The Ladies of Fangirl Academy (From Left to Right): Elle, April & Jessica
It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of Fangirl Academy’s brand new YouTube channel, Fangirl Diary TV. Now, we just discovered the Fangirl Academy a few weeks ago when Facebook suggested this cute, elfin-like redhead named April Marie Eden who happened to have a lot of the same famous SciFi people on her friend’s list that we did. We did a little research and we found out all about April and the Fangirl Academy and realized that it would probably be in The ‘Tastic’s best interest to keep an eye on her and the goings-on at the Academy. April graciously accepted our friend request and she and her cohorts, Jessica Hendrickson and Elle Viane Sonnet (of Chicly Geek News), have been keeping us entertained and informed ever since.
You gotta love it when the Vulcan salute is thrown out in their first video as a matter of course. Respeck, yo.
Here’s the release for the launch of the new YouTube Channel and below are the videos they’ve posted so far, Enjoy and subscribe (and subscribe to us for crap’s sake if you haven’t already.)!
One day, nobody dies. All across the world, nobody dies. And then the next day, and the next, and the next, people keep aging — they get hurt and sick — but they never die. The result: a population boom, overnight.
With all the extra people, resources are finite. It’s said that in four month’s time, the human race will cease to be viable. But this can’t be a natural event – someone’s got to be behind it. It’s a race against time as C.I.A. agent Rex Matheson investigates a global conspiracy. The answers lie within an old, secret British institute. As Rex keeps asking “What is Torchwood?”, he’s drawn into a world of adventure, and a threat to change what it means to be human, forever. – Starz
Starz has released an official trailer for the upcoming series Torchwood: Miracle Day that actually contains footage from the new series as opposed to every other trailer out there. Now, when we say ‘new series,’ we use the phrase loosely as the series is only new to the U.S. in first-run. It’s actually the fourth season of the BBC SciFi hit, Torchwood, which is a spinoff of the BBC SciFi hit Dr. Who. As an aside, here’s the thing we don’t get: they call a season a ‘series’ in th U.K. So, this begs the question, if they call a season a series what do the call a series? Did we mention that their food is awful as well.
Anyway, we started watching Torchwood a few months ago on Netflix streaming and we love it and one of the things that’s so great about it is that the U.K., ironically, does not have the same kind of puritanical standards for broadcast television that we have here in the U.S. Unlike Dr. Who, this show simply is not appropriate family viewing in the U.S. without serious editing (which is exactly what we assume they did when they aired the first three seasons on BBC America). Honestly, this show can’t even be aired on F/X, and is the domain of premium cable exclusively and that’s why we’re thrilled that Starz picked this up instead of FOX, which was the original intention. It would have been a watered-down mess if it had been on a Big-5 network.
Just by watching this trailer, it’s obvious that the U.S. treatment of this show is going to provide a much-deserved blockbuster film-feel upgrade, and look… Bill Pullman’s working again! Now, we need to make clear that fans who have never watched the series shouldn’t be scared off by jumping into the fourth seasons. First the show has been like The X-Files in both substance and style and even though there is a continuing story-arc, the episodes have stood on their own. Now, this new season, as to be expected from any premium cable drama will obviously feature a self-contained story-arc over the course of the ten-episode season and even though you may have not watched it before, rest assured that the producers will fill you in on the pertinent details that you’ll need. But, don’t forget, you can always get yourself acquainted by checking out the series on Netflix. I mean, seriously… we’re only talking about 31 episodes and you have over a month to do it and there’s not that much else on TV, right now.
Torchwood: Miracle Day premieres on Starz on Friday July 8th at 10:00 p.m. and we highly recommend it. You’re going to have a blast. By the way, if you’re one of the few people who have an Internet connection and don’t have Netflix, you can still watch full episodes of seasons one through three right on YouTube as apparently no one’s caught up to the fact that users have uploaded it. Check it out here.
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.
The season premiere of Dexter is Sunday September 26, 2010 the day before my daughter’s and my birthday and I couldn’t think of a better birthday present than the start of a new season with our favorite serial killer dad. Nothing says family bonding like killing murderers, chopping them up and dumping their body parts into the ocean.
The season 5 trailer was first shown at ComicCon and is now up on Showtime’s website. If you’ve never watched the show or didn’t watch Season 4, MAJOR SPOILER ALERT! Thanks to my cousin Matt Volke over at The Movie Brothers for this update.
… And to sweeten the pie and, Julie Benz (Rita) will be returning for the premiere episode.
Full story here, but again MAJOR SPOILER ALERT if you’re a newbie or didn’t watch Season 4.
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