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Extras (2005) s01e03 – Kate Winslet
I can’t imagine Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant had to take notes “Extras” but thankfully some little angel plopped between their shoulders and whispered the right things in their ears for some course correction. No more is Ashley Jensen marriage and man hungry, now she’s got a regular man, John Kirk. So then Jensen’s subplot… 📖
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Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1969-70)
Maybe I shouldn’t have complained so much about Gardner Fox. After approximately a year off (or just appearing as a guest star in Batman or Detective and not getting an Omnibus reprint), Batgirl’s started getting backups in Detective. Gil Kane came back to do the pencils, but with Murphy Anderson on the inks and—outside the… 📖
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Doom Patrol (2019) s01e03 – Puppet Patrol
Try as it might, this episode doesn’t lose all the second episode gains over the pilot. It does seemingly revolt against them—facing off team mom April Bowlby with serious superhero Joivan Wade but have it be all about how she’s just too negative and, like, needs to get with the team spirit stuff. Maybe do… 📖
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I Lost My Body (2019, Jérémy Clapin)
I Lost My Body is the profoundly vapid tale of a man (Hakim Faris) and his hand. The hand has been chopped off and as it travels through a computer animated Paris, the film flashes back to Faris’s tale and, presumably, how he lost his hand. Along the way, the hand kills a young mother… 📖
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Bastille Day (2016, James Watkins)
Bastille Day is an abject waste of time from the start, which opens with some very bad “video stock” only it turns out to be supposed to be “bad” video from a smartphone. Not even getting into the opening sequence, a terribly directed one, seems more appropriate for an eighties Porky’s rip-off more than a… 📖
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The Alienist (2018) s02e03 – Labyrinth
Okay, whoever oversees “The Alienist” and thought to hire Gina Gionfriddo to write this episode but not the whole series… is it good this person hired a competent writer, or is it bad they knew to hire a competent writer but chose not to the rest of the time. Given the show is all about… 📖
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Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1967-68)
The strangest thing about the first five stories in Omnibus Volume 1 isn’t how writer Gardner Fox uses Barbara Gordon’s position at the Gotham Public Library to explain how she somehow targets criminals. She violates professional privacy standards—if not laws (it was the late sixties, who knows)—to figure out where the bad guys are going… 📖
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I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Charlie Kaufman)
Once I’m Thinking of Ending Things makes it painfully, obviously clear what’s actually going on with nondescript Oklahoma intellectual artsy girl Jessie Buckley, her pseudo-intellectual, experience matters more but wait is actually smart or is he boyfriend Jesse Plemons, his weird parents—Toni Collette (who somehow manages to be the only person in the not-untalented cast… 📖
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Frasier (1993) s02e14 – Fool Me Once, Shame on You, Fool Me Twice…
My sitcom nostalgias date me but still aren’t bad ones. For instance, the Nathan Lane cameo in this episode of “Frasier,” back when having a Nathan Lane cameo was awesome. Lane shows up in the last act of the episode, which has Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) scrambling to recover his belongings and his good name after… 📖
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The Sapphires (2012, Wayne Blair)
When we were about halfway through The Sapphires I figured something must go wrong otherwise the film would have a better reputation. Though you never know; music biopics do have their unfortunately hidden gems (no pun). Sapphires doesn’t succeed as a music biopic or a music pic or a biopic but it’s got some excellent… 📖
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Extras (2005) s01e02 – Ross Kemp & Vinnie Jones
This episode introduces co-creator, co-writer, and co-director Stephen Merchant in an acting role, presumably a regular. He’s Ricky Gervais’s agent. Gervais is mad because he can get any parts whereas Merchant is mad Gervais can’t get any parts; no one wants Gervais is the idea. Certainly not on the movie he’s working on, a period… 📖
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Doom Patrol (2019) s01e02 – Donkey Patrol
So presumably someone at Warner Bros. watched the “Doom Patrol” pilot and thought it lacked a certain something. Whoever realized what it needed was Jovian Wade’s Cyborg deserves a bonus. Who even thought to ask if the character was available given the Justice League movie. And it’s not like Wade’s great—he’s fine and amiable—or even… 📖
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The Punisher: Valley Forge, Valley Forge (2008)
