The Irregulars, Tom Bidwell, Gunpowder Milkshake

Joanna Bourne, Historical Romance

Just sweet perfection.

The Irregulars is “a British mystery adventure crime drama television series” created by Tom Bidwell for Netflix. I pulled the description from the wiki so it must be true.

I’ve been looking at Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, and Paranormal books for a while. Lately I’ve moved on to movies and TV, all here on my little computer screen.
We live in such splendid times.

Anyway, I’ve been up to my eyebrows in magical teenagers in High School, (I found teenage angst boring even when was a teenager,) misplaced princes, fangs and fur out of European folklore, and the wars of empires of elves and mages. 

These are cool themes, which is good. They’re inherently interesting and emotionally satisfying themes with limitless potential. They never get old.

But they get written a lot and filmed a lot which is less good.

Metaphorically, these particular paths of the Magic Woods have been well trampled. Beer bottles and candy wrappers cans lie everywhere on the ground. 
You have to slog through endless mushy writing and — in movies — acting suited to the High School drama club before you discover the silver apples of the moon and golden apples of the sun.

OTOH, sometimes you get excellent acting. Novel treatment of old material. Fine dialog.
Irregulars is a nugget of gold in the spoils pile of Sherlock fandom. I recommend.

Gunpowder Milkshake also pleased me.
Excellent acting from everybody.
This one is heavily into car chases and folks kung fu fighting and extras getting bloodily killed
— action in which I am not interested.
On the computer, one can fast forward.
Ain’t technology grand?

Maybe study of Jackie Chan’s corpus of work would have kept the frenetic action scenes from being so boring. I dunnoh. I have no wisdom in critiquing movies and my taste is not especially commercial.

Final thoughts on Milkshake is that it worked for me and I recommend it.  

Both these movies have mixed-racial casts. Both do it soooo well.

RITA-winning author Joanna Bourne writes historical fiction set in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and Regency England. It was a time of love and sacrifice, clashing ideals, and really cool clothing.