Legends of Tomorrow (2016) s06e09 – This Is Gus

It’s such a good episode. And not just because of the last five minutes, which are fantastic and remind how the magic “Legends” really started when Tala Ashe arrived. She’s spectacular.

And it’s not just because there’s an adorable alien who looks like the goofy Gremlin in Mogwai form (there’s a little Gremlins montage in the music). Or because there’s a fantastic plot arc for Mick (Dominic Purcell) and his daughter, Mina Sundwall, which is hilarious, heartwarming, and not anywhere near done. Or because Shayan Sobhian gets a showcase where he’s going through Back to the Future changes but, like, George McFly-style, not Marty. Or even when he gets to talk about the representational importance of Muslim potheads in popular culture.

It does all of those things and gives Olivia Swann a whole subplot with Sobhian and gives Lisseth Chavez a Han Solo blaster.

But the string through all of them is a sincerity to character. An ambition for character. “Legends” taking a leap—it just goes there with the representation subplot (then makes it a big part of the main plot as Sobhian changes due to changes in his favorite sitcom)—isn’t really a surprise. The show likes its big, earnest character swings, which it almost always achieves thanks to the actors and writers, but this episode hits a home run then does two victory laps in a matter of minutes.

It’s outstanding.

The best acting from the episode, no contest, is Ashe, but it doesn’t really count because she doesn’t get great material until the epilogue. Sobhian’s really good in the A-plot. It’s either him or Purcell, though Purcell also doesn’t have as much to do (and he’s got Sundwall and Jes Macallan doing a bunch of heavy lifting on the B plot). Nick Zano has a bunch of material—with the promise of taking a much more prominent role in the rest of the season thanks to twists and turns—and he’s real good. Swann’s got some terrific scenes. Plus, a bitching golf cart on a studio backlot chase scene. Not sure whose idea it was to have that chase scene, but director Eric Dean Seaton does an excellent job with it.

Tyron B. Carter gets the script credit. Lots of good scenes. The stuff with the baby alien on a sitcom is all good, all funny; it just doesn’t compare to the character development running under it.

The episode ends with two big surprises; one of the surprises is well-forecasted, so it can be an in-joke between the viewer and one of the characters, but the other one is a definite surprise and promises more than they’ll ever be able to deliver.

I was confused when they wrapped up the big bad so early in the season, but the second-half setup is awesome at this point.

Professional Sweetheart (1933, William A. Seiter)

There are a handful of Pre-Code elements in Professional Sweetheart it doesn’t seem like the Code broke so much as saved movies from. For instance, when Ginger Rogers needs to break out of her Stepford Wives mindset—Kentucky cracker Norman Foster has beaten her into it—all the city boys need to do is put her former maid, Black woman Theresa Harris, on the radio in her singing spot and they know it’ll get Rogers upset enough to return to New York and her job. Mind you, Harris was a pal to Rogers, though given Harris’s singing can get through Foster’s layers of whitebread and make him feel funny in his hips in a way Rogers can’t… I mean, it’s gross.

Also gross? Having Zasu Pitts playing a vaguely Hispanic character so they can simultaneously make fun of her name and her being a ditzy woman.

There are probably some other things but those two and a half are the big standouts. The half being all Rogers needs to get her sinful thoughts of out her head—she wants to dress sexy, smoke cigarettes, and go to the clubs in Harlem—is for a red-blooded dipshit cracker like Foster to bop her one when she shows too much agency after being kidnapped.

Most of those elements—not Pitts, the movie craps on her from the start and she’s entirely complicit in the characterization—come in the third act, though Foster’s never a good character. He’s okay when Rogers is making eyes at him for a scene; otherwise he’s a hick punchline, literally hired to be her boyfriend because he’s the whitest guy they can find.

The “They” is wash cloth manufacturer Gregory Ratoff and his gang of cronies. There’s press agent (and former newspaperman) Frank McHugh, designer Franklin Pangborn (he makes all Rogers’s dresses and decorates her apartment and might be what 1933 codes as gay, but there’s a final twist on that subtext), and then lawyer Frank Darien. Rogers is their radio personality, their “Purity Girl.” They plucked her out of an orphanage and made her a star in New York City, but she just wants to get smoking, drinking, and dancing. Not to mention getting a fellow or two.

