Category: TV

Direct Beam Comms #30

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Game of Thrones

The sixth season finale of the series Game of Thrones titled “The Winds of Winter” aired last Sunday on HBO and was pretty great. The episode finished a lot of on-going storylines of the series and set a path towards some sort of conclusion to the overall Game of Thrones story at some point in the near future.

If only the fifth and the rest of the sixth seasons had been as good.

lead_960During the last two seasons of Game of Thrones much of the multitude of storylines have essentially been stuck in place. Things would happen to the characters and they’d do things in reaction to them, but in the end they’d end up right in the same place they started in. The series seemed to have completely lost its momentum and didn’t seem to be headed anywhere I could discern. I’m not sure if this was because the show’s based on the popular book series, and the creators of the TV series were biding their time trying to stretch things out for the storyline of the books to catch up with the show, or if the series creators were trying to do their best at translating the story of the books to TV which meant a lot of the same stuff over and over again? Regardless, the last few seasons of Game of Thrones simply haven’t been as good as the first few.

That being said, “The Winds of Winter” seemed to do a lot to right the series’ course.

Over the years the main and secondary casts of Game of Thrones have ballooned to perhaps dozens of actors. And with a cast that big meant that some main characters were written out of the show for entire seasons while others would only get a few minutes of screen time each season.

“The Winds of Winter” seemed to have fixed those issues with many characters exiting the series while at the same time all the various storylines of the show that have played out independently for years now being brought together into a single arch.

All of which is great. While all those separate stories might have been cool in the beginning, as we slowly got more and more and more separate stories the series grew into this colossal, unmanageable beast that started to get hard to follow. I can’t tell you how many times my friend Michael had to key me onto who was who’s brother/sister/aunt/uncle and why I should be caring about them. But it seems now like things might have changed on the show for the better. Even if it means less of what makes Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones and more cues from things like The Lord of the Rings right down to how battles play out and how oaths are delivered.

Season 6: C+, “The Winds of Winter”: B+

Halt and Catch Fire

One of the best series on TV Halt and Catch Fire is set to return Tuesday, August 23 to AMC. They’re calling it a “late summer” return, but to me late August is the start of the fall TV season.

Movies

Alien observation

51d5c400496bfa693ee7d753745a91b0When we first meet the character of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien at the most she’s got a few months to live and at the least several weeks from her perspective. The events of Alien plays out over a few days and at the end of the movie Ripley goes into a frozen hyper sleep where she dozes for 57 years before being rescued. But from her perspective one second she goes to sleep and the next she’s awakened by her rescuers.

Those 57 years pass in a flash to her.

From the looks of her apartment, the fact that she has to go through legal hearings on the events that transpired in Alien and that she has enough time to get a license to use heavy machinery and work on the docks, I’d say the events of Aliens play out over the course of a few months. And again, she’s in hyper sleep on the way to Acheron with the marines and when she’s awakened I’d say that Aliens plays out over no more than a week’s time total after.

The same goes for Alien 3 — Ripley’s in hyper sleep after Aliens and is awakened on Fiorina 161 where the story plays out over the course of, again, maybe a week. And the Ripley after that in Alien Resurrection is a clone and doesn’t really count!

So from Ripley’s perspective the three original Alien trilogy movies take place over the course of the worse few months anyone’s ever experienced!

(BTW — you can thank me for it if the next Alien movie is called Alien Observation.)

Sully movie trailer

“I’ve got 40 years in the air, but in the end I’m going to be judged on 208 seconds.”

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1978: Battlestar Galactica (the original series) debuts in European cinemas
  • 1982: TRON opens in theaters
  • 1985: Back to the Future premiers in theaters
  • 1996: Independence Day opens in theaters

Direct Beam Comms #29

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

The Tunnel

TheTunnel-1
Clémence Poésy and Stephen Dillane

Grade: B+: The new drama series The Tunnel debuted on PBS last Sunday night having originally aired in the UK back in 2013. Based on the Danish/Swedish series The Bridge which was also turned into a series that aired here in the US on FX also back in 2013, The Tunnel moves the action to a deep and quite dark tunnel.

Here, a body is found in a service tunnel of the Channel Tunnel that connects the UK to France. Half of the body is lying on the British side and the other half on the French which means that Elise Wassermann (Clémence Poésy) a French detective and Karl Roebuck (Stephen Dillane) a British one are both assigned the case. And when it turns out in a rather ghoulish way that there isn’t just one body, there’s actually two, and a bomb is placed in the car of a popular English writer things might be more complex than their case might have first seemed to be.

