I find it funny how surprising it was this fall to some that horror movies have been so popular lately. The Halloween remake this year wasn’t predicted to do too well at the box office by
the pundits, yet so far it’s gone onto make more than $150 million in
the US alone. And last year It brought in more than $700 million in ticket sales. Let’s not forget franchises like The Conjuring movies that have earned more than $1.5 billion and Paranormal Activity that brought in nearly $900 million — so it’s not like successful
horror movies are something new. There’s been successful horror movies
forever.
Those numbers are impressive and it seems like ever year some new
horror thing comes along and tops expectations and brings loads and
loads of people to the theaters, yet equally every year those films are
seen as aberrations.
The biggest problem with horror right now is that it isn’t “cool” and
the critics want to see and write about what they see as important
movies created by important people that talk about important things. And
a movie like Halloween ain’t ever gonna be one of those movies. So horror movies tend to be ghettoized much like superhero movies used to be.
I also think there’s a perception among a lot of people that those who go to horror movies, especially slasher ones like Halloween,
that there’s something wrong with them. Society says we’re not supposed
to like movies with blood and gore and if we do like them then there’s
something wrong with us. It doesn’t help matters that horror movies,
even the bad ones, makes us uncomfortable, forcing us to confront our
fears about morality and our mortality.
Equally problematic is that while there are some really good horror
flicks, there’s also a lot of really bad ones too. For every A Quiet Place or Get Out, bet’cha didn’t think of those movies as horror but they are, there’s loads and loads of Sharknados and sequels to Lake Placid too. And the critics seem to focus on the later. But the same holds
true for every other genera of movie too, from romance to superhero to
sci-fi. For every good one of those, there’s a ton of bad ones as well.
Yet Guardians of the Galaxy didn’t get dinged because it was released the same year as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was, but the same doesn’t hold true for horror movies. For them, the bad ones somehow taint the good.
Then again I suppose it’s no different then when the original Halloween or The Exorcist went onto make a ton of money at the box office in the 1970s. Those
movies were seen as aberrations and outside the norm. Something that
couldn’t easily be repeated. But time and time again scary movies came
along and found success that wasn’t expected.
It was just a few years ago that the superhero movie was seen at best
as entertaining and at worst something to be openly derided. It wasn’t
until recently that the mainstream critics began taking them a bit more
seriously until now they’re seen as an important art form.
And hopefully, horror movies will be seen that way one day too.
What To Watch This Week
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Tuesday
So far only available on the CBS All Access streaming service, Star Trek: Discovery gets a Blu-ray/DVD release today.
Friday
The second Fantastic Beasts film and Harry Potter spin-off, this one entitled Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, hits theaters today.
What was originally set to be a series, then cut down to movie-length western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs by Joel Coen Ethan Coen is available on Netflix today.
Also available on Netflix is the fourth season of the Narcos series, this one Narcos: Mexico.
Sunday
Insomniac Theater: Very early Sunday morning the classic sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and dare I say a better film, 2010 airs on TCM.
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about sci-fi films in the late 1970s
and early 1980s and I came up with a theory: for a time every sci-fi
movie back then either wanted to be the next Star Wars or Alien. Released in 1977 Star Wars would quickly become one of the most influential movies ever, and while Alien didn’t do quite as well at the box office in 1979, it too would go onto
become one of the most influential sci-fi movies in cinema history.
In 1978 there were such films as the dreadful Starcrash that was an Italian version of Star Wars and Battlestar Galacticawhich was the TV version of Star Wars that aired as a feature film in some countries. In 1979 Disney released their version of Star Wars with The Black Hole.
1980 saw the released of The Empire Strikes Back along with movies like Flash Gordon which, ironically, the source material from was influential to the creation of Star Wars while equally Star Wars was influential to the creation of the film version of Flash Gordon, as well as Battle Beyond the Stars which was Roger Corman’s low-budget version of Star Wars.
Alien
In 1981 there was Outland that was basically Alien minus the monster set on a mining colony and Galaxy of Terror that was Corman’s low-budget version of Alien.
