There’s nothing on TV to watch these days. Of course I jest, mostly. But whereas a few months ago I was watching loads of shows, and even a few weeks ago my DVR was still recording several things to watch each week, these days it’s mostly barren. I mean, when all you’re recording in a week are old episodes of This Old House and NOVA you know you’re in trouble.
It doesn’t help matters that the start of July is a sort’a dead-zone for TV here in the US. Most of the series that debuted last fall are done and those that weren’t cancelled are in hibernation. And while there are a few new things here and there premiering on streaming services — for the most part the new shows that will premiere on cable and network next fall TV have just gone into production and won’t start airing episodes for months.
Whereas before I’d spend the week looking forward to checking out new shows, for the most part in the heat of summer I’ve been watching reruns of things like The X-Files and Doctor Who.
One interesting thing about The X-Files… When the series originally ran I was all about the episodes that dealt with the series spanning conspiracy story that ran through the show. And while I also dug the stand-alone “monster of the week” episodes, back then they were second best to Mulder and Scully finding out who was really behind all those UFO abductions. Nowadays that’s flipped. Whenever there’s a conspiracy episode on I usually change the channel, but adore the “monster of the week” ones. I’m not sure if it was because at the time The X-Files originally aired those conspiracy episodes felt timely and I was dying to learn the truth that the truth really was out there or if in the intervening years after having watched hundreds of hours of the show and two films I realized there wasn’t anything to the conspiracy story. It was a bust, so why watch them all again today?
Which makes me wonder. If part of the reason shows like The X-Files are still airing in syndication today is because of the stand-alone “monster of the week episodes,” where does that leave most modern series today that have no stand-alone episodes and are all series spanning stories?
Anyway, there’s not a lot on TV these days to watch. In addition to watching episodes of old sci-fi and horror series I’ve already seen before I’ve been watching films too. Well, “films” might be too fancy a word — I’ve been watching “movies” like Total Recall and Bright Lights Big City that I’ve just happened to catch on TV, recorded and watched later. I do that quite a bit.
Looking out the next few weeks TV-wise it doesn’t look like there’s much relief in sight. I’m still working my way through GLOW and should probably go back and finish up The Santa Clarita Diet and Lost in Space, but as for new shows in the month of July there’s really only the reboot of In Search Of on History that I’m looking forward to and perhaps Castle Rock on HULU. I mean, Castle Rock is a show based on the works of Stephen King that’s being executive produced by J. J. Abrams which sure sounds interesting to me. The big drawback is that it’s on HULU. Which I don’t get. And I’ve made a commitment to myself not to subscribe to any other streaming services just to checkout a show or two.
Even if this summer when there’s really nothing on TV and Star Trek: Discovery is practically calling to me on CBS All Access saying, “There are new episodes here!” makes it really hard to not pull out my credit card and subscribe for a month or two and binge watch some Starfleet action.
I know for a fact that if I could somehow get a message to myself when I was a teenager and tell past-Bert that the biggest movies in the cineplexes would be based on Marvel comic characters I don’t think I would believe my future-self. Back in the 1990s, not only were comic books and comic collectors perceived as being quite lame, but the very few successful movies based on comics that were being released were all from DC. The ones from Marvel were so bad they were skipping theaters entirely and going straight to video.
Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly
If I might not believe the popularity of the Marvel movies, I know I wouldn’t believe my future-self if I would have included that one of the biggest movies to date was going to be one featuring the character of Black Panther and that other characters like Ant Man would have their own film franchises too. That would’ve been too crazy to believe.
Yet we do live in a time where a character like Ant Man, who when I was collecting comics was almost entirely irrelevant, has his own successful movie series, the second of which Ant Man and The Wasp now in theaters.
Not quite your typical Marvel movie, the first Ant Man (2015) was an interesting mix of a heist, science, action and comic book movie all rolled into one. Whereas most comic book movies feature a big villain coming down to destroy the Earth or otherwise murder a lot of people, in Ant Man the setting is small but the stakes are still big.
Ex-con Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is forced to become the next Ant Man from the first iteration of the hero Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). Pym’s been hiding his technology for decades after he lost his wife during a mission and needs Lang who’s good at breaking into places and stealing things to stop Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) who’s on the verge of recreating the tech for his own nefarious purposes.
Michael Douglass
What happens if Cross wins? He’ll be able to sell the shrinking technology to the bad guys who will be able to do all sorts of bad guy things using it. But the world probably isn’t going to end because of it.
