Television | the m0vie blog

The X-Files – Ice (Review)

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Darren

Now we’re talking. It’s been a tough couple of episodes, but The X-Files bounces back with a strong contender for the best episode of the first season. Like the last collaboration between Morgan and Wong, Ice is one gigantic homage to a classic horror film. (Well, two classic horror films.) Shadows took its cues from The Entity, while Ice draws heavily from both John Carpenter’s The Thing and Howard Hawk’s The Thing From Another World, both based on the John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There?

However, Ice works a lot better than Shadows. Part of that is down to the fact that Morgan and Wong seem genuinely enthused and engaged with their premise, rather than simply painting by numbers. Part of this is also down to the fact that this sort of horror and paranoia is more firmly in the show’s wheelhouse than the generic “protective avenging ghost” narrative from Shadows.

Ear, ear!

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Alaska, Berlin Wall, Dana Scully, David Nutter, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fox Mulder, gillian anderson, Hodge, John W. Campbell, mulder, Shadows, Television, Thing, X-File | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Season 1 (Review)

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Darren

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

Well, that was actually pretty satisfying. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has probably the most satisfying debut season of any of the Star Trek spin-offs. While the show’s first year can’t quite measure up to the very first season of Star Trek ever produced, it can hold its head high among the spin-offs. Although I will concede that the bar isn’t exactly high when it comes to measuring the first year of the tie-in television shows.

When I began a recent re-watch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I was glad to finish the show’s rocky first season. It was a slog, like the work one has to put in before delving into “the good stuff.” I recently picked up the blu ray of the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise. While there are a couple of nice episodes, there are quite a few I’d forgotten entirely because they were so bland. There are more I would like to forget. Star Trek: Voyager‘s first season is the single largest missed opportunity in the history of the franchise.

So Deep Space Nine‘s first year doesn’t have to do that much beyond “not sucking” in order to earn the coveted title of “best pilot season of a Star Trek spin-off.” However, as I watched the season, I was continually impressed with the quality of work done. There are a few duds (and a few classics), but the first year demonstrates remarkable insight into what is unique about the show’s premise. It doesn’t always have the courage to follow through on that promise, but it at least acknowledges it.

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Captive Pursuit, deep space nine, games, Ira Steven Behr, Move Along Home, Next Generation, science fiction, Star Trek Into Darkness, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the next generation, star trek: the original series, StarTrek, Television, video games | 5 Comments »

Wanted! Contestants for Irish Quiz Show!

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Darren

RTÉ is launching a new quiz show that will be recorded on September 4th as part of the network’s “format farm” season. The producers over at Vision Independent Productions got in touch with me and let me know that they are looking for contestants for Division. I’m always glad to help Irish film and television, so the full text and details are below. If you’d like to enter for a chance to win a €5,000 holiday, drop them a line at the contact details below. Or visit the website.

If you do decide to enter, best of luck!

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: division, Game show, games, Handheld TV game, Operation Transformation, Recreation, Television, trivia, Video game, Vision Independent Productions | Leave a comment »

Hannibal – Sorbet (Review)

Posted on August 16, 2013 by Darren

Hannibal took its time building up Hannibal Lecter as a serial killer. According to creator Bryan Fuller, there would have been a joke in Aperitif about Lecter’s culinary habits, but holding off on the sight of Lecter as a serial killer until the end of Entrée feels like it was a shrewd move. Not because it could ever fool the audience into forgetting that Hannibal Lecter is a murdering cannibal or anything like that. Instead, it builds up a certain amount of tension and suspense around the character, allowing us to see how those around him could have been blinded by his persona.

With a few obvious exceptions – knocking out Doctor Bloom in Potage or phoning the Hobbs household in Aperitif – we’ve mostly seen Lecter through the eyes of others. While the very premise of the show counts on the audience knowing who or what Lecter is, keeping him at a distance allowed the show a bit of breathing room in its first year. However, now that we’ve caught a glimpse of Lecter in action, Sorbet feels like its willing to pull back the layers on our eponymous epicurean.

Best served warm…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Anthony Hopkin, Bryan Fuller, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Hugh Dancy, laurence fishburne, Lecter, Mads Mikkelsen, Minnesota, murder, NBC, serial killer, silence of the lambs, Television, thomas harris, will graham | Leave a comment »

Hannibal – Potage (Review)

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Darren

Hannibal continues to move apace. Serialisation can often be a tricky beast, because it relies heavily on pacing. Reveal too much too fast and none of the plot beats carry enough weight. Drag out your revelations and your game-changing twists, and things feel too slow. The sense of progression is lost. On top of that, and something which is easily overlooked when it comes to serialisation, the key is to ensure that each episode exists as its own entity, while remaining a part of the whole. As often as one might use the “chapters of a book” analogy for episodes of The Sopranos or The Wire, this tends to ignore that each episode generally tended to be structured as its own entity. While a part of a larger story, each episode was its own self-contained unit of story.

Potage seems to suggest that Hannibal is finding its feet in the area, and carefully pacing itself. We are peeling back the layers on the eponymous psychiatrist at a pace that is neither too fast nor too slow. The evidence is mounting and his moves are becoming more brazen, but he retains his air of mystery. Since Lecter is a character who only really works with that sense of mystery, it’s a shrewd balance between progressing the plot and retaining the character’s appeal. Potage demonstrates the show has quite a knack for it.

The good doctor?

