Coming from the critically respected US cable channel HBO and boasting producer (and director of the first episode) Martin Scorsese and creator Terence Winter (The Sopranos) there are high expectations for this show. The cast includes recent Golden Globe and SAG winner Steve Buscemi (Reservoir Dogs, Fargo), Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting, No Country For Old Men) Michael Pitt (Funny Games, The Dreamers), Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), Stephen Graham (This is England) and Michael K. Williams (The Wire) who further add to the sense of expectation.

So what’s it all about? The show begins on the eve of prohibition, when the sale, manufacture and consumption of alcohol was outlawed which gave birth to a new era of gangsters typically identified with Al Capone, New York and Chicago. The focus here is instead on the city that influenced the game Monopoly (which until recently I thought was originally based on London) and on Enoch “Nucky” Thompson (Buscemi), the city treasurer who controls the city through various means and sees what a great opportunity prohibition is for making some more hard cash.

What follows is a glorious trip through this period with no holds barred and features everything that you would expect from a HBO production; quality, violence, nudity and bad language. The pilot itself has the added flair of Scorsese at the helm and there are certain flourishes that are undoubtedly his. This first episode also took the title of the most expensive pilot in television history from Lost, which is evident in the sheer scope of the production. The sets and costuming are amazing and transport you to this time and as with what Mad Men did for the 1960s inspired fashion, recent catwalks and pages of fashion magazines such as Vogue have been over flowing with 1920s themed garments. Boardwalk Empire shows once again that television can produce work that is of the same standard of excellent film making and that it is a desirable field for top filmmakers such as Marin Scorsese.

Tune in for the 1920s decadence on Sky Atlantic, Every Tuesday ^starting at 9pm.

This posed a bit of a problem. For while the cult references are fun for those that get them the downside is there are several classic films that have been slightly, if not entirely spoiled for me by Simpsons episodes.
Damn you Groening!

Here’s a few. Obviously, Beware Spoliers!

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
As soon as I was introduced to Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest I thought he seemed vaguely familiar. Then when Jack Nicholson’s character tried to lift the water fountain my suspicions were confirmed. I had seen the Chief in ‘The Old Man and the ‘C’ Student’ where Bart takes over the retirement home. In the parody scene Chief Bromden throws a water cooler through the window to gain access both in and out of a room. Once I made the connection I knew that the Chief would ultimately use the water cooler to escape from the hospital. ENDING RUINED!

Reservoir Dogs
Right, it’s pretty hard to live a media saturated life without picking up some references to Reservoir Dogs. However, if you had seen the Itchy and Scratchy Parody ‘Reservoir Cats’ before Quentin Tarantino’s classic, then you would watch the original film with the knowledge that sooner or later someone is going to get their ear cut off while ‘Stuck In the Middle with You’ plays on the radio. What should be an absolute shocker of a scene becomes tame in a way that QT wouldn’t be happy about.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I learnt to stop loving and love the bomb.
Although not a strong enough spoiler to ruin Stanley Kubrick’s classic, the dream sequence in ‘Homer the Vigilant’ in which Homer rides a nuclear bomb still gives away a huge plot point in Dr. Strangelove. In fact, as soon as I saw Major Kong put on his cowboy hat in Act One, I instantly knew that he would be waving that same hat in the air while riding a bomb to the ground in Act Three.
This spoiler was particularly disappointing because throughout the entire film the characters are trying to prevent a nuclear explosion and the knowledge that one definitely occurs diminishes that overall suspense.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
As with most Simpson Halloween specials, ‘Terror at 5½ Feet’ is a parody of a former horror narrative. The classic Twilight Zone episode features William Shatner going nuts over a gremlin on the wing of the plane and the plot of both stories is almost identical.
However this case stands amongst the others as I think the Simpsons writers actually improve on the story when they show the return of the gremlin on the back of the ambulance that drive Bart away in the end. The Twilight Zone Episode on the other hand cuts away when the technicians find claw marks on the engine of the plane without the additional twist.

Planet of the Apes
Granted, you would have to be part of one of those lost South American tribes that still haven’t been introduced to Western civilisation to not know the twist of the Planet of the Apes. It’s on par with Bruce Willis revealed as a dead guy at the end of the Sixth Sense and Darth Vader fathering Luke Skywalker’s Star Wars. However, The Simpsons chose not only to reference the twist, but to make sure you will never forget it by instilling it into your brain through a rhyming jingle during Troy McClure’s musical ‘Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off!’

By the way, it was the Earth all along, if you didn’t know.

