Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - Signature (Season 9)

Apparently this episode was "too controversial" to show at the normal timeslot for SVU. I had thought it might have something to do with the fact that they had finished showing Medium and were now showing Criminal Intent and so pushed SVU back. But I'm wrong because next week's episode is also too controversial. Imagine that; two too controversial episodes consecutively. Shocking.

This week's episode was really good, though. Despite the fact that three of the detective were missing, it did mean that Mariska Hargitay and Adam Beach got a chance to carry the episode, while B D Wong actually appeared in the episode (although as usual all he did was speak into a dictophone and bitch about other people). Erika Christensen was the most special guest actress for the episode playing a FBI agent who is seeking a serial killer.

Normally I give the top marks to SVU episodes when they actually make you think, but this episode didn't really do that. What sold it for me was the fact that there were a number of twists that I didn't actually see coming. The discovery that the serial killer was actually one of the murder victims discovered in the first few moments was quite, quite clever, but what was handled even better was the discovery that the person who alerted them to the victims was none other than Christensen's character. The discovery was well directed and in spite of Christensen's somewhat subdued performance, she does bring the character alive at the end. After a fashion.

What is perhaps the most interesting thing about this episode, particularly as Channel Ten's broadcast has been out of sync, is that we've seen Casey Novak lose her job because she chose to bypass the criminal justice system to bring someone down. Ironically in this episode we see Casey chastise Benson because Christensen's character did exactly that - and indeed at the end Christensen's character even goes so far as to say that one shouldn't become a monster in order to fight monsters. Ahh...hypocrisy thy name is Casey Novak.

"A"

Law & Order: Criminal Intent - Amends (Season 7)

It's taken a while but happily Criminal Intent has returned to the airwaves of Australia with a new season. Clearly in between time Vincent D'Onofrio has been eating all the pies because it looks as though it's been necessary to widen the door spaces for him to enter the sets. Greyer and fatter, poor old Goren looks in the worst shape he's looked in for the past seven years.

Over the past few years Criminal Intent has become the least popular of the Law & Order franchise and with Warren Leight taking over from Rene Balcer as the showrunner, the series has had some serious changes (and I'm not just talking about the introduction of a second team of detectives). Criminal Intent has gone away from showing crimes from the perspective of the criminals (hence the intent, or mens rea) and now spends a little more time on the lives of the detectives involved. I have to admit I'm not a fan, particularly when the crimes the detectives are investigating suddenly start to involve their family members.

Regardless of this, the first episode of the new season kicks off with a little case that just happens to be about the murder of the detective who was the last partner of Eames' late husband. To the surprise of virtuarlly nobody the case ends up being about the murder of Eames' late husband.

Vincent D'Onofrio still looks a little distracted as Goren these days and lot of the bizarreness of Goren seems to have seeped away. The curious head mannerisms have been replaced by just general crazy behaviour (watch him he describes himself as the "whack job"), but happily there are a few moments when the real Goren surfaces. This comes to the fore particularly when they look into the murder of Eames' husband.

Kathryn Erbe on the other hand never seems to look out of place as Eames and while the downsides to having to sit through the detectives emotional baggage has already been described, on the plus side it does give the actors the chance to show something more than just a dry, laconic wit. Eames gets the chance to show how much the murder of her husband affected her over the past few years, and so for that it's almost worth it.

I still can't say that I have particularly warmed to Captain Ross (and precisely why is the Chief of Detectives in Criminal Intent a different man to the one in Special Victims Unit?) and he clearly hasn't warmed to Goren. There is a nice moment when Eames effectively suggests that Goren is virtually autistic and unable to cope with change very well.

Next week is Logan and his partner, and I'm frankly hoping that with this episode we've left behind the emotional angst and can move on to just solving crime.

"B+"

Hancock

So perhaps it's not so surprising that dear old Will Smith has jumped on the bandwagon in regards to superhero movies. It's the kind of thing he does, bandwagon jumping, and when I went to the movies today I noticed posters for Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight and, of course, Hancock. Not so much a bandwagon as a full blown band-train. There are worse things you could be jumping onto.

The movie is slightly odd though in that it feels a little as though someone had a couple of ideas, neither one of which filled out a movie and so they were joined together. Now let me stress here, though, the two ideas do indeed go together it's just that, apparently, the thrust of the movie is that Hancock is desperate to find out who he is and why he's alone. However, none of that comes across in the first half of the movie, which is actually about a hero who is a loser and fights to better himself.

Two ideas, ya see, and despite the fact they do go together, they are presented as relatively independent.