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Abigail, Abigail Hobbs, Caroline Dhavernas, crime, drama, hannibal, hannibal lecter, Lecter, Mads Mikkelsen, NBC, serial killer, sopranos, Television, thomas harris, will graham, Wire | Leave a comment »

The Sopranos: Guy Walks Into A Psychiatrist’s Office…

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Darren

Guy Walks Into a Psychiatrist’s Office gets the second season of The Sopranos off to a strong start. We’re immediately informed that time has elapsed and that everything has sorted itself out. We get a montage to assure us that it’s business as usual, and the early part of the episode features Tony tying off the last possible lose end in the feud between himself and Junior. However, there’s also a sense that things are changing, both in the lives of our characters and also in the way the show is structured.

The first season of the show is a damn fine piece of television, but it’s also somewhat misleading. It’s a beautifully structured thirteen-episode mob epic which manages to satisfactorily tie up all its loose ends by the time the credits role on I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano. It’s understandable that so many people were frustrated by the show’s non-resolution after the first season wrapped up so elegantly.

With the success of that first season, there’s a sense of earned confidence to Guy Walks Into a Psychiatrist’s Office, as if Chase feels like he has a bit more freedom to work with in telling his great American novel.

Something’s not quite right here…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: al pacino, Christopher, Christopher Moltisanti, frank sinatra, hbo, james gandolfini, Janice Soprano, Melfi, Nobody Knows Anything, Paulie, Psychiatrist's Office, Seventeen, Silvio Dante, Soprano, Television, Tony, Tony Award, Tony Soprano, United States | Leave a comment »

The Sopranos: A Hit is a Hit (Review)

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Darren

A Hit is a Hit works a lot better than Boca, despite the fact that it’s structurally quite similar. It introduces a bunch of new characters and concepts to the series which don’t really extend beyond the episode in question. Massive G never appears again, and the pending lawsuit he threatens is never discussed in any later episode. It’s a light stand-alone tale coming towards the end of a season which has dedicated so much time and effort to building a full-formed world.

However, A Hit is a Hit doesn’t feel completely disposable. Part of that is down to the wonderful B-plot in which Tony finds himself struggling for acceptance among more the more reputable members of his neighbourhood, but it’s also down to the fact that the main plot feels like develops the themes of The Sopranos a lot better than Boca did, and that Christopher’s character arc feels like a logical progression rather than simply “an issue of the week.”

Ain’t that a shot in the head?

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: alec baldwin, arts, Beatles, Carmela, Carmela Soprano, David Chase, Emmy Award, godfather, hollywood, Italian American, james gandolfini, Mafia, Programs, Soprano, Television, Tony, Tony Soprano, United States | Leave a comment »

Birthing Hips Sink Ships: Dark Shadows & Improbable Feminism…

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Darren

I will concede that I am fonder of Dark Shadows than most. I’ve been disappointed with a lot of Tim Burton’s recent output, but something about his revival of the seventies soap opera worked strangely well. I’ll be the first to concede that it’s pretty esoteric. After all, like Casa de mi Padre, it’s effectively one single joke stretched across a film’s runtime. However, I couldn’t help but warm to it, at least because it seemed like Burton was enjoying himself a lot more than head been with films like Alice in Wonderland. There was something quite cheeky about it, from the way that it portrayed its central character as ridiculously unheroic through to the fact that it was perhaps the year’s most subversive feminist film.

Indeed, watching the film again this weekend, it struck me just how feminist the narrative actually was, despite the somewhat superficial distractions from that.

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Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: Angelique, Angelique Bouchard Collins, arts, Barnaba, Barnabas, Christopher Lee, Dark Shadow, Dark Shadows, Elizabeth, Hoffman, horror, johnny depp, Programs, Soap opera, Television, tim burton, Victoria | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Symbiosis (Review)

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Darren

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and also next year’s release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, I’m taking a look at the recent blu ray release of the first season, episode-by-episode. Check back daily for the latest review.

After Arsenal of Freedom, I was wary of Symbiosis. Star Trek has always liked exploring socially and morally relevant ideas through the vehicle of science-fiction. I can understand the appeal of it – science-fiction allows us to divorce basic arguments for all manner of clouding context and to address them in the purest or terms. I think Star Trek is at its most powerful exploring these themes (as The Next Generation would do in episodes like The Outcast), but there’s a risk involved. Nobody wants to be lectured about a simplistic moral principle for forty-minutes, and nobody wants to see a complex issue boiled down past all recognition.

So it’s pretty nice that Symbiosis works quite well. The show is a bit bumpy in places, but it does a lot of things well enough that it’s an entertaining watch. Indeed, it feels like the kind of episode we should have seen a lot earlier in the year.

Star gazing…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Arsenal of Freedom, arts, Beverly Crusher, Data, Denise Crosby, Earth, Federation, Orbit, patrick stewart, Photosphere, picard, Prime Directive, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: the original series, Sun, Symbiosis, Television, Wesley, Wesley Crusher, Will Wheaton | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Coming of Age (Review)

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Darren

Coming of Age is interesting, if only because it is one of those rare instances where an episode’s B-story is far more compelling and interesting than the primary drama unfolding. Coming of Age is apparently about Wesley’s entrance examination to Starfleet Academy, which seems to have quite high standards for an organisation that let Riker and Yar into its ranks, but that teenage academic story feels a little trite and cliché.

Far more interesting, however, is the strange investigation conducted into the crew of the Enterprise at the behest of Admiral Gregory Quinn, who makes a dramatic impression by suggesting to Picard, “I have reason to believe there may be something very wrong on this ship.”

Evidently he has been watching the first season as well.