Category: TV

Direct Beam Comms #119

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

The X-Files season 11

Over the decades the series The X-Files has had many endings. The first of which was its ending in the 1998 theatrical film, then there was an ending to the series when that finished in 2002, there was also an ending to the 2008 “I want to believe” film and the ending to the series again when it returned to FOX for a short run in 2016, all of which could easily have stood as a series ending but didn’t. So this new ending to the current crop of The X-Files episodes on FOX next Wednesday is nothing new, if this time it feels more permanent than before.

The X-FIles

What started this season as a little confusing with the first episode evolved into a strong season of The X-Files with some standout-episodes like the hilarious “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” the nearly dialog free “Rm9sbG93ZXJz,” the creepy “Familiar”and brilliant/gross “Nothing Lasts Forever.” For the most part, the episodes that worked this season were ones not tied to the overall conspiracy mythos. The conspiracy episodes were odd and really didn’t fit well with the stand-alone ones, but still, even a halfway decent episode of The X-Flies is better that most other series episodes out there these days.

Why does this ending to The X-Files feel different then before? It’s because this time Gillian Anderson has said she’s done with the show. Now this has happened in the past with co-star David Duchovny in the early 2000s when he effectively left the series after its seventh season. This time, though, with Duchovny pushing 60 and Gillian Anderson finding success in other shows, I could see this season of The X-Files being the last.

Well, last to a certain extent. Though I’d love to see Duchovny and Anderson return to The X-Files at some point in the future, even Darren McGavin famously kind’a sort’a reprised his role as Kolchak at age 76 in an episode of The X-Files, I think it’s more likely than not that at some point in the near future FOX will reboot the series with a brand new Mulder and Scully or with new characters replacing the old like has been done in the Star Trek and Star Wars films.

Still, to me Mulder and Scully will always be Duchovny and Anderson.

The Expanse season 3 TV spot

Comics

Infinity Gauntlet Box Set Slipcase Hardcover

Infinity Gauntlet Boxed SetThis nearly 5,000 page edition, that’s no type-o folks, will retail for $450 and is out this week just in time for the release of Avengers: Infinity War.

From Amazon:

The Mad Titan Thanos has gathered the Infinity Gems – and he plans to transform our universe into a nightmarish tribute to his true love, Death! Adam Warlock and the Silver Surfer unite Earth’s heroes and the universe’s cosmic powers to stand against Thanos and his Infinity Gauntlet…but when the dust settles, Adam Warlock’s good and evil sides – the Goddess and the Magus – may prove to be even bigger threats! Witness the birth of the Infinity Watch, as the universe must deal with infinite war and a cosmic crusade! But through all the chaos, what is Thanos’ secret agenda? Jim Starlin’s cosmic masterpiece, the 1990s’ “Infinity Trilogy,” is collected in full in this titanic box set, including every chapter, crossover and tie-in – plus an entire volume of bonus stories and behind-the scenes extras! It doesn’t get more Infinite than this!

Movies

Avengers: Infinity War trailer

The Movie Chain: #99: The Bourne Identity (2002)

Last week: The Martian

The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.

The Bourne IdentityI remember how excited I got when The Bourne Identity was released. In 2002 the spy movie genera was waning with the stalwart James Bond franchise experiencing its last gasps before being rebooted in 2006. But otherwise there wasn’t much else out there spy-guy-wise. Enter The Bourne Identity.

Part of the reason I was excited about this one was that it seemed like it was a spy movie meant for my generation. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon of last week’s The Martian) was a young guy at the time and the movie was being directed by Doug Liman who’s previous film Go was, and still probably is, one of my all-time favorite films. Differentiating itself from the Bond franchise, in The Bourne Identity Jason Bourne is a man who’s lost his memory and is in a journey across Europe with Marie (Franka Potente) to find his origins. Along the way he finds that when backed into a corner or threatened he can kick almost anyone’s butt on “autopilot,” can fight his way out of any situation or get out of any building when things look bleak.

Watching The Bourne Identity today I’m surprised as to just how small this movie is when compared to the other films that would come. The big action sequence here is Bourne and Marie in a car chase, except they’re driving an old, beat-up Mini Cooper rather than some flashy car like in the Bond films. Of course, all this would come later and this “smallness” that was a feature of The Bourne Identity was chipped away in subsequent films until now there’s not much difference between Bourne and Bond.

