Category: TV (Page 177 of 595)

Blu Tuesday: Earth, Heroes and State of Play

September 1, 2009 /

There are quite a few big Blu-ray releases in the month of September, and two of them (“Braveheart” and “Gladiator”) are headlining the rollout of Paramount’s new Sapphire Series premium label. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive either one in time to review for this week’s column, which is too bad, because I’m hearing that the subpar transfer on the “Gladiator” disc is going to cause a major ruckus in the Blu-ray community. There are still a few cool releases coming out today, but nothing that absolutely demands your attention… or your money.

“Earth” (Walt Disney)

I wasn’t very fond of nature documentaries before seeing BBC’s “Planet Earth,” but now that I have, I can’t imagine seeing one even remotely as good again. The people at Disney must feel the same way, because instead of going out and trying to make their own nature doc, they decided to just reuse footage from the award-winning miniseries to create a feature-length version. Simply titled “Earth,” the 90-minute film is narrated by James Earl Jones and plays out like a Greatest Hits of the documentary’s best moments – from the more narrative-driven stories about families of polar bears, elephants and humpback whales to an amazing look at caribou migration and the birds of paradise. Fans of “Planet Earth” probably won’t be interested in the more ADD-friendly edition, but at least Disney has included some cool extras for those thinking about buying “Earth” for their kids, like a pop-up trivia track and a new Blu-ray feature (Living Menu) that offers nature facts and video clips every month.

“Heroes: Season Three” (Universal)

The third season of “Heroes” was supposed to be a return to form for the superhero drama, but despite an excellent season premiere, it turned out even worse than its harshly criticized sophomore year. The meaningless deaths of a few fan favorites certainly didn’t help the situation, but there were a few positives to be drawn from what could effectively be called a train wreck of a season. For starters, Zachary Quinto proved that he could play a good guy just as well as a baddie, while guest stars Robert Forster and Zeljko Ivanek delivered memorable performances as the show’s marquee villains. Season Three may not have lived up to its promises, but the Blu-ray release of the show continues to deliver with picture-in-picture audio commentaries, a slew of production featurettes, and more. The HD edition also includes additional behind-the-scenes footage and a sneak peek of Season Four. It doesn’t make up for the disappointing string of episodes, but if the show really does get back to its roots this year, you’ll want Season Three to complete your collection.

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Action Movies, External Movie DVDs, Heroes, Movie Dramas, Movie DVDs, Movies, TV, TV Dramas, TV DVDs, TV Sci-Fi

Andrew Zimmern heads out into the great big “Bizarre World”

September 1, 2009 /

Feeling déjà vu? No, you aren’t crazy — Bullz-Eye’s Will Harris has indeed interviewed Andrew Zimmern before. But that was way back when Mr. Zimmern was only the host of “Bizarre Foods” — and now he’s got a brand new show to promote, the smartly titled “Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre World.” In honor of the new series, Andrew and Will renewed their acquaintance to discuss a variety of “Bizarre” topics, starting with the “Bizarre Foods” encounter with a witch doctor that indirectly inspired “Bizarre World”:

It was one of our favorite acts…and we didn’t eat a thing in it! I mean, the guy spat up on me, he beat me with poisonous branches, he beat a guinea pig to death against me, he blew smoke on me, he spat up on me again, he lit me on fire…and he did all of this stuff in the name of purging demons from me!

But fear not, “Bizarre Foods” fans — although the focus of the new series might be slightly different, it’s still cut from the same cloth as the show you’ve grown to love. As Zimmern puts it:

I’m a food guy, first and foremost, but I think that if you showed a cut of a ‘Bizarre World’ episode to a ‘Bizarre Foods’ fan, they would never notice that there’s less food. They would just be, I think, really psyched that there’s more non-food stories thrown in.

And of course, food or no food, the main ingredient of either show is Zimmern’s unabashed love for new experiences — a love that proves infectuous for viewers of all ages. In his own words:

The single greatest pleasure that I have in doing this show is when I meet families with 6, 7, 8-year-olds, or teenagers, who say, ‘It’s something the whole family can watch, and it lets us show our younger children that one man’s ‘weird’ is another man’s ‘wonderful,’ and we all kind of live in the same place.’ It’s just the best part of my day.

To read more of Will Harris’ latest chat with Andrew Zimmern, click on the above image or follow this link!

