Hawaii Five-0 (Season 1)

What I knew Going In: “Book’em Danno!”         Du-du dudu du duuu, Du-du dudu duuuuuuuu

I’ll admit I wasn’t even aware this was a thing until very recently. I knew of the old series of Five-0 but never watched it, I was too young. The theme tune, however, has been ingrained into me from god knows where for a good period of my life. The fact there was a new iteration of the show somehow shot straight past me and in fact the blame for me now delving into the new and updated series falls squarely onto the shoulders of my new girlfriend. Had she not introduced me to the series from her own love of it I would most likely have passed it by without a second thought, and what a mistake that would have been!

All the old characters from the original are back in new forms, apparently. As I said I haven’t actually seen the original but I was pretty sure the character of Danny was in it as someone had to be “bookin’em” and I took the educated guess that McGarrett was a revived character too. On my google search to confirm this I found that all of the team were in fact characters from the original series! Sure, some may have undergone sex-changes in what was likely an attempt to break from the male dominated late 1960’s setting of the original but they’re all there right down to the series antagonist! This makes the whole thing seem like more of a remake than the re-imagining I assumed, the faithfulness of which I obviously cannot begin to speculate.

Ex-marine Steve McGarrett is tasked with leading the newly established Governor’s Task Force and brings on police officer Daniel Williams (affectionately known as Danno, thanks to his daughter) as his partner after they have a stand-off in Steve’s dead father’s garage. No really, that’s the extent of how they know each other…
Not a lot of explanation goes into why McGarrett keeps Danny around after the events of the pilot episode but whatever his reasons the viewer is glad of it! Steve’s gung-ho navy seal and Danny’s ‘by the book’ police officer make the perfect buddy cops. Steve will do whatever it takes, such as dangling a suspect off a building or using a grenade to open a locked door, whereas Danny is left to despair as he tries to stick to the moral code of his police training. Neither is afraid to call the other out on the shortcomings of their individual approaches either and this is where their relationship hits screen gold. On more than one occasion I remarked that I could easily watch a full 40 minute episode of just the two of them bouncing off each other.

Filling out the rest of the team we have Chin Ho Kelly, an ex-cop with a corruption charge falsely (this is expanded upon later) pinned on him, and Kono Kalakaua, Chin’s cousin fresh out of the academy and thrown right in at the deep end. Again, Kono’s inclusion in the team is not really explained past her initial usefulness in the pilot but I guess with all the free reign Steve has been given he can just pick whoever the hell he wants. All of this uncertainty becomes irrelevant once the show gets into its stride though as the team works well together and the show itself is thoroughly enjoyable with its jazzed up theme tune and just past believable tech. It’s not quite CSI:NY levels of unbelievable, mind you, but placing a mobile phone onto the touchscreen desk and having it read the internal memory…really? Plus, going back to the theme tune, it’s one of those that doesn’t half climb into your brain and burrow into the furthest recesses. I have annoyed at least three people by whistling the tune as I wrote this review and that doesn’t include my own urges to gouge out the part of my brain responsible for playing it on repeat and slowly turning it up louder as I’m trying hard to concentrate.

On a small tangent, I would just like to make the observation that Chin really does love his shotgun! While McGarrett may sometimes show up with an assault rifle the majority of the time the team relies on small arms when forced into gunfights. Not Chin Ho Kelly though, oh no he is bringing his shotgun whether it is called for or not! Raiding a drug den? Shotgun! Saving a hostage? Shotgun!! Sneaking into a warehouse full of gang members to take them by surprise… Shotgun? It got to the point eventually when seeing him in the odd gunfight without the shotgun became strange to me. But hey, Chin is a badass so he plays by his own rules and so far it seems to be working for him…

The ending to the series was fantastic, a definite cherry on top of the cake that was the series as a whole. Within the course of 40 minutes all the threads that had been left dangling in front of the audience (and a couple you didn’t even realise were relevant) were pulled together effortlessly. The cliffhanger we are left with did not feel forced as many season endings seem to and you are left feeling that this is not a situation the characters can just resolve within the first few minutes of season 2.

