The Confession (Hulu)

Created by and starring Kiefer Sutherland, The Confession is a story of unique redemption and an exploration of good and evil featuring a hit man (Kiefer Sutherland), and a priest (John Hurt). The story begins on Christmas Eve, when the hit-man enters a church to confess his sins to the priest. Through a series of gripping flashbacks, the Confessor’s journey is revealed – laying out what has brought him to this moment and leading the audience to the dramatic ending where the man’s chances at ultimate redemption hang in the balance. While at first the Confessor seems to be an evil, cold-blooded killing machine and the Priest the ultimate arbiter of good, as the series develops it becomes clear that both characters are much more complicated than either could have suspected. – Hulu

9 out of 10

NOTE: As an added bonus, all links to shows and films in this review link to the actual shows and films on YouTube or Netflix.  Enjoy!

Last month we told you about the new, ten-part web series called The Confession starring Golden Globe and Emmy Award Winning Kiefer Sutherland (24, The Sentinel) and two-time Academy Award nominee, John Hurt (The Elephant Man, Midnight Express) in which a hitman (Sutherland) in a confessional has a metaphysical (it’s defnitely more metaphysical than theological, despite the show description) debate with a priest (Hurt) about right and wrong, good and evil, faith and doubt and the existence of God.  We had high hopes for this because it looked just so damned juicy and of course, simply look at the players involved.  How can one not be excited?

An Evil Jack Bauer? Fascinating...

The Confession has completely exceeded our expectations as far as suspense, intrigue and production values are concerned.  “The Hitman” (that’s the actual name of Sutherland’s character as Hurt’s is “The Priest.”) is literally the Jack Bauer from the alternate universe form the original Star Trek episode, Mirror, Mirror.  It’s as if Jack Bauer had two choices in life: go work for the government and use his particular brand of emotionless professionalism to protect his country and kill bad guys or become a dispassionate sociopath who works in organized crimes and kills random people for a living.  This Jack Bauer chose the latter.  I really can’t emphasize enough just how similar the two characters are so if you ever wondered how Bauer would be as a villain, here he is.

But, holy crap does this work.  The Hitman is cold, calculating and half of the adventure is just trying to figure out what his ulterior motive is, because we know he has one.  He wants to understand faith, but that’s not all, and we learn about his life through a series of flashbacks, each more contradictory than the last.  Hurt is brilliant in playing the role of the parish priest who starts out this conversation out of fear for his life and the lives of his parishioners but eventually it’s clear that The Priest is as fascinated with how this man became who he is and if he can help in find redemption.  It also becomes quite clear that The Priest is no more what he seems to be on the surface than The Hitman is. This Yin and Yang back and forth is beyond compelling.  Simply imagine if Jesus and Lucifer sat down in a coffee shop and had a conversation and Jesus is trying to convince Lucifer to come home.  It is simply amazing how good this series is at captivating its audience for eight minutes at a time, once per week.

And this is the only thing we hate about this show and we took a point off because of it.  We want more.   Playing out more like a full length feature film shown in segments, this eight minutes at a time business is just not cutting it and then after the eight minutes is up, we have to wait another week?  The upside is that we waited for the first seven episodes to air before we watched it so we got to see them back-to-back.  The downside is that we still have three more episodes to go and we may pull our hair out in between episodes.  We hope when this is released on Blu-Ray that they’ll combine the ten parts into one episode.

With Emmy Award winning Sean Callery (24) providing the soundtrack to put the cherry on top, The Confession is one show that you can’t miss and we believe it’s going to revolutionize the concept of episodic dramatic television.  We just hope that the next series like this on the Interwebs gets some major financing and actually gives us full 45 minute episodes.  Note to the networks: if it’s as good as this we will watch the flippin’ commercials!

Watch full length episodes of The Confession, here, but be warned; you’ll wish you had waited until all of the episodes had aired so you could watch them in sequence with no gaps.

