[8.3/10] We live in an age where anything you can imagine may be conjured up through the magic of CGI and green screen technology. There’s no place our heroes can’t visit, no foe they can’t fight, and no images that can’t be summoned in the process. By dint of spectacle alone, modern films should be able to awe, thrill, and grip us more than anything that predates such technological innovations.
And yet, the quiet miracle of Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography is that he can make the comparatively mundane feel like the most captivating, ominous, seat-gripping thing in the world. Strangers on a Train is not exactly a down-to-earth story. It involves a murder, and a mentally unbalanced homicidal stalker, and a minor celebrity caught in a web of bad luck and bad choices.
Despite that, though, it’s a lower tempo movie more often than not, more apt to string the audience along with the looming possibility of things going terribly wrong than pull the trigger on the fireworks. The movie lives in the tension of protagonist Guy Haines realizing a murder’s been committed in his name, fearing the consequences of who might get to him first: Bruno Antony or the law. The movie spends most of its runtime with the noose slowly tightening, more and more little things going wrong, until the release of all that stress in the film’s climax is as much a relief as it is cathartic.
What’s striking is how Hitchcock achieves that tension and transposes it onto so many seemingly prosaic activities. The juxtaposition of one man trying to finish a tennis match and another trying to fish a lighter out of a storm drain is the most suspenseful thing in the world when each is racing against time to pin a murder on the other. The mere presence of an unwanted visitor leering in the distance from the Jefferson Memorial chills the blood. And a runaway carousel ride at a local carnival has more cinematic electricity than all the CGI explosion-fests the world over.
It’s a cliché at this point to call Hitchcock the master of suspense. Still, the honorific is earned not just by the results on the screen, but by what common tools he uses to make them. The drama here is human, and the stakes are personal rather than earth-shaking, which allows the threats and possible calamities to be human-sized too. By keeping that focus on the small, the intrusions of the threatening and ominous feel that much larger, that much more likely to make you dig your fingers into the armrest, than stories and foes that are nominally bigger and scarier.
And there are few cinematic villains scarier than Bruno Antony. It’s a fantastic performance from Robert Walker who commands the screen every time he steps into the frame. What makes Bruno so terrifying is, again, the unremarkableness of him. Sure, he’s mentally unwell, having cooked up this famed “criss-cross” scheme and harboring no shortage of mommy and daddy issues. But he’s also someone who can pass, at least briefly, in polite company, whom you wouldn’t blink twice at if you walked by him on the street, who is a figure that would fade into the woodwork if you didn’t know what to look for.
Yet, he’s utterly terrifying. Hitchcock and director of photography Robert Burks see to that. Antony’s placid demeanor turns utterly menacing when he’s the only one staring amid a crowd of head-bobbers watching a tennis ball lobbed back and forth. He moves like a shark through a local carnival, pursuing Guy’s wife with an unnerving smile and steady gait. His run-of-the-mill small talk turns bizarre and disturbing if you let him get wound up long enough. A simple look from him sends Guy’s would-be sister-in-law into a panic. The superficially normal man spooks like a phantom when he’s framed in shadow or leans out of the darkness. The film’s grandest achievement may be turning a clever but simple man into an abjectly frightening cinematic creation.
That said, at the risk of being deemed one of Hitchcock’s hated “plausibles” -- people who question when a movie strays too far from reality -- there’s elements of Strangers on a Train that strain credulity.
The movie handwaves away the possibility that the two gentlemen who were with Guy’s wife at the carnival when she was killed would be treated as suspects. Guy’s girlfriend and her family advise him to act like everything’s normal despite the fact that the public would probably expect him to be at least a little emotional given the news of his wife’s demise, even if their relations were strained. And the police officer at the end seems pretty blasé about not searching Bruno for the engraved lighter that might at least partly exonerate Guy simply because Bruno claims he doesn’t have it.
Maybe there’s a cultural disconnect from American society now versus how these things might have been treated seventy years ago, but suffice it to say, they strike the modern viewer as profoundly odd reactions to what is admittedly a profoundly odd situation.
Regardless, that’s part of the unwitting charm of Strangers on a Train. For such a tightly-wound film, it has these funny little human moments that make it feel real. Amid Hitchcock’s trademark brilliant compositions and framings, built to let the images tell the story and build the tension, he injects these small interludes that serve no purpose but wonderful texture.
A hayseed bystander pesters Bruno and responds to a kiss off with, “So I’m not educated.” The police commandeer an old dowager’s car only to find she’s thrilled to be part of such drama. A small boy on the runaway carousel decides to interject himself into the struggle between Guy and Bruno like it’s a playground scuffle. Amid a high concept story, these little doses of well-observed reality and humor bring it home.
It’s in keeping with the way all this cinematic anxiety laid bare, all these tense moments stacked on top of one another, spin out from such humble beginnings. Bruno experiences a raft of good luck, running into a person famous enough that he can know the man’s troubles, with the time and resources to pursue his dreadful plan, and have enough things break in his favor, like the lack of a reliable alibi for his counterpart, to give him leverage.
And the reverse is true for Guy. From the simple act of running into one weirdo in a train car, his whole life is upended and nearly ruined. Words not meant seriously but spoken in anger tie him to the crime. A forgotten lighter gives his foil the chance to plant evidence. A fellow passenger’s intoxication deprives him of his alibi. So much goes wrong for Guy, that the viewer wonders what they would do in his situation, forced into a scenario where he’s innocent but cannot help but seem guilty to a neutral observer.