One interesting thing — The Bourne Identity didn’t do that well at the box office when it was released. It certainly made money for the studio, but it wasn’t a smash movie that year. I think what saved the franchise from doom was word of mouth and strong DVD sales. Let’s put it this way — in 2002 The Bourne Identity wasn’t even a top 20 movie in terms of box office. In 2004 The Bourne Supremacy was in the top ten.

Next week: Dance the night away!

Rumor Control

I’ve been overdosing on sci-fi lately. It’s easy to do. These days sci-fi is the most popular type of genera programming so it seems as if every week or two there’s some new sci-fi movie or TV series to come along that demands attention. Be it a series like Black Mirror or movie like Mute, more and more is available every month.

Mute
Mute

And that’s not taking into account all the classic sci-fi series and movies out there too. In the last few weeks I’ve bought films like 2010, Outland and Akira and series like Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica as well. Some weeks, especially when the Olympics were on and there weren’t too many things to watch, I was sci-fi all the time. If I wasn’t working through series like Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams then I was sampling shows like Altered Carbon while also catching movies like Alien Resurrection on TV. It’s almost like TV programmers have finally figured out that more people than just the geeks like me are into sci-fi and have started adjusting their programming accordingly.

One Sunday I was flipping back and forth between Mad Max: Fury Road and Alien: Covenant with The Martian airing a little later on. I was in heaven.

What’s really cool are things like the two original Netflix movies that debuted the last few months. First was The Cloverfield Paradox and then Mute. While I didn’t think that either of these movies were great, I still dug both of them a lot and thought they were each a lot of fun.

And all these shows and movies seem to be just the tip of the iceberg as it were in 2018 sci-fi wise. There’s also the upcoming new ABC show The Crossing, Krypton on Syfy and Netflix series Lost in Space to look forward to as well as returning shows like The Expanse and Westworld too. And that’s just what’s coming out in the next few months. If the flood of sci-fi that’s been coming out for some time now continues into 2018 I can only imagine what wonders we’ll be brought.

WestworldI’ve been watching so much sci-fi the last few weeks/months I had to ask myself the question, is it too much? On the one hand how can “too much” sci-fi be a bad thing? On the other hand there’s so much of it coming out, and so much is good, is the flood of it diluting sci-fi in general? Like will people one day look back on 2018 at some point in the future where sci-fi has returned to its traditional levels, a few series on TV and a few movies a year, and see this year as an aberration?

I’d suppose so. I think we’re living in this weird time when there’s so many outlets for TV be it cable, broadcast, streaming, on demand, online, digital download… and all these outlets want their own original programming means that programmers are willing to take chances on things they might not have a few years ago. So instead of just getting clones of CSI and Grey’s Anatomy we get a lot of interesting shows too like The Orville and Counterpart and what sounds like interesting series like Fahrenheit 451.

I always seem to be able to find interesting things to watch, even in times like in the early 2000s when it was very hard to do so. But these days when there’s so much TV out there and so much of it is great I think it’s now possible to find great things I want to watch just in my favorite niche of sci-fi. My concern is that I’ll get lost in my little pop-culture bubble, will become so immersed in sci-fi that I’ll forget to pop my head out and take a look around at what else is out there. I love sci-fi and I can’t get enough of it, but there’s more out there TV and movie-wise than just sci-fi. Am I right, or am I crazy and should I just enjoy all my sci-fi programs while they last?

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the week

Direct Beam Comms #118

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Star Wars Rebels

Over the years I’ve had to remind myself that for the most part, Star Wars Rebels is a kid’s show. Time and time again I’d get sucked into the story of the series only to get pulled out when there’d be an episode that was all-action, or one where the characters break into some location they realistically shouldn’t be able to or do some otherwise fantastical thing that didn’t fit with the “sci-fi realism” other episodes. Then I’d have to remember, Star Wars Rebels is a kid’s show on a kid’s network, Disney XD, and all the episodes with the complex stories and character relationships that I’ve dug so much over the last four seasons but came to an end last week; those were the anomalies that didn’t fit with the standard kid’s show episodes.

