Halt and Catch Fire: The PC Revolution

Halt and Catch Fire is AMC's latest attempt at prestige drama after the astronomical success of Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Set in 1983, the show is a fictionalized account of the early years of the personal computer revolution, when companies were desperately competing to create a computer that would be used by families in every American home.

Lee Pace stars as Joe MacMillan, a mysterious man who shows up at Cardiff Electric, a Dallas software company, with ambitions to build a PC that could surpass IBM's Personal Computer. He is full of ideas and is a brilliant marketer but he lacks any technical know-how. Scouting college students, he discovers Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), a brilliant young woman who understands the future of computing and is impatient to make her mark. She aspires to be like Ada Lovelace and Joe quickly recruits her. At Cardiff, he also finds software engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a man who has failed ambitions of his own. However, inspired by Joe, he starts to believe that this is his second chance to build the computer of his dreams. His wife, Donna (Kerry Bishé), who is also an engineering whiz, is wary, knowing that her husband's projects have caused him tremendous grief in the past. But before long, she is swept up in the madness and along for the ride. 

The show is a wonderful period piece, shot and designed with an unmistakable 80s feel that instantly transports you back in time. Some episodes can be a bit slow or heavy on tech-speak, but the actors are putting in wonderful performances that highlight the characters' passion and drive. It is particularly refreshing to have two strong female leads who are even more tech savvy than their male peers. In several episodes, it is Donna or Cameron who has to save the day when a computer crashes or a hard disk is erased while their male colleagues wring their hands in despair. Even though Silicon Valley remains a male-dominated sphere today, the show's creators are at least doing their part to acknowledge the great female engineers who contributed to the technological revolution.

Halt and Catch Fire is a fascinating glimpse into the first steps that led to the laptops and tablets we all own today. It's incredible to consider how dated all the technological concepts sound when you consider that these events were taking place just a few decades ago. We are living in the future these characters are envisioning and they have no idea the innovations that will ensue from their project. So, as Sunday night is the show's finale, it's time to start binge-watching on your PCs, tablets, and phones, and marvel at how far we've come. 

The Leftovers: A Mesmerizing Mystery

This summer, Sunday night has become jam-packed with quality television. Leading the fray is The Leftovers, the magnificent HBO series based on Tom Perrotta's book of the same name. Written and produced by Lost's Damon Lindelof, this show is a mystery that gradually unfolds with each episode, occasionally answering some questions but always posing new ones, and never ceasing to amaze.

The show opens on October 14, an ordinary day. A harried woman is at the laundromat, talking on the phone, with her screaming baby in tow. Finally she gets to her car, straps her baby into the car-seat, and sits down in front of the steering wheel. Still talking on the phone, she suddenly realizes her baby isn't crying anymore. She turns around, and he has disappeared. At first she is bemused, then terrified. Screaming for her child, she thinks he must have been kidnapped. But her terror is only amplified when she looks around and discovers a boy screaming in the parking lot for his father. More people start screaming for missing relatives and friends, and cars start crashing on the road as their drivers have mysteriously vanished. This is not an ordinary day.

Flash forward to three years after this incident. 2% of the world's population disappeared on that day, and no one has been able to figure out why. Religious leaders of all faiths have their own explanations, while secularists argue that this was random happenstance. Families were wrenched apart, the world was irrevocably changed, and everyone has different ways of dealing with the subsequent chaos. The Leftovers focuses on the residents of Mapleton, a small town with a sprawling cast of characters, who all have their individual tales of loss and hardship that will gradually be uncovered via flashbacks over the course of the series.

I won't delve into any further details about these individual stories because each one is compelling and satisfying as it is told. The cast features Justin Theroux, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, Christopher Eccleston, and many more, all of whom are all turning in excellent performances. These characters are broken people trying to cope with their survivors' guilt and make sense of a world in which anyone could suddenly disappear at any moment without any explanation. Some of them are trying to get on with their lives as normally as possible, while others go completely off the rails. Human beings are complicated, and in such complicated circumstances, there's no knowing what these people will do.

The Leftovers is a bizarre and wonderful show. Beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and tightly scripted, it is something I look forward to every week. I have no idea how it will end, and of course, the danger with something that has such a vague and mysterious premise is that it will never end satisfactorily. But even if the show never reaches a consensus about what happened on that fateful day, I am more than satisfied with the gradual reveals about the characters that populate this town. Each individual mystery is a thrill to uncover and every episode is a televisual treat. Interestingly, despite being on HBO, so far there hasn't been a lot of gratuitous nudity. This suggests the showrunners have a great deal of faith in their ability to keep the audience interested with a compelling plot rather than a slew of sex scenes. So log on to HBO Go or pull up HBO On Demand and delve into the world of The Leftovers. Just because Game of Thrones is over, it doesn't mean HBO still doesn't know how to entertain you on a Sunday night. 

