X-Men: Days of Future Past: Explosive & Entertaining

From the opening sequence, the sheer scale of X-Men: Days of Future Past is overwhelming. Featuring a bewildering array of characters, special effects, mutant abilities and plot lines, this is a superhero movie that grabs you from the very first frame and doesn't let go until the very last post-credits sequence.

The movie opens in an apocalyptic future where mankind is being decimated by the Sentinels, machines that were specifically created to kill mutants but evolved to kill humans who might have mutant offspring as well. Professor X, Magneto, and the "old" X-Men from the first three movies in the franchise are desperately fighting the Sentinels but it is a losing battle. Finally Professor X hits upon the brilliant idea of utilizing Kitty Pryde's special mutant ability; she can send anyone's consciousness back into the past. If she sends Wolverine back into 1973, he can enlist the help of young Professor X and Magneto to stop Mystique/Raven from killing the man responsible for the Sentinel program. When she killed him, she inadvertently ensured the program would flourish because mutants were perceived as a murderous threat to society. In addition, she was captured and her DNA was used to strengthen the Sentinels so that they could adapt to any mutant attack and never be defeated.

It's an elegant premise, ripe with the potential for time travel humor, complex character development, and twisty plots about how the past determines our future. The cast is impressive: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and Ellen Page? Sign me up. Each action sequence is riveting, featuring imaginative skills and subterfuge, mutant mischief, and brilliant imagery. Director Bryan Singer makes each scene unique; instead of repetitive sequences of buildings collapsing, you are treated to fun and innovative new approaches to the eternal battle between humans and mutants. There are plenty of surprises along the way and wonderful twists that will please comic book nerds and movie lovers alike.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is a worthy continuation of the X-Men franchise and proves that re-casting the characters in their younger days has injected more vitality and fun to these films. This movie wasn't as funny as I like my Marvel movies to be, but the innovation and relentless pace kept me on the edge of my seat and delivered a true summer blockbuster. So grab your popcorn and head to the theater. Summer has arrived and the superheroes are back in full force.

The Normal Heart: Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

The Normal Heart offers a stunning look at the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York. Based on the mostly autobiographical 1985 play by Larry Kramer, a co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) and prominent AIDS activist featured in How to Survive a Plague, The Normal Heart focuses on Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo), a gay writer who becomes an outspoken activist as his friends start to die around him and no one seems to care.

Because the story only spans the years of 1981 to 1984, it is a strikingly condensed piece of tragedy, full of confusion, rage, love, and despair. Within half an hour, Ned has gone from having one friend collapse and die in a few weeks, to knowing several gay men with the telltale purple spots of Kaposi's sarcoma that signal their lives are about to end. He partners with Dr. Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts), a doctor who is single-handedly tackling this puzzling illness among young gay men and trying to get NIH funding so she can figure out what's going on. She is in a wheelchair after contracting polio at the age of five, so she understands what it means to have your life ruined by a dangerous virus. However, she is not gay, and her caustic pleas to gay men to just stop having sex are largely derided. The play brilliantly illustrates the tangled web of gay politics, with older activists angrily declaring they fought for the right to love openly without shame and they now refuse to be cowed by a hypothetically sexually transmitted virus. 

In the meantime, the cautious Ned falls deeply in love with a New York Times writer named Felix (Matt Bomer). Their relationship is a powerful example of the lives and loves that these men are fighting to preserve. They are fully committed to each other, and even though Felix is quiet and closeted, he fully supports his outspoken partner in his fight for education, awareness, and funding. They are a wondrous team, a couple you will root for until the bitter end.

The Normal Heart is a love story but it is also a play about rage. Even though Ned is the focus, every character has a furious monologue, raging against prejudice, raging against this virus, raging against the ceaseless death toll while the world stands idly by. There are vast differences among the various activists' approaches and Ned butts heads with his closeted counterparts or colleagues who would prefer to use diplomacy rather than accusations. It's a fascinating, multi-layered portrayal of the people, beliefs, and politics that came into conflict in this uncertain time. 

I cannot praise the performances of this cast enough, particularly Mark Ruffalo and Matt Bomer who will make you smile and weep at the depths of Ned and Felix's love. Jim Parsons is incredible as a passionate, big-hearted director of the GMHC and Joe Mantello, who plays an activist working in the public health department and is seeing firsthand how the gay community is being ignored, delivers a particularly stirring speech about his helplessness and uncertainty in this war against a mysterious menace. The dialogue is blistering, compassionate, urgent, and evocative and every actor delivers these lines with the full force and impact they deserve. 

