Tag: series review

Four Weddings and a Funeral: Season 1 Review

~ Metacrone

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Four Weddings and a Funeral was a 1994 romantic comedy film directed by Mike Newell, written by Richard Curtis and starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell. This is a review of the 2019 Hulu miniseries created by Mindy Kaling and Matt Warburton which reimagined that film. Richard Curtis was one of the executive producers on the miniseries and Andie MacDowell appeared in the show, so the Hulu version has the blessings of the original creators. While the miniseries is an homage to the original film and Richard Curtis’ other romantic comedies, it’s not a direct retelling.

Four Weddings and a Funeral: The Miniseries is its own original creative entity which uses the framework established in the movie of a group of college friends who meet up again in London over a period of years at, yes, four weddings and one funeral, to tell its story. But the story it tells is more of an updated Jane Austen mash up than a new Richard Curtis film. It’s sort of Bridget Jones Diary and Clueless meet Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually.

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Moonlight Season 1/ Full Series Review

~ Metacrone

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Before Alex O’Loughlin moved to Hawaii and became a cop, he was a vampire private investigator in LA. Moonlight was a 2007-08 vampire noir, 16 episode CBS series starring O’Loughlin, Jason Dohring (iZombie, Veronica Mars), Sophia Myles (A Discovery of Witches) and Shannon Sossamon (Wayward Pines, Sleepy Hollow). It was created by Ron Koslow and Trevor Munson. The entire season can currently be streamed for free on the CWSeed site.

Moonlight takes place in present day (2007) LA, where vampire Mick St John (Alex O’Loughlin) works as a private investigator who solves murders. He also keeps an eye on a young woman he rescued as a young child from a kidnapping more than 20 years ago, Beth Turner (Sophia Myles). Beth is now an intrepid investigative reporter for up and coming online journalism outfit Buzzwire. Though Beth remembers her kidnapping, she initially doesn’t know who Mick is or that he’s watching her.

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Netflix’s Daybreak Season 1 Review

~ Metacrone

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Simply put, Daybreak, Netflix’s post apocalyptic Red Dawn meets Ferris Bueller zombie teen comedy series, is a hot mess. Or, as we used to say in the golden heyday of Tumblr of yore, a problematic favorite.

I purposefully stuffed way too many descriptors into the first paragraph and tried way too hard to sound cool and am now being way too obvious about every single thing I’m doing and speaking in the first person while breaking the 4th wall, in order to give you a sense of what might have been charming in Daybreak but is really just tres, tres obnoxious.

Daybreak, the TV show, is based on the comic book of the same name by Brian Ralph and created by Brad Peyton and Aron Eli Coleite. Like the comic, the main character is a self insert first person narrator who just happens to be a North American straight white male. I haven’t read the comic yet, but from what I understand, it’s more contemplative than the series, described in one article as being more like the 2009 Viggo Mortenson film The Road than Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Or, you could say more like the original, 1979 Mad Max film.

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Carnival Row Season 1 Review

~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

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In the world of Carnival Row, Amazon Prime Video’s latest entry into the fantasy epic genre, the darkness is rising. You probably didn’t notice it before if you’re human, so it’s presence now feels new. But in actuality, the darkness has always been around, and has been pretty active for a long time. If you aren’t human, you’ve always known this, since for many years humans have been busy colonizing nonhuman lands, exterminating nonhuman sentient species, and exploiting whoever’s left alive.

We aren’t given much backstory on the whole extermination and exploitation thing, and since Carnival Row is an original story rather than being based on a more detailed original source, such as a book series, we’re left to fill in a lot of blanks. The metaphors are pretty on the nose, so on the surface that’s not hard to do.

When you stop to think about it, even by the end of the season, the entirely fictional geographical and political worlds of Carnival Row are left exceedingly vague for a show that’s supposedly about political issues which affect refugees. For example, we’re never shown a map, despite shipping routes and battle strategies being discussed repeatedly, providing ample opportunities for the characters to casually flash one.

And I never did figure out who the Pact were, the enemy who drive Vignette, our heroine, from her homeland. I just mentally inserted “Evil Empire” whenever I heard their name. In the long term, their sole purpose was to create refugees, so they didn’t matter enough for me to bother with learning anything more. After that, in a twist of fate, the Burgue, who were supposed to be the refugees’ friends, become the “Evil Empire”.

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