Much like with Outland, Blade Runner from 1982 was essentially Alien minus the monster but set in a dystopian Los Angeles while The Thing also from that year was Alien only not on a futuristic spaceship but instead an Antarctic research station present day. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was more Star Wars than classic Star Trek in many regards with gigantic spaceships zapping each other while Disney’s Tron that year also owed a lot to Star Wars as well.
I think what changed things that year was the release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that was a huge box office hit in 1982. That movie broke the mold as it
was a sci-fi flick set present day about a nice alien visiting nice
people on the sometimes not-so-nice Earth and, other than special
effects wizardry, didn’t owe a thing to either Star Wars or Alien.
After 1982 there would be a much more diverse group of sci-fi movies like Terminator, Dune and Enemy Mine to be released. While there were still movies like The Last Starfighter that were essentially versions of Star Wars and Creature that was essentially a clone of Alien, for the most part filmmakers were done with trying to make new versions of Alien and Star Wars.
For a while, at least.
The one major sci-fi movie from the late 1970s that doesn’t fit the “clone” mold was Star Trek: The Motion Picture from 1979. While that film relies on the special effects revolution created with Star Wars, in no way shape or form did Star Trek: The Motion Picture want to be Star Wars. I think that’s because Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was helming this first feature film version of
the TV series and seemed to be an individual with a strong sense of how
he wanted Star Trek: The Motion Picture to be. While I think he was fine with utilizing the special effects wizards that came out of Star Wars, at the same time he wanted his Star Trek to be something entirely different that Star Wars. Which, for better or worse it is.
Dark Horse Comics is releasing an adaptation of William Gibson’s script to Alien 3 in comic form starting this week. Gibson’s version would’ve been more of a direct sequel to Aliens than the theatrical Alien 3 was and would’ve featured both Hicks and Newt as well as Ripley and is
considered by many to be one of the great unmade films of all-time.
After the deadly events of the film Aliens, the spaceship Sulaco
carrying the sleeping bodies of Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and Bishop is
intercepted by the Union of Progressive Peoples. What the UPP forces
don’t expect is another deadly passenger that is about to unleash chaos
between two governmental titans intent on developing the ultimate Cold
War weapon of mass destruction.
What To Watch This Week
The Girl in the Spider’s Web
Out this Friday are two new films in theaters. First up is the fifth
film to bring anti-social anti-hero Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) to the
big-screen The Girl in the Spider’s Web whileOverlord features American paratroopers battling it out with Nazi zombies during World War 2 in a horror/action flick.
The first Deutschland 83 series on Sundance ended its run way back in the summer of 2015. That series, about East German spy Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) infiltrating West Germany in 1983 was pretty good, kind’a like The Americans but from a German perspective. And now comes the next season Deutschland 86 that unfortunately, much like Mr Inbetween on FX, seems to be being burned off by Sundance since the series is airing at the very desirable slot of midnight (Eastern). What’s crazy is Deutschland 86 could easily be airing in primetime except that Sundance are instead airing episodes of Law and Order that at this point are nearly 20 years old.
Anyway…
Now set in 1986 just four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolically was the end of the Cold War and the beginning of German reunification, the action has shifted from averting a conflict between East and West Germany to instead the survival of East Germany. They’re literally running out of money as the Soviet Union begins pulling back as their economy begins to implode leaving East Germany short on everything from food to medicine. They’re so desperate that East German spy Lenora Rauch (Maria Schrader) is in South Africa trying to broker an arms deal, even though the South African government are their enemy, while back at home government officials Walter Schweppenstette (Sylvester Groth) and Annett Schneider (Sonja Gerhardt) work on a deal with a West German drug manufacturer to run a trial on some shady drugs in the East in order to obtain some hard currency.
Florence Kasumba and Maria Schrader
Deutschland 86 wasn’t at all what I had expected. The first season was much more the traditional spy drama, with Martin having to hide in plain sight in the West as he desperately tries to avert World War III. But this season is a bit different. Now, these spies are using their trade not to get one up on the west, but to instead try and save their country as it begins spiraling down the drainpipe of history. It’s a very interesting story/twist that I’m really interested in seeing where it all goes.
What To Watch This Week
The Fly (1958)
Sunday
In their final “Mummy Sunday” before Halloween, TCM will be airing The Mummy’s Shroud and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb tonight.
