Wanted to have a little chat about Justified, but was dismayed at the thin pickings up on YouTube to help clarify why I think you should be watching it too. In the end I shoved up a dirty grab of what for me was the turning point for the series. Watch it before it gets taken down, but be warned that it is slightly spoilerish for the episode in question (season one, episode four) if not the wider series:

Gun play and great dialogue. I love that Raylan only turns his attention to the healthy and armed goon once the pro has dropped his weapon. That’s a gallon of character insight right there.

There’s a nod to Tarantino at the beginning, but Justified isn’t as showy. They’ve taken the Elmore Leonard groove we’ve been treated to in the likes of Out of Sight and just run with it. What this means and is the thing I only grasped by the 4th episode is that there’s a lot of time spent on the supporting cast. An unusual amount of time to the extent that even the players who will be on screen for a relatively short period of time feel real and individual. That’s a hard trick to pull off on TV these days.

I think that dying hitman will stay with me a lot longer than the lead characters in shows that are well into their gazillionth seasons.

Initially, despite the pilot being very strong, I think I was slow to embrace Justified simply because I was still pining for Deadwood. Olyphant here is far removed from Bullock, but it’s hard not to want that show back. As a treat there are a few Deadwood alumni scattered across the episodes, but again it’s a very different show.

The original title was ‘Gunman’ and I think ‘Justified’ fits better in what is really a show about a gunslinger.

How he deals with life in the 21st century is the key to the character and this show is a Western through and through. Albeit one layered with the character quirks and hard decisions that have kept great drama like Breaking Bad on the air at the same time that an equally good show like Terriers was tossed away.

If you put a gun to my head I’ll say Terriers was the better show. Both it and Justified dealt some real curveballs to its leads, but the position that Hank arrives at with his ex is far more interesting than the one Raylan is still exploring early in the second season. But Terriers is dead and we can’t change that. And to be fair the father son relationship ended in a very different place than I expected in Harlan. Plus those final moments* of season one Justified are pretty fucking epic.

Now the show is back and has already thrown a stunningly good young actress into the works and a few new faces that I’m itching to see draw down on Raylan so it promises to be another great season. And I’d like to see Justified run and run. The gun play I count as a bonus, but the real delight here is the dialogue. Beautifully written for the entire cast.

At one point I had Olyphant down as my new Michael Biehn , but he’s found a path all of his own and he’s certainly a bonafide TV star now. But make sure you grab those Deadwood Blurays and watch A Perfect Getaway at least twice to see him at his pre-Raylan best.

Fucker is really hard to kill…

Seems the Dead Island trailer I embedded into the last post has really got under our collective skin. This morning a new bunch of people had found it, but interestingly it’s still playing on the minds of a lot of folk who saw it break yesterday. When I saw the YouTube version it had had less than 300 views. That’s up to 336,000+ right now.

Boom.

Dan over at Glasseye has a thorough unwrapping of the thing here.

Listening to it this morning without the visuals I’d also add this reference to the mix. I’m a big fan of what Lost attempted in that final season and that piece of music still kills me.

Personally I don’t care if Dead Island turns out to be a reskinned version of Manic Miner. I think the trailer stands alone not only as a piece of art (sorry Roger), but as a ‘movie’ in its own right. Duncan already took that a step further last night:

We live in interesting times.

There’s a point almost at the very end of Red Dead Redemption where the player is not given a choice in what happens next. That for me was my own little Rubicon and I immediately took a fresh interest in gaming as a way not just to play, but as a fresh (to me anyway) medium for narrative.

I know, I know. I’m a million years behind all the cool kids, but I’m doing my best to catch up and there are a number of gamey things I want to to try in 2011 (first hurdle being to cram more days into each month).

Luckily I’m working with some very cool people this year and we already have two short film projects we wanna do on top of everything else. Also luckily I’m one of those annoying types who just gets excited when I see how high the bar is constantly being reset so I’m looking forward to the next thing that knocks Dead Island off its perch.

But for now let’s just keep hitting the replay button on what I’ve been calling the DLG trailer.

