Californication, Season 3 (2009)

Hank Moody is acting as a single father to his teenage daughter.  Which is going about as well as you might expect, given that Hank's barely capable of looking after himself at the best of times.  But hey, at least he's lucked into a job teaching writing at a local university.  I mean, there's no way having inveterate womaniser Hank surrounded by attractive female students and colleagues can possibly go wrong, right?

Yeah, right.

So this is the third season of the show and it's pretty much more of what we've had before: damaged people making terrible decisions, and the entertainment value of watching those decisions come back to bite them.  I mean, it is no accident that the best episode of the season is undoubtedly the one where Hank's house of womanising cards finally crashes down around his ears.  It's a really fun 20 minutes, actually.

The only real issue with all this is that these damaged people do deserve their comeuppances in most cases, which means that sometimes you need to take a break from them.  Having watched two seasons of the show in the last two months, my wife and I have reached that point and will be taking a bit of a break from the show before returning to season four.

West Side Story (1961)

In 1950s New York, the Lincoln Square neighbourhood is the home of street gang The Jets.  The Jets have seen off any number of challengers in the past, but there's a new threat now: The Sharks, a gang of recent Puerto Rican immigrants to the city.  The Sharks are worrisome enough that Riff, leader of The Jets, intends to organise a formal 'war council' with them.  Before that happens, though, he wants to try and recruit old friend Tony back into the gang.

Tony, meanwhile, is looking to move on from the scuffles and loitering that seem to be the two major components of life in The Jets.  He's got himself a job, and has his eyes firmly set on the future.  He rejects Riff's recruitment speech, but accepts an invitation to attend a dance that night, where Riff plans to invite Bernardo, leader of The Sharks, to the war council.

When Tony arrives at the dance, his firm focus on the future is instantly forgotten.  He spies the lovely Maria across the dance floor, and from that moment on he only has eyes for her.

If only Maria wasn't the sister of a certain Bernardo ...

So in case you weren't aware, or it somehow wasn't obvious from the above, West Side Story is adapted from Romero & Juliet.  You've got your two warring sides, and your star-crossed lovers, but instead of swords and Shakespearean English, you've got flick knives and musical numbers.  Because make no mistake, this is a musical.  There are some songs here you will probably recognise, even if you didn't know their source before this: "America" and "Somewhere" being the two most obvious.

So is it any good?  Well, it won ten Oscars (including Best Picture) the year it came out, so clearly plenty of people thought so, but I can't say that I'm one of them.  The characters are thin and Tony's rather too insipid a leading man for my tastes.  And while there are some good song and dance numbers here, there are plenty more that didn't do a great deal for me.  Finally, at nearly 2 and a half hours long, it feels rather indulgent in its run time and pacing.

I'd like to see a new version, more tonally in keeping with The Warriors or The Wanderers.  That would be interesting.  This, not so much.

Glee, Season 3 (2011)

It is the start of another school year; for many members of the William McKinley High Glee Club, the last year of their high school careers.  That means that they have to make important decisions about their futures ... and also that this is their last chance to win the National Show Choir Championship.  Many founding members of the club will be taking their final bow (at least as official members of the team, at least) and moving on to college or other post-school pursuits.  This is their final hurrah.

As you might imagine, the twin issues of the future and Nationals are front and centre throughout this third season of Glee.  That's not to say that there won't be plenty of relationship shenanigans, of course (particularly since the show is introducing a bunch of new characters to fill out the club's ranks in season four, and that means new couple options), but the "who's going to hook up with who?" game generally takes a back seat to "what does this mean for our relationship?".

So basically what we have here is the same shenanigans and singing formula as the last two seasons, albeit with the different narrative focus that I note above.  If you've liked Glee thus far you'll probably continue to like it now, though the self-absorbed nature of the characters does get a bit wearing, and I feel like they fail to seize the opportunity to do something really interesting with the "what next?" story-lines.

This is the last season of Glee that I own on DVD, and the last I've ever watched in its entirety (I started season 4, but lost interest).  I think it makes a good point to leave the show, overall.  End on a high note, so to speak.

Coherence (2013)

Eight friends gather for a dinner party on the night a comet is supposed to pass close to Earth.  For not especially clear reasons, some of the group are concerned that this celestial visitation may have unusual side effects, like another (also made up for the film) comet did in 1923.  Though to be fair, one of the stories they created for this earlier incident is nicely creepy.

So when the lights go out at every house except one a few blocks away, the group is perhaps more prone to panic than they ought to be.  Lacking a land line and thus any way to contact the outside world (I guess in the film's reality cell towers don't have the batteries and generators and that generally continue to operate in a power cut in ours), two of the group head out to the lit up house, hoping they will have a land line there.

Those left in the house freak out when someone knocks at the door (why?  Panic prone, I guess), but then settle a bit when their two friends return, carrying a box.  Inside?  A table tennis racket and photos of the entire group.  The night is about to get very, very strange, in a quantum physics kind of way.

I was tempted to give Coherence a qualified recommendation because I have a soft spot for SF films that are trying to do something interesting with actual scientific concepts, and the ending isn't a bad one.  But in the end I can't quite do it.  The behaviour of the characters earlier in the film feels implausibly panicky, contrived for the needs of the plot, and the momentum of the movie sags quite a lot in the middle.

