Fall Pilots 2011: A Gifted Man/Suburgatory and those two I couldn't watch all the way through

The "An [Adjective] [Noun]" title has cropped up far too frequently in recent years, to the point where I can never properly remember the title to this show.  Perhaps if I write it down a few times it'll stick.  But the show's name is the least of A Serious.. A Beautiful.... A Gifted Man's challenges.  It's chief obstacle is in it's curious genre mix of medical drama, ghost story, with a sprinkle of romance.  It's House meets Ghost Whisperer but it takes itself more seriously than the pithy former series and strives to avoid the campy melodrama of the latter.

Patrick Wilson plays what he plays best, a bastard (although he did manage to swing sympathetic in Watchmen), and it's no surprise that he's really good at it.  He's also pretty good at letting his bastard guard down in moments too, showing clearly that his character is able to come out of his own ego.  It's a chance encounter Dr Michael Holt has with his ex-wife, Emma, which triggers this transformation, having not seen each other for nearly 8 years since he left her doing clinic work in Alaska for NYC where he's become a preeminent neurosurgeon.  His high profile clinic has led to high status clients and the show is effective at establishing his organization, establishing his type of clientele, and establishing his talent.  It's a little clunkier in establishing the other aspects of his life, specifically the introduction to his sister, his problem-child teenaged nephew and Emma, all who enter the show rather abruptly, though each serves a distinct purpose in how Michael relates to the world.

Obviously Michael is the focus character of the pilot, but there's little room for any other characters to make an impact.  The actors involved include the great character actress Margo Martindale as Michael's long-suffering personal assistant, and Pablo Schreiber as Anton Little Creek, a spiritual adviser set loose on Michael by his flighty sister (Julie Benz) are both highlights in the cast but, again, in supporting roles only.  There almost seems to be no room for anyone else in the pilot or the series, which is also loaded with no less than four cases for Michael to juggle in the midst of perhaps losing his grip on sanity once it's revealed that Emma died two days before he had his chance run-in with her.   Jennifer Ehle as Emma is the weakest link of the show.  Her choice to play the ghost as somewhat patronizing, perpetually sympathetic, a little cloying, and always painfully smiling is kind of grating, and I kept hoping there would be a more sinister twist to her attachment to Michael, and intent that would have been made painfully clear during Michael's "treatment" with Anton.

The pilot was directed by Jonathan Demme so it has a rather cinematic feel to it, but that cinematic aspect really makes me wonder why this wasn't a motion picture, as it seems like the idea of a spirit guide to personal transformation would suit a 2-hour screenplay far better.  I wonder how long a series about a man talking to a ghost can last without getting repetitive especially when the only journey for the show seems to be Michael's spiritual transformation.  I'm not certain what the week-to-week episode format will be or if it will be at all interesting, though hopefully it does something more interesting than a case-of-the-week slant (which judging by the synopsis of the second episode, it's not going to).  I'm intrigued by the show, but I think I'm only going to be let down.

While Cougartown is on hiatus ("EHHHHHHHHHHH" - Abed) Suburgatory is the substitute, a single camera sitcom about a teenaged girl and her single dad moving from NYC to the surreal suburban wasteland of plastic people.  The setting has been mined by films and television since the days of Clueless, so it doesn't feel familiar, but practically exhausted.  And yet, Suburgatory has found an angle that I haven't seen yet, that of the single father, having raised his daughter on his own after her mother abandoned her shortly after birth.  Of course, the show is realized from the perspective of Tessa (Jane Levy who just may be the next Emma Stone), but it's her father (a wonderfully cast Jeremy Sisto) as the handsome, single dad (fresh pickin's in the suburban jungle) that the show finds energy, for as unfamiliar as Tessa is with her surroundings, it's George that's even more out of place.

The cast is bolstered a host of comedic actors and actresses including Curb's Cheryl Hines, Firefly's Alan Tudyk, SNL's Ana Gasteyer and Mad TV's Arden Myrin, though it's the father-daughter chemistry between Sisto and Levy which is its strongest aspect and hopefully is utilized more than it was in the pilot.

Though obviously a convention of the high school comedy genre that it's exploring, Tessa's narration I found to be a tad overbearing in the pilot, serving the purpose of exposition often but not adding much to the comedy.  It's not an essential but if the show learns how to use it as a stronger comedic voice then it can become a stronger facet to the show.  Hopefully though the high-school aspect is less prevalent than Tessa's observations on the adult world around her

It's a good looking production, with set design and wardrobe aiding much of the humour's execution.  Bringing it back, it's actually not far off from where Cougartown started in its first few episodes, which isn't to say we have another Cougartown on our hands with Suburgatory (because some might construe that as an insult) but it's strong, funny and charming and hopefully develops a more unique voice from its cinematic predecessors (see also Mean Girls, Easy A).

And in my final (for now) pair of pilot peeks, I watched about 8 minutes of Pan Am before I just couldn't stand to watch anymore.  The show obviously had a good chunk of money sunk into replicating sets and costumes of the era, while digitally recreating the planes and cityscapes of the 1960s, but where Mad Men (its obvious inspiration) lives in its environments, nudging the era's gender politics and naive advancements towards the audience, Pan Am throws them in all in the audience's faces.  It's just so overbearing and, frankly, unbelievable.  It's definitely trying for a lighter, loftier tone than Mad Men, but in not taking itself seriously (introducing one of the Pan Am girls as a spy, and having another encounter her lover's family on her flight) I lost all interest.  I don't want another substandard, ridiculous soap opera, I already have Ringer.

Terra Nova, I was expecting to hate more than I did, and managed to last ten minutes longer through the pilot than I thought I would.  The network sci-fi shows (basically anything that's not on Fox) have rarely succeeded in the past 20 years, from Jeremiah to Dark Skies to Earth 2 to V, all cancelled within 2 seasons, while the sci-fi (and fantasy) shows that run on Fox, or the CW seem to be granted a much longer shelf life.  In North America, sci-fi and fantasy, no matter what the box office returns tell you, are niche products, specifically those that partake in long-form storytelling.  Why Transformers 3 and Super 8 make boffo cash at the box office is easy, spectacle, something which the genre programming on television can't afford to provide on a week-in, week-out basis.  On a network willing to take risks, which isn't the big three of NBC, CBS, or ABC, you will get a show with a focus, or at least a showrunner with a vested interest in the final product.  On the "big three" networks you get a product that's trying to satisfy executives perceptions of what the show should be as well as what network executives think the public wants to see.  What the public wants to see, I tell you now, is not Terra Nova.


Jason O'Mara, having survived another short-lived genre show (Life on Mars) is a cop in a dying future, where overpopulation has finally taken its toll and the ecosystem of earth in on the verge of total collapse.  O'Mara and his wife are busted with a third child (immediate guess, give his extreme over-protectiveness, is that the child isn't actually his and he's overcompensating) and he's scuttled off to 22nd century jail.  His wife gains a pass to Terra Nova, where the future of all mankind is set to inhabit a new civilization a few billion years in the past, coexisting with the dinosaur times.  O'Mara's wife orchestrates his jailbreak and he escapes with them to the past, where he's found out as a escaped con, but kinda sorta pardoned because his doctor/scientist wife is something of a big deal.  The future setting is intriguing, but poorly realized and ultimately disposable (we spend no more time there than we absolutely have to), while the dinosaur world looks, well, kind of like so many other major network sci-fi sets: dull and expected.  There's some interesting seeds of drama but none of the actors seem either skilled or invested enough in delivering them with anything remotely approaching subtlety.  Having seen a dozen other shows with a settling in a strange new world vibe, I basically felt like I've seen the show before and I knew where it was heading.  Shows like these are meant to be familiar, unchallenging, and, I believe, are purposefully unexciting, giving an audience who doesn't know any better something that will pass time quickly and without any fuss.