But beautiful anomalies they were.

Star Wars Rebels was one of the first Star Wars “things” to debut after Disney bought the franchise from George Lucas a few years ago. Taking place sometime before the events of Episode IV, in Star Wars Rebels it’s dark days for the nascent rebellion who, at that point, literally have no hope of defeating the Empire. Enter the crew of the ship the Ghost lead by one of the only Jedi left alive after Episode III Kanan Jarrus (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and ace-pilot Hera Syndulla (Vanessa Marshall) who, along with their crew, try and stop the Empire’s expanse anyway they can while also teaching young Ezra Bridger (Taylor Gray) the ways of the Jedi. Along the way the likes of Darth Maul and even Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones himself!!!) shows up to try and put an end to the rebellion.

The creators of Star Wars Rebels did a great job of not upsetting hard-core fans of Star Wars like me while at the same time telling new and interesting stories from a period that, up until then, wasn’t mined very well for its potential in previous media. Anyone who knows Star Wars knows that the Empire is at its height in Episode IV and because Star Wars Rebels takes place immediately before the start of that movie, we as the audience knows the characters on the show aren’t going to be the ones to defeat the Empire. But playing on this, in Star Wars Rebels many of the victories are minor ones, and because the focus of the show is of the crew of the Ghost, even these small victories can feel like big ones.

Over the course of four seasons there’s been a few ups and downs with Star Wars Rebels, which is to be expected. Some episodes worked better than others and some seasons worked better than others too. But it’s the fact that any of the episodes worked at all on a level other than simple kid’s action series that I think Star Wars Rebels was one of those hidden animation gems that fans of the genera flock to but most others ignore because, “I don’t watch cartoons.”

I suppose even if Star Wars Rebels is done I should be happy that the creators of the series got to tell their whole story without the show being cancelled before the end of the story as so many animated series are.

Legion TV spot

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

Lost in Space TV spot

Comics

New Mutants Epic Collection: Curse of the Valkyries Paperback

New Mutants Epic Collection: Curse of the Valkyries PaperbackI have a feeling that this collected edition of New Mutants was originally meant to coincide with the release of the New Mutants movie that was originally due out this spring. Except that movie was pushed back til next year while this collected edition is still being published on its original release date. This edition is kind’a interesting in that it marks the end of the original New Mutants story run right before Rob Liefeld took over the book up until issue #100 when New Mutants would come to an end and be transitioned over to X-Force.

From Marvel:

From the horror of Limbo to the glory of Asgard! As the fires of Inferno burn, the New Mutants must escape Magik’s dark domain – but that leaves the way open for S’ym and his demons to invade Earth! Luckily, X-Factor’s former wards, the X-Terminators, are on the scene! Can Rusty, Skids, Boom-Boom, Rictor, Artie, Leech and Wiz Kid help the New Mutants repel an army of demons and save Magik’s soul? Then, when Hela’s evil spell corrupts Mirage’s Valkyrie side, Doctor Strange lends a magical hand! But to cure Mirage completely, the New Mutants must travel to Asgard, home of the mighty Norse gods! The trouble is, Hela is scheming to murder Odin and conquer Asgard! Will a handful of mortal mutants be enough to defeat the Goddess of Death?

Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics, Vol. 2

Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics, Vol. 2The second collected edition of the Star Wars newspaper strips is out this week. If the first edition was somewhat unique in that all they had to go on was the first movie, then this edition had the first and second movie, the Marvel comic book stories and a few novels for the creators of the newspaper strips to draw from.

From IDW:

The epic seven-days-a-week sagas begin with “Han Solo at Stars’ End,” based on the novel by Brian Daley, adapted by Archie Goodwin and Alfredo Alcala, followed by seven complete adventures by the storied team of Archie Goodwin and artist Al Williamson. The pair had previously worked together on Creepy, Eerie, and Blazing Combat comics magazines, the Flash Gordon comic book, and 13 years on the Secret Agent Corrigan newspaper strip. They seamlessly shifted gears to take over, at George Lucas’s request, the Star Wars newspaper strip. Included are all strips from October 6, 1980 to February 8, 1981.

Movies

The Movie Chain: #10: The Martian (2015)

Last week: Sunshine

The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.

