All posts tagged: clunky

Lynley review – Wooden acting and clunky scripts stop this from being a great comeback for the detective show

Lynley review – Wooden acting and clunky scripts stop this from being a great comeback for the detective show

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Detective Inspector Lynley and his trusty lieutenant, DS Havers, are back. Seventeen years after The Inspector Lynley Mysteries slunk off our screens, following six series as a fixture on BBC One, the corporation has decided to reboot the franchise. But will this new drama – pithily titled Lynley – be a hard-hitting reimagining, or a more faithful resurrection of the Monday night staple? On a final warning for repeated insubordination, DS Barbara Havers (Sofia Barclay) is assigned to the new DI up from the big smoke. Tommy Lynley (Leo Suter), it turns out, isn’t quite like the rest of the team in this rural, East Anglian backwater: he’s an Oxford law graduate and the heir to an earldom, who drives a vintage Jensen Interceptor. “What is a bloke like you doing in a job like this?” Havers asks him on their …

Blue: Reflections review – a clunky rehash of their Y2K boyband heyday | Blue

Blue: Reflections review – a clunky rehash of their Y2K boyband heyday | Blue

Published by Sam Flores

‘Blue’s in the house / Oh it’s party time!” muse the fortysomething man-band on Souls of the Underground, the penultimate song on this seventh album, and the fourth since their 2011 reunion. The British four-piece are keen to take us back to their early 00s heyday, a time of Met bar table service, where the ladies have “a little prosecco” and the guys have a “nice cold beer”. Musically, it’s a clunkier approximation of their (comparatively) harder-edged hybrid of pop, hip-hop and R&B; think 2002 “low ride” anthem Fly By II but on a Megabus budget. The artwork for Reflections It makes sense that they would want to tap into modern pop’s deep well of nostalgia, but rather than recalling what made Blue originally stand out, Reflections often feels like a tribute to other evergreen boybands. For most of the album’s 13 tracks, the tempo is mid, with the dreary, Westlife-on-a-bad-day Candlelight Fades a particular nadir. The windswept One Last Time and The Day the Earth Stood Still are attacked with gusto, but both feel …