Category: Feature

Direct Beam Comms #24

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, ToysPosted on

TV

The Goldbergs, Fresh Off the Boat & black-ish

AJ Michalka and Troy Gentile of The Goldbergs
AJ Michalka and Troy Gentile of The Goldbergs

Last week, the ABC series The Goldbergs and black-ish ended their third and second seasons respectively while Fresh Off the Boat ends its second season this Tuesday. I enjoy watching these shows but honestly, I’m not sure I can point to one single moment last season from any of them that was memorable to me. That’s not criticism of these series since there are usually several times each episode that I literally LOL. But I’m not sure if it’s because there are so many episodes of TV here, between the three of them there’s 72, or if it’s because these shows are really like the lite-sitcoms of the 1980s, but there’s not a single moment in either The Goldbergs or black-ish or Fresh Off the Boat that sticks out to me.

To me, Fresh Off the Boat is an enjoyable show but is most like a 1980s sitcom with the characters being almost over-the-top and it being very heavy on the “situation.” And while I think that The Goldbergs and black-ish are better shows, to me The Goldbergs works best when the creators of that show find their own stories. But I get the sense that they’re being pushed to do more “event” style episodes like ones that pay homage to Dirty Dancing and Risky Business which are a bit contrived.

And while black-ish can, at times, be a much deeper show than either The Goldbergs or Fresh Off the Boat are, it can fall into the tropes that were popular in past sitcoms like the “very special” episode and “someone’s unexpectedly pregnant” that were staples of series past.

Grade: B for all

Robotech

Recently, Crackle began offering all 85 episodes of the classic animated series Robotech streaming via their service. Honestly I can’t remember the last time I watched Robotech from start to finish, but I plan to spend this summer filling some of my TV time catching up on this show that’s one of my favorite of all-time.

With the fall TV season slowly winding down and options for things to watch dwindling by the week, there’s a few new series I want to checkout in May.

Preacher Sunday, May 22 at 10PM (EST) on AMC

The cast of The Preacher
The cast of The Preacher

I hate to admit it, but I’m mostly ignorant on just what the Preacher comic and new AMC TV series is about. Checking out the marketing materials for the show and reading articles on it, Preacher seems to be a version of Hellblazer, except instead of a demonologist the main character is a priest who smokes, drinks and is otherwise self-destructive all while battling the unknown. That being said, having watched some of the promos for the show, Preacher seems to be less supernatural than I’d always assumed the comic was. Like the show really could just be about a hard-drinking preacher where, as it’s put several times in one promo, “anything can happen.”

Which is kind’a a bad thing. If the people involved in the show can’t properly describe what it’s about in a sentence or two, other than to say “anything can happen,” to me that doesn’t bode well for the show as a whole/moving forward. How can you create a compelling show if you’re not sure what it’s about?

DC Comics describes the comic series as:

After merging with a bizarre spiritual force called Genesis, Texan preacher Jesse Custer has become completely disillusioned with the beliefs to which he had dedicated his entire life. Now possessing the power of “the word,” an ability to make people do whatever he utters, Custer begins a violent and riotous journey across the country. Joined by his gun-toting girlfriend Tulip and the hard-drinking Irish vampire Cassidy, Custer loses faith in both God and man as he witnesses dark atrocities and improbable calamities during his exploration of America.

So who knows what the TV version will be about? Still, I’m interested enough in this one to check it out.

Wayward Pines Wednesday, May 25

The cast of Wayward Pines
The cast of Wayward Pines

The first season of this horror/sci-fi show about a small, isolated town in the Northwest US and all the weird goings-on there was interesting enough to me. It had some nice, unexpected, twists and turns and with the story of the first season being told in ten episodes start to finish felt about right. And now comes a new, second season with a new story and new lead actor. The first season featured Matt Dillion while the second has Jason Patric in a different story also set in Wayward Pines.

…the 10-episode, second season will pick up after the shocking events of Season One, with the residents of Wayward Pines battling against the iron-fisted rule of the First Generation.

