Category: 2021
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I’m hesitant to use the word “perfect” to describe a work. Mainly because perfect is very subjective. At a certain point in Mamo’s final chapter, I turned each page, holding my breath a little, waiting to see where creator Sas Milledge would take the book in its conclusion. But Milledge never hits those targets; she’s…
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While it’s the worst issue of Mamo, it’s still a great comic. Creator Sas Milledge just doesn’t seem to have enough story for it and stretches. Orla and Jo deal with last issue’s cliffhanger, with Orla abandoning Jo and the crow. Except the crow seemed to have already left the girls. Jo can’t go after…
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With each issue of Mamo, I consider starting by saying there’s no one like creator Sas Milledge in terms of visual pacing. At least for her character’s “performances.” Throughout the issue (and never concurrently), protagonists Orla and Jo have these reaction shots where Milledge has just paced it so perfectly their emotions come alive. Milledge’s…
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While reading the first issue, I didn’t realize Mamo issues were double-size. I just thought creator Sas Milledge had some preternatural sense of pacing; she does have it, but the issues are also double-sized. They don’t feel like two issues slapped together, either. Milledge fluidly paces the issue—starting with a cliffhanger resolution through a bunch…
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Creator Sas Milledge is masterful when it comes to introspection. Despite Mamo often being full of expository dialogue, it’s about the characters when they’re not talking, why they’re not talking, what they’re thinking about instead, and so on. Just like most of the book, it’s understated, thoughtful, and fantastic. The issue begins with teenager Jo…
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Emergency Declaration is a disaster movie made like a horror movie. It’s not just any disaster movie, either; it’s Airport meets Airplane but with bioterrorism. The bioterrorism doesn’t have to do with the horror movie; it’s all the investigation procedural. The horror movie experience is entirely reserved for the victims (and the audience). Declaration doesn’t…
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I don’t know how creator Ed Piskor is going to keep it up with Red Room. Sure, he’s doing four issue volumes, but does he have an overall plan? I suppose I could’ve read the back matter. Because, as usual, Piskor finds an entirely new way to slice the comic, this time following the story…
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Creator Ed Piskor once again surprises and (with qualifications) delights with Red Room. He’s on the third issue, and it’s an entirely different angle on the story, focusing on the FBI investigating the Red Room. There are some backstory details in the issue as well, like the Red Room being around since the mid-nineties in…
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Okay, I didn’t realize Red Room was going to have real mythology (in the “X-Files” sense). I thought it was just going to be a series of horrifying vignettes about the world of online slasher snuff videos. This issue’s all about the doctor who prepares the victims for the videos. They get all sorts of…
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It’s a much quicker read than I’d like, which is the nature of a licensed title. Even a circularly licensed one like Harley Quinn: The Animated Series. It’s following the source media’s plotting. The issue amounts to about a seven-minute segment of TV; between commercial breaks. Harley and Ivy get to Selina’s, with Gordon in…
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The Eat. Bang! Kill. Tour picks up right where the second season of “Harley Quinn” leaves off. Harley and Ivy are on the run after Ivy’s failed wedding, Commissioner Gordon in hot pursuit. There’s a very brief recap of the show in general and then Ivy’s not-wedding to Kite Man. It’s well-balanced exposition from Harley…
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Passing is a genre-buster, which heavily contrasts the very strict mores the film’s subjects live within. The film is an occasional Southern Gothic (set in 1920s Harlem), occasional character study Hitchcock homage. Harlem Renaissance society lady Tessa Thompson has a peculiar day when shopping for her son’s birthday; the sometimes very shitty white folks just…
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As a series, Ginseng Roots is a litany of successes; some are unimaginable because of the content (who knew Wisconsin ginseng farming trivia could be so engaging), but the overall success is creator Craig Thompson’s ability to present the information. This issue’s all about the current ginseng industry through the perspective of one company—Hsu’s Ginseng…
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Cyrano has good production design from Sarah Greenwood and costumes by Massimo Cantini Parrini. And there’s one time Ben Mendelsohn doesn’t seem terrible. And I suppose his musical number is the most personality the film ever shows because it’s like a really shitty Disney number, like a “Disney’s jumped the shark with that one” type…
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This Christmas special, “All Creatures,” goes for the jugular: the main veterinary case is a very sick Tricki Woo, whose illness panics pretty much everyone who’s ever met him. When Patricia Hodge calls for assistance, Samuel West heads out, but he, Callum Woodhouse, and Nicholas Ralph all have significant involvement in the A-plot as the…
