CliqueClack

Merlin’s penultimate season leads this week’s TV on DVD releases

The next to last season of fantasy favorite Merlin leads a collection of Brit shows hitting DVD and Blu-ray this week including Waking the Dead, Being Human, and Twenty Twelve. The final season of the critically acclaimed but viewer challenged Men of a Certain Age also gets a DVD release. For the kids — and adults who were kids in the 1970s — the complete Jackson Five animated series hits DVD and Blu-ray! In addition to series TV, the January 15 releases also includes several TV movies originally aired on the Hallmark channel. Have a look at our shopper’s guide to get information on these and other releases, and click on a link to make a purchase at Amazon.com

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Liam Neeson, Woody Allen, and a demon named Abyzou come to home video

In this week’s new home video releases, Liam Neeson returns to some familiar territory when dealing with the consequences of his actions in the surprise hit Taken. Unfortunately, the follow-up, Taken 2, didn’t fare as well with audiences or critics but it still may be worth checking out on video. Hollywood tried to make us think The Possession was some radical new version of The Exorcist … except it pretty much wasn’t. And Woody Allen followed up his charming trip to Paris with To Rome With Love, but you may be better off checking out some of his classic films new to Blu-ray this week: Hannah and Her Sisters and Sleeper. In fact, the classic films on video this week are where it’s at with the release of The Best Years of Our Lives, How Green Was My Valley, the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Tin Drum and more. Have a look at our shopper’s guide to see what else is coming on January 15, and click on a link to get more information or to make a purchase (any purchase made through a link at Amazon also supports our efforts here at CliqueClack).

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Sitcom Superlatives – Imports, Cameos, and Bromances

Best Import – Miranda

If you’re suffering from the mid-winter blahs like I am and find yourself in dire need of new laughs, I’d definitely suggest checking out the charming British sitcom Miranda. Think if a Liz Lemon-like character of similar failure-prone relatability in a sitcom with a mixture of the goofy sensibility of Happy Endings and the distinctly British embarrassment factor that the original Office had, and you have Miranda. The basic plot is of a large, very silly woman (played by the stellar Miranda Hart, who also writes the show) struggling to be mature and composed as she struggles through dating, work, and polite social interaction. Miranda also boasts a stellar cast of supporting characters that include her Lucille Bluth-ian mother, her best friend and co-worker Penny, and her longsuffering mutual crush Gary (played by the dreamy Tom Ellis, who Merlin fans will recognize as old baddie Cendred). It’s delightfully sweet, absurd, and poignant by turns. There is no technically legal way to get your hands on this show outside of the UK, and I don’t want to encourage anyone to break the law, per se, but if there’s a show worth finding a creative solution to watch, it’s this one.

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The Joe Schmo Show is back and as offensively hilarious as ever

When the first season of The Joe Schmo Show aired way back in 2003, it wasn’t the first prank or “hoax” reality show ever aired; but it was the most elaborate one yet. A faux Big Brother sort of show was created as a fake backdrop with mostly actors and one real, unsuspecting victim/contestant. The show was then all about trying to keep the Schmo (Matt Gould), a decent and friendly guy, from figuring out the truth while simultaneously parodying the most ridiculous tropes and archetypes of reality TV. It was original and hilarious, and you legitimately connected with both the actors trying to constantly live fake lives, and the real person of Matt at the center of it all. The second season was more of a Bachelor/Bachelorette ripoff, but things got interesting fast when one of the two contestants realized it was all fake, so she was incorporated into the cast. That was eight years ago.

Finally the Schmo is back, and pushing the envelope yet again. Last year Spike TV held auditions for a bounty hunter competition show called The Full Bounty, attracting real contestants. Of course, as you might suspect, it was all fake. So now we return to the world of mostly actors and one real person (Chase Rogan from Pittsburgh), taking aim yet again at reality shows while trying to pull the most elaborate hoax yet. Things have changed in the last ten years, and reality shows have become increasingly ridiculous. How crazy can they get while keeping Chase in the dark? Will they pull it off? And how offensive is it this time?

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Jessica Chastain owns Zero Dark Thirty

The release of Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden flick has been surrounded by myriad storylines. It’s been highly politicized: Republicans criticized its planned release prior to the 2012 election (the date was moved), Democrats – and Senator John McCain — have chaffed at the way the film “glorifies” the torture, the Central Intelligence Agency is being investigated for potentially sharing classified information with the film’s producers … even today, as the Academy Award nominations were announced, Bigelow was criminally snubbed in the Best Director Category. Despite all of these stories, these attempts to claim the movie for one particular cause or the other, Zero Dark Thirty belongs to star Jessica Chastain.

Chastain plays Mya, the fictionalized CIA intelligence officer who first developed and followed the lead that eventually led to the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Her story is based on accounts of an officer who doggedly chased down a single lead over ten years. Audiences have been cautioned against taking Zero Dark Thirty’s telling of this story as gospel. Like any movie, it’s been fictionalized for the sake of good storytelling, but considering the topical nature, the way the story is told against the background of the real history of the 10 years between 9/11/01 and 5/1/11 and the way the story is going to resonate with US audiences, it’s going to be tough for many to distinguish fact from fiction. At the end of the day, however, I am likely to believe that there is considerably more fact in the broad strokes of the story, with only the smaller – yet important – details as the fiction.

