As the year winds down it strikes me that there were an abundance of new television shows introduced this year even as such perennials as Lost and 24 went the way of the dodo. Of course I couldn't watch EVERY show, but here's a list of my Top 5 New Shows of 2010...and a few honorable mentions.
1) Hawaii Five-0
I confess: my week has become one very long line to wait for 10:00 Monday night. This show is sexy, funny, exciting, and in general just good television. And the revamped version of the classic theme song? Awesome! If you're not watching this show, I just want to know: Why not?!
2) The Glades
I didn't start watching this until a few weeks into the season. Thank God for re-runs. The Glades has a great cast with great chemistry. Matt Passmore is great as smart-alecky but brilliant detective Jim Longworth. And Kiele Sanchez sizzles in the role of his not-really-sure-what-she-wants kinda-sorta-sometimes-girlfriend and sounding board Callie. Carlos Gomez rounds out the cast as Jim's reluctant, long-suffering partner and county M.E., (are you ready for this brilliant character name?) Carlos Sanchez. A solid drama with a pleasant dose of humor.
3) Human Target
This show didn't seem to create alot of buzz, but it should have. There's fighting, explosions and guns; trains, planes and automobiles; attractive people and fascinating characters...good stuff. And the show got a nice boost with the appearance of the legendary Lee Majors as the former man known as Christopher Chance, bodyguard extraordinaire. You need to check out this show.
4) Covert Affairs
I was dubious about this show. As a matter of fact, I told someone I thought this could be the first bad USA original series made. I was, happily, wrong. Now, it started out a little slow, the characters were a little weak the first couple episodes, but they quickly buckled down and the result was nothing less than fantastic. Piper Perabo is wonderful as sexy and sweet new CIA agent Annie Walker--a spy with a conscience. For the ladies' viewing pleasure Christopher Gorham stars as blinded former soldier-turned-computer tech Auggie Anderson, Annie's lifeline to normalcy and sanity in her crazy new secret life. This show proves that you can't always get a good feel from a show from the previews. And it further illustrates the adage that if it's a USA original, it's almost a sure bet.
5) Rizzoli and Isles
Sasha Alexander is back. And her new character, Dr. Maura Isles, couldn't be further from her former NCIS character. It's ok, though: first, Ziva's tougher and hotter than Kate anyway; and second, Alexander is great as the Bones-with-a-sense-of-style Boston M.E. She's joined by Angie Harmon as her best friend, tough homicide detective Jane Rizzoli. The show takes advantages of being novel-based and has strong plots and intriguing storylines. With it's blend of drama and procedural, this is a show to watch.
Honorable Mentions:
a) Memphis Beat--Memphis is a nice change of pace as a setting for a tv show, and this show is extraordinarily entertaining.
b) The Good Guys--This show was funny from the start, but it's getting better by the week as the cast and writers gel. A good, strong show that isn't getting the recognition it deserves.
c) The Defenders--Jim Belushi and Jerry O'Connell are great in this show that brings the classic legal drama into the 21st century.
d) Blue Bloods--With a cast including Tom Selleck and Donnie Wahlberg, it has to be good, right? The only thing I dislike about this show is the Blue Templar secret society thing. It reminds me of the ill-fated last project of Patrick Swayze, The Beast. Otherwise, though, the show is excellent in every way.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It, Just Do It Again. But In English.
Ahhh, October! What a wonderful time of year. The world turns colder, the trees turn orange and yellow, people start burning fires in their fireplaces, filling the air with that delightful burning smell, and Hollywood offers us yet another Saw film, this one, of course, promising to be the last. Luckily, I haven’t had to sit and watch that movie yet.
Don’t despair, though, as it is October there are plenty of other scary movies to watch before the big one comes out later on this month. As a matter of fact, I recently saw Let Me In, an American remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In. Let’s deal with the original first.
Let the Right One In, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his novel and directed by Tomas Alfredson, is definitely in the right place at the wrong time. Vampires need to be left to their coffins, or bathtubs, or crates for about the next 20 years. We’ve seen so much of them that they just aren’t scary anymore, and any sensuality or sex appeal they ever had has been destroyed by the angsty, self-aware, shimmery vampires of the Twilight Saga. Happily, that’s not what these two films were going for.
This movie is very dark, perfectly befitting a vampire movie. It’s also rather slow and quiet. This sets up a feeling of loneliness, bordering on despair which is perfect for little Oscar, one of our two main characters. It was something I enjoyed, actually. Not very many movies are written well enough to be slow, quiet and compelling. The only problem is this feeling lasts for the entire movie, so even though I was interested in what was going on, by the 1:45 mark I was hoping they’d just get on with it. The other big problem with this movie is they way they deal with Eli’s (Oscar’s mysterious new girlfriend) backstory. There’s not a lot of detail besides Eli consistently claiming she’s not a girl and a brief glimpse of her while she’s changing clothes which appears to verify her claims. That was just a little too much.
