Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Jekyll

I've deleted my previous post because it was a bummer, and I didn't want to leave it up to depress me. What perks me up? Psychopaths!

If you haven't heard of the miniseries Jekyll, please go find it and watch it. It's a modern sci-fi retelling of the classic tale. James Nesbitt plays the title character and his alter ego, and I can't believe I haven't seen this man before because he's crazy good in this role. Matching his quality is Gina Bellman, who plays his wife. That's right. Jekyll's married with kids, and the missus is not about to let hubby off the hook just because he's got a homicidal alter-ego. She's still his wife, and she owns him. I cheered for her a lot.

There are a few high cheese moments. The opening sequence to episode five comes to mind, and a few of the secondary characters are way over the top, but the main actors do a stupendous job with great rapid fire dialogue. I also seriously loved how they handled flashbacks in this series. They played with time a lot. Sometimes when shows or movies do this it annoys me because it seems like the only reason they spliced it out of order was to hide how boring the story actually was, but this show did it with wonderfully clear reason to it. Now I think it should go without saying, but this show is pretty dark. Hyde is not a nice fellow. Really freaking scary for the most part. He's a raging id hell bent on killing and fucking everything around him, possibly in that order. So yeah, don't watch this with your kids, but once they're in bed, pop in the DVD, and I promise you'll get a smile like this on your face:

Labels:

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Heartily second this recommendation. Anything written by Stephen Moffat is fantastic. He wrote the best episodes of the New Doctor Who, the old DW spoof with Rowan Atkinson, and a hilarious somewhat-but-not-really-Friends knock-off called Coupling. It features 3 boys and 3 girls, but that's where the simularities end. Not for the kiddies though.

10:03 AM, April 02, 2008  
Blogger *lynne* said...

hola! delurking to say I've added this to my Netflix queue based solely on your recommendation :-) Actually it sounds excellent, I
m looking forward to wathcing it one day (we have 200+ on the queue...!!!)

11:20 PM, April 02, 2008  
Blogger Vampire Librarian said...

lynne, you know you want to bump it up in your queue. It is really good. It's freakish how good Nesbitt is.

11:54 PM, April 02, 2008  
Blogger Unknown said...

This recently finished airing here in Australia and it was absolutely awesome. So glad the DVD is now available. Who knew James Nesbitt could pull off such a role!

5:09 PM, April 03, 2008  
Blogger Kathy said...

This is a fantastic show! I hadn't checked Netflix though to see if it was on dvd -- I'd love to see it again.

My other favorite show about psychopaths, only with a psychologist not a psychopath as the protagonist, is back on BBC America -- Wire in the Blood.

9:04 PM, April 07, 2008  

Post a Comment

<< Home