Author: Andrew Wickliffe
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The Fabulous Baker Boys opens with pseudo-protagonist Jeff Bridges saying goodbye to his latest cocktail waitress one-night stand (always his decision, never hers–Baker Boys is all about taking advantage of patriarchal privilege). Under the opening titles, he walks to work. Baker Boys takes place in Seattle and regularly features its skyline, but director Kloves is…
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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2014) s11e10 “May 5, 2024: Public Libraries” [2024] D: Paul Pennolino. S: John Oliver. It’s another crowd pleaser episode with the feature covering attacks on public libraries throughout the United States. Well, maybe not throughout. Lots of solid jokes, and some good running bits. The news of the week…
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Legion of Super-Heroes (1980) #311 [1984] W: Paul Levitz. A: Gene Colan, Keith Giffen, Larry Mahlstedt. Thank Granny Goodness for this issue. It’s good. The first story has good art, good story. Brainiac Five finally fails to stop evil AI Computo from escaping. Giffen and Mahlstedt have never done better art. Then it’s Dawnstar and…
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American Gothic (1995) s01e13 “Resurrector” [1996] D: Elodie Keene. S: Gary Cole, Lucas Black, Brenda Bakke, Sarah Paulson, Nick Searcy, Jake Weber, Tina Lifford. Guest star Greg Travis asks Cole to help turn his radio career into a television one. Except the TV folks don’t want Travis’s wife (Irene Ziegler), despite her doing all the…
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Deadpool 2 (2018) The Super Duper Cut D: David Leitch. S: Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, T.J. Miller, Karan Soni. Middling, meandering sequel has foulmouthed invincible mutant hero who never shuts up Reynolds becoming frenemies with time-traveling cyborg Brolin (the TERMINATOR riffs are the movie’s greatest success) while trying to…
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Legion of Super-Heroes (1980) #270 W: Gerry Conway. A: Frank Chiaramonte, Jimmy Janes, Steve Mitchell. It’s a surprisingly packed issue, starting with the Legionnaires trying to escape a deep sea prison. On the surface, other Legion heroes investigate, getting into fairly regular battles with the Fatal Five. There’s also the interpersonal squabbling because Conway’s lazy…
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One of my major complaints about “The Twilight Zone” is the ending reveal somehow distracts from the rest of the episode. It’s a “gotcha” moment. And The Invaders does have a gotcha moment, and it does shuffle star Agnes Moorehead off-screen ingloriously, but at least it doesn’t do anything to undercut her performance. The episode…
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Tormented is the story of how the world’s greatest jazz pianist (Richard Carlson) lost it all because he wasn’t a forty-eight-year-old virgin. I mean, also because he let his former lover, played by Juli Reding, fall to her death without trying to help her. Good thing they’re on an island where any peculiar death results…
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The Dark Past opens with a lengthy, confidently showy, and capable POV sequence. Lee J. Cobb is arriving at work, just like anyone–and the movie does a lengthy “peoples is peoples” bit–except he’s a police psychiatrist. It’s his job to save kids from becoming hardened criminals, thereby not being on the taxpayer dime. It’s progressive…
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Rebecca opens with protagonist Joan Fontaine narrating, establishing the present action as a flashback—which is kind of important considering how much danger Fontaine will be in throughout. She’s got to make it since there’s the narration. Some of that danger is in Fontaine’s head. Or, at least, she sometimes apprehensive of the wrong person. Sort…
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Even when The Odd Couple plods, it never feels stagey, which is impressive since it’s from a stage play (Neil Simon adapted his own play), it mostly takes place in the same location, and many of those sequences are just stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon following each other around and bickering. The one thing…
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American Fiction (2023) D: Cord Jefferson. S: Jeffrey Wright, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross. Sublime deconstruction of the American academia novel, as through the eyes of exhausted ultra-brow author Wright, who realizes maybe he is willing to sell out to get rich. Especially since he’s back…
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Blankets (2003) OGN WA: Craig Thompson. Oddly callous memoir about creator Thompson growing up conservative Christian in rural Wisconsin in the eighties and nineties. The first half is rough but searching. The second half is more polished; usually for nothing. Thompson figures it out by the end, when it’s too late. More unfocused than bad.…
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All Creatures Great & Small (2020) s04e04 “By the Book” [2023] D: Stewart Svaasand. S: Nicholas Ralph, Samuel West, Anna Madeley, Rachel Shenton, James Anthony-Rose. While the majority of the episode concerns Shenton’s pregnancy fears, new guy Anthony-Rose works on his bedside manner (for the humans, not the animals). And Madeley has a monumental life…
