Feature – Page 11 – Dangerous Universe

Direct Beam Comms #150

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, TVOctober 14, 2018December 2, 2018

TV

The Haunting of Hill House ⭐⭐

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 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.

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 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

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 ⭐

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 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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

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!

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

The Bermuda Depths
Hellboy

Direct Beam Comms #149

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVOctober 7, 2018October 28, 2018

Rumor Control

When I was growing up in the 1980s, Disney wasn’t very popular with the kids I knew. I don’t mean we didn’t see Disney movies, even if many of them were released under the Touchstone Pictures brand, nor did we not watch Disney on TV since there were quite a few cool TV movies released then under the Disney brand then too. But as for what people think of as Disney with Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Pluto and the rest, I don’t remember them being around at the movies or on TV growing up.

The kids I hung out with were much more into characters from Looney Tunes than Mickey Mouse. In fact, for a time in the 1990s Looney Tunes characters like the Tasmanian Devil and Marvin the Martin were everywhere, on t-shirts, cars and body parts with tattoos. But not so much with the mouse.  And I think I know the reason why.

While in the 1980s episodes of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry running after-school were ubiquitous across the TV dial, during that time period Mickey Mouse was nowhere to be found. The reason was back then all things Disney related were moved from regular TV to the new Disney Channel, and back then the Disney Channel was a premium channel you had to pay extra for like HBO. So if your parents didn’t pay up you’d never see any Mickey Mouse cartoons. I knew of exactly one person back then who had the Disney Channel as a kid, the rest of my friends and family did not.

And because there was a whole generation of kids who grew up without a way to easily see Disney cartoons we never had too much fondness for them or their characters.

Which is why the whole idea of these new streaming services popping up all over with that have their own series you can see no where else frightens me a little.

If you want to see new episodes of Star Trek you can only do that on CBS All Access. If you want to see new episodes of the upcoming Star Wars TV show, and eventually any of the Star Wars movies outside of the theater, you’ll have to do that on Disney streaming.

All of which is fine, except I wonder how this will affect those brands in the future?

Part of the reason I love all things Star Wars was growing up the original trilogy of movies would turn up on broadcast TV from time to time. And even when it eventually moved to cable it wasn’t on the premium channels and was easy to see. I remember watching marathons of Star Wars many a Thanksgiving.

The same goes for Star Trek. I only really started watching that series when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered. And when that show hooked me I went back and watched all of The Next Generation since it aired in syndication and was pretty easy to see.

And since I’m a fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek I’ve spent many hours and more money than I’d like to think about on them, collecting everything from the films to posters to toys and everything in between.

I don’t think I’d be as infatuated with them if the only place to see them would’ve been two outlets that my parents would have had to pay extra to get. I might have bee into Star Wars because of the films, but I’m not sure how into them I would’ve been if it wasn’t as easy as it was to see them after the theater?

Right now it makes perfect financial sense to move Star Trek and Star Wars to these streaming services. They have this incredibly dedicated fan-base who’ll follow those franchises to the ends of the Earth and don’t mind paying $10 a month to do so.

My question is in 20 or 30 years when there’s a generation of kids who grew up knowing about shows that only appeared on streaming they might not have gotten, will they care as much as we do today? I think not, I think they’ll be like my generation and Disney. We’re aware of it but we’re not invested in it.

Ironically, right after my generation came of age Disney began getting its act back together and in the 1990s the Disney Channel became part of basic cable. Even more importantly they started releasing a popular series of movies and syndicated TV shows that really connected with the next generation of kids. To them Disney and Aladdin and Rescue Rangers and The Little Mermaid are their childhood touchstones where Looney Tunes and Transformers and G.I. Joe are part of mine.

It will be interesting to see if in a decade or so places like Paramount who owns Star Trek and Disney Star Wars will look back at what they’re doing now as some great mistake? That instead of tapping into a well of fandom they’ve actually capped that well and have taken short-term gains but setup a long-term collapse.