Monday
TCM will be airing loads of horror movies today including The Curse of the Cat People, Children of the Dammed, Village of the Damned, Island of Lost Souls and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Tuesday
Insomniac Theater: Very early this morning TCM will run The Fly and The Frozen Dead.
Later on in the day they’ll also be airing King Kong and Things to Come.
The surprise hit of the summer The Meg is available on digital download today.
Wednesday – Halloween
Insomniac Theater: TCM will broadcast the classic Night of the Living Dead and the not-so-classic Plague of Zombies very early this morning.
The IFC horror series Stan Against Evil will debut its third season tonight.
TCM will be running loads of horror movies all day long including Dementia 13, Cat People, Carnival of Souls, Spirits of the Dead, From Beyond the Grave, Black Sabbath and Dead of Night. Halloween evening they have a marathon of movies featuring Vincent Price planned including House of Wax, Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, House on Haunted Hill, Theater of Blood and The Last Man on Earth.
Thursday
Beginning very early Thursday morning TCM will be running a load of genre movies including Mighty Joe Young, The Valley of Gwangi, 2001: A Space Odyssey, One Million Years B.C., Brainstorm and Clash of the Titans.
HDNET Movies will be airing The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension this morning.
Friday
The final season of the Netflix series House of Cards is available today.
The second season of the animated Mike Judge Presents: Tales From the Tour Bus debuts tonight on Cinemax. Whereas the first season followed the behind the scenes goings on of country musicians, the second will follow funk.
Bohemian Rhapsody about the band Queen premiers in theaters today.
Saturday
Insomniac Theater: Based on a Stephen King story of the same name, though the two are wildly different, TCM will run The Lawnmower Man early this morning.
I’ve been od’ing on horror movies the last few weeks, which is something I tend to do during the month of Halloween. Beginning in September I start DVRing scary movies and save them for October. And during October the TV channels air loads of horror movies too so at any one time I might have 10 of them queued up to watch next.
This October I’ve watched things as diverse as movies like The Old Dark House, Halloween and Evil Dead to name a few to TV series like The House on Haunted Hill and old episodes of Making Monsters too.
When I watch movies I try and watch them as uncut as possible but sometimes I do have to admit that I’ll watch them with commercials or even worse “edited for content.” It’s hard to pass up a showing of Creepshow even when it’s on AMC that tends to insert commercials every few minutes and cut the good parts of the movies to ribbons.
But all that ends this week.
Sure, I’ll still watch horror movies throughout the year, but not as many as I am right now. Part of that is there’s less of them airing on TV after October when everyone goes right into Christmas mode. The good news is that I’m still working my way through The House on Haunted Hill series too which I probably won’t get through until the end of the year.
But for the most part, I’ll be back to watching maybe one or two horror movies a month until next fall.
+++
This is also the time of year I start working on my “best of” columns
for the end of the year. I usually do three of them; the best posters,
TV shows and what I call “best of the rest” which is a catch-all. But
this year I don’t think I’m going to be doing a “best of” posters
column. It’s not like there weren’t a lot of good posters out this year,
but I don’t think there were a lot of great ones either, with a few
exceptions. And I don’t know if those few exceptions are enough to
justify an entire column — or that I can come up with enough to write
about them?
What sucks is that the “best of” posters column is usually one of the
more popular things I write each year. And these columns tend to drive a
lot of traffic to my site years after they’ve been published as well.
So I’m a bit weary of not doing one because of that.
But on the other hand, is that a good enough reason to write a column
I might not be into writing? Instead I might write a ”My Movie Rundown”
column about all the movies I saw in 2018. I always felt weird about
writing a “best of” movies column since I really don’t see too many
movies a year, but maybe a general “rundown” column would make me feel
better about writing about them?
It’s been almost exactly 19 months since the last season of Daredevil dropped on Netflix. In that time four separate superhero series have premiered there; Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher and The Defenders. And while Daredevil/Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) was a large part of The Defenders, I have to say that I’ve missed seeing the man without fear in his own series all those months.
Luckily, the devil of hell’s kitchen has returned for a third season
after having spent the first battling Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio)
and the ninja clan the Hand in the second.