Blu-Ray Review: ‘Family Guy: It’s A Trap!’ (‘Star Wars: Return of the Jedi’ Parody)

An outrageous “Family Guy”-style remake of Return of the Jedi, this Star Wars spoof finds Chris Skywalker and Princess Lois attempting to rescue Peter Solo from Jabba the Hutt, defeat the mighty Stewie Vader and blow up the second Death Star. This wacky animated parody features off-the-wall Star Trek: The Next Generation guests including Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Michael Dorn as Lieutenant Worf. – Netflix

4 out of 10

This is the third installment of the Family Guy spoofs of the original Star Wars films and it is the worst by far.  In the opening scrolling text sequence in the beginning of It’s a Trap! the writers tell a tale about how they literally put no effort into the writing of this because they were so exhausted after having done Something, Something, Something, Darkside that they just didn’t care… this is not a joke, it is the absolute truth.  It’s even admitted to by Seth McFarlane in the commentary, and it’s apparent from the first joke that they completely phoned it in.

It’s a Trap! is boring and unfunny for the most part and the jokes are generally predictable and nowhere near as good as Blue Harvest or Something, Something, Something Darkside (with Blue Harvest being the best of the three).  There is one truly hilarious scene in the film but that’s it (and unlike some other reviewers, we’re not going to spoil it by telling you what that is.  You deserve to get some enjoyment out of this mess).  The rest is pretty much a waste of time from a comedy standpoint and what’s going to be disappointing is that this is that is going to be this season’s season finale because that’s what they’ve been doing with these direct-to-video movies for the last four years.  It’s really a shame because, It’s a Trap! is going to tarnish what has been the best season of Family Guy since the relaunch.  This episode seems more suited to second or third season post-relaunch Family Guy with the unfunny jokes and jokes that just got dragged on forever than it does for the 2010 -2011 season.  If you need any further proof of how bad this is or how the writers mailed it in, they threw in a Conway Twitty scene… again… but this time they gave him a Darth Vader helmet (no, I’m not kidding).

The only reason it’s getting a four instead of one is because the special features, albeit limited, are pretty decent (the commentary is funnier than the film) and the animation is fantastic.  This is the first of the Family Guy Star Wars spoofs to be produced in 16:9 and it is quite visually stunning and in fact it is the most visually stunning of the three spoofs.  That being said, quality of animation is not why we watch Family Guy, though.

Unless you are a die-hard Family Guy fan and you must have this in your collection, we wouldn’t recommend this.  The only reason we purchased it is because it came in the  trilogy and we needed the Blue Harvest Blu-Ray and the trilogy was just $4.00 more than just the one film. Also, for the record, the Blu-ray not only comes with the Digital Copy but it also comes with the DVD copy as well so at least it’s a bargain.

TV Tech SCOOP! Today Netflix Ditches Disc For PS3, Adds 1080p/5.1 Dolby Surround Content!

It’s official!  As of today, PlayStation 3 owners (and Nintendo Wii owners) will no longer need a disc to access Netflix streaming of television shows and movies.  This welcome development is long-overdue and highly anticipated for a service that has been beloved by PS3 owners and Netflix subscribers alike.

To make it even sweeter, the service for the PS3, which was already equal in quality to the XBox 360 service and far superior to the same service for the Nintendo Wii (the Wii offers no high-definition video service for Netflix, whereas the PS3 has offered programming in 720p since its inception) will also now be far superior to another media player device (including Microsoft’s XBox 360) by also offering programming in 1080p and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 Surround content for a true home theater experience.  These two features are not available currently on ANY other media device at this time.

A couple of notes on this:

First, there seems to be a discrepancy between today’s Netflix blog post and the Netflix press release from October 14th.  Today’s blog seems to imply that only 1080p content will feature 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus surround sound audio whereas the press release seems indicates that the enhanced audio will be available on all content.

For right now, I’m going to assume that the press release is the more accurate source for this as the writers of the official press releases in the P.R. departments are a bit more meticulous with the details than those who handle the corporate blogs.  I will research this later personally with my own system and if my assumptions are incorrect, I will update this article accordingly.

Second, there was something buried in the press release that should be noted as very significant to home theater enthusiasts:

“Dolby Digital Plus supports up to 7.1 channels of premium-quality surround sound…”

Now, although only 5.1 is being offered currently, as noted, DD Plus does have the capability to support the more contemporary 7.1 format.  Considering that Netflix has a strong reputation of actively improving the services they offer, it would not be surprising to see 7.1 offered in the future.  It might be a while, (after all, it took a year for Netflix to develop a PS3 application to run its streaming service as opposed to using a disc), but the wait will be well worth it.

This latest development is just one more reason to consider a PS3 as your ultimate media and entertainment device.

Current PS3 owners, go to the “PlayStation Network” section of the main menu and install the Netflix application from the “What’s New” area and you’re ready to go!