What’s interesting too about Ant Man is because the conceit of the film is that Lang can shrink down to the size of an ant, much of the film takes place in small, confined environments that usually don’t feature superhero battles. One part of the movie takes place in the bottom of a bathtub made cavernous because of Lang’s size, another inside a briefcase as it falls from the sky while the final battle between Lang and Cross has the most unique setting of any superhero battle I can think of.
Ant Man
It occurs in Lang’s daughter’s bedroom, but because the antagonists are teeny-tiny small things like her toy train set and stuffed animals become impossible large. At one point, the two are riding on the train and are trying to zap one and other with laser bolts of death. But when the camera cuts away to what the daughter sees at regular size, it’s a small, almost unnoticeable fight where those explosions come off as mere sparks you might miss if you weren’t paying really close attention.
Ant Man was one of the first modern superhero movies to have a comedic tone yet isn’t a spoof. It’s got all the elements of the traditional comic book movie, costumes, big action scenes, characters with personal problems, but it’s takes more of a fun approach to the material than most movies do. In the heavy Captain America: Civil War movie where the superheroes aren’t superfriends anymore, one of the two characters brought in to lighten things up during one of the big battles is Scott Lang.
This new Ant Man and The Wasp movie is set to team up Lang and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) as two characters with the power to shrink who must face off against the Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) who not only can shrink but she can easily move through things just like a, well, ghost.
Who would have ever guessed that a series about the 1980s female TV wrestling program GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling would be so good? The second season of the drama GLOW on Netflix debuted Friday and picked up right where the first season left off. If the first season was about the girls of GLOW lead by Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin banding together to make something out of nothing — even if it’s a women’s wrestling program that airs on local TV — then the second is about what happens when these same girls realize that if they’re all not looking out for themselves, no one will.
The cast of GLOW
The story of GLOW is complex. On the one hand it’s about these wild, over-the-top comic book-esque characters doing all these nutty and crazy things in a wrestling ring. They’ve got names like “Zoya the Destroya,” “Liberty Bell” and “The Welfare Queen” with over-the-top personalities to match. On the other hand these characters are played by “real” people like Ruth Wilder (Brie) an actress who hasn’t quite figured out how to make it in Hollywood and accidentally finds herself at a GLOW audition and realizes this might be her only chance at fame, Debbie Eagan (Gilpin) another actress who did make it in Hollywood for a time before having a baby derailed her career and Tammé Dawson (Kia Stevens) who plays the “Welfare Queen” in the ring but in “real life” has a son who’s attending Stanford and is willing to do anything, even play the “Welfare Queen” on TV, to keep him there.
And these are just a few of the deep and interesting characters of GLOW.
I kind’a sort’a wonder if the second season of GLOW will mark the beginning of the end of the fictional show within-the-show of the same name? While the real GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling turned out to be very influential, it only ran for four seasons and then only in syndication. I wonder if that’s where the fictional GLOW is headed too? The first episode is kind’a setting things up that way with director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) firing one of the girls for insubordination, Eagan renegotiating her contract for more money and a producer credit on the show and Wilder finding out that her spirit of “all for one, one for all” might be wasted on GLOW.
The fictional GLOW looks like a fun place to visit but it’s a facade, the “real life” place the actors of GLOW live in is just as unforgiving as our own.
Westworld
Westerns and sci-fi usually don’t go very well together. Whenever these genera meet it’s usually not very pretty — Cowboys vs Aliens immediately pops to mind. However, the exception to that rule is the marvelous Westworld series on HBO that mixes both genres together into something both new and familiar that wrapped up its second season last week.
Ed Harris and Evan Rachel Wood
In Westworld, it’s the future at the park of the same name guests can come and interact with the robotic “hosts” in a place that looks and feels like the real wild west. But the guests aren’t interested in playing nice with the hosts, many of them are there play out every dark fantasy they’ve ever had in a consequence-free environment during their stay. Much of the first season of Westworld had a distinctly Philip K. Dick vibe going on and dealt with a software glitch that caused many of the hosts to realize the true nature of the reality they’re trapped in and want to rebel.
The focus of the second season of Westworld is on the rebellion and its aftermath, told in two separate timelines. Here, once meek and mild host Dolores (Rachel Evan Wood) now leads a band of robots doing to whatever guests they find along the way that had been done to them over the years. But they’re not just out for blood, they’re also trying to find the fabled “valley beyond” and escape from the park. In a parallel story another group lead by ex-madam Maeve (Thandie Newton) who can control and reprogram other hosts on the fly searches the park for her daughter while guest William (Ed Harris) is trying to find the real meaning of Westworld hidden somewhere inside its borders. And that’s not even mentioning Bernard’s (Jeffrey Wright) story of, shall we say, “self discovery” in the second season of the show too.
