Underrated/Overrated

UNDERRATED

Charles Dance on ‘Game of Thrones’: While most everyone on this series rests somewhere between hero and villain (except that pinch-faced King Joffery), Dance’s turn as Tywin Lannister carries a menacing gravitas like nobody else. No surprise to anyone who watched Dance chew scenery opposite Eddie Murphy on the otherwise lazy “The Golden Child” from 1986, but between Dance and Peter Dinklage, the Lannisters are winning the war on the acting front.

‘Mamitas’ (2011): This debut from writer-director Nicholas Ozeki can be heavy-handed, but it deserves watching for telling an unexpectedly sweet story in our city’s own backyard. Ozeki’s Echo Park isn’t rife with hipsters or gangsters, just working-class families and two terrific leads in Veronica Diaz-Carranza and E.J. Bonilla, who carries the rabbity energy of a teen Al Pacino in a movie that could be a John Hughes-styled love story for a new generation.

OVERRATED

Hulu’s move to cable: Hulu recently announced that the network-owned service was looking into requiring a cable or satellite subscription to access its streaming video. While that’s an impressive dedication to the status quo, this will only drive viewers away as the Internet merges ever closer with television. The networks can either accept that viewers just want to pay for what they want or ask the music industry how well holding onto old business models has worked.

Superheroes: Now that “The Avengers” is here and Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy will soon “rise” to an end, can we agree on a new summer hero? Having seen characters from multiple franchises turned into overblown, Frankenstein monsters of films and Batman transformed into a raspy-voiced, quasi-political allegory (which has been awesome, by the way), there’s nowhere left to go, Hollywood. Find a new hook before the inevitable “Shazam” reboot.

chris.barton@latimes.com