2021: the year we add Streaming

I started this blog to help me get through all the films and TV shows I owned on DVD (and later, those I had digitally purchased).

We've now reached an inversion point where I find myself buying things so I can review them - and will thus watch them - while my list of "things on streaming I would like to check out" grows ever longer.

So, from 1/1/21 I'll be reviewing stuff I watch on streaming, as well as things I "own".  Media that was reviewed from a streaming service will have a Streaming tag.

Warehouse 13, Season 4 (2012)

Season 3 of Warehouse 13 ended with a major "all is woe" cliffhanger, so as you might expect, this season kicks off with the warehouse team employing desperate measures to correct the situation.  They succeed in this, of course - there wouldn't be much of a show if they did not! - but such drastic actions carry their own adverse side-effects that will soon force them all to confront a whole new series of threats.  And will confronting those threats lead to new dangers?  Well of course it will!  The Warehouse - it's like a perpetual motion machine for trouble!

This is the longest single series of Warehouse 13, with two major plot arcs running through it; one leading into the mid-season "the world is doomed" cliffhanger and one leading into the end of season "the world is doomed" cliffhanger.

... you may be noticing something of a theme with how this show likes to punctuate its major plots.

You may also notice something of a "guest stars from other genre shows" thing going with the show, too.  There's been a fair bit of that already, mind you, with the Eureka crossovers and guest spots from at least three different Star Trek actors, but this season hits a whole new gear on this front.

Despite the repetition of certain story beats, season four of Warehouse 13 is I think a stronger offering than the previous series (just as season 2 was a step up from season 1, come to think of it).  Hopefully this down-up-down-up pattern won't continue with another down for the fifth and final series.

If light adventure genre TV is in your wheelhouse, you will probably find yourself entertained here.

Black Christmas (2006)

The sisters of Clemson University's Delta Alpha Kappa sorority are looking forward to the holidays, and spending time with their families.

Unfortunately for them, their sorority house was once the home of one Billy Lenz. At Xmas fifteen years ago, Billy murdered his parents and mutilated his sister (who is also his daughter: don't ask). He's spent the time since then in an institute for the criminally insane. This year, he intends to finally escape and find a new family to spent the holidays with.

Targeted by a serial killer for Christmas? So far, so bad! But though they don't yet know it, it's even worse than that: sorority sisters start getting murdered even before Billy makes his escape. Why are two killers targeting these young women?

Well, for those of us in the audience, the identify of the second killer isn't all that hard to guess. For the unfortunate victims, of course, it will be half the film before they even know they are in danger.

This film - often styled Black X-Mas, as above - is a remake of a 1974 proto-slasher film (featuring none other than Superman's Margot Kidder).  It features a cast of then-TV-famous young women including Buffy's Michelle Trachtenberg and Party of Five's Lacey Chabert, as well as a pre-Arrow Katie Cassidy.  That's probably some pretty good geek-bait, honestly.

Is it any good, though?  Wellllll ... it's okay, I guess?  It gets off to a fast start and it has plenty of the murderin' action that people generally watch slasher films to get.  Also, the cast is solid.  On the other hand, I think it loses a fair bit of momentum because it keeps stopping to fill in the backstory of the murderer.  That's a big sin in this genre, to my mind.

At the end of the day, I didn't enjoy this enough that I would recommend it, but I did like it enough that I would like to check out the original.

Lost Girl, Season 4 (2013)

 

Kenzi Malikov lives a dangerous life.  She's a 'mere' human who works as a private investigator in the Fae community, disguising her 'inferior' heritage with regular doses of a black market lotion that lets her mimic the powers of a sprite.  The only people she can rely on are her friends Hale and Dyson, who help her solve cases and keep her secret.

If you remember my reviews of the previous three series of Lost Girl, you might be thinking "wait, isn't the main character a Succubus named Bo?".  And yes, yes it is, but at the outset of this season Bo is missing and none of the main cast even remember she exists.  That changes pretty fast, of course - Bo and her bodacious bosom are rather too important to the show to vanish for long.  But they are absent long enough for me to say that I would watch the heck out of "Kenzi Malikov, Undercover Human".

Anyway, once Bo is back we're set for more traditional Lost Girl hijinks, with plenty of sexy Succubus times, wacky Fae crimes, and scheming of all kinds.  As well, of course, there's the gang's struggles to find out who abducted Bo, where she went, and what was the motive behind the whole affair.

