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TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series “The Take” By: Brandon Wolfe All season long, ‘ From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series ’ has struggled to justify its existence. It never really made a ton of sense why this movie in particular had been chosen for expansion into a TV series, other than because it had vampires in it, and the series never gave us the impression that even it knew how to resolve that crucial issue. It mostly just played like a dragged-out, dumbed-down remake, and the handful of new ideas the series offered up never felt like enough to offset the feeling that we’ve seen this all before, the same way before, and much better. “The Take” concludes the first season of ‘From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series’, and while it’s one of the stronger episodes of the season, it still doesn’t feel like this show is on any path toward figuring itself out. Seth and Richie manage to complete their impossible mission inside the vampire Matrix, or whatever it is, and Richie emerges fueled w

TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series “La Conquista” By: Brandon Wolfe “ La Conquista ” is a very talky episode, which is a dangerous thing for a show so poor at dialogue to attempt. It is about building bonds and attempting to understand one’s enemy, which sounds well and good, but I don’t think the show has the character development necessary to pull off something quieter and chattier like this. Though I suppose it earns a few points for even trying. A wounded Richie is wooed by Santanico into embracing vampirism and being at her side for eternity, supplanting the role Carlos has long played in her afterlife. She also relates to Richie her origin, which is that she was sacrificed many years ago as part of a snake cult and made into a vampire (which we had already learned in the pilot episode, but I guess it needed to be hammered home). For reasons not made clear, she psychically became fixated on Richie and drew him to her. This thread of the story is the most tedious thi

TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series “Pandemonium” By: Brandon Wolfe “ Pandemonium ” is probably the episode of ‘ From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series ’ that adheres most stringently to the source material, which is saying something considering how many episodes have stuck to the script thus far. There isn’t much new here that we didn’t get in the parent film. Fortunately, “Pandemonium” covers what is easily the liveliest segment of the film, so even though you know the song by heart, it still has a beat you can dance to. Richie is getting his table dance from Santanico Pandemonium, right down to the foot-fetishizing he still receives even though he’s no longer played by Quentin Tarantino. But we are quickly snapped out of our bout of déjà vu by Ranger Gonzalez, who stabs Richie in his already wounded hand before engaging in a Mexican standoff with both Geckos. Yet before any triggers can be pulled, Santanico vamps out and lunges at Gonzalez, tossing the man around like a rag

TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series “Place of Dead Roads” By:  Brandon Wolfe ‘ From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series ’ hits a stride of sorts in its sixth episode. This is the first episode of the series thus far that truly distinguishes itself from the film that spawned it. Apart from the simple act of placing the characters inside the Titty Twister, there is very little in “Place of Dead Roads” that feels like merely an inflated retread of what we’ve seen before. We begin with a flashback to Richie living in the wilderness, bearded, crazed and hunting for food. Unable to snare any big game, he settles for a nearby snake as his dinner. It is strongly implied that eating this snake is what gives him his psychic abilities, and the fact that the series opened on another flashback, to the woman who would become Santanico Pandemonium being thrown into a snake pit in the woods as part of a sacrifice, is probably not a coincidence. And if this does play out in this way, then it’

TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series “Self-Contained” By: Brandon Wolfe “ Self-Contained ” continues with the ‘ From Dusk Till Dawn ’ series’ tack of taking a single scene from the film and drawing it out into an hour-long episode of television. In this instance, it’s the tense, fairly brief sequence on the Fuller RV where the family attempts to successfully smuggle the Geckos across the border into Mexico without incident. However, unlike previous episodes, this expansion actually mostly survives the transition. On the road to the border, the episode doesn’t deviate from the film in too many major ways. Richie still holds the kids in the back of the RV while Seth and Jacob get themselves acquainted up front. Seth still digs into Jacob’s background concerning his wife’s death, but unlike Harvey Keitel’s Jacob, this Robert Patrick version has more fire in his belly, and isn’t content to take Seth’s guff without asserting himself as much as he can, given the circumstances. The

TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series “Let’s Get Ramblin" By: Brandon Wolfe ‘From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series’, in its questionable gambit to take a 108-minute movie and expand it into a 10-hour season of television, has thus far vacillated between two modes with each episode. The first mode is to take a brief scene from the film and insulate it out into a full hour, bloating a kernel of an idea into an overstuffed cannoli. The second is to strike a balance between doing a slavish, inflated cover version of the film and carving out its own unique additions to the mythology to make something old new again. As recently as last week, the second, preferable mode was starting to take hold, but “Let’s Get Ramblin’” regresses frustratingly to the first mode, and is probably the worst offender in this regard since the pilot. We reach the leg of the story where the Gecko brothers finally cross paths with the Fuller family and forcibly adopt them as a means of getting to Mex

TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series “Blood Runs Thick” By: Brandon Wolfe The television version of ‘ From Dusk Till Dawn ’ introduced itself last week as a stop-and-smell-the-roses remake of the film it is based upon, filling in the gaps from the film in a tediously drawn-out fashion. The second episode doesn’t exactly shake off that bloated faithfulness, but it does give us some hints that this ‘Dusk’ does indeed plan on deviating from its source material in some significant ways. In the aftermath of last week’s disastrous armed standoff, the Gecko Brothers are on the run attempting to figure out their next move. Richie once again plays peek-a-boo with his brother through the bullet hole in his hand before wrapping it with masking tape. With their bank-teller hostage making a load of racket in the trunk of the car, we flash back to the bank heist that set the story in motion. The heist was merely alluded to in the film, but here we see it play out entirely, someth

