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Netflix Review: A Series of Unfortunate Events (Season 2)

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Series of Unfortunate Events Season 2

Things are about to get much, much worse… In a good way???

Before I say anything else, I should probably tell you that Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events may be one of the most faithful (and well done) book-to-film adaptations I have ever seen. The casting, the characters and costumes and settings… so much of this series seems to match perfectly with what I saw in my mind as I read the books. Netflix is doing an amazing job, and I really respect them for that.

Although it has been a while since I read the books, from what I remember the show seems to stick pretty close to them. I do like that the creators of this show decided to flesh out VFD a lot more than it was in the books. I am very intrigued to see how everything works out in the end, and especially how they handle the final installment of the series, which I personally thought was a bit of a let down.

However, the nature of the books which have been adapted means that this show continues to get darker and darker with each episode, as more and more terrible things happen to the Baudelaire orphans, more clueless or downright awful guardians take custody of them, and Count Olaf hatches yet more schemes to steal their fortune. The Baudilaires themselves are also faced with increasingly difficult moral choices as they descend further into the winding mystery around VFD and try to just keep themselves alive and safe… or as safe as they can be in vile villages, horrible hospitals, and carnivorous carnivals. The visual tone of the show gets darker and darker along with the story, with each episode’s color scheme a little drabber than the last, and each new, terrifying location a little more grimy and dingy.

This show seems to be a lot darker than the books, but maybe that’s just because the acting is so strong, the visuals so awful and compelling, the dark humor so on point, that it really just drives home the atmosphere that the books were originally getting at. While I did find it a little creepy, and slightly disturbing in parts, I was very impressed with this season, and I’m excited to see how Netflix will handle the third one, and finale of this series of unfortunate events.

Final rating: 5 out of 5 stars

“Can things get even worse for the Baudilaires? Oh, yes the can.”

Content note: This show is rated PG. However, this season does introduce Esme Squalor, Count Olaf’s evil girlfriend, who wears ridiculous, supposedly fashionable —and often rather revealing— clothing, and also sometimes makes remarks which could be taken as innuendo, or not, depending on how you look at it. These off-color remarks were one rather annoying addition to the show that I noticed, as I don’t remember anything of the kind in the books. There were also references to same-sex couples included in the dialogue a few times (The Quagmire triplets refer to their guardian and ‘her wife’, at one point a character mentions his two moms, etc.), another thing I don’t remember seeing  in the books. This show, especially the current season, is also quite dark, and a little depressing, so I would recommend caution for younger children, even if they’ve already read the books.

I hope you enjoyed my review of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Season 2! Have you read the books and/or seen the show? Do you prefer one over the other? What do you think about the show’s inclusion of more stuff about VFD? Let’s chat in the comments!

See you again soon.

🙂

Netflix Review: Stranger Things (Seasons 1-2)

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Stranger_Things_logoNetflix’s hit original series more than lives up to the hype.

If you’ve been on the internet at all within the last year or so, you’ve definitely heard of Stranger Things, a Netflix original series full of 80s nostalgia, an authentic small-town atmosphere, and complete with just enough government conspiracy theories and paranormal activity to really shake things up. I’d heard of it, of course, but I hadn’t really been interested until I saw the trailer for the second season, which came out around Halloween. I ended up binge watching the entire series after Season 2 came out, and, as you can probably tell from the little tag line at the top of this review, I loved it.

Fair warning: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Season 1: Missing kids and monster hunts.

Season 1 introduces us to three sets of characters, who all work toward similar goals throughout the story and often meet and crossover with one another: the kids, the teenagers, and the adults. The kids are Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will, a group of outcast middle-schoolers who love watching Star Wars and playing Dungeons and Dragons. When Will goes missing on his way home from a D&D game with his friends, his mother, Joyce, calls up the local law enforcement, lead by Chief of Police Jim Hopper, to find him. Will’s remaining friends go on the hunt for him themselves, meeting up with a strange, lost girl called Eleven, who has telekinetic powers and knows the one thing everyone else has missed; Will has become stranded in a parallel dimension called the Upside Down. He was taken by a monster called the demigorgon, which is now on the prowl in the small town of Hawkins, looking for new victims. Adults, teens and kids alike must band together to stop this monster, and uncover the sketchy goings-on at the high security government lab situated just too close to the town for comfort.

