NOTE: This piece was originally published onCritics at Large on September 27, 2013. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.
Sean Giambrone and George Segal on The Goldbergs, now on ABC
Even in this era of cable television when a series can
premiere at any point on the calendar, September, when the major networks premiere the majority of their new shows, remains a special time for TV viewers. Most of
the shows you see this fall won't be here come January, but with a crop of
almost 50 new shows coming your way in the next few weeks, it may be difficult
to figure out which to check out and which to pass on. Today I'm looking at
five new comedies which recently showed up on our airwaves, some more promising
than others: Brooklyn Nine-Nine
(Fox), Trophy Wife (ABC), The Goldbergs (ABC), The Crazy Ones (CBS), and Dads (Fox).
NOTE: This piece was originally published onCritics at Large on September 15, 2013. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.
Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
The following
contains spoilers for The Mortal Instruments, both the film and the book
series.
If I were writing this
to let you all know how notably underwhelming the recently released The
Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is, I know that I’m a little late to the
party. Even if you weren’t aware of the film, or author Cassandra Clare’s multi-volume
teen fantasy book series that inspired it, you probably heard that resounding
flopping sound the movie generated when it premiered in theatres a couple of
weeks ago. Just this past Thursday in fact the studio put the planned sequel (based on the second novel City of Ashes) on indefinite
hold. It is probably for the best.
Directed by Harald
Zwart (The Karate Kid, 2010), and starring Lily Collins and Jamie
Campbell Bower (who played the centuries-old vampire Caius in the Twilight
films), City of Bones is a bit of a hot mess: pretty to look at but remarkably
frustrating to follow. In fact, that is the most apt word to describe the
experience of watching City of Bones: frustrating. The movie – clocking
in at over 2 hours – feels both unbearably long and exasperatingly hurried.
I’ve read all five published books of the Mortal Instruments series,
including Clare’s more readable Infernal Devices
prequel trilogy, and even I found the film difficult to follow – and even more
difficult to like. I enjoyed the books, mind you, but I confess they don’t live
long in your consciousness after putting them down. Clare has produced a
believable world on the page, and offers a number of interesting twists on the
vampire/werewolf/demon narrative, but little of that makes it onto the big
screen. The result is a film that no doubt would anger a fan of the books and
confuse the average moviegoer.
NOTE: This piece was originally published onCritics at Large on September 4, 2013. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.
John Hannah and Suranne Jones star in A Touch of Cloth II: Undercover Cloth on Sky1
Last year around this time – as the summer was beginning to wane, and
the promise/threat of the new fall television season loomed – two new series
premiered which called me back to the very beginning of my life as a TV
devotee. Ask my 15-year-old self what my favourite comedy shows were and I
would have quickly answered Sledge
Hammer and Police Squad! Neither
series lasted long on the air, but both have lived long in my memory. Last
August, my inner TV child got two televisual treats: Bullet in the Face, a new series by Sledge Hammer creator Alan Spenser, and A Touch of Cloth. I’ve already written about the hallucinogenic
zaniness of Spenser’s show, but with A
Touch of Cloth II: Undercover Cloth, the second installment of the planned A Touch of Cloth trilogy,airing in the UK this past two
Sundays, the time has come to write on the latter.
A timely spoof of the recently reinvented British crime
procedural, A Touch of Cloth reinvents the parody genre for our era’s
much more media savvy audiences. The series brings the energy and style of the
Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker 80s classics Airplane! and Police Squad!
not only to the UK, but to the 21st century. Though it takes its title from a
play on ITV’s long-running procedural A Touch of Frost, A Touch of Cloth
casts its satirical net far wider, taking on bleak and bloody detective dramas
like Luther and Wire in the Blood, and even groundbreaking classics
like Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker.