MovieFest

I have some really great news about one of my favourite shows this year, Starz‘s adaptation of Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods proved to be one of the biggest and most unexpected success stories of the 2017 television season. Originally published in 2001, the Hugo Award-winning novel’s adaptation was lead under the guidance of executive producer Gaiman and showrunners/executive producers Bryan Fuller (the mastermind behind Hannibal ) and Michael Green ( Heroes ). With solid ratings and high praise from both television critics and social media (all of us), Starz renewed the series for a second season before American Gods ‘ third episode had even aired. Of course with that level of success comes many more questions which need to be answered, so Gaiman took some time to sit down with The Independent to discuss the first season, what the future holds for additional seasons of American Gods and even a mention of a little something Gaiman’s working on… that only goes by the fricking nam...

American Gods season 2 has the green light! Starz's glossy adaptation of the bestselling Neil Gaiman novel - about a battle of the Old Gods and the New Gods, in contemporary America - was renewed for a second season a couple of months ago. But today, we're hearing that the second season will be slightly longer than the first. During an interview piece with series overseer Bryan Fuller, The Wrap claims that American Gods will have ten episodes. (which is a hole 2 episodes more, and I'm not even being sarcastic) Fuller also teased the journey ahead for Ricky Whittle's brilliant Shadow Moon.  "Whenever anyone engages in a faith bargain and they commit to it, they change their perspective in a massive way," Fuller explained. "So the story we get to tell with Shadow in the future is one of a character who’s crossed that first benchmark, which was non-believer to believer. Now that he believes, how does he believe? And how will what’s happened with h...

Mr. Wednesday’s war has finally come, but we’ve gotten his target wrong all along. Sure, he wants to unite the surviving old gods of the world’s various fallen faiths and pantheons against the New Gods of American hegemony—technology, the media, guns, commercialization, and the military-industrial-corporate-intelligence-government complex represented by the mysterious Mr. World. But attacking we the people is his way to win. In “Come to Jesus,” the eight and final episode of American Gods’ spectacular first season, the war begins — a biological war in which Wednesday recruits Ostara, goddess of spring, to destroy all the vegetation in the nation until people begin worshipping the old gods again. “Never once have they had to work for it,” he reasons, “give thanks for it.” His plan is to starve the pampered Americans into prayer. Wednesday’s thesis, and by extension the show’s, is an even more fundamental misreading of American life than the series’ underlying assertion that in Am...

It’s strange to think that Emily Browning might just become the breakout star of American Gods, but here we are. You’d expect someone like Ricky Whittle to blow up, or perhaps Corbin Bernsen will get that career renaissance I spoke about last week. Maybe Omid Abtahi will translate the beatific charm of Salim into a big career, or Chris Obi will become a household name after displaying both calculated menace, kindness, and comic timing, usually in the same scene. And yet, Emily Browning, who played the lead in several huge-budget movies, is poised to make a career leap with performances like her most recent in A Prayer For Mad Sweeney. The tale of Essie McGowan (Emily Browning playing a second role) is a familiar one to a whole lot of Americans. Essie, in love with son of the lord of the manor where she works, is given a sweet gift and a promise of marriage. That gift is mistakenly believed to be stolen, and Essie’s spineless beau gives the answer his mother wants to hear, and not...

What did I say last week? They have only gone and done it again and smashed it with another truly tremendous episode, for our eyes to behold. Its starting to become a bit of a joke to be honest, every week I say to myself it surely cant get any better... But it does time and time again. There's something of an art to splitting the main cast of a television show into two groups. I've seen it done very poorly, and I've seen it done very well. Some shows, like Game Of Thrones , seem to deliberately break their episodes up into little segments and chunks, so viewers get to spend five minutes here, five minutes there, and only occasionally get a full-on episode in one location with one or two major characters. American Gods , being a travelogue at its core, has two groups of characters on the road, and they're two groups that function very well separately from one another. Shadow and Wednesday, the self-contained pair of the show thus far, are still on the road headi...

