The greatest TV show never aired

For those of you who don’t know, I studied Film & TV production in college. I, like most of my class, leaned more toward the film end of the course. I suppose we liked to think of ourselves as artists. Some of us still do. And some of us are artists.

Anyway, for our final year grad projects, the majority of us worked on short films or music videos. But two students – Paul Curran and Padraig Whitmore – conceived and produced this fantastic little kids quiz show. I thought of it recently while watching an episode of Horrible Histories. It’s got the same irreverent tone and a fantastic host in the disembodied floating head of Zorlax. Read the rest of this entry »

Locke & Key

Joe Hill is one of my favourite new horror writers. His work is always so original and manages to meld fantasy and terror as well as Neil Gaiman. He writes characters you care for and the plots keep you guessing right up till the last page.

So I was thrilled when I heard that Fox were adapting his comic-book series Locke & Key for TV.  I was even more thrilled when I heard that the cast would include the much underused Nick Stahl and Ireland’s own Sarah Bolger and that it would be directed by Mark Romenek (‘Never Let Me Go’, Johnny Cash ‘Hurt’ video, etc).

But then Fox, in their infinite wisdom, have decided not to screen the episode. At all.  Read the rest of this entry »

Film Review: Super 8

Allow me to preface this review by stating categorically that I have never liked any JJ Abrams film. To me, Mission: Impossible 3 is little more than a generic action film, Cloverfield is a failed experiment and Star Trek is just plain boring.

But now, with Super 8, Abrams has finally lived up to his hype.

The film tells the story of thirteen year old Joe who, along with some filmmaking buddies, are at the site of a train crash and accidentally record some blurry beast stepping from the wreckage. When the Air Force show up and put the town under lock-down, only the group of friends can work out what’s going on.

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Bridesmaids Review

I’m going to avoid rants on this blog as much as possible but decided to write a review of Bridesmaids for one simple reason; to balance out the reviews it’s been getting so far.

Let me start by saying that I have a lot of time for Kristen Wiig. I think she’s a great comedy performer and an amazing writer. For me, she’s the highlight of Knocked Up (another Judd Apatow-involved comedy I dislike) and her brief cameos on HBO’s Bored to Death are hilarious. Going by the rave reviews Bridesmaids has been getting – (even better than The Hangover) – I was looking forward to seeing this. I just left the cinema an hour ago and I couldn’t be more disappointed.

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The Hobbit – First Glimpse

Here are the first glimpses of The Office star Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings prequel, ‘The Hobbit’. According to director Peter Jackson, he got quite a shock when he saw the schedule for the adaption. ‘I felt a terrible drop in my stomach when I saw that we’d be shooting for 254 days’, he told Entertainment Weekly, ‘We’re only 12 days short of The Lord of the Rings even though we’re only doing two movies!” Jackson went on to say that he warned returning star Ian McKellen (Gandalf) that ”this isn’t Waiting for Godot or King Lear. This is The Hobbit. This is the real thing.”