the m0vie blog

The X-Files – Shadows (Review)

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Darren

Shadows feels a tad generic, but that’s by design. Written by the duo of Glenn Morgan and James Wong, Shadows was apparently intended to appease the network by offering something in the mold of a traditional ghost story – indeed, The Entity is often cited as an influence on the episode. Shadows runs off a rather conventional premise – a woman is haunted by a strange force capable of manipulating and moving objects, out to avenge some grave wrong.

In many respects, following The Jersey Devil, it almost seems like the first season of The X-Files is trying to knock off various items on a paranormal checklist. UFOs? Got ’em. A popular cryptozoology monster? Yep. Ghosts or poltergeists? We got a story here. The result is hardly inspiring. The X-Files tends to work a bit better when it’s venturing off the beaten track, taking something that isn’t mainstream and running with it.

Author John Kenneth Muir argued that watching The X-Files was like “watching a movie every week.” If that’s the case, Shadows feels more like a movie of the week.

The pen is mightier than the sword!

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Dana Scully, ghost, Ghost story, Glen Morgan, James Wong, Jane Goldman, Jersey Devil, John Kenneth Muir, Massage, Morgan, mulder, mulder and scully, Paranormal, Places and Hauntings, Shadow, Shadows, United States, X-File | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Profit and Loss (Review)

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

It seems we’ve reached the point where Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has figured out a base level of quality, an “average” zone that it can pitch to without too much effort or breaking a sweat. We’ve had three episodes in a row now that haven’t been brilliant, but have been far from terrible. Solid, watchable stuff. That might sound like damning with faint praise, but it took Star Trek: The Next Generation longer to find that base level of quality, while Star Trek: Voyager settled into a zone where that “average” was a lot lower.

Profit and Loss is unlikely to be anybody’s favourite episode, but it remains thoroughly unobjectionable. It features the cast playing their roles reasonably well, some hints at world-building and even a guest spot for Garak. Nobody will really remember Profit and Loss as a brilliant piece of television after completing a lengthy Deep Space Nine rewatch, but they also won’t curse its name. It’ll simply be an episode in the middle-to-end section of the second season that wasn’t too bad and wasn’t too great.

Love him and leave him…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Bajoran, Bashir, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassia, Cardassian, deep space nine, Earth, Elim Garak, Garak, Julian Bashir, Odo, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation | 9 Comments »

The X-Files – The Jersey Devil (Review)

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Darren

And with The Jersey Devil, the first season of The X-Files hits its first major snag. The first four episodes have done an efficient job laying down the character arcs and the ground rules for this new conspiratorial series. The rest of the season – like a lot of first seasons – has a great deal of difficulty trying to figure out a formula that works using those elements.

The Jersey Devil is, by all accounts, an episode that should work. It has a nice pseudo-scientific premise. It is written by the creator of the show, and who – at this early stage – could claim a better idea of how the series works than Chris Carter? It gives us some personal insight into both of our protagonists, and it sort of clarifies that Squeeze is not going to be the exception – that there will be a lot of anthology-style episodes.

And yet, despite all that, it doesn’t quite work. The premise is never as interesting as it should be. Chris Carter confirms that while he is a fantastic ideas man, he is not the strongest writer on his own staff. The best of these insights into Mulder and Scully were already made much better in Squeeze, and the rest feel somewhat trite. Despite the fact that it’s only the show’s second anthology-style episode, The Jersey Devil feels like it’s trying to hard to stick to the framework outlined by the three UFO episodes in the series’ opening quartet.

Casting light…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Bigfoot, Carter, chris carter, Devil, Diamond, Jersey Devil, jodie foster, Morgan, New Jersey Devil, Pine Barren, Rob Bowman, United States, X-File | 1 Comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Playing God (Review)

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

Playing God is – structurally – quite similar to Shadowplay. The episode follows the same basic format. We have three plots running concurrently. One of these plots is a science-fiction plot while the other two are centred around character development. What’s interesting about Playing God is that the script essentially changes the priority of these plot threads. In Shadowplay, the central plot concerned the science-fiction mystery in the Gamma Quadrant, while here the ethical quandary is pushed firmly to the background. (Much to the chagrin of writer Jim Trombetta.)

Instead, Playing God brings the character plotline to the front, giving us the first Dax-centric episode firmly based around Jadzia rather than the symbiote inside of her.

Quark smells a rat… er… I mean vole…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Benjamin Sisko, Black hole, Dax, deep space nine, Ira Steven Behr, Jadzia, Jadzia Dax, Large Hadron Collider, Michael Piller, Miles O'Brien, Sisko, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, StarTrek, Switzerland, Terry Farrell | 5 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Turbo

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Darren

Turbo is the best animated movie of 2013, well worth coming out of your shell to see. It’s probably the best Dreamworks film since Kung-Fu Panda and the best CGI animated feature since Toy Story 3. Indeed, Turbo manages to evoke a lot of the charming early Pixar films, in particular channelling Ratatouille, as we follow the adventures of one common unloved animal who decides that “good enough” is not quite good enough.

Stop the clock…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: animation, arts, dreamworks, Indianapolis 500, kung-fu panda, Kurtwood Smith, michael pena, Movies, paul giamatti, Ratatouille, ryan reynolds, Snail, Tito, toy story 3, Turbo | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Shadowplay (Review)

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

Shadowplay is a great example of the kinds of things that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is beginning to do very well. While the main plot works very well (so well, in fact that Star Trek: Enterprise would borrow it – and Rene Auberjones – for their first season episode Oasis), it’s remarkable how much of Shadowplay is given over to the two character-development subplots unfolding back on the station. Indeed, Dax and Odo have effectively solved the mystery of the missing villagers by about two-thirds of the way into the episode.

