Category: 2019
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Early on in the episode, there’s this shot looking through the skylight at Judy (Linda Cardellini) after she’s had a fainting sell and friends Christina Applegate and Brandon Scott have brought her home. They were out investigating the list of 1966 Mustang owners Scott procured (Applegate’s husband was run down by a 1966 Mustang). It’s…
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In a somewhat incredible turn, the episode opens with Christina Applegate and investigator—I guess—Brandon Scott going to cop Diana Maria Riva and telling her about the evidence they found. Riva doesn’t seem to care much about the evidence and seems ready to throw it away; it’s incredible Applegate doesn’t ask to speak to her manager.…
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After Christina Applegate opens the episode self-identifying as an atheist, I guess I turned on the religiosity radar. Or did I? Because the Christian imagery is everywhere this episode. Woo-loving spiritual White lady Linda Cardellini takes the cross she and Applegate find at the dead husband’s accident site and puts it up in her bedroom.…
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This episode’s set an indeterminate time since the previous, with Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini poolside in Palm Springs, taking it easy. Except they’re on a retreat with their grief group—the one other group members we see in the episode are the leader, Pastor Wayne (Keong Sim) and Telma Hopkins. Cardellini and Applegate aren’t going…
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James Marsden’s character loses all appeal when—in the morning after scene with he and Linda Cardellini—he starts listening to his white man self-actualization podcast. Then he does his workout on the trampoline and you wonder just how Marsden came up with his characterization. Did he get to see the whole series script with all the…
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Even more secrets! Not only does Christina Applegate find out something she didn’t know—and not Linda Cardellini’s secret, even though Cardellini puts her secret out into the world in the form of a confession in a balloon—to send up to Heaven to Applegate’s dead husband, along with the family (it’s his birthday), which the show…
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Oh, the secrets. So many secrets. Linda Cardellini has secrets from Christina Applegate—the scene where Applegate tells Cardellini she’s a saint and Cardellini says something like, “you’ll come to find out I’m the Devil,” is a little too on the nose. But then the show has its secrets too. Creator and writer Liz Feldman wants…
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Bad Education is the story of a junior in high school (Geraldine Viswanathan) uncovering the biggest school embezzlement case in United States history, something like $12 million dollars. Only it’s not Viswanathan’s movie. It’s Hugh Jackman’s movie, which makes sense because Hugh Jackman’s great in it. Not transcendent, but he’s really good. He can’t be…
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The currently strangest thing, one episode into “Dead To Me”—not counting director Amy York Rubin’s pointlessly pensive shot composition, which just distracts in a thirty minute “sitcom”—is how the show handles the humor. Outside the cold open, which has lead Christina Applegate short with neighbor Suzy Nakamura (Applegate’s husband has died and Nakamura is bringing…
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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…
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This episode gets off to a rough start wrapping up last episode’s cliffhanger—Sabrina and the gang discovering a shrine to her in the mines, which is at least hundreds of years old. Kevin Rodney Sullivan’s direction is peculiar in a bad way (unless there’s a good reason for it like they reshot all of Ross…
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So following Sabrina showing herself off as a possible messiah, Richard Coyle gets back to town with Miranda Otto—Otto’s totally Stepford Wives—and convinces his bosses she’s a heretic and they’re just going to have to kill her. Meanwhile, Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) is enjoying her new powers. She can make it sunny out, she can cure…
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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…
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Back when they were writing Alien, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and producer Gordon Carroll disagreed where the end of the second act falls. Gordon said it was “the darkest hour,” whereas O’Bannon countered with “the point of no return.” The idea being a point of no return is less subjective. This episode ends at the darkest…
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I was ready to love this episode. I wanted to love this episode. Ross Maxwell’s one of the names I like seeing on the writing credit. But this episode is a big whiff. Alex Garcia Lopez’s direction not being good is one of the problems. The other one is concept really not paying off. It…
