Star Wars: The Force Awakens - trailer breakdown

Every bit of promotional material that gets released for The Force Awakens leads me to believe that it's going to be good, so ever since the first trailer came out I ditched all preconceptions that the film would suck.  The trailers have been good, and I trust in JJ (even if he did bail out on Lost after five minutes and left Damon to do everything), so I've been assumed it's going to be great for months, and now I have this fear that it is going to suck, because I've gotten my hopes up so much.  Maybe it'll turn out shit.  But hey, I guess we'll have to wait until 18 December to find out, won't we?  In the meantime, they've given us a new trailer, and it makes the movie look incredible.

Here's the full trailer if you haven't seen it yet:

And now here's some things I picked out upon viewing:

The set design looks great.  It has that combination of the practical set look of the original trilogy and the over-CGI'd backdrops of the prequels, which I assume is what JJ was going for.

Here's BB-8, either the new R2-D2 or the new Jar Jar Binks.  I'm convinced BB stands for beach ball and it's a nod to John Carpenter's budget droid in his movie Dark Star.

I am loving the new look for the Stormtroopers.  They've modernised it, yet kept the essence of the original.  Whoever's been put in charge of costume design, good job.

Here we go with the lens flare.  He really can't resist, can he?

I like that there's a sort of graveyard of the Empire to remind you that this is a continuous story through and through, and the Rebels accomplished a lot in Return of the Jedi.  It points out that this is strictly a sequel and not a bullshit reboot like every other franchise continuation these days.

"It's true.  All of it."  Harrison Ford looks like he's settled back into the role of Han nicely, returning to the 70s/80s charm but layering it with his newfound 00s gruffness.

So apparently this is what hyperdrive looks like now...

No idea what's going on here but it looks fucking awesome!

What the hell is this thing?!  Did it wander off the set of Chappie?

Is it just me, or is that a lot of TIE fighters?  One thing I've noticed is that none of the dogfights take place in space.  They're all in the sky of some planet.  It's Star Wars, not Red Tails!  Get the spaceships back out to space!  Also, where the hell is Luke?!  He's nowhere to be seen!  He wasn't even in the new poster.

This poster, huh?  What a fucking beaut!

The Walking Dead Season 6 review - "JSS"

by Ben Sherlock

OK, this was a great episode.  This episode knocked my socks off.  It was action-packed, emotional, mysterious, terrifying, and it even raised a few questions amid the chaos.  All right, let’s start at the beginning, where we got Enid’s tragic backstory.  I feel like I’m the only person in the entire world who even likes Enid, but she’s a misunderstood kid, an orphan, figuring out her teen angst in the middle of all the fucked-up zombie apocalypse riff-raff.  I know I’m definitely the only one who likes Carl, or can even stand Carl.  But for what the character is, whether you like him or not, you can’t deny Chandler Riggs is doing a great job of bringing him to life.  When he saw Ron with the girl, you could see the jealousy in his eyes.  The pain was real.  Maybe something’s going on off-camera between those three.  So anyway, it looks like now, unfortunately, we’ve got a Carl/Enid/Ron love triangle situation to deal with.  With any luck, the writers will deal with it in true Walking Dead fashion and have Ron killed off in a couple of episodes’ time (if the Grimes family would just stop saving him) so we don’t have to deal with that shit.  Speaking of Ron, he isn’t exactly a nuanced, three-dimensional character.  He seems like a comedy sketch of a rebellious teenager whose mother just wants to cut his hair.  I bet we could sell that to SNL.  When he stormed out at the end of that scene, in my head I heard him shout, “This house is a prison!  On Planet Bullshit!”  And while we’re on the subject of dialogue I created in my mind, when Morgan saved Gabriel, during the silent pause I heard him say, “Gotta look out for a brother.”

So pissed that we didn't get to see this showdown.

So many questions about Morgan and the Wolves.  Was he previously associated with them?  They know him, they share an averseness to guns, he was reluctant to kill any of them, or even hurt them, despite what they were doing.  He was just asking them to leave.  And when he finally made an appearance promised after the credits of the season five premier in the season five finale, about six whole months later, he ran into a couple of Wolves in the woods.  But if I recall correctly, they were all playing it cool, and Morgan didn’t want to hurt them then either, they just forced his hand.

I knew the horn at the end of “First Time Again” had something to do with the Wolves, but the revelation that it wasn’t intentional was a total curveball, as was a machete-wielding savage taking out the housewife who’s having a sneaky cigarette as Carol watches.  That was really something.  It was one of the scariest moments in the series’ history, completely out of the blue and “WTF”-inducing.  Melissa McBride was great in this episode as she finally got to drop the innocent cookie baker act and let loose as the closet one-woman army that is Carol.  The Wolves’ invasion that followed reminded me of The Purge a lot.  When the world goes to shit, all crime becomes legal, so it’s only natural the writers would do a Purge episode, just like Rick & Morty did the very same year.

