Category: Direct Beam Comms

Direct Beam Comms #28

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Movies

MI–5 aka Spooks: The Greater Good Grade: C-

635823553900970690-STGG-LD-2005I finally caught up with this movie based on the British TV series MI–5 or Spooks, depending on where you live, from 2015. This film stars Kit Harington of Game of Thrones as Will Holloway, an ex-secret agent brought into the fold when things go wrong, people die the head of MI–5 Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) goes on the run.

Or something — I was never quite sure just what was going on.

I have a complicated relationship with the MI–5 TV series (2002–2011). That show was a sort’a UK version of the TV series 24 and shared both its strengths and weaknesses. Both shows were fast movie and action packed but didn’t have much depth. I remember watching the first season of MI–5 with a lot of interest, but I didn’t watch much of the series after the second season when the episodes started blending together to me. (Though I would argue that the second season episode of MI–5 entitled “I Spy Apocalypse” is a great hour of TV.)

That being said, I was interested in the MI–5 movie when it came out in 2015, though apparently not interested enough to go to the theater to see it or actually pay money outside my cable subscription to watch it.

The MI–5 movie is a lot like the MI–5 TV show, there’s a lot of action, a lot of things happen that if they didn’t happen in exactly the right order would mess up someone’s plan — and they always happen in the right order — and a whole lot of plot holes too. Which makes me wonder, with the MI–5 movie feeling essentially like an episode of the TV MI–5 that stars the guy from TV’s Game of Thrones why was did this need to be a movie at all?

It seems to me that when TV shows become movies that share most of the same cast and crew those movies tend to have a bigger, more expansive story than the TV series or go to places a single episode of TV on a budget couldn’t. Look at something like The X-Files movie from 1998 that featured a bigger story and bigger special effects or even the second Sex and the City movies that took that cast to Abu Dhabi.

The movie version of MI–5 does seem like it has a slightly larger budget than a comparable episode of the show but not much and all of the locations are shot around London, where the TV series took place, or London doubling for some other European local. The movie MI–5 does have the requisite story point of knocking off some of the TV characters in the film. Which now that I think of it, they did a lot of in the show too so even that’s not unique.

Still, even if MI–5 was a good episode of the TV series on the big screen that would have been good enough. But it wasn’t. The story here was absolutely a mess and I was never sure just what the characters were trying to do most of the time. And the end features a plot turn that’s so utterly insane it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Everest Grade B+

700x394Another movie from last year that I just caught up on was Everest. And, unlike MI–5, I thought Everest was really good.

Everest tells the real story of an ill-fated climbing expedition of Mt. Everest in 1996 where eight climbers were caught in a storm and died. The movie plays out as a disaster film where we’re introduced to characters based on real people at the start of the movie and get to know them as the story progresses. Which means that when things start going wrong in Everest at about the half way mark we feel for them.

When the 1996 event happened I remember hearing about it on the news and watching documentaries based on it years later. So I felt going into Everest that I had a good grasp for what was going to happen. What I didn’t realize was exactly how the disaster unfolded, how conditions kept getting worse and worse as little mistakes that alone probably wouldn’t have amounted to anything started adding up and costing lives.

Like the group trying to summit Mt. Everest getting stuck waiting for ropes to be installed to help them get over a difficult part of the mountain. Or a limited supply of oxygen at the top of the mountain. Or a mountaineer having vision problems waiting for a person to come down and meet him rather than simply going down the mountain with another group…

Alone these issues probably wouldn’t amount to anything. But here, together, and with a blizzard raging over the mountain would lead to all those deaths. Which makes me wonder how many times other groups going up Mt. Everest get into the same kinds of situations, but are able to get out of it without anyone dying since things go their way instead of against them?

The first half of Everest is an introduction to the characters and life on the highest mountain in the world. The last half is essentially the ill-fated climb. The climb starts at midnight the day of the summit, then goes until around noon when the actual summit’s supposed to take place with everyone heading back down by 2PM. Except here, with all these mistakes holding the group up then the blizzard tearing across the mountain ends up causing havoc as the group splinters, some of the climbers becoming lost and others trapped in a place where they literally can’t breath.

And as rescue attempts are mounted, it slowly becomes apparent that for some of the climbers, still very much alive, rescue simply isn’t possible.

