Category: 2013
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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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“Black Mirror” creator and episode writer Charlie Brooker really loves mentioning Twitter in episodes. It’s practically a drinking game, and it at least makes some sense time-wise because most of this episode takes place in the present. During the end credits, just like last episode, we get a flash forward to show how our new…
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White Bear feels contractually obligated, which is strange since it’s got a script credit to series creator Charlie Brooker. Maybe it just fell apart in production, too; Bear crumbles about halfway through, and it’s a short episode already—around forty-one minutes. It begins with Lenora Crichlow waking up in an empty house, apparently having just survived…
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Okay, now I’m beginning to understand some of the “Black Mirror” hype. Despite its trying for too clever and not getting there title, Be Right Back is fantastic. It overcomes director Owen Harris having one shot and repeating it over and over again: lead Hayley Atwell is on one side of the frame, the other…
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I had been planning on opening this post about The MacGuffin—sorry, I mean The Zero Theorem—with a quip about how it’s faster to just Google “Terry Gilliam Brexit” than to watch the movie but Gilliam’s actually not one of the bad Pythons on Brexit. So I had to fall back to The MacGuffin quip. Zero…
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Tangerines has such a profoundly straightforward plot and limited cast I expected it to be a stage adaptation. It’s not; writer and director Urushadze just knows how to perturb character development without theatrics. The film’s about the War in Abkhazia, but its protagonist isn’t Georgian or Abkhaz, rather an Estonian. The film itself does a…
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The Double opens with a look at lead Jesse Eisenberg’s monotonous, solitary life. He takes the train to his job, where he’s worked for seven years and only one person has bothered to learn his name, he’s got a crush on a girl (Mia Wasikowska) at work who doesn’t seem to know he exists, and…
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Murder Under the Mistletoe is the “Miss Fisher’s” Christmas (in July) special I obviously needed but didn’t know I needed. The episode opens with Essie Davis taking the girls—Ashleigh Cummings, Miriam Margolyes, Tammy Macintosh—to a ski lodge; Southern Hemisphere, snowy summers. But when they get there, of course there’s a murder—people are finally giving Davis…
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The episode opens with Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Ashleigh Cummings on their day off, Johnstone-Burt in his civvies somehow clashing with Cummings in her regular clothes; they’re fishing and dreaming of their honeymoon. Rude awakening when they discover a dead body in the water. Even ruder awakening when it turns out to be the latest in…
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It’s a pure delight episode of “Miss Fisher’s,” outside the murders and murderer, obviously, with Essie Davis and company going to hang out at a radio station in the pre-Golden Age of Radio. The format has caught on—especially with Ashleigh Cummings, who is the one who gets Davis involved in the investigation because the victim…
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The show’s hit a nice stride lately; this episode’s rather good, with little in common with the previous two other than Ashleigh Cummings’s detective skills continuing to develop. Otherwise, the setting is all different—Essie Davis has drug Cummings out to a vineyard (after telling her they were going to a farm but didn’t want to…
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I’m not just interested this episode because it’s all about the silent movie industry; it’s right at the transition to sound, which means we’re in the late twenties and Black Tuesday is approaching. I’m terrified what it’s going to mean for “Miss Fisher.” Especially when you consider this episode is all about one of Essie…
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Depending on the setting, there are certain predictable reactions from Miss Fisher (Essie Davis) as well as from “Miss Fisher,” the show; for instance, this episode takes place at a medical university—where Dr. Mac (Tammy Macintosh) teaches—and involves the rich male students (and the male teachers) harassing an exceptional female student, Andrea Demetriades. So it’s…
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Even if the subplot of this episode weren’t Nathan Page deciding he can’t remain friendly (friendly plus) with Essie Davis given her dangerous lifestyle and isn’t going to ask her to knock it off because Page’s non-sexism is one of the most winning parts of his personality… it’d still be a very depressing episode. The…
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Confession: I had no idea what they were talking about with footy. I assumed Australians played football—as in association football—but it looks like a big American football. My wife thought they were talking about rugby. But apparently there’s Aussie rules? Or footy? The episode’s about two footy clubs and their hooligans and a dead player.…