3 Short Paragraphs: Fall 2011 (pt 4)

Mixed bag this time with Terra Nova, Revenge and one sitcom Suburgatory that I was not even looking out for.

Conventional television specFic is not very good.  Sometimes it surpasses it's genre and becomes good drama, ala Battlestar Galactica, but usually it just falls into templates and formats and gets boring very quickly. Terra Nova is going to be one of those, I can just smell it like dinosaur poo.  The pilot was one of those rare two-hour premieres where we see the dark world of the future and are almost immediately tossed into the dinosaur & big bug filled past so humanity can "start again".  Luckily they cover the time-travel trope of "new timeline" so they don't step on any butterflies -- I commend them for addressing that. The annoying thing is that there has to be uppity teenagers and precocious kids and bad guys who saw The Road Warrior too many times. I will watch another few episodes, at least until it bores or annoys the hell out of me.

Then there is something I never thought I might watch again but... might... just... have... to.  It's Revenge, loosely based on the premise inside The Count of Monte Cristo, a premise I very much enjoy. Here we have a pretty girl returning to the Hamptons where nobody recognizes that she is the daughter of someone they destroyed years ago. She has a fortune given to her by an internet billionaire and connections every which way. The weird thing is that we are going to root for this pretty girl as she destroys lives and probably kills a few people. Its very standard but I am curious if it will get as dark as it could.

Suburgatory seems to be one of those out of the studio sitcoms based on a series of teen novels, but it isn't. It's narrated by our teenage girl lead who, along with her dad, has moved to the suburbs -- dad wants to give her a better life. I grew up in the suburbs of the 80s and they were not this idea of vast houses, boob jobs and plastic kids. And Jeremy Sisto is not the kind of guy I would expect playing a nice, schleppy dad who is a fish out of the pool around all the manicured and orange-tinted men of the burbs. But Alan Tudyk is in it, so it will warrant some more attention before the jaded daughter is converted into thinking every in the burbs is actually ok, afterall.

31 Days of Halloween 2016: Don't Breathe

2016, Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead) -- download

Jane Levy, she of Suburgatory redhead fame, returns in Alvarez's next movie. This movie is not quite a horror, but it acts like a horror. With a different score, lighting and attitude it would just be a new Panic Room thriller. But it really latches onto the fear the characters feel which made it a good choice for this season.

Rocky, Money and Alex are low rent burglars breaking into the houses of Detroit's wealthy, stealing a bunch of junk and hocking it. Alex's dad is a security specialist and the kids' trick is to get in via stolen alarm codes, carefully take what they want, and then trigger the alarm after they leave. They are doing OK, but Money wants more money and Rocky needs more money, to escape an abusive mother & boyfriend combo. Alex is just tagging along because he's in love with Rocky. And along comes Money with the "perfect plan".

There is a single house on one of those now classic abandoned streets in Detroit. The owner won a ton of money in a wrongful death suit and has socked it away somewhere inside the house. And the owner is blind. Easy job, right? Of course not, for just as the writing about these kinds of movies is eerily familiar, so is the idea that it will never just be easy. Things have to go wrong.

The fear starts when Money gets caught. And it continues as the kids have to try and escape this house, a house where the Trumpish ideas of protecting property are in play -- he will kill them and not blink a blind eye about it. Just because he is blind, doesn't mean this ex-soldier is at a disadvantage. The fear gets set to 11 when they find someone in the basement that they shouldn't have.

This is a well done, stylishly built horror as thriller; thriller as horror? The monster is a solid brick of a man with a very amoral agenda. The kids are getting killed off, sans the promiscuity. And there is a Final Girl. There is even the haunted house motif, though it is really only haunted with danger.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Companion

2025, Draw Hancock (feature debut; writer Suburgatory) -- download

Let's get this spoiler out of the way -- yes, she's a fuck-bot. Their words, not mine.

This is yet another one of those movies that expects you to have come in cold, not seen the trailers, not even seen the poster, which all reveal she is a bot. Or maybe its just a conceit in these kinds of movies wherein they don't give AF whether you have been exposed to plot spoilers and just make the movie with the familiar plot construction and reveal, as one would expect.

And it was revealed that Kent indeed was going to come into this movie cold, having been told by someone podcast related to view it without ANY exposure not even the above. Still, I wonder how long it will take him to guess what is coming, from the opening scenes.

Anywayz.

It starts with Iris's (Sophie Thatcher, Prospect) recollection of how she met Josh (Jack Quaid, The Boys), their meet-cute, how perfect it was, how much she loves him, and... how she ends up killing him. From the get go, Iris doesn't look quite right, maybe just in comparison sitting next to schlumpy Josh, as they small-talk during the driverless-car trip. She has a precise look: vintage looking mini dress, hair band, distinctive but understated makeup choices. She is also anxious about the weekend away, giving you the sense his friends don't really like her. Since you did she the movie poster and/or the trailer, you might snicker because she doesn't know she's a bot, and his friends might not like the idea of him bringing his fuck-bot to a weekend getaway. But who knows, maybe robot-girlfriends are a thing in this driverless-car near future, and not just mere appliances better left at home, plugged in next to the bedside table.

Anywayz, yes, there is tension at the house they arrive. Patrick (Lukas Gage, Road House) and Eli (Harvey Guillén, Reacher) are just lovely, PDA heavy but warm and accepting. But Kat (Megan Suri, It Lives Inside) and her douchey boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend, Canary Black), who owns this remote country lake house, are a little more distant. Kat distinctly doesn't like Iris, and Iris knows it, and we know Kat likely doesn't like a lot of people. But everyone loves Josh. But you get the idea they were college friends, when they were all very different people.

And then Iris kills Sergey. He says that Kat gave him permission to have sex with her, but how is she supposed to respond to that -- remember, we are not supposed to "know" she's a bot yet. He forces himself on her, she knocks him away and he responds by trying to strangle her. But, Iris found a pen knife mysteriously placed in her pocket. Next scene, she is covered in blood and looking very distraught and upset.

"Iris, go to sleep."

Yah she shuts down cuz she's a bot. A fuck-bot that Josh bought, and then jail-broke in order to kill Sergey, who Josh and Kat have conspired to kill, so they can all take his money. Sergey presents as an evil Russian oligarch / gangster type, but really he's just a douche, and Kat is his self-serving mistress. Except the plan doesn't go as... planned, when Iris gets hold of Josh's smart phone with all his controls over her, dials up her own intelligence, and then plots to escape.

I use the term fuck-bot, which is an incredibly contemptible term since everything we see about Iris, and eventually Patrick, is that they can be sentient, but even if these androids were designed to play a comforting companion role in someone's life, that they can have sex says everything about who would usually want one. The movie is not about exploring the morality & psychology of such choices, as its entire tone is dark-comedy, wherein Iris is the heroine, and Josh, a toxic misogynist, is most definitely the villain. I mean, no matter the means, they were plotting to kill someone. Iris plays the part of both patsy and weapon.