Okay. So there you are. If anything it proves I should be getting my fix of classic movies sooner but with so many it’s almost impossible to get there first. These are just personal examples from my experience and I’m obviously missing out on thousands of more references that are saturated within The Simpsons writing. That is after all, what makes it one of the cleverest sitcoms in television history.

Last night I did an almost unprecedented thing. Midway through the fourth and final part of a programme that I was looking forward to since its inception and ridiculously emotionally involved with from the first episode on, I switched off the TV and walked away. I simply couldn’t handle watching it. That programme was Shane Meadows This Is England ’86.

Thankfully this morning I summoned up the courage to continue and finished off what was quite possibly the greatest UK television programme of a generation.

Those familiar with Shane Meadows work (Twenty Four Seven, A Room For Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes) will have known to expect a certain amount of hardship in This Is England ’86. It’s predessecor, the 2006 film This Is England, centred around a young boy named Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) taken in and befriended by a group of skinheads. These were not the skinheads of The National Front but instead working class kids searching for an identity.

As with most of Meadows work we got to appreciate and laugh along with the jovaility of what is, in essence, a story of friendship and how these friends look out for each other. Until, that is, Combo (a convincingly frightening Stephen Graham), a racist skinhead from their past, returns with little purpose other than to infect the group. When he disrupts the equilibrium of the gang, all hell brakes loose.

It was exactly this friendship that made the third episode of the television series so hard to bear. Together again 4 years on from Combo’s racist attack on Milky, the gang are reunited, celebrating the wedding of the gangs substitute parents, Woody and Lol. When the father of Lol (played with a dead eyed menace by Johnny Harris) returns, a dark history is uncovered. Whether or not he abused his daughter as a child is made abundantly clear when he attacks and rapes her friend Trev in what was easily one the most harrowing scenes in televisions history.

So troubling in fact that when the continuity announcer set up the third part of the final episode with the words “the following contains scenes of sexual violence”, as stated before, it was too much to bear. I doubt I was alone in the action of turning the TV to standby but would encourage any others to persevere if they can, for what followed was storytelling of an incredible kind. In one fell swoop Meadows (and Graham) managed to take the character of Combo and offer him a glorious redemption. Aiding Lol with her justified revenge and allowing her a new lease of life. If you’d told any fans of the original film that by the end of the series Combo could be forgiven, you’d have most probably been met with universal derision.

But darkness without light is unbearable. Meadows knows this well and sprinkles the script with comedy moments and touching scenes that leave the audience grinning from ear to ear. Whether it be Gadget’s new found sexual partner or the groups kind hearted derision of him (“You’re a dick. Move On!”) to the ridiculous bully picking on Shaun (“13! 13! Who counts down from 13!”) there is so much love and kindness between the friends that This Is England ’86 as harrowing as, at times, it is, is also exceptionally entertaining.

The highlife and the lowlife. This is England. Nobody does it better than Shane Meadows.

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I was stunned by what proved to be a sleak, contemporary thrill ride. Sadly A-team does not continue this asscendancy.

Despite my personal reservations Joe Carnahan would appear to be the right man for the job. Both Narc and Smokin Aces walked the fine line between crowd pleasers and critical approval and that was surely something that Fox were hoping for when they placed the property in Carnahan’s lap. Considering how long this project remained in development hell you could argue that Carnahan deserves praise for simply getting it made but sadly for us cinema goers, that’s just not enough.

As I feared the biggest issue with the film is in it’s construction. The plan really didn’t come together. With the first installment of any perceived franchise there is going to be a certain amount of ungainly exposition. Star Trek managed to establish it’s universe in a frenetic opening five minutes which proved engaging enough to make a star out of Chris Hemsworth. It would appear that Carnahan has seen Abrahms’ effort… and done the complete opposite. A premise established by the TV show in less than a minute of voice over takes thirty five minutes for Carnahan to grind out and has a result the movie seems dissjointed and sluggish.

The cast do their best to muddle through. The four leads have good chemistry and Liam Neeson fits perfectly as the consumate proffesional, showered with admiration by his more junior colleagues. Sharlto Copley, the last of the leads to be cast, is also a cracking fit for Howling Mad Murdock commanding almost all of the laughs.

Outside of the core four the casting is a different story. Jessica Biel is yet again squeezed into a role which she is potentially too good for and Patrick Wilson’s C.I.A agent is disappointing as nothing more than a panto villain. Having said all that, the chemistry between Neeson, Cooper, Copley and Jackson and an uncredited cameo at the end of the film imply that Fox may still be intent on a second installment. Obviously a lot will depend on the film’s box office performance but if Charlie’s Angels got a sequel then anything is possible.

