Gotham On Fox (Hulu)

The new season (2nd) has started on Fox  It's dark and gritty and very well done. I'm enjoying it as any comic fan will!

Hulu is a great deal!

The new TV season is upon us. If you're like me and need to shift your viewing, try Hulu. It's really great and now for a small payment, you can skip commercials. What a deal.

LDS General Conference

Okay, it's not really a mainstream form of entertainment, but I really enjoy watching the LDS general conference when they broadcast it twice a year. The speakers seem genuinely nice and caring, concerned with the folks they are addressing.

Hector and the Search For Happiness

Here's an R rated film I can wholeheartedly recommend. I try to avoid that rating since so many plunge the viewer into worlds they'd be better off not experiencing, but this is a fairly wholesome light comedy that verges the borderline. There are a few F words and some undraped human form (but not full frontal nudity).

Hector is a British psychiatrist who is finding something wrong with life so he embarks on a search for happiness. And the results are magical. He finds many reasons or statements about happiness.

I found it to be a vicarious journey of self discovery and that made it easy to ignore the occasional crude humor. I find Simon Pegg to be an extremely gifted talent and this 2015 DVD release is one of those that contend for my top 100 films of all time! He brought life to his role as Scotty in the new Star Trek movies and he was great in Shaun Of The Dead and I even liked his efforts in Run Fat Boy, Run. There are several projects that I have steered clear of because of his lack of filtering, but this is one that deserves high praise.

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Project Almanac

I didn't expect much but this flick was still a disappointment. It was shot in that steady cam, home made movie style that was popularized by the Blair Witch Project. So it's already got one big strike against it, this style of movie making just begs for hard to follow crappy scripting.

So, they did have some moments that would have been fascinating if done in a normal movie style but it seemed so much more fake being a steady cam "real" experience.

And the ending was horrible! It's like they got tired of telling the story so they just wrapped it up! All through the movie they build up to a scene they discovered on an old videotape, so it comes and they just throw it away with no good resolution. 

Disappointing.

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Tracks

I had never heard of this film made in 2013 until I found it on Netflix. I watched it and then watched it again with Jeanne. We both enjoyed it completely and highly recommend it.

The story is that of Robyn Davidson, a young woman who attempted to cross the Australian desert in 1977. It is a slow moving, thoughtful and engaging film about courage, drive and grit.

A well acted film starring Mia Wasikowska as Robyn, it's no wonder I'd never heard of it, it only did 4 mil at the box office (less than it cost to make). The advertising must have been poor. I read online that both Julia Roberts and Nichole Kidman had been considered for the role but years later Mia got it. Had those earlier attempts with known actors made it, the film might have been more successful.

Rated PG-13 for some rough scenes, it's well within the standards of most families.

This is a really great one!

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Death In Paradise

I watched  some of these episodes as they were aired and now Jeanne and I are enjoying them on Netflix.

This is fun because it's a "fish out of water" story featuring a quirky detective from England stationed in the Caribbean. He doesn't like the sun or the sea or the beach. He doesn't trust his laid back co-workers or the local wildlife.

But..he's a good detective and that's what makes it a fun viewing experience.

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Jericho

I've seen it before, But found it on Netflix and re-watched it. This is a pretty good TV drama with good visuals and a well written story. It's fast paced but not so that the story is glossed over. There are better entertainment choices with this type of story, but it.s worth the time to watch it.

There are two seasons. Season one is better, they could have ended with that, but they continued with the next season, introduced some good characters and did a pretty good job wrapping it up. If you watch it and feel you need more there are two paperback books that continue the story available on Amazon.

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Backstrom

Second episode and I LIKE it! Just extremely quirky.It's just so strange. I like these kind of characters. On FOX, if you've missed these two episodes, get right onto Hulu and watch them before they're gone..Let me know what you think.

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Rediscovering An Old Friend

Sometimes we watch shows long enough that the characters become like real friends to us. Our daughter, Laura, really suffered a bit when the sitcom "Friends" ended because those characters had become so important to her. 
Jeanne and I have recently been visiting "Old Friends" on the series "Northern Exposure." We enjoy the characters even more than we did originally because they are so familiar to us. We like the quirkyness of the situations came up with and we enjoy the intellectual debates the entire town may have from episode to episode. It's been fun to re-discover an old friend!

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The Maze Runner

I haven't posted about movies for awhile, sometimes I'm just not as driven but "Maze Runner" got me interested in writing again.You see, it's a pretty good movie, it really grabs you and you get set into the action with the hero who, like us, is confused and disoriented and doesn't know whats going on. We get to go go along with him as he discovers the secrets of the "Glade" and it's occupants as the story unfolds.

The story holds up well and the effects work, it is your "typical" teenagers in trouble who need to save the world (as has been so popular in recent cinema). But the ending is very dissatisfying and at times I found myself disengaged from the story, even though I really wanted to figure out what was going on. I think it was a matter of paceing. If they had revealed some elements of the story more quickly it would have helped and at the end, when things were revealed..it happened too quickley. There was never a time where they let us as an audience take a breath and say "Oh, That's what's going on."


I hope you watch it and write your comments, I'm anxious to hear what you think of it.

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