Author: Bert Ehrmann
Dangerous Universe has been Bert’s web playground since 1998 when personal web sites were a rarity rather than the norm.
New Way to Deliver a Drama: All 13 Episodes in One Sitting
On Friday, Netflix will release a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: “House of Cards,” a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day,” the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.
Via: Netflix to Deliver All 13 Episodes of ‘House of Cards’ on One Day – NYTimes.com
The Americans on FX is the best new show of the year
That’s not saying much since it’s just a few days into the new year and so far this TV season there hasn’t been much interesting on, but the first episode of The Americans is very good. I like how much opportunity for drama there is in this show about Soviet spies living in Washington DC in the early 1980s — will the spy couple’s (played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) marriage collapse? Will the husband defect to the US? Will the wife kill him for defecting? Will their kids find them out? Will they make a mistake revealing themselves to the FBI agent next door… And whatever problems I might have had with the series Lost, the creators of that show did give us one thing that’s a benefit to other shows; the flashback which is used to great effect here in The Americans. While the main story plays out present day in the early 1980s US, we also flashback to the couple’s first meeting in the USSR and them infiltrating the US in the mid-1960s too.
My ONLY concern here is that the creators of the show might feel the need to add more action to The Americans than it needs. I’m hoping that The Americans stays the course of its pilot episode and doesn’t become a weekly The Bourne Identity kick to the head TV show. If it does stay the course, The Americans could become one of the great ones.
The Evil Dead Movies Part 1: The Evil Dead, Join Us!
Over the last few years Hollywood has become remake crazy, and it seems as if one of the more popular types of movies to be remade are horror films. One of the movies that’s in the process of being remade for good or ill is The Evil Dead.
What would become a trilogy of movies began with The Evil Dead in 1981, continued with Evil Dead II in 1987 and was completed with Army of Darkness in 1993. While The Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness would introduce varying degrees of slapstick humor and comedy into the Evil Dead mythos, the original The Evil Dead was instead a straight-up horror movie literally billed as “the ultimate experience in grueling terror.”