The movie as a whole, though, worked perfectly. Eli and Oscar were convincing even though I couldn’t understand a word they were saying (the subtitles were helpful in that regard, though). The rest of the acting was on par and the action of the film itself was believable and logical, something most horror movies are unable to accomplish. It is, in fact, that reality that makes the movie all the scarier. !!!SPOILER ALERT!!! I say that because at the end of the film we have a dilemma. Oscar’s first friend is evil. He realizes this and he has a choice. He can either let her die or help her live. He knows she is a killer and must kill in order to survive and needs someone to protect her and help her kill her victims; the movie makes no attempt to hide or gloss over this fact. And Oscar is in love with her and decides to run away with her, becoming her protector. Watching Oscar’s life, though, the part of it we’re allowed to glimpse, I’m pretty sure I would have done the same. Now that’s scary.
Let Me In (adapted from the aforemenationed movie, not the original novel, and directed by Matt Reeves, who also directed Cloverfield) is basically the same movie. It corrects the two problems I had with the original. It has a quicker pace through the middle of the movie so it doesn’t seem to drag at all. There’s also no showing of forcibly improvised girl-parts. Even with these changes (made for the shorter attention-spans and puritanical minds of American viewers) the movie is almost entirely the same. The acting is still good, especially for a movie riding on the shoulders of two very young actors. All the plot points are the same, if not slightly simplified or switched around for time-saving’s sake. The only real difference between the movies is that this one is in English and it has cameo appearances by Ronald Regan. Oh, and Elias Koteas (the guy that played Casey Jones in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies) plays a cop.
However, as much as I like these changes, I watched the same movie. It was as good the second time as it was the first, but it’s still the same. There was no additional point to be made, and nothing gained by the English being spoken except that I didn’t have to read for two hours. It did however give Chole Grace Moritz another opportunity to do stuff no little girl should really be doing. So that’s something.
Don’t despair, though, as it is October there are plenty of other scary movies to watch before the big one comes out later on this month. As a matter of fact, I recently saw Let Me In, an American remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In. Let’s deal with the original first.
Let the Right One In, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his novel and directed by Tomas Alfredson, is definitely in the right place at the wrong time. Vampires need to be left to their coffins, or bathtubs, or crates for about the next 20 years. We’ve seen so much of them that they just aren’t scary anymore, and any sensuality or sex appeal they ever had has been destroyed by the angsty, self-aware, shimmery vampires of the Twilight Saga. Happily, that’s not what these two films were going for.
This movie is very dark, perfectly befitting a vampire movie. It’s also rather slow and quiet. This sets up a feeling of loneliness, bordering on despair which is perfect for little Oscar, one of our two main characters. It was something I enjoyed, actually. Not very many movies are written well enough to be slow, quiet and compelling. The only problem is this feeling lasts for the entire movie, so even though I was interested in what was going on, by the 1:45 mark I was hoping they’d just get on with it. The other big problem with this movie is they way they deal with Eli’s (Oscar’s mysterious new girlfriend) backstory. There’s not a lot of detail besides Eli consistently claiming she’s not a girl and a brief glimpse of her while she’s changing clothes which appears to verify her claims. That was just a little too much.
The movie as a whole, though, worked perfectly. Eli and Oscar were convincing even though I couldn’t understand a word they were saying (the subtitles were helpful in that regard, though). The rest of the acting was on par and the action of the film itself was believable and logical, something most horror movies are unable to accomplish. It is, in fact, that reality that makes the movie all the scarier. !!!SPOILER ALERT!!! I say that because at the end of the film we have a dilemma. Oscar’s first friend is evil. He realizes this and he has a choice. He can either let her die or help her live. He knows she is a killer and must kill in order to survive and needs someone to protect her and help her kill her victims; the movie makes no attempt to hide or gloss over this fact. And Oscar is in love with her and decides to run away with her, becoming her protector. Watching Oscar’s life, though, the part of it we’re allowed to glimpse, I’m pretty sure I would have done the same. Now that’s scary.
Let Me In (adapted from the aforemenationed movie, not the original novel, and directed by Matt Reeves, who also directed Cloverfield) is basically the same movie. It corrects the two problems I had with the original. It has a quicker pace through the middle of the movie so it doesn’t seem to drag at all. There’s also no showing of forcibly improvised girl-parts. Even with these changes (made for the shorter attention-spans and puritanical minds of American viewers) the movie is almost entirely the same. The acting is still good, especially for a movie riding on the shoulders of two very young actors. All the plot points are the same, if not slightly simplified or switched around for time-saving’s sake. The only real difference between the movies is that this one is in English and it has cameo appearances by Ronald Regan. Oh, and Elias Koteas (the guy that played Casey Jones in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies) plays a cop.
