MOVIE THURSDAY: Tentative Schedule

MOVIE THURSDAY BEGINS MARCH 3rd!  10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific/5pm Hawaii

Okay! We have a lot of suggestions and a TON of great movies to see!  This is a very small, very tentative schedule for Movie Thursday. Remember, we can do pretty much whatever we want. Nothing’s written in stone, and I haven’t gotten suggestions from Tina yet.

Please check out the schedule for MARCH below, and tell me what you think!

I picked out as many as I could that are available on Netflix Instant Play.   I tried to rotate the movie by watcher — that way we’d all get a “turn.”  I also tried to cross reference our suggestions.

Our only scheduling problem is Mike — he works on Thursday nights. I thought maybe we could move Movie Thursday to another night on his turn.

Make sure you check out everyone’s list and add more suggestions as you think of them BELOW. If you see someone’s selection you haven’t seen or you think someone MUST see, add your comment!

[All selections available on DVD at Netflix. Selections marked ** are available at Netflix in Instant Play.]

SCHEDULE SO FAR

MARCH 3 —  **The Godfather [Courtney, Brooke]

MARCH 1o — **The Godfather Part 2 [Courtney, Brooke]

MARCH 17 — Pulp Fiction [Caleb]

MARCH 24ish — **One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [Amy, Mike]

Down the Road:

Saving Private Ryan [Courtney]

Roman Holiday and/or His Girl Friday [Brooke]

Casablanca [Caleb]

Inception [Amy]

Terminator and/or Aliens [Courtney]

Primeval Season 4 Episode 7 Finale Review

Photo courtesy of BBC America

What a great finale!  Well, if you watched series 3.  If not, all of the impact of Danny’s return and Ethan’s identity was lost on you and, well, I’m sorry.  It was brave, or at least an interesting choice, of the showrunners to take that tack – did they not care about new viewers, or was this a lovely gift for the faithful?  As a faithful who was fairly disappointed with series 3, I was nevertheless taken completely by surprise and was delighted to see Danny return through the anomaly.  And WOW what a great twist to have Ethan be his long lost brother!  I frankly don’t remember how often it came up in the third series that Danny’s missing brother was the reason he joined the police force, beyond the introductory episode, but hopefully I wasn’t the only one to have an great “OMG!” moment when Ethan’s identity was revealed.So, Helen is definitely dead, according to Danny.  Given his reappearance, it’s nice to have her literally and figuratively laid to rest.  But the memory of her character will apparently live on, since she had several documents in her hand (excuse me?) and Phillip’s name was on every one… Okay, that could be interesting.  Phillip was wonderfully creepy with his “Danny seemed erratic to me” line.  It was very reminiscent of Doctor Who’s “Doesn’t she look tired” line about Harriet Jones, eventually causing her downfall.  Danny was lucky, if you can call it that, that he decided to follow and protect his brother, and protect others from him, thereby sparing himself from whatever devious plans Phillip may have had for him.  When Primeval returns, Danny and Ethan/Patrick could certainly return, but if they don’t, it was nice to have that storyline tied up so nicely.

Interesting setting, the retired prison.  So convenient that the anomalies seem to always appear in remote locations.  Regardless, it was a nice and creepy, multilevel classic-for-hunt/chase site.  As for the anomalies themselves, Connor’s toy was a solid upgrade to the ARC’s anomaly tracking abilities.  Loved his line when he found that an anomaly had a date from the 1800s and that they therefore shouldn’t be worried –  expecting no creatures except maybe an “Oliver Twistasaurus.”  The anomalies occurring more frequently and developing twins was a neat effect, especially as it made some of them undetectable, another cool revision.  More to build on is always good news for this type of show.

Was anyone really surprised that Matt is from the future?  No more than I was surprised, meaning not, that the mystery man was Matt’s father.  Honestly, we’ve seen this already, not only in movies like the ”Terminator” series but in this very show, with the extremely scary creatures from the future that we saw during the last series.  Yes, yes, the future will be horrible, all because of one man, blah blah blah.  Could be Phillip, could be Connor, we’ll just have to see.

