TV
Happy!
Based on the comic series of the same name by writer Grant Morrison and illustrator Darick Robertson, Happy! on SyFy follows ex-cop turned hitman Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni) who during a hit is shot, has a heart attack and starts seeing a small, purple cartoon-like flying horse named Happy (Patton Oswald). Happy’s an imaginary friend to a little girl who’s been kidnapped, and Nick in a near-death state is somehow able to see Happy when no one else can.
It’s an interesting concept, unfortunately Happy! isn’t a very good show.
The first episode is so overstuffed with story from an evil Santa Claus, the kidnapping, four mafia brothers out to get Nick, a secret password that’s somehow tied to the real evil-rulers of the world… there’s so much going on here there’s hardly a through-line in Happy!. It doesn’t help matters that things are so over the top in terms of colors, action, gore and character behavior that nothing’s believable yet Happy! is set in what looks to be our world.
What Happy! reminds me the most of is the AMC series Preacher in terms of tone, story and over-the-top-ness. And I didn’t think Preacher worked as a series and I don’t think Happy! does either.
What really sucks is this is the second terrible series to come out of SyFy this year, the other being Blood Drive. I’m not sure if the person picking the shows at SyFy has really bad taste or it’s overall bad luck, but so far the new genera friendly SyFy doesn’t look all that much different from the old SyFy of a few years ago.
The Orville – first season
I honesty didn’t think I was going to like the FOX series The Orville too much when I first heard about it last summer. I’ve never been a huge fan of series creator/star Seth Macfarlane and the whole vibe promos for the series were giving off — a goofy sort of Galaxy Quest — didn’t look that interesting either. But because I watch a lot of new shows, and because The Orville was the first of the new shows to debut last season, I checked out the first episode.
And I didn’t hate it.
I actually kind’a liked it. As the first season has progressed some episodes have worked more than others, but all in all I’d say that The Orville was a lot more good than bad and it quickly became one of my favorites of the season.
About the ship of the same name commanded by Ed Mercer (Macfarlane), who, along with Commander Kelly Grayson (Adrianne Palicki), Security Chief Alara Kitan (Halston Sage), Navigator Gordon Malloy (Scott Grimes) and others explore the galaxy in the distant future. Which has been done many times before in shows from Star Trek to Babylon 5 and everything in between. But what I think differentiates The Orville from other modern day similar series like the newest Star Trek: Discovery or even The Expanse is that whereas those two series follow the modern model of telling realistic, and often depressing, stories told over the course of an entire season if not series. The Orville harkens back to the shows of old where each episode is mostly self-contained and there isn’t a season-long story and everything’s positive.
Which I usually don’t enjoy. I like my TV series to be telling complex, interweaving stories over the course of many episodes thank you very much. But for whatever reason with The Orville, be it the humor, the strong characters, the acting, the writing, the whatever… I haven’t missed the whole season-long story here and I think The Orville is a stronger show for it.
If anything, The Orville is a love-letter, or really probably MacFarlane’s personal love-letter, to the original Star Trek series. Where the reason for exploration is a noble one and the crew of the Orville head off into deep space only wanting to gain knowledge and an understanding of alien species and cultures even if it means putting their lives on the line. But what’s different and new here is that The Orville is a funny series too.
Some of the humor started of a bit broad and unrealistic — I’m thinking of a scene in the pilot episode where Malloy and Mercer ride in a shuttle to the Orville as Malloy drinks a beer and the two argue about it. It’s more cartoonish humor than coming from reality. But over the course of the season things have settled down a bit and while there’s still comedic moments they don’t come off as weirdly as that scene did in the pilot.
Unfortunately, I think that scene in particular turned a few people off to the show. When The Orville first premiered there was almost a stampede of online commenters who damned the show which I thought was very unfair. With similar series like Star Trek there’s always been the idea that the first season is a write-off. The creators of those shows spend that first season finding their footing and it’s not until the second season that those series start to come into their own and show promise. Which makes me wonder why people were so fast to damn The Orville when if it were called Star Trek: The Orville instead fans would probably be more willing to give the show more of a benefit of the doubt than they did here?
I adore Star Trek: The Next Generation but the first season of that series was pretty atrocious. Last summer I went through and watched much of the first season again and enjoyed a handful of episodes. A handful. Much of the first season of that show feels like an attempt at recreating the original Star Trek series again in the 1980s and most of it doesn’t work. However, whereas a handful of episodes of the first season of TNG work, I’d say that just a handful of episodes from the first season of The Orville didn’t work. And even the ones that didn’t were interesting for all sorts of reasons.
Altered Carbon TV spot
Comics
X-Men Epic Collection: Mutant Genesis
Travel back to the dark and mysterious age that was the early 1990s when the hottest comic books on the market were titles from The X-Men universe. Collected here in X-Men Epic Collection: Mutant Genesis are loads of comics written and illustrated by some of the biggest talent on the market back in the early 1990s including Jim Lee, Andy Kubert, Chris Claremont and Whilce Portacio. Now I’m not sure if these comics have aged well in the intervening quarter of a century since I haven’t read them since they were first released, but if you’re interested in what comics were like “back in the day” you could do much worse than checking out this collection.