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This episode takes place in late September 1938. The episode opens with Nicholas Ralph and Rachel Shenton going to the movies and watching a newsreel about Chamberlain going to meet with Hitler. Shenton keeps telling Ralph not to worry about world events, which isn’t a great recommendation for taking Shenton’s advice. The date’s not all…
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There’s not much veterinary procedural this episode. The most significant medical case involves Samuel West attending Patricia Hodges’s Pekingese on a sensitive matter. The only other animal is a pedigree bull, which Matthew Lewis offers to ex-fiancée Rachel Shenton and her family as penance for trying to get them to do bull fraud last season.…
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“All Creatures” bounces back this episode, which isn’t a surprise, but this episode has the same director as last episode (Sasha Ransome). At some point between filming the last one and this one, Ransome figured out how to direct Nicholas Ralph and Rachel Shenton’s chemistry. The last episode took a dive because of the episode’s…
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“All Creatures Great and Small” gets away with a certain amount of sentimentality and near saccharinity because it’s about people caring about their animals’ suffering. The show’s about folks at their most empathetic (right or wrong), and that emotionality can cover a whole bunch. However, this episode veers away from that comfort zone as Nicholas…
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This episode’s a sequel to the Christmas special, with guest star Cleo Sylvestre conveniently returning to remind star Nicholas Ralph he’s actually going to have to tell his love interest, Rachel Shenton, he likes her for anything to happen. But we also get to see the dog from the Christmas special, so it’s all good.…
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The season two premiere opens very similarly to the first episode, with Nicholas Ralph back in Glasgow. He’s visiting his parents (for Easter), so four and a half months after the Christmas special, and mom Gabriel Quigley wants him to move back home. There’s a job at the local vet office. The practice has the…
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The Lions of Leningrad is European without being Russian, albeit then translated (from French) into English. But it’s a Russian tragedy, complete with a love quadrangle, flashbacks, gulags, and revenge. The comic opens in Leningrad, 1962. The police arrest an indigent who’s broken into a concert hall. Only the arresting officer is a nitwit who…
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The first act of Seobok is an espionage thriller (or the first act of one), the second act is a buddy action road picture, the third act is a Sturm und Drang superhero movie. Well, superhuman movie, at least. The best part is the second act when spy-who-tried-to-get-out-but-they-pull-him-back-in Gong Yoo is teaching new charge Park…
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Remake show creators Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless are back with the script credit for the series finale. It’s an entirely acceptable conclusion, with competent but unambitious direction from Jabbar Raisani; most plot threads get resolved. However, the big one—Toby Stephens and Russell Hornsby playing “My Two Dads” with Taylor Russell—gets rushed through while raising…
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This episode has such an exhausting amount of Toby Stephens being macho someone calls him on it to his face. Stephens is convinced the robot—now on Alpha Centauri with the humans—has gone rogue. Raza Jaffrey, who points out he almost stole a space-camper and abandoned over a hundred people to the elements, tells him to…
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Yet another short episode. And it’s got a huge dramatic beat in the latter half, but not for the cliffhanger. In fact, everything after the dramatic beat just serves to reduce the impact of that beat. It plays very awkwardly, which isn’t director Julian Holmes’s fault, just the script’s. Katherine Collins gets the credit; as…
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It’s another short episode, but it’s also a Leslie Hope-directed episode, and she does not disappoint. Even saddled with flashbacks to when Taylor Russell was a baby, and Molly Parker has taken her home to mom Colleen Winton’s farm to raise her. It’s where we find out Parker gave up being an astronaut to have…
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So far, this season has had fifty-ish-minute episodes. This episode’s only forty. It’s got a couple things to do, and it does them expediently, which makes it a bridging episode of sorts. While the kids are safely in spaceflight, thanks to Taylor Russell and Russell Hornsby, their parents—half a galaxy away or whatever—are in more…
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While I’m sure they didn’t bring in Russell Hornsby—as Taylor Russell’s long-lost (in space) biological father—to offset Toby Stephens’s energy vampiring, but Hornsby does have that effect. The nicest “Lost in Space” has been in ages is when Mina Sundwall, being introduced to Hornsby, gives him a hug. Hornsby will have an arc, mostly with…
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It’s only taken twenty-two episodes, but “Lost in Space” finally addresses some fundamental questions about its robots. Did something make them, or did they make themselves? The show skirts around the robots having agency and sentience to make the human eagerness to enslave them a little less creepy, presumably. Though Molly Parker salivates over the…
The Stop Button 