'Guy Walks Into a Bar' (Justified, Season 3, Episode 10)

'Guy Walks Into a Bar' is a very good episode, and yet I didn't like it. I suppose that happens sometimes. I can't pinpoint anything particularly wrong with it, except that as a character episode it feels like stalling in the build-up to what is bound to be a very busy finale. But it's a good showcase for Robert Quarles, so I don't quite know what the hell my problem is. A weak B-plot, perhaps; but we'll get to that.

In 'Guy Walks Into a Bar', the election for Harlan County sheriff comes to a head. Napier wins by numbers, but Boyd Crowder manages to smuggle Napier's sister (Bonnie Borroughs) into a position at the county clerk's office, leading to the incumbent's disqualification thanks to nepotism laws. An angry Robert Quarles, taunted by Boyd and advised to leave Harlan by Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns), decides to confront Raylan at the bar where the marshal works as a bouncer while flirting with the owner, Lindsey Salazar (Jenn Lyon).

Meanwhile, Dickie Bennett (Jeremy Davies) is about to be released on early parole. Raylan attempt to keep him in jail by persuading Jed Berwind (Richard Speight Jr.) to change his testimony exonerating Dickie from Aunt Helen's murder fails, so it's back to Plan B: give a convincing personal testimony in front of Judge Reardon (Stephen Root) to convince him Dickie shouldn't be released.

That second plot strand is a bit of a drag, frankly. The Quarles storyline - in which we learn of the man's depressing life of heroin addiction, child prostitution, and parricide - is much better. The standoff between Raylan and Quarles in Lindsey's bar, featuring the by now customary shotgun-wielding woman as a third party, is as taut as anything this season; and seeing Quarles unravel mentally into a lost man with nothing but vengeance on his mind was worth it. The Detroit man's comeuppance will be satisfying, I hope.

'Loose Ends' (Justified, Season 3, Episode 9)

In a sense the episode title is apt. 'Loose Ends' is about unfinished business and the attempts by Delroy (William Mapother), Sheriff Napier (David Andrews) and Ellstin Limehouse to make sure their deeds won't come back to bite them. Like 'Watching the Detectives', the episode has the characters' messes catch up with them. And like that episode, it also moves the plot forward and reveals character in a couple of absolutely outstanding setpieces.

'Loose Ends' opens with Delroy the pimp and his girls bungling a robbery that leaves Krystal (Erin Anderson) dead. Delroy attempts to kill Ellen May (Abby Miller) too, but she seeks shelter with Ava Crowder. Meanwhile, Raylan, told by Art to leave Quarles alone, attempts to track down Tanner Dodd (Brendan McCarthy), the fugitive responsible for the car bomb that put Sheriff Napier ahead in the polls. Boyd, who pointed Raylan in Tanner's direction, seeks to reinvigorate his man Shelby's (Jim Beaver) campaign for Harlan county sheriff.

It all culminates in a terrific setpiece as Boyd crashes a town hall meeting and excoriates Napier for being a 'company man', while stressing his own criminal career began with his arrest for trade union work. It's a scene reminiscent of Mags Bennett's greatest moment of glory in Season Two, and Walton Goggins does as well with it as Margo Martindale did. Portraying a character performing a character isn't easy, and Boyd's speech is obviously disingenuous - his character is not reducible to blue-collar folksiness - but it's rousing all the same, and another of the by now alarmingly regular proofs that keeping Walton Goggins on board beyond the pilot was the best decision Justified ever made.

The other stuff is great too. Ava Crowder's rescue from the Season One scrappy heap continues to do wonders for me, as her transformation into hard-bitten crime queen runs up against her compassion for brutalised women, a product of her own history. Raylan, meanwhile, gets to share a wonderfully written, terrifically acted final scene with Limehouse, in which he proves no match for the butcher. The anger and hurt in Raylan's insistence that Limehouse telling him insulting stories about his mother 'would upset [him]' is something else. All in all, a great episode on the way to what I hope - not against hope, I think - will be a stunning finale.