External TV, Interviews, Reality TV, TV

Mad Men - Joan Holloway in black and red dress

Mad Men 3.3 – The young folks roll on the little cabin floor

August 31, 2009 /

Mad Men - Joan Holloway in black and red dress

Hi, I’m Bob and I’ll be your guest “Mad Men” blogger for today — and what a day it is. We have work masquerading as parties and parties pretending to be work. (Guess which turns out to be more interesting?) We see the hidden talents and proclivities of the ladies and gents of Sterling Cooper as mind altering substances, liquid and herbal, and good and bad behavior of all sorts rules Derby Day, 1963.

“My Old Kentucky Home” opens with a call back to last week‘s totemization of the hotness that was early sixties Ann Margaret, as Peggy Olson supervises an audition with a red-maned lass who claims to have acted in a production of Tartuffe but who sounds like she’s answering the $64,000 question when she says it was written by “Moliere?”  Harry Crane smiles like a loon and tries to ask more about her, but Peggy makes short work of him.

And it’s Peggy we’re going to be spending a good chunk of tonight learning to admire ever more as she realizes that she is a skilled creative, even if Sterling Cooper “hates creatives.” The cause of all that is a last minute assignment to put together material for a new Bacardi campaign, forcing her, pretentious Paul Kinsey and turtlenecked hipster Smitty to work over the weekend as the higher ups, which now include both Pete Campbell and Ken Cosgrove, all attend a swank Derby-themed shindig hosted by Roger Sterling and his new young wife, Jane.

Meanwhile, things aren’t easy on the home front. Not yet retired secretary Joan Harris, nee  Holloway, and her new husband, who, er, raped her last season are getting ready for a dinner party for his MD colleagues. The good news is that not even this psychotic can keep Joan under his thumb. As he fearfully tries to bully her — over table settings — he says angrily that he doesn’t want to have a fight, her answer is succinct: “Then stop talking.”

Joan Holloway

Joan is a survivor, no doubt. But before the night is over we learn that her husband may have some potentially serious career problems on top of his obvious violent tendencies — which nevertheless seem under control, just for the present.

Things are only a little less fraught at the home of Don and the now very pregnant Betty Draper. The Drapers are dealing with Betty’s dad, whose slide into dementia seems to be manifesting itself this week as something more like eccentricity, having young Sally read to him from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which, perhaps fortunately, she doesn’t seem to quite understand).

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Mad Men, TV, TV Dramas

Entourage 6.8 – The Sorkin Notes

August 30, 2009 /

It was only a matter of time before Doug Ellin and Co. slipped up and delivered a bad episode, but considering it’s taken this far into the season for it to happen, it really isn’t worth getting upset about. Still, not a whole lot went down in tonight’s show, and even worse, the filler portions weren’t very entertaining. The only subplot that did accomplish anything was the one involving Andrew Klein’s midlife crisis, but although fans of Ari were no doubt happy to see Jeremy Piven back after his pseudo-absence on last week’s show, this story is really starting to get on my nerves. Gary Cole may have been a great addition to the back-end of Season Five, but this year, they’ve turned his character into a boring mess.

Now that Marlo has locked him out of the house and frozen his assets, Andrew has started crashing at the office, and Babs has taken notice. With his meeting with Aaron Sorkin set to take place later that day, Babs gives Ari an ultimatum: either Andrew signs Sorkin or he’s gone. Of course, when it’s time for Andrew to prove his worth to the agency by reeling in the big fish, he isn’t there because he’s busy trying to get his notes from his home. When Marlo refuses to let him, and then burns said notes for him to see, Andrew absolutely loses it and drives his car through the house. Not a smart move, as it forces Ari to take the meeting in his place. Sorkin, however, hates Ari’s guts, and refuses to even listen to anything he has to say. So when they discover that Andrew has been sent to county jail, they go to visit him, only for Andrew to miraculously sign Sorkin after telling his lame sob story. I can’t say I was happy about that, though, as it only means Andrew is bound to stick around. This was the perfect time to get rid of his character and allow for Ari to get back to business, but now he’s stuck babysitting Andrew for what looks like the immediate future. Le sigh.

Meanwhile, in Other Subplots That Just Won’t Die, Eric and Sloan get together for drinks to try the whole friendship thing again, only for Eric to suddenly bail on her when Ashley comes crawling back. This whole back and forth between Eric and Sloan was always going to play a big role this season, but what was the point of bringing them together for a few seconds only for them to end up exactly where they were before? If Eric was upset that Sloan can’t decide what she wants, then why did he decide to meet her in the first place? It’s a pretty maddening storyline that I hope gets settled soon, because while I’m sure Eric will end up with Sloan eventually, the writers just need to get them together and be done with it.