Next time you’ll think about how the story doesn’t simply play backwards – it intercuts with the actual attack played forward, which adds to the impact and is an incredibly ballsy move at the same time. I’ve been in enough TV and film meetings now to say with some confidence that kind of thing is a ‘hard sell’ (not that you’d get much further than the ‘dead kid’ thing)…

Then hit replay and notice that the moment the two timelines come together is just as he reaches her and that’s when we fade to black…

Another replay to notice the rewind is in slow-mo and the attack plays out in real time…

The time after that you can try and pause the moments where it actually looks like the father is just playing with his daughter…

Next time just take a good look at that Surf Angel t shirt she’s wearing. The flip flops she’s running in. Her ponytail. Her freckles…

And watch at least one more time to notice that the necrosis is only visible up to the moment she hits the ground. I’m guessing the fall damages the brain enough to ‘release’ her and in good old Universal monster fashion she reverts back to normal at the very end.

Normal here being how we first meet her: a dead little girl.

Now aren’t you fucking curious to find out her name?

Using Google this morning I noticed the logo had changed again:

I clicked through hoping for some of this:

Only to find this:

Don’t worry, MacReady. Your day will come.

…Happy Valentine’s Day!

Is it socially acceptable to watch Green Lantern in the cinema but socially unacceptable to buy a Green Lantern comic?

There is a divide between ‘let’s go to the cinema and see the big summer blockbuster’ and ‘let’s go to the comic shop and buy an issue of Green Lantern’. There’s still a bit of a stigma there. Which suits me, I wouldn’t be caught buying a copy of Green Lantern either. But Marvel experienced an upturn in sales of Iron Man after the film came out.If it’s a decent film I’m sure Green Lantern will become part of the cultural conversation the same way Iron Man has. It’s a harder sell for DC than Iron Man was for Marvel: ‘Building a giant robot suit to kick the s*** out of terrorists’ is a much easier sell than: ‘Given a magic ring by an alien.’

From today’s Metro.

Also off to see Social Distortion in July (great interview with Mike Ness in the LA Times here), but it was watching the fantastic documentary Flight 666 that stirred up my old love of Maiden.

Never been to the O2. Just typing it makes me want to retch, but the tickets are pretty good and I’m confident that Bruce and the guys will still blow me away.

Been a long time since Donnington ’88 though.

Last week I met up with an old friend who was kind enough to give me one of the limited edition prints of a poster that you probably saw rule the Internet a few weeks ago. 20 things that happened on the Internet in 2010 is a puzzle poster by McBess commissioned by Syzygy.

You can see it in all its glory here. And I think I’m correct in saying that no one has yet to name all twenty things correctly…

If you want to grab the Internet’s interest by the balls and in a good way then this is the way to do it. Can’t wait to see what these guys come up with next.

Oh and my friend, John, also wrote one of my favourite books – the hilarious Sea Otters Gambolling In The Wild, Wild Surf. I still think it’s one of the few books screaming out to be adapted into a movie and if you haven’t read it please do so as soon as possible. You’re in for a treat.

One of those things that I’m probably not supposed to mention so I may have to pull this post and can’t give a lot of context..

The above art is for a Sleepydog project that involved a three page comic teaser. Written by me isn’t the interesting part as I got to work with a 2000AD artist – Mr P J Holden. An absolute pleasure to work with and a pro who didn’t mind holding my hand through the process.

As with a lot of stuff right now I’m not sure when I’ll be able to talk about this a little more, but I didn’t want to finish the comic phase of the project without mentioning it as I got such a massive kick out of working with PJ.

I mean the dude draws Judge Dredd. Come on.

I was given the Blu-ray release of Space: 1999 for Christmas and am still working my way through the episodes. I’ve only dipped into the extras a little so far and have grown used to how sharp and cool everything suddenly is. The model work of course still stands out and I think I can put my life-long love of sci fi down to the Eagle models more than anything else.

Some of the FX are of course cheap and cheerful, but it’s still a fun ride. Even if you’re not a huge sci fi fan it’s worth checking out just for the roster of guest starts – great British actors all.

The revelation this time around has been watching the episodes in the order suggested here. The series not only hangs together better as a whole, but now in the final phase of episodes there’s a sense of sadness building as we near the end. If you’re planning on revisiting Alpha then I can’t encourage you enough to watch them in this order.

I just hope sales have been good enough to justify a season two Blu-ray release…