The style of the movie follows all the patterns of those thrillers, like Becky, where someone is trapped in the woods, and has to use their wiles, and violence, to get away. I would have preferred if the sub-genre stylings were the window dressing, instead of the bot and AI and technology exploration being so, but sometimes a movie generates the best questions by leaving them to you to ask.

I really liked this one.

Kent is about to publish his post about the movie, so we'll leave it to the Comments to compare.  

3 Short Paragraphs: Fall 2011 (pt 6)

I am not sure what kind of person may have watched The Girls Next Door and thought, "That's the kind of girl I wish I was."  I am not narrow minded about such things but they were not exactly the best role models in the world. So, then who in their right mind would devise a show (The Playboy Club) where the monologuing dialogue of Hugh Hefner makes us reminisce about the good ol'days where girls who dressed up in bunny costumes were the kind of girls who "could be anything they want".  Rhetorical question.  At least the faux married girl/beard claims its all about the money.  Not even the mobster story can drag this mess out into a proper drama. I guess this is the show for people who don't get that Mad Men is a critique of that period.

In the same ilk of worshipping something going on in a previous era is Panam.  Remember when the world was smaller and going from one continent to another was something only the rich did? Or soldiers.  A stewardess would have been truly the only way for some to travel, to see cities around the world.  But of course we have to add spies and revolutionaries and infidelity to that plot to make it appealing.  I suspect this is a show for grandmothers to watch with their granddaughters and wax nostalgic about when they had fewer choices of independence.

So we had girls who were bunnies and girls who were stewardesses.  Now what else do the girls of TV want to be when they grow up?  WITCHES !!  The Secret Circle is a CW production of sexy witchcraft in a small coastal town.  Where I thought Suburgatory was based on teen novels, this one definitely is. Cassie's mom just died and she drives up the coast to live with her grandmother.  Almost immediately she is tossed into the secret circle, that doesn't seem all that secret, of other local teens who are witches with meagre powers --- Cassie is welcomed because she completes the circle and enhances their power.  BTW, her mom was killed by a creepy guy who turns out to be the daddy of one of the girls.  This is the Twilight of witches with dreamy forest scenes and longing looks, dressed up in the expensive clothes of The CW where girls wear full faces of makeup to bed and wear clothes outside their highschool non-budget.

10 for 10: what be on teevee?

[I said I wasn't going to do these anymore...like 2 years ago...but it's back!
10 for 10... that's 10 movies (or TV shows) which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie (or TV show) we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable? ]

In This Edition:

1. Shoresy - Season 5 (2025, Crave, 6/6 episodes watched)
2. Agatha Christie's Seven Dials - Season 1 (2026, Netflix, 3/3 episodes watched)
3. Wonder Man - Season 1? (2026, Disney+, 8/8 episodes watched)
4. The Muppet Show - pilot (2026, Disney+, 1/1 episodes watched)
5. How To Get To Heaven From Belfast - Season 1 (2026, Netflix, 8/8 episodes watched)
6. Hijack - Season 2 (2026, AppleTV, 8/8 episodes watched)
7. Laid - Season 1 (2024, W Network/Peacock, 8/8 episodes watched)
8. The Burbs - Season 1? (2026, W Network/Peacock, 7/8 episodes watched)
9. Look Around You - Seasons 1-2 (2002-2005, Tubi, most episodes watched)
10. Smack the Pony - Seasons 1-3 (1999-2003, Tubi, a handful of random episodes watched)

...and...go!

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Season  2 | 4

All the talk in 2026 about hockey-based TV shows has been about Heated Rivalry, which comes from former Shoresy writer/director Jacob Tierney. The second most talked about hockey-based TV show of the year has been, well, the Olympics, I guess, where the Americans squeaked out wins against the Canadians on both the men's and women's ice (it wouldn't be so upsetting if America was in a better space right now). Shoresy has had four good years of being the pre-eminent hockey-based TV show, so they've had a good run. This season is, like the other seasons, full of laughs and slow-motion shots of women in thongs walking away from the camera. As ever the dichotomy of a Jared Keeso project of both being progressive and salacious is present.

Shoresy is Keeso's love letter to hockey, a sport he clearly, dearly loves (the man played Don Cherry in a TV biopic mini-series and obviously relished it), and so the writer-star uses it as his platform to examine his concerns or frustrations or hopes and dreams for the sport, by way of a "whale-shit hockey league" in Sudbury, Ontario.

This season, Keeso turns his, and Shoresy's focus to the criticisms facing North American hockey players being too soft, that the Europeans, once known for being real delicate, finesse players, are now the biggest and toughest on the ice. The local league having folded, and the Blueberry Bulldogs no longer having a home, Shoresy, with inspiration from none other than Wayne Gretzky (making a cameo...or is it a literal Cameo), decides to stage an exhibition game of tough North American SOBs against the reigning Euro team.

I'm not sure I agree with the violence-as-sport aspect of the game (the one thing about the Olympics is how tamped down the fighting gets) so this idealizing of it kind of shifts me uneasy, but then, that's the point Keeso is trying to make, that we've gotten soft on the ice, I guess. Elbows up?

[11:27]

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Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent comes from affluence, but that affluence has waned since her father's untimely death. Her mother has to rent out the manor for parties and events in order to keep up the lifestyle. But in the morning, following the latest soiree, Bundle's beau turns up dead in his bedroom, and things are more than suspicious. Like, what's with all the clocks?

Anyway, turns out Bundle is a tenacious young lady, and also quite astute, and she starts poking around the shadowy world of the elites, which leads her to a secret meeting place upstairs from a private club where a secret society gathers and plots and machinates.  Bundle suspects that the secret society is responsible for the foul play that's stricken her life, but the clues start leading her elsewhere.

I enjoyed Mia McKenna-Bruce's performance as Bundle,  her petite and doe-eyed appearance mask a fiercely independent streak and formidable intelligence. Shockingly, her mother, played by Helena Bonham Carter, appears quite the opposite... she hides in her home, tending to her plants and seems to have little interest in expanding her knowledge of the world outside her ground. The men bundle finds herself surrounded with are largely boys of priviledge, and somewhat daft, inept, pompous or oblivious, except maybe Martin Freeman's detective who definitely sees her capabilities but also sees her only as a vulnerable young woman.

At three sub-hour length episodes, not sure why this wasn't just a movie, but it ends with the promise of something more, something much bigger and more adventurous for Bundle, and if we're going to do "cozy adventure" or "cozy espionage" instead of "cozy mystery", I might be there for it.

[23:51]

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In the long stretch of Marvel projects since, oh, let's say X-Men appeared in the year 2000, my enthusiasm for a Wonder Man project was at the very least in the lower quarter of said projects. I mean, certainly quite above things like the non-MCU-related TV shows or the Fox Network shows of the early 2000s, but I just have no experience with or opinions on the character. Its star, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, on the other hand, I think is tremendous, even though the majority of his work I've seen has been in other comic book projects (Aquaman, Watchmen).

In a series created by Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton and writer Andrew Guest (Community, Suburgatory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), it keeps Simon Williams as a Hollywood-based actor, but it seems that the majority of the show is cut from new cloth...but then I don't really know.

Here Simon is an aspiring actor who invest too deeply in any role he is given, much to his detriment. He's often fired from gigs because he wants to do too much to make his role meaningful to him and to the production. His family doesn't fully believe in him, but there's also worry, because Simon has super powers which have always seemed beyond his control.