All in all watching season 1 was a very enjoyable experience and I find myself raring to go for the second season and, as luck would have it, the first disc is already here waiting for me. I will be bumping the other seasons up onto my high priority list, if not only because I am told by my dear other half that I “Have to see the shark episode!”

PS. Since liking Hawaii Five-0 on Facebook I have had suggestions to join multiple groups proclaiming Steve and Danny as the perfect couple/soulmates. I couldn’t agree more guys! 😀

Project Almanac

What I Knew Going In:           Time Travel!!

Found footage is a trend in cinema that I never quite got behind. I understand it’s a cheap way to make your movie if you film the whole thing on handheld cameras, possibly even using your actors as cameramen, but the end result always suffers the same issues. The chief of which is the question of why exactly so many people begin filming their lives just before interesting things happen to them? Usually the excuses given by the films themselves are rather weak or sometimes non-existent. For example, at one point during Project Almanac we see our main character watching footage of his 7^th birthday and the camera pans from the children enjoying themselves to film his father apologising for leaving the party to go to work. Seriously now, who films that? It’s not exactly a moment to look back on in nostalgia…

The film addressed this strange behaviour at one point by having the ‘popular’ girl remark “You guys film everything, huh?” once she joins the group. At least this gives some acknowledgement from the film that this kind of behaviour is a little strange. Also, once the time machine is tested and the lead proclaims to his sister “From now on, film everything!” this does something to explain the rest of the filming in terms of documenting their experiments. The problem being that she already was filming everything as evidenced by the previous footage of school cafeterias and trolley rides around hardware stores. I think the viewer is just meant to accept that these kids are so caught up in social media culture that they film every waking moment in an attempt to capture something that can get them a few likes and shares.

Found footage films are usually interesting to me for a little while but then begin to drag as the issues pile up and the plot begins to show its stretch marks. Thankfully, for me, Project Almanac did not fall into this pit. The story began slow and ponderous but after about 20 minutes of set up the pace picked up and I was engaged. The 1 hour 40 minute run time flew past without me checking how long there was left even once! I was taken out of the flow a little once the go-to devices of audio/visual glitches and dropping the camera to obscure the audience view started to be employed around the climax. These are, unfortunately, probably just a symptom of the whole found footage genre though.

Now to the premise of the film; a kid finds the blueprints to a time machine hidden by his absent father in their basement. Okay, we’re talking Sci-Fi so I can suspend some disbelief as to why the father would leave it there before disappearing himself. The bit that didn’t quite gel with me was that after maybe a few days and the application of a car battery the kid and his friends make the damn thing work! His father supposedly worked for the government carrying out this research and couldn’t make it work but his son can with objects he bought at a Home Depot? This is definitely the case as well because when (SPOILERS AHEAD!) the kid meets his father at the end of the movie Dad exclaims “You got it to work!”
I understand the boy is supposed to be a genius but I assume the government may have had at least one of those too knocking around their secret research sections while the machine was being developed…

The core group of characters are, for lack of a better word, stupid! After testing the device and seeing a remote controlled car end up fused into the concrete of the basement they immediately decide its time THEY tried it out! There is a brief discussion of sending bacteria and white mice to test the effects on living things but this is swiftly brushed aside in favour of just using themselves as test subjects. Not a single one of these kids saw the car half-buried in concrete and thought to themselves “That could be painful if it happened to me…”
They are idiots with no forward thinking and very little regard for personal safety. So all in all the characters appear to be pretty accurate representations of the kind of kids I knew/was in high school.

Overall the movie was enjoyable enough to watch through and not get distracted by other things. The phone was ignored when it buzzed and Facebook notifications took a backseat. The story was slightly predictable at moments but nobody really goes to a found footage movie expecting something equivalent to The Godfather. It is not a film I would watch more than once though, I have experienced it and now I can tick it off the list and move on.

Small side note: One of the actresses in the film is called Sofia Black-D’elia. I googled, that’s her real name. Did her parents have a thing for serial killers when they decided on their hyphenation? This is totally irrelevant to the movie of course but relevant to my brain at 12am after watching a film for 2 hours.