According to Internet lore, Marvel once tried to get George Clooney interested in doing a Nick Fury movie with Garth Ennis’s original Fury MAX miniseries. Clooney pushed it away disgusted. Makes you wonder if anyone tried giving Morgan Freeman a copy of Valley Forge, Valley Forge, or if maybe Ennis and artist Goran Parlov were… 📖
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Time Lapse (2014, Bradley King)
While I do not have much if anything nice to say about Time Lapse, including not liking the title, it’s somewhat admirable director and co-writer King and producer and co-writer Bp Cooper were able to keep it going for an hour forty. They sort of faked it past the ninety minute mark, sort of into… 📖
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The Alienist (2018) s02e02 – Something Wicked
This episode we meet Luke Evans’s editor at the newspaper—I think he’s at the New York Times; doesn’t really matter; Demetri Goritsas plays the editor. Goritsas is terrible. And somewhat indicative of the show’s casting choices. It really doesn’t care if anyone’s good. Not if it can get the… scares, I guess. Thrills? Chills? Grosses?… 📖
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Concussion (2015, Peter Landesman)
Most of Concussion is inoffensive Oscar bait. Only for the dudes though. And only for the actors. None of the technicals. Will Smith is the main Oscar bait; he’s a crusading African immigrant coroner who’s a medical super genius who wholesomely communes with his cadavers before respectfully cutting them up. The film shows Smith talking… 📖
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Extras (2005) s01e01 – Ben Stiller
It takes about halfway through the episode to learn both leads’ names. One is Ricky Gervais, I mean his character name. Ashley Jensen is the other lead. They’re both movie extras, working on the set of a serious Ben Stiller genocide movie. When the episode starts, it’s them after a shot and they’re talking to… 📖
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Fun with Dick and Jane (1977, Ted Kotcheff)
Every once in a while, Jane Fonda will say a line just right and Fun with Dick and Jane will be, well, fun for a moment. Not a long moment. Sometimes it approaches funny, sometimes it’s just fun. But it’s something. Because fun and funny are in short supply in Dick and Jane. Somehow the… 📖
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Doom Patrol (2019) s01e01
Alan Tudyk is “Doom Patrol”’s red herring. So far, anyway. He’s in the prologue, which has him getting powers from a Nazi scientist in the forties, and then he narrates. There’s always narration. Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad. When it’s good, when Tudyk’s not being to snide, it nears Jean Shepherd. When… 📖
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The Punisher: Long Cold Dark (2007-08)
I’m going to go out on a limb and say having Howie Chaykin do an issue of art—the fiftieth Punisher MAX, so for the collectors’ who got anniversary issues–having Howie fill-in was a mistake. Maybe if the rest of it weren’t regular artist Goran Parlov, like if it’d been all guest artists. But Howie ends… 📖
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The Perfect Host (2010, Nick Tomnay)
The Perfect Host is clearly on a budget. It’s one of those carefully constructed on a budget movies, where you see the inside of the police station but never the outside and you can hear the other detectives, but it’s always just talky cops Nathaniel Parker and Joseph Will. They’re working a bank robbery, which… 📖
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Enola Holmes (2020, Harry Bradbeer)
Enola Holmes is a solid vehicle for the proposition of lead Millie Bobby Brown as a movie star—she infrequently narrates to great effect, in a manner far more Ferris Bueller than John Watson (more on the infrequently in a bit). But as almost anything else the movie fizzles. Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes? He’s not… 📖
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Wind River (2017, Taylor Sheridan)
Wind River is almost manipulative enough to be effective. If writer and director Sheridan just could’ve made it through his muted epilogue to the end credits instead of pointing out just where he was manipulative and how what a cheap job he did of it…. But he can’t. Not unless you count Graham Greene basically… 📖
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As Above, So Below (2014, John Erick Dowdle)
As Above, So Below is a combination of a Goonies rip-off, a Tomb Raider rip-off, an Indiana Jones spin-off (which might just be the Tomb Raider rip-off), and, I don’t know, either Blair Witch or every other found footage horror movie where the third act just decides it’s time for image overload in lieu of… 📖
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Peninsula (2020, Yeon Sang-ho)
Peninsula is the sequel to Train to Busan but more like it just takes place in the same universe. It’s part of the Train to Busan Extended Universe, much like Land of the Dead would’ve been part of the Night of the Living Dead Extended Universe. And watching Peninsula, you realize just how much it… 📖
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You Call This A Glitch?
