Some TV shows I've watched recently

"The Pacific" (2010): The first episode of the highly-anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed Band of Brothers mini-series, "The Pacific", was great. It was just what I was expecting the series to be, to be as grand in scope and story as Band of Brothers. The first episode drops you right into the action, where marines battle at Guadalcanal - at one point the beach-landing even reminiscences and spoofs the build-up to the Omaha Beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan - as marines land on the shores, not riddled by enemy firepower, but greeted by their Army counterpart which had settled on the beach.

The second, third, and fourth episodes follow individually Pvt. Leckie and Sgt. Basilone, both from different units, as they trudge through harsh tropical environment and undergo constant enemy fire and shelling, on different islands like Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester. They were also subsequently stationed in Melborne, where Leckie met his fling/love-interest and where Basilone received his Medal of Honor. The acting by James B. Dale (as Leckie) and Jon Ceda (as Sgt. Basilone) were commendable, but not great. Leckie, at most part, comes off convincing as a fresh recruit tormented by the ugliness of warfare and harsh environment, but at times his "temperamental" rant or outburst came a little too abrupt and uncalled for (such as yelling "f**k you" at his officer while being drunk after being dumped by his love interest he met in Melbourne); he toggles between a somber thinking literate, writing letters to a girl back home, and a disgruntled wise-ass who is simply unhappy at everything that's around him, including his superiors. Ceda, who played Basilone, comes off a tad stoic but it befits his character, which seems to have suffer from a little post-traumatic stress disorder.

The "core" action of The Pacific really picks up in Episode 5, 6, and 7, where the audience follows the journey of Private Eugene Sledge (played by Joseph Mazzello) from his training as a mortar-man to being deployed in Peleliu (an island riddled with rotten coconut trees plantation, and heavily-fortified Japanese strongholds), where the battle took the highest casualty rate in The Pacific war. The beach-landing sequence could be one of the most spectacular and intense of all war movies. Mazzello, whose boyish face accentuates his character's innocence, depicts Sledge in a realistic light, as he awaits the impending chaos about to unfold as the 1st division Marines storm the beach of Peleliu. The entire sequence is centered mostly on Sledge from start to finish, from the moment their crew-carrier craft left the ship till they were knee-deep on the shores pinned down by heavy machinegun-fire and artillery. As Sledge makes his way through the shores and as bullets whizzes by and people around him dying, you could feel his deep-seated fear, and that he might just die at any moment. The subsequent episodes continue Sledge's journey as the Marines cross an open airfield bombarded by mortar fire, as well as fighting the Japanese on the hills of Peleliu, before the final campaign on  the island of Okinawa. Oddly enough, the filmmakers manage to squeeze an extra episode dedicated to the battle on Iwo Jima, which the Basilone character was part of.

All in all, The Pacific makes for an entertaining and refreshing take on WWII's Pacific theatre, and a satisfactory follow-up to 2001's critically-acclaimed series "Band of Brothers". 10/10

IMAX - Under the Sea (2009): Movies filmed in IMAX always looked immense and grand, and "Under the Sea" is no exception. The underwater scenes are spectacular and almost sublime. Yet, Jim Carrey's soft-spoken narration doesn't quite compliment the immensity of the grandeur that is unfolding on screen. It seems almost frivolous at times that he would switch from describing the activities in an idiot-proof language i.e. "The mother is feeding her children", to touching on the need for human to put in effort to help preserve the ocean species due to global climate changes. At times I just don't get where his focus is at. Instead one should just sit back and enjoy the spectacle onscreen. 6/10

"Archer" (2009): An adult-oriented cartoon that spoofs the likes of secret agent James Bond. Loaded with lots of sexual humour and innuendos, this show's not likely to impress many. The character animations are stiff and their expressions are almost non-existent. It looks cheap, but the character designs (especially the female agents) look decent and sexy enough. Too bad there isn't a consistent storyline that I could follow through, and I stopped watching the show after the first episode. My rating: 6/10.

One should check out Comedy Central's "Ugly Americans" (2010), a show about the city of New York inhabited by all sorts of creatures, beasts, ghouls and demons, engaging in day-to-day activities alongside humans. This show offers more than just foul-mouthed humour - acting as a spoof on the oddities and ugliness of New York, "Ugly Americans" provides much parodies derived from other well-known movies & American pop-culture. 8/10