The Venture Bros., Season 2 (2006)

The misadventures of Dr Thaddeus Venture, former boy sidekick, and his entourage continue in this second anarchic season of The Venture Bros.  Venture's aged (grown would be the wrong word) into an embittered middle-aged man, scraping along by cobbling together 'new' inventions using his father's groundbreaking research and whatever else he can pinch when no-one's looking.  Irascible and immature, he's prone to making enemies and remains alive mainly due to the fact that his bodyguard is one-man-army Brock Samson and that he's subletting part of his compound to Dr Orpheus, the world's foremost expert in matters occult.

Venture's long-term nemesis The Monarch is back to plague him this year, and he's also going to have to deal with all kinds of kooky other challenges, including but not limited to time travel, a pastiche of the Scooby Gang that have hit middle age themselves, and his long-lost brother Jonas, who may be half his height but is twice the man Thaddeus is in pretty much every other way.

Off-colour, occasionally mean-spirited, and packed with all kinds of nerdy in-jokes, The Venture Bros. largely remains an entertaining blend of blacker-than-black comedy and pop culture absurdity.  There's an unfortunately transphobic air to some of the humour this year, which I didn't care for (mock the strong, guys, not the marginalised) but other than that, I had a good time here, though it definitely won't be to all tastes.

We Still Kill The Old Way (2014)

The E2 gang have the run of London's East End, vandalising homes, dealing drugs. and otherwise indulging in thuggish acts with no apparent fear of the police.  Certainly, when an elderly man interrupts their planned gang rape of a young woman, they have no hesitation about kicking him to death.

They perhaps should have hesitated, however, because the dead man is Charlie Archer, who used to be one-half of a Kray Twins-style pair of gangsters with his brother Ritchie.  The younger Archer sibling, and some friends from his active gangster days, are soon on the hunt for some old school payback.

Like a lot of people, I'm pretty easily suckered into the "aged legend shows they've still got it" trope, and the basic setup of We Still Kill The Old Way appealed to me.  I imagined we might get something where the older gangsters used old tricks and low-tech street smarts to outwit their opponents.  Unfortunately, the film just kind of has them do exactly the same things as their younger counterparts: they just wear suits while doing it and have the decency to not target people who aren't a part of their fight.  For a film that hammers the "things were better in the old days" tune pretty hard throughout, it doesn't do a whole lot to justify those claims.  If the script were a little smarter ... well, okay, actually it would need to be quite a lots smarter ... then that discrepancy between deeds and words could actually have been interesting.  But there's no evidence that the audience is even supposed to notice the issue, with the film unapologetically framing the elder gangsters as heroes despite the fact that they cold-bloodedly torture and murder people.

The cast works hard here; it's a shame they weren't given stronger material to work with.

Burn Notice, Season 7 (2013)

Despite his intention to quit the espionage business, Michael Westen finds himself forced into one last rodeo with the CIA, trying to take down a freelance organisation the agency has been chasing for over a decade.  To do this, he will have convince the targets that he's a worthwhile recruit. by going into deep cover and avoiding his previous associates.

And in one paragraph, we identify two key issues with this final season of Burn Notice.  A huge part of the show's appeal is the camaraderie and interaction between Michael and the other central characters, so it's strike one for forcibly keeping them apart (even if it doesn't last, because of course it doesn't).  Strike two is that after six years of battling one ultra secret, independent espionage group that answers to no-one but themselves, Westen suddenly faces another such organisation: one with enough profile to have been hunted for the CIA for more than ten years, and yet never previously mentioned.  In reality of course is because they only just got made up by the writers, but in-show it feels very unlikely.  Creating a wholly new enemy now is also just too late, I think.  I agree with the decision that the show couldn't go to the well of the original conspiracy again: they'd arguably done that for at least one too many years, probably two.  But the new antagonists simply aren't engaging enough, and the show's efforts to create drama by asking "are they even really bad guys?" (when clearly, yes they really are, even if they do act with loyalty to each other) don't help.

