Ahh, the sound of the nattering naybobs of Trekdom furiously trying to clap with one hand. You see, unless a program meets the narrowly specific parameters of what they will accept as "proper" Star Trek lore. Reminds me of those YouTube videos of entitled 16 year old's getting a new Lamborghini or BMW, and then pitching an absolute fit because it wasn't the color they desired. "This is NOT the Trek I was looking for"...... OK Obi Wan Kensnobby you win, we'll all go sit in the basement and watch reruns of the original series, or better yet, just the SPECIFIC EPISODES in each series that meet with your awesomely discerning taste. They rest you may send to the cornfield!!!!
Personally, I thought the producers and writers did a pretty good job of giving us a brand new crew, a brand new ship, an at least interesting situation as far as the story arc, while maintaining the connection to traditional "Trek" with appropriate amounts of fan service and character call backs. The animation, stylistically, is light years ahead of what is offered on "The Lower Drecks, er...Decks", and, the storytelling is aimed more toward the dramatic rather than the comedic. If that's not your thing, cool, but, neither should it be dismissed out of hand.
Personally, I found the amount of tension, thrills and FUN just about right, and the mix of immediate story and long arc balanced enough to hold my attention and leave me wanting more. Again, for a show aimed at the Nickelodeon demographic, that's no small feat IMO.
So yeah, I plan to continue watching it, and, it will be interesting to see if this version of the "Trekverse", can go where the others haven't gone before, or if the naybob's will be successful in stirring up enough negativity to eject the warp core and leave the crew stranded.
Here´s another one from the "Memorable Shows of the 70s" list.
But there are more reasons to watch this than the lovely ladies. The scripts were actually really good detective/crime stories without the goofy stuff that oftentimes goes along with shows from that period. Yes, there are the usual shows that represented period trends (disco, roller skates and stuff) but those were the times. On the other hand there were, as I said, good scripts that at times even reminded me of the A-Team albeit softer and less dysfunctional. Towards the end the stories became a bit repetitive, again that´s something I expereinced a lot in other shows from that time.
If you consider what went on behind the scenes with the constant changes of the lead cast one might wonder the show went 100+ episodes. It was number 1 at one point. Personally, I hadn´t seen anything past the 3rd season until now and I must admit I can see why the show dropped in ratings. Shelley Hack was a miscast in my eyes. She couldn´t produce a decent smile even if her life depended on it. She never seemed the gel with the other two and looked uneasy and out of place most of the times. It got better towards the end of the season but she was gone then and I didn´t mind at all. In came Tanya Roberts and althought here back story was weak she was an improvement over Hack. But she couldn´t turn things around as season 5 had some of the weakest scripts. So the ratings dropped lower and lower and they got cancelled.
The visual effects by Universal Hartland for the pilot movie and some of the episodes were excellent, however this show recycled so many shots by the end of the first season that I truly knew them by heart as a kid. When Universal Hartland closed its doors in early 1981, the quality of the visual effects went down the drain, in a very noticeable way. This show benefited by Battlestar Galactica's cancellation, as many props, sets, costumes and even some visual effects were taken directly from that show. The Terran ships were designed by Ralph McQuarrie (of Star Wars fame), so even now they look sharp and timeless. It's great to see the grounds of Montreal's Expo 67 standing in for New Chicago, just as well as the Bonaventure Hotel. As for the writing... well, it's a Glen A. Larson show, so it varies from campy to awful. Gil Gerard wanted more serious storytelling instead of an "alien of the week" fare, but Universal and NBC deemed the American public of the 80's not ready for something like that. The second season was (at Universal request, actually) a direct copy of Star Trek: The Original Series, and that abrupt change made the ratings drop so fast the season was cut short after the eleventh episode. The fan base decided to ignore the second season, and actually Season One is the only one available on DVD right now (Season Two is out of print since 2004). My favorite episode is the one featuring Buster Crabbe (as Brigadier Gordon), the original Flash Gordon AND Buck Rogers.
