(TV) True Detective: True Detective Season 2 Teaser Trailer HBO HD

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(TV) The Walking Dead 5x16 Promo [HD) "Conquer" Season 5 Episode 16 Promo (SE...

Check out the sneak peek trailer the season finale of AMC’s smash hit zombie drama “The Walking Dead”

(TV) The Walking Dead 5x15 Promo "Try" Season 5 Episode 15

Check out this intense trailer for next week’s installment (entitled “Try”) of AMC’s smash hit series, “The Walking Dead”.  

(TV) The Walking Dead Season 5 Episode 14 “Spend” TV Review

Tonight’s episode left an awful lot of questions that need to be answered but the main questions that popped into my head was just how did the Alexandrians last this long?

The honeymoon between the Rick and co and the Alexandrians is truly over as death visits both groups outside the walls which is not surprising but what was surprising was the cause of the deaths.

We’ve already seen that the Alexandrians are ignorant of the danger outside their walls and have super lax security measures but in this episode we two separate dangerous situations caused or exacerbated by the dangerous combination of cowardice and recklessness on the part of the Alexandrians.

The show has been setting us up to see the Alexandrians as desperately naïve and ignorant to the point it’s quite obvious the writers of the show are engineering a conflict between the two groups as Rick and co already know that the Alexandrians cannot hold their camp without their help.

The events of this week’s episode will surely bring the two groups at loggerheads as the the group loses Noah and Deanna lose her son Aidan. These two deaths will set up the mother of all conflicts between the two groups and no brainer who’s going to come up trumps.

Things started so well as we see Noah talking to Reg about learning how to build and reinforce the walls and Reg gave him a notebook. While the group is secretly split over the merits of the Alexandrian camp, Noah is one of members of the group who has bought in what the Alexandrians are trying to do and because of this Noah made the worst mistake you can make in The Walking Dead: aspire to keep hope alive by building a better future for himself and others.

We’ve seen the endeavor either get people killed in the most gruesome manner possible or turn them into a monster due to the moral compromises they had to make and in either outcome the character loses whether he or she lives or dies.  

Whatever happened this episode you knew that supply run was going to end badly given the lack of planning by Aidan and Nicholas despite Glen’s advice to come up with a different route out of the warehouse should things go pear shaped. Glen, at least up to this point, has never lost anybody on a supply run. On supply runs he saved Rick and Tara and gotten crucial supplies for the group but he mostly did supply runs by himself or with one other person  just as experienced out there as he was. However in “Spend” he found himself having to follow the lead two inexperienced but cocksure scouts in Aidan and Nicholas and watch the back of Eugene, who in his own words, “is not combat ready or combat inclined”.

Things start well on the supply run as they find what they’re looking for and prepare to leave but not before Aidan, neglecting to listen to Glen advising him to let the military clad walker come closer in order to kill it, shoots a live grenade which blows up which made a simple run ten times more deadly than they already was. In the next scene we see that everyone is more or less okay except for Aidan who is impaled by a forklift courtesy of the blast he caused and Tara knocked out with a bad cut to the head.

In the next scene we see Eugene, Noah, Glen and Nicholas in an office with Tara on a table unconscious pinned down by walkers which would have been fatal for all involved if Glen didn’t step up and come up with a plan to get them out of the office and save Aidan who came to after Nicholas thought he was dead.

So far just about every scene we’ve seen with the Alexandrians has shown us how unprepared and inexperienced they are to deal with threats outside and inside their walls as the scenes at the warehouse and building site show  both Glen and Abraham being forced to take the lead thanks to the recklessness and cowardice of  the Alexandrians.

Aidan and Noah wouldn’t have died if Aidan had listened to Glen and let the walker get close enough to kill it and the Alexandrian group would have watched one of their own get eaten alive if Abraham didn’t go commando and singlehandedly handle a whole herd with a little assistance from one of the Alexandrians who got over his fear thanks to Abraham’s display to badassery.

This episode also revealed that Deanna’s concerned that the group is taking leadership positions in the town too fast with Rick and Michonne already constables and after the incident at the building site, Abraham in charge of the community’s expansion which is understandable but takes a bit of gloss off her grand plans for the camp and doubt her motives when she’s worrying about the ascent of the only people in her group she knows who can keep the camp safe long enough to realize them. Sure almost everybody in the group is capable of cold blooded murder and sometimes struggle to know when to turn it off and on but the Alexandrians don’t have that kill switch and if they did, wouldn’t know what to do with it. We see that in the building site incident and fatefully, we see it in the poorly planned that gets Noah killed in the most gruesome way possible.

