What I've been watching

The Delivery Man (Netflix)- A British bloke gets tired of being a cop so he quits the force and studies to become a midwife.  It shouldn't work but it does. Darren Boyd is terrific as the put upon fish out of water lead and Fay Ripley breathes life into what should be a stereotypical character, the middle aged man hungry divorcee, and makes it work.

Cockroaches (HuluPLUS)- A nuclear accident happens one night and most everybody who wasn't below ground in some kind of basement type place dies.  The basement dwellers survive and move on to create a post apocalyptic civilization.  This one is odd ball as hell but it's funny and kind of compelling.  The survivors are an odd twisted bunch and the civilization they create is a mix of the old with lots of weird newness heaped in there as well.  I like this one so much that I'm going to have to watch it again to see if it holds up as well as I think it's going to.

Dreamland (Netflix)- Very dry, very droll Australian workplace comedy.  A few smart and talented bureaucrats, Rob Stich and the lovely Celia Pacquola, work in an Australian government office with a bunch of oddballs and ne'er do wells.  They have to hold back the tide of inconsistency, incompetence, and indifference to make their national infrastructure office work properly.  This one is very well written and acted but it's not the usual laugh a minute comedy one might expect, it's more cerebral, and that's a good thing.  The hugely talented Kitty Flanagan is also in this one and she's great as usual.  The original name of this show was Utopia.

Hell on Wheels (Netflix)- Gritty western about the building of the transcontinental railroad in the aftermath of the Civil War.  This one is consistently good but it has it's weak moments.  The first two seasons were exceptional, the third had it bright spots, and the fourth hasn't impressed me yet.

Dancing on the Edge (Netflix)-A group of black jazz musicians in 1930's era England bump up against racism, over zealous police, and the British class system.  They help popularize jazz in the UK but they run into real trouble when the leader of the band gets framed for the murder of his lead singer.  This one is over all pretty good, it's lush, filmed well, the sets and costumes look great, the women are smokin' hot, the music is nice, but it drags interminably at times and you can see things coming from a mile away. I'm four episodes in and it's six episodes long so I'm going to have to stick it out to see how it ends, and I hope they speed up the pace of the story.

Film and TV reviews

Incredibly fun French film about an intrepid female journalist at the turn of 20th century.  She gets into all sorts of adventures not to get or impress a man, instead she does it all to heal her sister who she injured in a tennis game.  It's wildly fun and super entertaining.

The first three series of this Irish import about criminals in Dublin is terrific.  The machinations behind all the drug running, the thefts, and cold blooded murders are incredibly interesting if you like this sort of thing, which I very much do.  This show features stand out performances by Tom Vaughn-Lawlor as the sociopath gangster Nidge, Charlie Murphy as the girlfriend of a gangster who suffers catastrophic collateral personal damage, and Susan Loughnane as the top gangster's girlfriend who becomes a junkie hooker.  This one is available through Netflix and HuluPLUS.

Very well done adaption of Douglas Adams creation.  The producers opted to use Adams novels as a template rather than to slavishly follow his original stories and it all works.  It's wildly funny and Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd are perfect foils.  This show is airing on Acorn TV.

Hilariously twisted 'retelling' of the controversy surrounding the Monty Python film 'The Life of Brian.'  This movie skewers everyone involved, the hysterical Christians who were so easily offended even though the film didn't mock their religion, the BBC, and most importantly of all the guys in Monty Python.  Once again Darren Boyd, as John Cleese, stands out.  This one is airing on Acorn TV.

Good but wildly over acted adaption of the Shakespeare play by the same name.  Feinnes makes the same mistake most British actor/directors make when adapting these type of films for modern audiences and that mistake is going so far over the top in his portrayal of his character that it detracts from the story.  He's all bluster and spit, which would have been fine if this had been a stage adaption, but on film, a much more intimate medium, he needed to tone down his performance.  All in all, this film isn't bad, it's just not that good, although, a usual Vanessa Redgrave is magnificent.