The Martian posterI thought the film The Martian was okay when I first saw it. This movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) marooned on Mars when he’s left behind after a natural disaster and has to survive without any realistic hope of rescue, then having to wait years for rescue to arrive wasn’t my favorite movie of the year. But over the last few years I’ve found myself watching it again, and again. In fact, I’ve probably watched parts of The Martian at least ten times.

I think part of the appeal of the movie for me is the theme of never giving in to desperation. I’m pretty much just the opposite — I’m the guy who would have stayed in the CDC building at the end of the first season of The Walking Dead along with Dr. Jenner. But to see a movie where the message is fight ‘em til you can’t and then fight some more really resonated with me like with the movie Dunkirk did a few weeks back.

I liked The Martian so much that I recently had to put a moratorium on watching it whenever it comes on TV. Sometimes I’ll get so infatuated with certain movies I’ll watch them so many times that I’ll start to dislike them because of over exposure and I don’t want that happening with The Martian.

Next week: No memories? No worries, solve your problems by kicking people in their heads and punching them in their faces.

Cool TV Posters of the Week

Posters of the weeb

Direct Beam Comms #117

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

McMafia ***/****

The last few years AMC has been mostly known as the network that airs The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, marathons of The Walking Dead, marathons of Fear the Walking Dead, repeats of The Walking Dead, repeats of Fear the Walking Dead, Talking Dead, marathons of Breaking Bad and, on occasion, wonderful shows like Better Call Saul. But, for the most part, what once was a network that used to air edgy shows like Mad Men and the above mentioned Breaking Bad now mostly devotes itself to airing back-episodes of shows about flesh-eating zombies. So when a show like McMafia comes along and there’s no characters literally eating other characters I’m not sure what to make of it?

I jest, but whereas McMafia feels like a show that would have fit perfectly on AMC ten years ago, today it feels a bit of an anachronism on there today. But I mean that in a good way.

In McMafia, James Norton plays 1%er fund manager Alex Godman who’s family emigrated to the UK from Russia decades ago. Alex’s life is wonderful. He’s got a beautiful girlfriend, a healthy family and a booming business. But when an item in the news wrongly claims ties from his fund to illegal money coming out of Russia it puts his business into a tailspin. And when Alex’s uncle is murdered, assassinated really, in front of him, he realizes that even though he was never directly tied to his father or uncle’s shady business practices, it doesn’t matter to the people against him and Alex needs to take the family crime mantle as it were or end up in an early grave.

In many ways McMafia reminds me of the TV series Damages, a seemingly legitimate business is involved in illegal activities, mixed with a series like Traffik where crime and corruption are worldwide and the only reason people don’t see it is because they don’t want to. I enjoyed McMafia a lot if I have a few reservations. I keep getting the feeling that this is going to turn into some bigger, British version of the series Breaking Bad. Where a seemingly nice and normal dude in the first episode becomes a not-so-nice and murderous man by the last one. Which is fine, I just hope that the creators of McMafia blaze their own trail rather than following the well-worn path established by Breaking Bad.

Heathers */****

The newest Paramount Network TV series Heathers is set to debut this Wednesday. Or at least it was until the debut of the series was pushed back until sometime later this year after real-life events at Parkland High overtook the fictional story in Heathers. However, the network released the series based on the 1989 movie of the same name a little early to streaming services so lots of people had the chance to see it before it was pulled last week.

The first episode of Heathers follows most of the major beats of the movie where at Westerberg High there are three people named “Heather,” all girls in the original but two girls and a guy here, who are the cool kids at the school. Alongside these Heathers is Veronica (Grace Victoria Cox) who’s semi-cool by association and new kid/dreamboat J.D. (James Scully) who quickly draws Veronica’s eye. One night out the two decide to go over to lead Heather’s (Melanie Field) house and take some embarrassing photos and videos and post them to her social networks. But things don’t go as planned and the two end up accidentally killing Heather.