Hence the boys tracking down Foster to try to create a wholesome romance narrative.

Professional Sweetheart’s big problem is the script. Director Seiter’s able to get some good energy going for the comedy—Ratoff and his sidekicks are bickering goons—but the film doesn’t have anything to do with Rogers. Except occasionally parade her around in underwear. But for a movie where she’s top-billed and the titular character… the first bit of agency she gets to show is her misogynoir.

McHugh’s pretty funny and has good timing. Ratoff’s maybe the best performance overall, even though he’s playing a vague European ethnic caricature—there’s this whole subtext about melting pot Americans trying to sell to stupid middle Americans, which is just Hollywood at that point. Pangborn’s good too, though it takes a while and there are caveats. Darien has the absolute least of any character but somehow provides the most stability to scenes.

Allen Jenkins is good as the dish cloth salesman out to steal Rogers away and Lucien Littlefield’s reliable as the radio announcer. It’s weird how reliability and stability are in so short supply in the film’s performances but there’s only so much anyone can do with the script.

Seiter’s direction is low middling. He shows some energy whenever he gets to do outside scenes, but is more often lethargic. It’s a bummer since he at least seems to be trying in the first scene, as the action pans from Rogers and Littlefield on air to Ratoff freaking out his nightly lingerie bribe for Rogers won’t come in time and she’ll presumably tell the audience to frack off.

Professional Sweetheart never gets near living up to the cast’s potential—it’s impossible to say whether or not Foster’s good or bad in the picture just because of the script–but the third act such a perfunctory, easy, icky conclusion, it drags the film down for the finish. It’s particularly odd how the first act is based around the idea Rogers is a star only to continuously demote her importance the rest of the picture.

Needs a rewrite. And maybe a new director.

And not to be so bigot-y in its progressiveness.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s02e16 – At the Mountains of Madness

I got really hopeful when I saw the title, At the Mountains of Madness, because they mentioned the Mountains of Madness in a previous episode and it’s the Lovecraft story with monster dinosaurs and so… monster dinosaurs are probably going to be cool.

There are no monster dinosaurs in the episode. There are the Mountains of Madness but they’re pretty boring and during the worst part of the episode, when the action leaps ahead two weeks and we lose Kiernan Shipka as lead of her, you know, own show. She has to go the Mountains because she’s become a danger to herself and others, but mostly others. See, she tries to take on the last Eldritch Terror herself because she’s feeling guilty about bringing about the end of the universe.

Things do not go well.

It even messes up Shipka’s seventeenth birthday party, which should be a book end to the series but isn’t really important. Not much in the episode works out being important, including Michelle Gomez’s resolution with Luke Cook. Gomez—in her Earthly variation—narrates the episode from a pulpit, where it quickly becomes clear she’s narrating in the past tense, making some of her statements all the more ominous.

Trying to help Shipka, the witches get into shenanigans to piss off Cook and the rest of Hell, leading to an utterly disappointing big fight scene. More risible than disappointing, especially since Sam Corlett makes a big deal out of the soldiers he can muster for Cook’s cause and then they’re… well, no spoilers, but it’s a pretty weak army and seemingly only there to gin up some more angst for Shipka and the supporting cast.

The finale goes on way too long—with one heck of an epilogue—but some nice homage to the original comic series and a few resolves for the supporting cast. Not most of them. Ninety percent of the supporting cast get no closure in the final episode, though since the show hasn’t given any of them significant subplots for the season it doesn’t really matter. They’ve all just been hanging around waiting for the show to finish apparently. Episode writer—and show creator and original comic (Chilling Adventures comic not, you know, in sixties Archie Comics) creator—Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa really doesn’t come up much for the finale.

It’s not the worst, but the episode is rushed, wastes everyone—including Coyle, who gets an unexpected big role—and doesn’t even provide a good finish for the Eldritch Terror storyline. My impulse was to blame it on Netflix, like maybe they cut the season order (before cancelling the show all together) but maybe Aguirre-Sacasa really just didn’t have it.

