Category Archives: TV

TV Tuesday: Person of Interest–and books of interest

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Each week, we’ll spotlight a current television show that we love, and the books that you just might like. Here are this week’s reading suggestions based on…

Person of Interest:

This show stands out for having an incredibly silly premise with a mind-blowingly fun execution. Reese (Jim Caviezel) is a modern-day Batman running around New York City battling crime bosses, saving lives, dodging his ex-CIA handlers, and hiding from the police. Oh and he stops cars full of bad guys with his rocket launcher.

In the meantime, his paranoid genius sidekick and tech support, Finch (Michael Emerson), uses a supercomputer to come up with the names of the people who are going to be killed in the next few days. It’s Reese’s job to stop that from happening.

And if Reese just happens to end up shooting a bunch of bad guys in the process, well, looks like the job has perks.

In books too, I have it bad for badass killer characters with traumatic pasts. Ever since Salvatore’s Drizzt D’Urden and Ludlum’s Jason Bourne, I’ve been infatuated with smart-talking, quick-thinking, fast-stabbing characters like Reese. There aren’t a lot of well-written badasses out there, so in my reading habits, I often default to other storylines to get my fix.

Here are a few character-driven book suggestions involving some seriously awesome protagonists:

Continue reading →

TV Tuesday: Castle, with a side of Heat Wave

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In an interview published just before Castle first premiered four seasons ago, creator Andrew Marlowe delightedly told eager fans that the protagonist’s name may have chosen specifically because when it’s shouted loud and fast, it sounds like a choice piece of profanity.  Any show that has that level of levity built right into the title was surely meant to be a winner.

Four seasons later, and Castle remains one of Monday’s highest ranking shows. This is in no small part to the leads,  the fierce Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) and the endlessly-charming  Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion), who have created the best will-they-just-go-make-out-already pairings this side of Boothe and Bones.  Add in a stellar supporting cast (I have a special place in my heart of Ryan and Espisito-centric shenanigans), and this lighthearted cop drama is one of the best studies in character development out there.

Castle-lovers, here are our reading picks for you… Continue reading →

[ Book Watching ] The Hunger Games, from Book to Movie

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Warning: This review will contain spoilers for both the book and movie versions of The Hunger Games.

One of the greatest challenges of taking a story from book to screen is figuring out what to change. A movie’s narrative needs to stand on its own, working under the assumption that there will be people in the audience who have not read the source material.

In recent years, we’ve seen this done to varying degrees of success. Atonement is a great example of an adaption done right: the end of the movie is completely different than that of the book (for good reason), but the endings had the same thematic feel and impact. And early this March, our Pirate Canary told us about the successful plot-pruning and adaptation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Safran Foer.

Of course, then there are the oft-maligned Harry Potter adaptations (past about movie four), in which one too many subplots were left on the editing room floor and the narrative started to get shaky for anyone who wasn’t familiar with the books.

And then we have The Hunger Games, undoubtedly the most-anticipated movie so far in 2012. Would it succeed in capturing the harrowing, break-neck pace of Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster books? Or would it fall victim to too much cut, too little left? Continue reading →

TV Tuesdays: Supernatural, and a few books to hunt down

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Every Tuesday we spotlight a current television show–and the books that you just might like if you watch it. Here are this week’s reading suggestions based on…

Supernatural:

With openings that regularly scare the bajeezus out of me, Supernatural follows the life of two brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester, who hunt supernatural beasties for a living. Even as each episode drops us into a different life-death-undeath mystery, the long-term plot trajectories pull me (and the Winchesters)  into tense stand-offs against demonic powers, soul-stealing devil deals, Armageddon-hungry angels, and ancient pagan gods.

Well into its seventh season, the show maintains a great balance of kick-butt action, character growth, development, and angst (yes!). More than that, the show isn’t afraid of flat out making light of itself in between the heavy doses of loss, disillusionment, and self-deception.

So if you watch Supernatural, here are a few books you just might wanna stock up on for the coming apocalypse: Continue reading →

[Small Chirp] Nathan Fillion is a Greek God

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Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Castle) has been cast as Hermes in the upcoming Percy Jackson sequel, The Sea of Monsters. For someone who is already worshiped as a Geek God, it’s only appropriate that he should land the role of a Greek god.

Hermes is a key supporting player in the Percy Jackson series written by Rick Riordan, as well as being the pivotal point for the main source of conflict in the books. Herme’s demigod son, Luke, becomes the main villain of the series, and the father-son dynamic between Luke and Hermes is the big reason why Luke goes over to the Dark Side in the first place. (Ha, I never realized how very Star Wars that is).