Maybe she'd be a good fit for Rick after all...

I'm starting to think Rick and Jessie may be quite well-matched for each other after all, after she showed her crazed homicidal edge in this episode.  Turns out she'll kill someone who threatens her family, unless it's her husband in which case she'll defend his actions.  And while we're on the subject, there was no Rick this week, unfortunately, but with such an engaging story brimming with pulsating action, and with other great characters like Morgan and Carol and Tara and Rosita featured so prominently, I hardly noticed our sheriff was absent from the proceedings.  Rick-less episodes that you notice are the ones that don’t involve any of his group, like the near-unbearable trio of Governor-centric episodes that redeemed themselves by being bookended by a heart-pounding cliffhanger that saw the Governor standing just outside the prison gates, watching it, and the fantastic “Too Far Gone.”  But we’re not here to talk about season four, we’re talking about season six’s “JSS.”  I won’t spoil for you what the titular acronym stands for because, while it’s not shocking, it is a sweet moment and almost completely re-evaluates the point of the story.

It puzzled me that Morgan was the only one to return, but wondering what Rick, Michonne, Daryl and co. are getting up to has me intrigued for next week, which I assume will jump back to the honking of the horn and show us why they couldn’t make it back.  What I’m loving about this season so far is that the writers have addressed the criticism of the Alexandria storyline that it’s boring and without danger by sending thousands of walkers its way and having the place invaded by the Wolves, a savage cult.  I throw the word “savage” around a lot to refer to people who flout the rules of etiquette, but I mean it when I say the Wolves are savages.  The introduction of the Wolves has been a long time coming, by the way.  It's been teased for years, and they're not even in the comics, so we had no idea what to expect, and these insane psychotic murderers did not disappoint.

For an episode in which innocent people were mauled and attacked in almost every scene, such a gnarly, gory, violent, visceral episode, it was beautifully directed.  It’s no surprise – episode director Jennifer Chambers Lynch is the daughter of a director who’s mastered creepy stuff on film, David Lynch.  Ryan Murphy may think he’s the master of horror on television, but with David bringing Twin Peaks back to our screens and his daughter behind The Walking Dead cameras, Lynch still reigns supreme in that department.  This week's "Hey, I know her" appearance was Merritt Wever, Schmidt's annoying and way-less-cool-than-Cece ex from New Girl.

So, this has been a tough review to write as I’ve tried to convey all the great moments whilst spoiling as little as I can, but I simply can’t stress enough how great this episode was.  After a suitably short and tense setup, it was all-action, but then it wasn’t just action.  Calling it all-action doesn’t do it justice.  It was jump scares and tension and character growth and intrigue and mystery and twists and turns.  There was so much going on.  And I can’t wait until next week when we’ll see what kept Rick, Daryl, Michonne, Abraham etc. from coming back in the hurry Morgan did.

The Walking Dead Season 6 review - "First Time Again"

by Ben Sherlock

First off, sorry it's a week or so late, but we only decided to create a blog yesterday and unfortunately I can't reverse time.  Every episode from now will be reviewed on time.

Fun fact: Deanna (Tovah Feldshuh) was a man named Douglas in the comics
More fun facts to follow.

All in all, season six of The Walking Dead is off to a solid start.  Morgan’s back!  And he’s here to stay – I checked the new opening credits (in which the series logo has decayed even more after another year of apparently being a dead thing), and Lennie James’ name was in the main cast, so he has to stick around for at least eight of this season’s sixteen episodes or his name will be on there and he won’t be in it and it’ll look stupid.  And hopefully, he’ll be around until long after those eight because he’s the only character left who can challenge the almighty Rick.  Thrilling and emotional, the premiere also revealed how Alexandria has remained so relatively walker-free all this time, and let’s just say it’s not a permanent solution.  But Rick has a plan that is a permanent solution, and it’s risky, and it’s The Walking Dead, so there’s bound to be a few bumps in the road.

