TheRetroCritic

Welcome to yet another Batman podcast! Gothamized is a completely unofficial guide to new series Gotham and a debate arena for all things Batman. CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE EPISODE CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE In this very first episode, we discuss the Gotham trailer, Bat-suits, Bat-logos, Snakenados, Samuel L. Jackson as Mr Freeze and we end with a riddle. Hope you enjoy it! You can also find us on podcast The Big Rewind  (available on iTunes) and send us emails with your Bat-questions and riddles here: gothamized@gmail.com

Ever wonder what a mini series about the Wizard Of Oz but not really about the Wizard Of Oz following Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Toto but not really Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly and Toto in a brand new adventure would be like? No? Well too bad: Tin Man exists and that's that. Zooey Deschanel stars as the annoyingly named D.G., a waitress living in Kansas, as she is swept back into a strange land known as The O.Z. by a tornado. Because... why wouldn't you travel by tornado? Once she gets there, we find ourselves in very familiar territory and yet rather alien territory as well. Numerous changes are made to the classic tale by L. Frank Baum and, although some of them are admittedly interesting updates, it feels like the mini series is almost trying to hide its Wizard Of Oz-ness as much as possible. It's unclear whether we're following Dorothy's first journey back to Oz or whether this is a completely unrelated adventure or whethe

Jack Bauer has finally met his match: the word "President". (from Episode 11, Season 8)

Based on a series of light novels and a manga, R.O.D: Read Or Die sounded awesome, on "paper" at least. The plot was something akin to a bookworm school teacher/special agent known The Paper (hence the above pun) fighting off weird super-powered bad guys over books under the US President's orders as some Beethoven manuscripts could end up being the key to building a 9th Symphony weapon that makes people kill themselves The Happening -style. In a word: nonsense. But it sounded like the kind of steampunky nonsense I could get behind. Remember The Amazing Screw-On Head ? The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen ? Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow ? I like all that stuff and I was looking forward to R.O.D introducing us to a crazy, messed-up world where Thomas Edison flies blimps, shooting carrots at robot penguins or something to that effect. The result was, indeed, appropriately absurd but not quite as joyfully so as it promised to be. The animated feature isn'

Jack Bauer's back and it's a darn good thing he is because, this time, a nuclear bomb is about to hit L.A. and kill thousands. The stakes are much, much higher and, despite David Palmer being president, it's not looking good for CTU or the US in general. The season opens on a morose note as we find Kiefer Sutherland's Bauer depressed after the untimely death of his wife and retired from CTU. Also, his relationship with his (annoying) daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) is damaged and she, once again, gets her own subplot where she runs around being all kinds of stupid and distracting hard-working people from what's actually important. Once again, she's the season's worst asset but luckily, her main "contribution" more or less ends about halfway through. After ruining several innocent people's lives, by the way. Poor old Billy Burke is dragged in as her own personal antagonist and isn't very convincing as a dude who just happens to be a cold

Based on an ongoing manga from 2006, the anime series of Nichijou followed a group of high school students as well as a robot girl, a child scientist and a talking cat as they embarked on very small but very significant (to them, anyway) random situations which they handled, more often than not, rather strangely. Early on, I wasn't sure if Nichijou even had a story or an arc to it. The first few episodes of the series really prioritising slapstick goofiness and emphasising the over-the-top reactions of the characters to certain minor events like bumping into someone or dropping a tiny sausage. It feels like a very cartoonish comic strip, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The humour is a wacky mix of observational, sarcastic and OTT slapstick with the occasional mini slice-of-life "moment" breaking up the episode. Every so often, you get a quiet, detailed but blurry shot of a street as a breeze moves a drape or something like that, before they cut to the ne

Back in the day, The X-Files was my late night show: I would sit and watch it secretly super late, waiting for that gross moment where Scully performs a full-on autopsy on someone, that ridiculous twist/open ending or that one snide Mulder comment I would pretend to get. Good times. Unfortunately I never got the chance to watch the show properly, from the beginning. Now, after finally catching up with the whole of Season 1, I can confirm that The X-Files still holds up well enough. This being the very first season, I'm sure there are much better things to come, and I remember much better things, but this is a solid start to an iconic monster-of-the-week, Twilight Zone -style show. In case you've never heard of The X-Files, the series follow Fox "spooky" Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), two FBI agents in charge of investigating the weirdest cases around. Mulder believes in all sorts of weird shit from aliens to telekinesis to whatever

It's well known that Stephen King wasn't too keen on Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of his classic novel The Shining back in the day. So much so that, in 1997, a "mere" 17 years after Kubrick's film was released, he even wrote and produced his own mini-series retelling the story but delivering much more backstory and character development. Well, that was the intention, anyway. The result was basically an entertaining enough yet completely inferior 3-part TV movie which did bring back some key elements from the book but failed to match the intensity, creepiness and stylistic class of Kubrick's film. The first part of this Shining mini-series sees the Torrance family move in to The Overlook Hotel after a long exposition-heavy tour and several flashbacks showing us Jack Torrance's (a sadly miscast Steven Weber) struggles with alcohol and son Danny's run-ins with imaginary pal Tony, who isn't Danny's finger in this movie, but instead a te