After the events of The Defenders, Murdock has been left a
broken man having a building literally fall on him. His senses dulled
and his hearing nearly ruined, Murdock spends most of the first episode
of the third season recovering in a church run by a sympathetic priest
and nun. He’s not quite sure where his future lies. On the one hand his
friends Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson)
think he’s dead after that building came down on him so he could easily
walk away from his life and start something new. On the other hand
giving up helping the innocent and punching the bad guys in the face is a
really hard life to leave.
The one weak point here is that while Murdock spends most of the
episode not quite sure if he still wants to be Daredevil or not, the
series is called Daredevil and not Matt Murdock so we as the audience knows he’s going to be the Daredevil again, even if he does not. So in a lot
of ways this episode feels a little bit superfluous in that regard.
Also returned in this season of the show is Fisk aka Kingpin. He’s
gone from the criminal ruler of much of New York to a man behind bars
since the close of the first season. And, in a hilarious moment in a
loud and raucous jail, screams for everyone else to “shut up” and they
obey.
I’m sure the third season of Daredevil will turn out pretty
interesting even if the first episode wasn’t much so, and I’m a fan of
the show/character so I’m into this one until the end. I just wish that a
little more had happened in the first one than it did. Let me put it
this way, I think that by the end of the season I’ll look back on this
first episode as one the could’ve easily been skipped with nothing lost
to the story.
The Conners ⭐⭐
The Conners
Perhaps the most controversial series of the 2017–2018 season was, surprisingly enough, the revival of Roseanne.
Even before an episode aired there was controversy over subject matter
and during the run of the show and there was more controversy as well
because of some lines in a particular episode about other sitcoms.
But because Roseanne got such strong ratings, more than 25
million viewers tuned into the first episode the week it aired, the
series was quickly ordered to a second season by ABC. However, during
the hiatus between seasons Roseanne Barr made comments on Twitter that
were considered racist, which she famously blamed on the drug Ambien,
and just like that Roseanne was cancelled. But because all good
stories need a twist along the way, after Barr agreed to leave the show
and have nothing further to do with it, Roseanne was un-cancelled, retitled and debuted last week as the Roseanne-less The Conners.
The first episode opens with Roseanne having died off-screen from a
drug overdose, some of the first season dealt with her being addicted to
opioids and hiding this from the family, and the Conners coming to
terms with the loss. I can’t think of any other sitcoms today that
portray the working class like Roseanne did and now The Conners do. The series can go from funny to uncomfortable in a single scene and is a better show than most sitcoms because of it.
I genuinely dug the first season of Roseanne and was glad to see it return, and The Conners didn’t disappoint in a strangely moving first episode. It’s pretty much Roseanne minus Roseanne, and because the main character’s gone it means there’s
more room for everybody else to have more story time than before.
I don’t think Roseanne’s going to be missed.
Camping ⭐
Camping
I don’t quite get the new HBO series Camping that debuted
last Sunday. In it, a tightly wound woman Kathryn (Jennifer Garner) goes
on a family camping trip to celebrate her husband’s (David Tennant)
birthday. She’s got everything scheduled out to the minute and can’t
deal when things don’t go exactly as planned. Honesty, Camping is more like a bad episode of Modern Family but with swearing and nudity rather than something I would’ve expected to see on HBO.
Although these have been collected many, many times before, Dark Horse is set to release a new version of the original three Aliens stories published together in a new volume this week in a volume that retails for $25.
Complete in this first volume is the initial Aliens trilogy–Outbreak,
Nightmare Asylum, and Earth War, in which Hicks and Newt–and eventually
Ripley–join forces to battle an infestation of Aliens both on Earth and
in the wider galaxy.
What To Watch This Week
Legends of Tomorrow
Sunday
TCM will be airing a load of movie featuring mummies this Sunday including The Mummy, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and Pharaoh’s Curse.
Monday
After “Mummy Sunday” TCM will have “Frankenstein Monday” which will include an airing of their new documentary The Strange Life of Dr. Frankenstein and classic films like Son of Frankenstein, The Curse of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Created Woman and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!
The fourth season of the series Legends of Tomorrow begins tonight on The CW.
Tuesday
One of the big hits of the summer Incredibles 2 is available on digital download today.