Dexter, Season 5 (2010)

Still reeling from the events of season 4, blood-spatter analyst and serial-killer-of-killers Dexter Morgan is desperately trying to sort out his feelings (something he's not used to having) and his life when he stumbles across a new target: a man who has killed twelve young women and dumped their bodies in the Everglades.

For Dexter, a fresh kill seems like just the thing to settle himself down, but everything becomes a lot more complicated when the murderer's intended thirteenth victim witnesses Dexter dispatch her captor.  Killing this witness would contravene the code by which Dexter controls his 'Dark Passenger', but how can he trust her not to reveal his secret?  How will the young woman cope with what she experienced and saw during her captivity?  And what will the two of them do with the knowledge that there are at least four other men involved in the deaths of the previous 12 victims?

If you've seen any Dexter at all, or read my previous reviews, you might notice that the synopsis above makes no mention of the police characters with whom Dexter works: no Angel, no Vince, not even Dexter's own sister Debra.  That's because for much of the season that crew are mostly involved in another case.  It's something of an issue with this season, really, as much of the tension in previous years has come from the parallel investigations by both Dexter and the cops.  That takes a lot longer than usual to get going, here, and while the idea of changing up the formula is not a bad one, I don't think it works as well as the writers might have liked, here: probably in large part because the plots involving the cops in the first half of the season more or less just feel like filler to keep them on screen from time to time while the 'real story' plays out with Dexter.

There's a common opinion that you are probably better off quitting Dexter after season 4, and I can see where the idea comes from, but I think it's a bit simplistic.  There is good stuff in season 5; stuff with Dexter and his son and step-kids, for instance, and I think they were continuing to develop both Dex and Debra in interesting ways here.  If you're enjoying the show to this point, and can overlook the strained contrivances of plot (which to be fair, have always been a major part of the show), then this season is still worth your time.

The Brotherhood (1968)

When a young American man arrives in Palermo, Frank Ginetta waits for him with a gun.  But it turns out the visitor is his younger brother, Vinnie, and therefore the newcomer is met with an embrace, rather than a bullet.

Frank's wife, on the other hand, seems suspicious of Vinnie's reasons for visiting, and perhaps she has a right to be, since there's a pistol hidden away in his luggage ...

From this point, the film leaps back to show why Frank is expecting someone to come looking to kill him, and why (and I don't think it is  much of a spoiler to say this, given the film's opening few scenes), it is Vinnie who must do it.

The Brotherhood was a significant box office failure, and I can't say I am all that surprised.  It is well-performed by a fine cast, but the characters aren't especially likable and the conflicts between them aren't really given sufficient context or clarity to make them compelling.  Or at least they certainly aren't at first, and once explanations are forthcoming, they feel a little too pat and manipulative.

If you're hankering for a gangster film, there are better options out there.

The New Statesman, Season 3 (1991)

Alan B'Stard MP is back for another year of schemes and machinations, whether it be staging his own shooting, manipulating the North Sea oil market, defending his position as "the most right wing MP in the House of Commons", stealing charity boxes or plotting to murder Gorbachev and re-institute the Cold War, there's pretty much nothing B'Stard won't do if he sees an opportunity to make a profit, or to kick someone else, or preferably both.

Alternately aided and undermined by his simple-minded fellow MP Sir Piers Fletcher-Dervish and by his wife Sarah - who is just as ruthless and mercenary as Alan himself - B'Stard connives, contrives and just plain cons his way through seven episodes here, as well as the extra-long "Who Shot Alan B'Stard?" special, which IMDB counts as part of season 2, but is on the season 3 disc in this collection.

Overall, this season is much the same in content and humour and those that came before, though the relationship between Alan and Sarah shifts quite noticeably here.  She's been implacably antagonistic to him in previous seasons but in this one she's sometimes his accomplice.  While the shift feels a little jarring at times, and is rather abrupt, I actually really like the new dynamic between the characters and think some of the show's best moments come from the pair of them scheming together even as they would cheerfully knife each other in the back.

The New Statesman will be too absurd for some tastes, but if you're at all a fan of any of Rik Mayall's other comedy, it should be right up your alley.

Rememory (2017)

Sam Bloom is driving when he's involved in the car accident that kills his brother, Dash.  Afterward, he is tortured by the fact that he cannot remember Dash's dying words.  So when scientist Gordon Dunn announces the development of a device that allows perfect recall of memories, uncorrupted by time or the influences of other experiences, Sam is understandably intrigued.

Unfortunately, the day after the announcement, Dunn is found dead in suspicious circumstances.  If Sam wants to recover his brother's lost words, he will need to unpick what happened to Dunn: not an easy task when he doesn't know any of Dunn's colleagues or collaborators.  And for that matter, how well does he even know himself?

Rememory is very much Peter Dinklage's film, and he does a fine job as the troubled but empathetic Sam.  He's got just the right touch of melancholy underpinning everything he does in the film.

And it's probably just as well that his performance is so strong, because this is a low key script that unfolds with a deliberately slower pace.  There are no fight scenes or chases here: just lots of not especially happy people having conversations they'd probably prefer not to be happening.  It isn't likely to be to all tastes.

If you're looking for a dramatic film with a more reflective air and slower pace, though, Rememory might fit the bill.