★★★★★ Recently American gods have just been smashing it and each week I think can they top the last? Answer Is yes and It's going to get a hell of a lot more difficult for American Gods to get much better than it does in Lemon Scented You, if only because it provides viewers with everything they've been waiting for while also giving them something completely unexpected. The show features some spectacular acting heavyweights, and while they've all had plenty of chances to show off their skills, this week gives every major character in the show a showcase moment, and to list them all would be to do a straight recap of the show, minute-by-minute. Suffice to say, I could not be any happier with American Gods than I am this week. The episode begins in a beautiful fashion. The first people cross the Bering land bridge into what will become North America. As they arrive, like the slaves or the Vikings, they bring their gods along with them. The people, hungry and cold and c...

★★★★★ Laura Moon has dominated the first season of American Gods without actually being on screen all that much. She was all Shadow wanted to have back when he got out of jail, and her phone calls clearly kept him going while in jail. The loss of his wife and best friend in the same moment of betrayal took away his post-jail life and put him directly into the service of Mr. Wednesday. Shadow's been consumed with Laura, and with his grief over her, this entire time clouding his judgement, but we haven't really heard or seen anything from her, aside from the occasional delusion. Or what might have been assumed to be a delusion. As it turns out, Laura Moon has been watching over Shadow this hole fu**ing time. Even now, after an affair, a horrible traffic accident, and death, Laura's still keeping an eye on her "puppy". Fortunately, it's not a literal eye, it's just a detatched arm, which she can easily sew back on by borrowing Audrey's arts and cr...

★★★★☆ Can you teach an old God new tricks? The central conceit of  American Gods  is the conflict between what was and what is. Specifically, the old gods squaring off against the new gods of the modern age. This episode was a lot more refreshing as it was nowhere near as confusing as the two that followed before. Mr. Wednesday is scheming something, and from all the talk from both sides, that seems to be a war. The combatants seem to be picking sides, and Shadow Moon is stranded in the middle of the thing, pulled from all sides by various urges. He's got new gods beating him up, he's got old gods playing games where his life is at stake, and his only friend is a con artist who may get him thrown back in jail before he can get his head smashed in by a giant sledgehammer. Wednesday's cons, as we've seen throughout the series, are relatively simple. He pretends to be a doddering old man. He sets up a pretty simple two-man con to “rob the bank” by pretending to b...

★★★★☆ Two episodes into  American Gods and I have had to watch them both a couple of times before I even understood what the hell was going on. Both episodes start with Mr. Ibis inscribing “Coming To America” in black and white, because  American Gods  is  an immigrants’ story  as much as it is a fantasy tale and a road epic. But as “The Secret Of Spoons” demonstrates from its opening sequence to its conclusion, very little is as clear as black and white. Not every “immigrant” story is the same. Some of our diverse nation’s community descended from people who didn’t immigrate by choice. They were kidnapped en masse and enslaved by people who arbitrarily designated themselves worthy of owning other human beings.  The unwilling passengers in the dark hold on which “The Secret Of Spoons” opens aren’t immigrants, and they aren’t passengers; they’re captives. Not prisoners. That’s a word we commonly associate with prison and crime and courts; these pe...

★★★★☆ From the opening scenes,  American Gods  is nothing short of a reminder of other loved television projects from the brutal genius that is Bryan Fuller. A rich, dark colour palate dominates the cold open, which features Vikings arriving in America a hundred years before Leif Erikson's famous cross-Atlantic voyage, and over 650 years prior to Christopher Columbus kicking off the colonisation of North and South America. These Vikings, expert sailors and valiant warriors, find this new world quite inhospitable. One man is felled by a rather comical amount of arrows. The others are vexed by big ass biting insects, hunger, and inhospitable lands. These Vikings eventually return to their homeland, never to sail again, but they leave behind something very important to them: their one-eyed warrior God. This is the first bit of world-building accomplished by the  American Gods  crew, who have an interesting task ahead of them. Eight episodes to establish charact...