The character-development stuff in Shadowplay is interesting because the two subplots are not written with resolutions in mind. Indeed, they don’t even kick off the respective character arcs. Kira and Bariel have been waiting to become a couple since The Siege at the latest. The last episode, Paradise hinted that Jake might not be cut out to be a Starfleet officer.

In short, what is interesting about Shadowplay is the fact that it’s really just demonstrating that the show has reached the point where it is doing the things that it does relatively well. Deep Space Nine has found its groove, that point in a show’s history when it seems like it’s relatively easy to produce an hour of television of reasonable quality.

A holo crowd…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: deep space nine, Dominion, Game, Ira Steven Behr, Michael Ansara, Noley Thornton, Odo, Shadowplay, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, star trek: the original series, star trek: voyager, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, StarTrek, Tempest | Leave a comment »

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – 0-8-4 (Review)

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Darren

The first few episodes of any show can be rough. It’s generally about learning to walk before you can run, drawing boundaries before you can cross them. The opening few episodes of a new television show often feel like a party full of people we’ve never met before – the first few hours are timid, awkward, probing. Hopefully, you get more comfortable and casual with the guests, you open up a bit – and before you know it, you’re having a great time. If things don’t seem to improve, you check out early.

Like The Pilot, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s second episode never feels like it’s straining too hard. Indeed, there’s a sense that we’re watching a show go through the motions. After all, Joss Whedon and his production posse are very familiar with constructing first seasons. There’s a sense that the team – led by Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen – have been given the keys to the most expensive car in the garage by Disney and ABC, and so the show feels more like a casual cruise than a pedal-to-the-metal joy ride.

0-8-4 does very little wrong. In fact, it does a lot of smart stuff, essential stuff, homework stuff. Still, it lacks any real sense of fun or joy – there’s no real suggestion that the show is giddily playing with the toys locked away in this particular toy chest. Appropriately enough, given the title, it feels a bit by the numbers.

When it comes to ranking the cast, Coulson is number one with a bullet…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: avengers, Cavalry, Clark Gregg, Cobie Smulders, Coulson, Gregg Clark, Jed Whedon, joss whedon, Ming-Na Wen, Peru, Phil Coulson, S.H.I.E.L.D, samuel l. jackson, Skye, world war ii | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Fifth Estate

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Darren

The ink is still fresh on The Fifth Estate, although perhaps that is too outdated a metaphor. The code is yet to be debugged might be more appropriate. History has yet to really decide what it will make of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Cyber freedom fighters, the internet generation’s Woodward and Burnstein? Or reckless and disconnected kids failing to realise that writing on screen can have very real consequences? “Editing reflects bias,” we’re reminded early in the film, perhaps a concession that that the movie can’t get the necessary distance to offer a definitive (or even especially nuanced) take on Assange and his revolution.

The Fifth Estate comes down quite hard against Assange, essentially reducing Benedict Cumberbatch’s white-haired technological genius to something like a Bond villain. Director Bill Condon struggles to make typing code look sexy with laboured metaphors. And yet, despite that, there’s a willingness here to engage with something big and bold and important, however clumsily the script grapples with the implications of Wikileaks.

The result is something far more compelling that the dire Diana. Diana was a film so close to its subject that it couldn’t muster any enthusiasm or offer anything approaching a challenging opinion. The Fifth Estate is too close to its subject matter, and it clumsily stumbles into obvious bias and slant, but it’s still an intriguing attempt to parse a new media that it seems Hollywood doesn’t really understand.

He’s Assange one, that one…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Bill Condon, contemporary, film, Julian Assange, Movies, non-review review, review, the fifth estate, thriller politics, Wikileaks | 5 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Paradise (Review)

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

In a really weird way, this second half of the second season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really has its finger on the pulse of the nineties. Whispers tapped into pre-millennial anxiety, the sort of paranoia that fed into shows like The X-Files and would play itself out through the show’s admittedly underdeveloped “Changeling” arc. In a few episodes, The Maquis will play with the old “freedom fighter/terrorist” debate in a way that was only really possible in an America completely at peace, post-Cold War but pre-9/11.

Paradise taps into some other anxieties. According to The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, writer Jim Trombetta was heavily influenced by the anti-technology philosophy of the Khmer Rouge, the infamous regime where even the stereotypical signs of learning and education (for example, wearing glasses) were justification for execution. However, whatever the inspiration, Paradise seems to tap into something decidedly more contemporary.

“This is my boom stick!”

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Chellis Glendinning, deep space nine, Game, Luddite, Michael Ansara, O'BRIEN, Sisko, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, star trek: voyager, StarTrek, Ted Kaczynski, United States, Wild Oats Markets | 2 Comments »

The X-Files – Conduit (Review)

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Darren

The X-Files is somewhat fascinating as a historical artifact, a prism through which the viewer might explore the United States in that gap of time between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. The show serves as something of a travelogue through the American subconscious, a vehicle for the nation’s fear and anxieties. It might be quaint now to look back on the show’s depiction of mobile phones and the internet, but The X-Files offers a snapshot of an America just on the cusp of that technological revolution, when there were still dark shadows and corners of the continent to be probed and explored.

One of the more interesting aspects of The X-Files is the way that it deals with faith in the nineties. Scully’s attempts to reconcile her religious beliefs with a rational approach to the universe are surprisingly insightful and nuanced, but Mulder’s belief system also offers a vehicle to explore the form that faith might take. “I want to believe,” Mulder confesses at the end of Conduit, with the iconic poster turning the sentiment into a motto. It doesn’t matter that Mulder chooses to invest his faith in aliens or conspiracies, The X-Files is still an exploration of what faith meant in the nineties.