I think what helps and kind’a hurts Everest is that since it’s based on a true story there’s never any one big “Hollywood” moment where a team of heroic climbers are able to rescue the lead characters and bring them down alive. Since that didn’t happen in real life, it doesn’t happen here. Especially since where you’ve reached a certain altitude on Everest that kind of rescue is impossible since the air’s so thin that it takes all a person has just to get themselves down, let alone another.

I do think it’s that realism that ultimately benefits the movie since the story never ever has that moment of the climbers emerging out of the storm unscathed unlike what happens in most fictionalized mountain climbing movies.

BTW — I was surprised just how full Everest was of movie stars — or at least a lot of recognizable faces from Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Kiera Knightley and Jake Gyllenhaal to name a few.

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1954: Them! premiers in theaters
  • 1958: Bruce Campbell of The Evil Dead films and TV series is born
  • 1976: Logan’s Run premiers in theaters
  • 1981: Superman II opens
  • 1983: The movie Twilight Zone premiers
  • 1987: Spaceballs opens in theaters
  • 1989: Tim Burton’s Batman is released
  • 1991: The Rocketeer premiers in theaters

Direct Beam Comms #27

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Cleverman

5760Cleverman, airing on Sundance Channel Wednesdays at 10PM (EDT), takes place in a slightly futuristic, slightly alternate Australia where another group of humans, the “Hairies,” emerges from the outback and are discriminated against by the government. These people are covered in fur, are much stronger than the average person and because of this have to live in ghettos away from regular Aussies.

Regular humans feel threatened by the “Hairies” because — well I’m not sure? Because they’re stronger? Because they’re covered in hair? Because they kill when threatened? Otherwise they seem pretty normal to me so I don’t totally get this.

I feel like if I lived in Australia and were familiar with their culture Cleverman would make more sense to me. I was never sure if the “Hairies” were supposed to be stand-ins for how the Aborigines were (are?) treated in Australia or something else. But some of the main characters of Cleverman are Aborigines, so I suppose not. And some of the characters, the “Cleverman” actually, can summon monsters up from the sea and reattach severed fingers— which maybe in their culture is something they can do?

Not being Australian and not understanding the underlying culture I was totally lost in most of Cleverman. The series looks nice and is well-written, it’s just so specific to people living in Australasia I don’t think outsiders will have a hard time connecting with the show.

Grade: No ordinary man can judge the Cleverman

Feed the Beast

Jim Sturgess and David Schwimmer in Feed the Beast
Jim Sturgess and David Schwimmer in Feed the Beast

The new series Feed the Beast premiered on AMC last Sunday, with a second episode airing Tuesday night where the show will regularly air.

Feed the Beast is about two friends and restauranteurs Tommy Moran (David Schwimmer) and Dion Patras (Jim Sturgess) who’s lives fell apart one year ago. Tommy’s wife was killed in a car accident which sent Tommy and his son’s lives spiraling out of control and then Dion was sent to prison for burning down the restaurant both worked at. Now, out on parole and owing $600,000 to the mob for the fire, Dion wants to open a new restaurant with Tommy that they, along with Tommy’s wife, were planning before everything fell apart.

Feed the Beast has an interesting concept but it’s got a few things going against it. First, it seems like everyone in the cast from Tommy to Dion to Tommy’s father Aiden (the wonderful John Doman from The Wire) is damaged in some way. Tommy started drinking too much after his wife’s death and has become an alcoholic. Dion is addicted to cocaine. Aiden is a racist. Tommy’s son TJ (Elijah Jacob) was so scarred after his mother’s death that he stopped talking…

In a world where most people are pretty good at hiding their pain and sins from outsiders, it seems as if everyone in Feed the Beast wears their pain and sins proudly on their shoulders.

Also, there was way too much going on in the first episode. There’s Tommy dealing with his son acting out at school. Tommy’s alcoholism. Tommy dealing with his wife’s death. Tommy meeting a woman at a grief counseling session. Dion’s drug addiction. Dion being threatened by a mobster who pulls other’s teeth when he doesn’t get what he wants that would seem more at home in Daredevil than Feed the Beast. Dion wanting to flee to France. Dion wanting to open a new restaurant to clear his name with the mob. And that’s just what I can remember in a jam packed first episode.