If you've enjoyed Lost Girl to this point, I see no reason why you won't like this season, too.  It's solid stuff overall, with a likeable cast and a good blend of comedy and adventure.

The Beguiled (2017)

Mississippi, 1864.  The American Civil War rages across the country, including in the region near the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies.  While out picking mushrooms, one of the younger students finds an injured Union soldier.  Despite the man being an enemy, she leads him back to the school for medical treatment.

Local Confederacy regulations call for the school's owner, Miss Farnsworth, to alert the authorities to the man's presence.  However, she fears that sending him to the prison camp in his current state would be a swift death sentence, and resolves to wait to tell them until he is well enough to survive.

At least, that's what she tells herself, her students, and the school's limited staff.  The fact that he's a handsome and quite charming young man might also have affected her decision.  It has certainly affected several of the other women at the estate.

Of course, the women's interests and motivations are not necessarily mutually attainable, and there's always the question of what their new guest's intentions might be: the situation is apt to become complicated!

If any of this sounds familiar, it's because there was a 1971 film based on the same novel, which I reviewed about eighteen months ago.  Some people have a fundamental aversion to remakes.  I am not one of them, and am often interested to see how new writers, directors and actors will approach such a project.  (For the record, I'm particularly interested in seeing how new writers and directors would approach The Hobbit.  Less so the actors, since I think the cast of those films did a good job).

Ahem.  In any case, what this means is that when it comes to remakes, or (as this more accurately is) new adaptations of the same source material, I'm pretty interested in how the films differ.  On that front, this offering falls a little short, I think.  It is somewhat different in that it tends to tell the story more through the viewpoints of its female cast, rather than its one prominent male character.  I like this aspect of it.  The problem - though only for someone who has already seen the earlier film - is that it does very little else that feels new or novel.

If you haven't seen the 1971 film, this is I think the better overall offering.  If you have seen the earlier one, it may not offer a sufficiently distinctive experience to be the optimal use of your 95 minutes.

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 1 (2016)

Arrow and The Flash have both generated a number of recurring super-powered characters who play an occasional role in events.  Now, blasting through the timestream comes Rip Hunter, who collects eight of these secondary supers, including - perhaps a little surprisingly - recurring Flash villains Captain Cold and Heatwave.

Hunter is a renegade agent of the Time Masters, an organisation which protects the timestream from time criminals.  He wants his eight recruits to help him prevent the conquest of Earth by Vandal Savage, which (if nothing is done) will occur in 2066.  The Time Masters have refused to take action against this event, saying that it is the correct course of history.  Hunter's wife and child will be killed by Savage in his conquest, however, and Hunter is desperate to prevent this.

Of course, defeating a man who is capable of conquering the entire planet will be no easy task, and there's also the rather inconvenient fact that Vandal Savage is immortal.  Born in Ancient Egypt and somehow imbued with eternal life by a meteor, he can only be slain by the two other people who were present when he received his powers.  These two have been reincarnated scores of times over the centuries, and each time they are, Savage hunts them down and murders them.  Their latest incarnations are, of course, among Hunter's eight recruits and are feeling pretty keen to pursue Savage rather than the other way around.

Legends of Tomorrow's first season is a bit of a bumpy one.  The team are not exactly stellar at working together, shall we say, and a lot of their efforts seem to make things worse for the world, rather than better.  Particularly early in the season, the plot of several episodes is "clean up the mess we made last time".  There are some decent in-fiction reasons for this, but it does get a bit wearing at times.  Still, the cast is pretty fun and ultimately I think it pays off pretty well.  I definitely enjoyed it enough to give season two a try.

His Girl Friday (1940)

 

Hildy Johnson, former star reporter of The Morning Post, drops into the paper to see Walter Burns, the paper's editor, and also her ex-husband.  It's no idle visit: Hildy is there to let Walter know that she's recently become engaged, and intends to quit the newspaper business to become a stay-at-home wife and mother.

Walter expresses pleasure at the news, insisting on meeting Hildy's fiance (a rather bland insurance salesman) and taking them both out to lunch.  This, of course, is nothing more than step on in a barrage of schemes to torpedo the impending nuptials.  Walter, you see, wants Hildy for himself - though rather more for her journalistic skills than for romantic reasons, I feel - and is pretty confident that if he can delay their departure long enough, he can find a story his ex-wife's reporterly instincts won't let her leave alone.  He may be right, at that: it just so happens there's a man on death row for fairly flimsy reasons.

