Tag: TV Reviews

Stream It Or Skip It?

In Outlast, 16 people are dropped on Chichagof Island by the Neka River, a remote section of Alaska just west of Juneau. It’s the middle of autumn. All of these people, most of whom have some sort of experience hunting, fishing and otherwise living outdoors, all consider themselves “lone wolf” types who’d rather work alone. But to get the $1 million prize available to those who survive to the end of the contest’s 45 days, these supposed “lone wolves” will need to work in teams. That is basically the only rule. No one will be voted off; the only way to get out of this valley will be to fire off a flare.

OUTLAST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Throughout history, humans have existed in groups,” a voice says as we see sweeping scenes of the Alaskan wilderness.

The Gist: After an airdrop is made with the instructions and some supplies, the group — all of whom have just met each other — are told to break up in four teams of four members each. Each team is given a designated area to find a campsite. The first night is all about finding a relatively flat spot near fresh water, set up a shelter and get a fire going to help the survivalists stave off the below-freezing cold after the sun goes down.

Some of the groups get their acts together, find suitable sites and set up a good shelter, complete with fire. Others aren’t so lucky. The region is considered a rainforest, so finding dry kindle and fuel is nearly impossible; the groups that start fires use dry cotton from the first aid kit for kindle.

After the first night, where the sound of brown bears were close by, all the groups go out in search of clean water to drink. Some even find food. But one contestant gets sick and decides whether to continue or not.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s Alone mixed with Survivor in the Alaskan wilderness, albeit with the caveat that the contestants need to work together.

Our Take: Two things we noticed right away about Outlast: 1) there’s no host, just a narrator filling in details between scenes, and 2) the only person of color in the entire group of 16 contestants was Javier Colon, who took the leadership reins of his team right away, much to the annoyance of the other three members.

It’s a pretty serious show; while there will be challenges, it’s really trying to proceed more like a docuseries and less like a reality show. It’s helpful that most of the contestants have some sort of survivalist or outdoors experience, whether they were in the military, are hunters/fishermen, or otherwise spent time foraging and surviving outside alone. There are a few wild cards, like one person who learned outdoors survival skills via survivalist series on TV, and another contestant who was a heroin addict and knows how shitty people can be to one another.

The first episode moves quickly, given that all the teams are doing is the basics of what they need to survive. That’s no easy task in that area of Alaska, and to see these teams fumble around and politely disagree with each other while others are like finely tuned machines was interesting.

We haven’t even gotten to the meat of the competition, as we saw in some of the season highlights at the beginning and end of the episode. The teams can change, and there will be defections as the competition goes along. But then the teams themselves, once they get an idea of where the other teams are, will start to sabotage one another in order to gain an advantage. If things are already tense, we can’t imagine how off the charts that tension will be once the teams start baiting one another.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Shots of the first season, after the narrator mentions that “they haven’t faced one another yet.”

Sleeper Star: We appreciated how Andrea took one for her team and tried a sip of some questionable water, but boy did she pay for it later.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nick, a wrestling coach, says about the team member who left, “You quit one time on me, I know what kind of person you are. This is after a diatribe on the moral failings of quitters.” He can just piss right off, as far as we’re concerned.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Outlast doesn’t try to do any more than show these “lone wolf” outdoorspeople work in teams and survive some pretty rough terrain. And, in this case, that’s all that’s really needed.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It Or Skip It?

The Spanish thriller Wrong Side Of The Tracks proved to be a hit on Netflix last year because it not only had the “old guy as neighborhood vigilante” angle on lock, but it had an excellent ensemble cast that made the show’s intertwined storylines interesting to watch. Everyone is back for a second season, and the storylines seem to be bigger and even more ambitious than the were in the first season.

Opening Shot: A man who is sleeping in his apartment hears construction work outside and is grumpy that it wakes him up early.

The Gist: Tirso Abantos (Jose Coronado) retired from the hardware store he owned in the Madrid neighborhood of Entrevías — he gave it over to his son Santi (Miguel Ángel Jiménez) — but he’s still as angry as ever, especially with the increase in drug activity in the neighborhood. He also misses his granddaughter Irene (Nona Sobo), who moved back in with her mother Jimena (Maria Molins) after Tirso helped save her from the gangs that were after her.

It’s Irene’s 18th birthday, and she still misses her boyfriend Nelson (Felipe Londoño), who, after killing Sandro (Franky Martin), is now co-leading his old gang with Nata (María de Nati). As she’s getting ready to leave the house, she ends up passing out. When she comes to, Jimena is setting up what’s supposed to be a surprise birthday party for her. But all Irene wants to do is give her some personal news. Jimena is sidetracked by her real estate developer boss, who comes to the party to tell her he wants her to lead a project where he wants to invest in Entrevías.

Nelson gets into it with a rival gang who is trying to take over the corner by the bar owned by Tirso’s friend Pepe (Manuel Tallafé). When he manages to escape, bloodied but mostly just pissed off, Nata tells him that they need to battle to push the Latino gang off the corner. She brings her guys over to the bar to get into a brawl with the rival gang, but Tirso interrupts it by shooting his gun in the air.

Tirso is starting to feel that he alone is the only one who can keep the drug activity off the corner, especially when he learns Pepe wants to sell the bar. After breaking up the fight, he decides to sit on the corner in a lawn chair. At one point he almost gets into a shootout with Nata, who is passing with Nelson in a car. Nelson, of course, doesn’t want to get involved with Tirso, not just because of Irene but because Tirso is his neighbor and good friends with his mother Gladys (Laura Ramos). Later, Nata tells him that this is his life now, which prompts him to threaten Tirso with a gun.