Rest of the show’s pretty good if not better. And, I guess at least there’s not one of the bad musical numbers.

But it’s a definite miss.

Rock Jocks (2012, Paul V. Seetachitt)

Rock Jocks is full of “it’s not racist because” jokes. There’s even a moment early on when Felicia Day tries explaining to Gerry Bednob how he’s actually a racist even though he says he’s not. When he disagrees, Day gives up, which is a fairly good place to give up on Jocks. You’ve hit the peaks worth sitting around for, namely Bednob is funny as the crotchety old White bigot who just happens to be of East Indian descent. It’s real cheap, real easy jokes. All of Rock Jocks is real cheap, real easy, real problematic. Writer and director Paul V. Seetachitt likes teasing racism, sexism, homophobia, whatever, but he never commits to it.

Well, wait. The sexism. There’s some real committal to the sexism.

The movie’s about the night crew at the United States’s secret remote asteroid destroyer program. If you’re good at video games, you get recruited and then you save the world from big asteroids the rubes don’t know about night after night. The captain is burn-out waiting-to-happen divorced bad dad Andrew Bowen. Bowen’s never anywhere near as bad as some of the other actors in the movie, which is the closest his performance gets to deserving a compliment. Day’s his first officer. She’s overly ambitious because she’s a woman and so it’s funny. He’s going to mansplain to her fierce and her other major subplots involve asteroid shooter Kevin Wu trying to humiliate her—his commanding officer—while captain Bowen ignores it to mope.

Part of the joke is supposed to be how all the Jocks are actually just shallow, thinly written assholes, but Seetachitt makes Wu the biggest asshole of all. Wu’s the shooter with the big ego, but Justin Chon’s still got the higher scores. Chon… could be worse. Wu could not be worse, not without supernatural intervention or something. He’s real bad and not funny.

Jocks hits occasionally—almost always in some way thanks to Bednob—but it’s a very low success rate on the jokes working with the acting working with the directing. In some ways, Rock Jocks is impressive. It’s low budget, but Seetachitt knows how to shoot everything in the script, he just doesn’t have a great editor in Adam Varney and for some reason Seetachitt and photographer Polly Morgan really want to do shaky-cam and shaky-zooms. Just, you know, because.

It’s annoying.

And invites you to ignore the performances because the camera’s ignoring them.

Supporting cast. Mark Woolley’s bad as the bean counter who just happens to be there on the night of the biggest, most important asteroid strike on the planet Earth in… at least a couple days. Who knows.

Doug Jones is great as the space alien who just walks around the base. There’s a bunch of nonsense about Jones having a giant Rube Goldberg contraption in his quarters but it’s all time waster. Lots of time wasting in Jocks, which would be fine at twenty-two—as a TV pilot—or maybe seventy as a goofy low budget, independent pop culture reference comedy….

But it’s ninety minutes.

There are subplots.

There are Robert Picardo and Jason Mewes as the security guards who sit and bullshit all night. It is very awkward. Especially since Picardo and Mewes aren’t bad. They’re just not funny. Ptolemy Slocum is bad as Bowen’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, who shouldn’t be in the movie but again, Rock Jocks really wants to hit that ninety minute runtime so let’s do full subplots for these jerks.

Day and Wu both have moments good and bad. Middling would be an accurate descriptor.

Rock Jocks proves you can be not competent while also not being incompetent.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e20 – The Mephisto Waltz

So, Luke Cook, who plays Lucifer this episode, looks a lot like Taylor Kitsch. Enough I thought they maybe paid for Kitsch. They didn’t, they got Cook. Who doesn’t seem to have voiced goat Satan in the previous episodes.

Anyway.

It’s the big finale, with Kiernan Shipka unintentionally letting Cook out of Hell and letting him assume his original appearance. There are flashbacks to Lilith and Lucifer’s time after the Fall, with Jenna Berman in for Michelle Gomez in the flashback, and we learn how Cook was originally beautiful but the longer he was out of Heaven, the faster he turned into a goat demon.

