The first episode of Fox’s Gotham tells the well worn story of Batman’s origin. A young Bruce Wayne is traumatized by watching his parents murdered in front of him. But Gotham isn’t content with merely telling us about Batman, they manage to shoehorn in the Penguin, Joker(maybe), Riddler, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy. On the surface, it wants to be a police procedural that follows around James Gordon, future Police Commissioner and friend of Batman. For the most part, I liked Gotham, but I found it impossible to pay attention to the story of Police corruption. When we flew over Stately…
Category: tv review
Fargo Tv Series
One of the most memorable bits from the movie Fargo was the way everyone talked. You know, eh? Like they’re all from the great white north, aye? They did this pretty well in the film as I recall, it seems a little off on FX’s Fargo. But there’s so much wild and crazy stuff going on, it’s just one more bit wierdness. The main stars are Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman. It’s a bit jarring to hear Watson talk like he’s from Bemidji, but it’s fun. He’s basically George McFly before he became a…
Showtime’s Penny Dreadful
If you liked the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you should like Penny Dreadful. Another show that steals some of the great characters of speculative fiction and tosses them into one big bowl. Penny Dreadful is a good looking show with great sets and costumes. Among the cast are such familiar names as Billie Piper and Timothy Dalton. The rest of the cast is a little less familiar, but they are good looking in a Steampunk and a horror kind of way. . After one episode, I kind of like Penny Dreadful. Yes, it is a bit predictable and it’s lack…
Black Box
Manic Depression is an interesting condition. You live for the high of the Manic phase and can’t stop thinking about suicide during the down of the depression phase. But the high is so damned good you are willing to risk death to get there again. Black Box is about a Doctor who is crazy. She has bipolar disease, the most recent name given to the madness formally known as Manic Depression. Just as there is no longer Asperger’s Syndrome, there is no manic depression. Not that the name really matters. The first episode of Black Box is pretty manic, depressive,…
Game of Throne Throughts
Spoilers. The first two episodes of season 4 of Game of Thrones have been very interesting. I think in part this might be due to the fact that after three seasons of constant scene shifting, character introduction, and plot lines being laid down stone by stone, I kind of knew who everyone was and why they were doing what they were doing. There were like only two characters that I really had no idea who they were. There were a couple of dozen faces that I didn’t really remember much, but the Main Players were often at Center Stage in…
Building Wild
A few years back one of my favorite reality shows was Monster House, where a team of builders turned a normal house into one filled with things you don’t normally find in a residential home. Building Wild reminds me of Monster House. Each episode features someone who wants a cabin built, usually in some difficult location where it’s all but impossible to get materials and equipment. We follow two dweebs around as they argue about everything and built cabins the way Cake Boss makes cakes and American Choppers makes motorcycles. They make cabins that are a step above the wooden…
Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond
Sky Atlantic and the BBC take a fairly wishy-washy approach to the life and times of Ian Fleming. On the one hand, they tell us over and over again how creative he was and on the other they insist he was unable to come up with a single original idea. We follow Ian around as he lives the life of a rich, spoiled brat who collects pornographic prints. Then WWII rolls around and he lands a job with the Navy. He very badly wants to be a spy and writes up all kinds of plans and designs all kinds of…
From Dusk Till Dawn
A million years or so ago, Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney starred in a movie by Robert Rodriguez about mad killers and vampires. The first half of the film is about two brothers, one is a thief and one is a madman. Then things shift gears in a pretty radical way as they find themselves trapped in a vampire invested nightclub in Mexico. One of my main gripes about the film was that the two halves of the story seem to take place in different universes. If you wanted a Pulp Fiction type movie, you were pissed off by the…
House of Cards Season 2
I’ve been watching the old House of Cards on PBS. It’s about a Whip in the British Parliament who is mean to the Prime Minister and ruins the poor fellow out of office. He is a white haired old man who has sex with a pretty young reporter. This fellow might be the same as Kevin Spacey is now, but for some reason Kevin banging a twelve year old reporter wasn’t nearly as offensive to me as Ian Richardson banging a twelve year old reporter. Ok, they weren’t really twelve, but the girl on the Netflix show does look really…
HBO True Detective
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are executive producers and stars in the story of a couple of backwoods Policemen in Louisiana. One is a little dim and one is a little super genius. The story is split between now, whenever that is, and about fifteen years back. Our damaged heroes get the call to investigate a murder where a woman’s body has been posed Hannibal Lecter style. She is surrounded by Blair Witch style twig sculptures that may or may not have some occult meaning. Their job is to find out who done it. In the present we find our…