The week on The Flickcast Chris and Matt return once again with some new things to talk (and complain) about.  Some of the topics on this week’s show include the season finale of The Walking Dead, AMC’s Breaking Bad marathon, the latest Battle: Los Angeles and Tempest trailers, Spider-Man: Turn Out the Dark, the iPad 2, the Verizon iPhone, Adam Green’s Hatchet 2 and a whole lot more.

In addition, like they do every week, the bioys picked some stuff for your reading, viewing or otherwise entertainment pleasure. This week Matt picked Spaghetti With A Chance of Meatballs on Blu-ray and Chris picked The Lord of the Rings on Blu-ray.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook and MySpace or via email.

Sometimes it is frustrating when you haven’t watched a television series from the get-go, and you keep hearing how great it is.  You can’t exactly jump right in during the third season, especially if the show is a serial drama. Such is the case with Breaking Bad, arguably one of the best shows on television.

Well fortunatgely, AMC has you covered. Starting Wednesday, December 8, they will air back-to-back episodes of the Emmy award winning drama until March, when the brand new season will begin. In total, there are 33 episodes of Breaking Bad, spanning three seasons. Due to the writer’s strike, the first season consists of a mere seven episodes. Seasons two and three each have 13 episodes.

The series stars Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris, and Anna Gunn. Cranston and Paul have both won Emmy awards for their superb performances on the show. If you are not familiar with the show, it revolves around a High School chemistry teacher who finds out he has terminal cancer and turns to cooking meth as a means of making some quick cash to leave his family. Naturally, the drug world is more complicated than he ever could have imagined.

The show is unflinching in its depiction of the seamy side of drug manufacturing and distribution. Far from glamorizing the trade, the show serves as an excellent deterrent. It is gritty, raw, and ugly.  Now there are no excuses for missing out.

For more information, you can visit the Breaking Bad facebook page, follow Breaking Bad on Twitter, or check the AMC website for viewing times.

It’s Emmy time and the nominations were announced this morning in LA at the Academy of Arts & Sciences for the 62nd annual awards show. It was a big day for HBO as it’s show The Pacific received the most nominations with 24.

Other shows nominated for several awards include Fox’s Glee with 19 nominations, AMC’s Mad Men with 17, NBC’s 30 Rock and HBO’s Temple Grandin and You Don’t Know Jack with 15 each, ABC’s Modern Family with 14 and NBC’s Saturday Night Live with 12.

Also nominated in a big way was ABC’s Dancing With The Stars with 9, Showtime’s Nurse Jackie with 8, CBS’ Two And A Half Men with 6, CBS’ Big Bang Theory with 5. HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, CBS’ How I Met Your Mother and NBC’s The Office all tied with 4.

As it often does, HBO led with 101 nominations total. ABC, with 63 nominations, received the most for any broadcast network followed by CBS with 57, NBC with 48, FOX with 47, and mighty PBS with 32.

All in all it seems like quite a diverse group of shows were nominated this year and we congratulate all of the nominees. Plus, it’s nice to see people finally get recognized for their work including Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights as well as Betty White with her 20th nomination for hosting Saturday Night Live.

Click through for more nominees and be sure to check out the official Emmy site for more. The 62nd annual Primetime Emmy Awards air on August 29, 2010 on NBC.

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This should come as great news to fans of AMC’s awesome show Breaking Bad (especially our own Shannon Hood). AMC has closed a deal to renew creator Vince Gilligan’s dark drama for a fourth season. The network made the announcement this morning via an official press release.

The deal had been reportedly in the workd for several months but had stalled due to budget considerations for the fourth season. The studio had wanted the per episode cost not to exceed $3.1 Million while the show’s producers were hoping for more like $3.3 Million per episode. Apparenly, the must have found a happy medium, or ‘Split the difference” as they say in the biz, because the show is coming back next year.

Breaking Bad has performed decently in the ratings but has achieved critical success. It has also garnered star Bryan Cranston two Emmys for his work on the show and a best series nomination last year. Knowing how this season ended, I’m very pleased the show will have a chance to continue. It deserves to be on for a long time.