Jeffrey Wright and Tessa Thompson
If the first season was Philip K. Dick then the second was a bit of that along with Solaris with Terminator thrown in for good measure.
I really enjoyed the second season of Westworld if I was a bit confused at finale episode. There were a few too many twists and turns and “is this taking place in the past or future?” in the finale for me to keep them all straight. There were a lot of stories all going on in the second season, probably too many to be neatly wrapped up in one episode which Is what I felt happened in the last one. In addition to wrapping things up and clipping dangling storylines, there was also a bit of new story, getting things ready for the third season of the show due out sometime next year in the finale.
I think it would have made more sense to rather than try and wrap everything up in the finale, to instead only finish some of the storylines and continue others next season.
The Expanse
There once was a time when The Sci-Fi Channel was the destination for quality science fiction programming. In addition to airing lots of classic sci-fi shows, they also aired series like Farscape, Stargate SG–1 and the Battlestar Galactica reboot in addition to doing things like creating mini-series like Dune. But over the years things changed and as The Sci-Fi Channel chased the bottom line into the ground airing things like professional wrestling and cheap-o movies like the Sharknado series while also changing their name to SYFY, fans of the genera slowly began abandoning the channel for other venues. However, a few years back new management seeing how well sci-fi was doing on other venues decided to once again air more original sci-fi programming on SYFY, one of the first shows of this new slate was The Expanse.
The cast of The Expanse
Great from the very beginning, The Expanse is set in the near-future where mankind is living on the Earth, Mars and throughout the solar system and is still struggling with all the things we struggle with today. But when a mysterious alien artifact is discovered that threatens the entire human race, humanity must band together or face extinction. The Expanse was the first show in a long while to return to the genera of “people in big ships zooming around in outer space” and is a show that seemed like it was made for me. Over the three seasons of The Expanse I only loved it more as the story of the series changed and shifted from what started out in the first season to the current third season.
If the first season and second seasons were about the lead-up to war because of this artifact, then the third was about this war breaking out. Which I figured was going to take up the bulk of the third season of the The Expanse. But that’s not what happened. Rather than focus on this war, the creators of The Expanse instead stopped the conflict in its tracks and then jumped ahead many months into the future. Going from conflict to a weird sort of inter-solar system alliance to figure out what happened when the artifact changed into a … something.
The ships of The Expanse
And that’s where the second half of the third season of The Expanse spent its time, trying to figure out what this artifact had become while at the same time trying to keep the conflict that had just been capped from boiling back over into war.
Honestly, the third season of The Expanse was the best season of the show so far, and I was dying to see where the series was going to go from here.
Except that even before it ended SYFY announced that they were going to cancel The Expanse after its third season. Their reasoning was the ratings of the show were never what they wanted and that since the series had convoluted streaming deals in place that didn’t benefit SYFY they weren’t going to commission any more seasons of the show.
Which was a major bummer, but luckily the cancellation was short-lived as Amazon quickly stepped up and picked up the show for their Prime service.
Still, it burns me to no end how much SYFY has fallen from once being the home to sci-fi to the thing it is now. When I want to watch sci-fi I almost never turn to SYFY, I turn to places like BBC America that shows things like Star Trek and The X-Files, pay cable like HBO with Westworld and Fahrenheit 451 and online streaming services like Netflix with Stranger Things and Lost in Space. SYFY? I usually avoid it at all costs — even morso now that they dumped The Expanse.
Ironically, the big new “thing” that Syfy has been promoting as of late is them being the new home of the Harry Potter film franchise. The film franchise that at this point is a whopping 17 years old. The film franchise that has been playing on all sorts of other channels for those 17 years already.
The Expanse is new and fresh and I’m extremely excited that I’ll be able to watch new episodes of it on Prime (hopefully) next year. As for Harry Potter on Syfy? Give me a break.
A new edition of the critically acclaimed and highly influential Lone Wolf and Cub manga series is due out this week. This volume costs a whopping $100 but has reproduced the artwork at its original size and in original Japanese.