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I’m not sure if I’ve ever known the word “fecund,” but thanks to this episode of “Sabrina,” I do now and beware. I’m always looking for a good adjective. It comes up when Richard Coyle is sweet-talking Miranda Otto and, although Coyle is one of the least dynamic casting choices, he’s really coming into his…
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Big development this episode… Satan, Lucifer, the Dark Lord, et cetera, is an active character. He appears as a goat-headed demon and whoever does the voice isn’t credited (whoever’s doing it isn’t the right casting) and He wants to get Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) to do his bidding. Not because He needs her to do His…
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Little Women has two parallel timelines. There’s the present, starting in post-Civil War New York City with teacher and pulp writer Saoirse Ronan living in boarding house (where she also teaches). Then it flashes back to Ronan’s life seven years earlier, at home in rural Massachusetts; she’s the second oldest of four sisters; oldest is…
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It’s a new year for “Chilling Adventures,” literally, with the episode picking up after winter break as Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) has decided she’ll no longer be attending Baxter High and going to witch academy full-time. New Baxter High principal and actual Biblical figure (albeit unbeknownst to Shipka) Michelle Gomez approves the move, Zelda (Miranda Otto)…
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The disconcerting part of The Irishman’s actually never-ending CGI isn’t the aging and de-aging, it’s star Robert De Niro’s creepy blue eyes. For the first half hour of the (three and a half hour runtime), I was trying to get used to De Niro’s CGI… makeup, but kept having problems with it, which didn’t make…
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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…
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I wonder if, much like that one immortal monkey divining Borges’s dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, one could assemble a list of all the action beats in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which are mostly from Aliens and Jurassic Park 1 and 2, and arrange them to figure out the story…
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Terminator: Dark Fate is the fourth irrelevant Terminator 2 sequel. It’s not the worst of them, it’s not the best of them. But the poor rights owners just can’t seem to figure out how to franchise and Arnold Schwarzenegger just can’t say no. If there’s a Terminator 7 in a couple years… Arnold will be…
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There are a sea of faces in Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists. Sea of faces, sea of names, which is the point. The book is a history of women ignored in history books, though not always. Writer Mikki Kendall doesn’t avoid the awkward subjects, like Susan B. Anthony’s white supremacy or the significant racism of her…
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I spent the first ten minutes of Queen of the Sea underwhelmed. The book’s set in the mid-1500s—maybe—it’s unclear because creator Dylan Meconis isn’t doing a straight historical fiction thing. Meconis is sort of doing Elizabeth versus Mary but not exactly. The world is a lot like fourteenth century England, but it’s not exact. Everything’s…
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Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass is a Young Adult graphic novel reimagining of Harley Quinn, set in high school, with Harley making friends and enemies while living with a delightfully supportive group of drag queens, fighting gentrification and 1% incels. It’s also almost two hundred pages of Steve Pugh art. It’s the new Mariko Tamaki too,…
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Farmageddon has so many sci-fi TV and movie references it’s hard to keep track. The whole thing feels like an homage to E.T. as far as the story—an alien (“voiced” by Amalia Vitale; voicing means making noises in Farmageddon, there’s no dialogue) gets stranded on Earth and makes friends with a local who helps them…
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Even with conservative expectations, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum disappoints. Even with adjusted expectations as the film progresses; the first act seems like it’s going to be a two hour real-time action extravaganza with lead Keanu Reeves fighting his way through seventies and eighties New York City filming locations, only with twenty-first century fight…
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I’m curious enough about The Battle of Jangsari I think I’m going to read War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent by Marguerite Higgins, which might have some information about the actual battle of Jangsa-ri because there’s nothing on the Google not about the movie. The big details, which you assume the…
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Troop Zero is heartwarming but not too heartwarming. It doesn’t promise the stars as much as it promises a gradual slide to fairness; it promises redemption to some but not the ones who really need it. It avoids any seriousness to instead provide consistent, constant entertainment. Often in the form of amusing montage sequences with…
The Stop Button 