Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on April 8th, 2009
This is the fourth film in the Poison Ivy series and its star power has descended from Drew Barrymore, to Alyssa Milano, to Jaime Presley, and has finally fallen on Degrassi: The Next Generation actress Miriam McDonald; which is sure to fulfill a handful of strange Canuck fantasies.
McDonald plays Daisy, the new girl on campus who is apparently a "tom-girl" because she wears jeans...and is from the country (I guess). It's a fish-out-of-water story to start where she is scoffed at by the cool girls for showing up in a taxi, and gets a meet-cute moment with the richest boy on campus. She turns out to be the biggest prospect in the whole Political Science Department, despite being a freshman, which makes her a target of the "Ivys."
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 29th, 2009
"Chicano" is a term for a Mexican American (US born with Mexican ancestry).
El Chicano was and is a band that started in the late 60s as club players called The V.I.Ps (playing after hours at a Japanese restaurant in East Los Angeles) who became popular because of their jazzy approach to Latin rock. This musical approach was really defined by this band, as well as by Santana who started about the same time, and their songs became the anthems for the "Chicano Movement" around the late sixties and early seventies.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on March 25th, 2009
This set contains all of the episodes from the first season (or “series” as it is termed in the UK). The show follows a standard teen drama format of a group of high school friends, this time from Bristol. Each token stereotype is covered in the main characters (the quirky girl, the party animal, the dweeb, the cool guy & girl, the ethnic guy & girl, the gay guy) and each receives their own episode to focus on them, with a few ongoing romantic plots stringing all of their stories together. Each of said episodes ends with the focus character coming to some sort of new advancement or revelation in their lives (Example: the character with an eating disorder bites into a burger).
The packaging has reviewers drawing comparisons between this show and Gossip Girl, as if Skins is the raunchier, overseas equivalent of it. The characters of Skins are at least not the privileged horde that infest North American teen dramas such as The OC or Gossip Girl, thereby making them a touch more relatable. At the same time, the situations and stories do get rather disconnected from reality. The beginning episodes wish to be more about real-life troubles, there's even one about homework (sort-of), but by the time the teens are in an episode where they are being deported from Russia and held at gunpoint, the series loses touch with teen issues and starts to play out like a juvenile Melrose Place.