Seven years in, the show's formula has become strained, and with the original meta-plot well and truly resolved, there's not a lot here for me to recommend season 7 unless you are a huge, huge fan of the show.

My personal recommendation would be to just watch seasons 1-4 of Burn Notice.  On that basis, it's sharply made TV with a satisfying conclusion.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

Emergency response for a breach in the Aqua-Line tunnel in Tokyo Bay initially seems to be well in hand, but then there are continuing disruptions in the bay area.  The authorities scramble to try and understand what is happening: is it an earthquake?  A previously undetected thermal vent?  It couldn't possibly be a giant amphibious monster, could it?

Well, this is a Godzilla movie, so of course it is option C; an option that the Japanese authorities are unsurprisingly not well equipped to face.  They try to trying to contain the creature without endangering civilians, which as you might expect significantly hampers their efforts to face the monster, and even when they finally can unlimber the big guns, are they really equipped to deal with the threat they face?

So unless you live under a rock, you're probably familiar with Big G to some level; there have been a plethora of movies from both Japan and the US, after all, as well as at least a couple of animated TV series.  This film is a reboot of the franchise, returning after the decade-long hiatus producers Toho decided to take after 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars.  Despite being a reboot, I'm not sure Shin Godzilla would actually be a good first Godzilla film for most people.  I mean, those of us who are fans of the franchise know that most of these films contain a lot of scenes of humans standing around and talking - those are cheap to film, after all - but the focus on human drama is even greater here than usual.  Godzilla in this film exists purely as an outside threat, and the script focuses tightly on the human efforts to contain or stop him.  I personally think it executes this story-line very well (certainly much better than the average for a Godzilla film), but for anyone who is here for lots of stomping kaiju action, this is not the film you're looking for.  The most recent US offering was much more in that kind of line.

Overall though, if you have watched and enjoyed a Godzilla film before, then this is a good entry in the series, and I recommend you check it out.

For those of you who haven't ever seen a Big G film, by the by, I strongly recommend seeing the very first film as your introduction: it's a legitimately good film, though try to watch the original Japanese version rather than the re-cut US release, if you can.

The Powerpuff Girls, Season 1 (1998)

Sugar and spice and all things nice ... and a dash of Chemical X.  That's what Powerpuff Girls are made of.  Now these three super-powered kindergarteners protect the Cit of Townsville from a myriad of menacing, malevolent miscreants.  These include the hyper-intelligent monkey megalomaniac Mojo Jojo; the undead magician Abra Cadaver, and the personage so evil they dare not speak his name, and refer to simply as Him.

Spoiler: "Him" is totally the Devil

The Powerpuff Girls is an anarchic, off-the-wall bit of fun, packed with pop culture references, puns, slapstick and every other kind of silliness you might care to name.  I think it's pretty great, overall.  Almost every 22-minute episode consists of two separate shorts, so it's rare for any particular story to outstay its welcome, and the short "Boogie Frights" might well be my favourite ten minutes of animated lunacy, pretty much ever.

If you can get past the (simple, but not crude) animation and embrace the absurdity of it all, The Powerpuff Girls is a fun ride.

Dark Matter (2014)

A year after his wife's death, James Reynolds is a shambolic wreck who is doing his best to drown himself in the bottle.  It's a far cry from the days when he was a highly regarded research scientist.  But then a meteorite crashes in his back yard, Reynolds cannot help but find his scientific curiosity piqued.  He begins to study the strange rock, discovering that it contains genetic material.

And of course, in the real world, this is when any sane scientist is calling the authorities because holy heck, who knows what actual alien tissue might do to us.  But this is a movie, so instead Reynolds grows a woman in his bath-tub, christens her Stella, and starts to teach her our language and culture.  All the while keeping the whole thing secret from his friend and former colleague.  Of course, said friend may have secrets of her own ...

