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Fear Case (2021) #2
I must’ve missed the modern technology in the first issue; Fear Case doesn’t take place in the seventies, they just drive a seventies car and artist Tyler Jenkins has a timeless (well, seventies-ish) style. The issue opens with a quick recap of the soft cliffhanger—one benefit to writer Matt Kindt’s verbose expository dialogue is quick… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e16 – Beware of Greeks
I want to know who had the idea to give the Crane family Greek in-laws—well, Greek in-laws once removed or whatever (John Mahoney’s brother, John Mahon, is married to Patti LuPone). Was it David Lloyd, who gets the script credit? Because it’s an inspired idea. And years before My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Throwing Kelsey… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e15 – Room Service
While this episode does a great job with Eugene O’Neill references—Kelsey Grammer at one point remarks to David Hyde Pierce they’re brothers out of an O’Neill play (because Hyde Pierce is suffering narcolepsy due to divorce proceeding stresses and Grammer is a sex maniac regarding ex-wife Bebe Neuwirth) and then the title cards all riff… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e14 – The Ski Lodge
It’s a very fun riff on Midsummer Night’s Dream with confused romantic intentions at a ski resort weekend. There’s a very quick setup with Kelsey Grammer combination guilting and bartering Peri Gilpin’s ski weekend prize away from her—as she’s pregnant and can’t enjoy the weekend, Grammer’s passive aggressive reasoning goes, wouldn’t it be better for… 📖
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Michael Hayes (1997) s01e22 – Vaughn Mower
So I missed the penultimate episode because streaming rights or something but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it had more of a conclusive feel than this episode. Something about the one feels like they held it from an earlier airdate and retooled it. Though there was a recent plot point where someone made fun… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e13 – The Maris Counselor
After a rough opening—with Peri Gilpin trying to gin up interesting callers in a bit where transphobia and ableism are the punchlines—the episode quickly becomes a David Hyde Pierce episode. Kelsey Grammer’s always around, but is always playing support to Hyde Pierce, who gets two great comedy set pieces. John Mahoney gets the subplot, which… 📖
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Bonobo (2014, Matthew Hammett Knott)
Bonobo has a lot of good instincts, but director Knott and his crew don’t seem to know how to realize them. The most obvious problem is cinematographer James Aspinall, who doesn’t seem to know what he should be doing—Bonobo is always too sharp and too muddy, a decidedly DV problem—but then you realize there’s bad… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e12 – The Zoo Story
It’s a Bebe (Harriet Sansom Harris) episode, even though Kelsey Grammer fired Harris last time she was on—last season. But it’s only sort of a Bebe episode; she’s still Peri Gilpin’s agent (maybe the biggest offscreen character continuity detail the show’s had to date, actually) and she wants Grammer back as a client, but Grammer’s… 📖
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Fear Case (2021) #1
Fear Case is high concept supernatural police procedural, with some asterisks. It’s not exactly police—they’re Secret Service agents—and the supernatural aspects may end up constrained. It’s too soon to tell whether they’re going to go atomic glow, Gwyneth Paltrow’s head, or full Alan Moore’s The Courtyard in the eventual reveal (or if there will be… 📖
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The Equalizer (2021) s01e09 – True Believer
This episode has a lot of stones. It’s very modern—a group of disaffected white guys become an alt-right terror cell because one of them’s a cop and really wants to use all his access to explosives for evil (it could potentially age very poorly)—and they all got together on a Parler knockoff. And it tries… 📖
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Michael Hayes (1997) s01e20 – Devotion
It’s an almost entirely middling episode with a great as always guest star performance from Joanna Gleason—she’s married to family values congressman, Jim Haynie, who’s schtupping Godly campaign worker Gina Philips—and they’re getting death threats because Haynie wasn’t pro-gun enough with the Republican party’s white supremacist base. The episode opens with David Caruso on a… 📖
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Flatliners (1990, Joel Schumacher)
I spent much of Flatliners’s first half trying to figure out if there was anything technically redeeming about Jan de Bont’s photography. While it’s easy to qualify certain failings—with Schumacher’s bad directing, with Eugenio Zanetti’s obnoxiously ostentatious production design, could de Bont actually shoot it well? No, he couldn’t. But it also doesn’t somehow excuse… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e11 – Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do
It’s a potentially great episode, done in by David Lee’s oddly inept direction during the most important scene—though Ken Lamkin’s photography doesn’t help—and the script. Jay Kogen gets the credit. I’m starting to recognize the new crop of writers on “Frasier” and it’s never for good reasons. The episode resolves one of the show’s longer… 📖
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Michael Hayes (1997) s01e19 – Power Play
The entire episode hinges on Allison Smith’s performance as a Patty Hearst-type who falls in with a post-Waco vengeance militia. Or at least if it were good it would. The performance. The episode’s not bad, with decent guest star turns from Byron Minns as a suspicious ATF agent, and then Linda Carlson and Frank Converse… 📖