Theseus war

Like it or not, 300 changed everything.* After hubris and audience fatigue had caused the ancient epic of the early 2000s to collapse, Zack Snyder's 2007 debut transformed the sword-and-sandal film into its present form. The subgenre of hyper-masculine, deliberately artificial-looking mid-budget pictures is still not dead, despite the fact that it has yet to produce an actual good film apart from its progenitor.

Immortals, alas, isn't the yearned-for exception to the rule. Whatever the intentions of the people behind it, the finished product is a rip-off of 300 by way of Clash of the Titans. Whatever other merits 300, a film I liked, might claim, it was hardly the womb of ideas; and if you're copying a remake, well... Suffice it to say that Immortals follows previous sword-and-sandal films so slavishly that it ends up with no identity of its own to speak of.

Anyway, the film is the story of Theseus (Henry Cavill), though considering the indifference with which the script treats Greek mythology I don't know why they bothered. Theseus is raised in a nameless village by his mother (Anne Day-Jones) and High Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt). When the evil king Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) sends out his armies in search of the fabled Epirus Bow, Theseus is enslaved, but he soon escapes with a ragtag bunch of misfits including the thief Stavros (Stephen Dorff) and the virgin oracle Phaedra (Freida Pinto).

Meanwhile the Olympians, led by Zeus (Luke Evans, who played Apollo in Clash of the Titans), fear that Hyperion may use the Epirus Bow to release the imprisoned Titans, but will not interfere with the affairs of mankind. Theseus finds the bow in a rock, and they take the weapon to Mount (!) Tartarus, where a Hellenic army has gathered to protect the Titans' prison from Hyperion's fanatical hordes. Along the way, they of course manage to lose the bow to Hyperion, setting the scene for an ugly showdown.

The script is quite simply boring as hell, and no-one could blame the actors for failing to breathe any life into it. Considering they use a literal deus ex machina more than once when the heroes find themselves in a pickle, writers Charley and and Vlas Parlapanides were presumably not taking their job too seriously. The story is padded to twice the necessary length, while still being something of a skeleton to hang an actual plot on: there isn't the slightest suggestion of geography or ethnography, real or fictional. One presumes the film is set in some fictionalised version of a country the script refers to as 'Hellenes', presumably because 'Greece' is too vulgar and 'Hellas' is too correct. The one good idea - the fight against the Minotaur, who is a large, brutish human wearing a wire bull's mask here - seems shoehorned in and is lost in a sea of awfulness.

The visuals don't help at all. Sure, the film's notion of Olympus - here, a darkish set populated by gods wearing silly hats - is better than the tinfoil-and-eyeliner extravaganza Clash of the Titans tried to sell us. Director Tarsem Singh conjures up some striking images, but it's all thoroughly ruined by the colour scheme, the very same mix of dark brown and gold with occasional dashes of colour that 300 should by all rights have killed off. That a very narrow aesthetic should dominate a subgenre would be merely irritating; but it really undoes Immortals, for what better way to declare yourself a 300 clone than to ape every detail of that film's look? Let's hope the upcoming Wrath of the Titans at last puts a stake through the heart of the sword-and-sandal film so that one day there'll be worthwhile films about the ancient world.

*Pathfinder, released a month after 300, may be safely ignored, since unlike the Spartan massacre it sank like a stone at the box office.

'Watching the Detectives' (Justified, Season 3, Episode 8)

The Justified team know how to craft an episode. That isn't just a platitude. As episodes have become mere chunks of a larger ongoing story, their internal dramatic structure has declined. Take Game of Thrones, whose first four episodes are pretty much nothing but exposition and world-building. It pays off in the latter half of the season, but a viewer who hasn't read the books might have given up by then. Or True Blood, which seems to mostly have abandoned intra-episode dramatic arcs for, well, stuff happening for an hour bookended by cliffhangers.