Which is the first problem I had with the series. In the movie J.D. and Veronica (Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) actually kill Heather and spend the rest of the movie trying to cover it up by murdering others in that black comedy. Yet in the TV series, Veronica and J.D. think they’ve killed Heather when in fact she’s not dead. But a suicide video that J.D. And Veronica put together for her goes viral, so when Heather awakens she finds out that she’s famous. Which is really lame. The whole idea of the movie is of this weird, murderous spree J.D. tricks and the cajoles Veronica to go on. I’m assuming the TV version avoids the high school murder-spree thing since, unfortunately, kids being murdered at high schools is a fact of life in 2018 America. But if the creators of the TV Heathers aren’t going to address this in some way and instead are going to change the essence of this story then I don’t know why they’d choose to make a TV version of Heathers in the first place other than on name recognition alone?

Honestly, this all might be a case of the TV version of Heathers not being meant for me. I didn’t like the TV series Riverdale either and that one’s a big hit for The CW and Heathers might be a similar case for The Paramount Network. Regardless, I left watching the first episode TV version of Heathers with a bad taste in my mouth that I think only rewatching the movie version is going to get rid of.

The Expanse TV spot

Fahrenheit 451 TV spot

Legion season 2 TV spot

Comics

In the last few years comic book companies have been releasing big, hardcover collected editions of multi-issue comic stories that are very expensive. I find it ironic that for a medium that started where a kid could spend part of their weekly allowance to pickup the latest issue of whatever, for those same comics to be collected in these edition that cost around $100 each is kind’a crazy. Still, comic companies keep doing this with two sets due out this week so they must be popular.

Kamandi by Jack Kirby Omnibus

I’m a big fan of the Kamandi character and over the years have bought many issues of the comic as well as collected editions of all the issues. Of which a brand new edition is due out this week.

From DC:

One of Jack Kirby’s greatest epics of the 1970s is collected at last in a single hard-cover volume. These are the stories that introduced the postapocalyptic world of the Great Disaster and Kamandi, the last boy on Earth, along with his friends Prince Tuftan, Doctor Canus, Flower, Ben Boxer and more! Collects KAMANDI, THE LAST BOY ON EARTH #1–40!

Absolute WildC.A.T.S.

While I could see dropping $100+ on a good collected Kamandi edition, I really can’t see dropping that much on a collected WildC.A.T.S. edition. If you’re not familiar, WildC.A.T.S. was one of the original Image Comics titles, and while I loved these when they first came out I don’t think they’ve aged too well in the last 25 years. If anything, these comics are a sort of time-capsule to the 1990s style of comic books where action came first and story was a secondary afterthought at best.

From DC:

Twenty-five years ago, Jim Lee premiered the legendary team known as WildC.A.T.s and help launch Image Comics. Now, Jim’s entire WildC.A.T.s run is collected for the first time in one oversized Absolute volume, including WILDC.A.T.S #1–13 and #50, CYBERFORCE #1–3, WILDCATS #1 and WILDC.A.T.S/X-MEN: THE SILVER AGE #1. This edition also features remastered color for WILDC.A.T.S #1–4, the unpublished script for WILDCATS #2 and a new cover by Jim Lee!

Movies

The Movie Chain: #9: Sunshine (2004)

Last week: 28 Days Later…

The Movie Chain is a weekly, micro-movie review where each week’s film is related to the previous week’s movie in some way.

The movie genera of a doomed space mission is a popular one. There’s movies like Alien: Covenant, Life and Cloverfield: Paradoxto name recent few. I think it’s because this kind of movie captures a few different genres at once from sci-fi to mystery and a lot of times romance too is why it keeps getting made over and over again. Whereas most other movies that feature astronauts blasting off into the void end up finding some slobbering monster in their story, the more esoteric Sunshine plays things a little different.

Directed by Danny Boyle who also directed last week’s 28 Days Later…, in Sunshine the crew of the “Icarus II” are flying to our Sun in attempt to kickstart it back to life after something went wrong causing it to dim sending the Earth into a new ice age. Along the way the crew featuring a pre-Captain America Chris Evans, Rose Byrne and Cillian Murphy of the last three movies, find the remains of the “Icarus” and learn that spending too much time that close to a star as the crew of the “Icarus” did can have some very bad side-effects.

Practically a forgotten movie now, Sunshine is the rare sci-fi movie that takes place in the very near future, feels real along with having believable characters and one heck of a great story too.

Next week: Trapped on a far-off planet, surrounded by nothing, low on gas.

Cool Movie Posters of the Week