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ianeff
Reviews
Peaky Blinders (2013)
Deadwood, re-shot in Ireland
Okay, so I don't know why everyone feels as if they have to modernize King Lear any more than I know why Sam Neill's taxis are all back-lit, but I'm really just insanely glad that they are. The cool, clean lines of this thing, echoed in everything down to the cheekbones of the lead, are amped up by the Nick Cave soundtrack, and the film's heavy grain.
In the vein of the retake on King Lear, you have a mother ceding her wartime claim on the family's business, book-making, to her two children. One is willful, the other, perhaps too clever for his own good. Casting a shadow over everything are the early days of Irish sedition.
Watch this. Take this in. It's a masterpiece.
Chaos (2011)
Just awful.
Wooden acting, self-satisfied, self-aggrandizing characters, boring action sequences, blah, blah, blah. There's really just nothing good about this series.
I'm trying to avoid spoilers, here, so I'll just say that when this bloated monster tries to be clever, it comes off as crass, and that I expected appreciably more from Freddie Rodriguez, whose character in Six Feet Under was understated and subtle.
The crux of how horrible this thing is comes at the end of every episode, when the characters come together and toss their heads around about how amazing all the plot-foiling and butt-kicking they've just done was. It's infuriating, annoying, and really not worth your time-- like the latter episodes of every trashy comedy out there.