It seems like rather than taking the simple approach here the creators of Feed the Beast decided instead to throw every story idea they had for the season into the first episode.

The second episode does back off of this jam-packedness somewhat, but there’s still a ton going on and probably three too many characters for a show like Feed the Beast to be able to realistically support on a weekly basis. Still, I enjoyed the show and am interested to see where it goes this season.

Grade: B

Animal Kingdom

MV5BMTQ4MjU4MDU0M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzU5NzU5ODE@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1499,1000_AL_Based off an Australian movie of the same name, the new series Animal Kingdom is set to start airing this Tuesday at 9PM (EDT) on TNT.

If I were to use one word to describe the Aussie film that word would be “brutal.” In the movie, teen Josh “J” (James Frecheville) moves in with his grandmother (Jacki Weaver) and his four adult uncles after his mother dies of an overdose. But while J’s home life might have not been ideal, life at grandma’s is dangerous with the family business being bank robbery and the local police having a tendency of shooting first and asking questions later when they find a suspected robber.

After the police murder one of the uncles the others kill two cops in revenge. Things really get bad when psychotic uncle (Ben Mendelsohn) realizes that the only person tying the family to the murders is J, and if he and his girlfriend disappear they’d be nothing liking them to the killings.

The crimes of Animal Kingdom aren’t pretty or cool looking. They’re dark and disturbing and I’m not sure how that would translate to TNT’s version of Animal Kingdom, the super-sized first episode of which is currently available to view on iTunes with new episodes airing Tuesdays.

In the first episode, much of the core of the movie from the grandma, now played by Ellen Barkin, to J (Finn Cole) to the family business being robbery remains intact. What’s different here is that much of the brutality of the movie has been replaced with action. In fact, TNT describes the series as being “adrenaline-charged.” It’s not a totally negative change since I’m not sure how a long running TV version of Animal Kingdom could do the things that are done in the movie version and sustain any sort of long-term story that doesn’t involve most of the main characters dead or in jail in a season or two.

To me, this first episode of Animal Kingdom felt like parts of the movie Animal Kingdom — the dysfunctional nature of the family, the family business… — mixed with parts of the movie The Town (also from 2010). More specifically; the spectacular nature of the robberies in The Town and some of the character dynamics of the robbers there too are mixed into the TV version of Animal Kingdom.

That being said, I actually enjoyed the TV version of Animal Kingdom a great deal. My worry about the show is that it’s going to turn into something like Sons of Anarchy-lite where it’s a lot about these outsiders doing these spectacular crimes on a weekly basis. And since much of the plot of the first episode came directly from the movie, it’s tough right now to see where the series is headed. I guess we’ll have to wait for the second episode and beyond after the creators of the TV version of Animal Kingdom run out of story from the film and have to start coming up with their own plot.

Grade: B+

Wrecked

img_25333_001_1082_r_0The TBS series Wrecked premiers this Tuesday at 10PM (EDT) and, like with Animal Kingdom, the first episode is available for viewing on iTunes.

If the first episode of Animal Kingdom was quite good, then the first episode of Wrecked was mostly dreadful. This spoof of the ABC series Lost with castaways stuck on a deserted island after a plane crash comes off as being a few years too late since Lost has been off the air for six years and audiences have moved onto new and different things.

Even so, Wrecked might be interesting if the comedy in the series weren’t so broad with almost every joke being delivered at a LOUD VOLUME to connote, I guess, WHAT I’M SAYING HERE IS A JOKE! Which is extremely annoying to say the least. It doesn’t help matters that it seems like every character on the island is cribbed from other characters from other series don’t feel realistic in the least. These characters feel like they were ordered out of a comedy catalog rather than having any traces of humanity.

Wrecked, like the series Angie Tribeca, seems like they were originally developed for Adult Swim yet somehow ended up on TBS. Which makes me wonder if this is a new model for TBS to try and get in on a younger demographic of viewer, moving away from being known as the place to see re-runs of Family Guy and Big Bang Theory? Which is fine when they develop a show like Angie Tribeca that’s quite good. But isn’t so great when a real stinker like Wrecked gets through.