Cook’s got some big reveals for Shipka, including some hard truths about her father and mother, as well as a bone to pick with Richard Coyle. You think you’re going to get a great Coyle vs. Satan scene and then you don’t. Instead you just get Coyle being a weasel, as usual. It’s a missed opportunity but not a surprising one—Coyle remains the show’s only significant casting mistake. He’s nowhere near as good as the other adults.

Then there are some big reveals for Shipka’s love life; not just because it’s the season finale but also because it figures in to the finale.

It’s all hands on deck trying to foil Cook’s plans: mortals Ross Lynch, Jaz Sinclair, and Lachlan Watson go into the mines to find the gate to Hell while Shipka and witch family do the magic stuff. Michelle Gomez plays for both Cook and Shipka throughout, leading to both good humor scenes and some more serious contemplations on gender structures and power between Gomez and Shipka. There’s a lot of good acting in the episode, even if it basically reveals the season could’ve easily been seven to ten episodes. When Chance Perdomo and Tati Gabrielle reunite after having been lovers, mortal enemies, and whatever else, it’s like they haven’t seen each other in forever. But it’s only been a week in show time since she was torturing him.

There’s also the problem with Shipka and friends all of a sudden getting great ideas, great enough to outsmart the Great Deceiver. Where was this imaginative thinking throughout the season when Shipka couldn’t breath without screwing something up.

And the season two teasers at the end, the promised developments, aren’t great for Shipka and the teens. The setups for the adults at least promise to amuse.

It’s a solid show but twenty (actual) hour-long episodes is a lot of investments for a conclusion and setup the show could’ve done in half the time, if not even less.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e17 – The Missionaries

So, actually, no, “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” apparently hasn’t hit the darkest hour or the point of no return yet because this episode just sort of shrugs at all the disastrous things gone wrong for Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) and her family. Cousin Ambrose (Chance Perdomo—who’s great this episode) is locked away and Shipka and aunt Lucy Davis are trying to get him out, but life’s still going on as usual for the most part.

Miranda Otto and Richard Coyle are off honeymooning in Europe, with Tati Gabrielle (whose character arc is a disappointment) minding the school. Shipka’s banned from witch academy so she’s just back at the human high school because she… can just sit in, apparently. Meanwhile beau and fellow expelled witch academy student Gavin Leatherwood’s just drinking away his sorrows and being mean to Shipka.

There’s some stuff with Davis trying to get in to see Perdomo, which is good enough thanks to Davis and Perdomo, but isn’t super compelling because it’s too drawn out. Then there’s Ross Lynch and Roz Sinclair freezing out Shipka because they think Shipka’s the one who made Sinclair blind. It’s intense.

They drive Shipka away. When she gets home, she soon answers a knock on the door to reveal Spencer Treat Clark, who the audience has already met because he’s a Christian missionary kid who’s already killed a witch. The episode opens with Clark killing off Darren Mann, who the show forgot for a few episodes just to bring back and kill off.

Turns out Clark’s not alone—he’s got a team of witch hunters—and it’s going to be up to Shipka and Davis to save the day (and Perdomo). Big surprises in store for Shipka in the finale, including some of the show’s most impressive special effects to date.

Michelle Gomez gets her subplot too, of course, which is just the show getting rid of Alexis Denisof three episodes after it introduces him. It’s not a great use of time in general, worse it seems to be wasting Gomez.

But the stuff with Shipka and the witch hunters? Awesome. Even if “Sabrina” introducing the idea of an interventionist God seems a bite bigger than it can chew, only without realizing it. It’s not a flex, it’s a misjudge.

Gelateria (2019, Christian Serritiello and Arthur Patching)

Once it’s clear directors Patching and Serritiello are going to be able to keep Gelateria going, the question becomes how can they possibly end it. The film opens with a lone figure on a rocky beach, yelling into the sea. The water has sound, the yells don’t have sound. Given how the film ends… it’s possible the whole thing’s circular to that first scene, possible it’s not. Doesn’t matter. Probably.