Click through for the complete press release from AMC.

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Hmm. Is it safe to call the show Broken Bad now? I have held out hope, despite all the signs pointing otherwise, that Walt is still a decent human being. Guess I was wrong. The season finale of Breaking Bad was a mixed bag, as far as I am concerned. Let me be clear, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but with so many story lines swirling around (Skylar? Hank? The cartel vs. Gus?) I was left wanting a little.

Who didn’t want to see Hank open a can of whup-ass on someone this season? Looks like Hank’s reckoning day will have to wait for another season. So be it.

(Spoilers for the season finale of Breaking Bad.) The writers chose to end season three with a Walt/Jesse centric episode. This is the episode that has absolutely confirmed the fact that Walt has gone to the dark side. He has sold his soul to the devil, and then some. We’ve seen the characters of Walt and Jesse transpose throughout the series.

Jesse was a strung out loser with questionable morals and penchant for the rock and roll lifestyle. Really, nothing he would have done would have surprised us. Now, he serves as the moral compass of the dysfunctional duo.

Walt was initially drawn to a life of crime out of necessity. He was dying, and cooking meth was a quick way for him to make cash to leave his family. Now he has become a comon thug, routinely participating in atrocities he never could have imagined before.

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Now, that’s how it is done. The best show on television gave us one of the best hours of television I can remember. It took me a full ten minutes after the conclusion to pick my jaw up off the floor and compose myself. It was that good. I LOVE THIS SHOW!

I also cannot really talk about this episode without revealing huge spoilers, so please don’t read unless you’ve seen the episode. This is one you don’t want spoiled.

This week’s trademark opening sequence shows the day in the life of a prostitute, Wendy, who is working out of the Crossroad Hotel. She looks rode hard and put away wet, and wears white go-go boots while she orally services dozens of men who pick her up in the parking lot. Her tawdry acts are juxtaposed against the jaunty song “Windy” by The Association. Perfect.

She takes a bag of fast food burgers to the street corner (where Combo died) and gives them to the two drug dealers we saw in the last episode. She hands over some money, and at first I thought they were her pimps, but she was actually buying product, and Jesse is watching the whole transaction camped out in his car.

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This recap contains spoilers for the Breaking Bad episode, “Abiquiu.”

“Abiquiu” opens with a flashback of Jesse and Jane pontificating about the artwork of Georgia O’Keefe. The two are examining a more chaste collection of O’Keefe paintings featuring a series of doors, which Jesse finds boring and pointless, while Jane admires artistic liberties that O’Keefe took with each individual painting.

Jesse can’t understand why O’Keefe basically repeated the same painting with slight variations. “Isn’t that insane?” he asks Jane.

Jane counters that she believes you should go wherever the universe takes you, and by using Jesse’s logic, there is no point to repeating anything, even acts that are enjoyable. She takes a last drag and crushes her cigarette out in his car ashtray, leaving the tell-tale lipstick trace that caused Jesse to fish it out of the ashtray earlier this season, as it is the the last tangible remnant of her physical being.

The scene brilliantly cuts to a pair of feet dangling several feet above the ground. Uh oh, who is that hanging? Once the camera pans back, you see that it is Hank, in the Hospital, in some sort of harness device that is lowering him to the ground. A physical therapists encourages him to take a step while Marie, Walt Jr., and Skylar look on.

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Note: this episode was directed by Rian Johnson, who also directed Brick and The Brothers Bloom. This recap assumes that you have seen the episode, heavy spoilers.

Well, this evening we had a two man show, in every sense of the word. This episode was 100% dialogue and character driven, which was a little surprising to me considering that we only have 3 episodes left this season.

As usual, we get treated to a visually pleasing opening sequence. This week, we see a housefly, going about its business in extreme close-ups while we hear “hush little baby” in the background.

I immediately thought of the expression “fly in the ointment”, and found myself thinking about it throughout the show. This was a very distinctive episode in that it only featured Jesse and Walt, and was self-contained within the meth lab.