Grade: D

Cool Sites

chipmunkson16speed

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1973: Battle for the Planet of the Apes opens
  • 1983: Superman III premiers
  • 1987: Predator opens in theaters
  • 1990: Gremlins 2: The New Batch is released
  • 2008: The Incredible Hulk premiers in theaters

Direct Beam Comms #26

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, FeaturePosted on

TV

Daredevil

latestI finished the second season of Daredevil last week after having spent most of last spring pacing myself by watching one episode a week since the series launch — that is until Memorial Day weekend where I blew through the last three episodes in quick succession. The first season of Daredevil mostly dealt with Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) slowly becoming the bad guy fighting, anti-yakuza and Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) battlin’ Daredevil we know and love. And the second season featured a more confident Daredevil taking on the mysterious Hand ninja clan who will stop at nothing to achieve their own ends with only Daredevil standing in their way.

Which is one point about the second season of Daredevil that I didn’t care too much for; the Hand might be too mysterious for the story going on here. I’m not totally sure exactly what the Hand was after all this time — other than what they get in the very last episode — or why they were willing to sacrifice so much in order to get it?

That being said I really enjoyed the second season of Daredevil. It was much better than the first season which was pretty good to begin with and had one of the best supporting cast on TV.

There’s Elden Henson and Deborah Ann Woll playing Foggy Nelson and Karen Page respectively. In lesser hands these characters would have been pushed to the background, in the series only to move the Murdock/Daredevil story along. But here they feel like real people with their own needs, wants and desires that sometimes are with, and sometimes go against the main Daredevil story.

There’s also Elodie Yung who plays Elektra Natchios, a spoiled rich girl from Murdock’s past who has much more depth as a character, and is much more dangerous, than anyone expected. I was surprised as to just how good Yung is playing the character of Elektra here — one minute soft and demur and the next scary and strong. I’d only ever seen her before as Jinx in G.I. Joe: Retaliation but she’s absolutely wonderful here.

A special nod goes out to Jon Bernthal who plays Frank Castle/The Punisher. There’s been at least three different actors to play the Punisher on-screen all the way back to Dolph Lundgren in the late 1980s. But it’s Bernthal who seems to have finally cracked and perfected him. He’s always on edge, always in the shadows who operates within his own moral code. It’s also an interesting version of the Punisher that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in any form — brain damaged from the attack that killed his family and never sure if what he remembers from his past is real or if it’s just a figment of the fragment of the bullet he took to the head?

Here, the Punisher is the anthesis of Daredevil — both want to stop crime yet it’s the Punisher who’s willing to kill to do so. And it’s where these to characters bump up against each other; both trying to do the same thing but are somewhat enemies because of their different ethos, that makes the Punisher/Daredevil relationship so interesting.

And apparently Bernthal’s portrayal of Frank Castle was so well received that a Netflix Punisher series is now in the works. Which does beg the question — can a third season of Daredevil without Punisher be as good as the second with? And too, can the character of the Punisher carry his own show when, as shown here, he works best operating in the shadows of some other super-heroes’ storyline?

I was also surprised as to just how gory the series is. Compared to other Marvel series like Agents of SHIELD and films like Captain America: Civil War where a lot of blood means a tiny tricky out of the side of a characters nose, Daredevil is positively The Evil Dead in blood in comparison. In the series people are cut and they bleed, and it sometimes takes stitches to close up the wounds.

Though this gore is more comic book in nature than realistic — people are cut and bleed but somehow things never get that bloody — it’s still adds to the realism of the show.

Regardless of what the future holds, right now I’d say that to me so far in 2016 Daredevil ranks as one of the very best shows of the season so far.

Grade: A

The Carmichael Show

lead_960The second season of The Carmichael Show wrapped up last week on NBC. It’s a different kind of sitcom in that it’s actually about something.