However, as much as I like these changes, I watched the same movie. It was as good the second time as it was the first, but it’s still the same. There was no additional point to be made, and nothing gained by the English being spoken except that I didn’t have to read for two hours. It did however give Chole Grace Moritz another opportunity to do stuff no little girl should really be doing. So that’s something.
What the Devil?
There’s no arguing with the fact that M. Night Shamalan has had a rough go of it the last few years. I even stuck by him for a while; my love for Signs and The Village (yeah, I liked it, so what?) gave me the courage to stand up to his detractors, knowing that it was still in him to make good movies. Lady in the Water was passable, but only because Paul Giamatti is the coolest man on the planet and I have a strange love for boring, modern-day fairy tales (C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength). Then The Happening, well, didn’t, and The Last Airbender was so impossibly bad that I, even I, could no longer keep up the fight.
But it still seemed strange to me that this man with such magnificent ideas could so very quickly lose his rational mind and think that releasing these most recent films would be a good idea. It’s like whatever affliction is corroding George Lucas’s brain has latched onto M. Night full-force. And I’m saddened, just as I’m saddened at every mention or thought of Jar-Jar Binks, that it is so obviously true. This is why I was initially worried about Devil, first part of the Night Chronicles.
There were two things, however, that gave me hope for this movie: It was directed by someone else (John Erick Dowdle, director of 2008’s not-horrible Quarantine) and it was written by someone else (Brian Howard, writer of 2007’s 30 Days of Night adaptation). That’s not a terrible team, right there. Neither of those movies were blockbusters, but they were both entertaining and a little scary. So hopefully, with easily the scariest supernatural enemy any group of humans could face and the twisted mind of M. Night on their side they should be able to concoct a watchable, somewhat scary and at least decently entertaining movie. Wonderfully, that’s exactly what happened.
This movie hits all the main fear-groups: claustrophobia, xenophobia, acrophobia, demonophobia, and for readers of this review, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. They also used my favorite scary-movie tactic, darkness. Instead of showing everything, they leave the really scary parts to our imagination by only allowing us to hear what’s going on. Coupled with all the tight shots (even in relatively open rooms, the shots still tend to be directly on the actor’s faces) this movie makes you feel like you are in the elevator of the damned.
That being said, there were some problems. First, the underlying story was a rehash of Signs with different supernatural baddies and a decided lack of Mel Gibson, no matter how hard our hero (Chris Messina, Julie and Julia) tries to be. And, even worse, the end was totally predictable, and a little anticlimactic. Predicable doesn’t bother me, except in this case it’s a repeat of one of M. Night’s previous stories. Luckily, the point of the whole thing makes up for these two failings, and makes the movie worth watching. On DVD.
But it still seemed strange to me that this man with such magnificent ideas could so very quickly lose his rational mind and think that releasing these most recent films would be a good idea. It’s like whatever affliction is corroding George Lucas’s brain has latched onto M. Night full-force. And I’m saddened, just as I’m saddened at every mention or thought of Jar-Jar Binks, that it is so obviously true. This is why I was initially worried about Devil, first part of the Night Chronicles.
There were two things, however, that gave me hope for this movie: It was directed by someone else (John Erick Dowdle, director of 2008’s not-horrible Quarantine) and it was written by someone else (Brian Howard, writer of 2007’s 30 Days of Night adaptation). That’s not a terrible team, right there. Neither of those movies were blockbusters, but they were both entertaining and a little scary. So hopefully, with easily the scariest supernatural enemy any group of humans could face and the twisted mind of M. Night on their side they should be able to concoct a watchable, somewhat scary and at least decently entertaining movie. Wonderfully, that’s exactly what happened.
This movie hits all the main fear-groups: claustrophobia, xenophobia, acrophobia, demonophobia, and for readers of this review, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. They also used my favorite scary-movie tactic, darkness. Instead of showing everything, they leave the really scary parts to our imagination by only allowing us to hear what’s going on. Coupled with all the tight shots (even in relatively open rooms, the shots still tend to be directly on the actor’s faces) this movie makes you feel like you are in the elevator of the damned.
That being said, there were some problems. First, the underlying story was a rehash of Signs with different supernatural baddies and a decided lack of Mel Gibson, no matter how hard our hero (Chris Messina, Julie and Julia) tries to be. And, even worse, the end was totally predictable, and a little anticlimactic. Predicable doesn’t bother me, except in this case it’s a repeat of one of M. Night’s previous stories. Luckily, the point of the whole thing makes up for these two failings, and makes the movie worth watching. On DVD.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
"Hawaii Five-O" Review
The Fall television season is under way and there is no shortage of new shows this year. And there are some good ones; but the rebooted "Hawaii Five-O" is, I must say, the cream of the crop. It's fresh, it's fun, it's funny, and (perhaps more important than anything, if we're honest with ourselves) it's HOT!