Depending on how the part is written, it may actually turn into a more melancholy role than we are used to seeing from Fillion of late. After all, absentee parenting is a central theme of the books; the gods are often absent from the lives of their demigod children, when they aren’t simply negligent. No god feels that harder than Hermes as he watches his son fight for the other side. Continue reading →

TV Tuesdays: You know what you watch, but what should you read?

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Every Tuesday we’ll spotlight a current television show–and the books that you just might like if you watch it. Here are this week’s reading suggestions based on one of my favorites:

Fairly Legal:

I saw the second season premier a week before it hits USA Network Friday, and what can I say, the show just keeps getting better. The quirky, witty female lead, complicated family and relationship drama, a pseudo-detective element, and fast pacing has me hooked.  Kate Reed quit her job as a lawyer to become a mediator a the San Francisco law firm her late father started. Now she’s fighting the system (and her stepmother) one mediation at a time.

When it comes to books, Fairly Legal speaks to the part of me that wants to be entertained, particularly when reading to unwind into the wee hours of the morning.

Here are some of my favorite drama rom-com novels with strong female leads: Continue reading →

Book Watching: How a great book became a worthy movie

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is one of the five books I would want with me on a desert island (the others being The Little Prince, any anthology of Jeeves and Wooster stories by P.G. Wodehouse, the Bible, and the fat poetry anthology that lives by my bed). I first read the novel during the worst semester of my college years; my life was so stressful that I read five or ten pages at a time,  barely able to take the grief and pain in Jonathan Safran Foer’s writing. But it was so good that I could not give it up, even when it sent me to bed shaking.

The story, for those who don’t know, is about Oskar Schell, a precocious, possibly autistic nine-year-old boy whose father dies in the WTC on 9/11. His father had played scavenger hunt games with him, so when Oskar finds a key hidden in an envelope labeled “Black” with his father’s things, he takes it as a clue that the last and most important hunt is still waiting for him.

He takes off on a solo mission to ask everyone in New York with the last name “Black” if they know anything about the key. Interlaced with Oskar’s journey to find his father in the boroughs of New York is the story of his grandfather, a man who’s lost both his family and the ability to speak, and his grandmother, the sister of her husband’s true love.

Jonathan Safran Foer doesn’t flinch in the face of emotion, which I find wonderful in the Age of Irony, and he also does some typographical things that feel emotionally powerful, rather than gimmicky. So you can imagine the curdled blend of hope and preemptive disappointment I carried with me into the theater to see the movie adaptation. Continue reading →

[ Book-watching ] Sherlock Holmes is kind of an asshole

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I have a confession that will likely knock me down several literary pegs: I’ve never read a single Sherlock Holmes story.

Now, that isn’t to say that I’m totally ignorant on the subject. I’ve watched the newest BBC re-visioning of the character, sat through several lectures on him in college lit courses, and–of course–pretty much have the Wishbone episode of “The Hounds of Baskerville” memorized. But as far as actually picking up the source material, I’ve just never really been interested.

But in order to fulfil my book-watching duties for Game of Shadows, the most recent installment of the Robert Downey  Jr. version of the character, I decided to suck it up and grab a recording of  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes off Audible. I only made it about halfway through the third story before I came to the follow conclusion: Sherlock Holmes is kind of a pretentious dick.

“Well duh,” says my roommate when I unveil this revelation. “That’s sort of the point of the character. He’s wicked smart and not afraid to show off his brains.”

“But he’s a jerk!” I counter. “How did he get to be such a popular heroic character?”

“Because everyone loves a smartass.”

That I definitely could disagree with. And it explains why I like the visual versions of Holmes more. I don’t like my literary characters being smart-mouthed unless they regularly pay for such lip (see: Harry Dresden). With Holmes, it appears that he can be smart allecky as can be and never pay a price (note: as I’ve only actually listened to one-tenth of one book, this assumption may be very, very wrong). Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed Game of Shadows so much; every punch Holmes received was well-deserved.

Game of Shadows picks up not too terribly long after the events in the first film, but much has changed.  Holmes is tipping farther into the land of manic genius as he tries to unravel the person behind the rash of terrorist bombings that have taken place throughout London and other major cities in Europe.  Enter Professor Moriarty, played wonderfully by Jared Harris, who sets into motion a frantic trip around Europe to not only stop the continent from going to war, but also save what Holmes holds most dear: namely a highly perturbed Dr. John Watson.

One of the biggest complaints from the original movie was the Holmes was far too much of an action hero. Purists (chief among them being Canary the First) wanted their Holmes to be just as he was in the books: battling only with brains and never with fists. That makes for fairly boring cinema. However, I feel as though director Guy Ritchie took some of the braying to heart. There are more sequences of Holmes precisely dissecting a fight before it happens, filmed through neat slow-motion shots while Holmes gives a running internal dialogue of his predicted moves. The mystery in this film is also much more complex than the first, giving Holmes more time to shine as the brainiac he is.

