Actor/Producer Jack Dishel has posted the first episode of his webseries :DRYVRS on YouTube. The premise of the series (I’ve only seen the one) appears to be the humorous encounters Mr. Dishel has with the people working for :DRYVRS, a UBER-like service he uses to transport himself from location to location.
Cleverly, the first episode features Macaulay Culkin as the :DRYVR come to pick him up. Mr. Culkin’s character, we quickly find, is a grown up and whacked out version of his Kevin McCallister from the Home Alone films…
As humorous as the premise was, is it just me or did the whole thing ultimately feel rather…I dunno…depressing? Don’t get me wrong: The adult Kevin having some serious issues regarding what happened to him when he was a child and growing up to be a seriously deranged individual makes a certain sense, but still…
Regardless, kudos to Mr. Dishel. He couldn’t have found a more intriguing guest for his his premiere webisode. That alone guarantees many people -obviously including myself- got to see his work.
Perhaps we can see more of this Kevin in the future?
When “Hello,” the first single from her new album popped up on the radio and I first heard it, I found myself choked up with emotions. She really knows how to hit a nerve…
But as with just about every artist struggling to get their works known, talent is but one ingredient in the mix and sometimes success is just as much about timing.
Which brings us to this seemingly oddball article which notes how…
So you think: What in the world could Sarah Palin (an at best ridiculous figure, IMHO, in politics) and Adele possibly have in common?!
Turns out in 2008 Sarah Palin, during her failed run as the Vice Presidential Candidate to John McCain, appeared for the first time on Saturday Night Live, in the cold opening, to considerable -and massive- audience interest/viewership. And who do you suppose was the guest musical artist for that particular episode of SNL?
You guessed it: Adele.
At the time she was an almost complete unknown and promoting her first album, 19. Because of the large viewership of that episode (the episode had one of the largest in SNL’s history), Adele snagged a very large audience to hear her sing and, clearly, they liked what they heard. Even more luck was on her side as the Billboard ballots were due two weeks from that date and many clearly her songs in mind…
The rest, as they say, is history.
While it is very conceivable because of her incredible talent Adele would have achieved her success anyway, one cannot and should not discount the benefits she reaped from her well-timed appearance on SNL all those years ago.
Which means that with this past Halloween weekend premiere of “El Jefe”, the first episode of Starz! Ash vs Evil Dead, it has been a mind boggling twenty three years since we’ve seen a healthy dose of our anti-hero/screwup in action. Sure, Mr. Campbell made a cameo appearance as Ash at the very end (after the credits) of the disappointing 2013 remake/reimaging of Evil Dead, but that’s all it was, a few seconds’ long cameo…
Here we finally, finally get what we asked for: Ash front and center doing what he does best: Kick demonic ass while simultaneously making an ass out of himself.
For that’s what the crew behind the original Evil Dead films discovered: That graphic, splatter horror could be merged with comedy to create something unique for these times. While this wasn’t an entirely new idea (years before Abbott and Costello meet up with, among others, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Dracula etc), the character of Ash, a knucklehead with a penchant for spouting some of the strangest/hilarious lines…
…was. He’s a clod, a dim bulb. An arrogant, selfish fool who nonetheless has one very unique ability: To effectively fight evil. Though the first Evil Dead movie was more of a straight up horror film, it was in the second Evil Dead this unique comic-Ash character really flowered. The clip above, from Army of Darkness, continued and expanded on that interpretation. Ash was the dufus character from a comedy that just happened to find himself in a full fledged horror feature.
Happily, Ash vs Evil Dead follows that path beautifully. Though older, Ash is certainly no wiser. In fact, other than dentures and a bigger belly, he’s the exact same fool fans have come to know and love.
The first episode of this 10 episode series (with a second season already approved! Yay!) succinctly re-establishes Ash while introducing us to his modern world, a place where he’s still a low level worker at the “Value Stop” chain (alas, the S-Smart found in Army of Darkness -and indeed all the elements present in that movie- could not be used in this show as that film is owned by another studio. No big deal: Strong continuity isn’t an important element in the Evil Dead universe). Ash also remains a lothario, readying himself in comical fashion in the opening scenes to cruise down to a seedy looking bar and pick up the only woman in the establishment…by lying and boasting about how he lost his hand (one can imagine how many times before he’s used this pick up line).
But all is (of course) not well and Ash realizes the evil he faced all those years before may be back. And the person responsible for its return could be…Ash himself.
I won’t go into all the details of this episode but we are introduced to a larger cast of characters who will accompany Ash on this new adventure. Some, like Lucy Lawless‘ Lucy appear only for a few seconds in this episode while three other regulars are given more time. Whether there are more characters to join in this journey, I’m not sure.
Yet.