Simon meets Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley, Iron Man III, Shang-Chi), the actor who played the terrorist The Mandarin, at a movie theatre and they wind up at an audition for the new "Wonder Man" movie (a remake of a 80's cheesy sci-fi classic) and become fast friends. Trevor takes Simon under his very experienced wing and teaches him a new approach to acting to compliment his talent, rather than get in his way. 

It's really not a superhero show, despite being set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is a show about performing, and friendship, with a bit of loving criticism thrown towards the filmmaking process.  The heart of the show is the bond between Simon and Trevor, and both Abdul Mateen II and Kingsley crush the shit out of it. These are two phenomenal actors playing struggling actors who become unlikely friends, and it sells... even as we find out that Trevor is actually a plant who is being pressured by a government agency to expose Simon as an unregistered super-powered individual (even that angle is a critique on how policing agencies wind up having quotas merely for optics, not necessarily for the good of the public).  It's clear that Trevor doesn't feel good about what he's doing and, while the conclusion of the series is a given, it's still a pretty enjoyable ride getting there.

It's a sweet and lovely series, way outside the usual MCU parameters. It's a surprise, and I liked it a lot, but I still fall into the camp of wanting more superheroics in my superhero show.

[42:29 - of course I spend double the time talking about a superhero show]

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Disney finally, FINALLY, did it. They bought the Muppets off of the Henson company two decades ago and outside of two rather terrific films (The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted) they have really, really struggled with what to do with them. Their attempts to contemporize the Muppets as TV shows haven't ever fully worked.  What the die hard fans have been shouting on message boards for ages is for Disney to just do The Muppet Show again. Disney has resisted for so long.

With Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg among the Executive Producers of the series, there was a slew of creatives involved with a strong desire to recreate The Muppet Show as exact to the vintage series as possible.  Disney conceded but without commitment. They got one episode.  One episode to get it right, to recapture all the feelings of a series that ended 40 years ago, and also make it feel like more than just a nostalgia trip. Pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter, also an executive producer, gleefully offered herself up to be the celebrity guest for the return.

The sets look astounding, as if they were always there and just needed dusting off. The Muppets look great, only the voices -- to this old fan -- seem off, because of course they are. There are different people puppeting the central characters these days. The skits... well they're classic Muppets bits, vaudevillian in nature, song-and-dance numbers, joke-centric comedy that's intentionally corny, and just the lunacy of the Muppets...but the show is as much, if not more, about what's happening back stage as on stage and the way the two bleed into each other has always been the delight of the series.

By all rights, this pilot seems to have been very, very well received with high viewership over an extended period of time, which has fingers tightly crossed that Disney is finally ready to commit to the format, and just let The Muppet Show live again. 

As soon as it was over, I was ready to watch the next one... I need a next one.

[56:29]

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I probably wouldn't have given How To Get To Heaven From Belfast a second look if not for the auto-play trailer on Netflix highlighting that it's the new series from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee. I liked Derry Girls just fine, but Lady Kent loved it, having watched it through at least twice before I waded in.

Derry Girls was a half-hour comedy about Northern Irish Catholics teenage school girls in the mid-90's during the waning days of The Troubles, How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is definitely not that.

The show is a comedy, but more like a comedy-thriller maybe as three old friends learn about the death of an estranged member of their high-school crew of outsiders. Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher) is now a detective show creator/writer, Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) is a mother of three and going mad, while Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) is still a died in the wool Catholic lesbian who takes care of her mom as an excuse not to live life. When they get together and venture to the small town outside of Belfast to pay their respects to their old friend, things are...weird. The family is really weird, almost cult-like. And Saoirse thinks she discovers that the body in the casket is not, in fact, her dead friend.

It's a twisty, spinny mystery, especially as the show very clearly and very early tells us that the dead friend (and a wife and mother) Greta (Natasha O'Keeffe) is in fact alive and being held by a woman who seems very much like a contract killer (Bronagh Gallagher).

Everything, though, ties back to a secret from the women's past, a murdered man that they buried and tried to forget about, but now seems to be at the center of everything.

It's an exceptionally weird and twisty show that constantly upends what the actual threat is to these women. The dynamics between the characters is a comedic one so there are tremendous laughs throughout, but the situation is a wild puzzle that only the showrunner knows the answer to. She provide the audience just enough information to keep them guessing at the wrong answers.

It's also a show that subverts expectations over and over again. It sets up many characters as being villainous, but usurps that expectation time and again in terrifically interesting (although just as often, sloppy) ways. 

It's quite a mess overall, but the mess seems almost intentional, as part of the fun (at one point, the show winds up in Derry, where, for promotion of season 3 of Derry Girls, they painted a huge portrait of that cast on the side of a building... that portrait not only pops up in this series, but also has Derry Girls star Saoirse-Monica Jackson standing in front of it eating an ice cream, which is mind-breaking meta).

[whoops, the timer got messed up...let's just say 1:08:30]

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The next train is arriving...handsome

In the last season of Hijack Idris Elba's Sam Nelson, a high powered corporate negotiator, was on a flight that got hijacked, and he took it upon himself to try to keep the people on the plane safe while helping the boots on the ground and the hijackers communicate and follow-through on demands. The big deal of Hijack was that the hijackers, for the most part, were unwilling participants, and that there were other plants on the plane.

Season 2 kicks off with the methodical business of a subway train in Berlin, which Sam is on, getting hijacked. It seems Sam is keenly aware that something is starting to happen and attempts to intervene...but no, to spoil the surprise at the end of the episode, Sam is the hijacker this time.

Much like last season, Sam is an unwitting participant, as are others involved. Sam must convince the metro control room that he is the lone hijacker, he must take the credit/blame/fall for this action. His only demand is that the Berlin police find Bailey-Brown, the terrorist that was at the heart of last season. Sam's been convinced that Bailey-Brown murdered his son (between seasons) and that his ex-wife Marsha (Christine Adams) is going to be killed if he doesn't follow through.

And so, over the eight episodes of season two, Sam tries to keep the train passengers in line, tries to keep the police actions at bay, tries to deduce who the plant(s) are on the train, tries to keep Marsha safe, all while trying his best to somehow find a way through all of this that keeps everyone alive. Nobody needs to get hurt, but people do get hurt.

I dunno, I've been following a lot of transit nerds on youtube over the past couple years and so I think a lot about subways and public transit systems, so seeing the Berlin network, trains and stations was really quite awesome. The first half of the season is full of upending expectations (not unlike How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, only having less fun with it) and the second half feels at times like it's stretching to fill the runtime. This would have made for a fabulous 2-hour movie, and would have still been really solid at 4 or 6 episodes, but 8 was too long, and it took too much time to get to what was actually happening (the ties to the previous season's adversaries implied that people who watched the previous season cared that much about the bad guys of that season to see them return). 

But watching Elba is always a pleasure. That's a handsome man right there. And of the large cast involved, they all do solid work, but there's not enough time with most of them to really invest in anyone but Sam and so what the other characters are doing seems...unimportant. A movie would have been more tightly focussed.

[1:20:19]

---

Based on an Australian series of the same name and adapted by Nanatchka Khan (Don't Trust the B... in Apartment 23) and Sally Bradford McKenna, Laid is a comedy about sex and death, as so much media is. In this case event planner Ruby (Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once) learns that seemingly all the men and women that she has had sex with are dying, and not from an STD or anything directly relational to her, other than they're dying in the order in which she slept with them.