Which, admittedly, doesn’t make much sense if you haven’t seen the first season of the show. But like I said, the creators of Wayward Pines took the series to some unexpected places and while the show wasn’t great, at times it was a fun one to watch.

Movies

Star Trek Beyond Trailer #2

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

Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens

On the Horizon

Currently, I’m working on articles about; animated films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the movie Independence Day, the weird movies of 1986 and the movie Aliens which isn’t weird but is also from 1986. 😉

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1970: Beneath the Planet of the Apes debuts on screens.
  • 1979: Dawn of the Dead opens in theaters.

X-Men paved the way!

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The 20th Century Fox X-Men movies are probably the most important superhero franchise in movie history. While today they might be second to the more popular Marvel Studios movies like The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America, none of those films would exist without X-Men (2000).

xmen_ver1Long before Iron Man smashed box office records and ignited the current superhero comic book movie craze or Deadpool became one of the highest grossing “R” rated movies of all-time came X-Men to a very different movie landscape back in 2000. Then, superhero movies weren’t a sure thing, they weren’t popular and they weren’t even all that respected. In fact, in the years just before X-Men there were a slew of TV movies-of-the-week that were based on then popular comic titles, of which only the super-fans seemed to tune in to watch. The failure of these TV movies would only go onto prove the point that comic book TV movies, and therefor all things comic book related, were “just for kids.”

And while the Tim Burton Batman movies had been popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the slew of comic book related films that followed including the post Burton Bat-sequels, Captain America, The Punisher and Fantastic Four all were poorly received — to the extent that the Marvel movies were only ever released on home video here in the US or weren’t ever released at all in the case of the 1994 Fantastic Four.

And into all this would come the announcement of the first X-Men movie in the late 1990s.

For years us fans had heard rumblings of superhero movies in the works from Iron Man to Spider-Man to, yes, X-Men. But for years that’s just what those rumors were, rumors and nothing more. Year after year these announcements would be made and fans would talk about their dream casts for these films but nothing ever came to be.

Until X-Men that is.

Famke Janssen, Halle Berry and James Marsden
Famke Janssen, Halle Berry and James Marsden

But when the first X-Men movie was announced and trailers for it began to be released I remember feeling a little trepidation. Gone were the usual costumes of the X-Men, replaced with something more uniformly black and more The Matrix like. And while there were familiar characters like Jean Grey, Wolverine and Cyclops in the mix, there were also odd choices like Toad with his extra-long tongue and the blue/nude Mystique.

I remember thinking that the movie looked good, but that “looking good” and actually “being good” are two totally separate things. In fact, I didn’t see X-Men in the theater. I think I was too worried that my all-time favorite superhero team would be something gross and unrecognizable on the big screen and stayed away. It wasn’t until months later that I finally saw the movie on DVD and liked it.

The first X-Men isn’t a great film but it’s not a bad film either. I’d call it “good-ish.” And while this “good-ish” movie didn’t break box office records, it grossed about $400 million in today’s dollars, it did good enough that it would pave the way for other superhero movies to follow.

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine
Hugh Jackman as Wolverine

Movies like the first Spider-Man film series and the new Batman and Incredible Hulk movies, along with loads of really bad super-hero movies too, would follow. All because the first X-Men wasn’t total crap and was actually “good-ish.”

And now 16 years later comes a new X-Men movie, X-Men: Apocalypse that’s the eighth X-Men movie if you could the character spin-off X-Men films. Some of the X-Men movies like X2, First Class and Days of Future Past would be very good. And some like The Last Stand and Wolverine very bad.

But it’s because of that very first X-Men movie back in 2000 and that it wasn’t total crap and didn’t bomb at the box office that we have any super-hero movies to talk about or watch at all. Because without X-Men there’d be no Captain America: Winter Soldier or The Avengers which would make Marvel and Disney several billion dollars poorer.