TV Review: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series – “Pilot” By: Brandon Wolfe Needing a flagship series for his new El Rey network , director Robert Rodriguez turned to his own filmography for content to adapt, an understandable impulse and one not without merit. There are plenty of Rodriguez films that could easily make the transition to television. ‘ Spy Kids ’ could become a family-geared action show. ‘The Faculty’ is so ready-made for a teen sci-fi drama that I almost half remember it as a late-‘90s WB show rather than a film. A show about the “ El Mariachi ” character going from town to town, getting into adventures, would be viable. And, hell, a ‘Sin City’ TV series would be a flat-out brilliant idea. But Rodriguez landed on ‘ From Dusk Till Dawn ’, and while I’m at least grateful that he didn’t opt instead to try to get some more blood out of that ‘Machete’ stone, this was not his best play. ‘ From Dusk Till Dawn ’ the film was a blast when it was released in 1996. Directed by Ro

The Monuments Men Review By: MattInRC There are two ways to view the ensemble historical drama The Monuments Men : the first is through the unfiltered eyes of the average moviegoer, interested in the genre and impressed by its stellar cast. The other way is to take a more realistic view of its rise from Oscar-sure-to-be to its odd February banishment. Regardless of how you look at it, the film utterly disappoints, playing fast and loose with its history and wasting every one of its emotional assets along the way. Based on Author Robert M. Edsel's account, the movie follows a group of American artists and designers as they struggle to preserve the world's greatest works of art while the final months of World War II draw to an end. The Nazis have been hording art and sculptures in the hopes of showcasing all of them in a Fuhrer Museum; but as the war turns against them, the Nazis decide to hide the precious works in mines across a battered Europe. Cue the conc

Win Tickets To An Advance For Screening For MONUMENTS MEN on February 5th – 7:00PM at Regal Natomas Marketplace in Sacramento. THE MONUMENTS MEN  is a 2014 American-German comedy-drama film directed by George Clooney , written and produced by Clooney and Grant Heslov, and starring Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett . Based on the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel, the film follows the story of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, an Allied group, tasked with saving pieces of art and other culturally important items before their destruction by Hitler during World War II Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, the film is an action drama focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to

Win Tickets To An Advance For Screening For MONUMENTS MEN on February 5th – 7:00PM at Regal Manchester Std in Fresno THE MONUMENTS MEN  is a 2014 American-German comedy-drama film directed by George Clooney , written and produced by Clooney and Grant Heslov, and starring Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett . Based on the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel, the film follows the story of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, an Allied group, tasked with saving pieces of art and other culturally important items before their destruction by Hitler during World War II Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, the film is an action drama focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their righ

Win Tickets To An Advance For Screening For MONUMENTS MEN on February 5th – 7:00PM at AMC Mercado in San Jose. THE MONUMENTS MEN  is a 2014 American-German comedy-drama film directed by George Clooney , written and produced by Clooney and Grant Heslov, and starring Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett . Based on the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel, the film follows the story of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, an Allied group, tasked with saving pieces of art and other culturally important items before their destruction by Hitler during World War II Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, the film is an action drama focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful o

EL REY NETWORK BEGINS PRODUCTION IN AUSTIN ON ADAPTATION OF ROBERT RODRIGUEZ CULT-CLASSIC FILM 'FROM DUSK TILL DAWN ' Maverick Filmmaker, Whose New Network Launches December 2013, to Direct First Two Installments of Scripted Series Don Johnson to Recreate Memorable Role of Earl McGraw; Miramax Signs on as International Distributor of Highly-Anticipated Original El Rey Network in association with FactoryMade Ventures, today announced the production start of " From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series ," the first scripted original to air on Robert Rodriguez's new genre-busting cable network set to debut this December. Based on his cult classic film of the same name, the supernatural crime saga, hour-long series (which will premiere on El Rey Network in Q1 2014) began filming in Austin this week with Rodriguez set to direct the first two installments. The 10-episode serialized drama, created, directed and executive produced by Rodriguez (Sin City, Machete, Desperado

Gravity Review By: MattInRC The gripping Gravity proves space is the final and most dangerous frontier.  WARNING: major spoilers ahead. The beauty and thrill of discovery involved in space travel is matched only by its inherent potential for dramatic loss of life, as evidenced by the tragedies of Challenger and Columbia. Director Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity takes us through just such a disaster, creating both a thrilling and cautionary tale that will either inspire or make you nervous each time you fly. Astronauts Ryan Stone ( Sandra Bullock ) and Matt Kowalski ( George Clooney ) are busy space-walking around the Space Shuttle Explorer when the ship is struck and destroyed by a dead Russian spy satellite. Their only hope is to make it to the International Space Station, which Stone finds has been abandoned, with its only functioning escape craft damaged. As secrets are revealed about the duo, one must make the ultimate sacrifice so that the other may live, paving the way fo