DVD: Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles

If, unlike me, you don’t object to Hollywood gently desecrating the still twitching corpse of an otherwise fantastic concept then welcome – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is for you. After James Cameron neatly finished his 1992 signature film Terminator 2: Judgement Day with the coda ‘No fate but what we make’ it only took Hollywood twelve years to abandon all sense of creative integrity and go after a little more of that dollar-dollar, guaranteed by yet more future war shenanigans. How could Cameron know that with his inconspicuous little post-script he would be giving anyone with a half an idea carte blanch to spin-off two further films (at the time of writing) and a television series? After all, it’s time travel isn’t it? There’s no rules so we’ll just create our own..

Enter stage left (before anyone had the foresight to greenlight a proposed new trilogy of Terminator sequels and thus perhaps closing off any other errant timelines) a new weekly serial completely disavowing the events of Terminator 3 and as yet with no intended tie in to the forthcoming Terminator: Salvation. The Sarah Connor Chronicles, as you might expect, follows the titular anti-heroine still on the lam from all manner of cybernetic organisms all of which remain humbly intent on annihilating her son, John Connor – now a fully-fledged angsty 15 year old complete with this month’s teen-fashion hairstyle, his fringe gracefully styled with lobs of gel across his eyes for that wind-swept look.

Just as John was assisted in T2 and again in T3: Rise of the Machines by two different T-800’s played by Arnold Schwarzenegger (the bad guy gone good), The Sarah Connor Chronicles also has a ‘good Terminator’ in the form of Cameron, female model with the appearance of a teenage girl. See? They’ve really switched it up on us. Can there even be sexual tension between the pubescent saviour of mankind and his ultimate enemy? Tune in and find out.

The risk that a weekly serial based around a now completely confused mythology (simply adding the caveat that this is a restart would be easier to swallow if the previous entries in the canon weren’t so well crafted) is the critical problem that a ‘Terminator of the Week’ is going to get old very fast even if your central conceit lends itself well to a relentless chase across America. The show circumvents this by dipping it’s metal endoskeleton into the big concepts yet again, focussing on Sarah, John and Cameron’s attempts to frustrate the creation of SkyNet when they become aware of a rapidly escalating chess computer artificial intelligence known as The Turk, a progenitor to what will eventually become mankind’s nemesis. These guys aren’t just on the run from cyborgs, they’re on the run from the future! Oh god, it makes my brain hurt.

The funny thing is, it works. Just. Cruelly cut short by the Writers Guild strike that threatened most of American television, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. While the universe that Cameron et al built remains a guilty pleasure that you feel compelled to explore regardless of which timeline you’re in, the ongoing arc that runs prominently throughout the series became a chore to dip into. Great for your DVD boxset but not for episodic television which requires a certain penetrable density to remain accessible. Forced to truncate their season to just nine episodes, it has been widely publicised that season two will feature a few more standalone stories.

The series really gets going in episode four when John starts to embrace his destiny and the show begins to show flashes of longevity. Although the tendency to wade too far into what has gone before occasionally grates (Kyle Reese’s brother Derek played by 90210 stalwart Brian Austin Green shows up soon enough), it is fun taking a wilder walk with a creative team able to bloat a streamlined backstory any which way they like. It feels a little odd referring to a Terminator by name rather than model number but you’ll get used to it.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles can be bought by clicking here, or simply win a copy by clicking here.

COMPETITION: Terminator TV series on DVD

After premiering earlier this year, the highly anticipated hit US spin-off, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is coming to DVD, courtesy of Warner Home Video.

Starring British actress Lena Headey (300, St.Trinians) as Sarah, Season 1 packs an action-fuelled punch which will keep you on the edge of your seat with stunning visual effects and high octane events.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles follows Sarah and her son John’s journey through a dark and treacherous world as fugitives from the law. Picking up in 1999, two years after Terminator 2: Judgement Day, this nine-part series kicks off with The Terminator tracking down John to his school and attacking him. He is startled when a class-mate comes to his rescue and confesses that she is in fact a robot sent to protect him. Realising that he is someone special, reluctant hero John and his tough, independent single-mother Sarah focus all of their efforts on stopping the birth of a technological enemy through Skynet’s activation and hopefully change the fate of humanity.

Pursued by tough-talking FBI agent James Ellison who believes Sarah and John are deranged, and aided by Cameron (Summer Glau), a fearless new female Terminator who poses as a student at John’s school and whose sole mission is to protect mankind’s future leader, the trio make a time jump from 1999 to modern day Los Angeles 2006 in an effort to help fulfil John’s destiny and save the world from an unstoppable war.

