Posts Tagged ‘ Recommended Viewing ’

Mid-season TV dramas are a mixed bag; for every good one there are half a dozen that you wonder how they made it to the screen at all. Luckily, Shawn Ryan’s The Chicago Code, which premiered last night on Fox is one of the good ones. In fact, it’s the best new show I’ve seen in a while.

Ryan’s had a good track record of morally ambiguous shows and characters. Vic Mackey and his Strike Team in The Shield; Hank and Britt in Terriers; hell, he even ran Tim Roth’s creepy lie guy in Lie to Me for a season. And, of course, he had Angel feed a bunch of lawyers to Darla and Drusilla because he just couldn’t seem to care.

The Chicago Code – so far at least – seems a little more cut and dried. Jennifer Beal’s crusading Superintendent Colvin is a straight down the line cop intent of rooting out corruption in the city. Since the corrupt Alderman Gibbons (Delroy Lindo) controls the department’s budget and refuses to fund her program for obvious reasons, she ropes in her former partner Detective Jarek Wysocki (Jason Clarke), sticks him with a brilliant young partner Evers (Matt Lauria), and sets him to work off the books. Just because every network show needs more than four main characters, Wysocki has a niece on the job, Vonda (Devin Kelley) who has the hots for her reckless partner, Joiner (Isaac Williams). Oh, and there’s an undercover agent in the Irish mob, too, played by Billy Lush, who’s trying to get close to Gibbons.

Every character’s motivations seem pretty much clear and its easy to see which ones are on the side of right – but it doesn’t matter; the stakes are high, as illustrated by the perfectly-timed gunning down of two major characters before the end of the episode. Lindo oozes more oilskin than John Shea, chewing up every scene he’s in with insincerity, while Beals is reliable as the steadfast straight arrow cop. Clarke has the more showy role as the honest but tough streetwise detective, but it’s Lauria’s performance as Evers that I was really impressed with; he was good in Friday Night Lights, but he’s really good here.

The show is off to a great start – and I’m looking forward to the next twelve episodes. You can catch up with the pilot on Hulu here.

Released just in time for a certain movie, the Iron Man Animated Complete Series collects the two season series that ran 1994-1996 as part of the Marvel Action Hour (alongside the Fantastic Four) – but the two seasons are so different that it may as well be two different shows.

In the first season, Iron Man – accompanied by War Machine and a barely-developed Force Works team (consisting of Scarlet Witch, Spider-Woman, Hawkeye and the Century) battles the Mandarin and his minions (which include M.O.D.O.K. occasionally disguised in a baby carriage) in pretty much self contained episodes. The animation and simplicity of the stories could have been made ten years earlier and are about on a par with He-Man.

In fact the first season could almost be recycled He-Man scripts with the names changed; they’re really that simplistic and dated.

Marvel Entertainment must have realized that they were on to a loser, because in the second season everything changes.

The animation improves, most of Force Works leaves, storylines are sometimes stretched out over multiple episodes, stories are cribbed from the comics (such as the Dragon Seeds storyline), the Mandarin’s presence is dramatically reduced, Iron Man gets new armor, Tony Stark gets a mullet and the show gets a snazzy new title sequence.

It feels like a completely different show – and one that can stand next to the Spider-Man, X-Men and Hulk cartoons of the day (and when do we get the Spidey and Hulk series on DVD?). For these episodes alone, the boxset is worth a look.

Plus, you get Fin Fang Foom. Can’t go wrong with that.

Iron Man: The Animated Series was provided free for review and is available from Amazon here.

I mentioned earlier that The Eleventh Hour was the final straw, making me love Doctor Who again.

(No spoilers until the embed at the bottom. Which is awesome)

I’m sure you’ve read the reviews, watched it on TV or downloaded the torrent (what torrent? who said there was a torrent?), tried to get into/actually got into/been jealous of people who got into one of the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith/Karen Gillan events that have been held in NYC this week, read the Bleeding Cool bit about a possible season long mystery, and, you know, generally got your geek on over the new Doctor and his scrumptious new assistant.

Yes, I just called Karen Gillan ‘scrumptious’. I’m bringing scrumptious back. And I have a weakness for Scottish redheads, what with me being married to one and all.

In any case, I won’t go into two much detail, but it feels more like Doctor Who than any other Doctor Who I’ve seen since the relaunch with the possible exception of Blink, which barely even featured the eponymous hero.

An English country village.

Something in the corner of your eye.

A new Doctor who fits into the role perfectly and looks, as one reviewer put it, like a Target novelization description of Jon Pertwee – an old face on a young man.

Requisite creepy alien being.

A Doctor capable of being silly, worldly and a little bit terrifying.

A companion introduced in a clever way and not being completely useless. Instead she’s resourceful, strong willed and funny.

Doctor Who – The Eleventh Hour is on BBC America on Saturday, April 17th and I highly recommend you watch it.

That slight spoiler bit I mentioned starts here.

The best damn bit about the episode for me was the climactic scene on the hospital roof, and Matt Smith’s delivery of two simple lines.

“Hello. I’m the Doctor.”

“Basically, run.”

Original Video- More videos at TinyPic

With the scenes of old villains (Sea Devils!) and all of the Doctor’s previous incarnations, my mouth literally dropped open. My wife, who was very amused already that of all the things I was going to break my no-torrenting rule for it was Doctor Who, laughed as I looked at her, open mouthed. I felt like I was a kid again, and like Doctor Who was the most important show on television.

So even though I’ve yet to finish David Tennant’s run, I’m officially on board with the new Doctor and Amy – and you should be too.

A virus has spread across the United States and there are only a handful of survivors left. Living by a hard set of rules designed to keep them safe are a small group of travelers: brothers Brian (Chris Pine) and Danny (Lou Taylor Pucci), Brian’s girlfriend Bobby (Piper Perabo) and Kate (Emily VanCamp), Danny’s friend.

Brian and Danny are headed to the beach where they vacationed when they were kids which they believe to be a safe haven – the only problem is getting there alive.

It’s not quite that simple of course, and things start going south fast as the group run out of gas and end up taking a vehicle belong to a father (Christopher Meloni) who only wants to get his infected daughter to a medical station he’s heard about.

It’s the decisions that follow that make the film interesting. Pine’s Brian is a bull-headed asshole who sticks his neck out for nobody. As far as he’s concerned, if you don’t follow the rules, you’re dead. By contrast his brother and girlfriend find it difficult to turn away from anyone who needs their help – and Kate, well Kate’s just trying to find a working phone. The group’s inner conflicts, even as they face external pressures, keep the story moving.

The film challenges what it takes to survive in a world like this, and keeps the attention through a nice narrative trick; as the small group encounter other survivors and victims, the focus always stays on them – and if someone gets left behind, they’re out of the movie for good, even though the repercussions of meeting them remain. The story here is of the core four – but by doing this, the movie acknowledges that theirs is not the only story out there, just the one we’re watching right now.

Amongst a cast of familiar faces (mainly from TV), Chris Pine stands out here. His portrayal of Brian is surprisingly deep, especially once we start to see behind his facade and look at what he’s had to do to keep him and his brother alive before the start of the film. It’s a good, muscular performance that proves that his leading man turn in Star Trek wasn’t a fluke; this guy’s got the goods.

Recommended.

Carriers is available on Netflix, Amazon and probably just about everywhere else.