The strength of the Danny/Ethan reveal and the changes in the anomalies outweighed the “meh” response I had to the Matt part of the story, and I therefore hope that we will see more of this when the show returns later this year.  Overall, a very well done season finale, and a return to the level of season 1.  Here’s hoping for more of the same.

Thanks to Simply Television for sharing this review by @Loster21Primeval, BBC America, Saturdays at 9 pm

Primeval Season 4 Episode 5 Review

Thanks to Simply Television for sharing this review by @Loster21…

Oh YAY it was better!  Far fewer ridiculous lines, most of the time spent investigating, another decent-looking and -sounding monster, and – could it be? – movement on the Matt/Mystery Man front, tying in with Ethan!  Please don’t get our hopes up for nothing… But as for this week’s episode:

The BlairWitch-style opening was fun, and added a bit of something different to open the programme.  I was pleased that they are continuing, in an admittedly very minor way, to show that these incursions are actually being noticed, and it harkens back to the other good episode of the season, with Connor’s geeky friend.

“Creepy village people” is a hackneyed element but one that hadn’t yet to my recollection been used by the series, so no discredit there.  They did drag it out a bit longer than necessary in the pub, but mercifully only for a few extra beats. It was nice that they were able to add a new twist to the anomalies by having one affected by chemical dumping, and somewhat easier by having that dumping done by villagers.   Perhaps it was a little too pat to have the perpetrators get eaten, but as they do have a number of storylines to work on, adding “prosecuting villagers for homicide through creature” would be more than this show could manage at this point.

I’m hoping that the reason that Phillip doesn’t want Connor in the field is a good one… “the animals are a distraction.”  Given his suspicious behaviour, it wasn’t clear if Phillip’s stated interest in the anomalies was itself a distraction from his clear animosity towards the animals, but this episode seemed to support that he is indeed focused on the anomalies.  I wonder if we’re supposed to wonder why he took over Jess’s spot and how he was able to make the anomaly appear, if that is in fact what he did.

Connor is still being written as goofy.  I am hopeful that, as things at Prospero become suspicious as they most surely will, the showrunners and writers will do something interesting with Connor.  He’s extremely bright and survived a year in the cretaceous period; surely they can do something with that.  Nice moment when we thought Abby might have been eaten… “Don’t shoot, there’s petrol everywhere” was good, “they just want to go home” was not.

Still hating the ridiculous way they write for Jess.  Is she smart, or is she not?  I’m starting to dread her appearances.

“I should be out there looking for them both.  This Ethan guy is dangerous.”  An example that the actual lines are still pretty dismal.  But it’s nice that they have Matt finally concerned with quickly locating a man he was told was a homicidal maniac.  Which brings me to another good part:

I LOVED the twist about Ethan, it’s great that they’re making something out of that group-of-travelers storyline.  It had good potential which was seemingly disregarded in its first two episodes.  Maybe they were trying to lull us into a state of not expecting anything interesting, which made the twist all the more surprising.  “I am the future, I am the past” was nicely creepy, and “I’m gonna make them see what I’ve seen, and suffer like I’ve suffered” was somewhat intriguing.  They are going to have to work hard, though, to escape this being a rewrite of the Helen story.  It was reassuring that the Mystery Man referenced her in this episode.  It felt like a nod to those of us who’ve watched the whole series, a confirmation that they realise we are wary of a revisit of the single-person-troublemaker scenario. 

We didn’t have the Mystery Man last week, but he was back for some crucial lines in this episode.  So, Ethan may be responsible for destroying the world?  “One life above billions of others…  Ethan is to blame for what happened… This has never been about fighting an army.  This isn’t about battles, money, power… it’s about one person with enough knowledge to bring down the entire world.”  Could it be that they really will tie this all together?  Or maybe it isn’t Ethan, maybe it’s Phillip.  Or Connor, for that matter.

Overall I was pleased that this episode had some good elements, and I’m hopeful that it will continue to get better.  There is so much potential here.

First published on Simply Television 1/22/11