelty that Mikael always showed towards Klaus during childhood....
Hoo boy. You could cut the tension in that sandstone Victorian villa with a chic, designer knife. After Paula’s resigned “Fine, you win”, it wouldn’t have felt out of place for her to draw a sword, toss one to Ellen and leap onto the coffee table to have this out once and for all by clashing steel over the tasteful soft furnishings. That’s how powerful the animus is between these two....
I love seaside arcades, which is why I drove to Great Yarmouth last week for a visit. It may be 2008, but somewhere, on that endless gallery of establishments that stretch along the sea front, a few classic coin-op games still remain – or at least, that’s what I thought. I visited the arcades that ran along the pier first, and was comforted to note that the dingy lighting and crimson carpets still remained – though the cigarette smoke had gone....
The highlight of the brief commercial, and the reason I bring it up at all, is because at the end of the PSA there’s a flying Terminator skull and an explosion, which suggests that people have been complaining about the violent content of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Either that, or this week’s episode, “Heavy Metal,” is going to be extra violent. Boy, I hope so! Cromartie’s back, and in a very X-Files feeling moment, he’s hanging out in a plastic surgeon’s office in the dark, looking through a list of head shots to figure out what the new actor playing him will look like… err, I mean, what his new face will be....
Told with intimate close-ups and a dreamlike blurring of the past and present, The Scent Of Rain And Lightning tells the story of Jody Linder (Maika Monroe), an Oklahoman 20-something whose psychological wounds are reopened when a lank-haired, loathsome character named Billy (Brad Carter) is suddenly released from prison. When Jody was still a child, her parents were both brutally murdered, and the finger of suspicion quickly fell on Billy....
Armed with just a candle, a blackboard, and a handful of TV’s most innocuous celebrities, Professor Cox set out to explore the science of Doctor Who. What, about the world of the Doctor, was really possible, and what was science-y bunkum? Could regeneration ever happen? Can something really be bigger on the inside? Could you, you know, actually reverse the polarity of the neutron flow? Entertaining Matt Smith interludes aside (how we’ll miss him), the hour’s Who links were a somewhat tenuous way of feeding non-scientists an hour of edifying physics, delivered by the nation’s groovy uncle....
I’m having a Jack Torrance-like crisis trying to write this little piece about The Shining, one of Stephen King’s best novels — one of Kubrick’s worst movies, if you ask King. But I’m of the pro-Kubrick school of thought. I like the long hallways, the way the director plays with the shot, the close-ups of Jack Nicholson’s mad face…Is this film speak? Honestly, even that seems too big of a venture since you’d probably need a big, smart book the size of King’s Danse Macabre (this book is like that film major in college who wouldn’t stop talking about horror films that inspired him) to really get down and dirty about the redrum, whatever the fuck Tony is, and that final, haunting shot of the group picture hanging on the hellish walls of the Overlook Hotel....
This The Simpsons review contains spoilers. The Simpsons‘ season 28 has been consistently more satisfying because it is filled with what makes the series great, chicken asses. “Fatzcarraldo” is more than just the journey of a hot dog cart to a steamy end. It is a celebration of the most basic ingredients that made Homer Simpson Public elephant number one: cheap, greasy food. This is the man who rolled a stick of butter inside a waffle and proclaimed that new religion had been born....
This The Simpsons review contains spoilers. The Simpsons Season 28 Episode 22, “Dogtown,” panders to puppy love and yet somehow manages to mangle the mutts into a mangy mess of mischievous mayhem. Who doesn’t love cute puppies, playing piano, getting their snouts stuck in pickle jars or scratching their butts along the concrete to clean their fire hydrant debris? Cats will get their day, but doggies are adorable. They are instant memes, man’s best friend, blind people’s eyes and the saviors of drunken arctic explorers....
The Son Episode 8 The Son season 1, episode 8, “Honey Hunt,” brings the battles home. The series has been getting more intimate as the real estate deals moves on and the dual arcs continue to inform each other. Tonight the tribes from the 1850s and 1910s explore spirit and sex, love and death. It’s not that Phineas is a yes man, but he is always ready to please, if not always eager to be pleased....
1.10 The Citadel For once, The Tomrrow People opens with a refresher course that’s actually necessary, considering the fact that the show’s been off the air for a month while the Christmas holidays happened and most of America’s attention turned to other, more seasonally-appropriate programming. In the interim, I have completely forgotten the names of pretty much every character on the show, except for Russell who was distinctive enough if only because he’s the only visible minoirty that’s been on the show from the beginning....
1.5 All Tomorrow’s Parties The Tomorrow People is a show that loves to start in the middle of the action and then back up and show us how we got to the cold opening point of the episode. As if realizing that, by this point, the show is getting a little monotonous, we get a cold opening of Stephen and his Ultra minder Darcy (Meta Golding), who we’ve seen before but never heard her name that I know of....
Yet a glance at the rest of the award season contenders reveals a whole array of different scores that deserve attention for different reasons. After all, the last year was one heck of a 12 months for film soundtracks, giving us a new John Williams masterpiece, reminding us (thanks to Xavier Dolan) just how good Oasis’ “Wonderwall” can be, and even capturing the power of silence in Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s stunning sign-language drama, The Tribe....
As the series progressed we came close to seeing the elusive Maris on several occasions but each time the writers pulled back and merely added more weird and wonderful character traits for the viewer to ponder. Hats off to people behind Frasier for creating the ultimate unseen TV character.
Remakes of television and films from Scandinavia are turning into something of a gamble. The US version of The Killing has been axed for a second time and the life of David Fincher’s big-screen take on Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy currently hangs in the balance. Nordic retreads have fared better further away from the US though as Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander attests, so it’s with optimism that we receive The Tunnel, the English/French language take on Danish/Swedish hybrid The Bridge....
This review contains spoilers. We were told a little while ago by the producers on The Vampire Diaries that someone would be signing off for good by the end of this series. Last week, it looked certain to be Alaric (the fire fuelled by news that the actor had signed on for a new CW pilot), but he’s still around, and this week we’re given a huge number of red herrings....
4.5 The Killer There’s been a lot of talk over the years about the diary voiceover that accompanied some of the first season. The show is called The Vampire Diaries of course and, to begin with, the show took its lead from the first person narration of the books. Realising it was a little silly and restricting, the series dropped the device, but it makes its return in this episode....
With the prison community broken up, all the survivors are exposed to a new sense of isolation as they find themselves away from the trappings of civilization in the latest episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead. They are now grouped up in little pockets that rely on each other for every basic human need, not the least of which is companionship to combat the horrors of isolation. These horrors are introduced in this week’s opening as viewers witness Bob before he was accepted into the warm bosom of the prison....
So among such classic figures as Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, Jake LaMotta and Henry Hill, we can now add Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort, a figure who’s as maniacally driven, selfish and downright compelling as any Scorsese character you’d care to mention. The result is a veritable torrent of cash, as Belfort and his growing team of oddball brokers begin fleecing the wealthy with shares that have little chance of accruing any meaningful value....
1.6 Running Mans Awww. I just kind of want to give this show a cuddle. Its final half an hour was more or less everything I wanted it to be, minus a few concessions I’m willing to make, considering the genre. Everything got wrapped up, all the loose ends got tied off, and there were even a few satisfying callbacks to the beginning of the story. Actually, it… kind of felt like the end of a film, didn’t it?...