The DVD is packed full of unmissable extras including deleted scenes and bonus footage, and we have three copies to give away. Check out a clip from the show here.

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To enter, just answer this question:

Which Guns N’ Roses song is used on the Terminator 2 soundtrack?

Send your answers to: competitions@the-void.co.uk by September 11.

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Note: Please don’t enter the competition via the comment box below. It’ll just get deleted and ignored!

STAGE: High School Musical – Live

Dave Scullion went to see High School Musical: Live On Stage, so you don’t have to.

It was a TV film, it upgraded to the cinema, it had a best-selling album, then a sequel, an ice show, a live concert and now a full-blown stage show. This is the phenomenon of High School Musical – a Disney cash cow that will be gloriously milked until it’s dead and dry, and currently it’s still full of milk. Sadly, however, the milk tastes very, very sour.

Some would say “why bother going?”, simply because the entire franchise is known to be shallow and clichéd pointlessness, as deep as a thimble and half as intelligent, but sometimes you can be surprised by even the worst thought-of theatre. This is not one of those times. Not in any way. My presence at this show was an ironic birthday gift from a reviewer friend of mine, and for the first time in my life I got to utter the words “I wish I’d never been born”. In July, anyway.

The premise is so unoriginal it’s hardly worth mentioning – new girl (Gabriella) is a genius geek who is also gorgeous, who falls for effete basketball jock (Troy), but their classmates immediately oppose this horrendous love-match until the entire school simultaneously decides “actually, sod it, why not?” and they all live happily ever after.

It’s so repugnantly optimistic that every character gets together with their opposite number from jock & geek to basketball coach & lunatic drama teacher. But – pinch yourself – is that a gay teenager over there? Possibly, but he doesn’t end up with anyone and instead gets to dance around in sequined trousers and be mostly ignored. This avoidance of any form of edge (no bullying, no sexual relations, not even any real anger) makes it impossible to empathize with any characters. It is an idealistic world without threat, and the pre high-school demographic are in for a horrible shock come age eleven when their new school isn’t full of cheesy-faced idiots whose idea of bullying is “gentle persuasion”. Instead it’s genuinely cruel-hearted fools and a massive punch in the scrotum. But this is Disney after all, and boy do we know it.

The entire experience is an exploitative vampire puppeteered by Disney, from the £5 High School Musical pens to the shameless in-show plugs for previous Disney pieces (someone sings an excerpt from the Lion King and one guy wears a Little Mermaid t-shirt… and somehow doesn’t get bullied). The shocking surprise is how cheap the set and costumes look, dispensing with the usual plush evocative settings of most Disney shows and replacing them with cold and boring school walls and lockers. Yet this show isn’t about believability or emotional depth, it’s about… well, here’s the stumbling block. On one hand it tries to evoke a sense of righteousness in doing whatever your passion is regardless of general opinion, but then the other throws this idea out of the window if you aren’t important enough to have a speaking role. As refreshing an idea as the song Stick To The Status Quo is (where kids in stereotypical cliques admit they want to be something other than a skater, a geek or a jock), this revelation is completely ignored and the characters remain the same throughout, reverting back to their respective stereotypes and only altering slightly at the end when everyone suddenly loves theatre. And I mean literally everyone, including the basketball coach who utterly changes character and suddenly loves the fact his son prefers drama to sport. Billy Elliot, this isn’t.

So is the music or the script or the cast or even the source material to blame for this inane cavalcade of garishness? Oddly, the source material is so much better than the play. The film is much tighter, much funnier and surprisingly watchable. As embarrassing as it is to admit that I voluntarily watched a sizeable chunk of High School Musical: The Film, it does give me a unique vantage point from which to understand where the theatre version went crucially wrong. The script and music has not been well converted to stage, providing lines like: “Thank you for showing me your top secret hiding place” – a line even a seven year old would baulk at if they weren’t so busy clapping or screaming. It’s a cliché-ridden amalgamation of all things expected. Letitia Dean’s Ms Darbus even says to Coach Bolton: “Never in all my years in the theatre have I seen such small minded, simple subterfuge”. Welcome to Disney, Ms Darbus, welcome to Disney.

