Change Your Image
tcc-6
Reviews
Serenity (2005)
Poor quality film from poor quality television
Everything in this picture has been done before. It is clichéd and weak. Whedon serves up the same stuff he's put on TV for years. There is no originality, no innovation, no drive to make a great film. There is only a childish raging against the networks and, by extension, the audience who rejected his work.
Serenity leaves me feeling bored and tired. It is very quotable, but it lacks substance. The space western was done to death in the seventies, while later revivals have fallen flat. The film is schizophrenic, not sure what it is of what it is meant to be doing. Is it space opera? Yes it is, but it is poor space opera. It feels as though someone has cloned Star Wars, but has lost the heart of it.
Rent this movie on a wet Sunday afternoon when there is not much on. Don't waste a your money of the cinema ticket.
American Playhouse: The Prodigious Hickey (1987)
Outstanding piece of drama from a young cast
It blew me away. It reminded me so much of Stalky and Co. I've been hunting down the book for years.
There is a lovely depth to the characters, that their often shallow exteriors conceal from first glance. Hickey's organisation is superb and when it fails, like Doc's experiments, it fails spectacularly. The masters are cunning, but unable to read between the lines, even when handed the evidence. Perhaps, it lacks some of the poignancy of Stalky, but it retains the levity of an Enid Blyton tale while making sure you know that these lads will be a force to be reckoned with in later life.
All round good laugh.
T.
Morons from Outer Space (1985)
Good piece of British comedy.
It's British, so it's not going to look or feel like the American style of sci-fi comedy. It compares well with Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest. The humour is subtle and ironic, it spends as much time sending up the tabloids and cold war paranoia as it does spoofing contemporary sci-fi. It also goes down the one road that sci-fi doesn't travel very often: What if we are well up the food chain compared to our neighbours? The answer it arrives at is "Then we are in trouble." Above all this is as gentle as ET, with a big heart and a good moral at the end of the story. If you like this movie, try the 2000AD strip 'Skizz' a much darker treatment, but again from the alien point of view.
T.