Posts

The Strain Season 4 Episode 10 And in the end, it was love that saved humanity. Love, and a generous helping of Star Wars allusions. We begin our farewell to The Strain by paying tribute to our heroes. I have to say, The Strain wrapped up and I feel very satisfied with the bows tied around each of the heroes’ narratives. I guess we should start with Eph and Zach. The strenuous father son relationship of the Goodweathers has been the core of The Strain since the first episode....

The Strain: Season 3, Episode 1 To heck with Vampire Diaries. So far, The Strain has been a gorehound’s dream, even if the overarching plot spins its wheels too much at times. As we pick things up, the Master’s full plan is yet to be revealed and the human vampire hunters have almost, kind of successfully taken the fight to the Master. Appropriately, we start things with Doctor Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll), who is still mourning the abduction of his son Zach by his vampire ex-wife Kelly (Natalie Brown)....

5.15 Gone Girl Instead, despite Katherine’s spirit being expelled from Elena by the gypsy dagger the gang used to help Matt at the beginning of the season, her spirit lives on presumably in some hell dimension. This leaves the door open for her return (it’s not as if they need to sort the actress’s schedule out in order to bring her back) and, with every other character coming off more and more frustrating and unlikeable as the show progresses, that’s fine by me....

It was nice to see everyone in the show besides The Monarch referring to 21 by his real name, Gary, now that the ex-henchman considers himself to be one of the “good guys.” And of course, Gary’s new role on the Venture compound also leads to some comical tension with Sergeant Hatred, whose own shortcomings as the Venture’s bodyguard are beginning to show more and more. After Gary’s crime-fighting attempts get in the way of the O....

8.9 Honor Cable’s longtime kingpin, The Walking Dead, comes from a somewhat similar place. It goes big, pretty much whenever there’s an option to do so, from its set pieces to its emotional beats (one has a burning crock pot, and the other has shoulder-launched explosives). The Walking Dead has never been subtle, and given that one of the show’s few remaining original characters is playing out his final moments, that gives Matthew Negrete, Channing Powell, and Greg Nicotero carte blanche to go directly for the feels, and they use every trick in the emotional play book to reach out for a reaction....

For the problem is that it’s a Woody Allen film, and it doesn’t take too long into To Rome With Love to recognise that the man is capable of much better than this. It opens clumsily, with a traffic officer telling us of the different stories in the city of Rome, and soon, we’re off meeting a collection of characters whose stories sort-of wrap together. Most of the few laughs come from the segment in which Woody Allen stars himself, as a retired opera director who hears a fresh opportunity when his daughter’s future father-in-law is singing loudly in the shower....

When the film begins, we learn that the cheery little critters used to be a delicacy for the Bergen, a miserable race who got their fixes of happiness by eating Trolls, especially during their annual Troll-stice festival. But for the last two decades, the Trolls have lived in harmony after a daring escape from their home in Bergen Town. Princess Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick) is irrepressibly happy all of the time, while grey-faced Branch (Justin Timberlake) doesn’t have time for singing and hugging while he’s fortifying his home against the expected return of the Bergen....

HBO’s uber-sexy vamp-in-the-real-world drama True Blood continued with its second chapter this week on FX, aptly titled The First Taste. We find Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) where we last left her – still at the mercy of local drug dealers the Rattrays and the savage kicking they feel she so richly deserves. Payback is a bitch, a truism the rednecks have no time to reflect on as angst-ridden vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) arrives in the nick of time to effect a rescue, 18th- century vamp-style....

Now, with Turbo being significantly hurt by the success of Despicable Me 2 at the US box office over the summer and only pulling in $82m in receipts (against a budget of $135m). What was once a blip now may be a bubble bursting. What ensues though is an underdog tale, as the establishment gangs up on Turbo, and it’s up to him and his small crew to… well, you get the idea....

First off, the show creators seemed to suddenly remember this episode that there were some sci-fi elements with Joe and Norrie, who have done literally nothing for this entire season so far. Now that Melanie has replaced the deceased Angie as part of the Dome 4, we can get back to Joe and Norrie’s original purpose. I totally forgot that Joe was science kid until they brought it back up with this episode as Joe got the bright idea to test Melanie’s blood to see what’s so special about the young girl who died in 1988, yet still walks Chester’s Mill....

Well, that depends. Do you like fun? Because that’s what I find myself having here. Broadly speaking? It’s the sheer pace of the film. Capably directed by Anna Foerster (and if that sounds like faint praise, just remember that after some of 2016’s blockbusters, capable is firmly above average), Blood Wars never sags, because it’s too shallow to let up for even a second. Like Wile E. Coyote strolling off a cliff into thin air, it can stay afloat as long as it doesn’t stop to look around, and it doesn’t ever make that mistake....