Speaking of Gladys, she picks up Ezequiel Fandiño (Luis Zahera), the disgraced police detective who went to prison for his involvement in Sandro’s gang. He and Tirso face off for her attention, but he also makes a big show that he’s around the neighborhood again and working against his old boss, Inspector Amanda Armatose (Itziar Atienza). But we see that he was sprung early for a reason, and ingratiating himself with Nata is a big part of it.

Photo: Netflix

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? When we reviewed Season 1 of Wrong Side Of The Tracks we compared it to Gran Torino, basically because they’re both about two angry old guys who want to clean up their neighborhoods. The comparison stands this season.

Our Take: While Season 1 of Wrong Side Of The Tracks (Original title: Entrevías) certainly had a purpose to its many-layered story, Season 2 feels like it’s a bit more freeform in plot. he players are established, but the stakes are now higher. In a lot of ways, it feels like in Season 2, creator David Bermejo and his writing staff are throwing all of the elements of the first season into the pot and stirring it to see what comes out.

That doesn’t mean that the story doesn’t move as well as it did in Season 1, with the same extended-length episodes. In fact, it moves better because we know where everyone in the ensemble stands and what their motivations are.

But the somewhat tight story that Bermejo put together in Season 1 has expanded in scope. Now Tirso is going to take on any and all gangs in the neighborhood, instead of just making sure Irene is safe. Nata and Nelson are looking to take over the neighborhood with a big supply provided by a mysterious trafficker named “Ghost.” Ezequiel is trying to buy his freedom by infiltrating Nata’s gang. And Irene, who appreciates what her grandfather Tirso did for her by having her live under his strict rules, will be involved with Nelson in a way that will likely alienate both her mother and Tirso.

In a lot of ways, it feels like a second season of this show was never Bermejo’s intention, but it was such a hit on Netflix that he and his writers had to scramble a bit to create reasonable plotlines for a second season. Even so, it’s still fun to watch Coronado continue to be an ornery old son of a bitch, Ezequiel use his knowledge of the neighborhood to serve his own interests, and Irene try to figure out just who she’s going to grow up to be.

Sex and Skin: Nelson and Nata have sex near the end of the first episode, right as Irene leaves him a voice message telling him her big news.

Parting Shot: Irene says in her message that she’s pregnant, and the baby is Nathan’s. We see Nathan’s phone light up with the message in the pocket of his jeans, draped over a chair as he has sex with Nata in the background.

Sleeper Star: María de Nati plays Nata as a complete and total badass; by the end of the first episode, Nata is well established as this season’s “big bad.”

Most Pilot-y Line: When Tirso tells Pepe and Sanchís (Manolo Caro) that the three of them can patrol the corner, Pepe replies, “What are you talking about, Tirso? The three of us slapping people around as if we’re The A-Team?” Gotta love the reference, but The A-Team did more than slap people around; they shot at people but never hit them and drove around in a cool-ass van.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the more sprawling second season storylines, Wrong Side Of The Tracks is still a pulpy ensemble thriller that has a slight undercurrent of camp beneath all of the gang activity and violence, which is an appealing combination.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It Or Skip It?

We miss GLOW, and think that Netflix should have given it a final season. If you’re like us, you may want to check out a new Mexican dramedy that involves women wrestlers, this time in the anything-goes world of lucha libre.

Opening Shot: Overhead shots of a working-class Mexico City neighborhood. Then we switch to a woman receiving her possessions as she gets out of prison.

The Gist: Ángela (Caraly Sánchez) has just finished a six-year prison sentence for drug possession, a charge that she has consistently denied. One of the possessions she gets is a backpack with roses embroidered on it. She said it wasn’t hers going in, and she maintains that leaving the prison.

Her mother Victoria (Carmen Ramos) picks her up; she’s been taking care of Ángela’s daughter Rocío (Alisson Santiago). Now 12, Rocío stopped visiting her mother a few years back and is not really all that interested in reconnecting. She’s not even home to greet her mother; she’s at “the fights” with her father Lalo (Cuauhtli Jimenez). Ángela goes to the local wrestling arena and sees the two of them rooting for a lucha libre wrestler named Dulce Caramelo (Scarlet Gruber). When Dulce wins her match, she dedicates it to her “daughter” Rocío.

Dulce is dating Lalo, and she’s bonded with Rocío; it’s to the point where Rocío smiles whenever she’s around Dulce and frowns in the presence of her mother. Dulce is lobbying Lalo to have him and Rocío move in with her, but he rightly wants to check with Ángela. For her part, Ángela thinks back to when her daughter was 6, and when the cops came to raid her bootleg t-shirt stand, the rose-embroidered backpack she grabbed was full of drugs. That’s memory is understandably bittersweet, because that was the last time Ángela was close to her daughter.

Ángela gets a job at a bridal shop; the owner is desperate to date Victoria, so he looks past Ángela’s prison term. Still, he keeps his eye on her; Ángela quickly bonds with the staff, which includes her former bestie Malena (María Balam). They rally around her when Lalo comes by and talks to her about Dulce wanting him and Rocío move in with her.

Ángela takes on Dulce in an all-takers match; she holds her own because her father used to be a lucha libre villain, so she knows some moves. But ultimately, Dulce beats her. But the arena owner tells Lalo that she should come back; she’d make a great villain. But she and Rocío made a deal: Ángela will let Rocío keep going to the fights; Rocío never wants to see her mother get back in the ring again, else she’ll move in with Dulce and her father. Afraid that she’s on the verge of losing Rocío, she decides to train and become an anonymous wrestling villain, with the help of her friend Refugio (Giovanna Zacarias).