Noah death was particularly gruesome as we watch Glen, who’s never lost anybody on a supply run, watch Noah get torn apart by walkers thanks to Nicholas’s cowardice when they get cornered by walker in a revolving door. “Spend” was a big Eugene episode as we saw him step up as he carried Tara back to the van and drew the walkers away from the revolving allowing Nicholas, Noah and Glen to escape. Unfortunately, after panicking when Glen couldn’t break the glass of revolving door, Nicholas bailed on Glen and Noah leaving them susceptible to the walkers on the other side which lead to the walkers grabbing Noah and pulling him back into the lobby despite Glen’s best attempts to pull him back.

The writers of the show laid the gore on thick this week as the camera lingered on the horrible deaths of Aidan and Noah as both were eaten alive and torn apart literally by walkers making sure we didn’t miss a second of the whole ideal. The Walking Dead is comfortably the goriest show on TV right now and “spend” made sure we didn’t forget.

Not all the drama in “spend” was reserved for the events at the building site and the supply run from hell as the Rick, Jessie and Pete love triangle takes a new turn as we learn from Carol’s rather cold interaction with Sam and the tense doorstep visit to Pete’s and Jessie’s house (the kid she threatened to kidnap and leave in the woods last week) that creepy Pete, who in every scene we’ve seen him in is either trying to get Rick drunk or asking to check up on his kids is abusive towards Jessie and maybe Sam.

We already see that Rick doesn’t like Pete and would probably kill him anyway but thanks to Carol’s experience as a battered wife and being able to spot the signs, Rick has the perfect reason to get Pete out of the picture. While the way we deal with domestic abuse in our context leaves a lot of be desired given the alarming rate of death surrounding the issue, executing someone for being an abusive asshole to his wife and potentially his kid isn’t the answer either particularly in the post-apocalyptic world. Rick and Carol have elected themselves as judge, jury, and executioner before and we know they’re waiting for the slightest instance the Alexandrians get out of pocket to do it again.

And with the revelation of Pete being a domestic abuser and the death of Noah and Aidan sure to split the camp once Glen, Eugene, Tara and Nicholas make it back, Rick and Carol might just get their chance.

All in all, “Spend” was a great episode  that going to definitely split the group in two and I can’t wait to see what happens next week’s even though we have pretty good idea that it might not turn out of well for the Alexandrians in any case.

Till next week.

(TV) Game of Thrones Season 5: Trailer #2 - The Wheel (HBO)

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(TV) The Walking Dead Season 5 Episode 13 “Forget” TV Review

This week’s edition of walking dead was pretty much an extension of last week’s edition as we see the group adjust to their new surround and some managing better than others.

The Groups integration into the Alexandria camp is sure to produce some of the better drama of the series as we get to see Rick and co under the rule of a another e and the early signs in this and last week’s episode is proving fruitful. In “forget” we get see the depths of the psychological trauma within the group as the episode reveals some are clearly not ready to integrate into the all too pre- zombie apocalypse surroundings.

We see this in the opening few scenes with Sasha clearly freaked out by Olivia’s chipper attitude and mundane as if the end hasn’t ended. Still fresh from the losses of Bob and bother Tyreese, Sasha is less than likely to integrate given the stark contrast between the homely surroundings of the Alexandria camp and the existential nightmare outside its walls.

I have to admit myself I’ve found the juxtaposition between the two rather jarring to the point I nearly forget that all involved are survivors of a zombie apocalypse. From the outset the group has had to deal with the constant threat of danger and that’s been the main driver of the story so far so seeing rick get rid of the beard and Carol play house with residents of the Alexandria camp is quite a strange site.

This episode as well as last week’s installment addressed a major point in the show of how the group would interact with a group that aren’t murdering psychopaths or a group of murdering cannibals and the answer so far is pretty well up to a point. While Rick Carol and Daryl are more than justified to suspect that the Alexandria group is more sinister than it lets on but the most concerning moments of the last two episodes has been on the part of  the group from Rick planning to take over the camp to Carol threatening a little boy with death-by-walker.

While the show has done its best to show that the governor and the terminates were evil personified and they got what they deserved, it glosses over the fact that Rick and co are just as capable of cold blooded murder as both their previous foes ever were. Because we see everything from the point of view of the group, we forget that they defeated and kill both Governor and particularly the Terminites in a savage and ruthless fashion.

