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Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.
How Better Call Saul bettered Breaking Bad
In the height of summer 2013, Vince Gilligan, the creator of "prestige TV" phenomenon Breaking Bad, and fellow screenwriter Peter Gould, took a long walk around their offices in Burbank, California. The end was nigh for Breaking Bad, and they had just recently signed a deal to make Better Call Saul, a spin-off prequel series set around Bob Odenkirk's popular shyster Saul Goodman, a criminal lawyer more criminal than lawyer, more cartoon than man. The only problem? Neither Gilligan or Gould had any idea what the show was about. "We had a very high concept without a lot of follow-through," Gilligan tells BBC Culture. "We would walk around, just cogitate, and say 'okay, so what is this exactly?!'"
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Girlbosses: The women being demonised on screen
In the new series of Industry, the HBO drama about young bankers in London that has just returned after the first season proved a zeitgeist-y hit, we see that Yasmin (Marisa Abela), previously a naive graduate, has risen through the ritual humiliations of the Pierpoint & Co foreign exchange desk. She holds court at lavish client dinners, enjoys a hedonistic nightlife and makes deals the morning after, strutting around the finance floor in power designer suits. To borrow social media vernacular, she is totally bossing it.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
House of the Dragon review: It's 'pure Game of Thrones'
It is a remarkable twist of fate that Game of Thrones – the biggest TV phenomenon of recent times, and perhaps the most influential show of the 2010s – has spent its afterlife being considered something of a failure. This is not true, of course: just take the array of desperate attempts to make "the next Game of Thrones". But the show's final season – criticised by many for feeling rushed and truncated – does hang heavy over its first spin-off series, House of the Dragon. After all, a prequel set more than 100 years before the main story, being released in a time of diminished good will, has a relatively tough task in overcoming cynicism and indifference. And yet, as it turns out: the best way to make "the next Game of Thrones" is simply to make more Game of Thrones.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
10 of the best TV shows to watch this September
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Twenty-one years on from the release of Peter Jackson's first Lord of the Rings film, a new story of Middle-earth is coming. The Rings of Power – an original tale inspired by Tolkien's writing – is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. "We feel like deep roots of this show are in the books and in Tolkien," co-showrunner Patrick McKay told the Television Critic Association, "we feel that this story isn't ours. It's a story we're stewarding that was here before us and was waiting in those books to be on Earth." With a large ensemble cast that includes Morfydd Clark (Saint Maud) and Robert Aramayo (Game of Thrones) as elves Galadriel and Elrond and Sir Lenny Henry as Sadoc Burrows, all eyes will be on whether the show – reported to have cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars – will stick the landing, as fans of this treasured franchise are known to be very discerning. Watch the trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power here.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
The Son review: 'A flawed film with a kind heart'
What does it mean to be a good father? It's a question many who find themselves responsible for caring for a child will ask themselves at one point or another. Is it a case of not repeating the same mistakes as your own parents? Is it about listening to and believing in your child when they're at their most emotionally vulnerable? Or is it obeying what authority figures say is best, even if you risk feeling cruel for siding with a stranger over your own flesh and blood? Parenthood – with all its various obstacles that require careful moral unknotting – is the subject of Florian Zeller's The Son, a well-meaning but hokey drama based on his own stage play Le Fils.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Why are we so fascinated by identical twins?
o re twins are being born now than ever before. The number has soared in the past 20 years, according to the Twins Trust, a UK organisation which supports twins and their families, with two of the suggested factors for this being the rising use of IVF and the fact more people are starting their families later in life: multiple embryos are often implanted in IVF and older mothers tend to have elevated follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) levels, both things which make the chance of having twins more likely. However the number of identical twin births has not climbed so dramatically. The likelihood of having identical twins is about one in 250 (or 0.5%). Their relative rarity is just one of the reasons why identical twins have fascinated writers through history.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: At Eternity’s Gate
There may never have been a painter as sure of his artistic vision, yet as emotionally needy, psychologically troubled and socially isolated as Vincent van Gogh. Willem Dafoe’s magnificent performance captures every bit of the artist’s complexity in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate. With stunning visuals and a judicious balance of poetry and drama, Schnabel draws us into both Van Gogh’s genius and his tortured life.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
White Noise is 'thrillingly original'
t seems like no time at all since Adam Driver was playing the embodiment of cocky youth in Noah Baumbach's While We're Young (2014). But one of the great things about Baumbach's films is that as he gets older, his angst-ridden characters get older, too: with each new project he shines a light on the worries of another age bracket. In his brutal 2019 divorce drama, Marriage Story, Driver played a director who wasn't a hip young flavour-of-the-month any more. And now, in Baumbach's latest brilliant comedy, which opened the Venice Film Festival, Driver is middle-age incarnate: a university professor with thinning hair, a thickening waistband, and a looming awareness that he might be closer to death than birth. The role suits him so beautifully that awards nominations should be heading his way.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Mary Poppins Returns
How do you make a sequel to one of the most beloved live-action children’s films ever? For several decades, the answer was: you don’t. Mary Poppins was released in 1964, but even though the source novel’s author PL Travers wrote seven further books about the Banks family’s magical nanny, no one attempted to follow a film that was, to use Mary’s own phrase, practically perfect in every way.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
The Jurassic Park film that was never made
The structure is so ancient that it feels almost prehistoric. Some people take a trip to a remote island, they see some dinosaurs, and then the dinosaurs try to have them for lunch. It’s what happened in Jurassic Park in 1993, and by the time the first sequel came out in 1997, the screenplay was already poking fun at how formulaic it was. “‘Ooh, aah’, that’s how it always starts,” says Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. “Then later there’s running and screaming.” How right he was. But this self-knowledge didn’t stop the makers of Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World (2015) sticking to the formula, and it wasn’t until the second half of this year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that the series found somewhere else to go.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Destroyer
Karyn Kusama’s moody Los Angeles cop thriller, Destroyer, is destined to be remembered as the film in which one of Hollywood’s most famously glamorous and elegant superstars, Nicole Kidman, demonstrated just how unglamorous and inelegant she could be. Kidman plays LAPD detective Erin Bell, a name which makes her sound like a Disney character, when she is actually the exact opposite. A gaunt, alcoholic wreck who tends to sleep either in a bar or in her car, Erin has papery, liver-spotted skin; cracked lips; bags over as well as under her eyes; and a mop of greying hair that would probably digest any comb that went near it. Whenever she trudges towards her colleagues, they swear under their breath and back away, mainly because she has become such an embarrassing liability, but partly, you assume, because of the stench that clings to her black leather jacket.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
