The Strain plays like a b-side to Pacific Rim. The sets feel eerily similar and the lights have that Del Toro signature to them. You can watch Del Toro grow as a director just looking at his street shots from Hellboy to Present, you can watch him add more to his signature style to become the psychedelic goth frame maker he is today. Seriously, his colors glow with a burning intensity that moves past dayglo raver days and ends up at an acid test party.
The Strain does have some somewhat hammy, dated characters which in the hands of Del Toro actually becomes sort of quaint and charming. Like a throwback to old pulp stories and comic books where characters still were "The Wife Who Doesn't Understand" and "The Lady At Work Who Does Understand". The main character however is that perfect post-millennial mash-up of hunk and nerd, so that nerd fans don't feel threatened but are simultaneously allowed to live out vicarious tough guy fantasies.
Some of the characterization and plotting is a little strained. Ah! Get it? But no, it is. But again that doesn't hurt The Strain because it has so much going for it. The monsters look amazing, the special effects are fantastic, the art direction is stellar and the world feels so well defined and fleshed out, it feels like you're stepping into something that's always been there, something you're already familiar with. And maybe that's just the Del Toro touch, and that's what feels so comforting when diving into The Strain, coming off your high horse and thinking that maybe you were a little bit of a dick when Pacific Rim came out, because that's what the cool kids were doing and maybe you should give it another watch and see if your opinion doesn't change when you realize that it's a fantastic ass movie (and you were being a little bit of a dick).
Oh! And "that guy" who has been in everything is in it. You know that guy, he's in Harry Potter as well as Doctor Who as well as Game of Thrones as well as Ideal as well as everything that's ever been cool ever.
Seen here in the thing you'd recognize him least from:
On HBO The Leftovers is shambling along, using "shambling" to describe the way the characters on the show are sort of stumbling into a cold, ugly, weirdo future, not describing the show's own momentum which is building rather well. Particularly this past week's episode which lost the anthology feel of the first two eps and the focus on Justin Theroux's character to focus on Christopher Eccleston's sad but true preacher. The episode was really driven by Eccleston's performance, who does a pretty convincing yank accent while taking the audience through a very personal hell amid the myriad of possible inferno's in the story's world.
I'm worried that not enough people are watching or talking about The Leftovers and that it won't get a second season and I'll be in another John From Cincinatti state. Not that I know how much of the series is planned anyway, I'm just starved for good, weird, apocalypse television and don't want to see Leftovers fail, despite how bad the title is.
There's a bigger post here, about apocalypse television and music and movies and culture (I may have to rethink the "music" part of that sentence, what are the apocalypse rock bands?)(WHERE IS APOCALYPSE ROCK?)(I feel like "Where Is Apocalypse Rock?" could be a spy story from the 1960s about a giant rock off an island somewhere communists live) but that post is not this post. This is just an endorsement for two good shows on one shitty invention.
-louie-
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