High School Musical: Live On Stage lacks the focus of the film, and at times so much action is happening across the stage that you wilfully ignore important dialogue and exposition in favour of watching a man in a hoodie pretending to be a kid pretending to be a caterpillar. Entire chunks of the flaccid plot are lost forever, leaving you in bewilderment as to how the school board allowed a major basketball tournament to happen at the same time as the science decathlon and the school play’s final recalls. This leaves anyone who isn’t solely interested in the music and spectacle utterly perplexed, and this misery is compounded when the first act is fifty minutes long and the second is an excruciating sixty. By the time the song Get Your Head in The Game came on I wanted to get my head in an oven and explore Sylvia Plath’s unique exit strategy… and that’s about twenty minutes in, although the song is generously repeated throughout the show for an audience clearly blessed with a memory of a dead goldfish and a severe hatred of originality.

Yet maybe this is too harsh for something aimed at children. This theatre piece is more akin to a pantomime than a musical, with audience members screaming and yelling for no apparent reason during potentially poignant moments. When Gabriella finds Troy in his “top secret hiding place” (a greenhouse, in case you cared) and they sing sweetly to each other, the audience started randomly clapping to a non-existent rhythm like a bunch of drunks at a music festival. Is this the fault of the audience or perhaps the fault of the play, unable to effectively convey the correct emotion to the audience?

Perhaps because of this lack of cohesion between actor’s intention and audience reaction the actors in High School Musical: Live On Stage never seem to really put their all into the sequences between songs, knowing their words don’t really matter too much. This seems especially so with Letitia Dean, who at times appears embarrassed and uncomfortable bumbling around like a desperate pantomime dame. Only Michael Pickering (Ryan) seemed to genuinely get into his role, but his character was the aforementioned (and unmentionable) gay guy, so any hope of exploring him was quashed as soon as he first flounced onto stage.

Finally, I must mention the venue. The Hammersmith Apollo is in desperate need of a revamp, in the same way the show needs to be smashed to pieces and rebuilt. The interior is literally falling apart, with missing seat and row numbers, carpets which are more chewing gum than carpet, and seats almost as flimsy as High School Musical’s plot. The Apollo’s aging sound system and poor acoustics meant words and songs were incomprehensible, making it even harder to accept the singing basketball team as they danced around the court.

Overall the experience was a garish and unpleasant one, where the audience’s senses were repeatedly assaulted with Disney’s worst kind of optimism which reinforces stereotypes instead of breaking them down. An embarrassing, torturous affair for anyone who’s not a child, and for those parents whose children have forcefully manipulated them into seeing this, it’s time to rewrite your will and exclude them from it forever.

COMPETITION: Cage Rage @ Wembley Arena

Win tickets to Cage Rage 27!

Cage Rage 27 – Step Up at Wembley Arena on July 12 is set to go molten. The coverage will be broadcast live on NUTS TV from 9pm, but we have a pair of highly sought-after tickets to give away!

The event will see two Cage Rage giants go head to head in the rematch that has got the whole MMA community buzzing.

Robert ‘Buzz’ Berry – the man than put the sham in Ken Shamrock when he floored the MMA legend before a global TV audience in the spring – comes up against his old adversary Neil Grove. Last time up Berry was beating the living daylights out of Grove when a chest infection got the better of him and forced him to quit. Following his collapse Buzz needed urgent cage side treatment – and was rushed to hospital where he spent several weeks recovering. Now they are facing eachother again.

The fight card includes other crowd pleasers like Dave Legeno, Kev Sims,  banana boy Tom ‘Kong’ Watson and Russian enforcer Umidjon Mavlyanov, from St. Petersburg, who is making his long-awaited Wembley debut.

For more info on the live event see www.nuts.tv. Tickets for the event can also be bought at the official website www.cagerage.tv

But why bother when you can go for free?! There’s a very short time span on this (about 24 hours!) so get in there quick for your chance to go to the MMA event of the year.

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To enter, just answer this question:

What is fight legend Fedor’s surname?

Send your answers to competitions@the-void.co.uk by 5pm on Friday, July 11.

DVD: Mad Men Season 1

When a programme is billed as ‘the next Sopranos’ then it’s setting itself up for a fall, and although Mad Men doesn’t reach the heady heights of David Chase’s epic series, it’s still one of the best dramas of the decade. Other critics have given it some stick for not comparing to the mobster drama, but it’s like criticising Amelie for not being The Shawshank Redemption – they’re both great, but completely different.

This remarkable and multi-layered show is set in a late-50s/early-60s New York advertising agency, and deals with the lives of the ad men, their wives, mistresses and their secretaries.

