David Squyres from Talk Stephen King posted a very nice and very thorough review of The Dark Tower Companion. My favorite line says, “Bev Vincent is able to speak with authority on the subject without talking down to the readers. In fact, he is so fluent in Mid-World, one gets the feeling he has gone through a doorway and visited. Really, you have the sense that he’s been there.”
I wrote a review of Tom Piccirilli’s forthcoming The Last Whisper in the Dark, which is a follow-up to The Last Kind Words. Noir as the night is long.
I thought it was hilarious that Carlton Cuse live-tweeted the most recent episode of Bates Motel from his mother’s place. Brilliant.
I’m not sure I agree with the decision to reschedule TV shows because they feature content that resonates with current events. They did it with Haven shortly after a school shooting, and then again with Hannibal and Castle after the Boston bombings. For one thing, I don’t think easily traumatized people will be watching Hannibal. I appreciate that they want to be sensitive, but it seems excessive. Yes, there was a bomb on Castle, but it didn’t go off. In case anyone thought it might, they reversed the order of two episodes, so we saw the one after the bomb episode last week and there was Beckett, intact. As standing-on-a-bomb episodes go, this was a decent one. It was a clip show, which isn’t my favorite thing in the world, but it had a sense of humor, so that helped. Plus a bomb.
They certainly didn’t waste any time resolving the car wreck cliffhanger on NCIS. None whatsoever. There’s still a chance, though, that Ziva might not survive the incident professionally. Will they turn that into another cliffhanger? Two more episodes and we’ll know. There’s also a reasonable possibility that Bodnar wasn’t responsible for killing her father and Vance’s wife.
I finally found time to watch the final two episodes of Banshee, a new series on Cinemax. The series is absolutely ludicrous in concept, and way over the top in content, but it’s fun. A guy who was in prison for many years for stealing a bunch of diamonds from a very bad man is finally released and instantly 1) has stand-up sex with a bartender in a pub’s stockroom and 2) becomes a target of the aforementioned bad guy. He reconnects with his computer hacker friend, a transvestite with a black belt and a bitchy attitude. He figures out where his former lover/crime partner is living and goes to Banshee, Pennsylvania. Through a very odd, incredible and amazing set of circumstances, he ends up becoming the sheriff of Banshee after the new guy in town is killed in a bar-room shootout. In the first of many memorable scenes of over-the-top violence, the guy is shot through the palm of his hand by a large caliber bullet.
The big man around town is an exiled Amish businessman. He’s violent and ruthless and has a fetish for women dressed in Amish garb. Of course he and the new sheriff lock horns and of course they have to work together at times. The Amish angle is interesting, though.
The fight scenes are pulpy and over the top. Hood (the name assumed by the unnamed protagonist) or someone else is beaten to a pulp at least once each episode, but the injuries never slow anyone down. A number of people suffer what seem to lethal stab and puncture wounds, but ditto. The fights are highly dramatized and choreographed and go on for several long minutes. Fingers are chopped off. A leg is blown off by a shotgun. A rocket-launcher gets misdirected and takes out two guys at close proximity. It’s like a live-action comic book. The sex is explicit and frequent.
There are only 10 episodes in the first season, but it has a coherent (if highly improbable) story arc and just enough loose ends to lead into a second season, which started filming recently. If you do check it out (and it is fun), stay through the credits. There’s a short snippet at the end of each episode.