In truth, Star Trek may have impressed me in part due to my disinterest in the TV show. On the other hand, having been an A-Team fan since childhood my level of expectation was that much higher when I entered the screen and whilst there were enjoyable moments that’s all the film was, a series of moments. Tonally the film hits more than it misses but a consistent tone is never really established. The film flits between Smokin Aces style action and the limited scope of a PG family romp. The resulting movie feels like neither one nor the other.

Watch the trailer to lower your expectations.

The biggest reason why Cinema can’t be HBO, at almost almost 60 hours, almost 3853 minutes, The Wire has literally days to tell it’s complete story. Brooklyn’s Finest has a little over two hours. But it doesn’t stop deluded film-makers trying.

For those very few of you unaware of HBO is it’s an American Television Network that prides itself in making quality, (and this next word is very important) uninterrupted television. Here’s a few examples; The Sopranos, Band Of Brothers, The Wire, True Blood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Oz, Flight Of The Conchords, Treme and the new, directed by Scorsese, starring Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire.

So why is the uninterrupted part so important. Funnily enough it’s got very little to do with the basic annoyance of having your favourite show stop and start every few minutes but much more to do with structure. The majority of Western Television, both American and British, will have a checklist of exactly when certain ‘action beats’ (dramatic incidents) can happen. Before the opening credits you’ll get a set-up, then cliffhangers dotted around the ad breaks, finally a resolution just before the closing credits, sometimes as little as 2 minutes long.

This format almost always leads to repetitive, over-familiar drivel. Why do you get that feeling you’ve seen it all before when watching TV? Because you have seen it all before. Most modern cinema isn’t any better, the 3-Act Structure of Beginning/Middle/End is essential to tell a story but unless the writer or director knows how to subvert said structure you’ll be leaving the theatre with a nasty case of DejaVu.

What HBO has done is open up this structure, play with it and draw it’s own way of telling a story. It’s no surprise that many of its stellar writing crew were authors. It ‘reads’ like a 60 hour novel. Cinema can not do this.

So why single out Brooklyn’s Finest as the archtyple example? First and most glaringly obvious is that parts of the cast reads like a who’s who of Baltimore regulars. Micheal Kenneth Williams (Omar Little), Hassan Jordan (Wee-bay), and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Clay Davis) all crop up as waterdown versions of their B-More counterparts. One particular scene of Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes looking over a balcony onto their turf is an almost shot for shot reply of Barksdale and Bell, it even comes complete with its own ‘I know something you don’t know’ double crossing.

Then there’s the myriad of plots bustling for screentime. Ethan Hawke as the cop who’ll stop at nothing to help his family, even if it means not only fracturing the occasional law as putting it in a bodybag. Richard Gere as a cross between Travis Bickle and his hooker saving role in Pretty Woman. Plus the aforementioned Don and Wes show, all of which could fill a film on their own. But then it wouldn’t be the ‘Wire meets Crash‘ film it so desperately tries, and fails, to be.

Subtlety that is usually reserved more for film that ‘normal TV’ goes out of the window. You need a scene showing that the undercover cop is unhappy in his work why not soundtrack his appearance with The Platters ‘The Great Pretender’. Not the most heinous crime in the world but by being so close in appearance to The Wire you risk fans of that show (and we are an incredibly protective, somewhat geeky bunch) screaming at the screen that David Simon (the creator) and co. would never stoop to such obvious levels.

Leaving Brooklyn for a moment another example of Cinema aping HBO can be found in it’s most literal translation; Sex and the City. Sex and City, and I may risk a schoolyard beat-down for this, isn’t that bad. Please don’t get me wrong the films are the cinematic equivalent to being given 12 hours at an all you can eat shit-buffet and being told you can’t leave until you’ve cleared the tables. But the original show had a certain quality to it, least of all in its groundbreaking portrayal of women actually enjoying sex. The films, however, stretched this to breaking point in a reverse of what Brooklyn’s Finest does to The Wire. SATC is self-contained and best at less than one hour for one story. The Wire is a 60-hour novel, impossible to condense.

What cinema has given to HBO could easily fill another article (high-end production values, incredible casting, etc) but TV and Film are two different mediums. For now, unless we increase running times to days, the labyrinthine plots and in-depth character development must remain rooted on the small screen for fear of capsizing what film can do.

Sadly The Wire is dead. Let’s leave it that way.

