#joe barton

[qutibahalfarouqitheclonetrooper]

I still dislike Joe Barton!

Vor.

[andrew-buchan-fansite]

It's worth watching this entire video again, as we await Black Doves s2

[my-film-reel-world]

I Just Watched (28th August): Black Doves – Series 1 (2024)

Wrong time of the year to be watching this, but oh well! I wasn’t aware of that at all going into it! 🤣🤣🤣

Oh, this series! Oh my god, this series! I absolutely adore this thing to pieces!!!!!

First off, the acting: Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw were just incredible from start to finish and worked each other off really well. I love that the two didn’t go into a romantic relationship; it’s a nice little subversion in the action thriller genre. Whishaw was witty and hilarious and had some of the best dialogue I’ve ever heard in any British crime show I’ve seen. The Kent Brockman gag was so unexpected, it actually had me in a fit of giggles! 🤣 And he straight up gifts a child a toy gun at Christmas! I love him so much!!! His relationship with his gay friends was sweet and especially with Ella Lily Hyland’s character. God, I loved their dynamic in this! Whishaw deserved that Best Actor award 100%, in my opinion. Knightley was a badass and had some gripping action sequences and razor sharp comeback lines. Fun fact: This is the first time I’ve seen her in a TV show, and she absolutely killed it! (Figuratively and literally!) It reminded me of her role as Elizabeth Swann in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. 😍🥰

Sarah Lancashire of Happy Valley fame was brilliant too, though I’m not a huge fan of her little white bob. Ella Lily Hyland is quite possibly my personal favourite alongside Whishaw’s. I just loved her acting and wise-cracking attitude in it. She’s amazing! Her gang was so fun to watch too.

Thanks to this show, I’ve now learned what a triggerman means. I never even knew it had a name in the first place. The more you know! 💫

The thing I wasn’t ever so keen on was the abundance of Christmas tunes that kept playing in the background. It was just unnecessary, in my opinion. Like, we hear those same popular tunes every single year; we don’t need them to be played again here! It wouldn’t really change anything if you removed them from the scenes they appeared in. That’s just a personal nitpick though.

Oh, and apparently, there are talks of a 2nd series??? I personally can’t see that happening. I mean, where can you even go from here? There’s no set up to another series at all. It’s fine as it is!

If you haven’t seen this show yet, you definitely should! It’s incredible. One of Netflix’s best!

10/10!

[ramblingrifleman]

Black Doves - Review

You know, one of the things that insufferable film nerds like myself will always pick up on, whether our accompanying viewers appreciate it or not, is the presence of Sam Troughton. Cast in Black Doves as a certain S. Yarrick (I’ll pause for all our resident Warhammer 40:000 fans to go change their pants), seeing his slightly gormless face brought back fond memories of that awful Robin Hood show…

Black Doves - Review

[watchingalotofmovies]

Black Doves

Black Doves    [trailer]

Helen embarks on a passionate affair with a man who has no idea what her secret identity is. Caught in the crosshairs when her lover falls victim to the dangerous London underworld, her employer's call in Sam to protect her.

Gripping, tight mini-series. Especially during the first half.

Just when I was thinking that a highly professional assassin wouldn't leave his bullet casings behind at his shooting spot ...

Starting with the stop at the US embassy the story increasingly stretched credibility and turned a bit too much into a two-against-the-world confrontation.

It also felt that the episodes had more difficulties to find a good balance between the personal demons of the protagonists and the cold, ruthless world of spies, gangsters and politics. Turns out the second half had a different director than the first, which might explain the change.

I also kept wondering how Helen's husband wasn't more suspicious.

Despite those minor complaints, Knightley and Whishaw make watching the whole thing very much worthwhile. And for a change the series didn't feel unnecessarily stretched.

[vintagewarhol]

[cantsayidont]

There's a giant billboard for BLACK DOVES less than 300 meters from my front gate, so I see it regularly and get mad about it all over again.

My big complaint with BLACK DOVES, aside from creator Joe Barton's mean-spirited ghoulishness, is that it is profoundly disinterested in the Keira Knightley character. She's front and center on the poster, but the show has no idea what to do with her character. Nothing about Helen ever makes sense or has any meaningful dramatic weight, and Barton is obviously far more interested in Sam the Sad Gay Hitman, played by an unusually repulsive Ben Whishaw (who should count himself lucky Barton's scripts let him be funny, because his awful beard makes him look like he's attached a filthy toilet brush to his face, holy shit), and whether Sam will successfully reconnect with his ex-boyfriend, who should very definitely stay far, far away from him.

