Category: TV

Alex Rider – season 2

On By Rick McIn books, TVLeave a comment

I haven’t read many of the books.

But the TV series is somewhat interesting.

Alex Rider is a British spy thriller TV series based on the novel series of the same name by Anthony Horowitz.

It stars Otto Farrant as the eponymous character, who is recruited by a subdivision of MI6 as a teenage spy …

It’s a pretty standard SAVE THE WORLD thriller. Impossible plots.

What I like about THIS thriller is the charmingly weird cast.

Brenock O’Connor as Tom Harris, Alex’s best friend,

Marli Siu as hacker Kyra Vashenko-Chao.

Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo as Jack Starbright.

I watched parts of seasons 1 and 3.

There will be no season 4.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Murder, Interrupted book 1 by James Patterson

On By Rick McIn books, TVLeave a comment

Murder, Interrupted book 1 is two true crime thrillers, as written by the famed author.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

In the first, a rich — but criminal — accountant hires an incompetent hit man to kill his wife.

In the second, a single mother tirelessly cares for her wheelchair-bound, chronically ill daughter. But when the teenaged Gypsy Rose realizes she isn’t actually sick and Dee Dee has lied all these years, Gypsy Rose exacts her revenge .

These two stories made up the first two episodes of Discovery’s Murder is Forever TV series

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I read the second book in the series, as well:

Home Sweet Murder.

Unstable – season 1

On By Rick McIn TVLeave a comment

I’ve always liked Rob Lowe comedies.

This show is funny.

A father-son comedy in which socially shy son Jackson (his real son John Owen Lowe) begins working for his successful and admired, but eccentric and narcissistic-adjacent, father Ellis (Rob Lowe) at his high-tech bio research facility in order to help save him from spiralling further following the death of his wife.

Good cast. I particularly like Rachel Marsh as Luna and Emma Pilar Ferreira as Ruby.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Fallout – season 1

On By Rick McIn TVLeave a comment

Not great. But I somehow got through Fallout.

The plot is too confusing. There are many subplots and characters that don’t seem to contribute. Perhaps they relate back to the original video game.

BUT Walton Goggins as The Ghoul / Cooper Howard is unforgettable.

And Ella Purnell ia perfect as the naïve Bunker dweller Lucy MacLean.

This will win all the awards for visual effects and cinematography. Some of the best shot at Namibia‘s Skeleton Coast.

… the aftermath of the Great War of 2077, an apocalyptic nuclear exchange in an alternate history of Earth where advances in nuclear technology after WWII led to the emergence of a retrofuturistic society and a subsequent resource war.

Many survivors took refuge in fallout bunkers known as Vaults, unaware each Vault was designed to perform sociological and psychological experiments on the Vault Dwellers.

More than 200 years later in 2296, a young woman named Lucy leaves behind her home in Vault 33 to venture out into the dangerously unforgiving wasteland of a devastated Los Angeles to look for her father, who had been kidnapped.

Along the way, she meets a Brotherhood of Steel squire and a ghoul bounty hunter, each has their own mysterious pasts and agendas to settle.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Colin from Accounts 😀

On By Rick McIn humour, TVLeave a comment

Funny TV sitcom.

Colin from Accounts is an Australian comedy television series created and written by husband-and-wife team Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, who also star as the show’s main characters. …

Set in Sydney, Australia and centred on Ashley (Harriet Dyer) and Gordon (Patrick Brammall), two singles who are brought together by a car accident and an injured dog whom they name Colin (from Accounts).

Ashley and Gordon are flawed, funny people who choose each other after being brave enough to show their true selves, scars and all, as they navigate life together.

Worth watching. Though I did feel the series got weaker towards the end.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

The Tourist – season 2

On By Rick McIn TVLeave a comment

Like most everyone, I loved season 1.

The Tourist (season 1)  is a 6 part TV show series where an Irish tourist in Australia is run off the road, waking up in hospital with amnesia.

Season 2 explains why Jamie Dornan as (The Man / Elliot Stanley / Eugene Cassidy) is on the run down under.

He goes home to Ireland to uncover his past.

Still surprising.

