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All Rise (2019) s02e09 – Safe to Fall
I spent the entire episode not being able to remember Lindsay Mendez’s character’s name even though she’s been on since the pilot. But it’s Sara and there’s a Sherri and a Sam and I had to remember a new character’s name—Kearran Giovanni guests as the first chair in Audrey Corsa’s case. Corsa is Sam, by… 📖
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WandaVision (2021) s01e08 – Previously On
I was not expecting that mid-credits reveal; I read the comics, I even read some threads, I even recognized the comics I’d read from the thread but not how they’d end up using it. They’re jumping around a lot from source material, but that mid-credits reveal… I may end up with the Paul Bettany as… 📖
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Resident Alien (2021) s01e05 – Love Language
There’s a bunch of great stuff in this episode but the big win is how it’s able to stare down mawkishness for the ending, song-accompanied “what have we learned” montage. Sarah Beckett’s teleplay finds the best sincerity is from the unlikeliest source—in this case Alan Tudyk’s genocidal alien—and even though the sequence starts in the… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s04e04 – A Crane’s Critique
This episode’s gimmick—Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce fanboying over J.D. Salinger analogue Robert Prosky, who just wants to drink Ballantine’s and watching baseball with John Mahoney—ages really well. We hit peak pseudo-Salinger four years later with Finding Forrester (raise your hand if you too had a friend who thought Forrester was a real guy… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s04e03 – The Impossible Dream
The Impossible Dream ages surprisingly well. Or, actually, maybe it doesn’t because you can imagine the exact same story being done twenty-five years later…. The episode opens with Kelsey Grammer waking up in a seedy motel, discovering a tattoo on his arm and a lover in the shower. The lover turns out to be Edward… 📖
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The Equalizer (2021) s01e03 – Judgment Day
Well, this episode establishes a couple things “The Equalizer” certainly didn’t need established. First, Chris Noth is not a regular cast member no matter what the titles say; he’s nowhere to be seen this episode. Second, turns out Andrew W. Marlowe’s not going to be the worst writer on it. I was upbeat when I… 📖
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Gun Crazy (1950, Joseph H. Lewis)
We don’t see John Dall court Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy. We get to see them meet cute when Dall—back home after the Army (and reform school before the service)—and his pals go to carnival and see Cummins’s shootist act. Dall was in reform school for breaking into a store to steal a pistol and… 📖
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Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur)
Despite Dana Andrews and Peggy Cummins being perfectly serviceable leads, Night of the Demon never really comes to life without antagonist Niall MacGinnis around. MacGinnis is a Satanic cult leader who conjures forth demons from Hell—hence the title—to deal with his enemies and—while he never explicitly confesses to his enemies… he takes a delight in… 📖
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The Equalizer (2021) s01e02 – Glory
Despite being a general improvement over the pilot and seeming to trend up in general (Adam Goldberg’s not obnoxiously bland this episode and Liza Lapira’s improving a little so maybe she’ll hit that level by the next one), this episode of “The Equalizer” has a lackluster, pseudo-cloying finish. The show tries to do a bunch… 📖
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The History of Time Travel (2014, Ricky Kennedy)
Once The History of Time Travel gets to the gimmick, it’s a good gimmick. Writer and director Kennedy even manages to get a good finish with the gimmick, which is something since it means making the third act of History incredibly tedious to build anticipation. And a lot of History has already been tedious, so… 📖
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The Equalizer (2021) s01e01
They don’t use the song. The movies didn’t use the song either, did they? I love that old “Equalizer” theme song. Stewart Copeland. Anyway. “The Equalizer: 2021” is Taken with Queen Latifah only she’s an altruist and not only using her very particular set of skills to help family members in danger. She’s got a… 📖
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Flora & Ulysses (2021, Lena Khan)
Flora & Ulysses is a perfectly functional multi-quadrant family movie. Khan’s direction is good—sometimes really good—and kid lead Matilda Lawler is good so, you know, it’s fine. I mean, it’d be better if Lawler actually got to be the lead in the movie instead of it splitting between her separated parents, blocked romance novelist Alyson… 📖
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Resident Alien (2021) s01e04 – Birds of a Feather
It’s the best episode of the show so far; easily. Both writing—Tazbah Chavez—and directing—Jay Chandrasekhar. Chavez’s script is able to balance out material for the entire cast in a way the show hasn’t juggled before—front-loading the B plot with the C plot and then introducing the A plot a little later, eventually weaving it into… 📖
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WandaVision (2021) s01e07 – Breaking the Fourth Wall
I’m going to be very basic about “WandaVision” and the reveals in this episode. The show’s been very subtly leveraging one of the cast for a big turn—with this alternating intensity device—and it works and it’s the only easy out I’d be okay with. It was rumored a few weeks ago but I didn’t pay… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s04e02 – Love Bites Dog
The episode opens with Dan Butler—who’s a regular per the opening titles this episode (but not last; he wasn’t even in the previous episode)—on the phone breaking up cruelly with his latest romance. And, it turns out, her sister as well. It’s dated—at least I hope it’s dated—but, you know, it’s just Butler being Bulldog.… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s04e01 – The Two Mrs. Cranes
Joe Keenan for the win. I missed the writing credit on this episode and put off finding out who wrote this marvelous script until now. Keenan starts the season out on a very high point, with an endless amount of always good one-liners as the regular cast gets to do a group showcase episode. Jane… 📖
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Elizabeth Is Missing (2019, Aisling Walsh)
