Author: Andrew Wickliffe
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The Book of Life has a very nice style once the story starts. Everything looks like it’s a miniature, like Life is a CG Rankin/Bass “Animagic.” Not quite as good, but there’s a charm to it. To the style. Not to the movie. Life’s oddly and relentlessly charmless. It begins with the first bookend device:…
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The Scarlet Letter’s opening title card explains while the Puritan customs might be atrocious to modern eyes, “they were a necessity of the times and helped shape the destiny of a nation.” Not on board with the former, but it’s definitely accurate for the latter. Especially since this version of Letter is about a white…
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How do you follow up an episode where your season villain, an omnipotent time deity played by Charity Cervantes, changed the entire world into a musical? If you’re “Doom Patrol,” with an almost limitless well of human despair. The main cast—April Bowlby, Diane Guerrero, Matt Bomer, and Brendan Fraser—are all rapidly aging to their deaths.…
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According to the opening titles, 20 Feet from Stardom will focus on background singers and session vocalists Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, and Judith Hill. Love and Clayton started in the sixties, Fischer in the eighties, Hill in the aughts. If they’re the main cast, the supporting are Claudia Lennear and Tata Vega. The…
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Right Hand Man reintroduces the idea of a triumvirate to the veterinary practice. Nicholas Ralph has put in for a student to be placed with them, Samuel West’s nasty attitude be damned. We meet James Anthony-Rose before Ralph and West, as Anthony-Rose discovers all the street signs have been taken down in the village (to…
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Monkey Face—sorry, Monkey Prince—sort of transcends this issue. The comic’s set over forty-five minutes to an hour, but isn’t a waste of decompression. Instead, Marcus the Monkey Prince has a very full after-school calendar. He gets some more training from the custodian, Mr. Zhu, who’s actually a mystical being (Shifu Pigsy), but most of his…
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Somewhere near the end of the second act, Good Bye Lenin! starts having some narration problems. At first they seem like a little bit too lazy writing or, given Lenin has five screenwriters, a too many hands situation. There’s just a disconnect between protagonist and narrator Daniel Brühl’s experience and what the film’s doing. Then,…
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Immortimas Patrol gives away some of the bit during the opening titles when the “Doom Patrol” theme gets an acapella cover version. Last episode ended with big bad Charity Cervantes getting pissed off. The town was celebrating the Doom Patrol for rescuing her, not her for being rescued, and she did something. This episode, we…
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It’s been long enough since I last saw Amadeus I forgot the narrative face-plant of the epilogue. The film objectifying the suffering of nineteenth-century psychiatric hospital “patients” is bad enough, but the way the film ignores it’s spent the second half of the nearly three-hour film away from narrator F. Murray Abraham… Well. It doesn’t…
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Maybe the first three-quarters of this episode is the best “Grantchester”’s been in ages. And “Grantchester”’s a perfectly good show, they just really figure out a way to knock it out of the park here. Last episode laid out the new normal—vicar Tom Brittney married to Charlotte Ritchie, playing stepdad to Isaac Highams—and then saw…
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The Marvels is a sequel to Captain Marvel, starring Brie Larson, which came out four years before but takes place thirty years before. It’s also a sequel to the TV shows “WandaVision,” which introduced Teyonah Parris (though her character appeared as a little kid in Captain), and “Ms. Marvel,” which introduced Iman Vellani as a…
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Okay, now “All Creatures” feels like it’s back. Carpe Diem is a regular, episodic entry, with Samuel West hiring a professional bookkeeper to get the practice ship-shape—did he hire Neve McIntosh because he was flirting with her at a dance and not able to ask her out so instead he offered her a job? Unclear.…
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By the time Rocky gets to the big fight, you forget there’s actually going to be a big fight. While the film does open with a boxing match, until somewhere decidedly in the late second act, Rocky isn’t a sports movie. It’s a character study of a boxer, sure, but he’s not in a sports…
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And this, ladies, germs, zombie butts, is what is called an hour of television. Or, well, forty-two minutes of television. “Doom Patrol” once again knocks it out of the park, but then the ball ricochets and pings around the ballpark, going out of the park and then pinging back in and out until the cliffhanger.…
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Theater Camp is a mockumentary, but doesn’t really need to be one. The occasional title cards set some of the stage (no pun), but the documentarians don’t just not exist in the film—their subjects don’t even acknowledge they’re being filmed. And it’s about a bunch of theater kids and theater adults—and social media influencers—so you’d…