So for me it’s no surprise that Carol threatened a child with death then, in the same breath, bribed him with cookies. It’s now that we see them with a group of good people we see just how battle hardened the group has become with Rick, Carol and Daryl preparing for the next campaign before it happens.  “Forget” and “Remember have been two good episodes as both group are sizing each other up with the Alexandrians eyeing rick and co with curiosity and the group with varying degrees of suspicion.

In “forget”, we also get a little contempt from the group towards the Alexandria camp as fortunate circumstances notwithstanding, they have been sitting pretty at the end of the world and resentment from certain members of the group is palpable.

The quite resent among the group towards the Alexandria camp becomes clear when their leader starts talking about her ambitious plans for the camp which brings a smirk of incredulity across Rick’s face as hears just as much BS as he can take. His incredulity turns into concern when he finds out that no one mans the camp’s clock tower which is a perfect for a lookout and, if needed, a sniper.

All this resent plus the worryingly lax approach the Alexandrians have to security almost seems to justify Rick’s plan to take over the camp or at least take back their guns as their lax security policies put him and his family at risk. However, the Alexandrians have gone out of their way to welcome the group which makes things worse given their experience with other groups who embraced them with open arms.

This week we got the strange pairing of Daryl and Aaron outside hunting “Buttons”. There are few contrasts as stark between two characters on the show as those between Daryl and Aaron but in “Forget” we find out that both more alike than we’d thought. Both spend most of their time outside the camp and as intimated by Aaron, outside the camp’s eerily suburban circle of bliss for one reason or another.

We also find out that Aaron is adept with dealing with walkers and is a pretty good shot probably gained through his rather dangerous and thankless job of recruiting people when he knows full well that the majority of people left are either good people ruined by their loss and the moral compromises they made to survive or murdering psychopaths.

We knew from the outset that Daryl was never going to fit in with the other suburbanites in Alexandrian camp so it does make sense that Daryl makes nice with Aaron and Eric as Aaron invites him for “some serious spaghetti”. Later we see Aaron show him a half built motorcycle before offering him a job as recruiter which he accepts.

The people in the Alexandria camp so far seem nice and are trying their best to be accommodating to the group but they seem quite clueless about how the world outside is and how this has affected the group because if they did Deanna wouldn’t have come up with the ill-advised idea of inviting the group to a party. It wasn’t that long ago when Rick and co was in a barn living off squirrels and acorns so adjusting to suburban life after surviving an zombie apocalypse isn’t going to be easy.

We see this when Sasha snaps on one of the Alexandrians as she bugs out at the Stepford Wives quality of the mundane conversation as if there isn’t a world of flesh eating killing machines looking for their next meal.

The highlight of the episode however was that chilling scene between Carol and Jessie’s son Sam in the armory when Carol is caught by the boy pocketing guns from the camps’ stash. Not only was it the most disturbing yet compelling scene in the episode but possibly in the second half of the series as she delivered the threat with little or no change in emotion as she moves room threatening to kidnap Sam and tie him up to a tree in the middle of the woods in his sleep in the same breath of bribing him with cookies which was brilliant but unsettling television.

But given Carol’s history with other people’s children it wasn’t a shock as she taught the kids at the prison how to use weapons, killed Lizzie, and now gave Sam sleepless nights for the rest of his life. It’s almost fitting that the two most ruthless people in the group are the people who were from the original group when The Walking Dead started as both Carol and Rick have assimilated the quickest to their new surroundings yet happen to be the most skeptical of the intentions and motivations of the Alexandria camp.

It’s been hilarious yet disturbing to see how quick Carol went “invisible” as from the moment the gates opened she started playing the ditsy homemaker who didn’t know how to handle a gun when we know she’s arguably the most ruthless and dangerous member of the group for the simple fact nobody sees her coming.

However it’s been less than hilarious but just as disturbing watching Rick makes moves on a married Jessie while planning to arm himself and the group in the camp despite the Alexandrians welcoming with open arms. What’s worse is his outright sociopathic tendencies leak out when see Jesse walk by with her husband and reaches for stolen gun in the small of his back with contempt in face. The Alexandrians only crimes so far has been having an A level sense of south/Midwestern hospitality and a D level understanding of their new guests and the threats outside and inside their walls but this hasn’t stopped rick and Carol planning for the worse.

What’s even more creepier about watching Rick’s scenes in Alexandria was the kick he got out of hearing a walker on the other side of the fence brings a smirk on his face as if he feels some type of connection or sense of ease with the undead which was unsettling and adds to the concern I have that Rick might just turn heel.

All in all, “Forget” was a good episode and a companion piece to last week’s installment as we see the group still adapt to the surreal surroundings of the Alexandria camp. The episode also sets up potential for much needed conflict within the group as for too long it’s been Rick calling the shots with little dissent.