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It’s kind of a Dot (Ashleigh Cummings) episode. At least more of a Dot episode than the show’s ever had before. Not only does she get a real subplot with beau Hugo Johnstone-Burt, who’s very taken with the outfits he sees around a fancy dressmaker’s (at least the ones modeled on half-French model Freya Stafford),…
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One upbeat (enough) “Miss Fisher’s” was apparently all they could take because this one is a very, very sad one. It’s all about a boxing troupe and the damage done on the community because of it. The community in question is the young poor men who spend their time in street gangs. Constable Hugo Johnstone-Burt…
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Last season, “Miss Fisher’s” went out of its way not to have detective Essie Davis happen into mysteries solely because she’s a rich White lady in the 1920s. Though… I mean, it sort of did. But this episode makes no attempt to contrive a reason to get Davis involved in the Julia Blake’s mystery. Davis…
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If this episode of “Miss Fisher’s” doesn’t have the highest body, it definitely feels like it has the highest. People get killed off throughout the runtime—and before it, actually, in flashback. The episode opens with a séance, which is automatically awesome just thinking about Essie Davis going off about séances. It’s almost a surprise she’s…
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Season Two starts off with a bunch of flashy character reveals, with finally meeting Nathan Page’s ex-wife (Dee Smart) not even being the main one. Very prim, very proper, very Catholic Ashleigh Cummings’s sister, Anna Bamford, is a sex worker and works in a brothel where one of the girls has just turned up dead.…
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Never interesting enough short documentary about the world’s most dangerous amusement park, with multiple fatalities and over a thousand injuries but… the filmmakers are incurious about that aspect other than for gossip. Streaming.Continue reading →
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This issue opens with a “you really should have seen this coming” twist. It’s an intense open, then the issue moves right away into a lengthy action sequence. Pretty much the whole issue. I went into this issue expecting it to start a “second story” or at least make sense as a halfway point in…
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Putting on my Robocop nerd hat a minute (does it ever come off?), the first film’s writers wanted it to be a commentary on how Detroit used to make the best cars and—by the eighties—they made shit. This issue of Robocop: Last Stand has an inspiring, come-together moment for Detroiters to rebuild Murphy in a…
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Robocop: Last Stand #3 gives a great example of what’s lost in the idea of adapting Robocop 1, 2, 3, or 4 to comic books—the damage to Robocop. The movies are all about him getting beat to crap, just about broken, losing limbs, his human face getting revealed, on and on. This issue has something…
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The previous issue of Robocop: Last Stand had a weird ending; it was truncated. This issue continues that scene and it’s very awkward since the previous context is gone. Maybe Grant’s not so much being quirky with the screenplay adaptation as just not knowing how to break out scenes because this issue goes out on…
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Robocop: Last Stand is, conceptually, a tough sell. It’s a comic book adaptation of a movie no one liked (Robocop 3) when it came out twenty years before the first issue of Last Stand dropped. It’s ostensibly based on Frank Miller’s original screenplay, but when a different publisher did a “based on Frank Miller’s original…
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All Is Lost is the harrowing tale of an unnamed man (Robert Redford) on his damaged yacht in the Indian Ocean. The film runs 106 minutes. It’s harrowing for all of them. Director Chandor knows how to harrow. The film has a mundane reality about it. Redford has no back story, no character development, almost…
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Director Moore snuck cameras into Disney World (and Disneyland) to tell the story of a creepy dad who goes insane while on the last day of the family vacation. Moore, who also wrote the tedious script, has reasons for the insanity, but they’re all nonsense because Tomorrow is more about showcasing the guerrilla filmmaking and…
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Just over half way into Inside Llewyn Davis, there’s a moment where lead Oscar Isaac looks into the face of responsibility–weighs it, weighs the consequences of not accepting it, makes his decision. Until that moment, the Coen Brothers hadn’t candidly identified the film as a character study. It happens in the middle of an epical…
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If it didn’t star Jackie Chan–and if it wasn’t released in 2013–Police Story: Lockdown might seem like a late eighties cheap Die Hard knock-off. Chan’s a gritty bad dad, super cop who finds himself held hostage by his daughter’s new boyfriend (Liu Ye). Of course, the daughter didn’t know her boyfriend was a supervillain, she…
The Stop Button 