Photo: Brenda Islas/Netflix

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Against The Ropes (Original title: Contra las cuerdas) definitely gives a similar feel to GLOW, especially the fact that the ladies at the bridal shop will join Ángela in her wrestling training.

Our Take: Against The Ropes sets up a complex problem for Ángela right at the start: No one believes that she shouldn’t have gone to prison, and she wants to find the person that the backpack belonged to. But at this point, she has to realize that much of it doesn’t matter, and she has to repair what’s broken with Rocío. So Ángela has to balance rebuilding her life and her relationship with her daughter while trying to get her name cleared.

Fernando Sariñana, the series’ showrunner, and the writing staff have done a good job making that complexity clear while not making the show a drag. Even the first episode, which sets up the story, has plenty of wrestling scenes for fans to enjoy, even if it’s tough to watch Ángela get rejected by her daughter over and over.

One of the other things we appreciated is that Sariñana and company don’t dwell a lot up front on Ángela’s past; she has to deal with the here and now, and the most important thing is repairing things with her daughter, so that’s what we see.

What we’re looking forward to is seeing Ángela becoming “The Black Bride”, bringing some friends along with her, and trying to challenge Dulce once again. How she’ll do it without Rocío getting wind of it will also be fun to watch. And all of this is helped by the fact that Caraly Sánchez can act as well as make some killer moves.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Ángela repairs her father’s mask and then looks in the mirror with it on, calling herself “The Black Bride” for the first time.

Sleeper Star: Alisson Santiago has a strong turn as Rocío; the kid is independent and knows that she has some emotional leverage over her mother. But she also is able to communicate how hurt she is that her mother abandoned her when she was little.

Most Pilot-y Line: Dulce actually threatens Lalo with a frying pan after he defends Ángela’s right to be a part of the decision about where Rocío lives. What decade is this?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Against The Ropes is setting up a fun, heartwarming story that should have a lot of great wrestling at its core.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It or Skip It?

Telling the story of an influencer before that was even a thing, Fortune Seller: A TV Scam recounts the story of an Italian telemarketing mogul who made billions selling diet pills before controversy ensued. Is it enough to get a true crime treatment?

Opening Shot: The series opens with the image of an older woman’s hands folded in her lap before pulling back to reveal her in a typical documentary confessional. She boasts about being able to sell anything – and a producer puts her to the test by handing her a pen, and she comes up with a pitch on the spot.

The Gist: Wanna Marchi came from humble beginnings as a beautician in an unhappy marriage, and she quickly discovers her knack for selling when she starts to sell beauty products from her store. Suddenly finding fame and fortune from appearances on a QVC-type of shopping channel on Italian TV in the 1970s and 80s, Marchi leans into the public’s infatuation with body image and good looks and begins selling slimming products. Soon, she faced allegations about her business even though she was still successfully selling millions of products just by appearing on TV.

Photo: Netflix

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The series is most reminiscent of the recent Prime Video docuseries LuLaRich, which dove into the online LuLaRoe leggings empire, which was also built from scratch.

Our Take: For true crime to really bite, there has to be a hook. For Wanna Marchi, it’s her ability to sell anything and everything — from the first shot, we know exactly what kind of character we’re dealing with and how she has gotten to this point where she is the subject of a documentary.

Unfortunately, that’s where the intrigue ends for Fortune Seller: A TV Scam. The first episode of the series does little to set up the ensuing conflict and chaos incited by her empire — to put it bluntly, by the end of the first episode, it’s not clear what makes her the subject of a true crime documentary. Marchi is presented as a charismatic figure who told a few white lies about her product’s benefits, but it’s not engrossing enough to warrant a four-hour investigation into her business practices.

While Marchi’s life story is inherently interesting — from simple roots to a billion dollar industry — the way that the story is presented is perhaps the most perplexing. Without immediate indication of what crimes she’s committed (or being accused of committing), it leaves audiences wondering what exactly the story trying to be told is.

Sex and Skin: None, unless you count the many topless but not explicit photos of Marchi’s daughter Stefania who often posed for photos this way “because she could.”

Parting Shot: Wanna Marchi’s shop is set on fire, and each of the documentary’s figureheads react to the occurrence.

Sleeper Star: Marchi’s daughter Stefania becomes her accomplice and reaps the benefits of her mother’s fortune, much of which she spent on her obsession with watches.

Most Pilot-y Line:: “The only thing I can do? Sell. Give me something to sell and I’ll sell it, no problem.” The opening to the documentary lays out exactly who and what the series is about: a professional seller.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Marchi is a fascinating figure but her presence as a true crime subject falls flat.

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Vulture, Teen Vogue, Paste Magazine, and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It or Skip It?

It’s sad to say that in many cultures, it’s still considered scandalous when women enjoy anime, video games, and eating delicious food. Those are things for “other” people. For “ugly” girls who’ll never find romance. These antiquated ways of thinking are embarrassing enough, but imagine being forced to give up the things you actually enjoy doing as a woman because some irritating little fairy needs you to help raise the birth rate in Japan. It sounds disgusting, but that’s the situation in Romantic Killer. It’s supposed to be funny, a way to turn rom-com clichés on their head, but it ends up falling more than a little flat. It’s also quite creepy when you really think about it.

