british – Page 10 – PopCult Reviews

PopCult Watches: Flowers Season 1, Episode 3

flowers

Flowers Season 1, Episode 3 (2016)
Written & Directed by Will Sharpe

flowers amy bed

Deborah has enlisted the builders to help her clear out and burn much of Nana Flowers’ things. Maurice has the pressure put on him by his editors to produce a new Grubbs Family book. Deborah has the family plant sees, and Nana’s ashes in the garden as a way to “heal” them but Amy questions why she keeps telling people lies about how her grandmother died. Maurice allows Deborah to spread his lie of Nana’s attempted suicide while keeping Shun his only confidante. Deborah’s sister Viv comes to visit, fresh off a divorce. George slinks around in an attempt to bed Deborah but ends up with Viv instead. Maurice comes close to telling his wife the truth but balks at the last moment.

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PopCult Watches: Flowers Season 1, Episode 2

flowers

Flowers Season 1, Episode 2 (2016)
Written & Directed by Will Sharpe

flowers s01e02

Nana Flowers is rushed to the emergency room in the wake of the disastrous anniversary party. A romantic rivalry is stoked over Deborah by the skeevy George and the earnest Barry the builder. Amy is having difficulty processing Nana’s imminent death after the doctors deliver a troubling prognosis. Abigail comes to comfort Amy, but Donald sees it as an opportunity to try to seduce their neighbor. Looming in the background of all this drama is Maurice who is having difficulty explaining just how Nana injured himself. He enlists Shun to dispose of his noose so that his attempted suicide will be kept a secret. However, young Hugo draws something that will force Maurice to open up about what happened.

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PopCult Watches: Flowers Season 1, Episode 1

flowers

Flowers Season 1, Episode 1 (2016)
Written & Directed by Will Sharpe

flowers 01

Maurice Flowers is a depressed children’s author living in a quaint country cottage with his family. A few months ago, after his depression began, Maurice entered into an open relationship with his wife, Deborah. Deborah is awkwardly attempting to extend herself and explore this option given to her but is feigning enthusiasm. Their twins, Donald and Amy, are overly ambitious grown children who bicker constantly and are sunk into their obsessions of craft (inventing and music, respectively) but share a mutual love for their neighbor Abigail. Rounding out the Flowers household are Maurice’s aged mother and Shun, a young Japanese artist who illustrates Maurice’s books.

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Movie Review – In the Loop

rwbcinema

In the Loop (2009)
Written by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, & Tony Roche
Directed by Armando Iannucci

in the loop

In the UK Minister for International Development Simon Forster makes an off the cuff remark that “war is unforeseeable” when questioned during a radio interview about the Middle East. This does not mesh with the company line coming out of Downing Street and the Prime Minister’s communications head Malcolm Tucker is more than happy to ream Forster out over this. Toby is new to Forster’s staff and, to make a good impression, he gets a spot in a meeting between the UK’s foreign office and a US delegation from the state department. This leads to another verbal flub from Forster and Tucker’s eventual solution to send him to Washington D.C. on a “fact-finding” mission. Problems snowball until all parties, those for and against war end up in a race to head each other off.

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Movie Review – Trespass Against Us

a24 visions

Trespass Against Us (2016)
Written by Alastair Siddons
Directed by Adam Smith

trespass against us.jpg

Chad Cutler is part of a caravan community in the English West Country. This collection of people living on the fringes of society is overseen by Chad’s domineering father Colby who has refused his son’s urges to move his family away from this rural waste. Instead, Colby recruits Chad into breaking into and robbing a prominent local politician’s house. Chad is a skilled driver, and so he manages to evade the police who know the culprits but don’t have the proof to apprehend them. Tensions increase between father and son as attention is drawn to their caravan and Chad’s wife plans to leave with the children.

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Movie Review – Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories (2017)
Written & Directed by Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman

ghost stories

Professor Phillip Goodman has made a career out of being a skeptic of all things supernatural and mystic. When we catch up with him, he’s exposing a medium that preys on grieving parents. Out of nowhere, Goodman is contacted by presumed dead paranormal investigator Charles Cameron, an inspiration to Goodman. Cameron claims that he had a crisis of faith and discovered three cases that he could find no rational explanation for. Goodman takes these three cases with the intent of doing his investigation and proving them hoaxes. However, as the good professor explores each incident and speaks to the people who witnessed each one he finds strange coincidences that hint at something more sinister behind these events.

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Revisiting Utopia – Series 1, Episode 5

Utopia Series 1, Episode 5 (2013)
Written by Dennis Kelly
Directed by Marc Munden

utopia jessica arby

An easy unofficial title for this one: “Deals.” And this is a title that works on multiple levels. The easiest is that much of this episode addresses the fictional Deal’s disease that has been spoken about during the series. Becky’s father died from it, and now she fears she inherited it from him. Each character is also making deals with people they probably shouldn’t but are forced to as an act of survival. As we push into the finale, we see alliances crumbling, new ones forming, and everyone being pushed further to the brink.

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Revisiting Utopia – Series 1, Episode 4

Utopia – Series 1, Episode 4 (2013)
Written by Dennis Kelly
Directed by Marc Munden

becky utopia

As I have come up with unofficial titles to these episodes so far, I feel compelled to do so with this one. It’s a toughie to pinpoint the exact theme on this chapter, but I think I would go with “We Become What We Hate,” as the episode features many characters crossing that line and playing The Network’s game. People become killers, they engage in manipulation, and they find themselves struggling to survive. Relationships definitely begin to fray, and we see that our group on the run may not be able to hold together for much longer.

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Revisiting Utopia – Series 1, Episode 3

Utopia – Series 1, Episode 3 (2013)
Written by Dennis Kelly
Directed by Marc Munden

utopia series 1 episode 3

The unofficial title for this episode? “Loss of Innocence,” as the episode opens and ends on children directly in the line of brutal cold violence. In fact, the opening scene of this episode received over 50 complaints and was aired just a month or so after the shootings in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. I would never argue that this start is meant to be light or easy to get through. The creators most definitely intended to unsettle the audience. And this is a weird wrinkle I have noticed in audience’s perceptions of media as of late. If the film or television show or other form presents an uncomfortable or unsettling situation, then it is immediately perceived as if the creator is explicitly endorsing a destructive action. This mindset is highly corrosive to understanding and appreciating art. The creator is not always reflected in the creation, most of the time not at all. If anything, the cold open of Episode 3 is the creator making an undeniable statement about the horrors of such events, particularly when we look at the turn for Arby in this scene, when he stumbles upon the child cowering in the gym.

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Revisiting Utopia – Season 1, Episode 2

Utopia Series 1, Episode 2 (2013)
Written by Dennis Kelly
Directed by Marc Munden

utopia jessica hyde

Episode Two comes out of the gate ready to lay the first real building blocks of the series mythos. We are introduced to The Network, a Cold War-era response by the West to Soviet Bloc countries building up arsenals of chemical weapons. The obvious question after learning about their existence would be, why are they still around then? That answer is not laid out in any sort of clear way this chapter, but their new agenda is hinted at. Outside of the core “gang on the run” cast, we have the background story of the Ministry of Health’s purchase of Russian flu vaccine coming under scrutiny and then a very convenient outbreak in the Shetland Islands. This helps flip the script on the government incompetence story and turn the Ministry into forward-thinking heroes.

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