Mr. Burke Reviews

Review #22: Like Father If you're old enough to remember when there were only three networks which would fill out their weekly programming schedules with "Movies of the Week", then this Netflix film might be of interest to you. Like Father , starring Kelsey Grammar and Kristen Bell , is reminiscent of some of the better movies of the week of years gone by, only with a slightly better budget and bigger names to drive them. To be fair, Bell has top billing and is the central character, but Grammar is the actor I'm more familiar with and the reason I decided to give it a go. The only thing that I know I've seen Kristen Bell in might be a single episode of Veronica Mars . (Note to self: see if that's available to binge.) Life Father is the story of Rachel Hamilton, a workaholic who gets left at the altar because she can't leave her phone home even on the day of her wedding. (She was late walking down the aisle because she took a work call.) Her estranged...

Review #21: Quantico, season 3 After a long hiatus, Quantico returned to ABC in April as a summer replacement series. I thought it had been cancelled. (And whether it had or not, it has been cancelled now.) After a year working with the FBI, and then a second year working with the CIA, what was there to do? Start a special task force working within the Bureau. I'm glad I waited until the season was over to write this review. My initial reaction was that the first episode was a little weak, and I didn't particularly care about the villain. And then something weird happened: the plot wrapped up. It was solved. Done. Huh? Instead of a seasonal arc, the show had weekly episodes, better suited to fit the task force, and this worked nicely. And then they ruined it. The later half of the season devolved into one continuous story arc, following a single nemesis, who outplayed them at every turn despite the fact that his tactics came straight out of The Art of War . The agents kn...

Review #20: Santa Clarita Diet SPOILER ALERT! The actual Santa Clarita Diet is human flesh! That's right, this is a zombie show. A comedy-horror, mostly life-like zombie show. I didn't know that going in, but it didn't bother me at all. I don't watch zombie shows, but this one is worth it. Santa Clarita Diet stars Drew Barrymore , who I actually haven't seen in anything in years, and Timothy Olyphant , who I can't remember seeing in anything in particular, as a married pair of Realtors (or "Real-a-tors"), Sheila and Joel Hammond, raising a teenage daughter in quiet suburban Santa Clarita. While showing a house, Sheila suddenly gets ill, comedically throwing up -- as in "insane amount of vomit". Joel, at first, thinks she's dead, but she comes around. Fact is, she is dead. Or undead, as the case may be. Sheila discovers that she now prefers raw meat to cooked meat, and all is fine until another agent, Gary, wonderfully played by...

Review #19: Collateral To determine the Emmy Awards, the Academy sends out DVDs with sample episodes of shows to its voters. I don't know how, but someone who worked in my last office left a bunch of these DVDs. Now, most of these discs were useless. Why would I want to see two or four random episodes in the middle of a series? Then I noticed that many of these nominated shows were available online or on Netflix. So I made a note a few that seemed interesting. Collateral was one of these. I knew nothing about it going in, other than it starred Carey Mulligan , whom I enjoyed in Bleak House and Doctor Who . (I didn't realize that both of these were over a decade ago, but there you go.) The pleasant surprise watching the opening credits was discovering that John Simm and Billie Piper , also of Doctor Who, were in the series. Mulligan is Kip Glaspie, a detective trying to solve what appears at first to be a random murder of a pizza delivery man. But, of course, there's...

Review #18: Designated Survivor I recently binge-watched most of the last year and a half of Designated Survivor , which ran for two seasons, but seemed more like four half-seasons. Each midseason break had its own cliffhanger or shocking twist, and after its hiatus, the show seemed to move in a different direction, cleaning up the bits it left behind. So, yes, it sometimes seemed that the writers were making it up as they went along, but I could more gracefully call it "responding to viewer feedback". If it were the latter, it didn't help much. The premise of the show was fair enough, but it didn't allow itself to continue for the long term. Keifer Sutherland is Tom Kirkman, the HUD Secretary, who is left out of a State of the Union address (for some reason, given in September) as the "Designated Survivor". For reasons similar as to why the President and V.P. don't travel together, there is always a member of the line of presidential succession who ...

Review #16: Jessica Jones, Season 2 Season two of Jessica Jones dropped, and even though I didn't intend to binge it, I pretty much did. Watching the entire series in under a week is binging for me. There's still plenty of violence and death, but not as murder-y as last season was. It also addressed concerns I had from season one: is she going to get any real cases that pay the bills (even if they aren't the focus of the episodes), and is she going to give in to the villain to save the life of a person who's just going to die in the next episode anyway. (Pet peeve of mine: I hate that, and my hate grows exponentially when that gets repeated.) So there were a couple of jobs, or at least references to getting back to work, before the series arc kicks in. I won't say too much about it because of spoilers, but there's another "experiment" just like Jessica out there, but meaner. The season is definitely a "novel for television" or "mini...

Review #15: Kings County Chocolate Whiskey Note to anyone who found this blog through a web search: this is NOT a whiskey reviewing blog. Okay, why am I reviewing alcohol? Answer: why not? It's a review page, and there's no reason to limit it to whatever I just saw on Netflix . I need to review something that I have an interest in and hope that the audience finds it interesting as well, at least enough to read to the end. That's one of the reasons I'll generally keep book reviews to my other blog: who is going to get excited about an obscure book from the 90s (or earlier?) that you might not find a copy of or some new freebie, self-published ebook, which you're not going to like. I'm an amateur when it comes to alcohol, and I drink it sparingly. My tastes are a bit pedestrian. Beyond beer at the ball park or concert, it's basically a Seagram's blend in my 7 & 7, or the occasional (more likely "seldom") shot of Jameson's , that I...