Opening Shot: A young woman stands in the doorway of her home clutching a bag of snacks and a box containing a video game. She rubs the box all over her face affectionately and recounts her childhood spending time playing games with male friends and eating plenty of snacks, talking about how she’s always eschewed relationships.

The Gist: Anzu Hoshino (Deneen Melody) is a high school girl who absolutely loves gaming. Strike that. It’s kind of her life. She also loves chocolate, snacks, and her cat. She prefers staying home and playing games instead of finding romance in the real world, and she isn’t about to give all that up at random to go out on a date.

But a magical fairy named Riri (Courtney Lin) is trying to change all that. One day, Anzu plays the wrong game — and she finds her favorite hobbies, cat, and snacks taken away so she can live life as if she were in a dating sim game. Riri comes to Anzu straight out of her TV, warning the high schooler of Japan’s declining birth rate, and how she’s been selected as part of an “experience” to help improve things.

The fairy race Riri belongs to can’t run a business without the innocent hearts of additional children in the world. Riri’s plan goes like this: By forcing people who the fairies believe will be “forever single” to find love, the birth rate will skyrocket and things will get back to business as usual. With that, Anzu is forced to live in a world straight out of a shoujo manga. Sure, there’ll be plenty of “hot guys” and all that as well as situations you only see in romantic anime, but Anzu doesn’t want that. So she’ll fight tooth and nail against it to the bitter end.

Source: Netflix

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? You’ll undoubtedly have visions of Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro, or even Teasing Master Takagi-san, both romantic comedies with decidedly pushy characters and some frustratingly unlikable personalities vying for your attention.

Our Take: On one hand, Romantic Killer is meant to be parodic to a fault and satirical. However, it has a bizarre premise that fails anyone looking for any scrap of feminist ideals. While it’s obviously trying to make light of stereotypes from time to time and doesn’t paint Riri in a positive light, it’s hard to get into a story where the entire goal for this fairy is to ensure a high school girl enters a relationship and eventually gets pregnant so the fairy race can benefit. It’s a little strange, right?

If the premise hasn’t set you off the series by now, the way everything plays out just might. Anzu steels herself against falling in love to defy the fairy who’s forcibly changed her life, but that isn’t how things play out. Almost immediately, the seemingly perfect (and totally hot) Kazuki Tsukasa (Jason Griffith) appears in her life, with all the perfect conditions in place for them to fall for one another.

Riri keeps trying to force the two together in so many cliche and pained ways, and while Anzu is adamant that she won’t fall for these tricks, we all know what’s going to happen. The writing’s on the wall: the pair are going to get together, and this is going to be a painfully slow descent into shoujo manga tropes. Except the heroine has to throw away the things she enjoyed in her life to do so, for…reasons?

Sex and Skin: None in this episode, but the story’s implications, despite being parodic, are frankly quite strange and may not be appropriate for younger viewers.

Parting Shot: Having taken shelter in the rain in a playground, Anzu wears one sandal and one Croc while waiting out the storm. As the rain pours and she sits beneath an oversized slide, Kazuki walks up to her carrying an umbrella and a bag from the convenience store. The pair stare at each other for a beat.

Sleeper Star: Courtney Lin ensures Riri is one of the most irritating characters I’ve seen in an anime series since Madoka Magica’s Kyubey. She’s great at her job, lending Riri this insistent and patronizing personality that quickly grates on the nerves as you question why Riri thinks they have the authority to suddenly do all this to Anzu. That’s a testament to how convincing Lin can be, as she plays Riri fantastically.

Most Pilot-y Line: “We’re here to solve Japan’s extremely serious low birth rate problem,” Riri tells Anzu. There it is, folks. That’s why Anzu has to give up what she enjoys doing so she can…let’s check our notes here…have a child she hasn’t even thought about having.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The first episode won’t convince anyone that Romantic Killer is more than just a reverse harem and the creators’ commentary on what women should be doing with their lives. And despite having read the manga source material, it does tend to add a bit more nuance later on – with Riri having a few changes in store – but you likely won’t want to stick around to see it through. Sure, some of this pilot might elicit a few chuckles, but in the current world climate where women’s bodily autonomy is challenged on a daily basis, the laughs tend to come too slowly to make Romantic Killer a satisfying watch when you really look deeper.

Brittany Vincent has been covering video games and tech for over a decade for publications like G4, Popular Science, Playboy, Variety, IGN, GamesRadar, Polygon, Kotaku, Maxim, GameSpot, and more. When she’s not writing or gaming, she’s collecting retro consoles and tech. Follow her on Twitter: @MolotovCupcake.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It Or Skip It?

Time jumps, at least the back-and-forth kind, are all the rage for prestige dramas these days. Sometimes the gambit works, sometimes it doesn’t. From what we’ve seen, the more care that’s taken with how each time period is presented goes a long way to helping make such a story cohesive and coherent. A new French thriller actively goes back and forth in time, using a device that definitely sets the two time periods apart.

Opening Shot: As foreboding music pays on a phonograph, the camera pans up from a bowl of cereal, some of which has spilled on the table. A little boy stares at a blue butterfly in a frame as the butterfly turns black.

The Gist: Author Adrien Winckler (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is at a creative impasse with the follow-up to his well-received first novel. So he drives out to the isolated house of Albert Desiderio (Niels Arestrup), a man in his seventies who has asked Adrien to write his memoir. As Adrien sits down with Albert, the older man wants to concentrate on his relationship with the love of his life, Solange (Alyzée Costes) who died a few decades ago.

He starts the story when they met, when both were around 12; he defended her against bullies who called her a “kraut whore,” and he saw the tough life she had, with a mother who took in “gentlemen callers” (i.e. customers) while Solange would wander around unsupervised. But that’s also when they fell in love.

Fast forward to when the two of them were around 20. Albert (Axel Granberger) and Solange are together but haven’t consummated their relationship yet. On the beach, the two of them encounter brothers who seem to be friendly, until one of the brother forces himself on Solange while Albert is in the water. She defends herself with a corkscrew, and Albert turns on the man’s brother to eliminate any witnesses. Albert has kept this incident secret for sixty years, and feels that Adrien is the one who should bring the story to light.

Adrien is dealing with his own past as he and his girlfriend Nora (Alice Belaïdi) try to have a child; he travels to Belgium to see visit the offices of the company his late father Wim started. His cousin invites him to the family mansion for dinner, but Adrien gets stopped at the door by his uncle — his dad’s brother — who considers Adrien and his mother personas non grata as far as the family is concerned. Nora finds Adrien’s manuscript based on his interviews with Albert, and starts talking it up to people.

Meanwhile, a police detective named Carrell (Sami Bouajila), who we see has a bold streak when he deals with a shotgun-wielding assailant, reexamines a cold murder case with a suspect who looks a lot like Solange.

Photo: Netflix

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’ve seen the back-and-forth time jump method Black Butterflies in shows ranging from This Is Us to Yellowjackets, but the tone of this series is more the latter than the former.

Our Take: Black Butterflies (Original title: Les papillons noirs) sets up an interesting dual storyline, with Adrien dealing with his own life turmoil while hearing about Albert and Solange, whom we feel weren’t done killing people on that beach back in the early sixties. Creators Olivier Abbou and Bruno Merle move the first episode along well, introducing the three sides of this story with just enough information to make the viewer intrigued about what comes next.

The person who gets the short end of the story stick is Carrell, but we get enough about him to know that he’s a gritty and determined detective, wiling to stare down a shotgun and almost get a face full of buckshot to disarm someone. But once he looks at that cold case file, involving the death of an American back in 1970, we know that the show is going to be about more than an old man telling an author the tale about the murder spree perpetrated by him and the love of his life.

We’re curious to know how Adrien’s troubled family life will connect into how he looks into what Albert is telling him, and how deep he’ll get into his subject’s life. Also, it feels like his relationship with Nora, which seems so solid in the first episode, won’t stay solid because of either his investigation or the fact that Nora seems to be happy reading the private files on his computer. But through the construction of Albert’s memoir, Abbou and Merle have provided an effective way to bounce back and forth in time in a way that alleviates any confusion and is pretty clear about where we are in a particular story.

Sex and Skin: Adrien and Nora get naked during a baby-making session, but the more provocative nudity comes when young Albert and Solange make love for the first time after they kill those brothers on the beach.

Parting Shot: Adrien trashes his novel manuscript and puts his pen name “Mody” on the manuscript of the Albert and Solange story. We then see older Albert staring out his window.

Sleeper Star: Alice Belaïdi is Nora, who seems to be a stabilizing force in Adrien’s life, but we’re not sure if that will stay that way.

Most Pilot-y Line: “My mother said you were a family of assholes. All except Wim. I just wanted to see for myself,” Adrien says to his uncle when the uncle threatens to call the police on him.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The format of Black Butterflies adds to both of its main storylines, even if they don’t look like they’ll come together during the first episode. When they do come together, we hope that the result is as entertaining as the first episode was.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It Or Skip It?

We seem to say this every time we come across a feelgood teen drama aimed for kids, but it’s almost refreshing to see teens doing things that are inspiring instead of seeing them have sex, drink and party. Call us old fuddy-duddies, but we’re encouraged that Netflix seems to be investing in a lot of shows that are more about the inspirational than about, well, the other stuff. A new series from Australia is in that inspirational category.

Opening Shot: A teen is on a plane. We hear her voice say, “They say that courage is knowing that you might have a chance at failing at something, and choosing to do it anyway.”

The Gist: Kyra Berry (Jada-Lee Henry) was a top gymnast in the U.S., surprisingly making nationals without a professional coach. But she hurt her knee at the national meet and offers to join various academies dried up. However, but then former world champion Maddy Cornell (Emily Morris) offered her a tryout at her Correga Academy in Adelaide, Australia; the three-month tryout could lead to a multi-year academic and athletic scholarship.

Despite the competition — only six scholarships are available, and only one for an international student — most of the girls are happy to see Kyra. Scarlett (Zoe Rae Burns) and Maya (Luciana Valdez Tirado) are not among that group; they even post a selfie of themselves on Kyra’s social media feed declaring themselves the academy’s champions.

Kyra knows the competition is going to be tough, especially because she can’t complete her front fulls without falling, something that’s been plaguing her since her knee injury. But Maddy encourages her by showing her video of an injury she suffered before she became a world champion, and tells her to work with Jaimi (Trung Le), the strength coach who specializes in helping people rehab from injuries. As she works with him for two weeks, her confidence grows.

Photo: Netflix

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Gymnastics Academy: A Second Chance is a spin-off of two Australian family movies: A 2nd Chance (2011) and A Second Chance: Rivals! (2019). Both starred Morris as Maddy Cornell; in the first film, she was more or less around the age Kyra is in this series.

