Once upon a time, Julia Roberts was America’s sweetheart. She captured our hearts with Steel Magnolias and Pretty Woman and won an Oscar for Erin Brockovich about a decade later. Fast forward 10 years, and Roberts decides to have a little fun playing against type in Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror.
In January, Warner Bros. announced it had dropped David Dobkin’s medieval action-adventure film Arthur & Lancelot, but it appears as if the sword might not be stuck in the stone after all.
The film/TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series has had a rough go of things, but it now sounds like Warner Bros. is seriously considering putting its muscle into the massive undertaking.
The human half of the Robocop remake equation has been a question for some time, but MGM is hoping to move the project forward by offering Joel Kinnaman the title role. The news comes nearly a year after it was announced that the film would be helmed by José Padilha, director of the Brazilian action film The Elite Squad
Now that’s more like it! After a week of bellyaching about how Spartacus: Vengeance has lost its charm & luster, “The Greater Good” quashed all potential rumors about the show’s competence and gave us the best episode of the season so far. Last night’s episode had the spark we were looking for, not just from the actors, but from the writers as well. This was premium television at its best, and it was damn fun to watch!
Looks like Alex Proyas‘ religious epic Paradise Lost has entered a whole other kind of hell—development hell. Legendary Pictures has scrapped plans for the film based on John Milton’s epic poem due to visual effects budget issues.
At PlayerAffinity TV, we cover a variety of shows, but it is fair to say we have a soft spot for a specific category. As I write, TV dramas we review on a weekly basis from that category include Alcatraz, Fringe, Person of Interest, and Supernatural. Science fiction shows (and those trying to pass themselves off as such) dominate the list, but if you thought it were a sign of brighter times for sci-fi series, you would be wrong. For many years now, among this broad category of “non-realistic” series, fantasy shows have been much more successful, and 2012 is likely to reinforce that.
Let’s face it. After last week’s spine shattering premiere of Justified’s third season, we all had unfairly high expectations for this week’s episode “Cut Ties”. And although it didn’t quite pack the punch we expected, the show did take a step back and remind us that Justified is still a serialized procedural, albeit an unconventional one.
This episode’s case-of-the-week brought things back down to earth for the US Marshal Service when one of their own, Bill Nichols, was gunned down by one of the witnesses he was protecting, a former mob enforcer named Terry Powe. But where the story lacked in suspense (Art already knew Powe shot Nichols the moment he received that phone call from Raylan), it made up in character development. Art Mullen (played by the awesome Nick Searcy) is one of those characters we tend to take for granted. Ever since the first episode of the series, Searcy has delivered many unacknowledged zingers that have been lost in the sea of awesomeness that is this show. It was refreshing to see the focus taken off Raylan for once. Art’s interrogation of Powe was particularly badass!
Although the films took a break from the misadventures of Kate “Does-the-Leather-Have-to-Be-That-Pain-Inducing” Beckinsale as Selene and her vampire/werewolf boyfriend Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), the leading lady is back in Underworld: Awakening, though I wouldn’t say she is better than ever.
At the turn of the year 2011, we did the expected year-end review
of what was exciting and disappointing over the past twelve months. In
the process, something — I wouldn’t have noticed just by considering my
own selections — jumped at me when looking at the consolidated choices
from the TV staff: almost everything worth praising in the drama
category, from the shows themselves to actors and actresses
performances, came from cable TV. If you have been following the gradual
transformation of the TV landscape in the U.S. over the past few years,
this might not come as a surprise, but it still made us wonder just how
much 2011 had contributed to that general trend.