TV

Nightflyers TV commercial

Daredevil promo

Project Blue Book first look

Star Trek: Discovery season 2 commercial

Comics

Absolute Kingdom Come

DC Entertainment is set to release the seminal Mark Waid/Alex Ross comic mini-series Kingdom Come in one of their gorgeous “Absolute” collected editions. The downside is this runs about $100 retail.

In the not-so-distant future, the DC Universe is spinning inexorably out of control. The new generation of heroes has lost their moral compass, becoming as reckless and violent as the villains they fight. The previous regime of heroes—the Justice League—returns under the most dire of circumstances, which sets up a battle of the old guard against these uncompromising protectors in a conflict that will define what heroism truly is. Collects KINGDOM COME #1–4.

Overlord movie trailer

Aquaman extended look

What To Watch This Week

Sunday

The latest animated Star Wars series Star Wars Resistance premiers this week on Disney HD.

TCM begins gearing up for Halloween and will be airing a whole bunch of movies featuring mummies including The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse Sunday evening.

The Walking Dead returns to AMC for it’s 1,790th season.

Tuesday

The surprisingly underperforming Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is released on digital this week.

TCM will air the 1992 Stephen Hawking documentary A Brief History of Time today.

Wednesday

After “Mummy Sunday” TCM will air a “Christopher Lee Wednesday” with a bunch of horror movies that featured the iconic actor with the likes of The Devil’s Bride, Horror of Dracula, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Horror Hotel, The Face of Fu Manchu and Rasputin, the Mad Monk.

Friday

Netflix will release its horror series The Haunting of Hill House Friday.

Matt Weiner’s first new series since Mad Men entitled The Romanoffs debuts on Amazon Prime.

First Man about astronaut Neil Armstrong starring Ryan Gosling premieres in theaters this week.

The Reading & Watch List

Cool TV Posters of the Week

Daredevil poster
Star Trek: Discovery

Lost in TV land

Feature, TVOctober 5, 2018October 28, 2018

It’s getting harder and harder to watch what I want on TV. There was a time and place when everything aired on either the networks or cable outlets, but that time has passed since now there are streaming services too. For a while it was easy to keep track of the streaming shows since there were just a handful to choose from, but lately it seems as if there are nearly as many streaming services as there are cable channels with more launching each year.

Right now I get a basic package from a satellite TV provider, subscribe to HBO and get a few hi-def movie channels too. I also subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Nowadays in addition to the streamers above, there’s Crackle, FX+ and CBS All Access to name a few. And later this year/in 2019 both Disney and DC Entertainment are set to launch their own services and will begin streaming shows like Star Wars and Teen Titans. Even Apple and Walmart are looking into getting into the streaming game too.

All of which is great, but because everything is fragmenting so badly it’s getting really hard to see everything I want to see without subscribing to a multitude of different services. This summer I seriously considered “cutting the cord” and switching to all-streaming.

With my satellite TV package, out of the hundreds of channels I get I watch less than 20 of them, and many of those not regularly. There are quite a few channels I only watch with one or two series a year. Looking at what I’ve DVRd in the past, and what I have set to DVR in the future, I only tend to watch BBC America, AMC, PBS, HBO, those hi-def movie channels and IFC regularly.

There are other channels like FX where I watch things like The Simpsons on occasion and Comedy Central where I watch King of the Hill. But as for original programming on those platforms, I can’t think of anything I watch regularly there.

Looking at all the channels I don’t watch, what I was surprised to find that they all seem to be airing the same stuff. There were lots of episodes of Big Bang Theory and the various procedural criminal dramas like Law & Order and NCIS… series in syndication all over the dial, which really doesn’t make sense to me. If I own a channel and my competitor is already airing Law & Order, why would I want to air that same show too?

I came to the realization that if most of the Earth’s biomass are made up of plants, then most of the TV biomass are made up of shows like Two and a Half Men and CSI along with infomercials.

I was surprised about that too, just how many channels I get that either are selling things or are airing a constant stream of infomercials. That’s a bit disappointing since there are plenty of channels I don’t get that air dramas and comedies I’d get if I subscribed to a pricier TV package, but I do get plenty of channels trying to sell me things.