Direct Beam Comms #23

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

The Grinder

The-Grinder-Season-1-Poster-FOXThe first season, and ultimately what’ll turn out to be its last season, of the FOX TV series The Grinder ended last week. This series started off as a kind’a wacky show about two brothers, one a successful small town lawyer (Fred Savage) who up until that point’s greatest accomplishment was having a “protected left turn” installed in their town and the other brother (Rob Lowe) who’s returned home after playing the character of “Mitch Grinder” on a fictional long-running show-with-the-show that’s like a legal version of CSI that’s also called The Grinder, who now wants to work at the family law firm since he considers his run on his The Grinder as being just as good as law school.

At first The Grinder was enjoyable but it started being a bit too formulaic. That formula was the firm would take on a case, brother Stewart (Savage) wouldn’t want Mitch to be a part of the case because of his lack of real world experience, but in the end Mitch by using his experiences on his The Grinder would be able to figure out a way to win the case.

Which was fine except that it started getting a bit old.

As the series progressed, though, the real The Grinder started to evolve away from that simple premise and started making fun of procedural cop and lawyer shows that are everywhere these days. When The Grinder moved to this it became much more enjoyable and many times more entertaining.

Under this premise I could’ve seen this show going for a few years, but alas FOX announced this week that the first season of The Grinder would also be its last when they announced the cancellation of this series.

Overall: C+, first half: C-, last half: B.

Movies

Captain America: Civil War

565cb34596f3bThe first Captain America movie was released five years ago and was good. It starts off as an origin story of the character where puny Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) goes from literal 90 pound weakling to strapping super-soldier Captain America via an experiment, then tells of Cap and his team’s adventures during WW2 against Hydra and the Red Skull. That movie did a good job of introducing the character and ultimately taking him from the 1940s to present day by the end of the film. What I didn’t expect was that a side character in that movie, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), would go onto play such a pivotal role in future Captain America movies.

Frozen and brought back to life much like Captain America, instead of waking to our modern world like Cap did, Bucky woke in a Soviet facility where he was turned into the “Winter Soldier.” A state sponsored assassin who was put on ice in between missions and would become the main baddie of the second Captain America: The Winter Solider movie.

And while I thought both the original Captain America: The First Avenger and Winter Soldier were good, I must say I really liked the third Captain America: Civil War movie a lot, and much of that is because of things like Bucky’s story.

This latest Captain America film bumps Bucky from nemesis to ally of Cap as Bucky struggles to regain his lost memories stolen from him in the process of becoming the Winter Soldier. Bucky’s main problem is that everyone’s looking for him because of a bombing that injured many and killed the King of Wakana. Cap, looking to help his friend, goes on the run with Bucky to try and track down the real bomber and clear Bucky’s name.

Except that with Cap, Bucky and the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) on the run means that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and the rest of the Avengers must go after them since the Avengers are now under the control of the United Nations as a sort of state-sponsored super-hero team.

What I liked most about all this was that none of the characters in Civil War were in the wrong with their beliefs. There’s a legitimate argument to be made that superheroes like Iron Man and Captain America need to be controlled by someone, lest they grow too powerful and decide to control us. And there’s also a good argument to be made that no one should be in control of an organization like the Avengers since they’d be in charge of the most powerful weapons on the planet.

568afc3d90c1cI think Tony Stark makes his point here with Avenger the Scarlett Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) who can do all sorts of weird things like control minds and use force-fields who’s staying in the US at an Avengers compound, “They generally don’t let foreign WMDs into the country.”

So it’s hard to root for any character here; is Tony too proud to admit that Cap might be right, that they’re doing a good enough job on their own and don’t need overseers or is Cap too proud to see that sometimes a lot of innocent people are hurt and die when the Avengers go into battle.

Or maybe bother Tony and Cap are both right and wrong at the same time?

All of which makes for a very compelling story. And this mixed with amazing action scenes where we see super-powered characters fighting each other in spectacular ways makes for a great film.

more-captain-america-civil-war-trailer-breakdown-740992Speaking of action, Civil War and previous Winter Soldier do an interesting thing with their big action set pieces — they start small and slowly build big. Be it Cap’s elevator fight in Winter Soldier that starts with Cap vs a few and turns into an all-out brawl that evolves to Cap vs a jet on his motorcycle or in Civil War that starts with Cap and Bucky confronting each other, turns to Cap and Bucky fighting a German SWAT team and ends up on the roads with Cap and Bucky racing cars and being chased by the likes of the Black Panther.

