TV Review: Better Call Saul

I wonder if Better Call Saul is the best TV show no-one else I know seems to be watching. Remember how everyone seemed to catch up with Breaking Bad once it acheived some sort of pop-cultural breakout (I remember more than on SF-focused website claiming it was "Science Fiction" because of y'know, chemistry, and covering it for the hits) but this series, nominally a prequal, seems to have generated far less attention.  In some ways I understand this, as BCS has a less obvious hook, being the story of a small time con-man-cum-lawyer and his search for...whatever it is Jummy McGill is searching for. But it's a truely fantastic show, and if you've any taste for finely written drama, you should be tuning in. 

TV Review: Marvels' Daredevil, series 2

It's funny how fans can affect your perception of a character. For example, I've never had any time for The Punisher, despite hardly reading a single issue of a comic he's in, largely because way back in the day I knew a couple of big Punisher Fans who put me off him. Their genuine enthuiasm usually translated into a love for a character because of sweary ultra-violence, a one note bullet-hose of a character who didn't have any truck with "softer" heroes, and even back then I was never really into that sort of thing. I've always liked my heroes, well, heroic. Still do. So I may have been one of the few fans of Daredevil Season 1 who wasn't looking forward to his appearance in Season 2 with a great deal of enthusiasm. 

Yeah, so I was wrong. 

DVD of the Week: Sicario

Sometimes you can see the shape of a film in the first ten or twenty minutes, as it sets out its characters and central themes and you go "oh, right it's that story". It goes back to the old idea that there are only a few sorts of tales (actually that hasn't gone around the web for a while, so we're probably due an out break of "Disney Princesses as Joseph Campell Archetypes" or something) but is also rooted in the viewers familiarity with story structure. Sometimes, however, a film can pivot from one to the other, leaving you excited or breathless, or just confused. I was left wondering about this after watching Sicario, which goes somewhere unexpected in it's third act and I'm still not totally sure what I think of that. 

DVD of the Week: Chappie

Neill Blomkamp burst onto the conciousness of the average cinema going geek (like me) with the all-round excellent District 9, a smart, well designed movie that started as a thinly veiled allegory for apartheid-era South Africa and turned into a roaring, battle-suit driven action film. It's the sort of movie that gets you excited not only because it's damn good, but because as the breakout movie of a new talent you can't wait to see what they do next. What he did next, of course, was the dissapointing Elysium, which layered on the heavy-handed allegory and really struggled to be any sort of coherent thing in the end. Expectations corrected, he now has a third film, Chappie, about a police robot acheiving sentience. So, how does that fare? 

Box Set Blues: Miss Fishers Murder Mysteries

We like a good procedural cop show in our house, even if they're increasingly all the same. One is a cop, one isn't, but has a wacky side skill! They Fight Crime!. Gruesome murder, red herrings, it's usually the second character you're introduced to, job done. The joy, then, is the casts rapport, the quality of the gimmick and how much you enjoy spending time the company of the show. We've watched quite a few, and generally enjoy them, and they make a nice relaxing hour before bed sort of show for us, so we've usually got one on the go, and keep an eye out for more. Our most recent obsession has, surprisingly, not been set in modern-day America, but rather 1920s Australia, Miss Fishers Murder Mysteries. 

Best of 2015: Books and Comics

So to finish off our trilogy of 2015 reviews, we come to the written word. This year I've managed to read 30 books, which I think is a record for recent years, and I'm quietly pleased about it. It's been skewed in some strange ways (more on that for a minute) but its also broadly diverse in others. I've rolled comics into this post as there has been a more "steady as she goes" feel to my comics reading, but even there I think I've done alright. Lets get to it.

TV Review: Marvel's Jessica Jones

When Netflix announced it's deal to bring a bunch of Marvel Superheroes to it's service in the form of four "street-level" stand-alones followed by a "Defenders" series, one of the more interesting aspects was the choice of characters they were using. Sure, Daredevil is a reasonable name, and Power Man and Iron Fist (currently also appearing in the Ultimate SpiderMan cartoon) are names you might be able to pick of a line-up, but Jessica Jones? Thats pretty obscure. Not that that is in itself a problem, of course - a clean slate in terms of wider perception can be a great opportunity - but there was definately an audible sound of journalists rushing to Wikipedia to try and work out who she is, and what the story would be. And Daredevil came and went, and was a great meditaion on the morality of violence, and guilt, and power, and brought us the stand-out villian that the MCU in any form has been desperately lacking (give or take the occasional Loki). But now we have Jessica Jones, which is about something entirely different. (Warning: Spoilers) 

Book Review: Career of Evil

There was a bit of excitement yesterday when J K Rowling mentioned on a Radio 2 interview that she has "written some of a childrens book", which more than anything else seems to demonstrate the hold that Harry Potter maintains over our collective imaginations. It also helps to vindicate her decision to publish her crime series under the pseudonym "Robert Galbraith", helping to to differentiate it from the Potter brand and avoid some of the snobbery about a "childrens author" writing "grown up" books that affected reviews of The Casual Vacancy. To be honest though, as much as I enjoyed the Potter series, I am quite happy with Rowling/Galbraith the crime writer, and she can keep writing books like Career of Evil for as long as she likes.