The Normal Heart is powerful and necessary viewing. Even if advances in research and medicine have made HIV/AIDS a chronic illness rather than a certain death sentence, there is still so much further we have to go. It is also a devastating indictment of how homophobia and prejudice allowed thousands of men to die in horrific circumstances. This still happens today and The Normal Heart is a much-needed reminder that we need to continue to rage against injustice and fight for equality, compassion, and love. 

The Cripple of Inishmaan: Pitch Black Comedy

Watching the final scene of The Cripple of Inishmaan is simultaneously the happiest and saddest experience you'll have at the theater. I have never seen a play that is so uproariously funny and yet also impossibly cruel: after two and a half hours, you will emerge from the Cort Theatre in a daze, wishing you could watch Billy's life story for a few hours more.

Set in 1934, The Cripple of Inishmaan tells the story of Billy Claven, a young man who was orphaned as a baby and is severely crippled on one side of his body. He lives on Inishmaan, a small island off the coast of Ireland, with his adoptive aunts, Kate and Eileen Osbourne. He is tired of his boring life and fed up with the small-minded townsfolk who always refer to him as "Cripple Billy." When a Hollywood film crew arrives on a neighboring island to make a movie, Billy decides to hitch a ride with Babbybobby, a boatman who has promised to take the irascible Helen McCormick and her brother Bartley over to see the filming. Billy hopes that this trip will be his ticket out of Inishmaan, and you'll have to watch the play to see if he ever makes it.

The playwright is Martin McDonagh, the man who wrote the brilliant In Bruges (a movie I am declaring required viewing for all readers of the blog), and it is clear that he revels in writing these kinds of stories. Life is a series of ups and downs, but in a McDonagh play or screenplay, you're going to get those ups and downs in a compressed few hours and feel positively giddy at the end. The dialogue is impeccably witty and shockingly harsh, the characters seem to have hearts of gold that tarnish within minutes, the scenarios are complicated and engaging. The set is also beautifully crafted, portraying the stark but quaint beauty of this Irish island. The lighting perfectly captures the movements of the rising and setting sun against the backdrop of gentle Irish music or the sounds of waves crashing on the shore. The coziness of the general store and the bleakness of the beach combine to make you understand why so many Inishmaan residents are content to stay while Billy is so desperate to leave.

The actors in this particular production are spectacular. Most of them are Irish, with strong brogues that present a bit of a challenge. But McDonagh has expertly crafted the dialogue, making repetition a key part of why the jokes are so funny and the observations ring true, so you will quickly pick up the rhythms and follow along without any difficulty. Daniel Radcliffe does a wonderful job in the lead role as Billy Claven, but the real standout is Sarah Greene, who plays Helen McCormick. Helen ought to be a thoroughly despicable character - she treats Billy horribly (well she treats everyone horribly, but particularly Billy), is rude and wild, and has a penchant for smashing eggs. But her antics and bright red hair considerably liven up the proceedings and keep things moving quickly. While everyone on Inishmaan dithers and gossips, she's busy creating a ruckus that the island can gossip about.

The Cripple of Inishmaan is a thought-provoking and engaging piece of theater, chock-full of laughs, surprises, and indelible characters. The play ends its limited run at the Cort Theatre on July 20, so if you're going to be in New York, you need to add this production to your must-see list. There's a reason it's the most Tony-nominated play on Broadway - you don't want to miss it.

Only Connect: Devious Quizzing

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the BBC's Only Connect is the most difficult quiz show on television. Currently in its ninth series, each edition features an astonishing display of mind-bending mental gymnastics, esoteric trivia knowledge, and seemingly miraculous problem-solving.

Each episode pits two teams of three people against each other and consists of four rounds. In Round 1, teams are given a series of four clues and they have to guess the connection. The fewer clues you need before spotting the connection, the more points you win. In Round 2, the clues make up a sequence, so you have to figure out what the fourth in the sequence would be. Be prepared for the occasional team that successfully guesses the fourth in the sequence after just one clue - it's like witchcraft. Round 3 introduces the evil Connecting Wall, a scrambled grid of 16 clues that have to be sorted out into 4 connected groups in two and a half minutes. And to end things, there's the Missing Vowels buzzer round, where teams are given a category and then have to identify a series of words or phrases with the vowels taken out. 