Everyone’s back on top form (particularly Melissa McBride, Josh McDermitt and Michael Cudlitz), but it’s still leading man Andrew Lincoln who steals the show from his stellar support cast in his portrayal of Rick Grimes.  It’s a joy to watch Rick, who’s now totally unhinged.  He doesn’t care anymore.  One of my favourite moments of tonight was when asking the residents of Alexandria to help him further fortify the place and Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam, aka The Wire’s Carver) says, “I’d like to help,” and Lincoln’s immediate deadpan delivery of, “No.  Who else?”  Rick just doesn’t care anymore.  He’s realised he doesn’t have to conform to social conventions now that society has collapsed, but this realisation couldn’t have come at a worse time as he’s now a part of a society.  People either listen to what he has to say or he threatens to kill them.  He carries himself like a normal dude, he doesn’t make a big, dramatic deal out of being crazy anymore.  He’s a little scary, but scary in a good way.  Rick may be my favourite character.  He’s so layered, and watching him transform from a frightened, straight-laced cop to a criminally insane murderer has been unbelievable.  However, for all his wacky antics, pulling a gun on anyone who questions him, I do fear he may be becoming predictable.  It used to be that you couldn’t see his next move coming, but now that you expect him to be irrational and do whatever’s necessary to intimidate people into respecting him, it’s taken out the impact.  It seems there’s nowhere left for him to evolve as the metamorphosis into a psychopath is complete, but he can’t stay like this.  Hopefully they can find a new and unexpected place for the character to go, since the number one highest-rated show in the world certainly isn’t going anywhere.

I think the writers’ room must have had a shakeup between this season and the last, since there’s a lot more humour thrown in this week.  Humour is never a bad thing, but it feels so out of place in a show as depressingly bleak as this one.  They’ve also decided to throw in a lot of walkers, and I mean a lot of walkers.  Literally hundreds on-screen at once.  But I’ll try not to spoil anything for those who haven’t seen it, but man, there’s a lot of walkers in this episode, which again, is never a bad thing.  They’re still writing in Rick’s group’s assimilation into the more civil community of Alexandria, having been out in the elements and seen what the world is like, witnessed horrific things, experienced harrowing losses, braved the apocalypse.  Compared to most of Alexandria, Rick and the gang are savages.  I like to think of it as Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer moving into an apartment across the hall from Monica and Rachel and being baffled by how mentally stable and emotionally vulnerable they all are.

Daryl, look behind you!

Carter (Ethan Embry) was a fun little side-character.  The fact that Carter thought he could take on Rick Grimes is hilarious, but this is a testament to the character’s transformation.  Current Carter (well, semi-current) might’ve stood a chance against naïve season one Rick, but a conniving, loudmouthed weasel trying to take season six Rick’s power away from him stands very little chance of success.  The gun-waving and the “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” speech was too easy to see coming to have an effect, but Lincoln and Embry played their parts perfectly.  These performances, along with butting heads and bouncing off each other, continued until a much more effective scene in which Carter is bitten and silence is needed.  Rick breaks Carter’s neck, and the acting and the direction and the cinematography is all on point in walking a fine line between Rick wanting to do it and having to do it for the sake of everyone’s survival.  I’m sure it’s just in the way they’re playing their characters at this point in the story, but when Embry revealed on Talking Dead that he’d originally auditioned for the pilot to play Rick, I erupted with laughter.  It’s because I’m picturing Carter in Rick’s shoes, and Andrew Lincoln has immersed himself so well into the role of Rick that it’s impossible to imagine anybody else playing the part as well as he does.

I thought this episode was perfectly scored.  Bear McCreary (assuming he still composes the show's music) really knocked it out of the park in capturing a suitably eerie sound for every scene, particularly when Daryl was riding his motorcycle and then a horde of walkers followed.  Norman Reedus didn't break face, you could tell he wanted them to follow him, and it was going to plan, and he wasn't scared, and the music captured the creepiness of that perfectly.

The black-and-white was an interesting effect to use, but given this show’s huge attention to detail, particularly in visual style, it felt like it might have been a last-minute decision – later viewing of Talking Dead confirmed this theory, as they only changed their mind from desaturated colour midway through production – because it was simply black-and-white.  It was the black-and-white filter on any basic video editing software.  It felt flat, it wasn’t interesting to watch.  When Tarantino uses snippets of black-and-white, it’s sort of grainy.  It feels old and rough.  It’s interesting to watch.  It makes the film a character in itself, if that makes sense.  The black-and-white in this episode was simply the same, with the colours turned grey.  Now that I think of it, the comics are in black-and-white – maybe it’s a reference to that.  (And a little side-note: this week's "Hey, it's that guy" appearance was Straight Outta Compton's Dr. Dre, Corey Hawkins.)

It was a good episode.  The single criterion for a good episode of The Walking Dead is actually very simple: Was it exciting?  Ask yourself that, and you single-handedly decide whether or not that episode was good.  “First Time Again” was very exciting, so it was good.  Now, what makes a great episode is a whole other can of worms I won’t get into yet because this was not a great episode.  The first great episode of the season, I promise I’ll tell you why it’s great.  But the premier was good, it was fun, it gave us closure on the season five finale’s open-ended turns that have been boggling our minds for the months since it aired, and most importantly, it’s got the season off to a refreshing start.  They’re not keeping it going for the sake of it, like The Big Bang Theory.  The show’s not in a rut – the showrunners still have a lot to say, and a lot of places they can take these characters, and I can’t wait to see where.

