All posts by Matt Dykes

Matt is a huge film and TV buff who studied film and moving image production at university. In his spare time he enjoys reading comics and books, the occasional gaming session and writing novels.
Pandemic Picks

Pandemic Picks: Deadpool

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So, I was wracking my brain to think of what Superhero movies would I be recommending people to watch now that they have time and immediately of course I thought about the whole MCU because, you know, we have time to watch them all now. But I wanted a single film I could recommend, a lot of Superhero films these days have the problem of, “Well before you watch this you need to watch that first, but you also have to watch this before you can watch that.” I just wanted one film that a new viewer could pick up and enjoy. Then I thought, Deadpool.

And why not? This is a film that was a labor of love for Ryan Reynolds. It took him eleven years to get the movie made and the amount of love he had for the project shows on screen. The film is a very faithful adaptation of the comic character, even down to the fourth wall breaking and the fact that the character knows he’s in a comic book. Having recently gone back and read some of the old Deadpool comics the characters that are in the film are all taken from the original comics which I had no idea about at the time.

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Pandemic Picks

Pandemic Picks: The Big Nerd Pub Quiz

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A slightly different Pandemic Pick for me today. This is something I’ve been playing with some of my friends for the last couple of weeks. It’s a Pub Quiz that you live stream through YouTube and answer the questions in a Google document. Lots of fun and great for getting a group of friends together to participate in.

It’s run by Mark Hughes who live streams from his bedroom in Rostrevor Co Down, Ireland. So far there have been five of them, I missed the first one which I’ve heard was very nerdy. After the first one Mark took some feedback and it became a little more of a traditional pub quiz and less nerdy with a sports round and general knowledge rounds. The audience is growing with each quiz and the sixth one is scheduled for Saturday 11th April at 20:00 BST. On top of these there are also some specialist quizzes coming soon including a Star Trek and a Star Wars one. The Star Trek one I am most looking forward to as if you’ve read my previous articles on my trips to Star Trek conventions you’ll know.

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Pandemic Picks

Pandemic Picks: Airplane!

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Today’s Pandemic Pick is the classic comedy film Airplane! Surely I’m not serious… I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley. I promise that is the only time I’ll say that in this article… maybe. Airplane! is one of those films that everyone has either seen or at least knows some of the jokes from. It’s considered by many to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, comedy films of all time. But what is it that makes it such a great comedy?

The film is the brainchild of the writing team of brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, they based the film on a real disaster movie that they had caught on late night TV called Zero Hour about the pilots of a commercial flight getting food poisoning and a ex-World War II pilot is forced to take over. Sound familiar? Because that is pretty much the exact plot of Airplane! It’s hard to imagine that there is a film out there with the same plot as this zany comedy that played it straight.

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Pandemic Picks

Pandemic Picks: The Expanse

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I’ll be honest, I was of two minds on whether I would do a Pandemic Pick on The Expanse or not because I know at some point it’s going to be the subject of one of my deep dives. Probably when it’s all over and I can do a proper retrospective on the series. However, this is what I am currently watching at the moment and I’m absolutely loving it, more so on the second viewing as well.

Whenever I recommend this show to anyone the first thing they ask me is, “What’s it about?” Well, that’s difficult to explain without spoiling it because the way the story unfolds is you are thrown into this world and are basically left to catch up with what is happening. I love that about a series though, it treats us like an adult, it says here is the world that you’re going to be in for this series but don’t worry you’ll catch up. The way the story unfolds sets up more and more of the events and situations that govern the world this story takes place in. It feels weird referring to it as a world when the series setting is the Solar System, not one specific world.

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Pandemic Picks

Pandemic Picks: Patient Zero

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So, for today’s Pandemic Pick I’ve decided to go for something a little different. Because we all have a lot more time on our hands it is a good time to binge the latest TV show or get through that list of movies you wanted to watch for a long time. It’s also a good time to pick up a good book and I’m recommending the first entry in one of my favourite series of books. Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry.

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Pandemic Picks

Pandemic Picks: Sex Education

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For my second Pandemic Pick I’ve chosen to go for something a bit more distracting from the horror of current world events. Sex Education. This series is a mixture of comedy and drama combining elements of teen movie fare like American Pie and giving it an honesty that films of that nature always lacked.

Set in the fictional English town of Moordale the series combines a lot of British and American high school tropes into a strange hybrid which sort of weirdly works. Have no illusions though, my American readers, there are no high schools in the UK that are like Moordale, we don’t have high school swim teams for the most part and our “jocks” don’t wear letterman jackets, very few, if any, high schools in the UK have rows of lockers like in American schools and we don’t have school swimming pools. Even if we did, swimming would probably be the last thing you’d want to do in them. Then again, I’m basing my knowledge of American schools on films and TV series so maybe this trope of a row of lockers in schools is just that, a film/TV trope.

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Pandemic Picks

Pandemic Picks: Jericho

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In this time of self imposed quarantine we need something to take our minds off of the awfulness that is occurring in the real world. Not surprisingly viewing habits seem to reflect the real world events, the number of people watching films such as Contagion has skyrocketed. So here is my Pandemic Pick for today which I have just finished binging for what is probably the fiftieth time. Jericho.

I’ll preface this with saying this is going to be a brief unspoilery overview of why it’s a good watch as I plan on doing a more in depth article about the series at some point. I’m keeping this spoiler free because it is a really good show that you should go into without having things spoiled for you if possible.

Jericho is the story of a small town in Kansas trying to survive the after effects of a series of nuclear blasts occurring all over the US which has crippled the country. Not only was the series about survival but it was also had an espionage twist and an aura of mystery surrounding several of the characters. It also has some very chilling images, one of the most iconic from the series was that of a young boy witnessing the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast. This image became heavily used in marketing and is on the cover of the Complete Series DVD Set in the UK.

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Pop Culture, TV

Endless Wonder: 10 Years of Warehouse 13

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In 2009 the Sci-Fi Channel re-branded itself to SyFy to shift emphasis from harder science fiction series like Battlestar Galactica and the Stargate franchise. Along with the re-branding, a new series began that had a science fiction edge- mixing supernatural elements with comedy and a quirky feel that explored history in an interesting and unique way. This was not time travel (although time travel would feature in the series at one point); it was a modern day set series about agents whose sole mission was to retrieve items that were imbued with powers. These artifacts were things that ranged from the irritating to a world-ending weapon of mass destruction-but even the lesser powered artifacts had downsides to using them.

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Sci Fi Films

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – 35th Anniversary

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NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE!

In 1984, a film was released that was considered to be a flop at the time. It made very little at the box office, however, the film went on to become a cult classic. The reason for this is: nobody really knows exactly what the film is about. You can speculate; you can say what the story beats are,-you can even think that you know what the deeper meaning of the story is. The truth is- this is a film that is completely unique to everyone who watches it. It’s a film that could easily be dismissed as a cheesy product of the 1980’s. You would be so very wrong in your dismissal though. There is more to this film than it’s cheesiness- which there are moments of- there is no denying that. One of the biggest draws of the film is the fact that it dumps the audience into an existing universe and offers very little information about it up front. It tells the audience ‘this is the world, you’ll catch up.’ Treating the audience with respect, and treating them like the intelligent people that they are, was something that is very rare in film in general. It was especially rare in the early 1980’s.

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CBS All Access, Star Trek

Star Trek Picard: What Do We Know?

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It’s still a couple of months away, but the hype for Star Trek: Picard is in full swing. At the 2019 Destination Star Trek, I was lucky enough to attend the Patrick Stewart talk and in that he discussed a few things to expect from the new series. For more on my experience at Destination Star Trek see my article here.

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