Justified outdoes those shows by striking a middle ground between one-offs and a larger myth arc: episodes develop one theme, story or character while simultaneously moving the main plot forward. (There were pure monster-of-the-week episodes in the first season, but no more.) 'Watching the Detectives' is a fine example: a breather episode in which we get to spend time with some neglected characters, it also moves the main plot forward by getting Boyd in trouble, showing us another side of Ellstin Limehouse, and murdering the hypotenuse.

Ah, yes: poor Gary. I liked him back when he was the sensible, grounded anti-Raylan: before, that is, he lost all his money and was chased by some very scary people, and before he fell in with Wynn Duffy and sent killers after his rival in love. The pathetic man holding poorly attended motivational seminars that we see at the end of 'The Man Behind the Curtain' hardly seems like the same person, but then Gary was always about appearances. It seems oddly appropriate that he would end up on the front lawn of the house he shared with Winona, shot through the heart by Quarles as a 'message' to Raylan.

In 'Watching the Detectives' Raylan has to deal with not one but two internal investigations. The local police department suspects him of killing Gary, and Quarles's men try to frame him for that crime by leaving murder weapons around Winona's place and using a bullet that bears his fingerprints. Meanwhile an FBI agent (Stephen Tobolowsky) believes Raylan is a dirty marshal in Boyd Crowder's pocket, and enlists our first-season friend David Vasquez (Rick Gomez) in his investigation. Other plot developments include a conspiracy to frame Boyd for an attempt on the life of Sheriff Napier (David Andrews) and Quarles's possibly final break with his Detroit superiors.

Letting us see Raylan's frequently extra-legal approach to law enforcement catch up with him is a blast, frankly, and it gives us more time with his colleagues: Art, bristling at Agent Barkley's suggestion that he's running a less than tight ship; Tim, giving Raylan a hard time while still letting him escape to cover up evidence and blatantly not caring about the FBI's opinion. The collision between Raylan's ways and proper procedure is a welcome reminder that far from being some sort of superhero he still is a 'lousy marshal but a good lawman'. And he's damn cool all the same.

Grim up north

Liam Neeson is a force of nature. His transformation from historical dramas and kindly-mentor roles to action stardom is the most stunningly successful Hollywood rebranding of recent years. It's not just Neeson's 6'4'' frame and steely blue eyes that help the makeover click. Rough around the edges in middle age, the Irishman is not your average slick action star: he portrays men who have lost someone. That made the otherwise simple Taken, and it goes a long way to explain the success of The Grey.

John Ottway (Neeson) is a hunter tasked with keeping wolves away from an oil drilling site in the Alaskan wilderness. When the operation winds up, the men (mostly) look forward to returning to civilisation, but their plane crashes in the middle of nowhere leaving most dead, with just half a dozen survivors. When grey wolves attack, they decide to make a run for the treeline. The rest of the film is essentially a long chase in which the men are picked off one by one, fighting back with very limited success.

Remember how in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, Adama pretends he knows the way to the Promised Land to give the remnant of humanity hope in a hopeless situation? The Grey doesn't even have that. Ottway - whom we first meet about to blow his head off - doesn't know where they are; he's perfectly aware the group is unlikely to survive, and doesn't pretend otherwise. He makes mistakes that get men killed. There is no destination, no safety for the survivors: there's only running and fighting for as long as they possibly can, not going gentle into that good night.

The advertising would have you believe The Grey is mostly Liam Neeson punching wolves, but not so: it's a philosophical film, all about meaning and fate or the lack thereof. As Diaz (Frank Grillo) points out, the fact that several men survived the plane crash only to be killed by wolves does not bode well for any traditional notion of destiny, while a late-film scene in which Ottway screams defiance mixed with pleading at an empty sky suggests that the filmmakers don't believe in an interventionist God. Even so it's more existentialist than nihilistic as the men find new meanings in their interactions and in the fight itself.