Ira Levin's novel is one of my favourites, and Polanski's film happens to be almost a step-by-step adaptation (he was Oscar-nominated for it), with a marvellous cast. This adaptation directed by Agnieszka Holland (adapted from the film, not the novel itself) isn't half bad. She had at her disposal a great cast also: modelling legend Carole Bouquet (my favorite Bond Girl), the always charming Jason Isaacs (he's 100% fluent in Spanish and he shows us that he can also deliver his lines in French, nicely), the very likeable Patrick J. Adams (in his contractually-mandated Suits haircut) and the lovely Christina Cole (a little bit under-used in her role). However the whole 3 hours lie to rest on Zoe Saldaña's shoulders, who is also producing. Moving the plot to Paris was a good move, albeit a distracting one given the fact that most of the cast is American or British, with a few French extras tossed in the mix. There's nothing in modern-day NY that even resembles the feeling and mood of the 1967 film, so the new setting might be an understandable approach. The locations (very touristic shots of Champs-Élysées, Eiffel Tower, Sorbonne, Le Grand Véfour and The Catacombs) and settings are fresh (all the interior shots were done in London), and the photography feels moody and effective. The fact that Rosemary is now an accomplished ballet dancer that supported her husband through college instead of a naive high-school graduated Omaha housewife, was a nice touch, given the current times. However, the final product feels more at times like an slasher-splatter film, departing drastically from the implied elegance in Polanski's film. This mini-series suffers (in my opinion) from the added scenes (the police commissioner and Julie's scenes are tedious) and plots (so much unnecessary drama) needed to fill-in the allotted 3.2 hours, despite its nicely done editing, music, CGI and practical effects. The supporting characters are underdeveloped in most cases, and Rosemary's nightmares and pregnancy ailments take so much exposition time, that it becomes boring. A well-trimmed 2 hours version in film format might deliver (removing the explicit violence) a better experience, at least for me.
Golgo 13 is a retro-style anime that draws heavily from sniper stories about impossible shots in adverse conditions during the turmoil of the Cold War. If you don't know the manga by Takao Saito (the oldest still in publication, since 1968 and most likely about to conclude soon), the whole vibe of the series will feel wrong to some viewers, as Togo's narrative hasn't changed since the 70's. There is not need of character development, as the series depicts vignettes in the daily life of a professional actually doing his job, and nothing else. The characters around him are either service providers (weaponsmiths, intelligence brokers and prostitutes), clients or victims, and pretty much following the structure of the classic Japanese gangster movies, characters fade in and out, and never cross paths with him again. These 50 episodes are just like the stories depicted in the first 70 numbers of the manga. We don't know anything about Duke Togo (that isn't even his real name), and we never will (other than his code name is an "engrish" word for Golgotha and the number 13 a reference to Judas). He has an asian appearence, but never in the manga is stated as Japanese (he travels with a passport from an unspecified nation), as he speaks fluently russian, german, spanish, french, italian, english, mandarin, afrikaans and portuguese, all of them well enough to pass as a native speaker. I happen to find Golgo 13 quite refreshing, as the "assasination of the week" nature of the show is my kind of thrill (L&O style), and I don't have to worry about what's going on next, as do I know he'll get the job done and collect his 3 million dollars... or else. Suggestion: don't watch the dubbed version, and try to watch before "The Professional: Golgo 13" and the "Queen Bee" OVA, so you can get in to the mood.
Probably the best Netflix series I've seen this year, and the best from Gaumont (I'm glad that they kept the same quality level from Hannibal), again shot in 4K for main photography and 8K for aerial views. From the production standpoint, it proves that José Padilha is one of the best Latin American directors & producers, as he kept most of his Brazilian film production crew, including Pedro Bromfman (his haunting music is excellent for this series). The fact that this series was mostly shot in Colombia (in some of the real locations where Escobar lived), is noteworthy, and the level of realism and fully transparent visual effects by Mr. X (via Technicolor) gives us a whole different sense of the unfolding drama. If you have seen the VFX breakdowns, you'll know that most of the streets and landscapes in this series are CGI-enhaced and extended. We all know already how this story ends in 1993, and despite this fact I'm glued to the screen in every episode. The Spanish dialogues are tweaked in a way that when translated the meaning is slightly different, so I'm pretty much sure that the whole series was written first in English. The whole cast is great, despite not many of them being Colombian (mostly Mexican, actually), and Wagner Moura's performance is spot on (probably an Emmy nomination would come his way soon) despite his very, very heavy Portuguese accent. Some parts I couldn't even figure out what he was saying, even when Spanish is my native tongue, so I kept the English CC active in every episode. Honestly, I can't wait for the second (and most likely the last) season. Their main achievement with Narcos was not glamorizing Escobar or the drug trade, but presenting a compelling, human story that everyone can relate to.