Will has been stretching his acting for quite some time, trying to prove he's more than just a quick talking black actor, and he's usually pretty bang on the money with his choices because of late his acting has been outstanding and more than just a little melancholic, what with The Pursuit of Happyness and I Am Legend. Hancock is a down and out, alcoholic, very melancholic character. When the movie opens though you have difficulty in understanding why the general populace is pretty sick of a guy who, in order to fight crime, causes nine million dollars worth of damage. The decision to put someone like that in jail is not at all unbelievable, but its quite interesting to see when he's in there that he's there entirely by choice because there is nothing the law can do to actually hold him.

Jason Bateman plays the guy who believes in Hancock, while Charlize Theron plays his wife. Bateman is fantastic, but Theron is outstanding. She is absolutely gorgeous and brings a great deal of elegance to the parts she plays. Generally I have to say that Theron is criminally underused in Hollywood. The twist at the end gives Theron a little more chance to have fun with her character and bring a lot more depth to her, making you go back over the movie and think about her earlier scenes. It's good stuff.

With superhero movies being so prevelent these days, and the desire, particularly from Marvel, but even from DC to a certain degree with the new Batman series, to make those movies so real, Hancock is perhaps the realest of the lot. It's a good movie and a great concept but perhaps its time to remember that these movies are grounded in fantasy to a degree and Hancock, as great as it is, is the end of the scale that we should start to move back from.

"A"

NCIS: In The Zone (Season 5)

So clearly something is going with NCIS Assistant Director Leon Vance who has turned up for the second episode in a row, looking mean and bossing Gibbs around. Is there change in the air? If I'm honest, though, I've never really been comfortable with Lauren Holly's Director Shepard (who isn't in tonight's episode) although maybe I'm just suffering from Alan Dale withdrawl...

One of the problems with the new series of NCIS being broadcast on Ten is that they are broadcasting episodes from season two straight after them, which means that I am constantly comparing the way NCIS is now to the way it was "back in the day". Tonight was particularly painful as "In The Zone" was followed immediately by "Doppelganger". In The Zone is an episode about...well about a petty officer who was in a complicated land deal with someone who then got one of the other POs to arrange to have first PO killed. Doppelganger is about computer fraud, but more importantly than that it is the infamous episode where the team discover that there is another team who are essentially their doppelgangers. The first one is a little po-faced and severe, the second, hilarious and thoughtful. The first one has Ziva, the second has Kate.

Oh, how I miss Kate.

And that worries me slightly. I love NCIS, but I find that already I'm "looking back" at the good old days. I saw already, and I mean really only in season five. This wasn't a problem that I had in the previous two seasons, even though I was still missing Kate, the fact is I didn't find it so much of a hurdle to overcome. Now I feel NCIS is just retreading the same old ground and not actually achieving anything new. Certainly it was interesting to see Tony go out into Baghdad to do his investigation, but when the episode essentially focuses on the character of Intel Analyst Nikki when they have seven good leads that they can play with...

You're a great actor Mark Harmon, but sadly it seems that the show without Donald P Bellisario's guidance has not been as brilliant as it once was. It looks as though it might be time for something to severly shake the team up, and maybe it might be time to say goodbye to Ziva.

"B"

Kung Fu Panda

With Pixar pretty much dominating the CG animated movie scene (and even though I am a huge Pixar fan) it's nice to see that the other CG animation houses aren't giving up. Dreamworks seemed to be riding just a little too high on the Shrek wave, so it's nice to see that their new movie isn't about the great green giant, but sadly it is still about a group of animals - imagination is what makes Pixar the head CG animation house, guys. That said, Kung Fu Panda isn't crap.

One of the nicer things about animated movie is that they are one of the few moveis that can manage to bring in a large cast of big name actors - joining Jack Black in this one are Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Dustin Hoffman, Lucy Liu and Seth Rogen, along with Ian McShane who, although not a huge name, appears to have replaced Brian Cox as the English actor who is being cast in every movie these days, particularly if they are family movies. However, big names are all very well, but in animated movies the best actors are those with the most distinctive voices and as such Jack Black shines with his exceptionally distinctive voice, alongside McShane whose voice just reeks of evil. Sadly, the majority of the rest of the cast don't really stand out at all. Don't get me wrong, they are all accepatable in their roles, but they really pack a punch. That said, Hoffman's comic timing is exceptional.

The animation in the movie is, as usual, excellent, but let's face it, these days if the animation isn't above the norm the audience just wouldn't tolerate it. What actually becomes the question is how far can you styalise the characters before they become something that the audience finds ridiculous. Fortunately that doesn't become a problem in the movie.

The movie itself is well written and quite funny, but it's a traditional sort of "misfit finds his true calling" kind of movie with the misfit in question having a master who believes in him and a rival who doesn't, but ultimately accepts she is wrong when the misfit beats the big bad villain.

Bearing in mind that the true audience for this movie is, if not children then definitely family and as such there is really nothing wrong with this movie. You could do worse than taking your kids to go see it.