So, while I haven’t posted in two and a half months, I have been writing a post about once a week and letting them sit in the Ulysses inbox, waiting for when I have some time. I did not, as it turns out, have some time this weekend to move back to WordPress.com from self-hosting,… 📖
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Eleanor Parker on DVD: A Cursory, Comprehensive Guide
Almost all of Eleanor Parker’s feature films are available today on DVD. Almost all of her Golden Age titles have been available since 2018, when Warner Archive released The Last Ride (1944), while Kino Lorber’s release of The Oscar (1966) a few months ago is the most recent new-to-DVD Parker film. Despite Warner Home Video… 📖
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Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
In the third act of Notorious, director Hitchcock and screenwriter Ben Hecht (who had some uncredited and quite exquisite help) figure out a way to get maximal drama out of a rather mundane situation. Well, mundane as far as the possibilities of American agents in Rio de Janeiro (with the permission of the government) trying… 📖
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Valley of the Gods (2019, Lech Majewski)
Valley of the Gods is a cautionary tale. If you’re going to make a combination of Citizen Kane—with either actual footage or a recreated shot—and then a bunch of vague Kubrick nods, including Keir Dullea (arguably in the film’s best performance) as a snippy butler and a HAL while doing a retelling of the Navajo… 📖
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House of Hummingbird (2018, Kim Bora)
Eun-hee (Park Ji-hu) is an average Seoul eighth grader circa 1994, which would be fine if being average weren’t a one-way ticket to nowhere. Park’s the youngest of three children; while presumably eldest sister Park Soo-yeon has already screwed up and is going to a crappy school across the bridge, son Son Sang-yeon is doing… 📖
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The Alienist (2018) s02e01 – Ex Ore Infantium
Dakota Fanning gets the “and” credit in “The Alienist: Season Two: Angel of Darkness: Ex Ore Infantium.” She doesn’t die (at least not in this episode, and since it’s based on a novel I could just spoil myself), but the “and” credit is quizzical because it’s very clear this time around she’s the star. The… 📖
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Doctor Who (2005) s03e10 – Blink
Blink is apparently not a backdoor pilot to a “Doctor Who” spin-off where recognizable cast—in this case Carey Mulligan on her way up—interacts with the world of Doctor Who without necessarily having to do a lot of scenes with David Tennant. Or Freema Agyeman, who’s second-billed but feels like she left the show and everything… 📖
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Doctor Who (2005) s03e09 – The Family of Blood
So I thought this episode—wrapping up a two-parter about the Doctor (David Tennant) turning himself into a human so as to avoid some aliens who are hunting him and losing himself in early 1900s England—wasn’t going to get any worse after Tennant, having regained his memory and alien… superpowers (sure, okay), asks his human love… 📖
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Doctor Who (2005) s03e08 – Human Nature
I didn’t have a great feeling when I saw Paul Cornell with the writing credit but I forced myself to be hopeful. Plus, Charlie Palmer directing, surely it would be all right. What’s the worst Cornell would do, another overly melodramatic time waster… And, yes, he does do another overly melodramatic time waster only this… 📖
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Rock Jocks (2012, Paul V. Seetachitt)
Rock Jocks is full of “it’s not racist because” jokes. There’s even a moment early on when Felicia Day tries explaining to Gerry Bednob how he’s actually a racist even though he says he’s not. When he disagrees, Day gives up, which is a fairly good place to give up on Jocks. You’ve hit the… 📖
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Doctor Who (2005) s03e07 – 42
There have to be TV shows where they unintentionally duplicate episodes. Soap operas, whatever. The same plot must get repeated. Unintentionally. Because it very obviously happens intentionally, such as with 42, which is a riff on a great two-parter from last season, only without anything similarly great. Like, if you’re going to remake something… don’t… 📖