Till next week!!!   

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(Books) Joel Hames: The Carnage Report One On One With Author Of Banker's Town

What made you want to be a writer?

Who wouldn’t want to be a writer? I’d always loved books and respected the people who created them, it was just a matter of opportunity. But when I had the time to write, I was too busy enjoying myself, and then work got in the way, and I ended up becoming a lawyer, and then a banker, and the idea of being anything I really wanted to be (other than a husband and father, of course) just faded away.

But then I gave up banking, and relocated to a spot about as far away as you can get from a major financial centre in England, with no viable Plan B, and my wife reminded me how I’d told her so many times, in years gone by, that I wanted to be a writer. And that was it.

Did you have any literary influences growing up?

Not really. I just loved books, pretty much any book, they were all good. Even an Oxford English degree didn’t really influence the way I went on to write. I might admire the craft or the beauty or the sense of the astonishing works I was reading, but it stayed outside, at a distance, something brilliant but ultimately alien.

But once I decided to write, I couldn't keep it out. Every great book, every glorious passage, I find myself dissecting them all, trying to work out the how and why, like Frankenstein with a few bundles of literary flesh. And there’s no reason in it, no decision to focus on books that relate, stylistically or thematically, to whatever it is I’m working on. So now everything I write has echoes of what I happen to be reading at the time, and it’s only in the never-ending redrafts that the inconsistencies between Chapter One’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and Chapter Twenty’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows get ironed out.

How much of Bankers Town, your latest release, is based on your background as a former banker?

The nature of the work, putting together complex debt capital markets deals, that’s all pretty much true. The people – well, a number of them are drawn on my ex-colleagues, generally exaggerated because (much as no one wants to believe it) bankers tend to be as normal as anyone else, and thus not the greatest material for a novel. The fraud is absolutely and completely made up – all the fraud (apart from LIBOR, which I knew nothing about at the time your honour and so help me that’s the truth).

Some of the deals are based (very loosely) on real, actual deals. Most of the steps within the deals did actually happen, at one point or another. The delicately-poised relationships between different groups and individuals within and outside the bank, the day-to-day business of putting these deals together, the idea that they’re basically a gigantic Jenga puzzle made out of compromises and half-truths, and that at any moment a rating agency or tax advisor or lawyer or investor or another bank or lender or swap counterparty or your client could whip a piece out, just like that, and a year’s worth of work could collapse round your ears, that’s real enough, that happened more times than I care to remember.

The notion that it was all a game, that what we were doing existed in its own abstract world and had no impact on the “real economy” – and accordingly, the ease with which a banker could abdicate responsibility for that economy and ultimately for everything he did – there’s an element of truth in that. I’d like to think that’s all changed, now, although I’m not sure the Treasury Select Committee would agree.

The camaraderie of the early years at the bank is real enough, unless it’s just time and distance putting a pretty gloss on it. And the post-financial-crisis feeling of a slow, inevitable descent into a place where things weren’t going to be at all nice, I’ve tried to capture that, to the extent I could, in the book.

Being a former banker, what was the best and worst thing about being a banker?

The best thing, undoubtedly, was the buzz of walking into a pitch wondering how the hell you’re going to sell your deal without boring the brains out of the people on the other side of the table, and getting questions you never imagined thrown at you, and then finding (to your delighted astonishment) that not only can you throw the answers right back at them, but that they’re the right answers, and even better, they’re the answers everyone wants to hear, and walking back out thinking the only way you’re not going to win this deal is if someone else is actually paying for the privilege of doing it.

The worst thing is working like hell on a deal for months of long days and nights and weekends and then finding at the last minute that it’s not your deal after all because someone else has actually paid for the privilege of doing it.

In your blog “The Economics of Banking”, you mentioned the lack of knowledge about economics among your former colleagues; do you think a greater knowledge of the field would have helped avert during the crisis?

I can only really speak for myself here, although I suspect many senior bankers in London are in a similar state of ignorance about the role they’re really playing in the world.

But it’s interesting that while I was putting deals together I’d have a view on the effect my deal would have on the bank, the investors, the client, and the client’s employees and customers and other lenders, and that was about as far as it went. It wasn’t until after I sat down to think about what had gone wrong in 2007 onward, and write Bankers Town, that I started to look outside this circle to the lenders of the lenders of the lenders, and their other borrowers, and their other lenders, and realise that (if I can use an example from the book), a surf-board boom and bust in Sydney can kill a spark-plugs factory in the Midlands as easily as a footballer can crash a Ferrari.

