what gekko watched next

Movies

Jack Reacher (2012): surprisingly entertaining performance from Tom Cruise, and an all-round solid, old-school action hero flick. ****

Skyfall (2012): I enjoyed Javier Bardem but was mostly underwhelmed by the latest instalment of the Bond franchise. **

Oblivion (2013): very good sci-fi yarn, again with Tom Cruise acting up a storm. ****

The Grandmaster (2013): Wong Kar Wai and Tony Leung team up again, though not as memorably as in the excellent 2046. ***

World War Z (2013): pretty decent zombie flick. ***

Shaun of the Dead (2004): the first of the "Three Flavours Cornetto", and the first one that I've seen. Pretty funny. ***

Sound City (2013): Dave Grohl's documentary homage to the studio where many of rock music's most iconic albums were recorded. ***

Les Intouchables (2011): a bit schmaltzy, but the performances of the two leads (particularly Omar Sy) win you over. ***

Seven Psychopaths (2012): okay but not great — for me it felt like an awkward amalgam of Adaptation and something by Quentin Tarantino. Christopher Walken is entertaining as always. **

Too Big To Fail (2011): a blow by blow account of the events surrounding the collapse of Lehmann Brothers in 2008, based on the book by Andrew Ross Sorkin. It's pretty dry fare; for me the highlights were Paul Giamatti's hapless, panicky take on Ben Bernanke and Evan Handler's geeky Lloyd Blankfein. **

TV

The Fall (2013): BBC crime thriller starring Gillian Anderson and soon to be Mr Fifty Shades Jamie Dornan. Filmed in Northern Ireland! ***

The Walking Dead (Seasons 1-4): I lapped up the first three seasons of AMC's hit zombie show. But by the end of season 3 the storyline was starting to flag, and I bailed out shortly into season 4. ***

Engrenages ("The Spiral", Seasons 1-4): excellent cop drama, billed as France's answer to the The Wire. *****

Bron|Broen ("The Bridge", Season 1): interesting bilingual crime thriller set in Sweden and Denmark. ***

Game of Thrones (Seasons 1-3): if everyone else is watching it… *****

Ray Donovan (Season 1): quite enjoyed the first season of this darker take on the Entourage world. Jon Voight and Liev Schreiber are excellent. ****

Dexter (Season 8): a fairly weak last season, with possibly the lamest finale ever. This show had its moments but should have been several seasons shorter, and it was only the excellent ensemble cast that kept it alive this long. **

Breaking Bad: probably the best television series out there. The final few episodes demanded a strong constitution, but the ending was worth it. *****

True Blood (Seasons 1-4): I've been lapping up this bit of vampire porn. ***

Newsroom (Seasons 1-2): fast-paced and entertaining, but patchy and prone to passages of maudlin liberal idealism.  ***

In Treatment (Season 1): interesting little show featuring Gabriel Byrne as a psychiatrist with some issues of his own. The main drawback is the season's length — at 43 x 30 minute episodes, it's not an undertaking for the faint of heart. ***

Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Seasons 1-2): billed as "Seinfeld on crack", it was initially pretty funny but the laughs started to dry up in season 2. **

Tube Enema!

THX 1138: low key early hard sci-fi effort from George Lucas, which I watched because I just read that it was the inspiration for the Toto song "99". If only Lucas had applied a similarly minimalist approach to dialog in his star wars prequels.

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace: 3-part BBC documentary on machines, philosophy and politics in the 20th century. There's some good stuff here: I particularly enjoyed the footage of objectivist whack-job Ayn Rand and interviews with some of her acolytes (sadly, her most notorious protege, one Alan Greenspan, declined to be interviewed). As the series progressed, however, it seemed to be lacking a coherent thesis, and in the end was overly fluffed up with sensational claims and dramatic sound-bites.