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The mystery in “Grantchester”’s season premiere seems a tad simple. The episode’s got lots of foreshadowing—whether it’s the victim (warning: the episode kills a teenager, which is harsh), the suspects, or the season setup. I’d forgotten “Grantchester” saves the biggest twist for last, and the finale takes the proverbial cake away from the other established…
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I only have the vaguest memories of my previous Tomb of Dracula read through, but when Harold H. Harold appears this issue… I remembered he was going to be obnoxious beyond compare. In not disappointing my expectations, writer Marv Wolfman succeeds in disappointing my everlasting soul. The issue opens with Dracula in Boston, messing around…
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Aka Thank Goodness Patrol. Sorry, just need to acknowledge how everyone was pretty sure MAX was going to delete the rest of “Doom Patrol” off the hard drive without dropping them. Things pick back up where we left off–the team is in over their heads (again), and the end of the world is neigh (again),…
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Buddy is in desperate need of some contextualizing. The film takes place—roughly—between 1928 and 1933. Given that timeline, it’s a little weird the Great Depression doesn’t start, but Buddy’s also really strange about when it decides to be grown-up and when it doesn’t. The film tells the story of eccentric socialite Gertrude Lintz, who raised…
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Besides the unfortunate special effects execution (the conceptions are fine), the only thing wrong with Beast from Haunted Cave is the title. And, I suppose, some first-act budgetary shenanigans—the movie’s about Frank Wolff’s crew knocking off a gold reserve in a mining town and heading across the mountains on skis to escape, and they have…
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“All Creatures” returns with an Easter special. Because the show’s changed so much since last time—Callum Woodhouse is off in World War II (it’s 1940)—the episode’s less the start of a new season than a special, which is fine, just a peculiar start. Since last episode (a Christmas special, so just a handful of months…
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Battle Beyond the Stars answers that age-old question… what if you mixed the star-fighting of Star Wars, the visual grandeur of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and some of the production design of Alien, but also had all the sexy babes in the galaxy hot for John-boy Walton’s bod. Also, it’s a remake of Seven…
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About the only compliment I can pay Ghostbusters II is the first half or so doesn’t reveal how terrible the movie’s going to get. The film had a troubled production, which might explain the special effects looking rough for the third act. II’s third act apes the third act from the first movie, only without…
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Polite Society is the story of British-Pakistani teenager Priya Kansara. She goes to an expensive London private girl’s school, where she’s got two best buds—Seraphina Beh and Ella Bruccoleri—and a nemesis—Shona Babayemi. Complicating matters is Kansara’s passion for martial arts stunt work. It leads to lots of fighting, which quickly reveals Polite’s major conceit: Kansara’s…
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The Quiet Man starts as a loving postcard tour of the Irish countryside. It’s pastoral, romantic, funny, human. Son of Ireland-gone American John Wayne returns home and immediately falls in love with neighbor Maureen O’Hara. Unfortunately, despite O’Hara having similar inklings, her big brother is Wayne’s new nemesis, Victor McLaglen. It’s this exceptionally lush, tender,…
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If Nosedive is any indication, “Black Mirror” having guest writers isn’t going to help things. Rashida Jones and Michael Schur wrote the teleplay (they’d previously written “Parks and Recreation” together) from a story by “Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker. The episode also kicks off the show’s Netflix run; it had been on Channel 4, but Netflix…
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For a micro-budget horror movie, Gangnam Zombie isn’t unsuccessful, but it also isn’t much of a success. The setting is decent—locked in a trendy office building on Christmas Eve, except Zombie doesn’t have the money for Christmas decorations. It also doesn’t have money for zombie special effects, so it’s more like they’re rabid vampires (complete…
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I wholeheartedly recommend Silkwood. It’s beautifully made, with a singular performance from Meryl Streep and great performances from its astounding ensemble. I need to remember to list all the supporting actors in the film. But I caution against reading up on the actual history. The film’s very accurate; the problem isn’t with veracity; it’s with…
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In the almost forty years since Ghostbusters’s release, the film remains unparalleled in terms of present-day, urban sci-fi action. The film’s a mix of crisp action comedy and a special effects spectacular, with Reitman’s direction toggling as needed and Elmer Bernstein’s score tying a beautiful knot. With the special effects, the film never isn’t grasping…
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A Matter of Life and Death suffers the unusual condition of being too good for its own good. Writing, directing, and producing team Powell and Pressburger (The Archers), along with their crew and much of their cast, do singular work on Matter. Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor is so breathtaking a character can get away with commenting…
The Stop Button 