If you’re at all into Evil Dead and, more specifically, the legend that is Ash, you’ll have a blast with this new series’ first episode. Let’s hope what follows is up to this highly entertaining premiere.
On Jimmy Kimmel and on Back to the Future day (ie, the day Marty and Doc traveled to the future, according to the movies)…
Very amusing. Thought the best overall joke was “Marty McFly’s” reaction to being told, at the end of the skit, that Micheal J. Fox would be a guest on the show.
Pardon the pun, but how time flies! I remember going to the theaters to see the original Back to the Future in 1985 and being blown away by it. Wasn’t as impressed with the two sequels (BTFII had some very funny scenes taking place within the context of the first movie but the ending was so clearly “to be continued” that it annoyed me. BTFIII closed out the series well but the characters went back in time so far, to the wild west, that it lost the sense of immediacy the original had. What made the original so cool was to see Marty meeting up with his parents when they were his age. He knew them, but he didn’t really know them. In BTFIII, while we see distant relatives of some original characters, we never felt the same closeness to them as the original movie’s plot had).
Nonetheless, if nothing else, this makes me want to watch the movies again.
A short while back it was announced the upcoming season, number five, of Person of Interest, a favorite show of mine, would be its last one and, further, it would have only 13 episodes versus the usual 22-23 allotment. Fans of the show were distressed but I noted that sometimes its a good thing when a show lasts a fairly long time (As noted, this would be the fifth season of the show) and is then allowed to gracefully exit (you can read my full comments about that here).
Since that time, it was announced that two other shows I enjoy, both on the Sci-Fy network, would also be finishing up after this season. One, Haven, has just begun airing while the other, Continuum, wrapped up its shortened 6 episode conclusion season just a short while ago.
Continuum’s story involved a dystopic future where corporations are essentially king and capitalism’s dark side is in full evidence. The police force of the future, called “Protectors”, are a tool of the corporations to keep common citizens trampled under foot.
A rebel group, known as Liber8, fights the power but their members, including the brother of one of the corporate class’ most powerful men, are imprisoned and, on the eve of their execution, all, including a Protector named Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols) are mysteriously sent back to our present time.
The members of Liber8 realize this offers them an opportunity to re-set the timeline and negate the dystopia that’s to come while Kiera fights them, certain they remain a menace to society regardless of the time they are now in while longing to return to her previous life and the child she left behind.
What made the show so fascinating is that, as presented, the violent, at times homicidal members of Liber8 nonetheless pursue a noble goal: They fight against a future society we as viewers are increasingly clued into as being a very terrible one while Kiera, the show’s protagonist, fights -sometimes obliviously to that fact- for that grim future that’s to come.
I won’t get into too many details regarding the storylines presented, but in four seasons the show managed to walk fascinating line with viewer’s sympathies. As viewers we feared what the members (and, increasingly, ex-members) of Liber8 were up to yet couldn’t help but think at times that their struggle, in any other series, might have made them the heroes of the show!
And Kiera Cameron, the show’s Hamlet-like protagonist, was presented as a sympathetic figure yet displayed tendencies that in other characters might have been viewed as major weakness or worse. She constantly lamented her fate and her losses, especially toward the end of the show, and could have appeared self-interested, indeed selfish, to the point of risking others’ lives for her own determined pursuit to get back to her future. And, as mentioned, her fight against Liber8, by its very nature, was a fight for the status quo which might eventually bring about a very unpleasant and dark future.
Again, this was our hero!
While the too-short six episode final season (previous seasons ran 10, 13, and 13 episodes long) pushed several plotlines out of the way or into a too-quick resolution, I’m thankful we got what we did.
Like many shows, Continuum certainly had its ups and downs but when all was said and done, the highs were far greater than any lows and those final few minutes of the series wrapped its storyline in an incredibly satisfactory way.
Much like the show in general, it managed to manipulate our emotions, offering us a hopeful, optimistic ending that was nonetheless wrapped in considerable sadness.
When the end comes for Person of Interest and Haven, it is my hope they can exit as gracefully.
Keza MacDonald offers a fascinating article, posted on Kotaku.com, regarding his frustrations with so many really, really, REALLY big/multiple-hour-killer games being available seemingly all at once:
I’ll go Mr. MacDonald one better: It’s not just video games. We live in an era where we are being absolutely crushed by the amount of recreational material we have available to us.
I know, I know, first world problems.
Still, they’re there. We have too many TV shows, too much music, too many books, too many DVDs/BluRays, too many (yes) video games, etc. etc. etc. screaming for every single second of our free time.
Used to be that the choices for entertainment weren’t all that many. When I was young, there were something like five or so channels on TV and the major networks didn’t air all that many first run shows, at least compared to now. You pretty much had to see these shows when they aired or, a little later, when they were rerun.
There was so little “new” programming available for all the hours of the day that it wasn’t unusual for the local networks to replay old TV shows on “down” times such as the weekends or early afternoons.