The other story of the night focused on Vince’s recent break-in after agreeing to meet with Ari’s security friend (played by Peter Stormare) for a demonstration of his services. There didn’t seem to be much to this plotline except for a chuckle-worthy scene where Drama stood in for Vince during a simulation, but the final scene of the episode did open a few doors for the rest of the season. At first, I was going to criticize the guys for even considering paying the outrageous cost for security (after all, the unwelcome visitor only snagged some underwear), but now that they’ve uncovered a possible identity with the driver’s license of a particularly creepy-looking guy named Curtis Tucker, it might be more serious than we were led to believe. That, or the security guy planted the evidence in order to scare Vince into paying their steep fee. I’ll admit that the former offers a more interesting premise, but don’t count my other theory out just yet.

Entourage, External TV, TV, TV Comedies

True Blood 2.11 – This love gushes from my heart, like a water from a spout

August 30, 2009 /

“Is this a bad time?”

You know, for as much as I’ve decried the lack of eroticism inherent in blood, Evan Rachel Wood is so damned sexy that you could almost…not quite, but almost…overlook the fact that her face was covered with the stuff when she made her first appearance this evening. Or maybe it was the other woman moaning in the background that helped make the scenario somehow more sexy than creepy. Whatever the case, it was clear from the get-go that Queen Sophie-Anne LeClerq, Vampire Queen of Louisiana, was not going to be a woman to be trifled with. She knows more than any other vampire we’ve seen, and although we didn’t necessarily see all that much of her power, all we really had to see was the way Bill acted around her to know that, man, she’s got to be off-the-charts powerful. Her comments throughout the episode ranged from funny (“I haven’t enjoyed sex with men since the Eisenhower administration”) to cynical (“Never underestimate the power of blind faith”) to a combination of the mystical and the mystifying (“Everything that exists imagined itself into existence”), but the most telling of her comments came from her complete dismissal of Maryann and her actions. In short, she can’t really be bothered by this creature…or much of anything outside of her own existence, really. Looks like the holier-than-thou manner of royalty remains consistent within both the human and the vampire worlds.

Poor Hoyt. He gets pissy with Jessica for her decision to bite his mother because of her insolent comments, only to have her offer disconcerting revelations about how she’s been longing to head over to Merlotte’s to find herself some manly company, then put the cherry on top of the conversation by destroying everything he ever knew about his father and his noble death.

Poor Tara. She was so chomping at the bit to save Eggs that she basically tried to alienate every single person in the house. My wife theorized that her angry words were due to the approaching mob, but, no, it appears that she was just being incredibly shitty. During her awful heart-to-heart chat with her mama, she did her very best to make her mother feel like complete and total shit…and, yet, Mama responds by playing the sucker and deciding that this is her only possible way to get her daughter back. I don’t blame her for her desperation, but, c’mon, this is Tara’s cousin and best friend. Given everything that had gone down in the previous few hours, did she really think that her daughter knew best?

I can’t imagine that anyone would deny that, if this episode belonged to anyone other than Queen Sophie-Anne, it was the tag-team dumb-ass duo of Jason and Detective Andy. Who would’ve thought that Andy would turn out to be the sensible one of the pair? There were laughs from Sam’s attempts to explain his shapeshifting abilities to them (eventually leading to the discussion later in the episode where Jason tried to work out the most sordid angles of Sam’s powers), from Jason’s dramatic comment about having read about the impending Armageddon in a book (just when you thought he was going to say it was the Bible, he revealed that it was Max Brooks’s “World War Z”), from trumpeting his awesomeness and then promptly running headlong into a tree, and…oh, hell, there were too many laughs to count, but the one that still resonates the most was surely this line.

“‘Sometimes you need to destroy something to save it.’ That’s in the Bible. Or the Constitution.”

God love you, Jason Stackhouse.

The whole sequence within the sheriff’s station was hilarious, though I thought it was a bit cheap to have Andy be wearing kevlar underneath his shirt when he got shot. Still, how can you go wrong with William Sanderson dancing his heart out in his boxers? Their intense discussion in the truck was pretty hilarious in its own right, particularly Jason’s assurance that “I watch a lot of porn to learn stuff,” but the sudden decision to turn this mystical invasion into something patriotic was somehow perfect for these two redneck yokels. The only thing that would’ve made it better would’ve been to have Jason and Andy start singing “God Bless The USA.”

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External Entertainment, External TV, Reviews, True Blood, TV, TV Dramas, TV Sci-Fi

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