The Carmichael Show follows the Carmichael family with son and lead of the show Jerrod (Jerrod Carmichael), girlfriend Maxine (Amber Stevens West) and Jerrod’s mom and dad played by David Alan Grier and Loretta Devine with Jerrod’s brother (LilRel Howery)and his brother’s ex-wife (Tiffany Haddish) too. So far, episodes of The Carmichael Show have dealt with things like racism, gentrification, pornography and the current political climate. Jerrod’s girlfriend is going to “Feel the Bern” next November while his father’s voting for Trump since he’s, “Going to bring the jobs back…”

It’s not the typical show and I think that might be part of the reason The Carmichael Show hasn’t been doing well in the ratings — though it was recently picked up for a third season. Most sitcoms find a formula, and if it works, pound it into the ground for years and years and years. But The Carmichael Show isn’t like that. Since each episode deals with different topics and themes, each one feels different that the one before.

While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with shows being about “nothing” ala Seinfeld, it’s nice that there are still shows out there that are about something. Be it series like Community, Arrested Development or, though not yet in those two show’s league, The Carmichael Show.

BTW — it’s nice to see David Alan Grier in a TV series again. To my generation Grier was one of the cornerstones of the In Living Color TV series. And while Grier’s worked consistently the last two decades, it’s nice to see him back on a weekly TV series.

Grade: B+

Angie Tribeca

960The second season of the TBS series Angie Tribeca begins this Monday at 9(EDT). The first season that aired in a “bingeathon” last winter was pretty funny. The show takes its cue from the irreverent humor of series like Police Squad and movies like The Naked Gun and Airplane. It’s goofy, silly fun.

In the spirit of Police Squad, Angie Tribeca follows the title detective (Rashida Jones) and her partner Jay (Hayes MacArthur) as they investigate all sorts of weird crimes from a ventriloquist dummy lead crime ring, illegal pet ferrets being smuggled into California as well as every single cop show cliche from the last 20 years from forensic scientists who seemingly know everything to gruff, but lovable bosses and everything in between.

That being said, Angie Tribeca does feel more like an Adult Swim style show than a TBS one. In fact, it sure seems like Angie Tribeca took a lot of the core elements from its show from other series like NTSF:SD:SUV that seems to share a lot of the same character types and themes too.

Grade: B

The Reading List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1982: E.T.:The Extra-Terrestrial premiers in theaters
  • 1984: Gremlins opens in theaters
  • 1989: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier opens in theaters
  • 1993: Jurassic Park opens in theaters

Direct Beam Comms #25

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Liquid Television

Aeon Flux
Aeon Flux

The MTV series Liquid Television aired its first episode 25 years ago this week, but if you’re under the age of 35 you’ve probably never heard of Liquid Television. I take that back — if you’re under the age of 35 AND you weren’t interested in things like animation back then you’ve probably never heard of this show.

Liquid Television was an anthology half-hour animated series that featured several different animated shorts in each episode. Some of these shorts were traditionally animated and others used puppets with some live action thrown in for good measure. Liquid Television was highly experimental and felt very much of its time of the early 1990s.

Now that I think about it, I didn’t care for most of the shorts that aired on Liquid Television. But at the time to get to the good stuff you had to watch a lot of episodes of Dog Boy.

When I say “good stuff” I mean shorts like ones for Beavis and Butt-Head and Aeon Flux.

Beavis and Butt-Head, one of the defining series for a generation that came of age in the 1990s, began “life” on Liquid Television as one of these shorts. I remember seeing “Frog Baseball” for the first time and not quite getting it. Looking at Beavis and Butt-head now it’s so crudely done and so gross and so over-the-top…on the one hand it seemed to be glorifying the stupidity of teens, but on the other hand it was so funny it was hard to not turn away.

After Liquid Television Beavis and Butt-Head was spun-off to its own series that ran for a whopping eight seasons, 222 episodes and a feature film. I remember teachers complaining about students doing the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh in class and for a while it seemed like everyone was replacing their The Simpsons t-shirts with Beavis and Butt-Head ones.

And Aeon Flux. I remember the first time I saw this show about a woman wearing dominatrix gear armed to the teeth in a futuristic setting with a seemingly unlimited supply of ammo (that so perfectly captured the aesthetic of The Matrix but was created nearly a decade before that movie) I was enthralled right from the start of the animated intro of Aeon’s eyelashes catching a fly ala a venus fly trap.

Aeon Flux was so good it made watching Liquid Television worthwhile on its own.

The story of Aeon Flux is hard to describe. It may take place in the future — on some far off planet. Or it may take place on the Earth. Aeon is trying to get something and is willing to shoot as many people who get in her way as it takes to get it. There’s not much dialog so the story is told through action.