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was a producer and writer on The Sopranos, and as you’d expect he has populated his new project with authentic characters who deliver smart dialogue and the plotlines that thread their way through the series are entirely believable. Even a normally inconceivable stolen identity angle rings true, thanks to the brilliant scripting and top-notch performances.

As the series progresses, we see more and more of the main players, and dig underneath the phoniness and surface pretensions. Not only does this give everything more depth, but the people we’re exposed to open up a whole realm of possibilities for the show if the writers choose to move away from the current leading role. Don Draper (Jon Hamm), is a war veteran with a shadowy past – one that even his wife (the luminescent January Jones) doesn’t have access to.

A conflicted, complicated man, with one foot in the past and one in the fast-approaching, Don is an advertising genius shaping the way Americans think and act. Yes, he messes about with other women and keeps secrets from his nearest and dearest, but in Don Draper, Mad Men has introduced another love-hate leading man in the mould of Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey. The guy’s a first class shit, but he’s just so damn cool with it.

Something else which is almost unassailably cool is the intro and theme music. Seriously, check it out:

The research and detail that has gone into recreating mid-20th century New York is astonishing, and it all contributes to making the end result so very slick and gripping.

Funny, without needing obvious jokes, Mad Men exists in a world before political correctness. Sexual banter isn’t harrassment yet. Jews do their thing. Gays keep their heads down. Racial divides are something that just are. You might not like it, but it is commendable that Mad Men doesn’t downplay this side of life.

Commendably subtle, utterly gripping, gorgeous to look at, insanely well scripted and impeccably acted – Mad Men is a must-see for anyone who takes their TV drama seriously.

Buy it here.

STAGE REVIEW: Cats

In 1968 legendary theatre practitioner Peter Brook wrote about the concept of Deadly Theatre, describing it as theatre that not only fails to elevate or instruct, it hardly even entertains. Had he been writing 40 years later, Brook could have dispensed with the term Deadly Theatre and just referred to Cats instead.

When it first opened in the early 1980s, Cats was no doubt an impressive show but those days are long gone – it’s time to forget the memories of what it was and move on.

Lumpen, meandering and filled with interminable opera-lite sequences, Cats is a perfect example of a musical that has failed to stand the test of time. It’s not the cast’s fault; but there is only so much can be done with such a tired show.

Set, costumes, choreography and lighting are still fantastic, while the impressive opening number establishes the tone for what should be a gripping production, but what follows is an incomprehensible mess.

The plot hardly exists, the tunes (bar the obvious exception) entirely forgetful, and the singsong dialogue painful to interpret. Cats still looks wonderful but is a solid gold example of style over substance.

They shoot horses don’t they? But the question of what to do with a mange-ridden cat is a far more pressing concern.      Mike Shaw

COMPETITION: WrestleMania 24

Once again the biggest sports-entertainment event of the year is here as the Superstars of RAW, SmackDown! & ECW come together.

Sports entertainment and boxing collide in The Biggest vs. The Best, as the diminutive Floyd Mayweather Jnr steps into the ring with 7ft monster The Big Show, and Wrestling royalty Ric Flair revels in the opportunity to play out the final moments of his career on the grandest stage of them all – WRESTLEMANIA BABY!

We have two copies of the WrestleMania XXIV three disc set to giveaway, courtesy of Silver Vision. To enter, just answer this question:

Who defended their 15-0 unbeaten WrestleMania streak at this year’s event?

Send your answers to competitions@the-void.co.uk by the end of July.

DVD: Pushing Daisies – Series One

Pushing Daisies is the latest American import to hit our shores based around a ludicrously high-concept that by rights shouldn’t make it past mid-season. Come on inside. Rather than shunting the programme to the depths of late-night television (right, now to Nightwatch and Quiz Call) as most broadcasters do with something that they’re not entirely sure of, ITV saw fit to give Pushing Daisies a prime-time Saturday night slot.

Pushing Daisies is the latest effort from Bryan Fuller, the man responsible for Dead Like Me (18-year-old girl as grim reaper) and for co-creating the criminally overlooked Wonderfalls. The series follows Ned (Lee Pace), a well-meaning pie-maker who has been inexplicably granted the gift of being able to bring things back to life with a simple touch. Mileage enough for a 22-episode season? There is of course a caveat: if something is brought back to life for more than one minute, cosmic karma takes over and an equivalent being dies in its place. In addition: if Ned comes into contact with the life he brought back to life again, that thing then dies permanently.

