When people on TV use your crockery, it makes your crockery famous, and that makes you feel a little bit famous. Television seemed unbelievably glamorous to me as a child. It still does, for the most part. The thought that my mug, mine, had a twin on the set of a TV show was like finding out someone I knew had been to space. I did let go of that mug, with accidental flair from the top bunk of a bunk-bed....
4.1 Growing Pains Having now seen the results, I’m confident that it’s the best decision the executive producers ever made. Viewers already love the characters enough to overlook any change of species, but to do it to your star is an admirably bold move. We see Elena’s transition from start to finish in heartbreaking detail, from the moment she discovers her death to her eventual fate, and it’s the best outcome any fan could have hoped for....
4.11 Catch Me If You Can Got all of that? Good. Starting with Stefan and Rebekah, isn’t it glorious to have Stefan fill the role of antihero now that Damon has shacked up with his girlfriend? We all enjoyed the Ripper back in season three, but his shady morals didn’t last long once Elena stuck her oar in so, now that element has been removed, we can assume the rest of the season will be occupied by a more fun, increasingly ruthless Stefan....
6.16 The Downward Spiral Season six threw all of that out and decided to get back to that wacky, absurd fun that made us all fall in love with the series in the first place, and this episode – The Downward Spiral – might be the best example yet of that coming to fruition. Seeing Caroline flip the switch was always going to be interesting on a character level but, my god, I seriously didn’t expect it to be such a hoot....
Finally, the wait is over. After a two month, middle of Season 3 hiatus, zombie enthusiasts were back at it, glued to their televisions at 9pm on Sunday night for a new episode of The Walking Dead. Before the hiatus, TWD left off with brothers Merle and Daryl pitted against each other in a death match, brought to you by The Gov (man, he really knows how to be an asshole, eh?...
2.10 18 Miles OutThis week’s episode of The Walking Dead seems to be pretty evenly split between two story lines, which is a big improvement over how schizophrenic the show was in the beginning of the second season. The A story is obviously Rick, Shane, and their new friend/kidnapping victim Massive Legwound Harry. The B story is Lori, Andrea, and one of the many blonde-headed girl members of Hershel’s farm family....
2.8 Nebraska Dealing with loss is a funny thing. Everyone in the real world would have a different reaction, and everyone on the show seems to have a different reaction, too. Carol goes off into the woods. Shane becomes caring. Hershel falls off the wagon. Shane is getting strangely nurturing. And Rick, seemingly, comes to grips with the fact that his decisions may not always be right. The immediate difference in the show since Glen Mazzara took over as show runner is style....
4.2 Infected The premiere episode of the fourth season of The Walking Dead was a very entertaining, solid piece of television. It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t as exciting as, say, the third season’s debut episode, but it may have been one of the more competent episodes in the show’s run. The relationship stuff worked better than usual, the special effects were as outstanding as ever, and there were some clever choices made in both the set-up and the execution of the It’s Raining Men action sequence in the Big Spot store....
5.16 Conquer There’s something to be said for The Walking Dead‘s expanded season finale episode from a sheer television standpoint. A 90 minute finale just feels like something special for a show that is already something special as far as television goes. There’s room in the episode. While the set pieces aren’t as impressive as Carol’s assault on Terminus in No Sanctuary, there’s more space to actually build up anticipation, and the multiple close calls all worked this week because it felt like, at any point, someone was going to die....
Gus knows that ‘all reporters get took once in a while’ but if Templeton would lie about something that didn’t matter, what might he do to make a big story look even better? We’re getting ahead of ourselves. The episode opens with McNulty making a call to Templeton posing as the killer. He tells Templeton that it’s the last call and from now on he will only send pictures and then sends a couple of images of the missing homeless guy....