Ruby's best friend AJ (Zosia Mamet, Madame Web) is a true crime obsessive (worshipping at the feet of Amanda Knox) and immediately wants to get down to business solving this thing, creating a whiteboard for Ruby's sex timeline.  

The gist of the show is that Ruby is a bit callous with her sexual encounters, using men (and women) in disregard for their feelings. She's in therapy but resists any action that would see self improvement.  She finds herself attracted to her client Isaac (Tommy Martinez) in spite of herself, and he in turn is into her, despite himself. But she knows she can't be with anyone else because all of her sexual partners are dying in very weird ways.  Unfortunately, that also means AJ's boyfriend, Zack (Andre Hyland), who Ruby slept with when they both were drunk at a mutual friend's wedding during the brief time in which he and AJ were broken up. The fuse is lit and it's only a matter of time before that bomb goes off.

Ruby is... selfish, self-centered and inconsiderate. She's defintely not the most horrendous person in the world but she's just on the other side of the line from being a "good person".  In trying to figure out why this is happening to her, why her exes are dying, she also needs to examine herself and the impact she has on others... and it's tough for her to escape her seemingly inescapable tendencies.

Laid, as a comedy, is a failure. Each episode has a few chuckles and sometimes a really good laugh or two, but for the most part the comedy is more conceptual, and when you're playing in dark comedy territory, you have to have a really good handle on tone, and this show never quite gets there.  Many times Ruby (and sometimes other characters) actually witness the violent deaths of one of her exes and there's maybe shock or surprise but no sense of trauma or lasting effects on them, and it's the weakest decision the show makes. That people are dying and Ruby is so centered on her romance with Isaac or AJ is just fixated on the mystery does the characters a disservice.

It's only trivian night host Richie (Michael Angarano), from the middle of Ruby's sex timeline, who doesn't die, and gets dubbed her sex loophole. Surprisingly Richie seems to become Ruby's grounding point, despite their sort of disdain for one another. 

While I didn't necessarily love every aspect of the show -- tone was definitely the most challenging part -- I was very invested in how this possibly could be happening. By the end of episode 6, we have an answer as Ruby's world falls apart, and episode 7 gets to the meat of it while Ruby's tries to pick up the pieces. Episode 8 goes for redemption, but Ruby's still Ruby...stripes don't change that fast. But it seems we have a finale, a resolution, except that there's obviously an unresolved Richie plotline and then Ruby's dad shows up the whole thing seems to have started again. Bam, cliffhanger...and the show is cancelled, and the American version didn't really follow the Australian version's plot, so ...no resolution.

The only part of this show Lady Kent seemed to enjoy was the theme, which was just James' "Laid" (of course). Stuck in my head for weeks.

[1:40:32] 

---

Decent remake of the Hanks poster

I don't really remember The 'Burbs, Joe Dante's 1988 dark comedy starring Tom Hanks about a man moving into the suburbs with his wife only to get paranoid about suspicious things in his neighbourhood.  I definitely wasn't itching to see it remade into a TV series.

But much like watching Hijack because Idris Elba, it's almost irresistable to have Kiki Palmer (Nope, One of Them Days), one of the most magnetic performers in Hollywood, in a starring role and not watch it.

Palmer takes on the Hanks role here as Samira.  She got knocked by with Jack Whitheall's Rob after a short courtship, and they got married, had the baby and now are moving into Rob's parents place, which they offered up as they're on a "permanent cruise".  The home is in a large cul-de-sac where all the neighbours seem to be up in each other's business, and stuck at home with the baby, Samira understands why, there's some weird shit going down here...especially across the street in the abandoned manor that was just sold.

Turns out the house used to belong to the family of Rob's friend in his high school years. She disappeared under mysterious circumstances and the family moved away a while later leaving the place to rot. This disappearance gets into Samira's head, as new weird things start happening in the neighbourhood, and she's not the only one who thinks so. She makes friends with a wine-drinking porch crew and they kind of fuel each other's paranoia, as they each harbour their own secrets. 

The show starts as all mystery, everyone is a bit of a blank slate and kind of suspicious, including Rob. Samira's pent-up house-bound energies need to go somewhere, so she puts it into nosing around, and trouble follows.

Palmer is, as ever, a damn delight. The show does touch upon her being a black woman in the suburbs (and the requisite racism that surrounds it) in the first episode but sort of lets the anxiety of it ebb as she becomes part of the community quickly. Julia Duffy (Newhart) reminds us why she was nominated for Emmys six years in a row, and bringing Mark Proksch's weird energy vampire energy from What We Do In The Shadows into the cul-de-sac is a real gift. Whenever Paula Pell and Palmer share the screen, the most unlikely of comedy-duos emerges and I want nothing more than a big vehicle for the two of them to lead up and drive around.  If anything, the weakness of the show largely falls on Whitehall's shoulders.  He's not bad, but there's nothing in his performance that tells me why someone like Samira would be with him, and he doesn't bring anything unique to the role that makes him stand out from the other very talented performers (like RJ Cyler who plays Samira's brother, they needed more of him in the show).

I haven't watched the finale, but already, most of the mysteries are resolved around the main cast, and the central mystery which started it has morphed into another one that's just a little less sticky. It's a fun, if light watch.

[1:56:49]

---

Created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, Look Around You started its life as a series of edutainment shorts that was all about editing, images and voice over, no real roles or characters. On Tubi the nine 8-to-10-minute shorts are compiled into two 35 minute episodes.  They seem to be spoofing something very specific from British culture of the 1980s, but such things are not alien to any child of the 1980's who had access to PBS or TV Ontario. These sorts of informational videos were filler on TV throughout my youth, the only difference here is these videos aren't teaching you anything useful...everything they're talking about is made up and/or patently absurd.

It's pretty frivolous, but at the same time tugs on both nostalgia and comedy strings in a delightful way. There won't be a lot of big belly laughs, but if you appreciate conceptual comedy, this will definitely scratch an itch.

The second season of Look Around You is an entirely different show. It's once again in the edutainment sphere, only this time as a hosted show, likely aimed at kids but for all audiences. The four hosts (including Serafinowicz and Olivia Coleman) all speak in a very gentle fashion as they explain their topic or engage with their guest or chat about the video we've just seen. It's all still styled so very early '80's and it's really silly business being played very, very straight. In one episode, Jack Morgan (Popper) is going to have plastic surgery performed by a miracle robot (operated by Benedict Wong), and in another the cast meet a horse that can predict the winner of horse races, while in yet another they discuss a super-serum that will give an athlete super-speed only for it to cause them to shrink in the process.

My favourite bit of the show is Serafinowicz's penchant for portmanteaus. He slips at least one in per episode.

Silly business. Good fun.

[2:08:10]

---

I like British comedy, but I'm by no means obsessive about it...mainly because a lot of it can be very localized, and/or too broad for my tastes. Well, hows this for too broad... a sketch comedy show starring...3 women? I kid.

I'd heard of Smack The Pony long ago, but really had no idea what it was. An Only Fools and Horses spin-off? I don't know. I never investigated because I had other things to consume.

The show stars Fiona Allen, Doon Mackichan and Sally Phillips, and yeah, it's just sketch comedy, the hardest programming to review. I wasn't keen on starting from episode one, because those early ones can be the roughest of a sketch series as the cast and writers find their feet. It's sometimes better to start in the middle so you can see the peak work and get familiar with the players involved so that you're a bit more forgiving of the roughness of the early shows.

