5 Reasons To Watch Rescue Me on Netflix

1.) If you want a clear cut, blunt force trauma styled tribute to 9/11, you can stop looking and come here. It’s seven seasons and layered with some of the best writing on television but it never forgets where its original aim is pointed. The tragic day in New York launched this show and the series circles back with dignity and honor. Denis Leary(Creator, Writer, Star) screened it at local firehouses in New York.

2.) It can go from comedy to drama in a scene. It will make you laugh one moment and cry the next. Leary’s writing is top notch and that’s because it’s darkly cynical and powerful without being preachy. The fireman here are well versed in bad decisions, heroism and are wack jobs, but in the end, their appeal is versatile.

3.) There are the regular easy to spot and love series moments. A fireman having problems with women. The overweight jokes are there but well written. The storylines are familiar and easy to digest. The show isn’t complex and doesn’t forget that people who watch the show need to see potent yet comfortable material.

4.) Be careful when you are watching this show because that rug you are standing on could be pulled out from under you. Major characters die and they do it without a buildup.

5.) The show never grows tired. In seven seasons and 90 plus episodes, Leary and the gang created something powerful, funny and easy to spread around. You won’t feel anchored to the floor but your attention and eyes will be glued to the screen.

Start watching now on Netflix. All episodes are there. The show wrapped up its run on the 10 year anniversary of 9/11. This is one of those shows that you don’t put in your queue. It gets clicked on right now.

It’s only been four days, but for the first time in three months, there isn’t a new episode of Banshee to look forward to this week. That’s sad and makes me long for an antique violin to strum on my deck, but let’s go back to Friday’s finale and have some fucking fun. I wrote my official reviewcap then. This is a more of a bang for bang, whatever said goes, funny, dark, light, mindfucked take on my favorite show. Why write more? I have two hands and this show gets to me, Let’s fire it up with the pre-credits sequence.

Tick…tick…tick…20 second countdown sequence. It all makes sense now. All the images click. Lucas with the gun, Kai staring up at the cross, Rebecca at the mass, Job in the chair, Burton closeup. All the images that have racked our brains for weeks now all carry a special identity.  (more…)

What-Banshee/ Where-Cinemax/ When-Friday night

Review of Episode 309-“Even God Doesn’t Know What To Make Of You

Directed by Loni Peristere

Written by Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner

It’s a common thing on Banshee to be mindfucked by the past. No matter how far or how fast the characters run, the past is sprinting way ahead of them, sitting down and sipping a drink, waiting for those tortured souls to arrive at the next brutal punching of the clock. “Even God Doesn’t Know What To Make Of You” taught us that no matter how we try, the hardest thing in this world is changing what you are. Switching from something that previously defined you and moving into a whole new skin. Asking for another hand from the dealer or requesting a redo or description of the blue pill. We are who we are in this world. Kai Proctor(Ulrich Thomsen) learned that in the hardest way possible this week.

It’s one thing to be mercilessly beaten half to death by a punch of large suited men, but it’s even worse when you have no idea why. Last week, Proctor was reunited with his family and welcomed back home by his father. He was connecting with his youth and finding love in Emily Lotus. It all went up in smoke when The Black Beards hauled him and his new love away like bodies being retrieved by their souls. Kai had no idea Rebecca(Lili Simmons) was dealing under the table with the Salvadorians. When the leader(who just had to be blind and carrying the voice of Louis Gossett Jr. with a couple pulls of reverence added to it) told him what his sweet little niece did, the resignation on Kai’s face was fatal for that brief glimpse of optimism that walked into his life. It dimmed for good when The Black Beard told him he would repay this lapse in judgement with his life. Kai may be a man capable of violence, but he has always retained a principle in his dealings. I love Peristere’s intercutting here with what seemed to be Kai’s internal struggle. Seeing him approach the room of prayer and worship slowly over the episode while being splashed with the final look on Kai’s face. Peristere did it in Evil For Evil in Season 2 and shows us a man in Kai who is slowly slipping back into the skin he has grown comfortable with for the majority of his life. Last week, he was smiling and had a few buttons opened on his shirt. He was loosening up and going warm, not soft. This week, he went back to being cold blooded and wound tight, never to return to his mother’s wishes or his father’s comfort again. Kai Proctor is a man apart. (more…)

The Leftovers is a modern take on the Twilight Zone with the curve ball spin put on it by the creator of Lost. It’s odd and intriguing at the same time, and your eyes can’t be taken away from the television screen. Like Banshee, it feels like cinematic television. The proceedings are beyond odd and create an uneasy feeling.

Several scenes involve zero music or a slow creeping painful violin being played. Characters give damaged a whole new identity and are unpredictable. There are no good or bad people, just lost souls being washed up on an island not fit for human interaction.

Novelist Tom Perrotta wrote the book for which the series is based on and the Lost creator, Damon Lindelof, took it and ran it over to director Peter Berg, who then walked into the office of HBO with an idea for TV addiction. All three minds put together the pilot and help produce the show about a modern world that suffered the most outrageous form of Natural Selection. The basic story line here is 2 percent of the population went missing, and the show picks up the events of a small Northeastern town three years later. Babies went missing. Mothers and fathers. Friends. As one guy puts it, “an asshole who nobody will miss”. All kinds of people, attached or aloof. There’s  no real explanation other than the fact that somebody from above decided to blindly trim the fat of the world we live in. The creator and storytellers wisely maintain the focus of the show on the aftermath and not what caused the disappearing act. Damon already wandered into trippy science fiction mania with the last 3 seasons of Lost.  Everything about the show stays far away from the norm and what you would expect.

There’s a cult called The Guilty Remnant, a group of wordless people who wear all white, smoke enough cigarettes that Don Draper may even take a bow and generally stalk anyone who hasn’t joined or needs to join the club. A priest can’t fill his church because after such an otherworldly event, a need to worship a higher power doesn’t exist. A mysterious woman carries a gun in her purse and has her car and house full of motherly artifacts but there are no kids in her home. Enter Justin Theroux’s guilt stricken fucked up beyond belief town sheriff and you have your moral center. He has no clue how to keep the puzzle pieces of the town together and has enough issues getting himself together for reasons that are explained in the first three hours of the series. His kids are true rebels, the daughter spying on strangers and coming within inches of teenage wastelands while the son has joined the services of an unorthodox sex maniac/spiritual healer named Wayne. (more…)