Walt discovers that there is a fly in the lab, and he completely over-reacts and obsesses over the insect. He tries various methods of swatting the irritating bug, to no avail. He then takes it upon himself to go onto the mezzanine level of the lab and promptly takes a nasty spill while trying to depose of the fly.

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This week, as usual, sees a whole slew of new movies and TV shows hitting DVD and Blu-ray. Some of them are new, some are old and some are hitting Blu-ray for the first time. This week, we’re most interested in movies such as Carlito’s Way, the curious combo of Tropic Thunder and We Were Soldiers, Breaking Bad Seasons One and Two and The Greatest American Hero complete series (pictured above with Connie Sellecca, William Katt and Robert Culp).

Movies

And Then Came Lola ~ Ashleigh Sumner, Jill Bennett, Jessica Graham (DVD)

Apocalypse Now: Redux ~ Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall (Blu-ray and DVD)

Carlito’s Way  ~ Al Pacino, Sean Penn, John Leguizamo (Blu-ray)

Coming to America & Trading Places ~ Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, James Earl Jones (Blu-ray)

Defiance & Enemy at the Gates ~ Jude Law (Blu-ray)

Extraordinary Measures ~ Harrison Ford, Brendan Frasier (Blu-ray and DVD)

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Kafkaesque: The adjective refers to anything suggestive of Kafka, especially his nightmarish style of narration, in which characters lack a clear course of action, the ability to see beyond immediate events, and the possibility of escape. The term’s meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.

In this 9th episode of the current season, we get a blessed reprieve from all the frenetic madness.  This episode was contemplative and character driven.  Ironically, despite its title, I found it to be one of the least bizarre shows of the season.

“Kafkaesque” delivers another great title sequence.  We get to see an awesome commercial for Pollos chicken, where we see images of  mouthwatering fried chicken set against the story of the “chicken robbers.”, the original founders of Pollos.  This advertisement is juxtaposed against scenes of Jesse and Walt churning out boxes of Meth.  Their Meth bags go into vats of “fry batter” that is distributed to Gus’s stores.

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This recap contains major spoilers for “I See You” the 8th episode in season three of Breaking Bad.

If there is one thing I have come to expect from Breaking Bad, it is a stellar opening sequence, and tonight was no exception. The show opens with Jesse putting on his street clothes (with considerable effort) to go home from the hospital after the brutal beating he took at the hand of Hank last week.

An orderly wheels him out to the front of the building, and leaves him to wait for his ride. Jesse sits there on the curb in his wheelchair when an ambulance pulls past him and wheels out a man on a gurney.

Jesse is shocked to recognize Hank, the very man who just beat him up. He follows the gurney into the hospital to confirm his suspicions, and yep, it’s Hank all right. Jesse can’t move much on his face, but his right eye lights up with glee at this Karmic event.

Back at the meth lab, Walt is trying to break up with his lab assistant, Gale, who is not taking it very well. Gale knows that he has done a great job, and doesn’t understand why Walt would let him go, it just doesn’t make sense.

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Wow! That’s the first thing I would like to say at the conclusion of this episode. The last ten minutes were were easily some of the most riveting moments that I have ever seen on television. As always, there are heavy spoilers ahead. These recaps are meant to be read by fans of Breaking Bad who have already seen the episode, and trust me, you don’t want this one spoiled.

I absolutely love some of the opening sequences that Breaking Bad has featured since the inception of the show. My favorite is still the teddy bear in the pool, but the opening scene of “One Minute” will stay with me for a long time. We finally get to see a bit of back story on the cousins (who are referred to as brothers in the opening.) It is obvious that the two men basically have ice water running through their veins, and in a chilling (in more ways than one) flashback, we find out how their steely detachment runs in the family.

The two young boys are playing in a yard with some sort of doll, and one of the boys tears a limb from the toy. The other boy approaches his Uncle (who is talking on a satellite phone) and tells him that he hates his brother, and wishes he were dead. The Uncle calmly tells the second boy to fetch him a beer from an iced down bucket. When the boy leans down, he holds his head under the ice water while the first boy frantically struggles to make him let go.

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