The first half of Gelateria is an absurdist walking tour of art venues, starting with Serritiello going to old friend Jade Willis’s concert. Serritiello’s so good it’s weird to think of him as the director too. He’s what gets Gelateria the initial buy in. He’s just staring at the unseeable woman across from him as he narrates from a journal; Serritiello’s really good at the regarding for the camera bit, he’s taking it seriously, the film’s taking him seriously.

So, I guess it does make sense he’s one of the directors too.

Anyway. Serritiello is going to that Jade Willis concert. The film still hasn’t established how absurd it’s going to get, not until after Willis yells at Serritiello for abandoning him and the dialogue’s not great. Then all of a sudden the film breaks the established narrative distance and mixes it up on the floor and looks up from Serritiello’s position (on the literal floor) and the world is totally different. Willis, who’s quite good, is taunting Willis, egged on by onlookers, and the film begins to establish its boundaries.

Serritiello is going to run along in a bit and look into a barber shop, where there’s a great bit with two customers on the phone. It’s nonsensical but excellent because of the acting, which seems to set Gelateria on steady ground only to immediately go shaky again. Turns out Serritellio’s passing the film off to a third customer, Daniel Brunet. His phone call is about hiring someone to speak Italian during his party on a yacht.

Serritiello, Willis, the other phone actors, they were acting. Brunet is mugging. It’s an immediate problem.

Brunet’s party turns out to be a five person affair in what appears to be a double bed cabin. It’s silly and if Brunet weren’t exaggeratedly odious it might even be funny. Things immediately improve when Simone Spinazze shows up. He’s the Italian hired to speak Italian for the amusement of Brunet and his guests. Once he’s done being made spectacle for terrible WASPs, Spinazze goes to work waitstaff at an art show. That sequence, which is where it becomes clear the film can keep up this momentum, ends in singer Joulia Strauss shooting someone.

She then runs out, gets into a waiting getaway car and speeds off with accomplice (and the other director) Arthur Patching. If it were a different kind of film, there’d be something to look at with Strauss actually having used the art show as a cover to perform a hit.

Anyway.

After Patching stashes Strauss in a safe house with the requisite birds (go with it), he then runs into Carrie Getman, who’s out bird-calling at night, passing the film off to Getman. When then get Getman’s sequence, which is basically her life set to a terrible self-help tape.

Take a breath, only halfway in.

Though actually the second half, which starts with a phenomenal animated sequence is all about how an artist ships her paintings off to a gallery on a remote island and then the gallery never gets in touch so she goes to investigate. There’s bingo involved, a hamburger joint, and avant-garde community theater. It’s all fairly awesome as far as the “plot” goes, with some excellent supporting performances in this section.

Unfortunately, the artist protagonist is played by Patching and Serritiello in drag as a grey-haired British lady. They alternate, which doesn’t matter much as they don’t get any significant dialogue, with Patching probably doing it more? Though the character gets introduced with Serritiello.

I mean, it’s fine for the absurdist comedy thing and all but it might have been funnier if they’d played it, well, straight. Especially given the acting possibilities for the outrageous odyssey through this sleepy little town.

Gelateria looks great, moves great, sounds great (Jack Patching’s score is excellent). Given the directors wrote, edited, photographed, and starred, it’s definitely all thanks to Patching and Serritiello—with major props to Tiago Araújo’s animation; the animated sequence is just what it needs to be to bridge the sections of the film. The film—running just over an hour—is one hell of a sprint. It never slows down, never tires, always kept moving smooth thanks to the directors’ masterful editing.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e10 – The Witching Hour

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Ross Maxwell co-write, sending off of “Sabrina”’s first season, with a deus ex machine of an episode where Michelle Gomez decides she’s been waiting too long for Kiernan Shipka to embrace the Dark Lord and it’s time to get drastic about things. If Gomez can’t sabotage Shipka’s friendships with mortals—in addition to the big action, Shipka also reconciles (enough) with boyfriend Ross Lynch and other friends Jaz Sinclair and Lachlan Watson embrace her immediately upon the big “I’m a Witch” conversation in the high school bathroom.

