Michael Shannon Movies Blog

  Death By Lightning at the IMDb   More up to date Shannon now, albeit one set in the past. This is a 4 part mini series that you can find on Netflix and I would recommend that you do. Shannon plays James Garfield, a lesser-known American president who was shot by an assassin three months into his presidency and who died of complications from the wound a few months later. His story is not well known, at least to myself, but it was an engaging and entertaining historical drama which was sumptuously staged and well-acted, by a stellar cast. The first episode opens in a contemporary warehouse as an old box splits open and out rolls a jar containing a human brain. This is labelled ‘Charles Guiteau: Brain’ and the series then dissolves into the past to see how we ended up at the brain storage facility. We meet Shannon’s Garfield as a young senator working his farm. He has the familiar trait of being a poor woodworker – we know his talents lie elsewhere! He has a long-suff...

  Shannon gets joint top billing in this 6 parts miniseries along with Alexander Skarsgard, but I think that’s down to those actors’ higher profile as this is really the Florence Pugh show.   She is the titular ‘little drummer girl’ a vague titled explained in passing by Charles Dance who laments about not being able to break a fanatical little drummer boy in a previous conflict, so what chance did he have with the elite terrorists?   The show is set in the late 70’s and opens with a pretty girl dropping off a bag of ‘music records’ at a diplomat’s house. She doesn’t attract suspicion, but we soon learn that the bag was a bomb when the diplomat’s house explodes.   Shannon runs an anti-terror Israeli unit and is charged with bringing down the Palestinian cell who caused the outrage. Short of a good plan of his own he decides to copy the terrorists and recruits a pretty young woman to infiltrate the cell. He picks Frances Pugh who is an actress touring with...

  Another TV miniseries now and probably one that I was putting off. I’m not a big fan of country music so this six-episode bio-pic of George Jones and Tammy Wynette didn’t really appeal. It was however really enjoyable and, although some of the music could have been trimmed a bit, the two leads were excellent.   I was familiar with Tammy, but hadn’t previously heard of George. It seems that he was quite the big deal though, and even today he has twice the Spotify plays as Tammy, despite them both now being dead.   The programme starts in 1968 but the timeline does jump about a bit. Tammy is an aspiring singer whilst George, played by our Mr Shannon is the big star. Tammy has a herd of kids and a husband, but George takes a shine to her and whisks her away after an eventful dinner at her house. ‘Which kids are yours?’ he asks as they run off with George having overturned the table – well he won’t be asked back.   There is a ‘Star is Born’ vibe going on as...