The end of an era for the X-Men! The original team, now called X-Factor, takes center stage when Proteus returns from the grave. But when Apocalypse strikes, infecting Cyclops’ son Nathan with a deadly virus, Cyclops must make a bitter sacrifice! And the current X-Men return to Earth to find that Professor X’s old foe the Shadow King has risen — and taken over Muir Island! It will take X-Factor and the X-Men’s combined strength to triumph — and when the dust clears, the two teams will become one! An uncanny new era begins as the reunited X-Men go back to basics — beginning with a deadly confrontation with Magneto and his fanatical Acolytes!
Movies
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
You thought they’d never go back to the island, BUT YOU WERE WRONG! They always go back!
7 Days in Entebbe
Alita: Battle Angel
The Reading & Watch List
- Red Star: The incredible story of the American fighter jet that fell into Soviet hands
- Quentin Tarantino and J.J. Abrams Team Up for ‘Star Trek’ Movie
- The ‘Justice League’ That Might Have Been: We’ve Seen the Script
- A Band Without a No. 1 Hit Is Outselling Bruno Mars and Ed Sheeran
- Behind the Scenes: THE ROCKETEER & BETTY STATUE
Cool Movie Posters of the Week
There are shows I don’t watch because I don’t have enough time and there are shows I don’t watch because I don’t get whatever streaming service or cable outlet they happen to be on that I don’t get. I’d love to watch shows like Star Trek: Discovery, The Runaways or Ash vs Evil Dead, but because I don’t pay for CBS All Access, Hulu or Starz means I don’t have an opportunity to check out those shows.
Now it’s an entirely different matter. There are so many shows that are “great” the problem is I don’t have enough room to list them all or time to write about everything. I have to think that there’s surly some “great” shows these days that don’t get critical acclaim since today shows can’t just be “great,” they also have to be “innovative” or “ground breaking” or “unique” too to get loads of people to watch them.
It’s happened in the movies already. The 1970s were considered a high watermark of cinema in the US yet by the mid–1980s things had devolved to the point where everyone was chasing big box office successes rather than wanting to make interesting movies. For example, in 1976 a movie about Watergate All the President’s Men was the third highest grossing film in the US that year. By 1986 the third highest grossing movie was Platoon, but that was overshadowed by the likes of Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee as the two highest grossing movies that year.
There’s quite a few storylines going on in Godless and that’s one of its faults. There’s the story of outlaw Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels) and his gang terrorizing the southwest robbing, killing and raping anyone they meet. Young Roy Goode ( Jack O’Connell) who stole from Griffin and is now on the run from him. Goode being shot and having to recuperate on a ranch owned by Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery). And a town full of mostly women who’s husbands were all killed in a mining accident that if Griffin every found would certainly attack.
It doesn’t help matters that several elements of the story are, shall we say, fantastical. Which, done in moderation is fine, but here they just add up to a bit of a mess. There’s the town with nearly no men since apparently every man was down in the mine standing in the same area and was killed when disaster struck. There’s also Griffin, who’s arm is so badly shot that it’s amputated 19th century style. Yet he’s able to get back on a horse and ride his gang out of town a few days later after having major surgery with major loss of blood in a time when at best it would take several weeks to recover, if that was even possible since most would have died after such a surgery. There’s also a few members of Griffin’s gang who are caught, almost lynched before Griffin and the rest of the gang ride to the rescue and, get this, lynches the entire town. Apparently in the old west this was the one town on the frontier that wasn’t armed and didn’t know how to fight back.
Did you ever notice…
A little backstory on this version of the character — played marvelously by Jon Bernthal, Frank Castle aka the Punisher first appeared in 2016 during the second season of Daredevil where he served as a sort of agent of chaos in Matt Murdock/Daredevil’s world. Here, Punisher was a sort of “yin” to Daredevil’s “yang” where he had no qualms about killing bad guys even if it made Murdock’s life, who won’t kill and wants to bring the bad guys to justice, a lot harder. But in the end the two did team together to take the bad guys down, even if Castle used a lot more firepower than Murdock wanted.
What we get instead is a Frank Castle hiding under an alias living life as a construction worker in New York, City. His job as the Punisher is done yet the nightmares of his murdered family remain. So what’s Castle to do? Stay hidden in plain sight and let things like a young worker at the work site be pulled into a life of crime and do nothing? Or put back on the bullet-proof vest and declare an all-out war on crime?
I’m not going to go into a lot of details here on the first season of Mindhunter since I’m currently working on my list of the best TV series of the year of which Mindhunter plays a part. And I’d just end up repeating myself here and there. But rest assured that Mindhunter is one of the best TV series of the year airing wherever. This show about the birth profiling serial killers by the FBI is so unlike any of the similar shows out there these days, and there are loads and loads of serial killer shows or shows that feature them, that it’s worth to note how different Mindhunter is from the rest. Those shows are all about vengeance and tracking people down whereas Mindhunter is all about talking, and trying to figure the killers out so that the next one can be stopped before he starts hurting people.