The main trend of the evening seemed to be either white or black dresses, with an added twist; Kristen Stewart (in Chanel), Saoirse Ronan (in Burberry) rocking the LWD (little white dress) both of whom looked age appropriate as sometimes with award season the younger actresses wear dresses that make them look old before their time. Vera Farmiga looked stunning in a white asymmetric Marchesa gown with a black sash, this sash trend was one of the big accessories of the night:

Looking exceptional in black were Kate Winslet and Olivia Williams, both opting for dresses featuring portions cut out. Williams’ was the more risque of the two with underwear appearing to be out of the question for this Catherine Walker creation. Winslet in Stella McCartney has really become a red carpet queen and is someone who knows how to dress appropriately for the occasion depending on whether she is a nominee or a presenter:

There were flashes of colour on the red carpet from some of the nominees; Audrey Tautou teamed her Lanvin super pink dress with red accessories, it doesn’t sound like it should work but she rocked it and Anna Kendrick wore a yellow above the knee Pucci dress which is her best look of this award season. It was good to see some colour on this red carpet after all the black, white and nude gowns that were so popular at this years BAFTA’s:

When it comes to the red carpet the focus is undeniably on the females as there is not much room for disasters for the suit wearing men but I think it is only far to point out those men who really stood out on the red carpet. Mickey Rourke as ever looked interesting in his gun steel coloured suit, teamed with cowboy boots and that’s how I like it, I can’t really imagine him any other way. TomFord is at an advantage as a designer himself but he did looked excellent as always in himself, wearing Tom Ford and wearing it well were Colin Firth and Nicholas Holt both stars of Ford’s directorial debut A Single Man:

Other notable mentions should go to best director winner Kathryn Bigelow who looked stunning when receiving her BAFTA, she is also the first woman to win this award and it would be excellent to see her do the same at the Kodak Theatre in two weeks time. Sam Taylor-Wood and Anne Marie Duff both nominated for their work in Nowhere Boy (and both pregnant) looked radiant in Alexander McQueen and Alberta Ferretti, I love that Anne Marie Duff was wearing flats which were hidden by her long red gown, she stated that it “is a pregnant woman’s prerogative.”

Award season is drawing to a close and I am very excited about what creations will appear on the red carpet in a few weeks, as well as to finally see whether it will be The Hurt Locker or Avatar that will dominate.

Emma Fraser also writes for A Piece Of Telelvision Pie.

After the success of Band of Brothers (which is by far one of my favourite television series of all time) The Pacific has been highly anticipated since the first trailer was released last summer and early reports suggest that it will not disappoint.

The $128  million price tag for the series indicates that they will not be holding back on the fight sequences and special effects. Though this is not a show that will be brilliant for spectacle alone, if the story telling is anything like that of Band of Brothers it will be the smaller moments between the characters that will make this TV event special, that this journey that these young men are on is one worth telling beyond the explosions and gun fights.

A familiar face in the trailer is Joseph Mazzello who you probably recognise from another Spielberg hit Jurassic Park in which he played Tim. Looking over his IMDb page his work in film and TV since that childhood role has consisted with bit parts so hopefully this lead role will help reinvigorate his career. Other faces you might also recognise are James Badge Dale who was Chase in 24 and also starred in The Departed and Aussie actress Isabella Lucas who was in Transformers 2 and most recently Daybreakers. Hopefully this means that there will be some female involvement in this series that goes beyond the HBO required boob count.

The celebrity, who shall remain nameless, then proceeded to verbally insult the police with mysogynistic and anti-semitic remarks. But as Mel Gibson’s latest film, The Edge Of Darkness explains, conspiracies are everywhere. So that story that I just told you was probably all made up. Like the holocaust, hey Mel, Hey? Hey?!

Like an erstwhile Dr. Sam Beckett, Mel Gibson is trying to put right what once went wrong by standing in front of the camera (for the first time since his arrest) and playing such a thoroughly likeable chap, that you can’t help but root for him. For chrissakes his daughter’s been murdered! Therefore Mel must be a nice guy and couldn’t have possibly said stuff that would have made Hitler blush. Well, that’s the theory.

Sadly, for Mel, his latest film is such a mess of Taken-esque revenge and Conspiracy Theory bullshit that the audience will be half asleep before they realise that Mel-the-actor is playing someone designed to make us forget his previous altercations and dubious rhetoric.

When his daughter is shotgunned to death on his porch (in a scene that is actually quite shocking) Mr. Gibson runs about dressed in a beige trenchcoat like an unlikeable Colombo trying to figure out why. This detecting is coupled with the occasional scene of an aged Jack Bauer-lite beating people up for information when talking seems to have run its course.

Ray Winstone pops up as a help/hinderence in a role that appears to come from another movie altogether. Spouting weird philosophy, smoking cigars and drinking red-wine on a park bench like a Cockney Deepthroat he’s the best thing in the film. Not that he helps the, at-times unfathomable, plot but he makes things slightly tolerable because, hey, It’s Ray Winstone.