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Witness (1985, Peter Weir)
Witness has a beautifully directed scene or sequence every five to ten minutes. Just something director Weir is able to particularly nail, sometimes with John Seale’s photography’s help, sometimes with Thom Noble’s editing, then probably least of all, with Maurice Jarre’s score’s help. Jarre’s score is good, very pretty, and occasionally redundant; when it sells… 📖
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Run Like Crazy, Run Like Hell (2011)
Run Like Crazy, Run Like Hell is a divinely unromantic crime thriller. It’s got all sorts of romanticized parts and pieces, but creator Jacques Tardi (adapting a Jean-Patrick Manchette) always finds a different angle to present. There are four main characters and four supporting ones, then some supporting supporting ones, but the principals are Julie,… 📖
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Tango & Cash (1989, Andrey Konchalovskiy)
The scary thing about Tango & Cash is its ability to improve. Not sure who wrote or directed the end of the second act, when Kurt Russell gets to act opposite people besides Sylvester Stallone and you remember it’s actually an achievement to make him so unlikable for so long, but it’s a lot better.… 📖
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Room 237 (2012, Rodney Ascher)
If you told me Room 237 exists because someone wanted to test out how far the “Fair Use” part of copyright exception went… well, okay, I wouldn’t believe it because obviously there’s the other terrible stuff going on and you’d do it better if you were just trying to bring “Fair Use” to the Supreme… 📖
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Mare of Easttown (2021) s01e05 – Illusions
“Mare of Easttown” is going to be seven episodes. Episode five here resolves at least two big subplots and positions Kate Winslet for the mother lode of character development in the next two episodes. It seems very unlikely Winslet will get any of that character development, as “Mare” is so impatient in its execution. Despite… 📖
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Mare of Easttown (2021) s01e04 – Poor Sisyphus
If “Mare of Easttown” were an ensemble show, this episode would be Enid Graham’s spotlight. She gets a suspicious phone call ransoming off her daughter—Graham’s daughter is the Three Billboards daughter, versus the show’s Laura Palmer—and spends the episode fretting over stealing from her job to pay the ransom. Unfortunately, the show’s only got so… 📖
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Mare of Easttown (2021) s01e03 – Enter Number Two
I’m distressingly in tune with Brad Ingelsby’s plotting. Just as I was thinking they were going long in not resolving last episode’s cliffhanger—in fact resolving one of the other, less important (to lead Kate Winslet) cliffhangers first—Julianne Nicholson shows up to tell Winslet her ex-husband, high school teacher David Denman, is rumored to be the… 📖
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Mare of Easttown (2021) s01e02 – Fathers
Lots happens this episode. An impressive amount of rising action, both in the case (teen mom Cailee Spaeny’s murder), Kate Winslet’s custody of her grandson (because mom Sosie Bacon is a junkie and Winslet’s son is dead), and then Winslet’s romantic subplot with Guy Pearce. We also get like three suspicious dudes, one out of… 📖
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Mare of Easttown (2021) s01e01 – Miss Lady Hawk Herself
About halfway through this episode, I couldn’t help but think… “Holy shit, are they really going to ‘Westworld’ another timeline in an HBO show?” Because even before the final third or so of the episode, which has lead Kate Winslet meeting visiting writing professor Guy Pearce in a bar talking about how his great American… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e10 – Where Every Bloke Knows Your Name
I don’t know if the laugh track is actually louder in the first scene or if it just seems louder because the laughs seem a whole lot more forced. The episode opens with an inspired flashback to Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce’s characters in middle school having lunch and being obnoxious prigs, then fast… 📖
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The Amityville Horror (1979, Stuart Rosenberg)
Despite not watching the horror franchises of the eighties while growing up in the eighties, I was familiar enough with them to know most franchises—so long as they started with an A list cast—had a generally well-received first installment before going to heck. And I knew The Amityville Horror was an exception; no one thought… 📖
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Judas and the Black Messiah (2021, Shaka King)
Judas and the Black Messiah has some third act problems. They end up drawing too much attention to LaKeith Stanfield’s character—the Judas—not having enough, well, character. Especially since director King uses footage of the real guy (it’s a true story) in the denouement, after opening the film with Stanfield in old age makeup playing the… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e09 – Perspectives on Christmas
Perspectives on Christmas is an exceptionally easy episode, starting with the title. There’s even a plot point about someone not trying hard enough with Christmas presents after making a big deal about trying hard with Christmas presents, which seems to be some kind of meta plea to be allowed an easy Christmas episode from writer… 📖
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Emma (2009, Jim O’Hanlon)