And don’t get me started on TV commercials that seem to take away more and more programming each year.

Unfortunately, “cutting the cord” for me wouldn’t be that easy.

Where I live I don’t get the best internet connection — I know, SHOCK! And the internet connection I do get has a data cap. Which to me would mean that in order to cut my TV cord I’d need to get upgrade my internet cord to do so. I’d also need to subscribe to HULU and even start buying shows via places like iTunes that sell packages of the latest TV seasons too.

So, I could cut the cord, but in the end I feel like if I wouldn’t be paying the same for what I already get, I might actually be paying more when factoring in things like a higher internet charges and buying TV shows.

For now, I think I’ll stick with what I have. While I’d love to see things like Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access and Star Wars on Disney, I really don’t want to start paying $10 a month here and there to watch them either.

Direct Beam Comms #148

Comic Books, Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVSeptember 30, 2018September 30, 2018

TV

Mr Inbetween

I hadn’t even heard of this FX show until a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t because I saw a trailer or commercial for it on TV or online. I only heard about Mr Inbetween because I happened to see a poster for it that caught my eye, otherwise I doubt I’d have checked out this wonderful series at all since I can’t watch what I don’t know about.

Originally developed for FX Australia but airing here on FX since that channel went “belly up,” Mr. Inbetween follows Ray Shoesmith (Scott Ryan), an underworld hood who’s equally at home tossing guys off of balconies as he is threatening someone for owing $10,000 to the wrong people. As Ray puts it, “I’m the guy who’s here to make you regret not paying up.”

And since Mr Inbetween is an FX show I figured it would have all these over-the-top action scenes of machine guns and violence like practically every other original show they air but that’s just not the case here. There is violence in the first episode, Ray does toss one unsuspecting man off a balcony and onto the hard ground below and in the second he murders a man who might not had it coming, but Mr Inbetween is much more nuanced, grounded, and much more a character piece, than say a similar show on FX like Mayans. Ray feels like a real person with real problems from his job to being a single dad who’s also on the wrong side of 40 for someone who needs to stay in top condition to beat people up for a living.

Unfortunately, I suspect because Mr Inbetween is grounded and because there aren’t machine gun fights every episode, it seems as if FX is burning this one off, airing two episodes back-to-back Tuesday nights at 11:30 PM Eastern. I guess the prime-time slots on FX are already full of things like airing The Avengers for the 100th time.

Oh well. If you’re interested in quality programming that’s character based, checkout Mr Inbetween while you can.

The Good Place

Most sitcoms ascribe to the rule that nothing ever changes. Just look at something like Big Bang Theory. That series has been on the air 12 seasons yet new episodes today aren’t that much different then the ones that debuted more than a decade ago. Which is perfect for shows headed towards syndication where episodes air out of order all the time which might lead to confusion if shows tied together in any real meaningful way. Sitcoms are the comfort food of the TV world where viewers know they can tune into just about any episode and spend a half hour or so with their TV friends. All of which is fine, I just find those kinds of shows in permanent stasis boring.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, there’s one network sitcom that breaks this mold and that sitcom is The Good Place On NBC. In The Good Place characters change all the time.

Spoilers for the first few seasons of the show follow.

In the first season Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) awakens in heaven after an accident only to realize that because of a mixup she was supposed to go to the bad place but switched places with another person who just so happens to also be named Eleanor Shellstrop too. As the season progressed and Eleanor did her darnedest to turn good and really earn a spot in the good place it was revealed that, a) there were others in the good place who were supposed to be in the bad as well and b) it was all a ruse by supposedly good overseer Michael (Ted Danson) who reveals that they’re really in the bad place.

And the second season starts with the characters having their memories wiped and Michael starting over tricking everyone that they’re in the good place. Only this time if Michael fails he’ll be put in a very bad place himself.