Thus it was that I’d discover shows cancelled long before I first saw them. Shows like the original Star Trek. The Wild, Wild, West. Perry Mason. The Twilight Zone. The Outer Limits.
Cable came and grew and suddenly you had hundreds of channels and the need to fill the time with something. So many new shows appeared that it became impossible to watch everything you were even mildly interested in.
A confession: I’m one of the very few people out there who hasn’t watched a single full episode of what is arguably the most popular show on TV today, Game of Thrones. It’s not that I don’t want to, its just that I never got HBO and, when the episodes were finally available to me via video release, so much had been written/talked (and spoiled) about the various plot points that it was pointless -by that time- to try the show out.
But early on I was damn curious about it and even bought the first couple of books of the series. These books sit unread on my bookshelf, given up for the same reasons I gave up on watching the show. Granted, its my fault I was spoiled regarding the show’s plot. I could have resisted checking out the various spoilers, yet having seen a few -even one!- there became no need for me to play catch up on the rest.
Getting back to Mr. MacDonald, I too have video games I’ve purchased fully intending to play them but getting sidetracked and eventually letting them go, sometimes without playing even a minute of them.
With whatever free time I have I’m nearing the completion of the latest Batman game (XBox One version) but waiting in the wings are The Witcher, Forza, and a few others I may never get to. And that’s not counting the current Grand Theft Auto game I’ve got on my computer!
By now I think I’ve made my point: We live in an era of oversaturation and we have to be more and more picky about what it is we decide to spend our free time doing.
While it is a good thing we have so many options available for entertainment, I worry about all those things we might have missed while pursuing the new and shiny. Used to be that certain works, with the passage of time, would be given second or third looks and, over the years, people would realize these sometimes forgotten works were special.
For example, the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Never successful in his time, his works were re-assessed over the years and became viewed long after Mr. Lovecraft’s death as truly great works of horror fiction.
Could that happen today and with so many works competing for our time out there? Could anyone find the free time to re-assess an older work and realize they are holding something truly special in their hands?
For better or worse, I fear that is no longer the case.
Having just concluded a few days ago after a two week or so delay due to a violent scene that was perhaps a little too close to tragic real life events, I eagerly looked in on the 10th and final episode of the first season of Mr. Robot and found it, like most of the season before it, a fascinating watch.
Also, a bit of a troubling watch, which I’ll get into in a moment.
To begin, Mr. Robot concerns one Elliot Alderson (played incredibly well by Rami Malek). Elliot is a genius level computer hacker who is also a social misfit. He can barely talk to people, is addicted to morphine, sees (and lies) to his psychologist, and in his free time hacks into other people’s lives. It is while doing this that Elliot fancies himself a do-gooder. If his hacks reveal bad or illegal things people are doing, he will expose them.
Elliot works, ironically enough, at a computer security firm where it is his job to stop hackers. One of his co-workers is Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday), a friend of his since childhood. The two share a platonic relationship -though there are moments we get hints of Elliot’s longing for her- along with a shared tragic past: When they were children, Elliot lost his father and Angela lost her mother after being exposed to chemicals.
The chemical exposure was caused by Evil Corp., the show’s “big bad” company that, ironically enough (part deux), employs Elliot and Angela’s company for security. Thus the two have to work –well!– for the very company they suspect caused their parents’ deaths.
Into Elliot’s life arrives a strange man who calls himself “Mr. Robot” (Christian Slater, also doing some fantastic acting here). Mr. Robot gradually pulls Elliot into his “work”. Mr. Robot, we find, is also a hacker who, along with a group of fellow hackers, has set a goal on something far greater than Elliot could imagine doing: Taking down Evil Corp and freeing everyone from any debt they may have to any corporation.
All they have to do is crack into Evil Corp and fry their data all at once and all over the entire planet.
To get into more details than this would bring us into SPOILERY territory and, since I intend to do so in a moment, I’ll keep quiet here.
Suffice to say that if you haven’t checked out Mr. Robot, I highly recommend you do. The show isn’t perfect and there was at least one episode, eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4 (episode 4 of the series) that appeared to be a time killer at best, but the show makes you think with each passing moment.
I highly recommend it.
Still with me? Good.
What follows, however, is…
SPOILER FILLED!!!
You have been warned!
Ok, so here we go: Up above I wrote the following regarding this show: “(Mr. Robot is) a bit of a troubling watch, which I’ll get into in a moment.” That moment has arrived.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, there have been times I’ve found myself picking up on “hidden” or “surprising” things in movies or TV shows before they are revealed to the audience. Perhaps it is because I’m a writer myself and spot some clues beforehand or perhaps it is just that I’ve an interest and affinity to see these types of details, but it happens now and again (not always by any stretch of the imagination) and sometimes a show/movie’s biggest “shocks” or “surprises” are not quite as surprising.