Conor MacNeill as Detective Ruairi Slater is terrific. What a role!

All the Irish casting is excellent.

BUT I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as season 1.

I like the comedy. The intense drama … not so much.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Girls5eva – seasons 1&2 😀

On By Rick McIn TVLeave a comment

Very funny. Smart dialogue.

As funny as 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

MANY pop culture references.

Cameos by Fallon, Colbert, Tina Fey, and more.

It follows four women who were part of a girl group named Girls5eva, which was briefly popular around the year 2000 before fading into one-hit-wonder status.

Now unfulfilled in their various lives, they reunite to try to find musical success again. 

I quite like Daniel Breaker as Scott, Dawn’s husband. He plays the one normal person in the show.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I watched season 2, as well. Not nearly as good.

A hard NO on season 3.

Bag of Bones by Stephen King

On By Rick McIn books, TVLeave a comment

I only read the first third of this book. I normally find King books to be superb storytelling — but too long.

I quit at the point where the ghost story started to get too weird and violent.

Bag of Bones is a 1998 horror novel … about an author who suffers severe writer’s block and delusions at an isolated lake house four years after the death of his wife. …

He decides to confront his fears and moves to his vacation house on Dark Score Lake, known as “Sara Laughs”.

On his first day, he meets Kyra, a 3-year-old girl and her young widowed mother, 20-year-old Mattie Devore.

Mattie’s father-in-law is Max Devore, an elderly rich man who will do anything to gain custody of his granddaughter. He was the bad guy when I quit the book.

Pierce Brosnan plays the writer in the TV mini-series.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

ANTHRACITE: limited series TV

On By Rick McIn TVLeave a comment

Not recommended.

Weird. Some sort of horror from France.

Well … there is humour, mainly around quirky Ida — some sort of online detective hacker. She’s terminally ill so doesn’t much worry about anything she does.

The plot is confusing.

Opening Shot: “1994.” The camera pushes in on a house on a lake. SWAT teams arrive in rafts and put up their weapons.

The Gist: The SWAT teams are there to invade the house, in the French Alps village of Levionna, which is the headquarters of a cult led by Caleb Johansson (Stefano Cassetti). Johansson ends up being the only survivor after a mass suicide …

Decider

30 years later the village economy is dominated by a mysterious company, apparently an anthracite (coal) mine.

A journalist looking into the past cult deaths is kidnapped.

His daughter — Ida — arrives to rescue her Dad.

After another seeming cult murder, Jaro Gatsi is blamed by the townspeople. He’s an ex-con who was hired to work at the ski resort.

There’s Jaro’s friend. Who’s got relationship problems.

Next — a troubled police detective, who seems to be the only cop actually trying to solve this thing.

An evil nurse in an insane asylum.

Too many fights. Gunshots. A car chase. …

The whole thing is pretty dumb. Who approved this script?

On the upside, it’s original and not often boring.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

All the Light We Cannot See – book & TV

On By Rick McIn books, TVLeave a comment

All the Light We Cannot See (2014) is a war novel by American author Anthony Doerr.

… set during World War II. It revolves around the characters Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl who takes refuge in her great-uncle’s house in Saint-Malo after Paris is invaded by Nazi Germany, and Werner Pfennig, a bright German boy who is accepted into a military school because of his skills in radio technology.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Overall, I was disappointed.

Too long. Poor storytelling. It rambled too much.

There were dozens of scenes that could have been left out — leaving the core story stronger.

WHY have 4 diamonds? That added nothing but unnecessary pages.

I’m astonished that the Pulitzer judges were impressed.

The mini-series — 4 episodes — is MUCH BETTER.

Don’t listen to the critics who gave it only 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I commend the screen writers for improving so much of the messy book.

Werner Pfennig is a much stronger character on screen.

Hugh Laurie is excellent as the World War I veteran suffering from PTSD.

Marie-Laure is played by Aria Mia Loberti who is legally blind. She responded on a whim to an All The Light We Cannot See open global casting search posted online. An amateur. Well cast.

I’d agree with critics that the NAZIs are cliche in the TV series . No nuance.

That was my biggest complaint with the mini-series.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.