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Gangster Squad struggles to find its tone

I think I liked Gangster Squad for all of the wrong reasons. I believe director Ruben Fleischer intended the flick to be a modern, violent version of the gangster movies of the 50s and 60s. Instead, I only began truly enjoying the film when I embraced the movie as camp – maybe not as tongue-in-cheek as the 60s Batman television show, but camp non-the-less. I actually turned to a colleague of mine at the film’s screening and asked if the story was based on a graphic novel that I perhaps hadn’t heard of; that if the source material could come from that type of surreal genre, maybe I could understand and appreciate the flick as intended a little better.

Gangster Squad lives in this space that’s somewhere between films like The Untouchables, Sin City and Reservoir Dogs while being absolutely nothing like them. The film really tries to be Dick Tracy in a post-Tarantino world, but doesn’t have the stomach to go all in with the graphic nature of its violence. There is a moment very early in the film where a mob execution is handled in an incredibly graphic way, that even as the camera pulled back from the action just at the pivotal moment, put the audience on notice for what kind of film it was going to be … only to never fulfill that promise.

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Mark Wahlberg starts off Philly’s new year with Broken City screening

My new year started off awesomely. Mark Wahlberg stopped in Philadelphia for a screening of Broken City. He not only took a good minute to greet the fans outside, but once inside the Prince Music Theater he literally took time to answer every single blogger’s question and to take pictures with every single member of the press core and their friends. And, he did so incredibly casually. Sure, walking the red carpet, chatting with press and talking to local politicians/celebrities is his job, but it doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy it. He greeted Mayor Nutter and Sharon Pinkenson of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office like old friends and took a good five minutes to chat with an extreme fan who waited beside me on the press line for an hour and described her incredible love of him in the interim. Is he incredibly fit? Hell, yes. While rocking a short-sleeved black polo I learned that he has the most well-defined forearms ever.

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The Following is the best new show you might be too afraid to watch

There is nothing like The Following on broadcast television today … I’m not entirely sure there’s much like it on cable either (Dexter perhaps, but that’s a stretch). Kevin Williamson’s new drama, premiering Monday, January 21^st on FOX, is many things at once: a captivating look into the mind of a cult leader and his followers, a series of unusual love stories and an “un-procedural” crime drama. As someone who is not a big fan of the thriller/horror genre, I didn’t expect to like The Following. That preconception was easily the thing I was most wrong about in all of 2012.

Before we get going, the rules of this review: while I’ve seen the first four episodes, I’m going to try to stay away from spoilers as much as possible. There is going to be one specific instance where that won’t be the case. There’s something that was so good that I feel I must share it with you, even if it makes one particular minor twist in the Pilot easy to figure out. That spoiler will be discussed on the last page of this review, so you can avoid it if you want. Again, it’s not a particularly massive thing, especially compared to everything else that happens in the first episode, but I figure I’d give those that want to watch unspoiled the option. Continue reading 'The Following is the best new show you might be too afraid to watch' »

Remembering Tanya Sloan, the Power Ranger with attitude

Generally speaking, the month of January usually brings new blissful beginnings. For me, this year, it just brought a whole lot of damn nostalgia. And so it was that I spent the dawn of the new year looking at classic episodes of Power Rangers ... you know, that corny kids show about rainbow colored superheroes fighting to protect the planet against monsters and what not. Ah, it was like I died and went to nerdtopia. Anyone that has read my writing can glean that I’m a die hard fan of the Power Rangers. That’s about as well known as Lindsay Lohan’s inability to regain her career. Still, what some people don’t know is that my love of the Rangers extends far beyond their first few seasons of the popular Mighty Morphin’ era.

On the contrary, I was a huge fan of the Zeo season as well. For this week’s Clacking in Color, I’d like to focus on one of my favorite Power Rangers — no, not Trini … although she was pretty awesome — but Tanya, the cool chocolate skinned sistah’ played by the beautiful Nakia Burrise. I was in the fourth grade when Zeo aired on Fox Kids, and even though I’ve already graduated from college with a journalism degree, I can still remember the lasting impression that Tanya left in the series and in my heart. Go get your Kleenex. It’s gonna be one of those editorials.

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Strike gold – black gold – with the Dallas reboot on DVD

Just in time for the second season of TNT’s Dallas reboot, you can catch up on season one with this week’s new home video release. As far as reboots go, TNT hit a home run with Dallas, especially by bringing back classic characters Bobby, Sue Ellen, Lucy, Ray Krebs, Cliff Barnes, and of course J.R. Sadly, we’ll only get to see the wonderful Larry Hagman on a handful of episodes this season, so it will be interesting to see how the show copes with the death of its star actor and character, and if the audience will stick around in the hopes that the new generation of Ewings will carry the torch.

In other releases, Archer, Smash and Anger Management get last season releases timed to the new seasons, reality shows Dance Moms and An Idiot Abroad come to DVD along with some classics, kids shows, and the crew of the Red Dwarf return for their first new season since 1999! All of these shows and more will be available on January 8th, so have a look at our handy shopper’s guide to see what’s coming, and click on a link to make a purchase or to get more information.

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