Welcome To The August 5th Edition

The Couch Potato Chronicles is a review column I started back at the end of the last century, as you can tell from the clip art constructed logo. It began as an emailed PDF, then became a Facebook feature, in a much shorter format, but since there were no cute kitty cat videos, people didn’t really read it much. Then I found beBee, which appears to be the ideal venue for it.

This will be a regular feature here. Either once a week or biweekly depending on what else is going on. Hope you enjoy it.

TRANCE, WEIRD & WEIRDER (NETFLIX)

Danny Boyle is one of better British cinema directors around. His first big movie, Trainspotting which was about junkies in Edinburgh, put him on the map a someone to watch.
Since then his career has been quite eclectic, and included movies like Slumdog Millionaire and Millions.

Trance is a movie about the theft of a 30 million pound painting. But as it progresses it reveals layer after layer of pretty bizarre stuff.
In the film James McAvoy plays an auctioneer at a posh London auction house a la Southebys, who gets involved with some shady characters, steals a painting and then, after getting whacked on the head, has a mental block about where he hid the painting.
So the thieves he’s working with turn to a hypnotist to help pull the info out of his head. This is not a spoiler, just the jumping off point, because this film is way more complex than it looks in the first 20 minutes.
It reminded me a bit of the Christopher Nolan film, Memento, but complex in a totally different way. This film, at least to me, was a riveting piece of entertainment. Riveting mainly because when I thought I had it all figured out…guess what, I didn’t. This is worth checking out if you like violent, sexy, really well directed caper flicks.

HELL ON WHEELS – A FOND FAREWELL (NETFLIX)

Over the years, AMC has been responsible for some pretty nifty series like Breaking Bad, the great espionage series Rubicon, the first of the modern day zombie series The Walking Dead, the great 80s tech drama Halt and Catch Fire, and my hands down favourite…Hell on Wheels.

If you have been sailing around the world in a 24 foot sloop for the past 6 years you might have missed this series. But it’s one of the best period westerns you will ever see.
On the larger scale it’s basically about the building of the railroad across the US frontier after the Civil War. The Union Pacific coming from the east and the Central Pacific coming from San Francisco.
On the human scale, it’s about a Confederate officer named Cullen Bohannon, whose wife and children are brutally murdered by retreating Union soldiers and the end of the Civil War. So his story is one of revenge. But in the process, he ends up working on the railway, and his story becomes the real narrative thread here.

Hell on Wheels, is actually the name given to the tent city that moved along with the railway as it made its relentless way west.
There are an amazing number of other characters in Hell on Wheels who in fact represent their own stories, all of which are masterfully woven together throughout the 6 seasons of this incredible series.
The main stars of the series are Anson Mount who plays Bohannon and Colm Meaney, who has never really been out of work since his days on Star Trek, as the ruthless Central Pacific railroad owner, Thomas Durrant.
This is a very complex, very gritty, highly detailed and well put together fictionalized telling of the building of the transcontinental railroad and the kind of people who it took get the job done.
Though series like these often fly under the radar, they are seriously good stuff, and well worth watching in order from the beginning. (Available on Netflix).

THE LATE, LATE SHOW WITH JAMES CORDON– FUNNY SHIT (NETWORK TV)

Several months ago when British actor, James Cordon was awarded the host job to replace crazy Colin Ferguson on the Late, Late Show, I thought, hmmm…pretty good British character actor, but does he have the legs to handle the rigors of a five night a week interview show?

I watched the opening night episode and concluded that he was a little wet behind the ears. So I decided to wait a while and then, being a bit of an idiot, proceeded to forget all about it until the Great Late July Early August TV Drought was upon us.
So on Tuesday night I recorded another episode. This one had Matt Damon, who is a genuine A-Level guest.
I started watching with a bit of skepticism, which is pretty much my main character trait. But it really didn’t take very long for Mr. Cordon to prove to me that he had the chops. He proudly reported that this was his 102nd show, and I thought, oh man, where does the time go?
Being a Brit and a talk show host, you could see from the way the show is set up that he is obviously a big fan of Graham Norton, who kind of revolutionized the talk show genre, over in England by bringing our multiple guests and skillfully managing the conversation between them all.
This was the structure of Mr Cordon’s show, and it really worked well. Matt Damon was on the couch with another actor I had never heard of named Keegan-Michael Key, and they got along famously. It really felt like somebody was getting ready to tell a fart joke all the way through the interview.
But these kinds of shows all thrive on the chemistry between the host and the guests and James Cordon is one very likeable host. When you are built that way, the chances of your being able to pull off something special every night are pretty damn good.
One of the things that Matt Damon brought up was a segment that Mr Cordon did for his show, that gets millions of YouTube hits. It’s called Carpool Karaoke.
So after the show was done we cranked up the Apple TV and watched a couple of these vids. And they were freakin’ hilarious.
The two we watched were with Stevie Wonder and Elton John respectively.
In between wailing away at the artist’s greatest hits, Cordon manages to get in a pretty decent mini interview.. But the net effect is that this is all a hell of a lot of fun.
So James Cordon and the Late Late Show are now officially on my radar. After that, it just depends on who the guests are, and who he’s Carpool Karaoke-ing with.

As usual, comments, Likes (ie Relevents) and shares to your favourite hives and peeps are always welcome.
Tune in next time when I may or may not be reviewing the Rio Olympics.

If you want to read more of my stuff, you can do that here:

https://www.bebee.com/publisher/@jim-murray

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https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/

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All content copyright 2016 Jim Murray

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