"B+"

Get Smart

One of the problems with doing a movie based on source material that is video rather than literary, is that the original material is better defined in the video regard - obviously. People's expectations are a little more set in stone and when attempting to bring the material into a new decade, particularly one that's over forty years apart (well from the original anyway), you have the joint task of pleasing hard core fans and appealing to a new audience. And, more importantly than that, trying to make it relevent to the present day. By that very definition it's almost impossible to make a completely faithful film adaptation of Get Smart.

When watching this movie I got the exact same vibes I was getting from The Pink Panther remake, but perhaps because I wasn't a hardcore Get Smart fan (as opposed to being quite a fan of The Pink Panther) I wasn't as bothered about it. Similarities between the two show the characters as more competent than their original counterparts, ultimately saving the day not because they stumbled on the solution, but because they actually were capable enough to work it out; the movies act as origin stories for the characters - neither of which had an origin in their original run; and both see the lead characters disgraced in the eyes of their bosses before getting help from a person in the organisation to save the day. But I realise now that Get Smart, like The Pink Panther, actually does have its heart in the right place.

Max Smart is more a Steve Carell character than a Don Adams character in this movie, though the traditional Adams traits still remain - Smart is still pompous, useless with gadgets and incapable of believing he is wrong; and the old jokes such as "missed it by that much" and "would you believe..." are both present. Rather nicely Smart ends up in the car that the Adams Smart used to drive in the television series, in a neat setup for a clever joke. Steve Carell, aside from having a passing resemblance to Don Adams, brings Smart to life very well, not mimicing Adams, but certainly maintaining the spirit of the original.

In much the same way, Anne Hathaway (easily the most gorgeous woman in Hollywood) does the same for 99 - although in the scene where 99 wears a short, silver dress with a bob wig, her resemblance to Barbara Feldon is uncanny. However, the origin of her character is vastly different to the original - now a brilliant field agent who can't keep her hands off her fellow agents it would seem.

Other characters are still portrayed excellently - Siegfried, Larabee, Shtarker, and of course the Chief, brought superbly back to life by the usually underrated Alan Arkin. Additionally, other Get Smart characters also have cameo appearances - Fang the dog, Agent 13 and Hymie (cast brilliantly as Patrick Warburton) - which help to remind us of the original television series.

But, of course, updating to present day means we have a rather large host of new characters including Agent 23 (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - though he doesn't call himself The Rock anymore it seems), Max's good friend and 99's former boyfriend; and Bruce and Lloyd, two scientists in CONTROL who help Smart out where possible and also develop Hymie.

One of the things that stood out for me personally was the amount of references to the James Bond movies, somewhat appropriate given that the original television series was a spoof of the aforementioned movies.

Get Smart is the kind of movie that will make you laugh a lot, but if you are one of those people who know exactly what the original series was like and you expect a remake of that you will be disappointed - but truth to tell, if you did get what you wanted, without that heavy dose of nostalgia, you'll would be just as disappointed.

"B"

Prom Night II

One of the many things that the Friday the 13th series was responsible for is the trend in the 80s to resurrect 70s horror movies and turn them into slasher series. Things such as Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both dying after sequels in the 70s, were brought back to life in the 80s as fairly straightforward slasher films, and, of course, they weren't the only ones. Someone, somewhere, thought that Prom Night was a movie that was apparently screaming for a sequel and so in 1987 we got one - albeit one that actually doesn't have any relation to the original at all. In fact, the only thing that ties the two movies together, aside from the title, is that someone gets killed and years later a killer tries to get revenge based on that death. In this case, however, the killer was the person who was killed - a slight twist.

In truth, this movie owes more to "A Nightmare On Elm Street" and "Carrie" than to the original "Prom Night". The opening sequence is very similar to Carrie, with a girl surrounded by fire on her prom; while various other sequences in the movie - most notably when the heroine is sucked into the blackboard - are very reminsicient of the killer dream sequences of A Nightmare On Elm Street, while the ending couldn't mimic ANOES more so if it tried.

Sadly, aside from those entertaining aspects, the movie generally is pretty poor. Acting-wise, no one really makes an attempt and even Michael Ironside seems to be a little bored by his part. It's sometimes easy to forget nudity was a mainstay of horror movies in the eighties, and so when the leading lady gives some full frontal nudity during a locker room sequence, it seems a little surprising. Sadly, nudity doesn't save her performance which is pretty much crap. It's difficult to feel any sympathy for her and when she disappears about two thirds into the movie, surprisingly you don't tend to notice.

The film is great in a "crap but entertaining" way, but it's nothing special and is actually not as good as the original, despite the more fantastical elements introduced, which I'm more of a fan of.

"C"