If everyone had studied economics, would that have occurred to them? And would it have occurred to enough of them to have made a difference? It’s just one thing, really, correlation, interconnectedness, call it what you will, the butterfly-wing effect. In reality, I’m not sure it would have made a difference. And I’m not sure it even would now, because for all the increased capital cushions and Basle III and clampdowns on bonuses, the next crash is only a matter of time. When it comes to money, humans are (as I’ve pointed out repeatedly in my blog), dumber than dogs. Once bitten, twice bitten, three times bitten, it doesn’t matter. It won’t stop us getting bitten again.

Everybody can name their favourite book to read, can you name your worst?

I’ll stick to the dead, and go with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a book that prioritises the quality of the prose over character and plot to such an extent that it ends up looking like a long, tremendously dull poem in badly-formatted blank verse. If you’ve never read it, don’t bother.

Much has been said about the self-publishing phenomenon, what’s your take?

As someone who benefits from it simply by virtue of being available to readers, I’m an unqualified fan. There were never enough agents or publishers to read everything out there anyway – I remember a brief job I had at a publishing house, straight out of university, flicking through hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts sent over the last couple of years to the ignominious fate of being judged by someone who had not the faintest idea of what a commercially-successful modern novel should look like. So much effort, so much talent, all consigned to the reject pile by someone who wouldn’t have known Donna Tartt from a Bakewell Tart/ Julian Barnes from Julian Clary.

Now, finally, there’s an outlet for it. Sure, there’s a lot of dross out there too, but it’s not that hard to spot. The difficulty (as a reader) is distinguishing the excellent from the merely very good. And the satisfaction of taking a plunge, risking a few quid and a little of your time, and discovering something really good, a pleasure formerly reserved for agents and publishers, is now available to all.

What the best and worst thing about being a self-published writer?

The best: being able to publish at all, and see your sales mounting up and your reviews suddenly appearing, and being, to all intents and purposes, a real writer.

The worst is having to do all your own marketing and not having the faintest idea how to do it without doing what everyone else is doing anyway.

How much of your time is dedicated to marketing as opposed to writing?

About half, now, which I was warned about online before I published, and didn’t believe, and look at me now. Some of it’s quite fun, I kind of enjoy coming up with “witty”, topical tweets, and for the last couple of months I’ve been working with a local film production company on a trailer for Bankers Town that’s going to be, if I say so myself, absolute YouTube dynamite.

Do you have projects in the work or new releases share with our readers?

Yes. There are always ideas boiling over, and a couple of books I’ve already written that I fully intend to hammer into shape for publication one of these days, but the book I’m working on at the moment is more of a straight conspiracy thriller. It opens with a riot at a prison, an armed convict who doesn’t exist, and a wheeler-dealer lawyer who’s telling the truth for once in his life, but can’t get anyone to believe him. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft, so with luck I’ll have the whole thing ready for publication by the end of the year.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts with your readers. 

Connect with Joe on Twitter @Joel_Hames and pay a visit to www.bankerstown.net. Get your copy of Banker's Town on Amazon here and here.

(TV) Hannibal at Comic Con 2014

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(TV) Turn: Turn Renewed For A Second Season, Why?

There are many mysteries in American television but AMC's decision to give revolutionary war drama "Turn" a second season is as mysterious as it gets.

Despite a lukewarm critical response and equally lukewarm viewing numbers, AMC, despite having a reputation as network that gives shows a chance to catch fire, has a history of chucking shows with numbers and a critical response similar to Turn. Shows such as the solidly written and acted "Low Winter Sun and the excellent but underrated "Rubicon" come to mind as shows that were just as good if not better than "Turn" but were cancelled after their first seasons.

While it's common sense that not every show on the AMC roster can become the ratings behemoth that is The Walking Dead, Turn has all the elements to become a show worth watching as it's a great story and has an excellent cast but throughout its first run, you got the sense that there was something missing. However, AMC, undeterred by the not so great numbers, have given the show's creator a second season to find it. 

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(TV) True Detective: Farewell To a Great Show

For all the talk about True Detective, from the comparisons to other shows such as Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad to the myriad of theories as to who exactly is "The Yellow King", one thing is abundantly clear about the show 8 episode run, it is truly great television. From the season long acting masterclass provided by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as Rust Cohle and Marty Hart to the excellent penmanship of writer, producer and creator Nic Pizzolato and the outstanding directing of Cary Joji Fukanaga, True Detective has been eight hours of life I look back on as eight hours well spent.