My first impression from the previews this summer was great, and I may have been a little biased, because I've been an Alex O'Laughlin fan since his "Moonlight" days. And Scott Caan is always great as the gruff-with-a-gentle-side, moody-but-really-a-nice-guy sidekick. Add in that guy from "Lost" (aka--Chin Ho Kelly) and a hot asian chick (aka--Grace Park), and it's a can't-miss, right? But with that impression (and the fact that O'Laughlin's tv history is rather bleak), I was a touch dubious, too. It kinda seemed too good to be true...like one of those movies where all the good scenes were shown in the previews and everything else was just sucky.
"Hawaii Five-O" lives up to the hype, though.
Well-cast, well-written, well-shot, well-set...so far, with four episodes under their belt, the show is doing great. The interaction between McGarrett (O'Laughlin) and "Danno"--because no one remembers, much less cares, that his last name is Williams--(Caan) is terrific. The on-going pseudo-feud over the nickname "Danno" is especially entertaining...although it probably shouldn't last more than another couple episodes before it gets old.
Then there's the beautiful setting of Hawaii. Brilliant for a fall show. Remember all those hot summer shows set in Miami, the Hamptons, and other great vacation spots? Yeah, well, it's Fall now. School. Cooler weather. Why not give your viewers some warm, vacationy scenery? Well played, CBS! Well played!
Bottom line..."Hawaii Five-O" is the hottest show this Fall. This is one can't-miss that actually didn't miss.
My first impression from the previews this summer was great, and I may have been a little biased, because I've been an Alex O'Laughlin fan since his "Moonlight" days. And Scott Caan is always great as the gruff-with-a-gentle-side, moody-but-really-a-nice-guy sidekick. Add in that guy from "Lost" (aka--Chin Ho Kelly) and a hot asian chick (aka--Grace Park), and it's a can't-miss, right? But with that impression (and the fact that O'Laughlin's tv history is rather bleak), I was a touch dubious, too. It kinda seemed too good to be true...like one of those movies where all the good scenes were shown in the previews and everything else was just sucky.
"Hawaii Five-O" lives up to the hype, though.
Well-cast, well-written, well-shot, well-set...so far, with four episodes under their belt, the show is doing great. The interaction between McGarrett (O'Laughlin) and "Danno"--because no one remembers, much less cares, that his last name is Williams--(Caan) is terrific. The on-going pseudo-feud over the nickname "Danno" is especially entertaining...although it probably shouldn't last more than another couple episodes before it gets old.
Then there's the beautiful setting of Hawaii. Brilliant for a fall show. Remember all those hot summer shows set in Miami, the Hamptons, and other great vacation spots? Yeah, well, it's Fall now. School. Cooler weather. Why not give your viewers some warm, vacationy scenery? Well played, CBS! Well played!
Bottom line..."Hawaii Five-O" is the hottest show this Fall. This is one can't-miss that actually didn't miss.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
"Kaleidoscope Heart" (Sara Bareilles)
A couple years ago the music world fell in love with a girl telling us she simply was not going to write us a love song. And what's not to love about Sara Bareilles? She's the lyrical equivalent of a female Paul Simon, vocally and musically comparable to Norah Jones injected with about 100 cc of spunk, and as accessible and fun a performer as Michael Buble. And to top it off, she looks and acts like the girl who grew up down the street and suddenly has all the guys in the neighborhood saying, "Whoa, where'd she come from?!" That first major-label album ("Little Voice", Epic Records) went gold, while the first single ("Love Song") is certified double-platinum. A lot to live up to.
And Sara took her time releasing a follow-up. It's been three years since the release of "Little Voice", but "Kaleidoscope Heart" was worth the wait.
Honest, raw, fun, and moving, this album has it all. From the title-inspiring "Uncharted" to the Alfred Hitchcock-quoting "Not Alone"; from the bouncy, mid-tempo "King of Anything" to the soulful ballad "Breathe Again". It somewhat follows the ups and downs of any relationship--it's relatable. If you're human, you'll hear your own thoughts echoed in Sara's velvety alto.
It's not easy following a star like "Little Voice". I think "Kaleidoscope Heart" will do just fine.
And Sara took her time releasing a follow-up. It's been three years since the release of "Little Voice", but "Kaleidoscope Heart" was worth the wait.
Honest, raw, fun, and moving, this album has it all. From the title-inspiring "Uncharted" to the Alfred Hitchcock-quoting "Not Alone"; from the bouncy, mid-tempo "King of Anything" to the soulful ballad "Breathe Again". It somewhat follows the ups and downs of any relationship--it's relatable. If you're human, you'll hear your own thoughts echoed in Sara's velvety alto.
It's not easy following a star like "Little Voice". I think "Kaleidoscope Heart" will do just fine.
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