Oh, and at one point Aeon is killed and goes to heaven where she gets her feet licked.

Aeon Flux did find some success after Liquid Television with a feature film version of the same name in 2005 that starred Charlize Theron, though honestly I could never bring myself to watch that.

Preacher

Dominic Cooper as the Preacher
Dominic Cooper as the Preacher

The first episode of Preacher on AMC aired last Sunday and it was…interesting. I think. I read the comic book just before I watched the show so I went into it knowing certain things about the Preacher story. But even after having read the comic I wasn’t totally sure on what was going on in the TV show.

Now that I think about it I’m not sure there was a coherent story in the first episode at all.

There’s this preacher named Jesse (Dominic Cooper) who’s having a crisis of identity and a guy named Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) that sure seems to be a vampire and a woman named “Tulip” (Ruth Negga) who’s good at killing people. And all these characters have interesting “moments” from Jesse trying to lead his flock and failing to Tulip preparing for a big fight with two prepubescent helpers and Cassidy battling, what I’m assuming are, vampire hunters at 30,000 feet.

But as to an actual story to hang these interesting scenes off of — there simply wasn’t one here.

Maybe in future episodes there will be. But after having watched the first super-sized episode of Preacher with all it’s weird heightened reality glory — I’d have to say if it doesn’t develop some story quick I’m going to be done with Preacher in a few weeks.

Grade: D+

Movies

The Hateful Eight

Hateful-EightIt took me quite a while to catch up with Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie The Hateful Eight but last week I was finally able to do so. And after watching it, I’m glad I saw it at home and not in the theater, though maybe not for the reason you’d think.

The Hateful Eight follows eight stranded stage coach travelers snowed in by a blizzard at a rest stop in the mountains that’s equal parts classic western with bits of a snowy outpost where you’re never sure just who’s who ala The Thing (1982) and bloody projectile vomiting and something’s in the basement ala The Evil Dead (1981) thrown in for good measure. One of the travelers, John Ruth (Kurt Russell doing his best impersonation of John Wayne since Big Trouble in Little China) is transporting Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the leader of a vicious gang who Ruth’s delivering for a $10,000 reward to the authorities. But at the stop he becomes suspicious of the other six travelers also stranded there when things seem amiss and becomes convinced that someone at the stop is part of Domergue’s gang and is there to free her and kill everyone else.

Much of The Hateful Eight follows Ruth along with another bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) trying to figure out just who’s who.

I really enjoyed The Hateful Eight. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in quite sometime and yet another great film by Tarantino. It was great to see Kurt Russell back in action in a snowed in outpost like in The Thing, Russell even looks a bit like his character MacReady did in that movie with shaggy hair and a mustache and beard, and the movie kept me guessing right up until the end as to who’s who.

That being said, I’m not sure I would have liked The Hateful Eight as much as I did if I saw it in the theater. It’s nearly three hours in length and like much of Tarantino’s films features characters in rooms talking to one and other without a lot of action. And with how Tarantino shot the film in lots of medium shots without a lot of camera movement meant that it felt like I was watching a stage play.

And while The Hateful Eight does feature some time-jumps that Tarantino’s known for, it doesn’t have that many. So the great bulk of the movie takes place with these eight characters interacting within the rest stop/haberdashery. Which at home being able to pause the movie at certain points so I could get up and stretch my legs and even splitting the movie over two nights made what I would have assumed something that would’ve had me squirming in my seat ready to bolt to the exit by the start of the final credits in the theater to something much more enjoyable.

Grade: A

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1982: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan premiers
  • 1985: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock opens in theaters
  • 1990: Total Recall premiers
  • 1991: The TV series Liquid Television debuts on MTV 25 years ago
  • 1996: The last episode of Space: Above and Beyond airs 20 years ago

Direct Beam Comms #24

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, ToysPosted on

TV

The Goldbergs, Fresh Off the Boat & black-ish

AJ Michalka and Troy Gentile of The Goldbergs
AJ Michalka and Troy Gentile of The Goldbergs

Last week, the ABC series The Goldbergs and black-ish ended their third and second seasons respectively while Fresh Off the Boat ends its second season this Tuesday. I enjoy watching these shows but honestly, I’m not sure I can point to one single moment last season from any of them that was memorable to me. That’s not criticism of these series since there are usually several times each episode that I literally LOL. But I’m not sure if it’s because there are so many episodes of TV here, between the three of them there’s 72, or if it’s because these shows are really like the lite-sitcoms of the 1980s, but there’s not a single moment in either The Goldbergs or black-ish or Fresh Off the Boat that sticks out to me.