While Stranger Things is certainly a slower-paced show, the writers always find new ways to kick the suspense up another notch. I came into the show knowing several pretty big spoilers (they’re quite hard to avoid on the internet these days), but the show still surprised me and kept me on the edge of my seat at every turn. It perfectly balanced elements of psychological horror and tense, nail-biting scenes with freaky, in-your-face jumpscares.

The writers also do an expert job of weaving the different threads of the story together into a tightly-knit tapestry, and even though the cast of characters is quite large, all of them are well developed and interesting. Even though the teenagers’ section of the story wasn’t my favorite, it is only fair to say that this is just personal preference, as all the characters were fleshed out and played very well by their respective actors. Maybe I was just a bit disappointed when what I thought was the message of this portion of the story ended up falling flat. The writers seemed to have planted a subtle message about modern hook up culture (a teenage character hooks up with her boyfriend, only to regret it later on and also have her negligence basically lead to her friend’s death), but it was later subverted when she just ended up back with that same boyfriend at the end of the season. This supposed message was undermined even more in Season 2, when she hooks up with another character, apparently without any consequences or regrets at all.

But all in all, Season 1 was a fantastic intro to a fantastic show, complete with all the scares, tears, and feels you could wish for. I finished it still wanting more, and, thank goodness, there was a whole new season just waiting for me to dive in…

Season 2: A new challenger approaches…

It’s been a year since we last saw our friends in Hawkins. Season 2 starts off on Halloween of 1984, catching us up on all the small town happenings and introducing a few new characters, including a brother and sister from sunny California who instantly become the coolest, most envied kids in town, and Joyce’s new boyfriend, Bob (played by Sean Astin). Will is no longer missing, but he’s still feeling the aftereffects of his journey into the Upside Down, which include terrifying  visions of a great shadow monster that fills the whole sky. Meanwhile, a strange blight is spreading across Hawkins, attacking crops with rot and slowly transforming the landscape into the likeness of the Upside Down. Hopper, who has been hiding Eleven in a house in the woods for the past year, is called out to investigate the blight, and Eleven endeavors to escape her quarters and find her mother and her past. Hawkins must once again face the darkness from the Upside Down, and, with Eleven’s help, hopefully defeat it.

Season 2 really ramps up the threat posed by the Upside Down, broadening the scope of the show for a much more epic, cinematic experience. This time, our heroes face an intelligent evil instead of a mindless monster, an villain easily capable of destroying all of Hawkins, and maybe the entire world. I really enjoyed this broadening of horizons, and I honestly liked Season 2 even more than Season 1. It almost made the first season feel small in comparison, as characters venture outside of Hawkins and a new set of friends and threats are introduced. The writers once again managed to craft an extraordinarily tightly-woven storyline out of a massive cast of characters, and still made sure that every character had their own distinct personality and backstory. I really enjoyed how they allowed different characters to take the spotlight in Season 2; where as Season 1 was more focused on Mike, this time around it’s really Will’s story, with Steve and Dustin and a few other characters playing much bigger roles. The creators of the show are not afraid to mix things up, while still retaining all the awesome aspects of Season 1 that made the show good in the first place, and Season 2 more than lived up to all the hype. I can hardly wait to see what happens next!

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“The hype is real! And, surprisingly, quite justified this time.”

Content note: Stranger Things is rated TV-14, and not without reason. There is a lot of language, some violence and scary images, and, as I said before, a character who hooks up with two different boys. Although the show stars several young actors, it’s definitely not a kids’ show, and I would personally say it would be better for older teens.

Thanks for reading my review of Stranger Things! Do you like the show? Which do you like better: Season 1 or Season 2? What are some of your favorite characters? Let’s chat in the comments!

🙂

Netflix Review: The Flash (Seasons 1-3)

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the-flash-192898DC triumphs on the small screen.

Believe it or not, I used to hate superheroes. My dad has been a big superhero fan for ages, but whenever he would talk about the latest Captain America movie or Spiderman film, I would always roll my eyes. Finally, however, he managed to get me into Marvel with the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes animated TV show, and from there I went on to watch the films and become the massive Marvel geek you know today.

