Tag Archives: Band of Brothers
PHIL vs BILL Dylan McDermott, the star of TV’s Hostages, finds himself held captive by Russian gangsters in this B-grade Canadian thriller about a seemingly innocent man who wakes up bound hand and foot in an industrial freezer. How he wound up in this predicament and plots to extricate himself makes for surprisingly dull escapism. Other movies about people trapped in claustrophobic or desperate circumstances – Buried, 127 Hours, The Call – cranked up the tension with economy and ingenuity but Freezer, despite its twists, is too one-dimensional to generate suspense.

Bill O’Byrne’s Bargain Bin Blues: Freezer

Freezer | Value for money: $$ Directed by Mikael Salomon. Written by Tom Doganoglu, Shane Weisfeld. Starring Dylan McDermott, Yuliya Snigir, Peter Facinelli. To misquote Brian Fantana, but for a higher purpose, 68 per cent of the time Freezer works all of the time. Almost the entire movie is set in a freezer unit of what looks […]

Read more
Tonight in HD: July 10

Tonight in HD: July 10

SoHo Highlight: Band of Brothers (Sky 10, 8.30, 5.1) HBO’s searing, authentic, true-life dramatisation of an elite paratroop regiment going to hell and back in wartime Europe at last screens in HD on NZ TV — just in time to mark its 10th anniversary. While the first of 10 episodes suffered from too many boot camp […]

Read more
Weeds to Light Up Thursday Nights

Weeds to Light Up Thursday Nights

SoHo will premiere the latest — and last — season of Weeds on July 21. It will take over Girls’ 8.30 Thursday slot and screen here three weeks behind Showtime in the US, which has just released a slew of smokin’ hot posters asking the question to which all fans want the answer after season […]

Read more
Blu-ray of the Day: Saving Private Ryan

Blu-ray of the Day: Saving Private Ryan

Cast: Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Paul Giamatti, Vin Diesel, Ted Danson. Director: Steven Spielberg. Screenplay: Robert Rodat. Score: John Williams. Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski. To paraphrase a line from the highly decorated, 1998 D-Day dramatisation, this Ryan upgrade is worth it, with an HD transfer as jaw-dropping as the combat sequences that […]

Read more
Post-Pacific Generation Ready to Thrill - But Not in HD

Post-Pacific Generation Ready to Thrill – But Not in HD

TV One will maintain its military Monday strand with an Iraq War miniseries from The Wire’s David Simon but, unlike The Pacific, Generation Kill won’t screen in HD. The decision is as daft as TV One repeating Band of Brothers in SD and is a double-blow for fans of premium drama: the network’s decision to pick up […]

Read more
Pacific on Ratings Crest but Divides Kiwi Critics

Pacific on Ratings Crest but Divides Kiwi Critics

If you missed Monday’s premiere of The Pacific, you can catch it again at 10.20pm on Sunday. As it did with Band of Brothers, TV One is screening same-week repeats of the World War II drama in HD. Having paid a premium price for the HBO miniseries, the network would have been buoyed by the […]

Read more
Pacific Not So Swell

Pacific Not So Swell

TV One’s flagship HD drama of 2010, The Pacific, didn’t draw the big-gun ratings HBO would have hoped for when it premiered on US TV at the weekend. It was watched by 3.1 million viewers, which was surprisingly modest given the publicity surrounding the launch of the World War II miniseries — and only a […]

Read more
The Pacific Rides Hollywood Reporter Rave

The Pacific Rides Hollywood Reporter Rave

The first published review of The Pacific calls it “as sensitive and realistic portrait of American combat in the Pacific as you ever will see”. The hotly anticipated follow-up to Band of Brothers will screen in HD on TV One from April 5. The Hollywood Reporter today acclaimed the Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg collaboration as “a […]

Read more