Hosted by the marvelous Victoria Coren Mitchell, a woman who is firm but fair, and always funny, this show is incredible not only for the quality of its contestants but the quality of its writers. I can't imagine what sort of people come up with such elaborate and tricky clues year after year, but they are frighteningly clever. The Connecting Wall is particularly devious, featuring multiple clues that could belong to multiple categories, further complicating an already thoroughly complicated puzzle.

The show often deals with very British topics, so it can be rather disheartening to a non-British viewer like myself when you simply cannot figure out any connections. On the plus side, you can always dismiss a particular set of clues as being too British and therefore not feel like quite such a fool. The show's website offers up a plethora of Connecting Walls so you can play for yourself and measure your connecting prowess. It's an addictive and frustrating pursuit, a form of schadenfreude that only a quizzing nerd like myself could recommend. So delve into the world of Only Connect and follow me down the rabbit hole. You'll be so glad and annoyed that you did. 

Silicon Valley: Startup Satire

It took me a while to warm up to it, but six episodes in, I've become a wholehearted fan of HBO's Silicon Valley. The satire, which started out a bit too broad for my liking, has become much more precise and incisive over the past few episodes, leading to explosively hilarious half hours every Sunday night.

The series follows a group of men who are navigating the tricky waters of establishing a successful startup in the hyper-competitive world of Silicon Valley. Our hero is Richard Hendriks (Thomas Middleditch), an unassuming software developer who works at a Google-like corporation called Hooli and unwittingly develops a compression algorithm that could become the next big thing. After getting caught up in a bidding war, Richard chooses to take a startup investment from eccentric billionaire Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch), instead of selling his algorithm to his boss at Hooli. After making this momentous decision, he is faced with the harsh realities of managing a tech startup. He is a software developer, not a businessman, and as CEO of Pied Piper (the much-ridiculed name he gave to his company), he quickly learns that he's in over his head.

Richard lives in a "tech incubator" owned by Erlich Bachman (T. J. Miller), a loud stoner who sold his great idea and now runs this incubator with the deal that he owns 10% of any idea that his tenants come up with. He isn't helpful in terms of tech or business savvy, but he turns into Richard's spokesman, projecting a confident brash belief in Pied Piper that Richard sorely lacks. Richard's colleagues are the moody Satanist, Bertram Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), the sarcastic Pakistani, Dinesh Chugtai (Kumail Nanjiani), and the painfully awkward Donald "Jared" Dunn (Zach Woods), who is the only one with any business sense. Richard's best friend is Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti (Josh Brener), but he is quickly kicked out the company when everyone realizes he has no programming skills. Hooli hires him as a potential spy into Pied Piper's operations who could reverse-engineer the algorithm, only to discover they've made a massive mistake. While Richard feverishly works on turning Pied Piper into a viable company, Big Head just has to kick back at Hooli with the other "unassigned" employees, waiting until his contract expires so he can vest his stock options. 

The show is never funnier than when it tackles a very specific problem that highlights the absurdities of the modern business world. In one episode, Erlich is in search of someone to design the perfect company logo, a project that is destined to go disastrously wrong. Questions of corporate culture and management style plague the company: they're just a group of guys who code, what do they know about business plans and delegating tasks? After getting the investment from Peter Gregory, Richard discovers he can't even cash the check because it is made out to Pied Piper, a company name that is already registered in California by a man with a successful sprinkler business. 

Silicon Valley is a tale of awkward geniuses who set out to live the dream and end up in a startup nightmare. The first season is just eight episodes, allowing for a concentrated dose of weekly tech humor and heart. It's an excellent companion piece to the political satire of Veep, and should become a staple of your Sunday night TV line-up. So if you haven't been watching Silicon Valley, log on to HBO Go and get started. 

Fargo: Madcap Minnesotan Mystery

If you enjoy the work of the Coen brothers in general and their 1996 movie Fargo in particular, then Fargo the TV series is just what you're looking for. But even if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you should give this show a shot. Because it is a welcome entry into the prestige cable "limited series" lineup.

Fargo tells the "true" story of a series of murders that shook up a sleepy Minnesotan town. To give away the nature of those murders and the perpetrators would ruin your enjoyment of the pilot, which just goes to show you how crammed this show is from the get-go. Suffice to say, there are good guys and bad guys, murder and mayhem, and with four episodes down, things are unraveling delightfully.