The way the show is constructed strongly suggests that Barton regarded Knightley and her character as unwelcome intrusions in the show he WANTED to make. I get that Ben Whishaw as Sam the Sad Gay Hitman is not going to carry a big-budget streaming show, but I came to see Keira Knightley, and Barton's evident resentment of her presence really made me mad. (I did like the bitchy lesbian hitwomen, but it's not their story either, and I was constantly nervous that Barton was going to kill them off because he loves to be ghoulish.)

[cantsayidont]

Teevee shows:

BLACK DOVES (2024): Keira Knightley attempts unsuccessfully to renew her action star credentials with this violent, very uneven Netflix miniseries from Joe Barton (creator of THE LAZARUS PROJECT). Knightley stars as 40-ish deep-cover spy Helen Webb, whose two little children and dull husband Wallace (Andrew Buchan), an up-and-coming Tory MP, have no idea of her real past, her real occupation (spying on Wallace for a shadowy espionage organization), or the fact that she's been having an affair with a man called Jason (Andrew Koji of WARRIOR, wasted), who's just been murdered. Ben Whishaw (looking like he's been scraped out of a lint trap) costars as Helen's friend Sam, a sardonic gay hitman who is supposed to be watching her back while coping with problems of his own. Set at Christmastime, BLACK DOVES has a weird streak of holiday sentimentality that sits uneasily with Barton's dry black humor (which is sometimes fun) and mean-spirited ghoulishness (which is not). Worse, Barton leaves Knightley flailing in a badly underwritten part that's completely overshadowed by both Sam and the supporting cast — there's never any reason to care about either of Helen's lives, and the script seems reluctant to take her motivations (protect her children, avenge her dead boyfriend) at all seriously. Unlike THE LAZARUS PROJECT, the more interesting character threads also feel divorced from the murky plot, which is convoluted and far-fetched, but short on imagination and never very interesting. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Several, with snotty assassins Williams (Ella Lily Hyland) and Eleanor (Gabrielle Creevy) the show's principal bright spots. VERDICT: Not so much "Ho Ho Ho" as "Oh ho hum," and I was dismayed by how disinterested it is in its ostensible lead. If you want "married mom is secretly a badass spy," try WHO IS ERIN CARTER, which is less gay, but more fun.

HELSTROM (2020): Muddled, dreary Hulu horror-drama based on D-list Marvel Comics characters Satana and Damian Hellstrom, Son of Satan, here known strictly as Daimon (Tom Austen) and Ana Helstrom (Sydney Lemmon). In the show, the adult siblings' now-institutionalized mother Victoria (Elizabeth Marvel) is possessed and their father is/was a demonic serial killer, so Daimon and Ana both have powers; Daimon, a college professor in Portland, has a sideline as a demon hunter and exorcist, while mean lesbian Ana is a trader in rare artifacts with a hobby of supernaturally assassinating rich assholes. A late holdover from the era before Marvel Studios TV projects became completely Mouseified, HELSTROM doesn't have the clammy deracinated theme-park blandness of the Disney+ shows, but it's still a wearisome slog. Daimon is boring, and I loathed his self-righteous noviate sidekick Gabriella (Ariana Guerra), but Ana's dead-eyed bitchiness, killer outfits, and silly haircut are kind of fun, at least in the early episodes. It might have worked better with an X-FILES/KOLCHAK-style monster-of-the-week format, but it fails to generate the atmosphere needed for a PG-13/TV-MA horror story, and the indecipherable plot bogs down in reactionary "redemptive power of family" horseshit. CONTAINS LESBIANS? The sole reason for watching, but while the show tells us that Ana is an inveterate womanizer, we never once see her kiss a girl! VERDICT: Ana Helstrom is great, but everything else is tedious and unappetizing. CWs apply for quasi-incest themes, medical torture, parental abuse, and an icky supernatural forced-pregnancy plot.

THE LINCOLN LAWYER (2022– ): Agreeable but very ordinary legal drama, based on the Michael Connelly novels, about L.A. defense attorney Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), trying to get back in the game after a stint in rehab and unexpectedly inheriting the clients of a colleague who's just been murdered. Becki Newton and Neve Campbell costar as Mickey's ex-wives, with Jazz Raycole as his client-turned driver Izzy, who chauffeurs Mickey around in a Lincoln SUV and acts as his sounding board, and occasional guest appearances by Elliott Gould. Created by David E. Kelley and Ted Humphrey, this is an utterly conventional lawyer show, with the usual contrivances and limitations (like recurring bouts of smug whorephobia), and even at his lowest moments, Mickey is much too affluent to really sell the "feisty underdog" shtick. Nonetheless, it's a well-polished formula, buoyed by Garcia-Rulfo's likeable lead performance, and it works better than the disappointing 2011 movie with Matthew McConaughey, although I wish that the show would allow more time for Mickey's smaller cases, which are more satisfying than the big case plots. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Izzy is gay, but it only comes up once or twice a season. VERDICT: Nothing special, but it goes down easily.