The wolves are created using a mixture of real animals (for close-ups), animatronics and CGI. The latter two look rather poor, in all honesty, so we should be grateful the wolves are rarely shown in detail. Their behaviour is in any case more archetypical than realistic, a physical and philosophical foil to the humans rather than 'real' animals. It's a well-acted, well-shot film: nothing in the career of Joe Carnahan would have led you to suspect he had such a taut thriller in him, but there you have it. Mean, lean and ferocious, The Grey may be more depressing than entertaining, but it makes for a good time at the cinema.

Remove all the bars that keep us apart

I wish  I knew how it would feel to be free
I wish I could break all the chains holding me
I wish I could say all the things that  I should say
say 'em loud, say 'em clear
for the whole round world to hear.

I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart
remove all the bars that keep us apart
I wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree
that every man should be free.

I wish I could give all I'm longing to give
I wish I could live like I'm longing to live
I wish that I could do all the things that  I can do
though I'm way overdue I'd be starting anew.

 - Nina Simone 

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, 
   because the LORD has anointed me 
   to proclaim good news to the poor. 
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, 
   to proclaim freedom for the captives 
   and release from darkness for the prisoners, 
 to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour 
   and the day of vengeance of our God, 
to comfort all who mourn, 
  and provide for those who grieve in Zion— 
to bestow on them a crown of beauty 
   instead of ashes, 
the oil of joy 
   instead of mourning, 
and a garment of praise 
   instead of a spirit of despair. 
They will be called oaks of righteousness, 
   a planting of the LORD 
   for the display of his splendour... 

Instead of your shame 
   you will receive a double portion, 
and instead of disgrace 
   you will rejoice in your inheritance. 
And so you will inherit a double portion in your land, 
   and everlasting joy will be yours. 

- Isaiah 61:1-3, 7

'The Man Behind the Curtain' (Justified, Season 3, Episode 7)

Justified's third season is different. Having far more players has led to some characters dropping under the radar. Winona's token appearances have culminated in her first non-show, while Rachel and Tim seem to take turns assisting/annoying Raylan in alternate episodes. Where Season Two always returned to Mags Bennett and her convenience store as a locale, Season Three is more dynamic, with constantly shifting alliances, characters, and places.

Place is what 'The Man Behind the Curtain' is all about. As the episode opens we meet Raylan, now living above a bar instead of his old motel room and mightily ticked off at the noise. (As the show has moved into its third season with Raylan still not having an actual stable place to live, the juxtaposition between his reluctant rootedness in Harlan and his peripatetic existence - between cases, thugs and women - has shown us his conflict between growing up and perpetual adolescence: the former symbolised by Winona and the baby, the latter by his job.) Then there's Quarles, kicked out of his base of operations by Raylan's meddling, and Boyd, who complains he doesn't want to keep coming down to Noble's Holler and whose bar is shut down by the bent local sheriff.

The episode throws even more veteran character actors into the mix. This time round we get Stephen Tobolowsky as an FBI man trying to stop Raylan from messing with addition #2: Sammy Tonin (Max Perlich), the feeble son of Quarles's boss and adoptive father, has come down to Harlan to check on the Detroit man's enterprise, which is proving less profitable than expected. In truth, Quarles has proved far less clever than he thought: having alienated not a few people in Harlan and raising Raylan's ire by trying to bribe him, he's still got the upper hand but is beset in a way he wouldn't have thought possible.

All that analysis, I suppose, is partly to distract from the fact that I didn't like 'The Man Behind the Curtain' very much. The A-plot - Raylan's attempt to get to Tonin - is flimsy and leaves something of a hole at the centre of the episode. Boyd's struggle with Tillman Napier (David Andrews), the Harlan sheriff who's in Quarles's pocket, props the episode up; but were it not for the fact that the previews made next week's offering look like a ball, I'd be a mite disappointed.