Picoreview: A Royal Night Out

Picoreview: A Royal Night Out: charming. A Royal Night Out is ever so loosely based on V.E. Day in England, 1945, when a young Elizabeth and Margaret were granted permission to go out into the crowds to celebrate like everybody else. In real life, this apparently happened after Elizabeth, standing up on the balcony with her parents, realized she couldn’t *see* any of the people, not at all, because of the spotlights on the royal family, and she wanted to be able to see and participate. The movie is an…

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Picoreview: Pride & Prejudice & Zombies

Picoreview: Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: startlingly enjoyable! Look, I won’t kid you. When P&P&Z came out as a book I thought, “*God* I wish I’d thought of that.” It didn’t matter if it was going to be a one-hit wonder (and it apparently was; SENSE & SENSIBILITY & SEAMONSTERS apparently didn’t do nearly as well), it was just such a great idea that yeah. I wish I’d thought of that. I didn’t read the book, but I wished I’d thought of it. I *didn’t* read the book, so I…

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Picoreview: Jessica Jones

Picoreview: Jessica Jones: YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY I had a concerned rant about Jessica Jones after the first trailer was released, and I am very very glad to say that my concerns were unfounded. The story was not, as it seemed from that trailer, “the girl is a victim but now she’s Fighting Back.” It was considerably more “the girl’s abuser returns and she fucks his shit up,” only vastly more awesome. It also wasn’t a *horror* vibe so much as a noir one (some of the CAMERA WORK, OMG!), which was a…

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TV & Movie Roundup

A week ago I went into Dublin and had a Movie Day. I went to see The Martian, Everest and The Intern, and decided not to go to Macbeth because I wouldn’t have gotten home until the heat death of the universe, or something a lot like it, like, eleven-thirty at night. :) The Martian was, somewhat astonishingly, as good as everybody’s been saying it is. In so far as I had any objections to the plot, it was that their eventual solution seemed obvious to me from the moment…

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Picoreview: NCIS Season 10

Picoreview: NCIS Season 10 (and the first 2 eps of s11): …that was actually really, really good. I mean, NCIS is a solid show. It’s generally of reasonably high quality and consistency, with very few actively bad episodes and correspondingly few really *good* ones. The actors are all appealing and their interactions are terrific, and the whole thing lends itself to the sense of family that it’s supposed to. The season started out with plenty of AUGH, between the bombing and (much more alarmingly) Ducky’s heart attack, but every season…

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