This slow build is something I don’t see a lot of other comic book movies using, but it seems like they should be when they all seem to be trying to copy the Marvel style of films.

I really have to nit-pick to find anything in Civil War that I didn’t care for. And I’m one who’s the first to pounce on story elements that don’t make sense or characters who change at the whim of story beats. That stuff simply isn’t present in Civil War. It’s a solid movie from beginning to end, does a great job of introducing new characters like Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) to a new Spider-Man (Tom Holland), has an interesting story interspersed with action scenes that actually drive the story rather than just featuring characters punching one and other in the fact — and does it all without missing a beat.

Grade: A

The Reading List

Trapped on Tape: 10 Great Horror Movies that are Only on VHS

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1971: Escape from the Planet of the Apes opens.
  • 1982: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior opens in the US.

Direct Beam Comms #22

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, Toys, TVPosted on

Term of the week

Gunpla: Stands for “Gundam Plastic Model.”

TV

Doctor Who 1996 TV movie

Comparatively, the mid–1990s weren’t great when it came to sci-fi. Sure,TV series like Star Trek and The X-Files and other sci-fi shows thrived, but for the most part sci-fi films and TV were a niche market at best. Back then, there were a very few successful comic book movies and in fact, most comic titles aired as after school cartoons and not as films. And even what’s now one of the world’s most popular TV series Doctor Who’s original run was cancelled in 1989 and was then considered decidedly uncool.

Paul McGann as the Doctor
Paul McGann as the Doctor

Yet “uncool” or not in 1996 FOX TV decided to create and air a made for TV reboot movie of Doctor Who.

Starring Paul McGann as the Doctor, Eric Roberts as the Master and Daphne Ashbrook as Dr. Grace Holloway, this new Doctor Who was a continuation of the old but tweaked a bit for American audiences. Gone was the UK setting for a Canada doubling as the US and really the only English “thing” in the show that previously was defined by its “Englishness” was the Doctor himself.

At the time I remember FOX heavily promoting the show and it seemed like they were hoping they might have a hit on their hands that they could then spin out to a new Doctor Who TV series. Maybe it was because FOX was just beginning to ride the wave of The X-Files mania that was starting to grip the nation that they thought that reviving a cult British classic TV series might lead to winning ratings.

And the spring of 1996 I was extremely excited about the prospect that Doctor Who might be returning to TV screens. I was a Doctor Who fanatic as a kid thanks to my friend Cameron but had drifted away from the show in my teenage years. (Though I might be mis-remembering this as I’m not quite sure just when our local PBS station stopped airing episode of Doctor Who.)

But watching the 1996 Doctor Who movie was a disappointment. It was Doctor Who and it felt like an honest attempt at translating something that was so different than the average TV series into something more palatable for American audiences. But something was just missing from the 1996 Doctor Who. The ratings for the TV movie were poor and that was that. It would be nearly a decade before the relaunch of the now mega-popular Doctor Who TV series that would return the series to prominence.

One thing about the 1996 Doctor Who that I appreciate — it might have failed but it’s never been ignored by the most recent incarnation of the show. The movie was celebrated a few years ago during the series 50th anniversary and McGann has appeared as the Doctor in a flashback episode of the current series and has voiced the Doctor in a series of audiobooks too.

Oddly enough, just after the 1996 Doctor Who movie aired sci-fi was about to become huge with the likes of mega-blockbusters Independence Day and The Matrix. I kind’a wonder if the 1996 reboot Doctor Who had been released more around the time of those movies if it would have found more of an audience on TV?

Movies

Dune (1984)

The sleeper must awaken!
The sleeper must awaken!

I rewatched the movie Dune a few weeks back — theatrical, not the extended cut thank you — and noticed that several of the actors in the movie went onto star in various sci-fi/genera TV series in the 1980s/early 1990s.