I never thought I’d get into DC. Marvel heroes were at least slightly believable, and had developed personalities and quirks and flaws that I found extremely interesting. The DC heroes, on the other hand, looked like mere cardboard cutouts, without any personality at all.

I did watch Batman Begins (and enjoyed it thoroughly), but I thought at the time that that would be the end of my interest in DC. But then, I discovered The Flash. Or, well, my dad discovered it, and watched it, and liked it, and said I should watch it too, so I did…

First things first: his show is a geek’s dream come true! There are tons of nerdy references, a delectable ammount of science (fiction) and Cisco Ramone, who will probably forever be my geek hero.

For the sake of clarity, I will do the rest of the review season by season, so that I can say what I liked about each season, and what I didn’t enjoy so much…

Season 1: Great plot, poor acting

The plot of Season 1 is masterfully written, complete with nods to the original comics, an overarching storyline that keeps you watching, and lots of twists and turns and surprises along the way. The acting, however, was not so top notch. Except for the brilliantly acted Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh), who really held the show together, the acting in the first few episodes was fairly cringe-worthy at times, and a bit stiff at others. Even the show’s star, Grant Gustin, didn’t quite seem to be in his element. The acting improved drastically as the season went on, however, and this season is definitely worth watching, if only for the amazing and exciting plot.

Season 2: Great acting, iffy plot

Season 2 seemed to have the opposite problem: The acting was very good, and I felt like all the actors had begun to really know and understand and play off each other very well, but the plot was significantly weaker, nowhere near as compelling as the first season. The introduction of more time travel and parallel universes was very interesting, but the use of another speedster as the main villain felt a bit like recycling the original plot. That said, this season was still really enjoyable (i.e. don’t skip it!) and I really liked all the stuff with parallel universes.

Season 3: Great acting, great plot, great show!

In Season 3, it really felt as if The Flash has finally found it’s feet: a tense, compelling plot, great acting and character development, the introduction of some awesome new characters… it was amazing! Even though the main villain was, once again, a speedster, I felt like the way he was portrayed was fresh and different enough for the Season to hold its own. However, I’m really hoping that they find a completely different type of villain for Season 4. The cliffhanger at the end of this season is also extremely unfair and I was almost crying; that’s how good it is!

Final rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“Took them a while to really find their feet, but, then again, it’s not a BBC show, so we’ll cut them some slack.”

Content note: The show is rated as TV-PG, and it was fairly clean (not a lot of swearing or immoral references), but I would still advise some caution. At one point, a character does get very drunk, and there are also characters who are dating that living together throughout the story. It really annoys me when it is assumed that as soon as people start dating they are supposed to move in together. However, there was very little else of concern. I would say probably ages 14 and up.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed my review. Have you seen The Flash? Whose your favorite character? (Mine are Cisco and Harrison Wells). Do you like DC or Marvel, or both??? Let me know in the comments!

🙂

Netflix Review: BBC’s Sherlock (Seasons 1-4)

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250px-Sherlock_titlecardThis review is really, really late. It was pretty difficult formulating all my thoughts and feelings about this show into a single post, but I’ve done my best, and I hope you enjoy this review! WARNING: There may be a couple of spoilers in the review below, so please proceed with caution!

You’ve probably heard of Sherlock, even if you’ve never seen it. It’s one of the ‘big three’ fandoms: Supernatural, Doctor Who, and, of course, Sherlock. The series has its ups and downs throughout the seasons, despite having only three episodes per season and only four seasons to speak of, but I’ll do my review season by season in order to capture my feelings about this show as accurately as I can.

Season 1: The Brilliant Beginning

Sherlock begins, first and foremost, as a retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories, set in modern London. The very first episode captures an updated version of the story that started it all, A Study in Scarlet, deftly introducing us to John Watson (played by Martin Freeman, of Hobbit infamy), a retired army doctor with a limp and a taste for danger, and the brilliant, quirky Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch of Tumblr fame). I love how John and Sherlock play off each other; practical, unassuming John and wild, unpredictable Sherlock, thrust together as flatmates on the hunt for a murderer. It is, in all honesty, their friendship that really makes the show.