The central characters are insurance salesman Lester Nygaard (played by the ubiquitous and fantastic Martin Freeman, whose Minnesotan accent gets better as the show progresses, I promise), menacing hit man Lorne Malvo (played by Billy Bob Thornton in a haircut reminiscent of Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men), intrepid and intelligent police officer Molly Solverson (played by the non-ubiquitous but sure to become superstar Allison Tolman), and the hapless but dependable officer Gus Grimly (played by the always engaging Colin Hanks). There are several characters on the periphery, who may or may not come into focus as this story winds its way to a close, but these four actors are at the center of this twisted tale and they are all hitting it out of the park.

In recent years, critically acclaimed cable dramas have mostly featured antihero male protagonists who are doing the wrong thing for perceived right reasons. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Dexter: these are all stories of men who do heinous things yet manage to keep the audience rooting for them in some sick fashion. Those shows are fantastic, but it is refreshing that Fargo's creator and sole writer, Noah Hawley, has realized that what cable drama could really use is a great female heroine. Deputy Molly Solverson is the best new female character on television and Allison Tolman imbues her with goodness, intelligence, and daring. This is a woman who is determined to solve this tricky case, despite the various obstacles thrown in her way by a decidedly sexist boss. She is plucky and smart, and I can't wait to see her solve this case and reap her just rewards.

Fargo is also appealing because of its tone. It's a dark comedy in the best Coen brothers tradition, and despite the shocking events that take place, it never ceases to be funny or descend into moments of lighthearted absurdity. Every hour of this show features strong performances, intriguing plot twists, cinematic cinematography, witty dialogue, and spellbinding storytelling. And the promise of a limited 10-episode run means that it can't overextend itself. The most worthy comparison for this show might be HBO's True Detective, which was also a limited series about solving a series of murders. But while that show chose to meander into meaningless philosophical sidebars and glorify the flawed male protagonists at its center, Fargo is choosing to celebrate a central female character who knows how to do her job and is solving an intricate case with actual clues and solid police work. This show has great characters, but it's also putting the story first, and as a result, it is bringing must-see television to Tuesday night.

The Trip to Italy: Coogan & Brydon & La Dolce Vita

If you can't travel to Italy yourself, the next best thing might be to watch The Trip to Italy. The sequel to 2010's marvelous The Trip, this series sees the intrepid Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon team up yet again to review six restaurants for a column in The Observer. But this time, rather than touring inns in the northern English countryside, they are following the footsteps of Milton and Byron on a Grand Tour of Italy. It's a sumptuous, scenic undertaking, with plenty of comedy and pathos along the way.

In the first series, Coogan was decidedly the unhappier man of the duo. But now, it's Brydon who's more troubled. I won't spoil what happens, but let's say there are some uncharacteristic shenanigans. However, as with any show featuring two of England's premier comedians, the comedy far outweighs the drama. These six episodes feature an unrelenting onslaught of impressions - there are the various James Bonds, multiple Godfather monologues (appropriate, given the Italian setting), and of course, some Michael Caine for good measure.

The banter between the two men is also much more upbeat. I know they're only playing fictionalized versions of themselves, but I can't help feeling that Coogan's recent success with Philomena and the general upswing of his career trajectory has made him a much happier person. Unlike The Trip, where he was constantly competing with Brydon to show off his comedic chops, The Trip to Italy features a much less desperate Coogan, one who actually seems to enjoy Brydon's antics and bursts out laughing in every episode rather than wryly pursing his lips and looking grumpy. And for some reason, the two men loudly sing along to an Alanis Morissette CD as they drive to their various destinations. It's an odd but delightful addition that further enhances their breezy camaraderie.

Of course, the Italian scenery might  have contributed a great deal to the cheeriness of the actors. The first series was beautiful, but these Italian hotels are jaw-dropping. Nestled in green mountains, featuring azure sea views, bathed in glorious sunshine, and serving up plate after plate of delectable Italian cuisine: it is impossible to be in a bad mood during this trip. This series was also edited down to make a feature film, and I look forward to seeing what scenes director Michael Winterbottom chose to highlight. This exercise between editing for film versus editing for television allows for a fascinating glimpse into Winterbottom's thought processes about the essence of each Trip. So head on over to the BBC iPlayer to catch the entire series, or buy the DVD box set. It's a trip worth taking.