I’m not sure what I thought Elizabeth Is Missing was going to be—I only half read a description—but when it became clear Glenda Jackson’s character (not Elizabeth) would be searching for that character (played by Maggie Steed) but also Jackson having Alzheimer’s and also sort of live action flashbacks with her younger self… Well, I… 📖
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The Monuments Men (2014, George Clooney)
The Monuments Men is cute. It probably shouldn’t be cute, or if it should be cute, it should somehow be more cute. But it’s fairly fubar. The film’s got very little dramatic momentum since it can never find a tone and also because its scenes try to skip over the drama or do whatever it… 📖
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Ginseng Roots (2019) #5
Maybe half the issue is the fascinating world history of the ginseng trade—it was actually an American export to China hundreds of years ago too—while the other half is a more colloquial info dump on how pesticides affect ginseng crops. At one point I remembered something I’d learned about ginseng growing from the previous issues… 📖
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Ginseng Roots (2019) #4
It’s been almost a year since I last read a Ginseng Root and I’ve been lallygagging on getting back into reading because I was worried I’d be lost without a reread. But this issue’s a nice concise look at creator Craig Thompson and his brother’s experience picking rocks for comic book money. So, while ginseng… 📖
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The regular posting thing is intentional and will continue
Despite learning multiple times over the last eleven or so months I don’t like soft launches, I’ve been doing a bit of a soft launch on The Stop Button for the past few weeks. I don’t even remember how long… actually, it’s almost a month. Basically it’s two related posts a day, though the daily… 📖
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The Informer (1935, John Ford)
Smack-dab in the middle of The Informer is a romance between IRA commander Preston Foster and his gal, Heather Angel, sister to an IRA man (Wallace Ford). Foster and Angel steal moments together on one fateful night, tragic circumstances giving them unexpected time with one another, but those same circumstances sort of foreshadowing their very… 📖
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Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)
Until the action-packed last thirty minutes, Stagecoach is a class drama. A group of strangers and acquaintances are in a stagecoach, traveling West, post-Civil War. It takes fifteen minutes at the start of the film to get them in the coach, with some of the time spent on establishing the characters (and why they’re traveling),… 📖
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The Famous Sword Bijomaru (1945, Mizoguchi Kenji)
The Famous Sword Bijomaru is a tragedy. Well, at its best, it’s a tragedy. The film—which runs sixty-five minutes and has zero subplots, very few close-ups, and no establishing shots or sequences—opens with apprentice swordsmith Hanayagi Shôtarô presenting his benefactor, Oya Ichijirô, with a new sword. Hanayagi is an orphan, Oya took him in at… 📖
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The Swordsman (2020, Choi Jae-hoon)
Many years ago, Val Kilmer talked about how the original Tombstone director got replaced and one of that guy’s crimes was making the actors wear accurate textiles, which doesn’t matter on film. You can have a lightweight poncho and it’ll look the same on screen. Welp. I don’t know if it’s the benefits of shooting… 📖
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All Rise (2019) s02e08 – Bette Davis Eyes
Relative to “All Rise,” I had some expectations for this episode. It seemed like they’d wrapped up the season’s existing threads last time and were ready, once again, to try to figure out where they’re going. “All Rise” has had Covid—there’s a very meta moment this episode where Jessica Camacho (whose B plot is actually… 📖
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WandaVision (2021) s01e06 – All-New Halloween Spooktacular!
I’m not going to write it but there’s a very good academic paper called “The Blipped Hero: Why Marvel Can’t Do a Heroic Age, in Comics, Film, or Streaming.” Also this would be the perfect time for Sentry to do the hero stuff, because then Randall Park can do an “Agents of Atlas.” More than… 📖
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Mad Love (1935, Karl Freund)
Not even halfway through Mad Love’s sixty-seven minute runtime it’s clear all the film’s going to have to do to succeed is not to fail, which isn’t going to be easy. The film’s about a brilliant surgeon (Peter Lorre) who’s sort of publicly stalking married stage actress Frances Drake. Now, he falls in love with… 📖
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Parade (1974, Jacques Tati)
Parade somehow loses the plot after intermission. Given the plot is just a night at the circus, usually showcasing director Tati’s pantomiming, it shouldn’t be possible to lose such a thing. But Parade does. Maybe intermission not coming halfway through the film should be a sign. And at least the post-intermission material sails by relatively… 📖
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Trafic (1971, Jacques Tati)
For the first hour, Trafic has a lot of gems. The film opens with a car manufacturing plant with a lot of nice, precise composition and editing, and director Tati maintains an interest in the goings-on of cars and their drivers. The action centers around an auto show in Amsterdam (presumably filmed at a real… 📖
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The Suspect (1944, Robert Siodmak)
The Suspect is the unlikely tale of middle aged shopkeeper Charles Laughton, who forms a friendship with a young woman in need (Ella Raines), which gets him in trouble with his wife, Rosalind Ivan. There are complications—the film’s established Ivan has been a horrible wife to Laughton and a bad mother to their son, Dean… 📖
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The Lady Refuses (1931, George Archainbaud)
The Lady Refuses gets frustratingly close to making it to the finish. It collapses in its final moments, though it’s barely been keeping it together through the third act, when everything (by everything the main plot and the single directly related subplot) comes together and profoundly fizzles. The only reason it provides any tension at… 📖
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Becker (1998) s02e02 – Imm-Oral Fixations
This episode has a really strong guest star performance from Marjorie Monaghan. She’s an old model friend of Terry Farrell’s, in town for a few days, wants to hang out. Except Farrell’s trying to get her greasy spoon’s freezer fixed and she’s got to deal with people in New Jersey, which is what passes for… 📖