Box Set Blues: Justified, Season 6

It remains a mystery to me how a show such as Justified has remained such a secret pleasure over the six years it has run. It seems never to have acquired a vocal critical following, nor a substantive fan base, and over the UK it's distributer dropped it entirely after four seasons, leaving Sky to pick it up for it's on-demand "Box Sets" service, where we eagerly snapped it up. It's always been a smart, witty and well acted show, a modern mix of Western and Crime drama, and with it's sixth and final season it looks to pull everything together, and give it's cast of characters the send off they deserve. And in the end, it really does, and not in the way I expected either. 

DVD(s) of the Week(s): Round-up!

So, the holidays have come and gone, and as we've been out and about and not sat in front of a computer screen, the blog has taken a week or so off. To bring us back up date, I'll do a few catch-up posts, for books and films and so on. First up will be Gone Girl, which we had started to watch a few weeks back only to discover that the disc was faulty, leading to a somewhat frustrating case of interuptted viewing! So if nothing else, it was good to get closure on that!

TV Review: Gotham, Series 1

Back when I did a post about Arrow and Agents of SHIELD, I commented that I was trying to round up all the superhero themed shows that we'd been watching over that season, to try and draw some final curtain around them. Which meant that I'd sort of forgotten that we'd been watching Gotham. Part of me feels like that could just stand as a review in it's own right. But Gotham is a strange beast,  born from a strange concept. If Arrow is the show you get when you want to make a Batman show, but aren't allowed to, Gotham is it's Dark Mirror, the show you get when you don't want to make a Batman show, but feel obliged to have him hang around in the background. 

Book Review: Perfidia

There are a lot of fictional worlds out there that are engrossing, engaging and yet places you really wouldn't want to actually live. Anything after any sort of apocalypse, for instance. Or Westeros. But if you're in a world with Zombie, or Dragons, or even Zombie Dragons, there is the comfort of distance, a comfort that this isn't, and can't be this world. I think that in many ways that is one of the big selling points of SF/F fiction, the distance that lets you explore the potential horror of alternative lives knowing that it can't happen to you. The thrill of crime fiction is different, of course, because it's set in this world, where terrible things can, and do happen all the time, with hardly a Zombie Dragon in sight. And right at the dark, terrible end of Crime fiction is Noir, and my favorite Noir writer has to be James Ellroy. 

TV Review: Better Call Saul

If I can be permitted to observe one of Breaking Bads very few flaws, it was that outside of Walt and occasionally Jessie, we saw very little of the any of the characters as independent agents. They pretty much all exist to be foils, or metaphorical warnings, or counterpoints, to Walt and his rise/fall to villainy. As such. I've never been too sure about the idea of spinning any of them off, because the really interesting characters in that mix are often either a) dead, or b) built on mystique anyway, and often both. Also, is it a world worth exploring? Breaking Bad is a deeply personal story, not a portrait of a wider world, which is, of course, ours to start with. But we have a spin off, based on a supporting character, and that is Better Call Saul, based around Saul Goodman, sleezebag lawyer extraordinaire. 

TV Review: Marvel's Daredevil

One of things that all the current crop of superhero shows - an ever increasing list, looking forward to next autumn - is that they all seem to want to stay safely middle-of-the-road. Most of them wear their superheroic costumes over well-established formats - The Flash's "freak of the week", Arrow's soap operatic character work, Gotham's crime procedural roots - and for the most part it works pretty well for them. And why shouldn't they? After all, "comics" isn't a genre, it's a format, and it's adaptations would do well to remember that. But the other thing they have in common is that by and large they're staying mass market, middle-of-the-road sort of shows on major networks. It wasn't until Netflix picked up Daredevil that we would see a superhero show wearing it's costume over a different sort of skin, that of the "quality, cable" end of the spectrum. So it was always going to be something a little bit different. 

Book Review: Hide and Seek / Tooth and Claw / Strip Jack

A few years back I ran through a year of reading crime and detective fiction, to see how I enjoyed the genre. I started way back with Wilkie Collins The Moonstone, and through the Golden Age of murders in country houses, all the way up to the modern, serial killer dominated, modern era. I really enjoyed it, as an exercise, and ended up with a bunch of authors I wanted to go back to. But there's always another series to read, I guess, and I only read about 20-25 books a year at the moment, so squeezing them in is a problem. However, when casting around on social media for inspiration for something to read next, I was reminded of Ian Rankin, whose Knots and Crosses I'd really enjoyed, and so picked up the second Rebus novel - Hide and Seek - for the kindle as my next read. I've since read two more, one after the other. 

Book Review: The Cuckoo's Calling

Crime is a genre I don't read enough. I few years back I read a "Year of Crime", 20 books from different writers across the genre, and found a lot to like there, but never really found too much time to go back. Its got it's own beats and conceits, cliches that have broken into the wider culture, and ones that haven't, and the "detective" figure has had an impact in both SF and Fantasy over the years, although often a very specific model of it. So naturally I'd never heard of Robert Galbraith, who'd written a moderately well read, but well reviewed first novel, The Cuckoo's Calling, until it was revealed that he was, in fact, the pseudonym of much better known author J K Rowling. I can see why she did it too, after The Casual Vacancy - not perfect, by any means, but certainly interesting and at time very ambitious - got more than it's fair share of snippy reviews that seemed to drip some contempt for a "childrens author" writing "adult books".