Thursday
Insomniac Theater: At midnight tonight (Eastern) the sequel spy series to Deutschland 83, Deutschland 86 debuts on Sundance.
What was originally set to be the backbone of the Paramount Network back in March, Heathers is now being burned off in a five night “binge” after controversy overtook the series before a single episode aired.
Friday
The second season of the animated series based on the hit video game Castlevania is available today on Netflix.
Looking to collect much of the wonderful art that’s gone into the Dungeons and Dragons game over the decades, and maybe cash in on a little of the nostalgia DND has been getting ever since it was a feature of the Stranger Things TV show, comes the book Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana.
From one of the most iconic game brands in the world, this official
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS illustrated history provides an unprecedented
look at the visual evolution of the brand, showing its continued
influence on the worlds of pop culture and fantasy. Inside the book,
you’ll find more than seven hundred pieces of artwork—from each edition
of the core role-playing books, supplements, and adventures; as well as
Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novels; decades of Dragon and Dungeon
magazines; and classic advertisements and merchandise; plus
never-before-seen sketches, large-format canvases, rare photographs,
one-of-a-kind drafts, and more from the now-famous designers and artists
associated with DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.
I’m a little conflicted over the new Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House.
Part of it is really good but part of it is just okay. But I could
easily see the “okay” part turning good if given enough time.
Based on the Shirley Jackson novel of the same name that was turned
into two films, one in 1963 and one in 1999, this new ten episode
version takes place over two time periods. The first looks to be about
25 years ago when a family moves into renovate and flip a large manor
house named “Hill House.” Father (Henry Thomas), mother (Carla Gugino)
and five kids are living at the house during the renovation when weird
things start happening. Doors are locked and refuse to open, youngest
son Luke draws a woman he sees everyone assumes is an invisible friend
while youngest daughter Nell is haunted by an apparition at night.
Cut to present day where the family, now grown adults, have adult
problems and don’t quite get along. Especially Nell (Victoria Pedretti)
who seems unstable and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who’s in rehab.
Nell’s never quite gotten over her experiences at the house, which
present day and past with the family at the house are flashed back and
forth quite a bit, and begins losing her grip on reality when the
apparition that haunted her as a little girl returns to her as an adult.
The part of The Haunting of Hill House I really liked was
all the stuff set in the past. Everything there from the acting to the
color choices to the design was really top notch, and scary too. I think
where things falter a bit in the first episode comes when the story is
set in modern times. To me that had the vibe of Six Feet Under: Paranormal Activity where a few of the characters were a bit too over the top for the
reality of the show that was set in the past. Of course Luke is addicted
to drugs and sister Theo (Kate Siegel) wears gloves all the time
because she’s a germaphobe — even if she doesn’t have problems bringing a
date home for a one-night-stand when we first meet her.
Present day in The Haunting of Hill House
It doesn’t help matters that all the time shifting in the episode got
to be a little confusing. At one point the family goes running out of
the house in the past when it seems as if things have gone all Amityville Horror on them one night and it’s either get out or die. But in the next scene
the family are back at the house and everything’s normal again since
that scene takes place sometime before the previous one. Even worse is
when part of the episode set present day flashes back a few years in
time, which left me scratching my head a minute until I was able to
figure out what was going on and play catch up with the scene.
I’m assuming this is done since this is how the characters in the
present are remembering what all happened in the past, which makes
sense. I just wish it had come off a little less confusing. My biggest
concern for the The Haunting of Hill House is that I’m not sure how they’re going to sustain the story over ten episodes and not slow things down too much?
Still, I can’t get over how effective and scary some scenes in the
first episode were or how good the stuff set in the past was. I also
liked how effetely darkness was handled in the episode. Here, the dark
is like a fog where things are clear close but lose detail and shape in
the distance which I really liked.
At the end of the episode something happens that I don’t want to
spoil that seems to indicate that the story set in the present might be
more than people just sitting around complaining about their lives.
Doctor Who ⭐⭐
The cast of Doctor Who
The eleventh modern, 38th overall, season of Doctor Who debuted last week on BBC America here in the US. For the first time in
55 years the Doctor is being played by a woman, Jodie Whittaker and
because this current season of the show has a new executive producer
with Chris Chibnall, Stephen Moffat left the series last season after
having produced it since 2010, in many ways this new season of Doctor Who feels like a fresh, new start.