I'm not keen to binge the show, just putting an episode on when I have 20 minutes or so to kill, it kind of fills a hole, being amusing enough, and completely non-taxing. The show has little structure, and from what I've seen so far, no real recurring characters, although there are repeating bits, like dating profiles (where different characters record their absurd dating profiles). 

The show will have long-form sketches where ideas are given room to play out and grow, and there are a lot of sub-1-minute gag-based sketches which are uncultivated nuggets that feel, unfortunately, too slight to be satisfying (my favourite sketch I've seen so far involves characters meeting at an art show, kissing each other on the cheek and smearing lipstick, only for the smeared lipstick to be seen everywhere all over the place in incremental ways, really quite amusing).

More than a few British character actors-to-be pop up here, including Darren Boyd and Sarah Alexander... I'll no doubt come across more as I continue my relaxed pace of consumption. 

Enjoyable, if not earth shattering, my only real problem is the quality of the sound on Tubi. The mix of the audio has the laugh track too loud to sometimes hear what's being said in a sketch. 

[2:22:19]

[I don't know why I fool myself into thinking I could ever get these written in 10 minutes or less.]

---FIN---

Fall TV Preview round 1

I like television, always have... once I graduated from a cartoon and kids show diet to "Must See TV" with the Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers and beyond I realized how appealing ongoing, serialized storytelling was.  For a long time, though, I, like many, considered it inferior to cinema, but now that television has adopted cinematic production values and often a creator (rather than formula)-driven mentality, it's equaled, if not surpassed the capabilities of cinema.  The only limitation seems to be the financial investment, but the talent is more and more migrating to the long-form storytelling capabilities of the small (and/or on-line screen).

I was a sit-com devourer, and in my teenage years became a steadfast consumer of genre television, absorbing classics like Doctor Who, modern shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Flash, and Bravo's incredible slate of "TV Too Good For TV" like Twin Peaks, The Prisoner, The Avengers, Max Headroom, and, erm, Cop Rock.  I've not always watched the best TV, but as the years have progressed I've developed a taste for quality television, but still with a tendency towards comedy and genre programming still in effect.  It's with this lens that I've approached the fall previews that have recently flooded the youtubes.  Overall, I'm curious about much of the fall season, but expect to find most of it lacking any sustainability or long-term interest.

The 100 It's "After Earth" meets "Lord of the Flies"... it's only lacking the competition element from being Battle Royale/The Hunger Games. It's a CW show so it's going to hit a lot on romantic entanglements, and there seems to be a lot of typical eye-rolling teenage conflict. That said, Paige Turco, Henry Ian Cusick and Isaiah Washington as the adults of the piece, I like, and there seems to be some nice plot twists ingrained in this. I don't have much hope that they can pull it off though



The Tomorrow People It's the X-Men. It's Mutant X. It's Push. It's been done a dozen times, in fact the Tomorrow People was done 40 years ago, and 20 years ago, and 5 years ago on BBC. There's no reason why this can't work again, but tossing in another trite "chosen one" subplot and too much of the usual CW "good looking young people" vibe, but a lot of that could be the grating emo tracks the CW is overdubbing into all their promos.



Star-Crossed CW seems to be banking heavily on the whole "pretty young people in genre settings" scenarios this year. Were I 15 I would be so totally devoted to the CW. As a grown up, this all makes me feel a little... I dunno, bored, by it all. This one is easily the worst of the lot, and just as easily put up on the podium as Twilight fangirl bait. It's Romeo and Juliet meets Alien Nation.



Hostages This one would interest me as a movie but as an ongoing series I just don't see how it's going to run more than a half dozen episodes. Toni Collette and Dylan McDermott make for a surprising cast in a show that can't possibly have a long-term gameplan.



Sleepy Hollow A bit of a surprise for network TV, this seems more in line with a SyFy original than a Fox program. Ichabod Crane awakens in the present day, teaming up with the modern day authorities to do some ghostbusting, as the headless horseman returns as well. Production values look not too shabby and there's a solid chuckle or two in the trailer (more than I can say for most previews), but again, this doesn't look like a series with legs or a long-term gameplan.

Intelligence An update of the Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman thread, but it stars Josh Hollaway, so, you know what, it's cool. It looks pretty bad ass but if it can heavily ingraine the DARPA secret and theoretical tech of the comic book Think Tank then there might be something to it. It took Person of Interest a season for me to really catch on, and to see the bigger picture, so hopefully this has it too, because Josh Hollaway. "A secret agent Disneyland for men, are you kidding me? I love that sh..." - Josh Hollaway.



The Crazy Ones It's "Mad Men" if it were set in the modern day, and the products used in the show were actual product placement, and if Don Draper were played by Robin Williams, and if Sally Draper were Sarah Michelle Geller and Bob Benson was some kind of immortal (and has become bisexual I see). Geller looks pretty great, but the rest of the show, especially Williams at his most annoying Williams-ness, looks unbearable. It'll probably be a hit.



Rake Greg Kinnear is a pretty awful human being, in the trend of shows following pretty awful human beings. But he's awful in the quirky-funny almost-tolerable way. It actually looks entertaining enough, but it's one of those single-character based hour-long comedies that, for me, wear out their welcome quickly (it's a no win situation, either the character stays the same and his antics get tiresome, or he grows and is no longer the character you tuned in to see originally).



The Goldbergs When I was a kid, The Wonder Years taught me all about what it was like to be a child of the 1960s, all while still being relatable as a child of the '80's/'90's. The Goldbergs is The Wonder Years but set in the 1980s, and instead of Daniel Stern we have Patton Oswalt narrating. The adult cast looks good, but unfortunately the trailer doesn't have a single solid laugh in it, which is kind of sad. The REO Speedwagon bit gets close though and there's some conceptually funny bits which, I hope, actually pay off in a full episode. I'm hopeful for this one, but I'm definitely wary.



Trophy Wife While I could stare at Malin Ackerman's malamute-esque eyes for hours, I can't do so in the form of terrible situation comedy in which she attempts to go toe-to-toe with Marcia Gay Hardin (she's who the show should be about). I assume she'll still be game for more Children's Hospital and the cameo appearances as Tessa's mom in Suburgatory...



The Michael J. Fox Show Who doesn't like Michael J. Fox? This show seems to be set around that very premise, only here he's a retired news anchor with Parkinson's Disease getting a little stir-crazy around the house, so he goes back to work. I laughed quite a few times throughout the trailer, but I'm wary that all of the jokes seem to be about disarming the stigma of the disease. I hope it's something the show writers can overcome and create a genuinely entertaining family/career comedy around a very charismatic lead actor.



The Blacklist The trailer seems to break down the entire first episode of the show, but as a result it leads to the set-up to the larger structure of the series. I wanted to hate it, as it's yet another Clarice/Hannibal-type scenario (so many scenes in the trailer I've seen so many times before), but it does seem to have some very enjoyable twists... and a gameplan, as well as a great set-up for an episodic show.



Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. A show by Joss Whedon set in the Marvel Universe of the movies, OF COURSE I'm watching this. I'm so fanboy-intrigued that I can't even be impartial or critical about the trailer. I just want to watch it. Now please.