The third season begins right after the end of the second where Michael, not wanting to be burned alive for all eternity on the surface of a star, helps Eleanor and her group find a way to the real good place. But in order to do so they’re all sent back to the Earth as if they never died in order to prove to the universe they really do deserve a place in the good place. The group comes together not realizing they already know one and other but there’s one small problem, a new member who just so happens to be a demon (Adam Scott) sent to make sure they don’t earn a ticket to the real good place.

What I dig about The Good Place is that the characters have evolved and changed throughout the series. If in the first season Eleanor is a self-centered destructive person then by the second she’s actively looking out for others in her group, going as far as turning down a spot in the good place if it meant that everyone else couldn’t go with her. And the same goes for Michael, who’s the character who’s changed the most in the series. If in the first season he’s a goofy, lovable guy who can’t understand why his perfect creation is failing in all these weird ways, he’s trying to trick Eleanor into believing it’s because of her, then in the second he starts as this slimy demon who’s actively trying to hurt the main characters of the show until he comes to the realization, abet over hundreds and hundreds of times of “rebooting” everything and trying to convince Eleanor and her group that they’re really in the good place, that what he’s doing is wrong until he goes about helping them escape.

Not only do the characters change but each episode of the show builds upon the last which is death for syndicated series. Viewers can’t start with a random episode and enjoy the show. The only way to watch The Good Place is to start from the first episode and watch from there. Though the series might be bad for syndication it’s great for binge watching via streaming services.

But that’s why I think I like The Good Place so much. I never know what’s lurking around the next corner or how the characters will evolve as the season progresses.

Manifest

The plot to the new NBC series Manifest is genuinely interesting. In it, a airliner takes off from Jamaica in 2013 but lands in New York in 2018. Five years have passed outside, but inside the plane it’s only been a few hours. For some like Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh) it means a mother who’s passed away and a fiancé who ended up marrying her best friend. For others like Ben’s (Josh Dallas) son, it means treatment options for what was considered five years ago terminal leukemia.

Now the idea that a plane taking off and landing someplace/somewhen else isn’t unique, “The Odyssey of Flight 33” from The Twilight Zone and the Stephen King novel The Langoliers immediately spring to mind. Still, Manifest could be a really interesting series about what it’s like to fall asleep in one world and wake up in another.

Some of which is present in Manifest, there are interesting ideas about what happens to a family separated for years and brought together and a woman trying to pick up the pieces of a life broken while she was away and how these people are seen by the outside world.

But in the first episode of Manifest the show takes a bizarre left turn. Instead of focusing on the whole time travel thing, which is pretty interested in itself, the creators of it decided to insert a weird, almost superhero, thread to the series. Here, Michaela begins hearing voices, one warns that a bus she’s riding in is about to hit a little kid and another tells her that she needs to release a few dogs locked behind a gate. She thinks she’s going crazy until her brother shows up after hearing the same thing. And it turns out letting the dogs go was the beginning of cracking the case of two missing girls.

I don’t know how interested I am in sticking with Manifest, the whole voices thing has me really worried. Like, isn’t the whole airplane full of people traveling in time five years interesting enough, isn’t there enough material for at least one season of a show from that all by itself?

Murphy Brown

I remember I used to watch Murphy Brown when it was originally on but honestly can’t remember when I stopped. I wasn’t watching it up until the series ended in 1998 after 10 seasons, nor can I honestly even remember a single episode of the show. Some of that has to be that as far as I can tell other than the period Murphy Brown aired the series never ran in syndication. I’m assuming this is because episodes were sometimes very topical so that jokes about Dan Quayle that worked in 1988 might not be as funny to those alive today who weren’t even born with he was Vice President.

I take it back, I do remember two things about Murphy Brown. The first was that one of the running gags on the show was the character of Murphy Brown had a rotating cast of characters who played her secretary with a new face at the desk every week. That and she had a guy played by the late Robert Pastorelli who spent the seasons constantly renovating her house.

But as for actual episodes and stories, I don’t remember a single one.

