On the Town (1949)

Three sailors start a one-day furlough in New York determined to see the sights and find some dates.  Not necessarily in that order.  Shenanigans ensue.

That's pretty much the whole plot of this very slight Gene Kelly / Frank Sinatra musical.  It's a total marshmallow of a film, the script relying heavily on happenstance, schmaltz and the charisma of its cast to carry it along.  It can't even rely on the strength of the musical numbers, which frankly didn't do much for me.

Prehistoric Man is about as catchy as it gets.  And boy oh boy does it get offensive around the 2 minute mark.

So it's a mediocre musical with a very slight plot.  None of this stopped it from being well-received at the time of its release, mind you, but certainly it's not aged as well as say Singin' in the Rain in any metric.  If you've a hankering to visit the heyday of the musical, I'd suggest you look there rather than On the Town.

Californication, Season 1 (2007)

Hank Moody used to be on top of the world.  He was in a long term relationship, he had a smart and mature young daughter, he'd written three critically and commercially acclaimed novels, and production on a movie adaptation in the works.

And then it all went to hell.  Hank stopped writing.  His relationship broke up.  He even hated the movie they made, though the residuals from it are more or less what's keeping him financially afloat.  His daughter was still a bright point for him, but not enough to stop him from descending into an empty, embittered regimen of drinking and casual sex.

Hank is, in other words, pretty much the archetypal TV version of a novelist, though since this is a premium cable show, his sexual shenanigans are more explicit than the norm.  Not that you'll see his junk, of course.  Californication is much less egalitarian about its nudity than say Spartacus: Blood & Sand.  

A failure to be egalitarian is certainly something of an issue with the show in general, actually.  This could be some smart writing: for all Hank's angry diatribes about how LA society treats women, he treats them badly himself, and maybe we're supposed to notice that.  Maybe.  But I'm honestly not convinced.  Hank's the kind of guy who thinks that being okay with female pubic hair makes him enlightened, and - at least in season 1 - I'm not convinced the show's actual creators don't feel the same way.

All that said, Californication is in many ways an easy and entertaining watch.  David Duchovny (who had real life sex and relationship issues that I'm sure the show didn't help) has the on screen charisma to make Hank's misadventures pretty engaging, and the program isn't afraid to let us laugh at Hank himself, at least some of the time.  Plus the supporting cast is really solid.

Descendants (2015)

After Beast's curse was broken by Beauty's love, he led a crusade that swept the magical kingdom of Auradon.  All the villains and their sidekicks were banished to an island off the coast, sealed behind an impregnable barrier beyond which there was neither magic nor wifi.

Twenty years later, the Beast is ready to hand over the crown to his son, Prince Ben.  For his first royal proclamation (despite not actually being king, yet ...) the young Prince announces that he will allow four of the children of the villains back into Auradon.  After all, he reasons, they are not responsible for the actions of their parents.

And so we met Jay, son of Jafar; Evie, daughter of the Evil Queen; Carlos, son of Cruella de Vil; and Mal, the ringleader of the quartet and daughter of Maleficent - who despite being redeemed in the Angelina Jolie film is "the worst of the worst" in this.

Of course, being raised by embittered villains is not the kind of thing to make you a totally well-adjusted young person, and the foursome arrive in Auradon set on proving their bad guy bonafides (and more importantly to them, winning the approval of their parents) by finding a way to breach the barrier and allowing villainkind to run amok once more.  And nothing the good guys can do is gonna stop them, right?

Unless you've never seen a film before you probably already have a very good idea of how the movie will play out from there.  Descendants is not going to surprise you with its innovative plot.  It executes well on its familiar beats, though, and as I have recently opined on goodreads, sound execution often trumps innovation.  Probably the only part of the execution that's a little iffy here is the musical numbers, which didn't exactly rock my world.  It's otherwise a solid and entertaining, albeit entirely predictable, 90-some minutes.

Banshee, Season 3 (2015)

The man pretending to be Sheriff Lucas Hood almost seems like he might be in a pretty good place.  He's getting to know the teenage daughter he only recently learned he had, he's in a relatively healthy relationship for once (except for the fact that he's lying to her about who he is) and the man who has actively been trying to ruin his life - the father of this ex - is finally dead.

But of course, Banshee has always been about morally compromised people making bad personal decisions, so you can bet that "Lucas" and his friends will find a way to make their own lives way, way more complicated and dangerous than they need to be.

This third season of the show suffers from a couple of significant issues.  The first is that it comes after a season with a pretty satisfying ending.  You could stop watching this show at the end of season 2 and it would hold together pretty well.  In fact, I suggest you should stop watching at the end of season 2.  This season has a cliffhanger-ish ending instead, and while that's successful in that it makes my wife want to find out what happens, it feels a bit under-cooked, just kind of appearing in the back end of the run.

"Feels a bit under-cooked" is probably a good short hand summary of the whole season, actually, and it's a major flaw.  There's a lot going on here; many different stories at once; but they're not interwoven well and none of the villains are all that engaging or interesting and the people you want to see clash are generally not intersecting that much.  It feels unfocused and at times padded - which a season of only 10 episodes never should, and sub-plots seem to appear abruptly and then get dropped again an episode or two later for no real value other than "we wanted to give character X something to do for a few scenes".