Happy Christmas: A Slight Story

Happy Christmas stars Anna Kendrick as Jenny, a woman who comes to Chicago to stay in her brother, Jeff's basement after a bad breakup. Jeff and his wife, Kelly, have just had a baby so they assume Jenny will help out with babysitting while she figures her life out. But it looks like they might need to babysit her instead.

Jenny has a tendency to get wildly drunk and her whole life is a bit of a mystery to her brother. Nonetheless, Kelly (played by the marvelous Melanie Lynskey) takes pity on her bizarre sister-in-law and entrusts her son to her. Jenny takes care of the baby just fine, enlisting the help of her friend Cameron (Lena Dunham). The two women gradually befriend Kelly, who became a stay-at-home mom after the birth of her baby and has been struggling to find time to write a follow-up to her successful first novel. Jenny and Cameron encourage her to take a stand and carve out some time and space for herself, a subplot that is very sweet and speaks to working mothers everywhere.

Apart from that story line however, Happy Christmas is a bit of a meandering meditation that tries to have a plot but doesn't really succeed in executing it. Writer-director-actor Joe Swanberg (he plays Jeff) is an extremely indie director, one of the proponents of the mumblecore movement, who makes movies that are mostly improvised and don't have to be tightly scripted or shot expensively. This movie feels extremely low budget, and the old-fashioned opening credits initially confused me because I thought this might be a period piece set in the 70s or 80s instead of in the present day. It doesn't feel like a film for casual audiences but for indie enthusiasts or people who enjoy the work of the admittedly fantastic Kendrick and Lynskey.

If you do watch Happy Christmas, stay all the way to the end of the closing credits, as they feature a very extended scene that was cut out of the middle of the movie. It features Lynskey, Dunham, and Kendrick, sitting around and improvising their way through a very funny scene that showcases what this movie was all about. If the movie had just consisted of these three ladies sitting around and talking, in the vein of the epic conversations contained in the Before Sunrise trilogy, it would have been truly special. 

Matilda: From Screen to Stage

A few weeks ago, I saw Matilda the Musical on Broadway. I left the Shubert Theatre both delighted and appalled that the ten-year-olds on stage were already more accomplished than I could ever be.

A brief recap if you know nothing about Matilda: it's the story of a brilliant little girl who has horrible parents. She loves to read and is a child prodigy, but her parents think she is insane for preferring Dickens to reality TV. When she finally enrolls in school, she has the misfortune of attending the Crunchem Hall Academy, run by the terrifying Agatha Trunchbull, a woman who ought to be imprisoned for her barbaric treatment of the students. The one saving grace is Miss Honey, Matilda's first-grade teacher, whose name is a perfect indication of her personality. She recognizes Matilda's talents and the two of them form an alliance as they stand up to the people who keep trying to put them down. Matilda the movie was one of my all-time favorite movies as a child, but I only recently read the book. The Broadway show is relatively faithful to the book but takes a great deal of dramatic license at certain points, like fleshing out Miss Honey's backstory. This means that no matter how well you know the story, you'll still be surprised. 

I was blown away by the children in this production - they are immensely talented and supremely confident. I also had no idea they weren't British until I read the playbill. They're all speaking in spot-on British accents in addition to singing and dancing, and it's a remarkable feat. It can certainly be difficult to understand the lyrics at times as the children's voices are a bit shrill and the acoustics aren't great. But who cares about the lyrics when you're staring at the mesmerizing set? It's colorful, innovative, and spellbinding. Every inch of the stage is used to brilliant effect; trap doors and set pieces are popping up all over the place and the choreography is magnificent. One song that involves the children swinging on playground swings is particularly astonishing as they keep swinging higher and higher until they look like they could fall into the audience at any minute. You won't be able to keep your eyes off the stage.  

Matilda is an entertaining and engaging show for adults and children alike. With Tim Minchin as the composer, you can expect clever and hilarious lyrics stacked with double and triple entendres to keep audience members of all ages amused. The acting is stellar, the production design is excellent, and overall, it's one of the best ways you could spend two and half hours on Broadway.

The Lego Movie: Everything Is Awesome!!!

After completely missing it in theaters, I finally watched The Lego Movie last week. And it was as delightful as I had been promised. It was also the weirdest, most meta movie I had seen in a while. It is unabashedly tongue-in-cheek throughout and satirizes the standard tropes of animated movies while making numerous pop cultural references to everything from Lord of the Rings to Batman. If there's a Lego version of a famous movie character, it shows up in this movie and comes in for a fair share of mockery.