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The One-Percent in One-Percent Warrior’s title does not refer to the super-rich, but rather when someone transcends in their film-related martial arts excellence. The majority of the film is just a forty-minute action sequence with star Sakaguchi Tak roaming around an abandoned zinc factory—on its own little CGI island—and kicking various butt. A lot of…
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The Moon runs about two hours, but it’s got enough story for eight. About the only way to tell all the story it’s got overflowing would be a miniseries remake. And even then, you could probably toss on another couple of episodes to even it all out. The film concerns South Korea’s second attempt at…
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Until the third act, when it suddenly becomes clear the film never really had anywhere to go (at least not in this installment), Dr. Cheon is mostly delightful. Even the listless ending isn’t not entertaining, it’s just listless. After a magic-heavy dream sequence opening, Cheon settles into the gag–Gang Dong-won is a “doctor” who solves…
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The Swiss Conspiracy opens with a lengthy title card and voice-over explaining—broadly—the Swiss banking system. Then, the movie’s opening titles, an absurdist, almost silly montage of Swiss postcards, set to composer Klaus Doldinger’s least funky music in the film. Doldinger’s score is always fun and cool (and often quite good), even when it doesn’t precisely…
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For the first half or so, The Childe ostensibly has three lead characters. The protagonist is Kang Tae-ju; he’s a half-Korean, half-Filipino illegitimate son of a Korean rich guy. Life has sucked, leading to Kang becoming an underground boxing champ (which has so shockingly little to do with the movie it’s like they forgot it…
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If Creature from the Haunted Sea weren’t atrocious, it’d have to be fantastic. There’s no possible in between for the film, which is high concept, no budget. The film starts as a political spoof about Cuban generals fleeing the revolution with gold. They enlist the aid of gambling gangster Antony Carbone, who has a yacht.…
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Devil’s Partner opens with an old man in his shack killing a goat to seal a deal with Old Scratch. The man’s arrangement is simple—his soul for two years. Wait, two years of what? Shh, watch the movie. We also never get to see any more of Old Scratch than his hand. It’s effective but…
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The Magnificent Fraud tells the unlikely tale of an actor on the run who just happens to be in the right place at the right time for the role of a lifetime. Akim Tamiroff’s stage actor’s enjoying a residency of sorts in San Cristobal’s hottest nightclub, one maybe owned by the president’s troubleshooter, Lloyd Nolan.…
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The Terror is not camp, which is bewildering, not just because it’d be better if it were camp, but because, based on its vitals, it seems like it can’t not be camp. The film stars Jack Nicholson as a Napoleonic officer—he does not attempt an accent, thank goodness—who gets involved with some supernatural goings-on involving…
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As usual with “Doom Patrol,” I wasn’t expecting that turn of events. I knew “Patrol” had planned something conclusive for this season, but Done Patrol is a last episode, not a season finale before a refresh. They knew and didn’t play chicken with renewal, which is exemplary these days. The team—Diane Guerrero, Joivan Wade, Michelle…
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The Plague of the Zombies opens at its lowest point—the film involves Haitian-style voodoo (not really, the movie’s version of Haitian-style voodoo) being practiced in a Cornish village, and the high priest has a trio of Black men drumming. Throughout the film, we’ll learn about the voodoo setup (though not a lot, including what they…
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“Grantchester” toes an interesting line with religion and religiosity. It avoids it. Yes, the show’s full of religious imagery, complete with beautifully lighted sequences where Tom Brittney gives a lovely sermon and it’s never about being shitty; it’s always about how God’s actually all for the gays and so forth. Because, besides Brittney and Al…
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As penultimate episodes go, Portal Patrol is a doozy. The team has found themselves stranded in the time stream, so it’s good Joivan Wade got his Cyborg upgrades because he has to make them a little pod to survive. The current stakes are saving the world and April Bowlby (who doesn’t appear this episode), so…
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Al Weaver directed this episode, which I think is the first time one of the show’s stars has directed an episode. Weaver’s got a little to do on screen—he’s worried about Tom Brittney, who’s moping after hitting the guy with his motorcycle, but it’s all okay. I mean, okay in the sense Brittney’s not getting…
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In the Line of Fire is about bad use of taxpayer funds. President Jim Curley is on the campaign trail, trying to shore up support in ten states in nine days or something, and his chief of staff, Fred Thompson, doesn’t want to listen to any nonsense from the Secret Service about a viable threat.…
The Stop Button 