Kazuo Koikes samurai epic is a tour-de-force of graphic fiction, and the Lone Wolf and Cub Gallery Edition features selections of the late Goseki Kojima’s spectacular illustration reproduced at original size on heavy-stock art paper to preserve the work in detail as it exists today, as close as one can come to owning these rarest of artworks. Including in its entirety the final titanic clash between ogami Itto and Yagyu Retsudo. This deluxe volume is a must-have for collectors and enthusiasts of the finest comic art ever created.
Taylor Sheridan has had a good couple of years. Not only was he the writer of the Oscar nominated Hell or High Water film a few years back, he is also the creator of the Sicario film of which a sequel is due in theaters in a few weeks. And now comes Sheridan’s latest co-creation the TV series Yellowstone on the Paramount Network.
The cast of Yellowstone
Starring Kevin Costner in his first role in a TV series, Yellowstone is about the Dutton family living in Montana of which John (Coster) is the head of. The Dutton’s own the largest ranch in the US and that’s where the problem lies. It’s so big everything around it is closing in from Indian casinos to housing developments. And while Dutton might have the land to spare he doesn’t want to part with any of it making this powerful man a target for powerful enemies.
On his side are two of his kids Jamie (Wes Bentley) a lawyer, Lee (Dave Annable) head of the ranch and Beth (Kelly Reilly) a business executive. But youngest son Kayce (Luke Grimes) is estranged from his father from something that happened in the past.
Yellowstone isn’t bad but I didn’t think it was that great either. I wasn’t quite sure who to root for? Is it the Dutton family who are trying to stop progress, even as dad flies around his ranch in a helicopter and live in a nice house, or is it the people trying to build subdivisions and expand communities that cut into the wilderness. On the one hand I can see Dutton’s point that with every winner there must be a loser, and it’s usually those who aren’t too well off who lose. But on the other hand it’s tough to take that kind’a advice from a guy who’s the biggest winner in Montana.
If you dig shows like the classic Dallas but always thought there should be more modern-day cowboys in that series then you’ll probably also love Yellowstone.
In Search Of TV spot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXylT6_BMLI
Movies
Mission Impossible home media art
I noticed that the artwork being used for the digital download and Blu-ray versions of the Mission Impossible movies had been updated recently. Before, those covers used things like the movie posters for the previous films while the new ones feature a unified look that ties the movies together.
I’ve noticed other franchise movies like those from Marvel do this too. I suppose when the movie studios are trying to sell the franchise as a whole and not necessarily each individual film a unified marketing approach makes sense.
A new line of Robotech 3.75” ReAction figures are due out sometime this fall from Super7. Figures include four veritech fighters including Rick Hunter and Roy Fokker’s jets, the SDF–1 and a Zentraedi Battle Pod. The figures will retail for around $15 each.
If you are reading this, the reason why is because of the summer of 1998. Back then I was a punk college kid who finally had a job that would allow me to go to the movie theater on a regular basis. And getting this job coincided with the 1998 summer movie season.
I’ve been interested in movies all my life, but until 1998 going to them was a luxury. I’d go to the movies a few times a year before then, but that always felt like a special occasion and I didn’t always get to see what I would have chosen to. In the 1990s as the movie landscape began to shift I started to pay more and more attention to what was all coming out and began buying magazines like Cinescape and watching Entertainment Tonight in order to be able to see what movies were coming out. Back then, I only had a part time job and as a college student couldn’t really go see a lot of movies in the theater.
And because I was interested in movies, and interested in all things creative, I started this website that year specifically to do things like cover all the upcoming movies I was interested in.
There were a few early websites that were already doing this like Dark Horizons and Ain’t it Cool News that were very influential to me. Those sites were mostly about breaking news scoops for upcoming movies. Around that same time there were also proto-blogs that were becoming popular too. Myself, I was more interested in writing about things I’d already seen rather than just about upcoming movie news. So what Dangerous Universe would become was somewhere in between a movie news site and a blog. But rather than talking about my life as people do in blogs I’d talked about movies I’d seen, and as TV became more influential that too.
Over the decades I’ve quit Dangerous Universe many times and the site would sit fallow for long periods, and there were many other years that I’d only post things to the site once or twice a month, if that. But for whatever reason, be it my love of movies and TV shows or simply because I need a creative outlet to express my views or I’d go crazy, Dangerous Universe has endured. The last few years I’ve probably posted more to Dangerous Universe than I have in the last 10 years, and that’s saying a lot. Even 20 years later I still enjoy it.
And I’m not sure it would be here if the summer of 1998 had a bunch of movies that sucked rather than ones that rocked.