The rest of the film depicts the battle of wills between Walter and Hildy and the pair's equally fierce struggle to write a story that the city's corrupt mayor and sheriff have no intent of letting see the light of day.

His Girl Friday is a seminal 'screwball comedy', with the razor-sharp banter and rather cynical view of love that generally characterised such works.  It's mostly good fun to watch, though at the end of the day it's hard to say that it's got a "happy ending". On the one hand, both Hildy and Walter seem to have got what they think they want ... on the other, I'm not sure what they want is all that sensible!

If you want to watch some skilled 1940s thespians deliver snappy dialog at a thousand words a minute, this film definitely has you covered.  Just don't expect anyone to be a better person at the end of the film than they are at the beginning!

Arrow, Season 4 (2015)

Oliver Queen has fallen in love and left not just Star City, but his identify as The Arrow behind, in order to build a new life with Felicity Smoak.  But Star City is not as ready to let go of Oliver Queen as he is of it.  While Oliver's friends continue to try to keep the streets safe, they and the police both find themselves overmatched by a mysterious organisation known as the Ghosts.  Both Oliver and Felicity are soon drawn back to the city to help defeat this new menace.

Of course, defeating the Ghosts will be no easy task, as they possess weapons unlike anything Oliver's friends have ever seen ... though fortunately Oliver himself has, as we learn through (yet) more flashbacks to the five years when the world believed him dead.  In a nice change of the formula, however, Oliver is not the only one whose past will play a significant role in this season's developments.

Arrow remains a solid action-focused superhero show.  It profits hugely from good casting in the cast around Oliver.  This is not to say that Stephen Amell is bad in the lead role - he's not - but the program is definitely much helped by the presence of strong and charismatic players making up the rest of the main (and for that matter, supporting) cast.

One weakness of this season that I will call out is that the resolution in the final showdown feels a bit reminiscent of that of season 2 (though not to anywhere near the extent that season 2 of The Flash felt like another variation of season 1).

The Flash, Season 2 (2015)

 

Barry Allen and his friends managed to thwart the machinations of Eobard Thawne, but in doing so they inadvertently opened a series of rifts that lead to a parallel Earth.  The team quickly dubs this other reality "Earth-2" (not a nomenclature the people of that world particularly appreciate, as you might imagine).  This parallel world is similar but not quite the same as their own: the same people often exist, but they have different jobs and personalities, and there's a whole new batch of metahumans there.

In and of itself, contact with another world is not necessarily a bad thing.  Unfortunately, Earth-2 is home to a psychotic super-speedster named Zoom, who has terrorised his world for years and fully intends to do the same to "Earth-1" ... right after he's done murdering The Flash, of course.

Faced with an enemy whose speed far out-strips his own, and who commands a menagerie of supervillain minions, can Barry and his friends even survive, let alone triumph?

I'm a sucker for alternate reality stories, so I am pretty much the target audience for an Earth-2 type storyline, but this season of The Flash didn't quite work for me.  I certainly don't think it is up to the standard of the first.  It's a bit too po-faced grim for much of the time, and several of the elements of the season-long arc are too reminiscent of what we saw in the previous series.  It's still a decently entertaining superhero show, mind you, and I intend to keep watching, but it's definitely a qualified recommendation.

True Blood, Season 3 (2010)

Sookie Stackhouse and company are back for another series of sexy supernatural shenanigans involving multiple conflicting vampire factions, Viking revenge schemes, and werewolf turf wars.  

The previous season of True Blood ended with all kinds of melodramatic events: deaths and disappearances, oh my!  This season hits the ground running on the follow-up to those developments, and keeps the action and the plot twists (and of course the gore and nudity) flowing at a fairly rapid rate for its entire twelve episode run.

True Blood is a show with a very specific formula: it's very over the top, sudsy stuff, with unashamedly histrionic writing that profits from the commitment of its charismatic and talented cast.  It certainly won't appeal to all people, and I think there's a very real risk that at some point the soapy silliness is going to overwhelm the actors' efforts to keep it engaging, but for now it is still managing the balancing act of treating all these shenanigans with utter in-character seriousness.

If sexy vampires are your thing - and clearly it hits a chord with a lot of people - True Blood definitely delivers the product you're after in season three.