DIE HARD 6 to be a '70s-set prequel?!?

by Ben Sherlock

Earlier this week Fox announced that it was in negotiations with gifted auteur Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard) and master of the craft producer Lorenzo DiBonaventura (the cinematic genius behind every single Transformers film) for a sixth Die Hard.  That's right, they're prodding the corpse a couple of years after it got killed in Russia to see if there's even an inch of life left in it.  This is, of course, necessary, given the $300m+ box office haul of the last one.

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) - a big hit...somehow

And their brilliant, innovative, subversive story idea revolves around John McClane's origin story set in 1979, which of course we needed, because the first film didn't provide us with enough information about McClane's backstory, just that he was a street-wise New York cop with two kids who had a faltering marriage and a tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And the third one, which actually did blatantly show McClane as a cop on the streets of New York, wasn't enough because that was a sequel and not a prequel, and prequels are always so great and successful, so they feel the need to make one.

I know I'm supposed to maintain a certain journalistic integrity and present the news plain and simple and unbiased, but I'm not exactly reporting about a war here, it's a new Die Hard movie, so the hell with it.  This is the worst idea I have ever heard.  Doing a sixth Die Hard in the first place is a bad idea in itself, even if they did have a good premise (which they don't), after the travesty that was the fifth one.

It was a nice, consistent action franchise until that Christ-awful fifth one.  There were many factors at play that ruined that movie - among them a complete disregard for the logic at least loosely considered in previous instalments - but one most glaring reason immediately comes to mind, and his name's Jai Courtney.  If Dwayne Johnson saves franchises (evidenced by his heroic rescue of the Fast & Furious and G.I. Joe series), then Jai Courtney kills them (Die Hard, see also: Terminator, Jack Reacher's struggling to get a sequel going, the DC movieverse will never get off the ground since he's in Suicide Squad).

It's him - the author of all your pain

A Good Day to Die Hard (and a terrible day at the movies) confirmed that the franchise was dead.  Let's just accept that and move on.  It's over.  But no.  It made a lot of money.  So they're handing the reins to Len Wiseman, the greatest director on planet Earth, the guy who brought us the Underworld movies because apparently he thought that's what the world needed, an entirely Earth-set remake of the quintessential Mars movie Total Recall, and that Sleepy Hollow TV show we all asked for.  On top of all of that, he originally learned the craft of filmmaking from one of the greats, Mr. Roland Emmerich, on the sets of his masterpieces Stargate and Godzilla (1998).  Come on, Wiseman, wise up.  You're no good!

Here's Len standing with the reason he's always too distracted to make his movies good

OK, so Live Free or Die Hard (or Die Hard 4.0, whatever you call it) was good, but that wasn't because of Len Wiseman.  That was because it had Bruce Willis playing John McClane, and not that weird, callous psychopath with McClane's name and face that went to Russia and stole trucks and shot people without thinking and jumped through brick walls and fell from helicopters through windows without feeling pain.  McClane cuts his feet on shards of glass, he doesn't soar through windows and move on without so much as a groan.

But that's what Die Hard needs, Bruce Willis as John McClane.  That's basically what Die Hard means.  The fans want Willis, not some twentysomething Willis lookalike playing a younger version.  That's a completely different movie for a completely different franchise.  What the hell are you thinking, Fox?!  Have you all gone mad!!?  You think it'll be a box office hit, we all know that's why you're doing it, but it won't even make money if it doesn't have Bruce in it!  Do us all a favour and either cancel the movie or set it in the present day with a good script, a good director, and Bruce fucking Willis as his own character!!

Take note: THIS is what Die Hard should look like (hair optional)

Welcome to our blog

Welcome to our blog, which will cover - you guessed it - news, reviews, interviews and such. During our unhealthy amounts of spare time, we'll be bringing you content from a wide range of nerdy categories from gaming to TV shows, which we watch a lot of in said spare time, and movies, don't forget those bad boys. Our judgements of whether or not these things are good should help you trim the fat on your gaming and cinema-going and TV viewing and buy you more time to go outside and experience the real world. Anyway, this is just our first post and won't be our last. We hope you'll turn a blind eye to real news about real issues and come here to fill your minds with who's being cast in what. We're here for a good time so let's have one. Stick around for the coming days for more, unless you have something better to do, in which case go do that and stop wasting your time here.