Looper (2012): look, given that I grew up claiming Back to the Future and Terminator as two of my all-time favourite film franchises, it was always going to be hard for me not to have a soft spot for any film involving time travel (heck, I even enjoyed Hot Tub Time-Machine!).

The History of the Eagles (2013): excellent documentary featuring extensive, unprecedented interviews with all band members. Pretty much essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in the ban or classic rock in general.

Killing Them Softly (2012): reasonably entertaining gangster yarn.

The Hobbit (2012): while it wasn't without a certain charm, it left me rather underwhelmed.

Django Unchained (2012): again, underwhelmed. Some brilliant performances (Samuel L. Jackson's in particular) but overall it didn't quite work for me.

Ted (2012): surprisingly funny.

The Wire: Possibly the last great cable tv series that I'll discover retroactively. Took me a long time to get around to watching it, and it took a while to get me hooked, but once it did I couldn't get enough. Quite simply a brilliant piece of work, with some really memorable characters. It's all in the game, yo.

You Can't Do That On AndroidTube

I've been suffering a bad case of blog-stipation, so let me try to squeeze out a very brief précis of my recent Android-Tubing pleasure…

Super 8: nice little retro alien horror flick. Lots of stylistic throwbacks to the kind of flicks children of the 80s grew up loving.

V For Vendetta: finally got around to watching this graphic-novel adaptation. And rather enjoyed it.

Cocoon: filling in a bit of a gap in my 80s repertoire. If you can get over the weirdness of seeing Brian Dennehy transmogrify into an angelic alien, this is quite a touching, yet cautionary, look at what happens when a fountain of youth is discovered.

Spaceballs: another inexplicable blank in the gekko canon. As a hard-core Star Wars aficionado, it's probably just as well I didn't watch this growing up as I may well have resented seeing my beloved franchise mocked so irreverently. Watching it now, as an only slightly-less defensive aficionado, I found it amusing in parts but pretty cheesy.

The Young Ones: inspired by my long-time admiration of his Lord Flasheart character from BlackAdder (Woof!), I decided to check out Rik Mayall's breakthrough comedy which was co-written by Ben Elton. Has its moments, but hasn't held up anywhere near as well as Blackadder.

Bottom: Rik Mayall's follow-up to The Young Ones, also featuring his comedic cohort Ade Edmondson (Viv from the Young Ones). Pretty forgettable fare; it went for 3 seasons but really wasn't good for it.

Searching For Bobby Fischer: a slightly Hallmark-esque drama about a father and his chess-prodigy son, based on a true story. Lawrence Fishburne has an amusing, though implausible, turn as a street-smart chess hustler.

The Killing (Forbrydelsen): excellent crime thriller t.v. series from Denmark. Blends some of the real-time urgency of the 24 series (in that each episode corresponds to a day), with a dash of Se7en thrown in. Each season (there are 3) deals with a single murder and its implications for a range of unrelated characters.

To Catch A Killer: we had a bit of a Brian Dennehy thing happening, so we went with it. This is a surprisingly good made-for-tv crime drama from the early 90s, based on the appallingly true story of serial killer John Gacy, played chillingly by Dennehy.

The Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes: I was rather disappointed with this attempted reboot/coda of the Apes franchise. The plot unfolded like a join-the-dots attempt to take us from present-day earth to a planet populated by super-intelligent apes.

The Bourne Legacy: speaking of franchises, I actually really enjoyed this addendum to the Bourne, um, legacy. I liked Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker, and I like him again here.

Men Of A Certain Age: probably the highlight of this installment of AndroidTube. By turns funny and serious, the show is about three middle-aged blokes in LA, who are buddies since high school and all going through some sort of mid-life crisis. The big 5-0 may be a ways off for me, but I really related to some of the issues faced by the characters, as they come to terms with where they're at in life, what they've accomplished versus what they had hoped to, etc.

Abandoned: a special dishonourable shout-out to Bad Santa (what was Billy Bob playing at?), and the catastrophic Rock Of Ages.