As Ned’s pie-making business runs into financial difficulty, a private detective named Emerson Cod discovers Ned’s mysterious talent and proposes that the two team-up to solve murders, Ned resurrecting victims just long enough to spill their guts (sometimes literally) before the pair split the reward money. It all adds up to make one of the most distinctive police procedurals you’re likely to find.

It’s a brave and bold experiment and it works, blissfully so. If Tim Burton made episodic television, he might make something that looked like Pushing Daisies. The whim of Jim Dale’s narration recalls Amelie, while the colour palette of the show rages with clashes to create a hyper-real storybook look which suits the premise of the show down to the ground. The cast are uniformly excellent and kooky enough to inhabit this surreal world convincingly. Crucially, the scripts remain smart and punchy throughout with a oddly dark homespun charm.

Due to the writers’ strike in the States, Pushing Daisies only completed a nine episode run, so there’s plenty more gas in the tank and no excuse not to get caught up with this gem.

Pick up a copy of the DVD now by clicking here

WWE: Twist of Fate

The Matt and Jeff Hardy Story

If they didn’t share the same surname, you’d never guess that Matt and Jeff Hardy are brothers, and this two disc set exemplifies that. Smartly separated into a Matt-based disc and a Jeff-based disc, the difference between the two men in this double-disc set is startling.

Taking the favoured approach of interviews with short clips of matches peppered throughout (rather than a handful of talking heads padded out with full-length bouts), the two discs tell each performer’s story to date with comment from themselves and others – including friends and colleagues.

While Matt Hardy has had a passion for wrestling since day one, even going so far as to set up his own promotion in his pre-WWE days, it’s seems that Jeff is lost in the world, and is just doing the same as his big bro – albeit with a hell of a lot of flair. While Matt is depicted as a talented wrestler in the tradititional sense, with a healthy dose of daredevil spirit thrown in and serious career ambitions, Jeff is a man with one aim: entertain the audience… at any cost. If that means putting his life at risk, then so be it. It might be a winning formula with the pyro-addicted stunt-hungry fans, but it just goes to show again the difference between the siblings.

We see home footage of the pair from the very beginning of their wrestling careers, and their garden-based trampoline wrestling outfit. The youthful exuberance is tempered with tragedy though. The pair lost their mother at a young age, and it’s clear that her death had a marked impact on both their lives, but to its credit the DVDs keep the sentimentality to the minimum.

This release doesn’t shy away from the nasty stuff. Matt’s real-life betrayal by longtime girlfriend Lita and his on-air meltdowns regarding love rival Edge are tackled head-on, and he talks calmly and eloquently about life, love and loss. However, the difficulties Jeff has faced are trickier, and his documentary doesn’t delve particularly deeply into the murky world of drugs. What’s more, it’s clear from his comments that he has no regrets over his behaviour to date and seems unaware of how much he’s fucking things up. It seems that Jeff hasn’t quite hit rock bottom yet.

When it comes to extras, each disc has a decent number of bouts (single and tag) but the best of the whole lot is Matt Hardy and Edge’s brutal cell match, where the animosity between the two is all two obvious and there’s no play acting when it comes to the blows being delivered.

Twist of Fate is an unbalanced release, with the elder Hardy’s disc outstripping Jeff’s in both quality and quantity. Nonetheless, it is a revealing insight into two of the wrestling world’s most interesting and entertaining performers.

You can buy a copy here.

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The WWE is coming to the UK! Get yourself some tickets here.

WWE: Royal Rumble 2008

Royal Rumbles are difficult to review. Although the lead-up matches are often important and involve titles changing hands, none of it matters because what we’re really waiting for is the main event. Thirty men entering the ring one after another at regular intervals, tasked with throwing eachother over the top rope, until only one is left standing.

This year’s Rumble had a decidedely lacklustre build-up, featuring matches between Rey Mysterio and Edge, and Ric Flair and MVP (who, inexplicably, still has a career even though no-one likes him and he’s dull as hell… no matter how many times we’re told he’s ‘the best in the business’)

However, all of this is more than made up for when we get to the main event. The Rumble itself is WWE at it’s best; cramming in long, gruelling performances, small-scale storytelling, impressive ring action and as many audience pops as you could hope for. Also available in a sexy steelbook, Royal Rumble 2008 is a hell of a DVD and proves that the Rumble format has plenty of life left in it yet.

Buy a copy here, big boy.

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The greatest show on Earth is coming back to our fair isle in November. Click here to find out when and where.