A TV show inspired by the characters who populated the works of a beloved fantasy author tops the DVD releases for the week of June 29.
“The Watch: Season One”: “The setting for 41 novels, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, a flat Earth balanced on four elephants standing on the back of a turtle, where physics are powered by magic and collective imagination, goes the comic route,” writes Los Angeles Times critic Robert Lloyd in his review. “Unlike the magisterial Middle-earth of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and its many imitators, everything here is a little shopworn, in various stages of decay and improvised repair — the characters as much as the world they inhabit.”
In “The Watch,” a group of these characters comes together to help save their city. The show “is a mystery story that involves dragons, a missing library book, and the administration of justice (or lack therof) in the city of Ankh-Morpork, where thieves and assassins have trade guilds and immunity from prosecution, as long as they stay within their quotas and leave a receipt,” Lloyd writes. “Led, sort of, by an often inebriated Capt. Sam Vimes (Richard Dormer), the Watch, whose ranks never swell here to more than five, has become largely irrelevant. … But, as happens in detective fiction, a seemingly mundane assignment will expose deeper fissures, just as the sudden reappearance of an old friend turned enemy — Samuel Adewumni’s Carcer Dun — will set Vimes on a new trajectory.”
Also new on DVD
“Percy Vs Goliath”: Christopher Walken stars as a Canadian farmer who takes on Monsanto, with Christina Ricci as the lawyer helping him fight the corporate giant.
