05 June 2013

Parker (2013; Taylor Hackford / John J McLaughlin)

This has all the ingredients of a shit movie - well, let's be honest, it is a shit movie - but yet I found this kept my interest much more than I expected.

It's got nothing on the very entertaining Safe, it's got more money than The Mechanic, and it has a story and character that was sorely lacking from The Killer Elite.

Is it that Jason Statham is watchable, terrible accents and all?  Is it that I've missed Jennifer Lopez so much since Out of Sight, that I was forgiving as heck?  I dunno.  I'm an hour in and my brain hasn't gone Please make it fucking stop like it did with a couple of other titles I've tried to watch recently.

Good story is where you find it, perhaps?

04 June 2013

Top of the Lake (Sundance Channel, 2013)


In between eps of a weekly, live, local turd, Jane Campion's Top of the Lake got under the skin of this junkie and seven hours later over a mere two nights, faith has been restored in watching New Zealand-made police drama.

Sure it was funded totes overseas.  It's director hasn't worked in her birth country for two decades.  Its leads were Americans and Australians and a Scotsman.  But its Queenstown setting and cast of supporting characters were recognisably and unselfconsciously Kiwi.

This was good television.  A believable, vulnerable, spiky heroine in Elizabeth Moss, no matter her Oz accent drifting in and out.  A credible Kiwi bloke of a cop - something not quite right somewhere in that head of his - in David Wenham.  And Peter Mullan evincing a migrant with a serious and ruthless sense of entitlement.  The child actors were convincing.  Holly Hunter stole every scene she was in.

And then there was the writing:  where - not unlike The Good Wife - unfinished plot strands were left for the audience to pick up and finish in their heads.  This mini-series was about character, framed in a missing girl procedural, no matter that its plot elements are familiar - execution by directors Campion and Gareth Davis was flawless.

A damned fine show.

Postscript:  just two things that stuck out for this viewer and his Other Half -
  1. a child in police custody is never returned to their home when there is suspicion of abuse - and the possibility of further abuse; and
  2. Oz cops may bear arms in Oz but if they're on secondment in New Zealand, I doubt very much they'd be allowed to carry a firearm whilst working here. 

03 June 2013

Hannibal S01E06-07

This show is just so fucking delicious.
  • Watching Jack Crawford (the excellently cast Laurence Fishburne) struggle with his guilt of using female FBI trainee Miriam Lass (a cheekily cast Anna Chlumsky - see below) in the search for the Chesapeake Ripper and losing her - and knowing he will do it again with the emergence of Buffalo Bill is just a wonderful character set up and connection with the canon.
  • Seeing showrunner Bryan Fuller and friends take the now grown-up protagonist of My Girl (Chlumsky) and... urgh.  Oh dear.  Who said Americans can't do black humour?
  • The more I see of Mad Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lecter, the less I see of Anthony Hopkins Oscar-winning turn (particularly his time with Ridley Scott) - and the closer and more faithful Lecter is to author Thomas Harris' original creation.
  • Six eps worth of accumulated Cooking With Hannibal scenes - and knowing where the meat comes from - somehow resulted in me salivating during the seventh ep's meal preparation finale.  Thanks Mr Fuller!
  • And Gillian Anderson has joined the show as Hannibal's supervisor.
Hannibal is just goddamned awesome.  And it's been renewed for a second season.