Our Take: What we have been appreciating about the various Australian kids’ series that Netflix has debuted over the last year or so is that they’re well-written stories that both kids and adults can appreciate. They don’t talk down to their kid audiences and they don’t irritate adults. They’re just good stories that star teens that aren’t doing the types of things we see in other series, like the recent Aussie import Heartbreak High.

Are there high stakes here? Sorta. There’s only one international slot for the scholarship, and it seems that Kyra is coming from behind in order to grab one of those slots. Scarlett and Maya are going to do all they can to knock her out of contention. But most of the series seems like it’s going to be more inspirational and coming-of-age than anything else, with Kyra coping with being on the other side of the planet from her Minnesota home, maybe dating Bradley (Jett Gazley), a soccer player at the school where the academy students go, and her overall transformation into a confident, world-class gymnast.

And that’s OK. There’s certainly space for a feelgood teen dramedy that has minor conflict, lots of scenes of people flipping and twirling, and inspirational competition scenes. Jada-Lee Henry is extremely likable as Kyra, and Morris’ calming presence as Maddy is welcome, whether you ever saw the two other Second Chance films or not.

What Age Group Is This For?: The show is rated TV-G, so it’s good for all audiences, though gymnastics-loving kids 6 and up might appreciate it the most.

Parting Shot: Scarlett and Maya realize that pushing Kyra out of contention is going to be tougher than they thought; Myra looks towards Kyra as she says, “I have another idea…”

Sleeper Star: Akira Van plays Li, one of the girls who becomes fast friends with Kyra. She’s under tremendous pressure to achieve, and when she introduces herself, she talks about how much she has to do on top of her already strenuous day of gymnastics and school.

Most Pilot-y Line: Scarlett and Maya mention a student named Louisa, who got cut when she couldn’t do a front full. Jami overhears them and asks another coach, “Was there a Louisa here last year?” “I don’t think so,” the coach replies. It did sound like a pretty lame lie from Scarlett and Maya, didn’t it? As TV villains, they need to do better.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Gymnastics Academy: A Second Chance has a feelgood story, appealing stars and lots of top-notch scenes of athletic achievement. It’s definitely not edgy, but that’s a refreshing change for us.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It or Skip It?

Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners is a story based in the world of Night City, straight out of CD Projekt RED’s game, Cyberpunk 2077. That universe itself is based on a world created by cyberpunk legend Mike Pondsmith. This anime adaptation is the brainchild of CD Projekt RED and Studio Trigger, the anime outfit that brought us classics like Kill la Kill and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. This anime series features original characters not seen in the game, but the world is just as richly detailed as it would be if you were hopping back into it yourself — as well as a few surprising cameos. It’s a high-octane, neon-soaked thrill ride that has a bit of a traumatizing first episode for its protagonist that ultimately escalates into a nonstop parade of giddy violence, adolescent rage, and – you guessed it – true cyberpunk realness.

Opening Shot: The camera pulls back on a multihued city at night, eventually focusing on a man with cybernetic ocular enhancements. A series of police cars with cops talking about their shifts (and their wives) can be seen. Suddenly, someone opens fire on the men in the cars. It’s a bloodbath, and it’s ugly.

The Gist: David Martinez (Zach Aguilar) is a student at Arasaka Academy in the flashy yet corrupt Night City who lives with his mother Gloria (Gloria Garayua). David doesn’t care much for school and prefers to spend most of his time braindancing (essentially viewing interactive footage akin to VR) with discs containing “experiences” from those with cyberpsychosis — a mental illness derived from the constant replacement of body parts with cybernetics.

While David clashes with his fellow classmates, his mother works as a first responder with the medical Trauma Team division. When tragedy strikes, David comes into possession of a military-grade piece of cybernetic tech known as a Sandesvistan. He plans to use it to teach a set of bullies a lesson. But in the meantime, he’s jobless, broke, and without any future prospects. Life seems like it has no purpose for him in Night City…but he’s going to take revenge on those who wronged him on the way to get to this lowly state, that’s for sure.

Photo: Netflix

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As this is a Studio Trigger anime, the parallels between shows like Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill can’t be ignored, from top to bottom. Visually, it also resembles the more recent Trigger film, Promare. If you enjoy the studio’s other productions, there’s no doubt you’ll be on board with this one as well.

Our Take: David’s tale is one that will be familiar to stories with a down-and-out protagonist, but that just makes it easier to root for him. Seeing Night City through his eyes really illustrates just how dismal life can truly be there, even if it’s painted as the ultimate utopia by some of those who live there. It’s even easier to get into his head and root for him as the underdog than it was for protagonist V in the video game, because you know how worn down David is by everything from the very beginning. In fact, this is the story that should have been told from the start in the Cyberpunk video game.

It’s relatable, easy to digest, and you can feel for David as he’s filled with anger, hurt, and confusion – where to go next? Who’s responsible? Who will pay for the hurt he’s endured? That’s more powerful than any heist gone wrong, and a story that would have made the perfect playable set of missions. It’s also what makes this series so watchable right off the bat. That, and its impossibly cool vibes. It might be the coolest series Trigger has done yet.

Sex and Skin: There’s full-frontal nudity a few minutes into the episode with a glimpse of a woman having sex. It’s pretty quick, but it’s detailed – you can’t mistake what’s going on. It happens again later in the episode with additional nude women, who are revealed to be part of a braindance program a ripperdoc is — ahem –– enjoying alone. Also, the character Lucy (seen briefly) is wearing what looks like a thong akin to Ghost in the Shell’s Major Motoko Kusanagi.

