TV Review: Supergirl, Season 1

And so we come to the end of this year's DC TV Universe Review Extravaganza! Four shows from the CW/CBS stable, three in the same world, and one, because it's on a "grown up" network, out  on it's own barring a single crossover. Because yes, one of these shows jumped from the smaller network on a Major Network, building off the success of it's predecessors and presumably hoping that it can make it as a breakout hit. It's an interesting choice of lead character too; an all too rare female lead; a character that a wider audience may not be aware of, but part of hugely popular brand. I'm talking, of course, about Supergirl, cousin that grumpy guy that was up on cinema screens not so long ago. 

Movie Review: Hail, Caesar!

I think it's safe to say I'm a pretty die-hard fan of the Coen Brothers and a new film from them is always a cause for celebration. I love then in part because they seem to pretty much do what they want, moving from blood-soaked dramas, to light comedy, and picking up all sorts of other genres to play in along the way. They've had occasional misfires for sure - although I don't always agree with critical consensus about which films those misfires actually are - but even the Intolerable Cruelty's of this world I've found interesting and entertaining. This year we are back with farce after the excellent Inside Llwellyn Davis, alighting on the Hollywood of 1951, in Hail, Caesar! 

Movie Review: Deadpool

So with a rare chance to get out to the cinema - on Valentines Day, no less - then going to see a "grown up" movie was one the cards. Given it's Oscar season, there was quite few on offer, but Z wanted to see Deadpool, and thats a grown up romantic movie for a night out, right? Right? Aside from good early reviews and promising trailer, I can't say that I have been itching to see it based on the property alone; Deadpool isn't a character that has ever grabbed me, and I think I've mentally filed him away other hyper-violent 90s creations whose fans are always a little bit too enthusiastic about the "blood and swearing" element of the character. Which I admit is narrow-minded of me, and I guess it's a credit to the marketting around the movie that it got me past that hurdle in the first place. Z, to her credit, just watched the trailers and though "Yes, I want to see that." And I'm glad we did. 

DVD of the Week: Pitch Perfect 2

If it seems a little like our frantic consumption of pop-culture has slowed a little, then I guess that's because it has. Some of this continued busy times in the household in the run-up to Christmas (yes, its that time of year!) which seems to peak in early December before slowing down for the actual holiday. But it's also because a lot of the "new season" shows are now up and running, and filling our hours without actually finishing; a quick count reveals at least 7 ongoing shows we are working though at varying rates. But, we are trying to stick to "Movie Night" on saturdays, and most recently it was the follow up to the unexpectedly good Pitch Perfect, expectedly called Pitch Perfect 2. 

Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

We suddenly seem to be on a run of actually getting out to see movies. OK, so we've usually got at least one child in tow, but with Robert now old enough, and interested enough, to go to the cinema, and Ewan reasonably keen on the idea too, it feels like we've turned a bit of a corner. No longer is a relatively rare, logisitically fraud special occasion, although I would perhaps like to see something with a more adult rating at the cinema more than once a year. Yes, I know I went to see Mad Max Fury Road twice, but shush, OK? So with a couple of days off for just me and Ewan last week we took the opportunity to catch up on our blockbuster watching, this time with Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. 

DVD(s) of the Week: Frances Ha and Transcendence

I need to do a bit of catching up on some this review stuff, especially the movie of the week, so I thought I'd roll the last couple we've watched together, as they make an interesting comparison. On the one hand, we have Frances Ha, which on the face of I shouldn't like, and the other, Transcendence, which I should. Of course, the opposite turned out to be true, which goes to show you can never judge a film by it's synopsis or trailer. First up, the one I liked.

Movie Review: Furious 7

With a couple of days off last week to keep an eye on Ewan, I was keen to get him out of the house for a few hours. He's reached that age where all he seems to want to do it keep to himself, watching youtube videos or playing DOTA2, or occasionally both. After a couple of weeks off, I was starting to get worried he'd forgotten what the outdoors looked like, and was in danger of turning into some sort of 21st Century version of Gollum, clutching his Chromebook and muttering gaming slang to himself. So, to the movies, which involved a dangerous few minutes in the sunlight before the safety of a darkened theatre was reached, lured by Popcorn and the promise of Furious 7.

