Author: Will Harris (Page 79 of 261)

Will is a member of the Television Critics Association and has written for Decider.com, the Onion A.V. Club, The Dissolve, Indiewire, Rhino.com, TV Week Magazine, The Virginian-Pilot, Popdose.com, and EW.com along with writing for Bullz-Eye.com and Premium Hollywood.

Welcome to the Concession Stand

Welcome to a new feature here on Premium Hollywood…and, believe me, it’s one I’ve been wanting to premiere for quite some time. I’m someone who enjoys trying new foods and new beverages, and I’ve often thought it would be fun to write a column which gave me the opportunity to write about the experience. Unfortunately, I’m forever buried in DVDs that need to be reviewed. Finally, I had an epiphany: why don’t I figure out a way to combine the two?

And, thus, “Concession Stand” was born.

The beverage: Mountain Dew Voltage.

Last year, over a quarter million votes helped Voltage win the so-called “DEWmocracy” election, with the taste, name and color of the product all developed by the customers themselves…well, y’know, with a little help from the folks at PepsiCo. (What, like they’re gonna give the yokels all the power?) As the bottle proudly trumpets, it’s your standard Dew brew, but charged with raspberry citrus flavor and ginseng. The color of the beverage is a slightly disconcerting shade of blue, but the raspberry mixes with the traditional Dew flavor rather well, making the taste not so far removed from a Sweet Tart. If it’s icy cold, it goes down fast and smooth…which is good, since it’s so sweet that drinking it slowly may result in you taking awhile to finish the bottle, but caffeine fiends with a sweet tooth will have no problem chugging it down to score the inevitable rush.

When I was pitched the opportunity to check out Voltage, they sent me three bottles of the stuff, so I scoured my to-be-reviewed pile to see if I had three DVDs featuring the same person in some role or other. Lo and behold, I did…and that person’s name was Lea Thompson.

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Greetings to the New Show: “Kings”

Mark my words: you need to tune in for the premiere of “Kings” tonight. It’s an epic drama with the kind of scope that you rarely see on television in series form – executive producers Michael Green, Francis Lawrence, and Erwin Stoff have literally created a new world, one which provides them with the opportunity to offer tales of war and love without offending any existing countries – and it needs to be a hit right out of the box, lest it be canceled without ever having a chance to build on its concept.

If you’ve seen the commercials for the series (and if you’ve watched NBC for more than about fifteen minutes at any point in the last few months, you surely must’ve caught at least one), then it’s probable that at least one familiar face has leapt out at you: Ian McShane, late of HBO’s “Deadwood.” McShane plays King Silas Benjamin, leader of a land known as Gilboa, which, despite being an obvious monarchy, looks suspiciously like America. When “Kings” opens, Silas is preparing to address his subjects, and when he embarks upon his speech, we’re introduced to some of those who are watching it at home, including a young man named David Shepherd (Chris Egan). Unfortunately, despite the optimism within Silas’s speech, we soon fast-forward to two years later, when David and many other men of Gilboa are in the midst of fighting in Gilboa’s war against the neighboring nation of Gath.

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Catching Up With… “Lie To Me”

I enjoyed the pilot episode of Fox’s “Lie To Me,” but I’ve been struggling with this season’s plethora of scheduling annoyances – seriously, has there ever been a year when this many good shows were being pitted against each other? – and haven’t been able to catch it since then. I’m pleased, then, that the network has decided to provide the series with a new timeslot on Wednesdays at 8 PM, where I can actually watch it once in awhile. (I can wait on “The New Adventures of Old Christine” and “Gary Unmarried” ’til they get a DVD release, I can just read Mike’s recaps of “The Chopping Block,” right?)

According to Fox’s blurb on tonight’s episode…

“Lightman (Tim Roth) and Foster (Kelli Williams) investigate the disappearance of an 11-year-old girl who may have been murdered. Meanwhile, Loker (Brendan Hines) and Torres (Monica Raymund) must determine whether a famous peace activist is who she claims to be and if her bestselling memoir is true, but Loker’s attraction to the socially conscious woman may be clouding his assessment of her.”

Having already seen the episode, I can tell you a few other things as well:

* Lightman makes the girl’s parents cry before the opening credits roll.

* When handed a huge roomful of people who claim to have tips on where the girl is, he proceeds to narrow down the population to a far more manageable level with two quick statements.

* By episode’s end, we have learned a great deal more about Foster’s personal history, along with why she feels so strongly about this case.