My question is, is this new Doctor Who too fresh and new?
If memory serves me correctly always before whenever the Doctor would
“regenerate*” his companions, essentially side-characters who travel
the universe with the Doctor, would remain between the seasons. So
whereas the face of the lead character would change, the side ones would
stay the same giving the audience at least some continuity between lead
actor switches in the show. But this time everything’s new, from the
Doctor to the companions to the series’ look and feel and the producer
as well.
In this first episode the Doctor comes literally crashing down to
Earth and into a train after having been dumped out of her Tardis at the
end of the last episode that aired way back at Christmas.
She’s confused from having regenerated and finds herself in the middle
of an intergalactic hunt where a random unsuspecting person is picked to
be stalked by a clad-in-black armored wearing alien. Helping the Doctor
are four people she meets on the train. Much like with just about every
other companion the Doctor’s ever had, these individuals go from
skeptical to helping someone they’ve just met on an adventure in no time
flat.
Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor
If there’s anything that hurts the first episode it’s this lack of
anything connecting it to the past seasons. It’s almost like when Doctor Who was relaunched in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston in the title role.
That show was an almost total reinvention of the series, updated for a
21st century audience and the 2018 Doctor Who feels very much
the same way. It’s not as a severe a change as the 2005 one was with the
classic series, but there’s certainly a change present in the 2018 one
from what’s come before.
Still, while I noticed this I don’t seriously think this is going to
affect the quality of the show in a real, meaningful way. The latest
season of Doctor Who is different, but Whittaker is a lot of
fun in the title role and I love it when every so often TV series change
things around, tries something new and shake things up a bit. Shows
that rely on the same formula over and over again can get a bit boring
and sometimes changes like those made on Doctor Who can keep them feeling fresh and new.
*Regeneration is a brilliant ploy by the producers of the Doctor Who to keep the series going whenever the lead wanted to leave the show. He’d regenerate and a new face would take his place.
Better Call Saul ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul
Most TV dramas these days have stories that wash over the characters
like the sea does over the shore. The story is the thing that moves
around and acts upon the characters who mostly remain unchanged. And the
characters are just that, characters. They are archetypes — the doctor
who’s biggest flaw is that she cares too much about her job, the cop
who’s out of control, the scientist who’s brilliant but lacking social
skills — and don’t feel like people whatsoever.
I think that’s why I love the AMC series Better Call Saul so
much. In that show it’s not the story that interacts on the characters,
it’s the character interacting between each other that generates the
story. And the characters in Better Call Saul don’t feel like TV characters, they feel like real people.
This fourth season of Better Call Saul has been a series in
flux. We all know that eventually the character of Jimmy McGill (Bob
Odenkirk) will one day morph into the sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman who was
a part of the series Breaking Bad. And I think everyone,
myself included, thought this transformation would’ve taken place by the
end of the first season, only it didn’t. What we got instead was a slow
burn of Jimmy, who’s spent his life trying not to disappoint big
brother Chuck (Michael McKean) but failing miserably while also trying
to keep his relationship with girlfriend Kim (Rhea Seehorn) from
crumbling. And with each and every failure and misstep throughout the
seasons Jimmy draws closer and closer to down the path to Saulhood.
Looking back over the season(s) I think I know what went wrong with Jimmy, why he became a “bad guy” in Breaking Bad.
He always took the wrong lessons from his failures. Last season he
ended up losing his law license and rather than buckling down and doing
the right thing to wait out the mandatory period before he can get it
back by getting a normal job, he got a job at a cell phone store where
he realized the best way to make a little money was to sell “burners,”
disposable phones, to criminals for a markup.
If he’d only done the right thing I don’t think Jimmy would’ve ever
become Saul. Again and again Jimmy does the wrong thing, even if it’s
little wrong things, and because of this he edges closers and closer to
becoming the person from Breaking Bad.