DVD of the Week: Cloud Atlas

I've mentioned before that one of my favorite books of the last few years is David Mitchells' Cloud Atlas - an intricate, sprawling, and pretty pretentious in places mediation of life, humanity and all that "stuff" that serious novelists like to meditate on. Its the sort of book that, in my wildest dreams, I would like to write myself, the sort of complexity and cleverness, mixed with genre-savvy and accessibility, that I wish I had myself. Part of the joy of the book is the nested structure; 6 stories that fold into, and then out of, the next one as we move forwards (and then back again) in time. Each story is tonally different, each a homage to a different style, and yet each journey is essentially thematically the same. What possessed then to make a movie it is completely beyond me. And yet they did.

First Impressions: Star Wars Rebels

It feels strange to admit that I have a large affection for the now defunct Clone Wars TV series. Strange because when it came out it really looked unlikely to ever be the sort of show I could care about, and make an effort to watch. Set between two of the Star Wars prequels - which I've never hated, but certainly never felt more than "sort of liked, with some pretty decent sections" - and featuring whiny Anakin Skywalker and his never-even-hinted-at bratty Apprentice, it doesn't sound promising and its pilot "movie" wasn't that great either. But Clone Wars really grew on me - it handled its characters fantasically, expanded it's horizons, and in the end was a better prequel to the Classic Trilogy than the official Prequel Movies. Oh, and Ahsoka became possibly the best female lead on kids TV that wasn't called Korra. And then it was cancelled, a victim of the Disney buy-out of Lucasfilm, and instead we got Star Wars Rebels. How's that working out?

Movie Review: 22 Jump Street

21 Jump Street was one of those movies that turned out to be a pleasant surprise; a fun, breezy and self-aware buddy comedy that could easily have been terrible, but was largely saved by a neat script and engaging central performances. Like all such films, especially ones that go on to make a pile of cash, a sequel had to be made, bringing with it all the potential problems that come with sequels to comedy movies. For a start, the buddy movie has a pretty set formula that is well tested. It won't surprise you, but it works, and I don't really think anyone has properly nailed the follow on to that yet. Next, there is always an urge to repeat the jokes that worked the first time around, despite the fact that by definition the audience have seen them before. 21 Jump Street wasn't doing anything terribly new, but was doing it well, so turning out for 22 Jump Street seems like a safe bet.

Games Review: Gloom

I think its fair to say that the Web Series "Tabletop" has cost me a lot of money. Its a pretty fun series hosted by Wil Wheaton (yes, that Wil Wheaton) and three guests, where they play boardgames for your entertainment. It's really slickly put together with cut-outs for rules explanations, and on-screen graphics, and edited to be pacey and funny. It's good stuff, but for a family full of gamers its...expensive. Especially for smaller, shorter, more portable games that look like they'll run well for newbies as well as more veteran gamers. One such game was Gloom, a card game based around making your characters as miserable as possible, and then killing them horribly.

Games Review: Saints Row IV

Until recently, I'd never played any of the Saints Row games. I'd been aware of them, of course, as they've been pretty successful, but the original looked like such an uninspiring Grand Theft Auto rip-off that they just never seemed worth the time. I've become increasingly jaded with the GTA series as time goes by anyway; the games seem increasingly po-faced without actually being clever or interesting about it, and the cathartic charm of trangressive ultra-violence wears off after so many sequels. So what is the attraction in one of it's lesser clones? But I needed a new co-op experience after we'd finished off Borderlands 2, and Saints Row IV had reviewed well, and was starting to turn up on the Steam Sales, so that was that.

DVD of the Week: White House Down

So last year was a year in which Hollywood released not one, but two movies in which terrorists invaded the White House. I mean, what are the chances? After the first time you'd think they'd increase the security! This seems to happen more than simple co-incidence would allow, and it's always fun to compare the two films, especially when they're as similar as the disappointing Olympus Has Fallen and this weeks film, White House Down. Both are basically Die Hard, but in the White House, both are dumb as posts, and both probably think the Bechtel Test is something that you run on your phone line if your internet connection gets slow.