Brooklyn Nine Nine This show only really works if you enjoy Andy Samberg's manchild schtick, which I do, so I'm in. Bounce that off Andre Brougher and I'm in doubly. To me, this could be the next Unusuals. To others, I can feel the eye-rolling from here. Plus Joe Lo Truglio, Chelsea Peretti and Terry Crews. Created by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (they of Clone High, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, and the 21 Jump Street movie), so in other words, yes.



Enlisted A screwball military comedy, in the vein of... well, EVERY screwball military comedy EVER. See also: Police Academy. Not generally my thing, but the cast looks very solid, and there were some actual laughs in the trailer. It has a total Bill Lawrence vibe (CougarTown, Scrubs)so looks quite promising.



Dads Former child actor showdown between Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi in a Seth McFarlane created 3-camera comedy that looks, well, like the typical 3-camera comedy, complete with a live studio audience. Could be likeable, but the trailer is excruciating.



Almost Human Credit to JJ Abrams for giving genre shows a decidedly huge boost in recent years, from Lost to Fringe to Person of Interest, but his track record is at best 1:2 so I've become wary heading into any of his produced programs. That said, Karl Urban! But was I really looking for a mis-matched buddy cop show where one half of the team is Data from Star Trek? Kinda yawn.



Winners:
Agents of SHIELD, Brooklyn Nine Nine

Potential Winners:
The Blacklist, The Michael J. Fox Show, Intelligence, Enlisted

There's Potential:
The Goldbergs, Rake

Potential Losers:
Sleepy Hallow, The 100, The Tomorrow People, Hostages, Dads, Almost Human

Losers:
Star-Crossed, The Crazy Ones, Trophy Wife

KWIF: The Last of Sheila (+4)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It's been a busy couple of weeks so I missed doing a write-up last week and am trying to get ahead of it this week as another busy weekend is ahead. To be perfectly honest, my heart and mind aren't really in it to win it, but here we go anyway. 

This Week:
The Last of Sheila (1973, d. Herbert Ross - hollywoodsuite)
The Final Destination (2009, d. David R. Ellis - rental)
Starship Troopers (1997, d. Paul Verhoeven - netflix)
Hail, Caesar! (2015, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - blu-ray)
Christmas on Duty (2025, d. Jake Van Wagoner - hallmark)

---

When Glass Onion, the sequel to Knives Out! came out in 2022, director Rian Johnson routinely cited The Last of Sheila as one of his key inspirations for the Benoit Blanc sequel. I, like a great many, was completely unaware of the existence of this film, whose biggest claim to fame would be that it was co-written by Psycho star Anthony Perkins and legendary Broadway musical composer Stephen Sondheim. I mean, yeah, what?

Turns out that Perkins and Sondheim are old friends and that for years they would stage grand-scale scavenger hunts and murder mystery parties for their pals (one of which was this film's director Herbert Ross). It wasn't a far stretch for them to take a few of their ideas and build a Hollywood-style narrative around it.

The result is The Last of Sheila, where millionaire movie mogul Clinton Greene (James Coburn) has invited a few of his Hollywood acquaintances from in front of and behind the screen to a weekend of games and adventure.  His six guests include aspiring screenwriter Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin) and his wife with family money, Lee, horny and hungry star agent Christine (Dyan Cannon), over-the-hill director Philip Dexter (James Mason), superstar actress Alice Wood (Racquel Welch) and her latest husband Anthony (Ian McShane). They're all in different states of desperation as to not turn down Greene's invitation, but it seems like the only one that wants to be there is Christine.

Clinton promises fun and frivolity, but there's an air of something quite off. Clinton's beloved wife, Sheila, died, a victim of a hit-and-run about a year earlier, and Clinton hasn't been the same since. His game, and the plot thereof has sinister undertones, and it's not long before people start to suspect that Clinton is either toying with them, or planning something far more damning and dramatic. It seems the roleplaying he has each person playing is the secret of another player, and it's up to the players to figure out who's who.

Only trouble is, on the second day of the multi-day event, Clinton is murdered, and so the game becomes, well, just which one of them murdered him, and why.

The Last of Sheilah may not seem like much at first, and the first act, right up until Clinton's death, seems maybe a little frivolous, as if the whole affair is about Clinton trying to uncover, through is game, just which one of his guests was the driver that killed his wife. But it's nary so simple, and the twists just keep on twisting in rather delicious fashion throughout.

It's an exceptionally clever mystery that, like the best of them, isn't teasing the audience with clues as to its answer, because the mystery it's trying to solve isn't the mystery it's actually trying to solve, and even when the mystery is solved, there's still more to it. This film doesn't really relent until its last frame, and it ends in such a unique place that, somehow, still feels utterly unique.

The only part about The Last of Sheila that is maybe a little underwhelming is that its a cast of six, which doesn't seem like enough suspects when we can narrow them down and eliminate them pretty quickly. Of course, Ross is very clever with what he shows and doesn't show, and the script is very delicate in what it tells us and what it holds back.

I don't want to oversell it, but it's a really fun movie, and an absolute must for any fan of murder mysteries.

---

It's been a roller-coaster ride already through The Final Destination franchise (and I'm not just talking about FD 3). I really liked the first film from X-Files veteran James Wong, and felt the second from David R. Ellis let go of the seriousness and went total bugnuts bonkers bananas instead, both in the wickedness of the deaths and in the ridiculousness of lengths it goes in trying to connect itself to the first film. I had really anticipated Wong's return to FD3 only to find I missed Ellis' batshittery, and that Wong's attempts to bring the tone back around to serious wasn't so fun (plus the deaths were somewhat underwhelming). 

And so, seeing that Ellis was back behind the helm for the fourth entry, doing that 2010s-era trope of using the first movie's name but with a definite article rather than a number to differentiate it, I was excited to see what absolute lunacy Ellis had cooked up.

Unfortunately what he cooked up was a cowpie served on horseshit. 

Wasting absolutely no time, The Final Destination opens on a quartet of 20-somethings (actually playing 20-somethings this time, and not teenagers as I first thought) at a racetrack. One of them has a vision of a brutal collision which dominoes into the stadium collapsing and many people dying. And so, like the other films, our protagonist has a freakout which winds up leading him and his friends and a few other interlopers outside the stadium when the accident occurs.

And then they all start dying in freak accidents.

We've seen it before, and it's all been done better.

At well under 90-minutes this is a film that takes no time getting to where its going and where it wants to go, killing off CW-quality actors in complicated fashions, while our protagonist and a few other believers follow the visions he's having to try and prevent the others' deaths.

This film doesn't care one lick about its characters. It doesn't even pretend. Any moment where two characters should be connecting with each other are quickly cut away from in favour of what narrowly constitutes this film's plot.

It wouldn't be nearly so bad if Ellis were up to his same tricks as FD 2, but the death scenarios have little of the panache that they did in his earlier movie, where he would set up innumerable potential means for a character to die, only to deke us out a number of times and blindside us to our uproarious delight. Here, he does it in half measures and it's not so exciting or entertaining.

Also there's a battle between the Wong and Ellis camps in how our protagonists learn to interrupt death's plan. Wong's films have the characters seeing signs, in shadows or scattered paperwork or splattered condiments or photographs. Ellis lazily has the protagonist see prophetic visions. I much prefer the former, because it's more clever and visually interesting, and it means that any of the film's characters can see the signs. In Ellis' films only one can have the visions.

