I’ve been a self-help junkie for about thirty years. There’s nothing quite like the high you get from reading a good self help book. I’ve never had the money or the urge to take the next step and attend a conference or a workshop or a retreat. Our hero in Enlightened is a woman who had a bit of a breakdown and then went to Hawaii for treatment. In standard not the real world fashion, she goes back to work for the company that helped her to have her breakdown in the first place. Amy is still a nutcase when…
Category: tv review
The Girl-Hitchcock and Hedren
Alfred Hitchcock has a soft spot for blondes. Tippi Hedren was a blonde. HBO’s The Girl explores their onscreen and off-screen relationship. Here we find Hitchcock at the height of his directorial power and Hedren without any power at all as she starts her acting career. The Girl is the story of an obsessed older man and a repulsed younger woman. When Tippi spurns Alfie’s advances, he gets his revenge by forcing her to spend days shooting dangerous scenes with live birds. He later makes her strip for the camera. Since this all happened fifty years ago, everyone on the…
NBC’s Revolution 1st Episode
Revolution is the story of a world where electricity no longer works. In the opening scene we see a man who knows what is going to happen, his wife who knows what is going to happen, and his brother who gets a call warning him about what is going to happen. Then it happens-click-everything stops working. Cars rolls to a stop, planes fall from the sky, computers and TVs switch off-and will never switch back on again. Welcome to the revolution. We flash forward 15 years or so and find ourselves in a cul-de-sac turned into a farm where the man…
Copper on BBC America
Being a great fan of regular BBC programs, I was happy to hear that BBC America was going to produce it’s own scripted program. The show is Copper and it will have a BBCish run of only ten episodes. Set in 1865 we follow the adventures of a bunch of less than wholesome people. Our hero is a Copper who uses brass knuckles and knives as well as guns. He splits the spoils taken from a group of bank robbers-after he and his fellow Irish police officers have killed them. He spends a lot of time in a whorehouse, but…
Hatfields and McCoys on History Channel
The History Channel’s Hatfield & McCoys is a story without heroes. We start off in the mist of The US Civil War and watch two soldiers struggle to stay alive. One of the two soldiers, a man named Hatfield, decides to desert from the Confederate Army and leaves his friend, a fellow named McCoy, behind. Mr Hatfield heads home and proceeds to make a good deal of money from logging. Mr McCoy gets to spent some time in a Union Prisoner of War camp. When Mr McCoy comes home after the War, he is none to happy to see Mr…
Bunheads-Could Amy Sherman-Palladino Have Found a Worst Title?
As a diehard fan of Gilmore Girls it’s impossible to watch Bunheads and not get a strong sense of Déjà vu. We have three generations of strong willed women living in a small town. We have a gruff and lovable man serving beverages. We have a main character who speaks in paragraphs and tends to roll her eye rather a lot. Gilmore Girls flashbacks aside, I like Bunheads, even if it has one of the worst title for a TV Show since Suddenly Susan or maybe GCB. It’s the story of a Vegas showgirl who marries an older man from…
Game Change
It’s not too surprising that the network that airs Real Time with Bill Maher would not have a very high opinion about John McCain and Sarah Palin. And it was hard not to make fun of Sarah Palin while she was running for Vice President of the United States of America. Still, it was pretty amazing that Sarah Palin got the nomination when even a short chat with the woman would show she was as dumb as a bag of hammers. With apologies to bags of hammers everywhere. I’m not as interested in politics as I once was. I have…
Homeland on Showtime
There are some shows that should only be one season. Heroes and Prison Break would have made pretty good one season shows, as they quickly lost their way after the first season. Damian Lewis had his own short lives series, Life, which should have been left off at one season. The first season of Homeland had a lot of promise. A forgotten POW is found in a locked room after being held hostage for eight years, but is he a hero or a villain? That’s the big question our hero, an ambitious CIA agent, has to answer. We are shown…
Alcatraz
Alcatraz is the story of time traveling murders and the people who want to catch them before they kill again. It’s a good show on many levels, the actors are great, the production values are high, and who doesn’t long for a glimpse of the good old days of prison life in the early 1960s? The problem with all new Sci Fi shows is that the Sci Fi fan base has a very long memory and it’s all but impossible to come up with something completely new. Alcatraz has the look and feel of Fringe, The X-Files, Prison Break, LOST, The…
Torchwood Miracle Day
In Torchwood Miracle Day death takes a holiday-and it looks more like a permanent leave. The interesting Torchwood bit is that Captain Jack, our hero, has been immortal-until Miracle Day that is. So is it all a plot to kill off Captain Jack for good? The first season of Torchwood had a high sexual content, as many British sci-fi shows do these days. The second season they dropped it down a couple of notches. The third season had little to no sex that I recall. This latest Torchwood, from the BBC and Starz held the sex back until episode three…