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Sarah (7798 KP) rated Taskmaster in TV

Oct 9, 2018

Taskmaster

2015 | International

8.8

(8 Ratings)

TV Show Rating

Hilariously bonkers

My friends raved about this show and I was forced slightly against my will to watch an episode, but in the end I was very glad I did.

This show is absolutely hilarious and has such a simple premise - comedians undertaking deceivingly simple or bizarre tasks to be scored by the Taskmaster himself Greg Davies. The tasks themselves vary, and so do the results which makes for very entertaining television. Watching fairly to very intelligent people come up with the silliest, stupid or downright convoluted solutions to basic tasks is so much fun. I also love Greg Davies’ very harsh wit and criticism, and how badly some of the contestants take it. Some series are funnier than others, and series 1 has so far been my favourite, but all are very entertaining to watch. Watching this show makes me think this could be what it’s like to work behind the scenes in escape rooms or the Crystal Maze experience, people trying to solve puzzles in the strangest of ways. Fair play to Alex Horne for managing to keep a straight face most of the time!

If you’re looking for something silly and lighthearted to watch, then I’d definitely suggest giving this a go.

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Show all 3 comments.

Sarah (7798 KP) Oct 10, 2018

I love Tim Key and Romesh Ranganathan too - Tim’s cheating is hilarious and Romesh is downright scary!

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Andy Walker (4885 KP) Oct 13, 2018

I like Taskmaster but after watching it since the beginning It's starting to get a bit tedious. It also depends on who is on it as to how good it is.

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Awix (3310 KP) rated King of Thieves (2018) in Movies

Oct 10, 2018

King of Thieves (2018)

2018 | Action, Crime, Drama

6.6

(13 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Michael Caine leads a crack team of crock crooks in robbing a safe deposit vault in London in this loosely-based-on-reality black comedy thriller. Quite apart from Caine, the film has an excellent cast (Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Ray Winstone, Paul Whitehouse, and Michael Gambon, plus Charlie Cox for the streaming generation), which will probably be what draws most people to it.

Initially this looks like it's going to be a slightly cosy comedy thriller about blokes who are too old be robbers any more, but - very pleasantly - it quite soon acquires some real heft and gravity to it, with the various members of the gang falling out and attempting to double-cross each other - most of these actors are well-known as comedians, but there is some proper meaty drama here and scenes with a definite tension to them.

Not quite as much Caine as you might hope for, but he is still the guv'nor as far as British film acting is concerned, and this is his best role for a while. Everyone else is good too. The film never quite gets the shifts between comedy and gangster thriller right, and the low budget keeps it from being very cinematic, but it's an engaging movie driven by great performances.

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Awix (3310 KP) rated Cats (2019) in Movies

Dec 24, 2019

Cats (2019)

2019 | Musical

3.8

(16 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Here's where I wrinkle my nose up at the Smashbomb scoring system - Cats isn't so much 'shoddy' as - well, it's such a particularly strange film that it's actually quite hard to tell whether it's any good or not. My instinct is to say not: a selection of character actors, comedians and musical theatre stars are CGI'd into human-animal hybrids like something out of The Island of Dr Moreau and hoof and yowl their way through a selection of TS Eliot's comic poems set to music. The plot does a good impression of being absolute gibberish, as the singing cat-people compete to get sent off to the bit of the sky that radio waves bounce off where they will receive a new life, while Idris Elba schemes to rig the contest. It's just weird.

Alternatively, this is a quasi-Lovecraftian surreal Arabesque which, fatally, fails to consider the difference between presentational and representational performance modes inherent in the transference of a narrative between theatrical and cinematic contexts. (i.e., people dressed as singing cats in a theatre can be beautiful and moving; people CGI'd into singing cats in a big-budget movie is more disturbing than anything else.) Jennifer Hudson's maximum-Streep, maximum-volume onslaught on 'Memory' made me want to hide under my seat.