And now 20 years after the series originally ended comes another season of the show also on CBS. This time instead of being a brash 40-something Murphy’s a retired 70-something who’s watching the world change around her with no outlet for her opinions. So she decides to get the gang back together and take a job hosting a new show.

I though the first episode of Murphy Brown was interesting, if I’m not sure that I’ll stick around for many more. Sitcoms that measure success by how many jokes they can deliver per minute usually aren’t my thing.

Comics

Marvelocity

Comic book artist and illustrator Alex Ross has already had a collection of his work from DC published with Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross and now comes a collection of his work at Marvel with Marvelocity.

Here is the beloved Marvel Universe of comics characters, brought to thrilling life as only Alex Ross can. They’re all here: Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man, the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, and many more—all seeming to leap, blast, and launch off the page.
For almost thirty years, Ross has been working nonstop to create some of the most astonishing images in comics, and while Marvelocity collects the very best of that oeuvre, it’s much more than that. Inside are hundreds of drawings, paintings, and photographs that have never been published before, including an original ten-page story featuring Spider-Man versus the Sinister Six, redesign proposals for the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and a re-creation of an epic battle between the Sub-Mariner and Iron Man.
But this isn’t just the story of the Marvel characters—it’s also the incredibly inspiring true tale of a little boy who only ever wanted to draw and paint super heroes. And with enough determination, talent, and very hard work, that’s precisely what he did. Marvelocity is the result, and is sure to entrance and delight fans of all ages.

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Vol. 1

If you’ve yet to checkout the early appearances of Swamp Thing you might want to pick up this reasonably priced collection that retails for just $25.

Deep in the bayou of Louisiana, far from civilization’s grasp, a shadowed creature seen only in fleeting glimpses roils the black waters…a twisted, vegetative mockery of a man…a Swamp Thing! These are the tales that introduced Alec and Linda Holland, Anton Arcane, Abigail Cable, the Patchwork Man, the Un-Men, plus an appearance by Batman! Collects THE HOUSE OF SECRETS #92 and SWAMP THING #1–13.

Movies

The two classic Kolchak TV movies get a first-time-ever release on HD this week from Kino Lorber. This is a “must buy” for me as these movies were some of the best things to ever air on broadcast TV.

The Night Stalker:

An investigative journalist takes a stab at the supernatural. This unforgettable first entry in the Night Stalker series introduced the world to the quirky reporter with a penchant for the paranormal and became one of the top-rated TV movies of all time. Investigating a series of Las Vegas murders, Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin, The Night Strangler) discovers that each victim has been bitten in the neck and drained of blood. Though Kolchak’s outlandish theory about the murders gets him nowhere with the police, his initiative to apprehend the killer himself gets him into hot water… with a modern-day vampire…Teleplay by legendary sci-fi/horror writer Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man).

The Night Strangler:

Supernatural phenomena, baffling murders and offbeat humor mark this second Night Stalker offering with a great cast and suspense so palpable, it’ll feel like a presence right there in the room with you. Surfacing in Seattle, Kolchak (Darren McGavin, The Night Stalker) uncovers another maddening mystery: Every 21 years—for the past century—a serial killer commits a spree of murders, drains his victims’ blood and then quietly disappears. But Kolchak is onto this monster and is about to discover a shocking underground lair… an army of rotting corpses… and the ageless madman behind it all. The great Dan Curtis (Burnt Offerings) produced and directed this highly-rated TV movie written by legendary sci-fi/horror writer Richard Matheson (I Am Legend).

Dark Phoenix trailer

What To Watch This Week

Tuesday

The most recent Marvel Studios movie Ant Man and the Wasp gets a release on digital this week.

Wednesday

HDNET Movies will be airing one of the greatest horror movies of all time today, The Evil Dead.

Saturday

Insomniac Theater: A truly bizarre horror flick from 1986 Deadly Friend that has one thing going for it — it was directed by Wes Craven — airs very early Saturday morning on TCM.

Quite possibly my favorite classic sci-fi horror movie of all time The Thing From Another World also airs on TCM Saturday afternoon.