Jonathan Banks
And that’s not to mention the wonderful Jonathan Banks as Mike
Ehrmantraut (I love that name) who’s going down a slippery-slope of his
own. He started out as a retired cop working as a parking lot attendant
and then graduated to becoming a member of a criminal organization led
by Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). He’s a guy who’s great on details and
the small stuff and genuinely loves figuring things out for Fring. But
in the final episode of the season he’s asked to do something to someone
he genuinely likes which will cement his place in the organization and
get his nickname from Breaking Bad as the “Cleaner.”
Star Wars Resistance ⭐
Star Wars Resistance
The new Star Wars Resistance show on Disney Channel is a fun series that’s set right before the events of the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Fighter pilot Kazuda Xiono (Christopher Sean) joins the Resistance and
becomes an undercover racing pilot in order to spy on the First Order.
Unfortunately, whereas the last Star Wars series, Star Wars Rebels,
had a lot of depth in terms of story and characters, even if it also
had elements that would appeal to the younger generation, Star Wars Resistance is a show meant to appeal to kids and not really adults. Which is fine, not everything Star Wars has to appeal to middle-aged men. But at the same time I really can’t see myself investing much time in something as lite as Star Wars Resistance in the long-run.
Mr Inbetween ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Scott Ryan in Mr Inbetween
The wonderful “blink and you’ll miss it because we’re gonna air two
episodes back to back at 11:30PM and blow through this one in less than a
month” series Mr Inbetween wrapped up its first season last
week after having debuted just a few weeks ago on FX. This Australian
show, written by and starring Scott Ryan, is about Ray Shoesmith who
does unsavory things for unsavory people and is quite good at his job.
While this sounds like a lot of other shows out there, especially ones on FX that’s a network know for over-the-top dramas, Mr Inbetween doesn’t feel like the typical FX show. To me the series it matches the most is Breakind Bad but through the lens of an Australian. Ray feels like a real person,
with problems, an ex-wife, daughter and girlfriend. And for the most
part he’s a guy who, other than some anger issues, is pretty normal.
It’s just that every so often he’s called on to hurt someone who owes
someone money, or even sometimes kill.
He’s a complex character and Mr Inbetween is a complex show I don’t think FX has ever seen the likes of.
The first season, just six episodes long, was mostly about Ray
dealing with his screwed up life. Be it explaining to a girlfriend why
he bashed two guys during a road-rage incident or stringing along two
hitmen out to kill him. It’s not really about any season-long story like
is in vogue with so many shows these days. Instead, Mr Inbetween is about characters first and story second.
Because this show was so different and so off-brand for FX, and since
they seemed to be trying their hardest to burn this one off as quickly
as possible, I figured Mr Inbetween was going to be one of
those “one and done” series that are here today and forgotten tomorrow.
But surprisingly it did okay for FX considering they didn’t air new
episodes until after 11PM and they decided to renew the show for a
second season.
Horray! Sometimes the good-guys do win, even if they’re bad-guys.
Deutschland 86 TV commercial
Movies
Pet Sematary trailer
Glass trailer
What To Watch This Week
The Old Dark House
Sunday
The follow-up to last winter’s James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction is the new Eli Roth’s History of Horror that premiers on AMC tonight.
After airing on CBS for a season before moving to The CW where it became one of their more-popular series, Supergirl begins its fourth season today.
The new HBO series Camping about a family forced to get along together on a vacation to the outdoors debuts this week.
Monday
The only sci-fi movie to star Pee-Wee Herman, even if he’s listed in the credits as Paul Mall, Flight of the Navigator airs tonight on TCM.
Tuesday
Insomniac Theater: The mostly forgotten 1979 post-Star Wars Disney gem The Black Hole airs on TCM very early today.
Roseanne minus Roseanne The Conners premiers tonight on ABC.
Wednesday
TCM is set to air a whole slew of horror movies starring Boris Karloff including one of my favorites The Old Dark House tonight.
Friday
The third season of the Netflix hit Daredevil drops today.
Set 40 years after the original, Halloween premiers in theaters today. Though if we’re really picking up 40 years
after the original, wouldn’t that make Michael Myers a 60 to 70 years
old dude?
Saturday
Insomniac Theater: The totally trippy Dreamscape from 1984 about people traveling within other people’s dreams airs very
early Saturday morning on TCM. DVR this one for the “Snake Man” scene
alone!