One of my favorite 70's mini-series as a kid was Martian Chronicles. I had just finished Ray Bradbury's book back then (1979), and I was "in the zone" the first night that the haunting theme composed by Stanley Myers came out my little TV (as a kid I had a B&W 12" General Electric portable TV that my grandmother gave me as a gift so I could watch series at night while lying on my bed). The story was a huge departure from the book, but I was thrilled, and hugely dissapointed that it was only 3 episodes long. Over the years, I have bought this series several times (Betamax tapes, VHS tapes and the infamous Collector's Edition DVD, and also the soundtrack CD from MGM Music), and today had the chance to enjoy it in 720p, in one sitting. It looks fantastic. The budget was spent in the main cast and locations, and very, very little in visual effects (as usual in most of BBC's fare of the late 70's), and the end result is fairly decent, with only a HUGE, AWFUL, BAD VFX shot in the third episode that even as a kid made me laugh, and a few matte paintings that aren't that good here and there. The sets, props and art design are early 70's top of the line (it was shot in 1978), some of them as good as anything NBC or BBC had on the air back then. The idea was that keep the story and message clear, despite the obvious flaws. The Martian props are just amazing, and I've been looking for Martian Conflict Masks since. As a modern viewer, you'll need to look at this show with you suspension of disbelief mode fully active (the sky is blue, there are clouds everywhere, water canals and more importantly AIR, on Mars), and take the astronautics "science" with it huge grain of salt (that part of the show was crap even then). You have to, in order to enjoy a great cast, a thoughtful narrative and an excellent ending.
This show is incredibly stupid and bad. But somehow it became a guilty pleasure for me.
It's so bad but at the same time in a way that it is entertaining to watch, just not how it was intended to be.
This show must have the most plotholes I have ever seen in a TV series.
If this wouldn't air on a major network like CBS it'd be cancelled after 3 episodes max despite the really, really low production costs that it must have, I suppose.
But since it's on CBS it got a full first season order of BS technobabble making no sense and characters so unlikable and sterile that I don't care for a single person and wonder how they made it through life so far. Not to speak of the positions they literally fell in.
Katharine McPhee (Paige, the waitress) is the only exception and good "feature" of this series.
Not because she is such a great actress, haven't seen enough of her to judge on that, but being the only halfway reasonable person on this awful cast of awful actors makes her the only likable person, in a way.
It's helping that she is cute, too.
I could go on and rip the premise and every episode apart and make fun of its absurd plots, terrible reasoning, repetitive and dumb dialogues but others did that already well enough.
Although being very nit-picky when it is about technology and terminology, that is basically raped on this show on a regular basis, my biggest pet peeve isn't within the above-mentioned.
Surprisingly it is with the blatantly wrong use of HTML syntax in the opening.
You have the maincharacter narrating that he has a higher IQ than Einstein and is one of the four people with the highest IQ on earth but it is subtitled with stuff like </starring> following the "stars". Ugh.
This contradiction is seriously annoying me and shows the technical and intellectual precision that this show has to offer throughout.
Non-spoilerish;
After having finished Penny Dreadful S1 I must say I'm satisfied with how the first season ended. It seems the makers of PD knew there would eventually be a S2 and took their time and didn't rush through the story- that's awesome!
The show is/was enjoyable, delivered some really impressive performances and a well written story( apart from the misdefined egyptain creator diety Amon-Ra- that part is bullSHIT.
Amon-Ra was a more or less good buddy.)!
The cast- Great!
Eva has, once again, shown us what she's capable of as an actress. Impressive acting here!
Frankenstein, oh Frankenstein. I hate the Frankenstein stories and I already expressed my opinion on Frankenstein and his Creationin in my previous post, but someting has changed and I learned to actually like Frankenstein in Penny Dreadful!
What I absolutely don't like is Reeve's role, he plays sexy Dorian Grey, who basically didn't draw my attention at all. I simply didn't care if/when something awful happaned to him...
I was dry like an empty barrel, no tears, no pity and no sympathy!
His on-screen time was a joke! Reeve's a great actor and I think he deserved much better!
Scare/Anxiety Factor- mild/medium. Each ep. adds more mystery than anxiety.
Worth Watching? In my opinion, YUP! You should be watching! ^ ^
When the Hellsing TV version was initially released I was really into the show's edginess. At that time we didn't even have a broadband connection and so for most episodes I was left with checking sequences from the already downloaded packets and waiting for it to complete (funny how times have changed). Despite all this I never actually watched the whole thing. So to check this off I decided to watch the OVAs instead since they have been released for some time now.
Most people with the intention of watching "Hellsing" already know this but I'm saying it again; there is little reason to check out the TV version with the existence of the Ultimate OVAs. They are not only superior in production values but also true to the manga source material. So instead of fighting ghouls and vampires created by computer chips this builds to a showdown between religious factions and an army of vampire Nazis in the middle of London.
The thing is obviously not perfect. The comedy feels a bit misplaced and the pacing towards the end a bit uneven (with a lot of focus on shots of impaled people, blood streams, crosses or ruins) and the chief Nazi was quite anti-climatic.
Still, if you're up for a ride with one of the most overpowered protagonists ever and are not put off by a rain of blood and body parts this will suffice and is probably the only show of it's kind to receive this deluxe treatment.