The Reading List

Cool TV Posters of the Week

Supergirl
The Haunting of Hill House

Direct Beam Comms #147

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVSeptember 23, 2018September 23, 2018

Movies

Rumor is that Henry Cavill won’t be returning to the role of Superman/Clark Kent/Kal-El he’s been playing in films since 2013. While Cavill’s been portraying the character for five years, he’s only had one movie of his own, the first Man of Steel, but has also played him in Batman vs Superman and Justice League. Fans are reacting with the news with a bit of shock, but let’s face it, Cavill was never going to play Superman forever. So far five guys have played the character in the movies; Kirk Alyn, George Reeves, Christopher Reeves, Brandon Routh and Cavill and a few more on TV; George Reeves again, Tom Welling and Dean Cain.

And when it comes to the cartoons I’m not even sure how many have voiced Superman. There are many as diverse as Bud Collyer who voiced him on screen in the early 1940s to Jerry O’Connell who played him this year in The Death of Superman.

And that’s not counting Nicolas Cage who very nearly played Superman in a 1990s production that would have been titled Superman Lives that would’ve been written by Kevin Smith and directed by Tim Burton.

So, in many ways Cavill is in good company. Sooner or later his tenure would end and I think it’s best for these actors to leave on good terms with roles like this. He’s played the character for a few years, and whether or not you liked his version/take on the strange visitor from another planet, I think he played him well.

In the short-term there’s been rumors that the new Shazam (Zachary Levi) or the upcoming Supergirl will be filling in for the last son of Krypton whenever a villain needs to be punched in the face really hard. But fear not, eventually some other actor will be brought in to fill the man of tomorrow’s boots.

Lost movies

I’ve always been interested in versions of movies that almost were. One example of this is the recent Solo: A Star Wars Story. That movie was originally going to be directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller who were three weeks away from being finished with their version before being fired for “creative differences” and director Ron Howard was brought in to complete the film/reshoot scenes.

While I really dig Howard’s version of the movie, I wonder what Lord and Miller’s version would’ve been like? Here are a few other movies that started out one way but ended another.

Enemy Mine
Originally begun by director Richard Loncraine, this sci fi flick starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. was halted and Loncraine fired when the studio didn’t like what he was delivering. Wolfgang Petersen was brought in and threw out Loncraine’s footage, redid everything from the special effects to the sets, reshot the script from the first page and delivered the finished film of what we now know of as Enemy Mine.

Galaxy Quest
While there’s not another version of Galaxy Quest floating out there like there might with Solo: A Star Wars Story or Enemy Mine, the tone of Galaxy Quest did change after the film was completed. Originally, the movie was rated R and scenes were cut and objectionable language changed in order to secure a PG–13 rating. But if you pay close attention, there’s still a hint of this rated R version hiding in the PG–13 version of the movie that was released. When Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver’s characters are climbing through the innards of their ship the NSEA Protector, there’s a part where they have to crawl through a Rube Goldberg inspired section where it looks like everything inside is meant to cut, squash or burn the two to death. Weaver’s character takes one look at the setup and says, “Well, screw that!” But if you watch her mouth, what she’s really saying, and what was dubbed over, was “Well, f@#k that!”

Today that line might have survived the cut and made it into the PG–13 version of the movie, but back in 1999 when the movie was released that was a no-go.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web trailer

Captain Marvel trailer

TV

The Haunting of Hill House TV spot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9OzG53VwIk

What To Watch This Week

Monday

Mainfest
This new series that looks absolutely not at all like a sequel to Lost mixed with This is Us premiers on NBC this week.

Tuesday

Doctor Who
Beginning Tuesday morning with episodes of the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, BBC America will be airing 13 days straight of Doctor Who.

Thursday

Murphy Brown
The old sitcom reboot train continues with Murphy Brown, a new show that picks up more than 20 years after the series ended back in 1998. And to be honest, I can’t believe Murphy Brown ran all the way ’til 1998.

The Good Place
The third season of the oh-so-good The Good Place returns to NBC this week.

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Captain Marvel
Daredevil