There were times, though, when this giant mystery seemed to overwhelm the film. Part of what made the first movie so enchanting was the narrow focus–one case that never took the pair outside of London. The gallivanting trip across countries made for an awful lot of continual rehashing and re-positioning of plot that made a good chunk of the story seem like mere check marks on a list. Plot pieces didn’t always surface seamlessly; sometimes they had to be jerked full force into the light so that Holmes and Watson could move on to their next port of call.

That said, the movie was great fun. Jude Law’s Watson in particular was highly entertaining, with his dry humor and logic offering the perfect foil to Holmes insanity. Robert Downey Jr. is still the perfect casting for the role of Holmes (regardless of what Canary the First may think), striking just the right balance between crazy and gifted. And he’s still definitely an asshole. But at least he gets punched for it.

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Happy Birthday, Holmes! (Born January 6, 1854)

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Read More About What’s Hitting the Screens:

[ Small Chirp ] Ender Wiggin Finally Cast

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When they first announced they were going to adapt Ender’s Game into a movie, I was in high school and just finishing the book for the first time. Orson Scott Card’s masterpiece of science fiction* was the first book to truly blow my mind—and as such, I was not at all excited to see it transferred to the big screen.

That’s right. Not excited. And for one simple reason: who the hell could star as Ender Wiggin?

Ender is one of my favorite protagonists of all time. He is deeply introspective, wicked smart, and has such vast character growth throughout the novel that it is impossible not to become irreversibly connected with him.

Oh, and he’s only 8 years old.

Eight years old! What the hell kind of child star could ever pull off such gravitas—especially for the twist to end all twists at the end of the novel? At the time when the film was first announced in 2003, I remember Haley Joel Osment’s name being bandied about to star. But absolutely none of my high school friends (read: super duper nerds and Card elitists) thought that Osment—or any kid—could ever actually play Ender.

Seven years later, I assumed that the movie idea was totally dead in the water. Imagine my surprise when I got a text from one of my friends saying that Ender has finally been cast. But the surprise was quickly followed by dread. If there wasn’t a child star in 2003 that I could name who could play Ender, then there certainly wasn’t one in 2011 that I could think of…except… Continue reading →

Fantasy Watch: Fairy-Tales the New Trend?

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One day, they found themselves trapped in a world where all their happy endings were stolen. …our world.

Whenever a new paranormal, fantasy, or science fiction show appears on my TV watching radar, I pounce. This Halloween week, we have the pleasure of seeing two fairy-tale related premieres. Grimm, a detective-style story about a guy who can see the fairy tale creatures all around us, and Once Upon a Time, a story of fairy tale characters who find themselves in a small modern-day USA town.

The Story: Once Upon a Time…

…an evil queen got her revenge on Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas) by cursing them to be sent to a parallel world, their memories wiped and their happily ever afters gone.

“Where are we going?” Snow White demands, as a maelstrom of psychedelic curse clouds consumes the walls of the nursery.

“Somewhere horrible,” the Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla) says. “Absolutely horrible.”

Modern-day state of Maine.

But the story really starts when a ten year old kid (Jared Gilmore) takes a Greyhound bus upstate, turns up on bail bondswoman Emma’s  (Jennifer Morrison)  doorstep, and announces, “I’m your son.”

Not only that, he insists that Emma needs to come back with him to Storybrooke, Maine to save everyone from the Evil Queen’s curse. Everyone there is a fairy tale character, he tells her, and they’ve all forgotten who they are.

By pairing the two worlds, Once Upon a Time promises something to both fantasy-lovers and those of us in it for the mystery, drama, and small-town angst. Each episode will spend time in both worlds, moving Emma’s story forward, even as it retraces the steps of Snow White’s happy ending and the lead up to the Evil Queen’s curse.

The performance is top-notch, with the actors playing up the melodrama of their fairy tale roles, and the gritty humanity of their modern day counterparts. Robert Carlyle (Mr. Gold aka Rumpelstiltskin) plays his creepy, mad role to perfection and there’s something so adorable about Jennifer Morrison’s frustrated confusion as the little boy demands she return to Storybrooke with him.

And of course, my personal favorite bit of the first episode? The soundtrack as the Evil Queen crashes the wedding.  Dun-Dun Dun-Dun Dun-Dun.

The pilot creates and builds on its dramatic tension. We, as viewers, know the truth about Storybrooke and we also know who everyone’s alter ego is. But it’s a secret between us, the town mayor (aka Evil Queen), and the little boy. Fairyland itself incorporates an interesting cross-section of fairy tale characters: Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio exists alongside Brothers Grimm’s Snow White and Red Riding Hood, promising variety and vivid characters.

With its premiere on ABC netting over 12 million viewers, Once Upon a Time is sure to stick around. But only time will tell if it’s a story worth watching.