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Bonus round: Spot the product placement

As a film starring nobody of note this is likely a sad reality of gaining funding but I thought I would point out some of the more blatant moments, for fun of course.

1) When things are floating around during the first test of the machine we get a lovely slow motion shot of a can of Red Bull floating past the camera.

2) When they are inexplicably filming their school cafeteria we get a head on view of a Windows Phone almost being presented to the camera.

3) Paraphrasing: “The hot girl drives a Hybrid! Only a Hybrid battery can power the time machine effectively! We need her HYBRID!”

4) A good chunk of the movie is set at Lollapalooza. I’m from the UK so Lollapalooza is nothing more than a funny word to me but the extended shots of Imagine Dragons onstage smacked of promotion more than it did storytelling.

Notes on the Author…Blogger…Me?

I love movies. I love TV. I love animation. I love documentaries. It’s safe to say I am a fan of visual media along with most people in the western world.

A statement I quite commonly hear, however, is “How have you NOT seen that?!” You see the fact is I have fallen far, far behind on my media consumption over a period of years. The relatively rapid release schedule of multiple competing companies within the entertainment industry gave me a huge demand for time. On the other hand other passions such as books, games, friends, work/study and even sleep have left me with limited time to give. There are, quite literally, not enough waking hours in the week.

At the age of 20 I decided to do something about this. I started a subscription with Lovefilm to receive DVDs through the post (streaming at the time was not even on my radar). I added a selection of around 100 films to my rental list and began to delve into what I had missed. For a time I seemed to be making headway until one day I went to manage my list and found it had inexplicably doubled in size. Where originally there had been a manageable 100 titles there were now a little over 200 and the number continued to grow faster than I could deplete it by watching.

It has been just over 6 years now and my situation has not improved. My active list of rentals has ballooned up to over 600 films and that isn’t even taking into account the number of films I have sitting in reserve (at the time of writing 83!) waiting for release or availability. My sin is that I cannot let a film go when I find it interesting and so every DVD I receive and watch usually kicks up 2 or 3 new films to rent from the previews alone.

The introduction of Amazon Instant was, at first, a godsend as it allows me to consume the media I crave without having to wait for the rental disc. Unfortunately what was initially my helping hand has now become another weight holding me back from my goal. You see the addition of streaming has opened up a whole new set of media that I didn’t know I was missing (mostly TV).

In short, my mission seems impossible but I am determined to keep pushing through in the vain hope that one day I will emerge the other end.

On a slightly humorous and revealing side note I did attempt to manage my list a few months back on the prompting of my new girlfriend. She felt I could probably get rid of a fair few items as some were still present from 6 years back. I trawled through all 600+ titles and removed 5, I also added another 2 that were new sequels to films I had hidden in there. How she didn’t break down in despair at me immediately is a mystery.

Now, I don’t claim to be an expert in the process of movie-making or TV show production in any way whatsoever. I know what a dutch angle is and I could point out a lens flare but that’s as far as it goes. Story wise I did pretty well in English literature at GCSE and I passed my Theatre Studies A-Level comfortably but I don’t go around analysing subtext and themes with a fine tooth comb on a regular basis. If I watch or read something it’s generally for enjoyment and looking to see if the colour scheme is reflecting the protagonist’s mood kind of sucks me away from that. I want to immerse myself rather than sit on the outside and analyse. In short I am not a critic, I am a consumer. Any views on the films and TV I write about are coming purely from my experience as the audience member watching them.

A lot of the time I am going to be experiencing pop-culture when it is no longer “pop”, experiencing film and television for the first time without the social context of the time that spawned it. See me miss references to events that were originally meant to be topical but have long since been filed away in my consciousness. Despair as I just don’t get the point because the point is no longer relevant. Perhaps be amazed alongside me as future context brings out new meaning in past works. Who knows, maybe my journey will be enlightening for me and maybe it will be infuriating, maybe bits of both. One thing it will definitely be though is an experience, come share it with me if you’d like.