Parting Shot: An enraged David, now fed up with the cards life has dealt him, is sick of being bullied. He takes the military-grade Sandevistan cybernetic implant to the ripperdoc he saw at the beginning of the episode and, instead of trying to sell it, demands that the doc install it so he can defend himself. He’s not going to let anyone step on him any longer.

Sleeper Star: Gloria Garayua brings warmth and understanding to Gloria Martinez, whose role is shorter than it should have been. She’s a believable concerned mother to David and wants what’s best for her son. Still, the first episode reveals she may have had some secrets as well. Garayua’s tone fits the character perfectly — and here’s hoping we see more of her again at some point for a repeat performance.

Most Pilot-y Line: “‘Bout time I chrome the f**k up,” David seethes when he bursts into his ripperdoc’s office and asks that his newfound equipment be fused to his spine. From this point forward, we know he’s never going to take being abused and mistreated by his peers lying down again. And that means plenty of action is to follow, so you’d better stay in your seat and see how it all goes down.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners is a fantastic addition to the Cyberpunk universe. Its narrative is even more engaging than the original game in certain respects, with a protagonist it’s easy to get behind and root for. It’s rife with stylistic decisions that keep it 1:1 with its source material, from the language to the in-game call system, colors and fonts included. The animation is gorgeous, dynamic, and colorful, just as in-your-face as Night City should be. And it’s a shame it wasn’t a playable story in-game, because this is the epitome of what Cyberpunk in-universe storytelling could be.

(Note: If you do watch, unless subtitles are required for your viewing, you’re best left keeping them off, as Netflix’s subs are completely inaccurate, with a good 90% of the lines incorrect in ways that completely change the meaning of a sentence. Hopefully this is a problem that’s resolved going forward, but this may be the worst case of Netflix subtitling issues seen in an anime series on the platform and that’s not an exaggeration.)

Brittany Vincent has been covering video games and tech for over a decade for publications like G4, Popular Science, Playboy, Variety, IGN, GamesRadar, Polygon, Kotaku, Maxim, GameSpot, and more. When she’s not writing or gaming, she’s collecting retro consoles and tech. Follow her on Twitter: @MolotovCupcake.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It Or Skip It?

You ever watch a scene or scenes on a show and rewind to try to figure out just what happened and/or what was said? You tend to do it for one of two reasons: Either the moment was so shocking that you have to take it all in again or the moment was so confusing, you need to decipher exactly what went on. We rewound the last scene of the first episode of Echoes and watched it three times. Sad to say, it wasn’t because we were enthralled with it.

ECHOES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman running through an upscale neighborhood.

The Gist: Gina McCleary (Michelle Monaghan), an author in LA, is very close to her identical twin sister Leni (also Monaghan), who is a horse farmer in Virginia. She calls her sister all the time for advice, and they leave each other messages in an online journal. But she’s getting worried that her usually-responsive sister isn’t returning her calls.

She eventually gets a phone call from Leni’s husband Jack Beck (Matt Bomer) that Leni has gone missing. Without a second thought, Gina flies to her hometown to see where she can help. It’s more than just wanting to help, though; the two of them are so connected that she wouldn’t know what to do if Leni was no longer around.

Gina is as pushy as Leni is relaxed, so when a day’s search ends for the night, she leans heavily on Sheriff Louise Floss (Karen Robinson) to keep looking. The folksy sheriff, who was a deputy when Gina left town under extreme circumstances, knows what she’s been through and relates the story to deputy Paula Martinez (Rosanny Zayas).

Gina goes to the house where she grew up, where her father Victor (Michael O’Neill) lives with her younger sister Claudia (Ali Stoker), who completely resents Gina for leaving. Gina notes that Jack has hired a nanny, Natasha (Maddie Nichols), and moved her niece Mattie (Gable Swanlund) to a different room. In addition, body parts from old creepy dolls her late mother gave her and Leni are missing.

As she goes looking for Leni in some of their old haunts from when they were kids, including a local cave, we find out that Gina is actually Leni; the two regularly switch lives. It seems that the real Gina has run off for good, as a note tells Leni that she can choose either of their lives going forward.

Photo: JACKSON LEE DAVIS/NETFLIX

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Echoes plays like an extremely dumb version of Orphan Black.

Our Take: There were lots of reasons why the first episode of Echoes, created and written by Vanessa Gazy, grated on us. The first was the wooden acting by lots of people who have been excellent in other projects. Monaghan is especially melodramatic as we hear her lyrically write to her sister in this online journal that makes no sense to us. Do only the two of them see it? Or is this public? Don’t they call and text each other all the time? Why communicate in this clunky way?

But she’s not the only one whose performance is stunningly bad. Bomer has an accent that goes in and out, and the usually reliable O’Neill seems to have only slightly modified his usual cantankerous federal agent persona into a cantankerous rancher character. And Robinson’s folksy Sheriff Floss might be a bit too folksy for the tone of this series. It doesn’t help that all of these fine actors are saddled with lines that are either just plain bad or delves in too much exposition. For instance, Gina’s husband Charlie (Daniel Sunjata) says that Jack “feels like he brings your LA drama to his quiet Virginia life,” which just told us where the two sisters live. Oof.

All of this would be fine if the very idea the show is built on made any sense. Why on God’s green earth would these women switch lives so often, which means they spent however much time they’re the other sister’s life lying to their family and friends? And when it’s revealed at the end of the first episode that Gina is really Leni, we’re left scratching our heads; we still weren’t clear which sister Monaghan was currently playing and which left. Her voice over at the end that said, “OK, Gina, welcome back to being Leni, to being me… so I can find out just what you did here… to both of us,” we had to listen to that line 3 times to even come close to figuring out who was who and what Leni is looking to do.