Dark Matter is a cheaply made British SF film.  Some of the physical effects ... well, okay one of them ... actually presents a clever use of limited resources, but otherwise it is pretty much gimp suits and catastrophically bad CGI all around on the technical front.  None of which would matter to me if the movie was interesting, but it's a tedious mess, quite frankly.  None of the characters are especially interesting or even likeable people, and the acting's mediocre enough that even a good script would struggle to come across well.  Fortunately(?) that's not an issue here as the script is murky, pompous and silly at pretty much every turn.

Steer clear of this Dark Matter.

Californication, Season 2 (2008)

Hank Moody's finally won back the woman he loves.  But well, Hank wouldn't be Hank if he wasn't making bad choices and generally fouling up his own life, so this blissful domesticity isn't likely to be long for the world.

Not that Hank is exactly alone in the self-destructive stakes, as his friends variously lose their jobs, shack up with a fraudster, snort half of California's entire drug supply, and otherwise succumb to most of the temptations thrown their way.

Basically, what I'm saying is that if you got rid of the parts of Californication that are about people making really bad decisions, you might basically have a minute or two of each episode left over.

Fortunately, the show contrives to keep(most) of its characters on the line between sufficiently-flawed-to-screw-up-this-much and sufficiently-likable-that-you-keep-hoping-they-won't.  Whether that balancing act can be carried over for the entire run of the show, I'm not sure.  I guess we will see.

If you don't mind your comedy a bit on the crass side, Californication might be for you.  It's not as clever as it thinks it is, but it's an easy watch.

The Signal (2014)

Three MIT students – Jonah, Nic, and Haley – are on a road trip to move Haley to California. Part way through the journey, Nic and Jonah discover that a hacker named NOMAD, who nearly got them expelled for breaking into MIT servers, has found their location and is taunting them with strange and ominous emails. They track NOMAD to an abandoned house in the middle of Nevada and decide to go after him.  It's a decision that will have repercussions they never could have expected ...

Unfortunately, said repercussions are unexpected because they don't actually follow on from previous events in any kind of coherent manner.  The script is constantly looking to throw the next mystery or twist at you without ever considering if it has actually established the necessary foundations to land it with any real emotional or narrative impact.  To me the whole thing feels like the film-makers desperately waving their hands and chanting "oooh spoooooky" in the hope that you won't notice that none of it makes a lick of sense.

A waste of your time (which is a shame, because the cast are solid and could have given us something worthwhile with a decent script).

The Shield, Season 1 (2002)

The Farmington district of Los Angeles (known informally as "the Farm"), is rife with ethnic gang-related violence, drug trafficking, and prostitution. Operating out of a converted church, known as the Barn, the Farmington police work to maintain the peace in the district and reduce crime.

The centerpiece of the division is the Strike Team, led by Detective Vic Mackey. Their official purpose is to use force as necessary to deal with the more violent and dangerous crimes in the area, while remaining within the law. In reality, Mackey and the Strike Team use criminal methods to coerce information and stage arrests when police procedures fail them, and take payments from drug-dealers to ignore their activities.  Sooner or later, someone - perhaps their politically ambitious new boss, Captain Aceveda - is going to take exception to their activities.  Not that Vic and his team intend to go down without a fight if it comes to that, of course ...

The Shield is a solid cops and crooks drama where the line between one side and the other is often blurred.  In this regard it is much like The Wire, and interestingly the two shows both started and ended within a few months of each other.  They have more differences than similarities, though, at least based on this first season.  The Shield has a more traditional 'case of the week' structure (though with continuity from episode to episode) compared to The Wire's focus on one big investigation per season. Also, The Shield remains tightly focused on the law enforcement characters, some of whom also happen to be crooks, rather than showing both sides of the struggle.  The end result is that they both scratch similar issues, but don't feel like re-treads of each other.

Overall, The Wire makes a stronger impression to me, but if you want a more populist, conventional approach to 'shades of grey' policing, The Shield is off to a good start here.