I watched the FX series The Bridge when it first debuted also in 2013 and thought it was all right. That series took place on the border between the US and Mexico and since it was also based on the Danish/Swedish series had most of the same plot-points as The Tunnel. The US series had interesting moments, but what lost me was the idea that the murderer had this almost supernatural way of doing things and the character of Sonya Cross (Diane Kruger) who had absolutely no social skills whatsoever which meant that I watched about half the first season and gave up on it.

While the British series is also based on the Danish/Swedish The Tunnel is like a distant echo of the US series and after one episode seems much more watchable.

The Elise character in The Tunnel still has her quirks but she’s no where near as anti-social or distant as the Sonya one was in the US show. I remember it being mentioned several times in marketing materials for The Bridge that Sonya was supposed to be slightly autistic which Kruger played up well in the show. Except I could never imagine that her character would ever have been able to relax enough or make enough friends on the police force to advance in the ranks to be a detective — or even a street cop for that matter. There’s a lot more that goes into getting a job like that than being great at it, and all Sonya had was that she was the perfect detective but no one could stand being around her.

In The Tunnel, while the Elise character still has some of those same quirks — she’s almost robotic in the way that she talks to people and doesn’t understand visual cues on how to act — her character still feels that she might have some social skills and could maybe have realistically made her way up the ranks to be a detective. Or at least this would have been possible in the universe of the show.

The one part where The Tunnel and The Bridge do seem to share some story is the idea that the killer is this high-tech super-ninja able to do just about anything with computers. To the point where in the first episode of The Tunnel he takes over someone’s car to the point that the police can’t get him out.

This part stretched the story a bit, but since this was the only beat that seemed off I was able to overlook it. Plus Dillane, whom up until this point I was only really familiar with in his role of gruff, dangerous Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones is really good in The Tunnel. Here, he plays a seasoned detective who’s lighthearted, the opposite of Elise, works on instinct more than the “book” but is just as good at his job as she is hers.

I can’t tell you how weird it is to know that the US The Bridge and the UK The Tunnel came out the same year. It means that in all likelihood neither would have been able to “steal” anything from the other show. So it’s interesting to see how both shows handled the material.

Roadies

The cast of Roadies
The cast of Roadies

Grade: B: The Showtime series Roadies debuts tonight (6/26) but the pilot episode’s been available via YouTube for some time now. This series, created by Cameron Crowe, feels very much like an extension of his movie Almost Famous (2000), and I mean that in a mostly good way.

Roadies focuses on the backstage hands who travel city to city building and tearing down the stage for an arena rock band. An ensemble cast is lead by Luke Wilson and Carla Gugino as Bill and Shelli respectively, the two responsible adults trying to keep their group of quirky younger technicians working together under tight deadlines. One of these techs Kelly Ann (Imogen Poots) has decided to leave the tour and go to film school since she’s lost her passion for the music while Bill is starting to question his role in the tour too. The question is will Bill or Kelly Ann leave or will they stay with the group of “lost boys” who never have to grow up and are always having fun at the show?

Since you probably recognize the names of Luke Wilson and Imogen Poots, I’ll let you guess if they stay or not. (Hint — they stay.) And I think that’s part of the problem I had with Roadies, or at least a problem I see having with Roadies; I’m not quite sure where the series is headed from here?

Like I said I enjoyed this first episode. It feels a lot like the backstage goings on in Almost Famous but shifted from the early 1970s and updated for 2016. And since I loved Almost Famous I suppose I was destined to like Roadies too. But I’m not sure where the series goes now? The story of the first episode seemed to have a beginning middle and an end. And the introduction of a corporate “suit” Reg (Raf Spall) who’s there to stress the “branding” of the band the roadies are supporting and cut costs seems a bit cliched and toothless. Of course Reg doesn’t know anything about music and of course Kelly Ann’s able to give him a tongue lashing like no other. He’s the bad guy in a suit and she’s the girl with spunk.

What would’ve been interesting is if Reg were a music fan, knew more about music than the roadies and had still been the way he was. But I digress.

But other than the threat of Kelly Ann and Bill leaving, which is resolved by the end of the episode, and Reg there’s not much else going on in the first episode. So, will future episodes of Roadies focus on different venues then, and different goings-on behind the scenes? Or will the story be about Reg trying to control the roadies? I wasn’t sure which is a red flag for me.

One thing I did like was the episode starts when everyone waking up the morning of the show and reveals what a day of a roadie looks like from start to finish heavy lifting and all. Which was interesting. I kind’a wonder if future episodes will also employ this format?

Movies

The Girl with all the Gifts movie trailer

28 Months Later?

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back movie trailer

“Two things are going to happen in the next 90 seconds…”

The Reading List

Russia Actually Lights Rockets With an Oversized Wooden Match

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1972: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes opens in theaters
  • 1987: Innerspace opens in theaters
  • 1999: The last episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine airs