DVD of the Week: The Heat

Usually, when I do one of these reviews, I try and grab a copy of the movie poster, or DVD cover to put up as a headline image, because, well, that seems like a sensible thing to do. You may only be dimly aware of any given movie, especially a year after it came out, but the posters tend to act as a visual reminder of the film, and who was in it. In the case of The Heat, it's also a reminder of how ridiculously dumbass Hollywood posters are getting in relation to women in the age of Photoshop, because according to most versions of the poster this films stars Sandra Bullock and who-the-hell-is-that-supposed-to-be-because-it-sure-ain't-Melissa-McCarthy. 

DVD of the Week: Fast and Furious 6

There is something about franchises that get up to the "5s" and "6s" that always generate a certain aura about them; like whatever their other qualities there is something there that people will go and see regardless, so they just keep going. I mean, I think the last film I saw with a 6 at the end started "Police Academy.." and we all know how that ended up, and the other great bastion of big numbers, the Horror Genre, often finds itself beaten with the critical stick for just this tendency. However the Fast and the Furious Franchise has seemed oddly immune to this, maintaining both a fanbase and a watchability factor that seems to deny the normal rules for films with numbers at the end. So this weekend, it was time for Fast and Furious 6.

DVD of the Week: Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa

I've don't think I've ever "got" Alan Partridge. In fact I'm not sure I've ever "got" the man behind him, Steve Coogan, despite the occasional performance in something I've watched that he's been in. He's got a solid reputation, and a good following, and it's not like I've really got anything against him; but he's never been an actor I've sought out, or actively avoided. He just "is". I also have a great reservation when it comes to TV characters (and to a lesser extend, actors) making the jump to a big screen. Most of the time the result is terrible, a lazy rehash made with National Lottery money so that everyone involved can play at being a movie star for a few months. There are exceptions, of course, but far more duds than hits. So an Alan Partridge movie? What the hell am I watching this for?

Games Review: Papers, Please

So, the Steam Holiday Sale came and went, bringing many heavily discounted offers and leaving with a chunk of my money. It could have been worse, I guess; a lot of the best offers were for games I already owned (thats a good thing, I think) and most of the games I bought were for games that were on the indie end of the market; the sort of small gems that have got a lot of press this year but I've never got around to buying. There's often some discussion as to whether these sorts of sales help developers, as people often wait until a game is cheap before getting it, but my own experience tells me I probably wouldn't have bought these games at all, normally. So surely half-a-sale is better than none. Anyway, the first of these that I loaded up and got into was Autocratic Bureaucracy Simulator, Papers, Please. 

Games Review: Tomb Raider

OK, I'll start with a confession - I've never been a fan of the Tomb Raider series. In fact, in some ways I think I actively stayed away from it, wary of it after an uninspiring few sessions with one of the early games and the general presentation of Lara Croft - sexy gun-bunny in tight pants Lara - as some sort of example that games weren't all about male characters. I mean, Lara has always come across as a male wish fulfilment character, aimed and marketted at the "boobs and guns" market, she's hardly a sign of any sort of progression in gamings depictions of women. But, many people have spoken of the new Tomb Raider as something different - not just a dreaded reboot of the the series but a genuine new direction in lots of ways, so I picked it up in a Steam Sale to give it a whirl.

DVD of the Week: Flight

I'm growing quite fond of my "aca-scuse me?" tag, which i'm using to denote films that turn out to be better than they have any right to be on paper. Its an odd phenomenon, where a big sack of cinematic cliches can be elevated by cast, or script, or direction, into something much better, just as it's opposite ("Wolfpunching") can take a potentially great sounding idea and render it something much less fun than it should be. The latest example of this is, of course, this weeks DVD of the Week, Flight, or the Best Damn TV Movie You'll Ever See.

Box Set Blues: New Girl, Series One

On of the biggest changes in my viewing habits of the last year or so has been my rekindled love of US sitcoms; a form of comedy that we seem to have forgotten in the UK for now. Sure, they can be pretty formulaic, but they also tend to be consistent, character driven and above all, actually funny, so I'm always on the look for new series with decent reputations to pickup. We're still missing a few but one of the big break-out hits in the US of the last year or so has been Zooey Deschanel vehicle New Girl, which we picked up the first series of recently on DVD.