Somehow this four hour adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma has rapidly delivered dialogue but never manages to work up any energy. It’s just people talking fast at one another, then lengthy “action” sequences, then more fast talking, then more dragging out. It’s especially noticeable with something like the oft-adapted Emma because there apparently isn’t a… 📖
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All Rise (2019) s02e15 – Hear My Voice
So I guess it doesn’t matter if J. Alex Brinson committed a crime—presumably falsifying records is a crime if you’re a cop (though, then again, probably not)—it matters if the D.A. is going to prosecute. No resolution on whether the D.A. (who actually appears this episode—Ian Anthony Dale) is going to prosecute. You’d think they’d… 📖
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Legends of Tomorrow (2016) s06e02 – Meat: The Legends
I wasn’t thrilled when I saw Rachel Talalay’s name on the director credit but it’s good direction (not just for Talalay but in general). The episode is split between the Legends in the fifties trying to find an escaped alien and Caity Lotz and Adam Tsekhman crash-landing on an alien world. Lotz and Tsekham are… 📖
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All Rise (2019) s02e14 – Caught Up in Circles
Oh, “All Rise” isn’t anywhere near done with the season. For some reason I thought it was going fifteen. It’s going at least seventeen, which means there might be time for it to do something after the trial the cliffhanger sets up. On the way to the cliffhanger is Simone Missick getting the most to… 📖
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The Equalizer (2021) s01e08 – Lifeline
I watched this episode like it was the season finale, so I was more bullish on the epilogue than I would’ve been if I’d known there were two episodes after this one. This episode’s got Queen Latifah doing a CIA one-shot amid her regular plot lines, like daughter Laya DeLeon Hayes and aunt Lorraine Toussaint… 📖
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King Kong (1976, John Guillermin), the television version
You know, a three-hour King Kong movie may just be a bad idea. Though the television version of Kong is intended to be a two-night experience, turning the original two hour and fifteen minute movie into two two-hour network blocks. An almost mini-series event, only not because the only way to get it so long… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e08 – Desperately Seeking Closure
After surviving a whole episode as Kelsey Grammer’s love interest, Lindsay Frost dumps him at the beginning of this one, setting Grammer off on a self-reflection whine arc for the whole show. It’s an on-point episode as far as the character goes—Grammer’s done an obsessing episode at least once before, if not twice. Last time… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s05e07 – My Fair Frasier
Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) finally gets to end an episode without driving away his latest love interest—this time it’s Lindsay Frost, guest starring as a high powered attorney who’s in town to try a sensational case and she and Grammer have a meet cute where she helps him get a purse returned. See, Peri Gilpin’s pregnant… 📖
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Life on Mars (2006) s02e08
The “Life on Mars” season finale begs think pieces about its failures. Not the direction; S.J. Clarkson does a great job. Not the acting; everyone’s good, though not really great because it’s such a bad story. To wrap up the mystery of whether series lead John Simm is living in 1973 and experiencing hallucinations he’s… 📖
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Life on Mars (2006) s02e07
S.J. Clarkson directs this episode so it always looks good and moves well. The script’s from first “Mars”-timer Mark Greig, who turns in a fairly decent “is the guv a killer” episode. Philip Glenister’s been charged with murder and the evidence is against him; with replacement DCI Ralph Brown in to oversee the case, John… 📖
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Michael Hayes (1997) s01e18 – Gotterdammerung
It’s recognizable guest star week on “Michael Hayes.” Lots of guest stars. Sadly former “Facts of Life” co-stars Meredith Scott Lynn and Charlotte Rae don’t share any scenes. But there’s also the return of Larry Miller—he gets a “special appearance” credit—and does his best Gene Hackman in “The Conversation” (or Gene Hackman in Enemy of… 📖
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Michael Hayes (1997) s01e17 – Lawyers, Guns and Money
I desperately wanted Joe Spano’s guest spot to be the worst part of the episode. Even as Spano continued to try to chew the scenery, his mouth open, half-chewed chunks falling out all over the place, if Spano were the worst thing… it’d be tolerable at least. Sadly, no, they go full “plans within plans”… 📖
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Legends of Tomorrow (2016) s06e01 – Ground Control to Sara Lance
Last season ended with aliens abducting Caity Lotz after they’d resolved the season plot line; this season premiere has Jes Macallan and Dominic Purcell trying to piece together what happened the next morning. It requires them tracking down the various members of the team, who are also somewhat missing. It provides a nice introduction subplot,… 📖
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The Equalizer (2021) s01e07 – Hunting Grounds
The episode opens with district attorney Jennifer Ferrin deciding she’s going to go after vigilante Queen Latifah because it’ll make a good “law and order” story for the media. Yep, Karen Ferrin (it even rhymes) will be going after Black woman Latifah who helps the BIPOC people the NYPD at best ignores, at worst murders.… 📖