Though Morgan was coy about the specifics during the interview in his Lore office, he dropped a few hints. Mulder and Scully would go on the run, an ode to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest. Morgan and I discussed our fondness for Black Mirror, to which he bashfully said he didn’t think he could live up to. Those inspirations led Morgan to season 11’s “This,” which combined a contemporary sci-fi concept with real-life projects like the NSA’s Titanpointe building in New York to create a digital afterlife that might be just as scary as any of the monsters he’s made bump in the night....
“I always felt my career was six degrees of X-Files,” Hooks told Den of Geek. “But at least now I directed it so I have a direct connection to it.” On top of a technically challenging episode to shoot, Hooks was behind the camera for one of Mulder and Scully’s more intimate moments, emotionally and likely physically. We spoke with the director about his monster-of-the-week inspirations, the brilliant work from Konoval, and the undeniable chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson....
It’s 1940. It is the job of the British ministry to produce propaganda films that will entertain whilst also motivating and inspiring. Realising their films are in vast need of an ‘authentic’ voice, the ministry hires Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) to team up with the witty, yet cynical and rather embittered, lead screenwriter Buckley (Sam Claflin) to produce an epic that will be a call to arms as well as warm the hearts of the nation....
Colors: Ive Svorcina Blood in the Clouds is Chapter Two of the five-part God Butcher story and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a book with words like “blood,” “god,” “butcher” and “clouds” in the title. Talk about truth in advertising! You get what you pay for and this might have been the best four bucks I spent this week. The God Butcher takes place over three eras in Thor’s life, starting about 800 years ago, picking up in the present day and continuing in the far future....
The last Kaiju movie that I had seen prior to Pacific Rim was 1962’s King Kong vs Godzilla. Its entertainment value lay mainly in its kitsch qualities, although no-one watching could claim they hadn’t been entertained. This was in 2005. I would not claim to be any sort of expert or have much more than a passing knowledge of Kaiju creatures and movies. This testosterone-fuelled pomp, however, was not the reason that I left the cinema in a mood psychologists refer to as ‘Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins‘....
My Sister’s Sister‘s Rosemary DeWitt stars as Abby, a massage therapist who develops and aversion to human contact. What follows is ninety minutes of depressed and repressed people slowly failing to talk about what’s bothering them. It’s well acted – presumably when the performances are uniformly restrained this has been imposed – and isn’t offensive in its quality, it’s just that I don’t really know why Shelton wanted to tell this story....
4.5 Me And The Devil If the last few weeks of True Blood were all about the cloud of ick currently permeating Bon Temps, then this week was without doubt about secrets. Secrets, lies and revelations, which would have made a reasonably apt title for the episode. As it turns out, Me And The Devil was equally apt. Poor Pam. Poor foul-mouthed, rotting Pam. Not only is her face a dripping mess, but the loss of her most prized possession has clearly had an effect on her long-dead brain....
4.5 I Wish I Was The Moon Despite arresting and condemning Sookie’s new beau, or Eric, as he’s more generally known, to death (and for a second there, it looked like curtains for Diet Eric), His Highness came to his senses and did the decent thing. Whether out of loyalty to Sookie, or for some nefarious purpose yet to be revealed, the main thing is that Eric lives to mooch his way, wide-eyed and innocent, through another day....
Anyway, Queen of the Damned comfortably outvamps Interview with the Vampire. It’s based on two of Anne Rice’s books, The Vampire Lestat, and (unsurprisingly) Queen of the Damned, attempting to meld elements of both together, and beginning with the story of LeStat’s origins and early years. The world-weary Lestat is truly unimpressed with his existence; because of what he is, he must shy away from the world, discouraged from forming attachments with others....
And yet, as the summer fades to autumn, along comes Jonah Hill to bring us one of the most mesmerising bad guys of the year so far. Not that, with his smiling blue eyes, high-pitched giggle and “Hey bro!” persona, he seems all that villainous at first. But then, that’s what makes him such a menace – his Miami gun runner is self-confident, fearless, charismatic, and worryingly lacking morals or anything resembling a conscience....