Season 1 really got me hooked on Sherlock, especially with it’s diabolical cliffhanger ending, wonderful acting and production, and quintessential British flare that takes you direct to the heart of London. In retrospect, this season is so much lighter and funnier than many of the later ones, even though there is the dark undercurrent of Moriarty’s schemes to contend with. But it feels like just a fun show about two unlikely flatmates, one of whom happens to be a detective. Not so with Season 2.

Season 2: The Famous Fall

First of all, let’s get one thing out of the way: I only watched two episodes of this season. While I did watch the beginning minutes of the first episode in order to find out how our heroes extricated themselves from the Season 1 cliffhanger, I never watched the rest. This episode, “A Scandal in Belgravia”, while a fan favorite, contains a fair amount of nudity, and that was not something I was very interested in watching. The other two episodes, however, more than made up for this. Episode 2 is a modern adaptation of the famous Hound of the Baskervilles story. I read the original at a young age, dispute my mother’s warnings that it was super creepy, and thoroughly enjoyed it, and I liked this episode as well.

But it is the third episode,”The Reichenbach Fall”, which really takes the cake. To me, it is the height of this show’s brilliance, the best episode of the whole lot. Tense, exciting, with high emotional stakes and an all-to-literal cliffhanger ending that nearly had me in tears, this was the point where the show peaked. It would have been extraordinarily hard to match this grand display of writing, acting, and production skills (the editing is flawless, as always), and, in my opinion, the rest of the show was unable to surpass this episode.

Season 3: The Mediocre Middle

A lot of people love Season 3, and I can understand why. But the fact remains that I simply did not enjoy it nearly as much as I did the previous seasons. It is at this point, to me, that the series begins to go off the rails; what began as a modern adaptation suddenly became more of it’s own entity, it’s own interpretation laced with vastly different story lines and characters. Many fans have remarked that it feels a little bit like fanfiction, and I agree, but I don’t think that this is a good thing. There are some pieces of fanfiction that are so good they come up to the level of, or surpass, the original source material (*cough, cough* Blue Sky *cough, cough*). But that’s just what they are: fanfiction. When the creators of the show start writing their own show like fanfiction, catering a little too much to the fans and making things a little bit too silly or unbelievable, that’s where things go wrong.

Season 3 of Sherlock simply felt like a different show, and not the show I’d signed up to watch. There were moments of it that I did enjoy, of course, but the entire thing seemed a little off. I didn’t like the direction that they took it, but of course this is just my own gut reaction. It was well produced, well acted, and the plot was certainly well written. It just didn’t sit quite right with me.

Season 4: The Fiendish Finale?

No matter my thoughts about Season 3, I was extraordinarily excited when I heard that Season 4 of Sherlock would soon be coming to Netflix. I actually invited my best friend (another Sherlock fan)  over and we ate snacks and watched all 4.5 hours of Season 4 all the way through in one spectacular evening. (Small note: I actually ended up doing a bit of live tweeting during this event. You can find my hilarious commentary collected here.)

Again, Season 4 felt like a much different show from the first two seasons. It was a lot darker, and there was a ton of people hallucinating, to the point that sometimes I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on in the real world, and what was just hallucinations. But it was epic in a way that the first two seasons couldn’t really match, not even “The Reichenbach Fall”. It was also extremely brutal, as relationships and characters I’d come to know and love were picked apart by the writers.

Fans will probably hate me for saying this, and it is a bit of a spoiler, but I feel like the ending was really the ending. The story seems to have been sufficiently wrapped up, and I think to do any more seasons would be forced. It was a long journey, and sometimes a hard one, because the writers insist on doing every awful thing they can thick of to your favorite characters, but in the end I think I enjoyed it very much. I might have to go back at some point and watch it all again.

Final Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

“Top notch! A first rate show. But you do realize that you’re actually the writers, not the fans, right?”

Content note: This show is definitely not for children. Besides a bit of violence and language, there is a fair amount of innuendo (not to mention that whole “Scandal in Belgravia” bit), including tons of people who mistake Sherlock and John for a gay couple, and stuff like that. It’s not rated TV-14 for no reason!

