So, it’s the lull in the entertainment year, when Hollywood finishes up off-loading its most awful movies that it doesn’t want to send direct to video and television shows are in re-runs and cancelled shows are replaced.
The replacement shows are a mixed bag this time around, but there are two surprisingly good ones:
- The New Adventures of Old Christine is really, really funny, which is remarkable, considering how Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ first post-Seinfeld show, Watching Ellie, was unbelievably awful. (It even had a character quite clearly intended to be almost identical to Kramer.) It’s not changing the face of comedy or anything, but that’s OK: Just being a really solid sitcom is plenty.
- Conviction, which is set in the Law & Order universe, but without the theme song and stilted structure, is also pretty good, although maybe not quite as good. It’s odd seeing a kid who looks like Fred Savage — but isn’t — as a lawyer, but the rest of the show is pretty darn interesting, although only on TV would they refer to someone who makes more than $50,000/year as “underpaid.”
- Heist, though, ouch. It should be noted that I like stories about criminals. One of my favorite comic books of all time is Secret Society of Super-Villains #1, where Mirror Master and Captain Cold rob a fast food restaurant in lieu of paying for lunch. I dig villian-centered novels (my father introducing me to Slippery Jim DiGriz was probably a bad role model to set up for me) and caper movies. This, though, this is just bad. Leaving aside that it’s trying to cash in on the buzz generated by Andre Braugher’s Thief on another network: It’s got characters named Lola and Pops. It has scenes painfully clearly written while the screenwriters were rewinding and watching key scenes from Pulp Fiction. It has people amusingly punching each other in the face. It has the actress who plays the really, really bitchy wife of Shane on The Shield as an impossibly young chief of detectives. I actually felt brain cells of mine dying as I watched this, and wouldn’t be at all shocked to learn they’d left a note.
- According to Tom Shales at the Washington Post, I’m probably being too easy on Heist, if anything: “‘Heist’ seems derivative of an imitation of a copy of a clone — so plastic-coated and phony that it’s hard to tell what it’s ripping off.”.
Don’t go into The Ice Harvest
expecting Say Anything or even Grosse Pointe Blank — it’s not that kind of comedy and, honestly, calling it a comedy at all is probably setting up false expectations. Call it a film noir with gallows humor and you’re probably closer to the point, and ready for the slippery ride through Christmas Eve streets.
This is a darkly funny — of the more smiling, less laughing breed — crime story, in which the crime is complete almost before the opening credits are, and which follows the culprits trying to survive the next few hours until they can get away with it. There is a sense of quiet desperation to everything in the movie — including the life that this caper was supposed to take the cuplrits out of — that give the entire affair a certain underlying sense of despair.
Strong performances throughout, including the always-good Cusack, but also strong performances from Thornton, Platt and Quaid.
Recommended for that intersection of film-goers who both enjoy film noir and the novels of Carl Hiaasen.
If you expect A History of Violence to be a typical Hollywood mindless shoot-em-up, you’re going to be disappointed. But you might just be the audience that would get the most out of the film anyway.
David Cronenberg’s thriller is violent, but more important than the fight sequences are their consequences for Tom Stall and the characters, each of whom changes over the course of the film as a result of being part of it, or merely witnessing it.
The question of identity, both the one a person is born to and the one they create for themselves as an adult, is the other central theme, specifically the question of which is real. When faced with the revelation that she may not know the whole truth of who her husband is, Edie Stall has to figure out if she still loves her husband and how she feels about that realization.
The film does not wrap things up into a tidy little bow: Unlike most movies, the violence done in the film does not end in a satisfying way and we know that the consequences of what happened will continue, for all of the characters, for the rest of their lives.
A strongly recommended adult (in the true sense of the word) film.
The handful of episodes on the Firefly: The Complete Series DVDs range from the merely enjoyable to the great, but Joss Whedon’s Firefly is somewhat frustrating as a “complete series” because he wasn’t given time to complete it, or even to put a satisfactory ending on the show’s television incarnation.
Mysteries abound after the final episode, with the secrets of many of the characters frustratingly only hinted at, at best.
That said, the series is one of the strongest science fiction television series to date and marks a maturation of Joss Whedon’s craft — many of the same archetypes from his Buffyverse appear here, but in more complex and satisfying form. Well worth seeing for any science fiction fan, particularly those who prefer their starships a little more Millennium Falcon and a little less Enterprise.
Strongly recommended.
Lucas Agrees to Write ‘Star Wars’ TV Series
Star Wars creator George Lucas has agreed to write a 100-episode TV series of the classic sci-fi epic.
The series will focus on the missing years between Revenge of the Sith and the original Star Wars movie, released in 1977.
Producer Rick McCullum said at Monday night’s Empire Awards, “We’re very excited–we just got confirmation George Lucas has committed to writing the Star Wars TV series.
“I guess this is the news all fans have been waiting to hear.”
Yeah, because if there’s one thing the last three (well, four) movies got right, it was the writing …
- In related news: Indy 4 script completed. Well, Harrison Ford says it’s ready, because George Lucas turned in a final script. The good news is that Steven Spielberg is doing a rewrite before the cameras start rolling. Me, I’m hoping for the McCarthy era, Soviet thugs and Rachel McAdams as a university colleague of Dr. Jones.
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