Pasckie Pascua's Nerdy Squirrel Reviews: TV Series.

"Vera" (Amazon Prime), British crime drama series based on the Vera Stanhope series of novels by Ann Cleeves. So far, 11 Seasons/Series, and a 12th shad begun filming. We are currently on Series/Season 2. Stars Brenda Blethyn as the principal character, Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope. ENGROSSING, accessible, fast-paced yet devoid of actioner bombast. Each story/case ends in one 1.5 hour episode. "Vera" is Ms Blethyn's show. I saw her only once before this unfeigned, unpretentious police procedural, in Mike Leigh's 1996 superb drama "Secrets & Lies." Now I get the urge to locate/watch her other movies.        Vera is a nearly retired employee of the fictional Northumberland & City Police, who is painstakingly obsessive about her work and driven by her own demons that she vehemently wards off. She lumbers along in an unkempt, "unsexy" swagger but her clinically calculating mind that is backstopped by a dismissive personalit...

"Whiplash" (2014), written and directed by Damien Chazelle, stars Miles Teller and J. K. Simmons. The film depicts the relationship between an ambitious jazz student (Teller) and an aggressive, abusive instructor (Simmons). You know by now that this movie is one of 2014's best. Simmons' ferocious delivery equals blood that drips down the kid's drum kit, magnified or accentuated in a most brutal way by the movie's dagger-like sound editing. It cuts deep. Okay. As a cinema, this is exemplary--but the movie's impact on me is its parallel vein with how I was trained/schooled as a journalist. It's personal.           I started out as a high school worker in the circulation department of a tiny newspaper that battled the Marcos dictatorship for years. Then I moved to proofreading, then translator (English features/news to the paper's Tagalog/Filipino counterpart). My mentor was the late Jose "Joe" Burgos. Those who know him, especiall...

DARKEST HOUR (2017), directed by Joe Wright, stars Gary Oldman. As Winston Churchill, Oldman was sure winner in the last Oscars. So I don't want to talk about virtuoso acting. No brainer. This movie is a good subject for a conversation. Churchill's life as United Kingdom's Prime Minister is an episode in history that needs to be told. And discussed. The time was May 1940. Or the time before United States joined World War II. Nazi Germany swept across Western Europe, threatening to defeat the UK. The movie revolves around the friction at the highest levels of government between those who would make a peace treaty with Adolf Hitler and Churchill, who refused. Churchill believed the Germans are untrustworthy.                     That time, Churchill wasn't very popular. A brooding alcoholic with short temper and awful diet, his record in the Admiralty was shot owing to the Gallipoli Campaign in the First World War, his views o...