Touches You

The first must-see film of the year.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I have only seen two episodes of this Flash TV series (The Trickster and The Trial of The Trickster) and I have to say I found this show very hilarious and funny.Even the intro reminds me of BTAS. The last episode was the funniest where The Trickster hypnotizes the flash to do his crimes.

I've been a Flash fan since the early 60s, and I thoroughly enjoyed this series when it surfaced on DVD (we got the pilot but not the series in the UK). Here are my comments, in no particular order: John Wesley Shipp was fine as Barry Allen and Flash.The costume was OK. The muscled look was, to me, wrong, but it worked. Kind of.The effects weren't bad for a TV series at that time, albeit on DVD there is a noticeable granulation to the image when an effects shot begin.Amanda Pays' role and the exhaustion effect. This annoyed me, but I suppose you have to have some sort of jeopardy built in or else the character is too powerful (either that or the writers weren't good enough).And my major bugbear: the series was too formulaic. Maybe it didn't matter at the time, but if you watch the boxset you find yourself saying "Hang on - didn't I already watch that story?" Well, yes, you did. But here it is again, dished up next week with different characters.So I rank this an honourable failure (or a qualified success). Let's hope the new version does the trick(ster)!

If you're going to have a show populated entirely by one-dimensional characters (at best), and spoken in overused clichés, I suppose the only way to do it is to for the cast not to act.I saw the episode that came with the Smallville DVD, and struggled to get through it. I thought it would be a fun evening, sitting back and watching the series based on the movie of 1990. I own the movie. I enjoy it. It has the right level of campiness.But this episode of the series tried, like so many products of the late '80s/early '90s, to tackle issues such as homelessness and genetic engineering. And, like most of these products, it came across as jumping on board the cliché bandwagon. On top of that, characters spout lines comic books wouldn't print, with no emotion or sense of what they were saying. Perhaps I can't fault the cast; they had nothing to work with.At least it drags on.

This was a "cute and fun" show which stands out in my mind as one of the first and most unfortunate examples of network mismanagement I'd seen.I recall The Flash being bounced around the schedule more than a superball without advance warning. If I recall correctly, the third or fourth week it aired it was already a rerun! To make matters worse, the show was often not aired in the slot advertised in the TV schedules (which, in 1990/91, before the net, was pretty much the only way to know what would be on). The worst example was once when I tuned in to see The Flash, I was just in time to see it going OFF! I called the local TV station about this who informed me that "it was moved an hour earlier at the last minute by the network". No new show could have survived this kind of treatment.Oh, well. It was a show that was genuinely fun to watch and captured a true "comic book" feel. It died far too early.