Short takes: ‘Slow Horses’ season one, ‘Invasion’ season one and ‘Foundation’ season one

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 26, 2023

Author’s note: This post contains what I hope are relatively minor spoilers for Foundation. MEM

Slow Horses is a fun six-episode streaming television series based on Mick Herron’s novels about a group of underperforming British spies who have been consigned to a backwater office in London under the not-so-watchful eye of jaded Cold War veteran Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman).

The plot is set in motion when Slough House’s newest arrival, ambitious hotshot River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), starts wondering why he’s been tasked with surveilling a disgraced right-wing journalist. Cartwright soon stumbles into a plot involving the kidnapping of a foreign university student by right-wing extremists who may have links to Britain’s security apparatus.

Lamb is fond of ordering his charges to do nothing, but he’s spurred into action when one of his subordinates, the strangely capable Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke), is shot and seriously wounded the same night as two other officers in his care end up accidentally killing a nighttime intruder at Slough House. With the kidnap victim facing a dawn execution deadline, Lamb tries to rally his remaining staff members into tracking the terrorists while eluding a cleanup squad that British intelligence has dispatched with a possible eye toward pinning the fast-developing fiasco on the “slow horses.”

Funny? Meh. Fun? Yeah!!! (In which I explain why you should probably have seen ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ already.)

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 4, 2014

Guardians of the Galaxy, the most recent release from the Marvel Comics movie empire, is a fun, light-hearted science-fiction action-adventure film that you probably should have seen several weeks ago if you have any interest in that type of thing.

The movie’s protagonist is the wise-cracking, bubble-gum-chewing Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). In a brief prologue set in the 1980s, Peter is abducted from Earth by an alien group known as the Ravagers moments after the death of his mother. This isn’t quite as shocking to Quill as it might have been to the ordinary middle school student, since his mother had always told him that his father was an extraterrestrial.

Roughly two decades later, we find Quill visiting an abandoned alien city, where he combines advanced technology and 1970s aesthetics. On his way to recovering a mysterious orb, Quill dances to a portable tape cassette playing one of numerous vintage songs featured in the movie.

With the job nearly accomplished, Quill (or Star-Lord, as he sometimes calls himself) is accosted by some second-tier alien villains whose names I did not catch. (I thought of them as Chief Henchman and the Expendables; all are employed by a notorious religious fanatic named Ronan the Accuser.) The human uses skill, daring, clever gadgets and luck to make his escape, but his troubles are only beginning.

Fourteen short men traverse a forest and see wondrous things in ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 31, 2013

Director Peter Jackson’s latest take on the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien is The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. This, the second entry in Jackson’s trilogy based on The Hobbit, begins with a brief prologue setting up the quest at the heart of the story: The wise, powerful and quirky wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) arranges a meeting with Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), the heir to a dwarven kingdom that the dragon Smaug has conquered, dispersed and occupied.

Gandalf tells Oakenshield what he told the dwarf’s father: Rally the seven dwarven armies and drive the fire-breathing lizard from its roost in the dwarven-carved caverns beneath the Lonely Mountain. Oakenshield is willing to try this, but he has a problem. His people’s armies will only unite under the command of he who wields the Arkenstone, and that gem is among the jewels and precious metals that Smaug is lounging upon right now. Gandalf smiles upon hearing this, for he knows a thief that might be able to spirit away the Arkenstone…

Cut to the present moment. Gandalf, Oakenshield, a certain Hobbit thief (Martin Freeman) and a company of 12 dwarves are working their way toward the Lonely Mountain whilst being hunted by a band of powerful, bloodthirsty orcs. Gandalf leaves the group just before they enter the foreboding Mirkwood Forest. The short-of-stature travelers are captured first by hungry spiders and then by irate elves. Heroism by the titular Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins by name, is required in both cases to extend the quest.