Quick Shots - 23/Jan/2017

'Travelers' Season 1

In the wake of the 'OA', I then moved on to watching this Netflix series. Somebody said 'OA' was Philip K. Dick-ian, but actually this series is a lot more Philip K. Dick.




There's also a very special girl whose nose bleeds.
Pithy observations aside, it has some cool characters doing cool stuff. The notion of the consciousness transmigrating through time and quantum entanglement is pretty cool. Put it this way, I wanted know what happens next right from the start to the end of season 1. It's laudable that Netflix i pumping out this much original content that's actually interesting.

'Inferno'





Dan Brown's Professor Robert Langdon rides again. Somehow I don't think they'll be making many more of these. It's really straining credulity with the premise and the action sequences are lame, while the repeated premise of solving puzzles is looking very tired in this film. In fact they're not even solving the puzzle of embedded into an old text with this one; they're solving some puzzles left behind by a guy who vandalised Renaissance Art.

Otherwise it's the same old Tom Hanks who is essentially doing more Tom Hanks acting: Solid and maybe a little boring. Felicity Jones, star rising with 'Rogue One' adds a dose of cheese. I don't know that she's such a great actress.

'Designated 'Survivor' - Season 1




So I started watching this thing on the day Donald Trump got inaugurated and it got me thinking that maybe this is a kind of accidental critique.
So far I'm through 4 episodes. The impression I'm getting is that it's a bit of a Democrat's dream where all the crappy politicians get killed in one fell swoop and there's one decent guy in government who happens to survive.

Political legitimacy rears its ugly head as the issue du jour, and the inevitable situation room thing where the President has to dig in hard against a gun ho general. The cliches are all there, but it's interesting because the White House is currently occupied by a bloke who has even less of an idea than Kiefer Sutherland's character. At least Tom Kirkman was a cabinet secretary. The Donald has never held any public office. The series reminds us that it was never truer to say "I've got a bad feeling about this."