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Showing posts with the label netflix

NETFLIX CATCH-UP: ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (SEASON 5)

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Talking about the latest season of Arrested Development .

NETFLIX CATCH-UP: AMERICAN CRIME STORY (SEASON 2)

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Talking about American Crime Story: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace .

NETFLIX CATCH-UP: THE PUNISHER (SEASON 2)

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Talking about Season 2 of Netflix's The Punisher .

IRON FIST (SEASON 2) - VLOG REVIEW

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I talk about Season 2 of Marvel's Iron Fist .

NETFLIX CATCH-UP VLOG - THE BLACKLIST, THE GOOD PLACE

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My thoughts on shows The Blacklist and The Good Place .

NETFLIX CATCH-UP - VLOG REVIEW

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My thoughts on a few Netflix shows: Lost In Space , A Series Of Unfortunate Events (S.2) and Arrested Development (S.5).

THE WEEK OF - REVIEW

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Review available on the new website .

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS - REVIEW

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Review available on the new website .

JESSICA JONES (SEASON 2) - VLOG REVIEW

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I talk a bit about the second season of Netflix's Jessica Jones .

THE RITUAL - REVIEW

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A Netflix-distributed release, The Ritual is a British horror film about a group of friends who decide to go hiking in Sweden (and soon find more than they bargained for) following the shocking death of one of their friends when a liquor store robbery goes off the rails. The lost-in-the-woods subgenre of horror movies is one that tends to either surprise (for better or for worse) or fall completely flat. The Ritual aims to be a modern take on The Blair Witch Project crossed with Deliverance  as the protagonists encounter strange twig-made structures in the woods then get picked off one by one by an unknown element. The film mercifully doesn't attempt a hand-held shaky-cam style of storytelling: this is a well paced and acted movie with some excellent cinematography throughout, especially near the climax. Some dream sequences give certain scenes a surreal quality but, unfortunately, they fail to add much in the way of substance. And this is probably the film's biggest sho

ALTERED CARBON - VLOG REVIEW

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I talk a bit about Netflix's Altered Carbon .

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST - REVIEW

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Based on the popular anime series, Fullmetal Alchemist is a 2017 live-action adaptation from Japan following Alchemist brothers Elric and Alphonse as they encounter a range of powerful enemies and search for the Philosopher's Stone. The film was recently released on Netflix. We first meet the two brothers as children when an alchemy experiment aiming to bring their dead mother back to life goes wrong. Cut to years later and we learn that Alphonse's body somehow vanished after the botched experiment and he now inhabits a knight's empty armour indefinitely, hence the nickname "Fullmetal Alchemist". Unless Elric, who has himself lost limbs, can somehow recover the Philosopher's Stone, he might not be able to ever summon his brother's body back. A big action sequence early on depicts the brothers fighting against a man whom, they believe, is using the Stone nefariously and the scene boasts some big CGI effects, something the film fails to match before it

NETFLIX'S FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST & GODZILLA - VLOG REVIEW

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Stream in which I review Netflix's Godzilla mini-series and the live-action Fullmetal Alchemist movie... among many other things.

THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX - VLOG REVIEW

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I talk a bit about Netflix's The Cloverfield Paradox .

THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX - REVIEW

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After hinting for months about what the next Cloverfield film would be and when it would be released, The Cloverfield Paradox finally got a surprise release last night exclusively on Netflix right after the Super Bowl. This straight-to-Netflix approach to the film's release has prompted quite a bit of discussion in terms of whether the movie was just not good enough to get into theatres or whether this is something we're likely to see happen with more and more blockbusters, good or bad, in the future. Frankly, those statements are probably both true. With the success of Bright and others, we're definitely going to be seeing bigger movies released directly to Netflix, that's obvious. And yet, while the surprisingly good 10 Cloverfield Lane re-ignited interest in the Cloverfield franchise, the reality is that The Cloverfield Paradox would have probably bombed at the box-office. The great thing about this particular series of films, apart from its usually clever m

WHAT HAPPENED TO MONDAY - REVIEW

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Released on Netflix in 2017, What Happened To Monday is a science fiction thriller starring Noomi Rapace as seven sisters named after each day of the week who try to survive in a dystopian one-child-only society. In order to tackle an overpopulation problem and attempt to fix the environment, the Child Allocation Bureau, run by Glenn Close's intimidating politician, enforces this one-child policy which takes the oldest siblings, if there are any, and cryogenically freezes them until society can accommodate them. When a woman dies while giving birth to identical septuplets, her father (played by Willem Dafoe) decides to raise the kids in a way that allows all of them to live their lives. Each of them is allowed to leave the house on a specific day of the week, hence their names, if they pretend to all be the same individual. At home, they can look and act like who they are but outside, they become the same person. Of course, when one of them doesn't come home as planned, t

BRIGHT - REVIEW

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This year Netflix released Bright , a fantasy cop movie starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, the latter playing an Orc of all things. Directed by David Ayer, the film quickly became a popular target for everyone to trash and make fun of. Set in an alternate present where elves, fairies and other creatures live side-by-side, the film sees human cop Daryl Ward (Smith) reluctantly partner up with an Orc as they spend a whole night dealing with dirty cops, protecting a powerful magic wand and running away from the likes of evil elves, Mexican gangsters, Orcs and the Feds. It's been compared to Alien Nation and, indeed, there are obvious similarities but the film is so derivative that it somehow comes back around to feeling rather original and fresh. There's definitely a heavy-handed message about racism in there that, while relevant, is hard to take completely seriously when everyone's talking about magic wands the whole time. Bright wants to be a lot of things but it n

THOUGHTS ON BLACK MIRROR - PODCAST

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We talk briefly about Black Mirror on The Big Rewind.

JIM & ANDY: THE GREAT BEYOND - REVIEW

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Released on Netflix this month, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond is a documentary revealing actor Jim Carrey's unusual behaviour on the set of Man On The Moon as he appeared to embody the spirit of ground-breaking comedian Andy Kaufman both on and off camera. A bushy-beard Jim Carrey is interviewed on the subject and this is intercut with actual footage gathered back in 1999 during Man On The Moon's production. We meet a Carrey completely committed to "be" Andy Kaufman (or the typically aloof Tony Clifton) from start to finish confusing just about everyone from cast-members to director Milos Forman. With the help of Kaufman's partner in crime Bob Zmuda, Carrey keeps this method acting train going no matter what, staging stunts at the Playboy Mansion, with the crew and reporters in the process. One staged incident, for example, sees him getting seemingly gravely injured while filming a wrestling scene in the film and getting carried out on a stretcher. The a

STRANGER THINGS 2 - VLOG REVIEW

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I finally talk about Season 2 of Stranger Things .