There’s often something anti-climactic about watching the resolution of a conspiracy thriller. The fun of acting detective and testing paranoid theories (Grant’s mum is Mr Rabbit! No, it’s Wilson! No, it’s a cabal of world leaders using Rabbit as an acronym for ‘really a bit bleak in truth’!) outweighs the pleasure of being presented with the answer. The revelation was as much a surprise as it could be after Dennis Kelly spent six weeks working his viewers up into such a state of shivering paranoia we were prepared to believe that anyone, from Wilson’s dad to Dugdale’s unborn (and fictional, as it turns out) child was behind it all....

Last week, it looked as though V was hopeless. Another sci-fi TV show damned to the refuse pile, destined not to be renewed next year. Then I read an article saying just how much money per commercial break the show pulled in thanks to its hot start earlier in the year. Given FlashFoward‘s stagger and tumble, and V‘s relatively stable, albeit a bit low, number, given the financials involved, is it possible that V might be showing some signs of making a renewal in spite of the show’s decrease in relative quality from its opening episode?...

The collective effort of several directors, including Adam Wingard, Joe Swanberg and Ti West, V/H/S (which possibly stands for Various Horror Stories) is a new take on the kinds of portmanteau horror features we seldom see any more – Asylum, The House That Dripped Blood or Tales From The Crypt are a few great examples. It helps, too, that the entire film is shot on grainy, lo-fi videotape. This not only gives V/H/S a visual coherence, but also lends the movie a sleazy sense of the forbidden you may remember from renting movies from a video library, or borrowing second-generation copies of banned horror flicks from friends....

The plot of the episode has the Baby Bears fighting over who gets to play with a basketball until a rogue pizza lands in their laps. Before the always-hungry Bears can chow down, the pizza is snatched by a ragtag group of kids who challenge the Bears to a basketball game. Whoever wins gets to keep the pizza. The whole thing sounds like the plot of a movie you’d rent from Blockbuster in the 90’s and that’s not a dig....

He wakes up on a beach and remembers… nothing. That is one of the many tantalizing puzzles unwrapped in the opening minutes of Westworld Season 2. In fact, much of tonight’s premiere was about teasing just where Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard fits in the multiple timelines established in the opening sequences. And each of them has fascinating implications. For inside Bernard’s memories of those turbulent days after that gunshot was fired is the key to not only what led up to the episode’s final moments of a sea littered with dead hosts, but also to the whole of season 2, which we saw glimpses of as Bernard struggled (and failed) to remember a damn thing… including events we see for much of the rest of the episode involving him and Tessa Thompson’s Charlotte Hale exploring the non-ethics of data-mining....

It completed the takeover by DVD as the top choice for watching movies at home, a brutal destruction and takeover of the VHS format that had served the world since the late 1970s. And as we’ve discussed in the past, the death of VHS took the rental window with it. For people who are far younger than me, that was the months-long gap where you could rent a film, or buy an ex-rental in a big box, before an official sell-through release (in a smaller box!...

Doctor Who is for the British, an iconic part of their pop culture heritage and history. Doctor Who is for nerds, for anyone who has ever wanted to take off in a little blue box and visit alien worlds and times. Doctor Who is for children, who may have to hide behind the couch while watching, but who can share the excitement of TV-induced terror with their family. Prior to that, Moffat said he was worried about casting a woman because of the show’s “Daily Mail-reading viewers,” elaborating… This is the thing with progress: It takes courage....

When the love of Leo’s life disappears under enigmatic circumstances, Leo goes in search of her — a mission that eventually puts him on a direct collision course with dangerous AWOL American soldiers Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) and Duck (Justin Theroux) in the seedy environs of Berlin’s criminal underworld. A blend of noir and sci-fi infused with elements of Blade Runner, MASH, and other films, Mute is the most personal project yet from director and writer Duncan Jones....

There should be some sort of label for this burgeoning sub-genre of sentimental, low-key indie comedy: the best I’ve come across so far is cinepassion.org’s “Sundance-calibrated sitcom”, coined in a sniffy review of Little Miss Sunshine. The whole selling point of the indie comedy-drama is its supposed quirkiness, its idiosyncrasy. Watching a Fox Searchlight movie marks you out from the chumps in the screen next door chortling at the latest Jim Carrey movie as an altogether more discerning viewer....