The movie's "hero" is Emmet, a construction worker who always follows the instructions and thinks "everything is awesome," as declared by the most popular song playing on the radio. When he inadvertently stumbles across the "Piece of Resistance," he uncovers a secret plot by Lord Business, an evil tycoon who has been trying to take over the Lego realms by stifling creativity and insisting that everything be constructed according to the instructions. The entire movie is a commentary on people who think Lego should only be used to follow the instructions laid out in the kit, versus people who want to play and create something new. It is incredibly clever storytelling that might soar right over the heads of younger children if it wasn't for a strange moment at the end of the movie that makes this subtle commentary hilariously overt.

The voice actors are brilliant in this movie, led by Chris Pratt, who imbues Emmet with all the likable goofiness that he brings to his characters in other movies or TV. His co-stars include the hilarious Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett as an exceedingly dark and broody Batman, Morgan Freeman playing a Gandalf-esque wizard in a send-up of his usual voiceover roles as God or some wise old man, and a host of other wonderful comedians and actors who keep the proceedings upbeat and entertaining.

The visuals are also stunning. The animation team has rendered every single thing in Lego, constricting themselves only to movements that Lego pieces can perform, or brick pieces you would find in a regular Lego kit. Even a sequence involving a vast ocean has waves rendered in Lego and it is an amazing feat of ingenuity. Every frame makes it apparent that a great deal of thought and love has gone into both the story and look of this movie.

The Lego Movie is a wonderful film that showcases how supposed "children's movies" have turned into hugely entertaining blockbusters with meta-commentary for adults. This film doesn't even stay meta and completely bares its premise, in a move which was certainly one of the more intriguing things I'd seen all year. So watch the movie and let me know what you think of the bizarre twist at the end. I barely played with Lego as a kid, but this movie certainly showed me what I had been missing.

Arrow: Small Screen Superhero

After Veronica Mars was cancelled and I gave up on Gossip Girl after Season 2, I largely ignored the CW. I assumed it was a network for angsty teen soap operas that could never interest me. But a few months ago, my friend Rose alerted me to Arrow, a superhero series based on the DC Comics hero, Green Arrow. Admittedly I'd never heard of the character, but I do enjoy my superhero movies, and Rose's recommendation was enough for me to start binging on Season 1 on Netflix.

After Episode 1, I was hooked. The pilot episode of Arrow is a perfect example of how to start a series. It's full of intrigue and drama, and packed with shocking reveals that hint at how much more there is to explore in this world. Our hero is Oliver Queen (the chiseled Stephen Amell), a wealthy playboy who has just returned home to Starling City after being shipwrecked on a Chinese island for five years. His father died in that shipwreck and Oliver returns as a much darker, somber man. Things happened to him in that island, which are gradually revealed in flashbacks over the course of the season, but the key thing is that his father gave him a mission to rout out the corrupt citizens who had failed Starling City. To perform that mission, Oliver sets up an underground lair in a nightclub, dons a hooded costume, and prowls the city with a bow and arrow, delivering vigilante justice.

Of course, there's a romantic subplot with his old girlfriend, Laurel (Katie Cassidy), who may have had a thing with his best friend, Tommy (Colin Donnell), and there's plenty of family drama with his secretive mother and stepfather, and his angsty teenage sister. The entire first season follows a story arc about the Undertaking, a shadowy plot that slowly takes shape as Oliver investigates the circumstances around his father's death and his personal vendetta. Everything culminates in an explosive season finale that seriously impressed me with its scope and the extensive planning that must have gone into setting up this arc over 23 episodes. The writers are not messing around, and this show is clearly crafted with a great deal of care and attention to detail. 

The action on Arrow is expertly choreographed and Stephen Amell's body is a wonder to behold. I do not think he is the best actor on TV, but he is certainly the fittest one. He is constantly having conversations while doing insane exercises and is clearly working hard to embody the physicality of this demanding role. Since his character is merely regarded as a vigilante and has no magical powers, Amell is adept at making Oliver seem so startlingly skilled that he  is worthy of the superhero label. His co-stars also pull their weight and there's a fun mix of dramatic and comedic chops on display to round out the cast and keep each episode interesting. This is certainly a show that could benefit from shorter seasons - the middle episodes do lag somewhat and contain more filler in order to meet that 23-episode quota. But overall, the show delivers solid material that is refreshing, surprising, and entertaining.

Arrow is a show that's made for binge watching. So many episodes end with a cliffhanger that compel you to keep watching. And if the middle episodes start to wear on you, you can just skip ahead to where the action gets interesting again. I've heard great things about Season 2, which just ended in May and apparently featured yet another explosive finale. I don't know when it will be released on Netflix, but I can guarantee I will be following Oliver Queen's latest adventures. I suggest you follow suit.