Writing has never been Banshee's strong point, but it is actively a weakness in this season.

Catch That Kid (2004)

12 year old Maddy is a climbing enthusiast whose best friends are a go-kart mechanic and a wannabe film-maker.  When Maddy's dad loses the use of his legs, and the only solution requires a $250,000 medical procedure, the three youngsters set out to rob a bank: one that rather implausibly suspends its vault a hundred feet in the air, so that Maddy will have to climb something.

So four years before she would start raking in the big bucks (and enduring the flak) that comes with playing the lead in the Twilight series, Kristen Stewart played the lead in this tween-targeted bit of nonsense.

Catch That Kid is harmless fun, especially if you have the sense of humour of a twelve year old, but it suffers from some pretty lazy writing.  For instance, a couple of pretty major plot points rest on the fact that everyone loves Maddy's dad ... but we only know this to be the case because one of Maddy's friends says "Everyone loves your dad!".  You're supposed to show, not tell, guys.  And the fact that you're a silly kids film doesn't excuse you from that.

I mean, you want me to suspend my disbelief that three pre-teens are going to rob a bank with a supposedly state of the art (if incomplete) security system, and a vault that's ten storeys in the air (begging the question of how you actually put anything in it)?  Sure, I'm willing to go with that.  And you want me to accept go-karts that can outrun cop cars, because something something nitrous oxide?  No problem.  But don't cheap out on setting up the emotional beats of your movie.  And it's the emotional connection that's missing from Catch That Kid, making it ultimately feel a bit empty as a film.

Weeds, Season 6 (2010)

Married to a mobster and running from a murder she did not commit (but for which she is nonetheless significantly responsible), Nancy Botwin swears to herself and her family that she's going to just live a quiet, normal life from this point on.

It's a promise that lasts maybe half of one 22 minute episode of the show.

Nancy's life has been spiralling from crisis to crisis ever since she decided to turn to drug dealing in order to support her family after her husband's death.  There are few situations so dire that Nancy can't make a decision that will render it worse, and the "Nancy Effect" is in full force here in season 6 of Weeds.  I mean sure, the final moments of season 5 left her with very few good options, but when stuck between a rock and a hard place, Nancy does tend to set herself (and often those around her) on fire and then dare both sides to smash her between them.

Your schadenfreude at Nancy's self-destructive ways will be the primary determinant of how much entertainment you get from this season of Weeds.  Because boy oh boy an awful lot of the drama and comedy comes from her self-inflicted misery.  Not that she's alone in making terrible choices mind you: she's surrounded by a bunch of enablers, when you get down to it.

There were two more seasons of Weeds after this one, but this is where I leave the show.  This season has a solid ending that feels like a good place to stop, and season seven actively winds back the little bit of decency Nancy does show in the finale of this one.

Gods of Egypt (2016)

In ancient Egypt, the narrator of this film tells us, the gods lived among humanity and ruled over it.  Larger and stronger than us, the gods bled gold and were possessed of great powers.  For many years, under the rule of Osiris, it was a golden age for man and god alike.

But then the day came for Osiris to hand over power to his son Horus, only for his brother Set to seize the throne.  Osiris was killed, Horus blinded, and a dark age of war and slavery descended over the land.

At the time, our narrator was a street thief with a girlfriend whom he loved very much, and at her urging he attempts to steal Horus's eyes back from Set, unintentionally precipitating a sprawling quest that travels all over this world, the heavens, and the land of the dead.

My hypothesis is that someone responsible for this film loved Ray Harryhausen's Clash of the Titans, because oh my does it remind me of that film: we're got a pretty main cast that simply doesn't have the chops to make the purple prose of the film actually work, not just one but two very attractive women whose only real role is to motivate the menfolk, a plethora of extravagant monsters and action scenes that the film never really has time to set up or pay off on properly, and oh yes, we have massive stunt casting on the gods, presumably in an attempt to make the film seem more high brow than it actually is.

We've also got the whitest bunch of "Egyptians" you're ever likely to see, visual effects that frequently looked far less 'real' than Harryhausen's near 40-year old stop motion creations ever did, and a script that's significantly less convincing than the effects: it's a film that fails on almost ever level as a creative work, really.

Personally, I had a ball with it, because I have something of a soft spot for terrible films that are blithely unaware of how bad they are, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it.

The New Statesman, Season 2 (1989)

The corrupt and venal Alan B'Stard MP is back for another series of dirty political chicanery.  These seven episodes see the New Money Tory attempt to strip the poor of the vote, get implicated in a sex scandal involving underage girls, and re-inventing himself as a Nazi-Hunter (it turns out there's money to be made from it, and it's easy to find the Nazis when you're the one who has been helping them hide all along).

This second series of The New Statesman continues the anarchic mix of comedic absurdism, smuttiness and cynicism that characterised the first.  Rik Mayall mugs his way through the scripts as the "ridiculosuly handsome" (in his own mind, at least) B'Stard, managing to endow his character with just enough charisma that his venal self-importance and utter lack of empathy for anyone else stay just on the 'humorous' side of the humorous/horrible divide.

If you want a version of House of Cards that is entirely aware of the silliness of its own plotlines, and which doesn't give a wick for good taste, then this is worth a look.