Based on a BBC TV series of the mid-80′s, The Edge Of Darkness tries to cram in a series worth of plot into a less than two hours running time and fails miserably. One scene (SPOILER ALERT) towards the end of the movie has Mel kidnapped in his kitchen by the bad guys, only to escape a mere 10 seconds of film later, then return to said kitchen having done nothing for the story. A metaphor for the pointlessness of another bog standard revenge movie perhaps?

As the screenplay by Departed scribe William Monahan consistently tells us, “Everything in Massachusetts is illegal.” Except presumably making dull movies, which will only get you a slap on the wrist.

Kicking off with an incredibly tense and surprisingly emotional pre-credits sequence, the 11th Trek film then jumps from world to world encompassing Iowa and Vulcan and transporting (Bad Pun Number 2) between several time zones from Baby Kirk to Teenage Spock to where the heart of this movie lies, Young Adult Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Kirk (Chris Pine). The former fighting his eternal battle with Bjork’s idiom that there is definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to human behaviour and the latter drinking heavily, bar-fighting and trying to lay Uhura. Apart from the last part it’s clear this is a new, ’00s Trek.

And it is. JJ Abrams has done an impressive job in making this ‘Star Trek’ but not as we know it (Bad Pun Number 3). How he’s done it – by using a tried and tested Trek device of ‘the alternative Universe’ – is his wisest move in cinema yet, as he gets to make the world his own but with the added bonus of keeping all the same characters that fans know and love.

Perversely it’s the nods to the original that are many of the highlights. Be it Chekov’s V pronouncing disability, Uhura’s alluring miniskirt or the introduction of an unrecognisable ‘Red Shirt’, these are the parts that stay with you after the film has finished.

Sadly though this pandering to the fanbase is responsible for a mid-section segment that fits painfully with what has gone before (Bad Pun Number 4). Without giving away spoilers I’ll just say it involves Kirk being chased around the ice planet of Hoth by weird creatures (as Kirk is wont to do) before running headfirst into a coincidence fatter than James Doohan’s stomach.

But this is a minor slight on a film that I was convinced would be far too po-faced for my tastes. Instead it’s exciting (the opening and closing set-pieces), funny (comic highlight being Bones’s Jimmy Stewart worthy intro) and looks pretty frecking great (the fact that not once did I notice the SFX is high praise indeed).

All this makes Star Trek’s latest journey the first decent blockbuster of the summer. Shame I only came up with four bad puns…er… Beam Up The Popcorn, Set Eyes to Stun, Can JJ Kick It? Yes He Khan…

He works as producer, writer and/or director on projects that include ‘The Day Today’, ‘I’m Alan Partridge’, ‘Genius’ (funny that), the little seen but still wonderful ‘The Armando Iannucci Show’ and the reason we’re here today, ‘The Thick of It’. Or more accurately ‘In The Loop’ the biggifying of the BBC4 political satire.

‘In The Loop’ is a profundity-strewn comedy to rival ‘Dr. Strangelove’ in the ‘look at what douches we have running the world’ stakes and sees regular ‘The Thick of It’ cast members swap the halls of Westminster for the bigger stage of Washington. And Fictional War. Lots of Fictional War.

While US General Miller (James Gadolfini) tries his best to avert said War and Neocon-esque Linton Barwick (David Rasche) tries his best to kick it off, poor little Brit minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) is caught in the middle. But fear not as Shouty Scot and chief liason to the PM Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) is there to tell him what to think. As is the rest of the ‘The Thick Of It’ cast in one sense or the other. Including Chris Langham as Education Secretary. (That last sentence was a joke. And quite a fantastically tasteless one at that.)

Without the foreknowledge of Malcolm Tucker et al, ‘In the Loop’ may seem as hard to get your head around as ‘Fast And Furious’ but it does an admirable job of keeping things relatively simple whilst also being laden with as many characters as a Robert Altman flick. Why the other characters, except Malcolm, play similar roles but with different character names seems odd to the seasoned ‘Thick’ viewer but as a stand alone piece its funny, biting and brilliantly sweary.

A couple of detractors may say this is a few years behind relevance but unless no other war is started from here until the end of time by idiots who want attention then those detractors are just plain wrong. A better argument would be does it deserve or necessitate a big screen incarnation. Well yes and no. No because the venture isn’t exactly cinematic (it would work easily on the little tele box and may be better suited) and yes because its better written and acted than 90% of the gumph on the silver screen.

Oh and the dictionary definition of a genius is someone with ‘extraordinary intellectual and creative power’ just to prove I’m not actually a genius.