The film is also extremely ugly. Shots are composed terribly, like sub-par Lifetime films, either a clear signifier of reduced budget, or a side effect of shooting a film for 2010's-era 3-D, or probably both. I was constantly taken aback by just how low-budget the film looked.

I had hoped FD3 was the low point of the series, but I was wrong. I know redemption is coming with Bloodlines but I'm hoping the fifth entry starts laying the path.

---

I remember seeing Starship Troopers on opening weekend in 1997, and being blown away by how crazy good looking the aliens and the cgi and the costumes and weaponry and sets and gore and all of it looked. I also recall being blown away by the acting, and how goddamn awful it was. I revisited the film once more when it came out on video, and I really, really wanted to love the film, but it sat on the borderline of unwatchable for me, and I just set it aside.

In the nearly 30 years since, Starship Troopers has been re-evaluated by the critical community as a sly, subversive film that fits in perfectly with Paul Verhoeven's other sci-fi greats like Robocop and Total Recall. Except those films had good actors, acting good, while this film has a host of mediocre actors acting poorly. Oh, the bad acting is definitely intentional, I see that now, certainly in the direction Verhoeven was giving his cast if not actually a conscious effort on the parts of performers like Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards. It's evident Verhoeven was not a fan of the 90's trend of horny teen dramas starring late-20-somethings playing teenagers, and sending them into bloody combat and turning these beautiful white faces into tools of a fascist empire is entirely the point. 

But it's still a tough hang.

The action is incredible. The bug creatures are probably the best on-screen alien creation this side of the Xenomorph (they're so damn colourful), and the satire, when it rears its head, stings like a paper cut. But any time we need to spend with any of these characters is like having a root canal without any anaesthetic...so, so painful.

Just like in 1997, I really, really want to like this film, and I kind of do, but I hate it more than I like it.

I've never watched any of its direct to video sequels, as I can't imagine it being done on a lower budget with even lower tiered stars, and not with an auteur director and totally leaning into the fascistic glory of warfare rather than satirizing it...yeah, no thanks.

--- 

In the Coen Brothers' filmography, there are certainly much tighter narratives, much more character-centric stories than Hail, Caesar! and it's hard for me not to say that No Country for Old Men or True Grit or A Serious Man or Inside Llewyn Davis are definitively better films than Hail, Caesar!, because they are. I just like Hail, Caesar! more.

 I can't help it. There's a chilliness to each of those other masterpieces of the Coens' career second half, but Hail, Caesar! is all warmth. 

Their comedies, especially post-2000, tend to have a bit to then, something a little cynical. It's all love here, a true love letter to the Hollywood studio system of old and the movies that they produced, while also being very keenly aware of the sexism, the shadiness, the manipulation, the darkness behind it all. The Coens aren't saying that the art was worth the sacrifice...or maybe they are. I actually don't know. They dive into communist and socialist thinking in a manner that seems both mocking and reverential, much in the same way that they poke sharply at the studio behind-the-scenes while also adoringly creating synchronized swimming or song-and-dance numbers that rival (and possibly outdo) the similar films of yesterday.

I already reviewed the film back in 2016, and most everything I said there still stands. It's just an unabashed delight to watch with it's star-studded cast (just more and more faces popping up in tiny parts) and big time set-pieces.  It wasn't the most warmly received movie at the time, but like most Coens films, people have come around on it and started embracing it. I've always been exceptionally fond of it.

The only thing I got wrong in my review was in my prediction of how big a star Alden Ehrenreich would become. I hadn't gauged how brutal the backlash would be to Solo (despite being a movie, that itself, has become a bit of an secret success in Star Wars circles), and Ehrenreich seemed to have taken the full brunt of that backlash. He's never become a big star, but revisiting Hail, Caesar! for the first time in a while, and I was blown away once again by just how damn charming, charismatic and multi-talented he is. He's just a magnificent performer and I enjoy seeing him in everything I've seen him in (hello Weapons).  Hopefully he finds *that* movie or *that* prestige TV series that finally connects him with the public.

Watching this film reminded me that I need to get AppleTV back and finish off The Studio which feels like it's time travelling kin to Hail, Caesar!

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Oh, gawddammit, it's that time of year again isn't it. 

Even before Halloween was over, Hallmark had already started airing its slate of seasonal romance films for Christmas 2025.  They've slashed their roster practically in half from last year, likely in part because their leaning into episodic series and reality TV more this year, but also in part likely because of the cheddar prez who started slapping obtuse tariffs on productions made out of country, and the Hallmark movie churn is heavily dependent on crossing the Canadian border.

Anyway, I've already stockpiled a few Hallmarkies for the annual Toasty and Kent Advent Calendar, but this pile of doodoo isn't going to wait that long. I can't have its stink just wafting around for that long.

In Christmas On Duty, Parker Young of (Suburgatory and Enlisted in his Hallmark debut) costars with Janelle Parrish (Sugarplummed) in...ugh... a seasonal military-themed "romance". Usually the Hallmark military-themed productions are cloying wanna-be tearjerkers about a woman pining for her man serving overseas and how difficult life is without a man around or some shit. I dunno. I don't watch them, because they're pretty much what they say they are on the sleeve.

But this, at least, was stepping away from the tearful reunions, and instead was vying for an opposites-attract/road-trip engagement. It did try, and boy it failed spectacularly.

The story opens with Young and Parrish competing for a spot in the marine's infantry, and Parrish comes out on top. Their fathers have a long rivalry that has extended to them, if in a friendlier fashion. Six year later they're reunited at Quantico training where Parrish is looking for duty commander or something. I dunno, the movie care only marginally more about the rank-and-file-ness of the military than I do.

Their rivalry immediately rears its head and they get in trouble with their outgoing Colonel. Forced to serve watch duty together on Christmas Eve, the pair instead find themselves on a mission to rescue Christmas because the delivery truck can't make it's way through the storm to bring toys. Given an official mission, Young and Parrish put their difference aside and head out in an old 5-ton and go shopping for the kids, having a couple verrrry stupid detours and encountering some very contrived obstacles along the way.

Meanwhile.... nevermind. It's not worth getting into.

This movie not only has the talents of the usually quite charming Young and Parrish, but also the always solid Peter Jacobson (Colony) playing Parrish' Lt.Col.(ret) father. None of the military personnel in this film were convincing in the slightest, and the chemistry between Young and Parrish never really accelerated. The whole production feels like a trial run, a proof-of-concept rather than anything resembling refined product.

It's a story that wants to have the big road trip side-quests that lead to big comedic or romantic or dramatic set pieces, but none of the side-quests lead to anything resembling big comedy, romance or drama. The complication (and there's always a complication) is so under baked that when it cropped up I was left scratching my head why anyone thought there was a problem.

But there is real snow. Sometimes.

And there's Doug. At one side-quest Young and Parris encounter a hapless middle-aged stoner-coded store employee who has, accidentally, locked himself out of the store. Doug is the only bright spot in this otherwise kind of dull and sparkless movie, to the point that both Lady Kent and I were left asking "what's Doug up to?" multiple times after his appearance (did we spy him in the parade afterward?).

Also "Finding Mr. Christmas" Season 1 winner Ezra is in this, for about 5 lines and is out-acted by an 8-year-old. The man's an ex-marine AND won the Hallmark leading man competition and he relegated to a cameo!?! Don't expect to see him in any Hallmarkies next year. I honestly don't know what they were thinking (having seen the first two episodes of season 2 of Finding Mr. Christmas, at least it seems they can't do worse).