Incidentally, I don’t think the show’s writers know how to deal with telephones in general. Sinclair and Watson tell Shipka they’ve been calling her all weekend and apparently Shipka just hasn’t been answering… but they’d have to answer the phone at the house because it’s a mortuary and a business. Sure, they eat the bodies in the closed caskets, but it’s still a business.

Anyway, it’s a telling oversight. Same goes for astral projection, which was a huge no no in the first or second episode but now is literally how the witches check in with one another because they don’t have cellphones. Astral projection is the texting of “Sabrina” world.

Gomez brings back thirteen witches to destroy the town; the sequence where she brings them back is the only good use of the digital Vaseline filter in iMovie the series has done (and, sadly, not in all the shots), but it works because Gomez is flipping amazing in the scene. Just awesome.

So the witches are going to protect themselves and let the ghost witches eat the townsfolk and Shipka, along with Lucy Davis, Miranda Otto, and Chance Perdomo all decide they’re not going to let the mortals die, causing a rift between various parties. But the scene where Otto decides to play hero is pretty great. And Davis has some very nice stuff this episode, particularly with boss slash love interest Alessandro Juliani, who has been around for a while on the show but hasn’t made much impression apparently because I thought he was Taika Waititi.

Doesn’t matter. Nice stuff this episode.

Lynch and romantic rival Gavin Leatherwood team up to protect Lynch’s drunk-ass dad, while Sinclair and Watson protect Sinclair’s grandmother, L. Scott Caldwell, from the ghost witch attack. Throw in Shipka’s turn to the Dark Side of the Force—relatively speaking—Zelda kidnapping one of Richard Coyle’s newborns, Perdomo joining Coyle’s Jordan Peterson-esque like cult of male students, not to mention Gomez’s big reveal where she lays it all out to her captive audience.

Literally captive audience; she narratives the episode, from the beginning, like every episode is some tale she’s telling to her listener. As the episode progresses, we find out more and more about the listener, but we’re all in it together. Fantastic finish, fully delivering on all the promises of Gomez’s character throughout the season, including expectations from the comic. It’s very good.

In fact, everything’s so good it makes up for Shipka’s wanting arc. Once she gets the proverbial Force Lightning, she stops being the protagonist and becomes the subject of the show. Not a great place for the next season setup, though maybe it’d work better if they hadn’t wasted a couple minutes flashing back through the entire season when Shipka’s got to make her big choice. Instead of let her act the season, they let the clips do it for her. Not a good move.

But otherwise a successful end to a very successful season. Though I do hope they get Shipka back as show lead next season. They didn’t take it away from her—turning it into an ensemble—until the very end of the episode, but they’ve been moving in that direction for a while now. Fingers crossed for next season.

You Can’t Get Away with Murder (1939, Lewis Seiler)

The You in You Can’t Get Away With Murder refers to Billy Halop, nineteen year-old punk kid who doesn’t respect what sister Gale Page sacrifices for him and instead runs around with neighborhood tough Humphrey Bogart. They knock over gas stations, they play pool, it’s a good life… at least until things go wrong during a hold-up—with Bogart’s not billed victim using what looks like (but sadly can’t be) a Krav Maga disarm on him, forcing Bogart to use the gun he took off Halop instead of his regular piece. Only Halop got his gun from sister Page’s boyfriend’s apartment. Harvey Stephens is the boyfriend, some kind of reserve cop or security guard. It gets established by the car Stephens is driving in the first or second scene… I wasn’t paying attention. I thought he was a cabbie.

As Halop and Bogart get pinched for a different hold-up, the cops gossip about Stephens’s getting arrested for the murder Halop knows Bogart committed. End first act, let’s go second.

Bogart and Halop are in Sing Sing for five year sentences—the film, which looks like an A picture from time to time, usually thanks to Sol Polito’s gorgeous photography and Bogart’s phenomenally slimy performance, has a great introduction to Sing Sing with a tour boat introducing it. Things are fine enough, save Harold Huber trying to convince Bogart to dump Halop and make Huber his number one pal, which eventually becomes important but never to character development. There isn’t any character development in Murder. It’s important because after Stephens gets sent to the prison’s death house and Halop starts feeling pangs of guilt at not telling the truth, Huber’s able to poison an increasingly suspicious Bogart against his buddy.