* Loker attempts to offer up a compliment to the aforementioned peace activist. When he feels the need to explain to her how he means it, you will laugh and cringe simultaneously…and you will feel the same effect later in the episode, when he attempts to get his copy of the woman’s book signed.

* Alison LaPlaca guest stars as the woman questioning the veracity of the activist. You may remember her as one of Rachel’s bosses on “Friends” (Joanna, the one who utilized a pair of handcuffs on Chandler), but when I saw her, it just made me realize that “The John Larroquette Show,” where she served as the female foil, really needs to come out on DVD.

* Despite Loker’s initially poor abilities of flirtation, you will probably feel rather sympathetic for him by the time the end credits roll.

Yep, “Lie To Me” is as imminently watchable as I remembered it…possibly even more so, given that the producers seem to be doing a really solid job of spreading the wealth amongst the characters rather than turning it into “Tim Roth and Friends.” Be sure to tune in at 8 PM…yes, that’s 8 PM…so you can enjoy it as much as I did.

“Gulliver’s Travels”: still animated, but forgotten no more!

Right about this time last year, Bullz-Eye pulled together a feature entitled “Animated and Forgotten,” where we shined the spotlight on some of our favorite animated films that hadn’t gotten nearly as much love as we thought they deserved. The piece opened with a look at Max and Dave Fleischer’s 1939 take on Jonathan Swift’s “Gullliver’s Travels,” about which our man Bob Westal wrote…

After Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” became the top grossing picture of 1938, Paramount Pictures turned to Disney’s best known competitor, Max Fleischer (animator of the hugely popular Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons) for an animated feature of its own. That was the good news for Fleischer. The bad news was the studio wanted it in less than a year, and “Snow White” had taken three years to complete. Turning to Irish satirist Jonathan Swift’s fantasy classic — which, strangely enough, had already been transformed into a pro-Communist parable by stop-motion animators in the Soviet Union — Max and brother Dave Fleischer discarded their original concept of using Popeye as their Gulliver. Instead, they went with a conventionally heroic characterization, relying on timesaving rotoscopes of actor Sam Parker. (If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, rotoscoping was an animation process invented by Max Fleischer that involved tracing over filmed images.) The rushed production was marked by innumerable problems, including a bitter feud between west coast and east coast animators. While no gunplay resulted from the cartoony clash, it didn’t help the final result. When the film was released at Christmas, critics were unimpressed, but the Fleischer shop’s visual invention and broad comedy was enough to make the film a hit; animated features were still very much a novelty and Paramount’s gamble actually paid off. A follow-up film, the fanciful musical bug fable, “Hoppity Goes to Town” might have done as well. But it was released on Dec. 9, 1941 — two days after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Ouch.

Fortunately for you, however, E1 Entertainment has released “Gulliver’s Travels” on DVD and Blu-ray…and unlike the cheap-ass versions that are regularly popping up in Only-A-Dollar stores, this time it’s been digitally restored and re-mastered. Investigate it a bit more with the widget below:

Simon & Simon: Season Two

It’s been so long since the first season of “Simon & Simon” hit stores – we’ve passed the two-year mark and we’re heading for three – that fans of the series may have feared that they’d never see any more of the adventures of private detectives Rick and A.J. Simon (Gerald McRaney and Jameson Parker) released onto DVD. Fortunately, Shout! Factory has picked up the torch that Universal dropped. While it’s unfortunate that there aren’t any special features on the set, the packaging reminds us that it is indeed a bonus that Shout opted to spend the coin to include the “Magnum, PI” crossover episode that kicked off the second season of “Simon & Simon.” As far as the show itself goes, it’s relatively pedestrian as detective shows go, but it does manage to rise above its one-liner concept – “They’re detectives and they’re brothers!” – thanks to the performances of McRaney and Parker as well as Mary Carver, who plays the boys’ mother, Cecilia Simon. Guest stars this season include Ray Walton (“My Favorite Martian”), Eddie Albert (“Green Acres”), Richard Anderson (“The Six Million Dollar Man”), Dean Stockwell (“Quantum Leap”), and Richard Kiel, a.k.a. Jaws in the Bond flicks, but don’t go looking for Downtown Brown to rear his head. Alas, Tim Reid didn’t become a regular cast member ’til Season 3…and as it stands right now, there’s no word on whether Shout has plans to release that or not.

Click to buy “Simon and Simon: Season Two”

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