Thank you so much for reading my review! Have you seen Sherlock? Do you have a favorite season or episode? Do you have a least favorite? Chat with me in the comments below!

🙂

Netflix Review: A Series of Unfortunate Events (Season 1)

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Come on, Netflix, let this get another season! Or two…

I loved watching the 2004 Jim Carrey Series of Unfortunate Events film almost as much as I enjoyed reading the books, so when I heard that Netflix was doing a remake (of sorts) you can imagine my trepidation. Would they get it right, the tone, the humor, the casting, the sets? Would it be as good as the movie? Would they do (gasp!) the rest of the story?

And now, the verdict is in: The tone is good, the humor is good (some parts had me laughing out loud, and I was watching this late in the evening when other people were asleep…), the casting is good, the sets are spectacular. But there are two things I had trouble with: It’s not steampunk, and it’s not British.

<Cue ridiculous rant that has very little to do with my final thoughts about the show>

The first six episode of the eight episode season are, basically, a restatement of the Jim Carrey film. This is to be expected, of course, as the show is an entirely new undertaking, and does not pick up where the film left off, at the end of the third book in the series. Although there was plenty of extra details and scenes from the books which had not been included in the 2004 film, I was rather amused when some of the shots used in the episodes were composed in exactly the same way as shots from the film. This was probably a nice homage to the Jim Carrey film, but still a little bit odd and jarring, at least to someone who notices such things, like me. Other, normal people probably won’t care at all.

In fact, I’m sure they won’t.

#filmstudentproblems

Another thing that struck me was the casting. The acting is brilliant and well done, even the children and extras (and don’t get me started on the fact that the new Violet Baudelaire looks a lot like actress Emily Browning from the film). But nobody, I repeat, nobody had a British accent, not even Lemony Snicket who, while played  in a wonderfully deadpan manner by Patrick Warburton (who I am sure I must have seen in some other movie), began to annoy me with his non-British-ness. In the original film, Lemony had been portrayed as a mysterious British guy, always shown in silhouette, which was exactly right, and I had enjoyed his narration of parts of the movie. While Patrick Warburton’s narration was humorous and reminiscent of passages from the book, I found it to be slightly overused. And, for one thing, he’s definitely American. For another, I felt a bit cheated that he was just shown to us right away, without the mystery of the original film. Yes, there is mystery in the show (I, for one, am wondering what exactly they plan to do with the VFD) but in the film there had always been a sense of ‘Who is this mysterious narrator? Why doesn’t he show his face? Who is he hiding from?’ Patrick Warburton’s Snicket does not appear to be hiding from anyone.

And, about the steampunk…

The books had always struck me as being very British, as had the film, which also exuded an air of delightfully witty and whimsical steampunk. The show is not steampunk. It has been called steampunk, but probably by rather misinformed people. It is not steampunk. It is trying very, very hard to be steampunk, but it’s just not.

<End ridiculous rant>

By now, you probably think that I hate the show, and are wondering why I said I hope that it gets a second or third season. But I don’t hate the show. Netflix took a chance and revived an old story that, as far as I know, has kind become a little bit of a cult classic. And the result is very good. The casting, despite not being British in any way, shape or form, is amazing. I think I might even like Neil Patrick Harris’s performance as Count Olaf a bit more than Jim Carrey’s! It’s not steampunk. It’s definitely not. But it brings the world of the Baudelaires to life in a very new way. I think newcomers to the story, and old fans alike, will very much enjoy Netflix’s version

As I said, there are eight episodes in this season. And while the first six cover fairly old ground in a sort of remake of the Jim Carrey film, in the last two we get to see book four, The Miserable Mill, brought to the screen for the first time ever! Let me tell you, I was very excited for this. Yes, we’ve seen the first three books before, but the show and the film do a fairly equal job with them, so you can take your pick. But they did the fourth book. And then they left it on a cliffhanger! And, maybe, we’ll be getting a few more seasons!

I would love to see the rest of the story told on screen. It had always annoyed me that there was only ever one Jim Carrey film… Come on, Netflix, make it happen!

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“Good, well made, funny, but not enough British-ness or steampunkary!”

(Can you tell I have a problem???)

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