In the case of Mr. Robot, I figured out Mr. Robot’s identity a couple of episodes before we reached that reveal. Not only did I figure he was Elliot’s father (an easier guess), I knew he was a figment of Elliot’s imagination as well. In this case what clued me in was the multiple times characters (particularly Elliot himself) noted Mr. Robot was “crazy”. There was even one startling scene where Mr. Robot confronted one of his cohorts and, while waving a gun at his head, said the same thing about himself.
Regardless of my amazing (I kid, I kid) precognition, the reveal that Mr. Robot and Elliot are one and the same person instantly made me realize another thing: Mr. Robot is a cyberpunk version of Fight Club.
In Fight Club (the movie, I have not read the book it was based on) we follow the narrator (Edward Norton) and his eventual interactions with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) who introduces him to a “Fight Club” where men beat each other up and, eventually, engage in societal anarchy. They fight the “powers” that be and are disdainful of society and its mores. Eventually it is revealed that Tyler Durden and the narrator are one and the same person, that Durden is the narrator’s id breaking out.
I hate to say it, but this is pretty much exactly what we’ve got going on in Mr. Robot.
Interestingly, I didn’t like Fight Club (the movie) all that much because the concept was a hard one for me to wrap my head around. In Mr. Robot, however, I totally get the concept of cyber security and hacking and therefore find myself intrigued with the concepts presented.
Having said that, I repeat: Mr. Robot is, thematically, pretty much the same thing as Fight Club. While Mr. Robot is extremely well done/acted, one can’t escape the fact that it is also very derivative of that concept. So much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk doesn’t one day sue the makers of Mr. Robot. Hell, if Harlan Ellison had a case against James Cameron for The Terminator, Mr. Palahniuk certainly has one for Mr. Robot.
But just as James Cameron created a terrific piece of movie-making with The Terminator, so too do the makers of Mr. Robot create a must-see TV show.
I’m a big fan of Longmire, the television show that aired for three seasons on A&E only to be cancelled on a particularly juicy cliffhanger. Thankfully, Netflix snatched the show up and come September 10th, ten episodes will become available for any subscriber to see:
This is the first time I’m eager to catch a “new” series on Netflix. I was no more than curios to see the new Arrested Development but when I started seeing the episodes I wasn’t all that impressed and dropped it after the first one. I’ve read/heard varying accounts of how good/bad the new episodes were. If I ever find the free time, I’ll eventually give it a look-see.
But I most certainly will be giving Longmire a look. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it’ll remain as fascinating as it was when it aired on A&E.
Word got out yesterday that actress Yvonne Craig passed away. If the name isn’t familiar to you, these two images, perhaps her two most iconic roles, most certainly are.
First up, as Batgirl in the famous, and purposely campy, Batman TV series of the late 1960’s:
Secondly, as Marta, perhaps the most famous of the green-skinned Orion slave girls and featured on the original Star Trek series episode Whom Gods Destroy:
and…
As one grows older, it sometimes comes as a shock to realize actors you associate in your mind (and thanks to the permanence of their taped roles) as so very young wind up being just like you and also susceptible to the ravages of aging.
In my mind, Harrison Ford is forever associated with his youthful roles in Blade Runner and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now 73 years old, it came as something of a shock to see him in the latest Star Wars movie commercial, though I had seen his gradual aging in other recent roles (including his fourth appearance as Indiana Jones). Still, upon seeing that commercial and realizing it was the first time I’d seen “Han Solo” since (gulp) 1983, for the first time I saw him as what he was: An older gentleman yet one who in my mind remained forever frozen as he was back then.
So too it was a shock to realize that Mrs. Craig passed away at the age of 78. Unlike Mr. Ford, she hadn’t appeared in any significant role on screen since the early 1980’s (she has a single role listed for 1990 and voice work for 2009-11) so her visage is stubbornly linked to the roles I see above, forever young and stunningly beautiful.
It was a shock to read of her passing and a further shock to realize she had lived a very long and (I certainly hope) full and fulfilling life. R.I.P., Mrs. Craig. Like many others of my generation, I will always remember you.
P.S.:
One of Mrs. Craig’s very early roles was captured in a May 31st, 1958 aired episode of the first season of the very popular Perry Mason show. The episode, titled “The Case of the Lazy Lover“, featured both Mrs. Craig and, delightfully, actor Neil Hamilton. This man’s name isn’t familiar to you? Perhaps this image will refresh your memory:
…or this one…
Both Mrs. Craig and Mr. Hamilton would, of course, go on to appear in the Batman TV show. Mr. Hamilton played Commissioner Gordon during its entire run while Mrs. Craig would appear in the third and final season as his daughter Barbara Gordon/Batgirl.
Interesting they would reunite some 10 years later on the screen!