It does help Bogart loses Halop to the prison library, where kindly, aged inmate librarian Henry Travers works toward rehabilitating the lad best he can without ever being able to say the word, “Jesus.” Having Travers get to lay in with religious indoctrination instead of just vague “you won’t be able to live with yourself if you don’t tell the truth” business probably wouldn’t improve Murder, but it might give Travers something to chew on in his performance. What he’s got is pretty thin; three screenwriters—Robert Buckner, Don Ryan, Kenneth Gamet—and they can’t come up with good monologues. I do wonder if one of them came up with the train car in the middle of the prison yard for the breakout standoff, or if it was a group effort.

Because once Page realizes Halop knows something, she tries to get him to save Murphy too, which Halop resents. Maybe if Murder went a different way—i.e. not into prison—it’d be able to get through with Halop, but he’s never good. Like… just… no. He’s never good. Sometimes when he’s doing his fidgeting stuff it seems like it could lead to something good—if he weren’t talking in bad Jimmy Cagney impressions—but he never breaks from the exaggerated deliveries. Bogart’s able to amp it up, quiet it down like none other. He’s awesome. No one else is even close. I mean, Huber and Travers are only good about thirty percent of the time, which isn’t a lot given their importance.

Page is fine. She’s got nothing to do but moon over Stephens, who’s eh (you can see why Halop doesn’t like him), and fret over Halop.

If the movie didn’t treat him like a racist caricature, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson would win for actor you most like to see onscreen. But the movie cranks the racism from about a two (for 1939) to about a six, which is way too much. Wasting Anderson’s voice is bad enough.

And George E. Stone isn’t good as the main prison gossip, who’s always around to advance the plot. He’s ineffectual. Against Halop, which is incredible.

Even if Halop were good, even if Seiler didn’t get weird with almost all the close-ups—the medium shots are fine, the close-ups are intentionally but pointlessly askew—the script would still be blah. Even with Bogart being great… well, there are better movies to see Bogart doing the same thing in.

That Polito photography is fantastic though. Especially at the end.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) s01e04 – Witch Academy

I’m very confused; the witch school is within walking distance from the farm where Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) lives. I thought it was a boarding school far away. Turns out it’s a boarding school—Shipka has to do three nights there—but it’s within walking distance. So she was never going to see her human friends again by just not… going to town anymore. Or something. It’s not explained and confusing but fine.

Because the welcome to witch school episode, which is mostly about how the other witches haze Shipka, works out. The characters it introduces, the twists it introduces, the whatever—they all work out. Shipka being terrified when the mean girl trio of witches (Tati Gabrielle is the leader and good, the other two are fine but background) lock her up in a well or simulate burning her or hanging her—it’s called harrowing and the established students put the new ones through it because it’s what the witches went through back in the olden days and the witch trials. Or something. The backstory on it isn’t very important, not after we find out Miranda Otto majorly harrowed sister Lucy Davis back in the day. Also not after Shipka discovers she’s fairly old to be a new student, apparently, because the school grounds are inhabited by the ghosts of all the little kids who died in their harrowings over the decades. They’re not exactly haunting the place, not exactly not.

The ghost kids leads to a great subplot for Shipka, Otto, and Davis, where the show does a fantastic “girl power” move and never pauses to acknowledge it much less congratulate itself for it. “Sabrina”’s very comfortable doing well.

But Shipka not being able to get through the harrowing just doesn’t fit; it does the hazing PSA and well, but it doesn’t really work with Shipka’s character as she’s developed to this point.

Anyway. Simultaneous to Shipka being away for a long weekend—she tells her human friends she’s at the state fair or something—boyfriend Ross Lynch gets some more information about the creature in the mines after it turns out Lachlan Watson has a possessed uncle living in her house and never told friends about it even though the guy’s obviously demonically possessed. It’s a scary subplot. Very effectively done.

Overall, it’s a solid episode. Not perfect, but very solid. They succeed at introducing the school, including warlock love interest for Shipka but not really Gavin Leatherwood.

So, solid.