To me, Fresh Off the Boat is an enjoyable show but is most like a 1980s sitcom with the characters being almost over-the-top and it being very heavy on the “situation.” And while I think that The Goldbergs and black-ish are better shows, to me The Goldbergs works best when the creators of that show find their own stories. But I get the sense that they’re being pushed to do more “event” style episodes like ones that pay homage to Dirty Dancing and Risky Business which are a bit contrived.

And while black-ish can, at times, be a much deeper show than either The Goldbergs or Fresh Off the Boat are, it can fall into the tropes that were popular in past sitcoms like the “very special” episode and “someone’s unexpectedly pregnant” that were staples of series past.

Grade: B for all

Robotech

Recently, Crackle began offering all 85 episodes of the classic animated series Robotech streaming via their service. Honestly I can’t remember the last time I watched Robotech from start to finish, but I plan to spend this summer filling some of my TV time catching up on this show that’s one of my favorite of all-time.

With the fall TV season slowly winding down and options for things to watch dwindling by the week, there’s a few new series I want to checkout in May.

Preacher Sunday, May 22 at 10PM (EST) on AMC

The cast of The Preacher
The cast of The Preacher

I hate to admit it, but I’m mostly ignorant on just what the Preacher comic and new AMC TV series is about. Checking out the marketing materials for the show and reading articles on it, Preacher seems to be a version of Hellblazer, except instead of a demonologist the main character is a priest who smokes, drinks and is otherwise self-destructive all while battling the unknown. That being said, having watched some of the promos for the show, Preacher seems to be less supernatural than I’d always assumed the comic was. Like the show really could just be about a hard-drinking preacher where, as it’s put several times in one promo, “anything can happen.”

Which is kind’a a bad thing. If the people involved in the show can’t properly describe what it’s about in a sentence or two, other than to say “anything can happen,” to me that doesn’t bode well for the show as a whole/moving forward. How can you create a compelling show if you’re not sure what it’s about?

DC Comics describes the comic series as:

After merging with a bizarre spiritual force called Genesis, Texan preacher Jesse Custer has become completely disillusioned with the beliefs to which he had dedicated his entire life. Now possessing the power of “the word,” an ability to make people do whatever he utters, Custer begins a violent and riotous journey across the country. Joined by his gun-toting girlfriend Tulip and the hard-drinking Irish vampire Cassidy, Custer loses faith in both God and man as he witnesses dark atrocities and improbable calamities during his exploration of America.

So who knows what the TV version will be about? Still, I’m interested enough in this one to check it out.

Wayward Pines Wednesday, May 25

The cast of Wayward Pines
The cast of Wayward Pines

The first season of this horror/sci-fi show about a small, isolated town in the Northwest US and all the weird goings-on there was interesting enough to me. It had some nice, unexpected, twists and turns and with the story of the first season being told in ten episodes start to finish felt about right. And now comes a new, second season with a new story and new lead actor. The first season featured Matt Dillion while the second has Jason Patric in a different story also set in Wayward Pines.

…the 10-episode, second season will pick up after the shocking events of Season One, with the residents of Wayward Pines battling against the iron-fisted rule of the First Generation.

Which, admittedly, doesn’t make much sense if you haven’t seen the first season of the show. But like I said, the creators of Wayward Pines took the series to some unexpected places and while the show wasn’t great, at times it was a fun one to watch.

Movies

Star Trek Beyond Trailer #2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzWIGFiGrlA

Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens

On the Horizon

Currently, I’m working on articles about; animated films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the movie Independence Day, the weird movies of 1986 and the movie Aliens which isn’t weird but is also from 1986. 😉

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1970: Beneath the Planet of the Apes debuts on screens.
  • 1979: Dawn of the Dead opens in theaters.