  • Kyle MacLachlan (Paul Atreides) – Played Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks that was co-created by David Lynch who also directed Dune.
  • Dean Stockwell (Doctor Wellington Yueh) – Co-starred as Al Calavicci in the series Quantum Leap.
  • Patrick Steward (Gurney Halleck) – Starred as Captain Jean-Luc Picard over 176 episodes and four movies of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Toys

Alien Warrior Dron ARTFX+ Statue

This statue, which retails for $80, can hang off the walls of its diorama and upside down on its base via magnets. (Space Marines not included.)

The reading list

The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1973: Soylent Green opens in theaters
  • 1994: The TV mini-series The Stand premiers.
  • 1996: The TV movie Doctor Who airs on Fox.

Screaming for attention: 400 TV shows and counting

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Late last year researches at FX Networks found that there were more than 400 scripted TV shows in 2015. Not 400 HOURS of scripted shows, but 400 DIFFERENT shows. Let that sink in for a minute. If there’s 400 scripted shows and each show has on average 10 episodes, some would have more and some less, that’s something like around 4,000 hours of NEW TV produced last year. To put that number in perspective, with that amount of content you could watch nothing but new TV shows 24 hours a day from December to mid-June.

Humans on AMC
Humans on AMC

And that’s not including news programs and game shows and variety shows and reality and TV movies either. That’s 4,000 hours of scripted dramas and comedies.

Part of why there’s so much “stuff” out there is that every channel wants to have a hit series that draws in viewers, which might turn a channel very few are watching, and therefor getting less ad dollars, into something many are watching and talking about and getting lots of ad dollars. Case in point AMC. A decade ago AMC aired classic movies, hence the name; American Movie Classics. Then in 2007 they launched Mad Men to great acclaim and have since launched other popular series like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. Before, AMC was a channel that hardly anyone watched. Now, AMC is one of the most watched spots on TV and one that now makes a lot of money.

And with viewers “cutting the cord” as it were online services are also trying to get in with scripted shows too. Netflix and Amazon have have been creating series specifically for their service for a few years now and now other platforms like Hulu and YouTube are getting in on the game too with content of their own.

Jessica Jones on Netflix
Jessica Jones on Netflix

I watch a lot of TV, probably too much. And even with my prodigious TV habit I couldn’t watch everything last year that I probably would have in years past. For example, the series Humans on AMC looked interesting enough but I had too many things to watch at that time and never got around to it. And with a show like Jessica Jones on Netflix I did watch the first episode but when it didn’t immediately connect with me I moved onto something else.

Now I’m not saying that I’ll won’t go back and try and watch Jessica Jones or Humans again this summer when there used to be fewer new things to on, but I can’t guarantee it since nowadays there are just as many new and interesting series premiering during the summer as there are in the fall/winter months.

New shows last summer like Halt and Catch Fire, True Detective and The Carmichael Show, all of which I enjoyed a great deal, took whatever time I would normally have to checkout things I’d missed during the fall and instead put the focus on them. In fact, the only show I did catchup on last summer was Fargo, and that was only because a friend highly recommended it.

Maron on IFC
Maron on IFC

Which makes me wonder, what am I all missing? Years ago I was only ever able to get into The Wire when I caught up with it after HBO aired the first few seasons before the start of the third. Up until then I’d watch a few episodes at the start of each new season and give up. It was only because I had the time to catch up on it that I was able to be sucked in by that wonderful show.

But the last few years that really hasn’t been happening for me. I tell myself that I need to watch the latest season of House of Cards or Justified or Maron and something else new will appear on my pop-culture radar and I find myself putting off things for one more season.

I suppose the solution to all this is to count my blessings, too much of a good thing is better than nothing, and wait for the day that the eventual collapse of all this good stuff which is inevitable. There’s no way that all the networks and cable channels and online services can be pouring BILLIONS into these new shows with all expected to make back any money.

Maybe what I need to do is to get a colossal DVR and record EVERYTHING I might be interested in when the day comes after the pop-culture collapse when the only thing on to watch are reruns of The Big Bang Theory and episodes of Redneck/Swamp-Truckers/Fishermen/Miners/Pawn on The Discovery Channel.