And then things took a weird turn... Star Trek: Insurrection , the ninth film of the franchise, is quite probably the least respected of all Star Trek films, and although it's much more watchable than most would give it credit for, it's easy to see why it is often last on people's Top 10 Star Trek Movies lists. Look out for mine on here very soon, by the way. First Contact gave the Picard team solid ground to build on with a respectable outing full of action, gross leathery Borgs and time-travel. With Insurrection, the idea was to go for more of a Voyage Home vibe: a lighter, more one-setting based, more personal story. Problem is, Shatner and co. could indulge in such a holiday flick after three iconic, more serious efforts but The Next Generation peeps only had the vastly uneven Generations behind them and First Contact, their first decent movie. No time to go on holiday, surely! Time to nip it in the bud, I would say. Alas, right off the bat, Insurrec

New posters are up for the new season of Arrested Development , coming soon to Netflix. Here's one of 'em: For more, go to empireonline.com . ...COME ON!!!!

For me, this movie is why the whole odd numbers curse thing just doesn't work. Do people really love The Wrath Of Khan and not like The Search For Spock ?  Illogical doesn't begin to describe it... Yes The Wrath Of Khan was a good, fun movie but so is this one! I mean, no Star Trek movie is perfect and neither is The Search For Spock: some of the humour in it is a bit corny, the whole Spock-is-inside-McCoy thing is needlessly delayed (though Deforest Kelley acting nuts is ALWAYS worth it) and Leonard Nimoy's Spock isn't physically in the film for most of it. That said, there's plenty of great, epic stuff in the film. For one thing, there's plenty of action as Klingons finally take centre stage on the big-screen and follow-up on the whole using-Genesis-as-a-weapon thing and one of them is played by Christopher Lloyd, which is awesome in itself. Plus the actual search for Spock, besides being a mission I can totally get behind, is handled really well

After the way Season 1 left things (messy), you could forgive this follow-up season to struggle for a bit before fixing things and getting started. Unfortunately, Season 2's brand new ideas fail to rise above what the whole season is essentially about: filling up those plotholes. Ironically, in the process, new plotholes are introduced and the new stuff mostly fails to gel convincingly with the old stuff to the point where a lot of episodes bring something up that's quite interesting only to cover it all up by the end of it. Take the whole Harvey Two-Face Nathan Petrelli thing, or the potential death of Noah Bennet as foreseen in one of Isaac Mendez's lost paintings, or even Mohinder possibly turning to the dark side: all subplots with potential but none of them really know where they're going and none of them really delivers. Like Season 1, this is very much a season of two halves. Except here it's much shorter. For one half we're mostly concerned with

Going through this first season of Heroes sure brought back memories... I remember thinking that was one hell of a show, unlike anything else I'd seen and admiring how fresh, bold and new it all was. To a certain extent, this still sticks. Heroes did jump on the bandwagon of growing superhero movies early making it very much of its time. Since then, we've had grittier, smarter comic book movies and edgier sci-fi series ( Fringe anyone?) so looking back, Heroes almost feels like a kids' show... with the occasional bit of gore, of course. I mean, it's still kinda edgy but in a cute oh-let's-not-go-too-far-with-it type of way, it's restrained but still goes a long way to make this at least a bit more adult-friendly once in a while. Without Sylar, Zachary Quinto's cartoon villain, going around slicing people's heads off, Heroes would be the show Marvel would produce if Marvel was run by your grandfather's dad. The plot sees a group of 'spe

It's crazy to think that True Blood came out the same year as Twilight . It's just nuts. I mean, Twilight is the bad Disney movie take on vampire lore! True Blood is just... Good. The show sees that modernized Twilightness and gives it a very welcome, and very clever, tongue-in-cheek anything-goes rock-n-roll attitude combined with an effortless Near Dark cool you certainly haven't seen in a while when it comes to vamp flicks/series. The first season takes a familiar route with random murders being committed by a mysterious killer, typical TV plot ( Twin Peaks , anyone?), the whole thing being a whodunit that just happens to also be about vampires and a whole hidden world humans have no idea about. The show is set in a time where humans and vampires have learned to live side by side with vampires settling on a blood substitute, a drink conveniently called "Tru Blood", but obviously unspoken tensions between both still exist. As the season goes on, wh

A hard one to review this one... Mainly because I'm still trying to figure out if I liked it or not! I mean, it has all the ingredients that make up a cool sci-fi series and for someone like me, who grew up watching the likes of Star Trek , Farscape and Lexx , it should have had me at "hello". Having never seen the 80's Battlestar Galactica series, I wasn't really sure what to expect from this remake. After a viewing of the pretty decent TV movie, I was really looking forward to more spontaneous Cylon cruelty (Number Six snaps a baby's neck in the movie for crying out loud!) and more OTT space opera drama/action. The first two episodes pick up where the TV movie left off: with the Battlestar Galactica valiantly... fleeing Cylon attacks and worrying about the amount of water the crew has left. It's pretty standard socio-political stuff but frankly they could have started the season with a plot bearing a little more "oomph". Thankfully G