Sex and Skin: None, at least in the first episode.

Parting Shot: See above; Leni comes back to her house as herself, braids in place and self-inflicted bruise on her head. She hugs Jack and Mattie, but her drawl-inflected voice over has her thinking about just what the hell kind of chaos Gina inflicted when she was being Leni for the past year.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Robinson as Sheriff Floss; yes, she may be too folksy at times, but she’s taking the goofiness of the role and running with it.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Charlie, a therapist, asks Gina over the phone if she’s seeing things through a lens of anxiety, Gina replies, “No I’m seeing things through a lens of shit is fucked up.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. Echoes is without question one of the most messy and confusing shows we’ve seen in awhile, and there really seems to be nothing for a viewer to grab onto that would tempt them to move to the second episode after the first is over.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Stream It Or Skip It?

We’ve already seen how devastating it is when a country’s internet access is reduced or cut off by attackers. It’s not just the fact that you can’t scroll TikTok: Banks can’t operate, credit card transactions can’t go through, and even power and water could be affected. A new Peacock/ Channel 4 thriller imagines how, in the near future, a cyber war can escalate quickly, and what the implications of that are.

Opening Shot: A young woman searches through what looks like the grounds of an empty carnival.

The Gist: It’s 2024, and as Saara Parvin (Hannah Khalique-Brown) is shown opening manhole covers, climbing down a brick wall, going into a locked cabana, etc., the scene always seems to be shifting. What she’s really doing is participating in a speed-coding exam, with a “work experience” position at the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at stake. She comes in second to the exceedingly speedy Vadim Trusov (German Segal), but they both get offered the job.

She’s eager to tell her father Ahmed (Nitin Ganatra), who has been down lately; no one else in her family knows about this classified and somewhat risky job. She’s assigned to the malware department, and almost as soon as she enters the building, she’s embroiled in an emergency. As engineers are running a stress test, much of the UK’s internet access goes down. After calling in Danny Patrick (Simon Pegg), the head of the department, it’s found that malware was executed to bring the system down, with the stress test used as a cover.

As engineers try to get services back online, Saara is tasked with trying out the code in a walled-off sandbox environment. However, she finds a small line of code that was set to execute another malware program when a “like” was hit on a particular Facebook page. Danny is so appreciative that he brings her to the meeting of the cabinet of PM Andrew Makinde (Adrian Lester), who is facing reelection as the public is reeling from an ongoing recession. When a particularly snarky cabinet member points out that an intern found the code and not the cadre of GCHQ’s highly-paid engineers, Danny knows that they’re going to have to go through the code line by line to make sure no other triggers are there.

In the meantime, Saara gets some bad personal news, and her devotion to her new job and this cyberattack brings her in major conflict with her family. Danny is getting pressure from his bosses to declare Russia as the source of the attack, but he knows that the escalation that will result might bring down everything that’s dependent on the country’s internet services which is, well, basically everything.

Photo: Jonathan Birch/Playground Entertainment/Peacock

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Remember CSI: Cyber? No? Well, that was also about cyberattacks, but it does seem that The Undeclared War treats cyberthreats with a bit more realism and reverence.

Our Take: One of the things we always hated about shows that centered around people who work with code is that, well, staring at people staring at code is pretty boring (believe us, we’ve stared at our share of code in our lives, and we found that to be quite boring. Can’t imagine how boring it is for people who aren’t programmers). Peter Kosminsky, the writer and showrunner of The Undeclared War, solves this issue, at least when it comes to what Saara sees when she dives into code. Stylistic choices are among the reasons why the show strikes the right degree of tension and personal drama.

The opening scene, with its weird hodgepodge of locations, doors on odd places, and jumps from place to place gives us an indication of how Saara codes. Another scene, where she walks through a dark file archive room, illustrates how she scrolls through code. And in another scene, where she’s in a phone booth in the middle of a field, she looks through one phone directory after another until she finds the tiny anomaly. We fully appreciate Kosminsky and company’s attempts to make Saara’s process more dramatic.

In a lot of ways, the story feels more along the lines of 24 or Homeland, where the main couple of characters will get an inner life but the rest of them will be one-dimensional functionaries. Coders like Max (Tom McKay) feel like they’re there to spew jargon and stare at screens, giving Danny and Saara people to bounce off of. But that’s OK with us, because the central tension of the series, where a cyber war could be touched off due to a less-than-cautious governmental approach during an election year, has more than enough juice to keep us interested.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Saara is lying awake in bed, next to her boyfriend, finally able to let go and cry about her tragic personal news.

Sleeper Star: We haven’t heard from Mark Rylance, who also stars in this series, as yet; we’re curious as to what his role will be. And, of course, Simon Pegg is great as a boss who is actually apologetic to his people when governmental red tape keeps them cranking away at code day and night.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Saara enters the GCHQ building and meets Max, she extends her hand. “We’re not shaking hands at the moment,” he says. They’re trying to represent 2024 as a post-pandemic world, but this and the presence of masks in another scene show that it or the fear of it is still hanging around. It feels like it’s a poop-or-get-off-the-pot situation when it comes to the pandemic, doesn’t it?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Undeclared War sports good lead performances, some creative storytelling and a plot that steadily builds tension. And we don’t have to look at that much code, which is a plus.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Exit mobile version