That central underlying tension -- between truth and falsity, between what really happened and what others would believe, between assauging and dangerous man and confronting him whatever the consequences -- fuels the film. Strangers on the Train is an unsettling take on the “For Want of a Nail” story, where one accidental shoe scuff leads to multiple deaths, veritable blackmail, and several more lives hanging in the balance.
Guy learns his lesson by the end of the movie, but it’s a lesson for filmmakers writ large at the same time. Sometimes the most terrifying, tense, and thrilling things emerge from the smallest sources. It’s a tribute to Hittcock’s virtuosity, and his team’s superlative efforts in an age before computer-generated sorcery, that they could make a chance meeting on the railway, and the sparks and consequences that unspooled from two distinctive but recognizable men, loom as large as anything their successors would awe audiences with half a century down the line.
After seeing several people on SM recommend that it be seen in Spanish if possible, I waited until I could find a theater nearby that was showing it. I am estatic that I saw it in Spanish. It was an amazing treat to see it in the language that the characters would have spoken. The spanish language voice actors are all Mexican, giving the film it's final seal of authenticity that the english language is missing (though this is not a negative critique of the english language cast, but rather an extra treat of the spanish language version).
The film is a heartfelt tribute to the tradition of The Day of the Dead, part of the cultural heritage of Mexico and it's indigenous roots. The film shows the time and care the producers, writers and director took in staying true to and understanding this celebration as observed in Mexico, from the offerings to the dead, the significance of the vibrant marigolds, and the love and gathering with our ancestors and family.
Yes, Coco follows the tradition of all Pixar movies, with a focus on love, family and friendship. The difference this time is that it places Mexico, its culture and its people, at the center of the story.
It's pretty amazing that we now live in a time when a show like this is possible. Resurrecting an old classic story, bringing back original actors and playing on nostalgia to continue a plot that we last saw over 30 years ago is something that we could never have imagined happening only a short while ago. Fans of various films and shows have fantasised about exactly this sort of thing for as long as I can remember, and we've finally reached a place where the powers that be are willing to listen (Twin Peaks, Star Wars, The X-Files, Veronica Mars, Ghostbusters, Creed, Deadwood).
It's no surprise that if it's done right, the audience are going to love it. Cobra Kai does it right. Bringing back Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, we finally get an official continuation of The Karate Kid saga showing how their lives went. Unfortunately, the wonderful Pat Morita is no longer with us so Mr. Miyagi can't return too, but his presence is felt throughout.
The show chooses to use nostalgia to the full, and it's to its credit that the format works well. It heavily references moments from the original films, uses the original soundtrack and brilliantly makes use of small clips as flashbacks. It also gives us a new dynamic by introducing the next generation of karate kids and gets us invested in their struggles all while entwining them with the bad blood between Daniel and Johnny.
It also takes the very interesting tactic of making Johnny a protagonist and showing us things from his perspective. This makes it very easy to become invested in the drama on screen, because we are rooting for everyone. Johnny himself can be his own worst enemy, but he recognises the mistakes he's made and wants to improve himself (even if his own dated viewpoint gets in the way). Daniel is a successful family man, but his hotheaded temper hasn't entirely gone away and he needs to struggle to find his balance again.
And then there are the kids, who are all great. Miguel becomes Johnny's first student, and goes from a kindhearted geek getting bullied to something of a monster thanks to taking Johnny's teachings a little too much to heart after he realises how good it makes him feel. It's a fascinating transformation that isn't easy to watch, because it becomes harder and harder to root for him. On the other side we have Johnny's estranged son Robby who begins learning from Daniel and is set on a path to redemption from his life of petty crime. All the different paths and goals crossing here make for an often cheesy but never dull mix.
While the show does often fall back on formulaic nonsense (bullies, geeks, family arguments) that play out in unrealistic ways, the pure entertainment makes it all work. My biggest criticism is that the karate itself feels very glossed over; I found it hard to believe that all of these kids were ready for the All Valley Tournament by the end of the season and I don't think the show establishes the passing of time all that well (this must have taken place over the course of a year or so, surely?). I also think that a few of side characters (Amanda, Hawk) are barely fleshed out enough to justify their screen time.
Cobra Kai is a highly entertaining and often very funny show that knows how to use nostalgia to its full and succeeded in making me really care about where all of these characters are going.
I don't get nearly as excited about the MCU as I used to (mostly because they're churning out movies and TV shows at a rate that I just can't keep up with), but I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Definitely worth watching.
Some loose thoughts/things I enjoyed below (spoilers are marked):
- the story is good, the 2nd act is kind of slow, but it picks up towards the end
- the fight scenes are super cool and creative (especially the one on the bus and the one on the scaffolding)
- I liked the way they utilized the rings in fights, it felt really fresh and like something we haven't seen before
- the final battle is actually awesome (monkey brain loves big monsters and explosions)
- the cast is excellent (I'm particularly thrilled to see Awkwafina getting more recognition)
- the soundtrack is beautiful and I love the way they used traditional Chinese melodies
- badass women all around (Michelle Yeoh my beloved)
- impeccable CGI
- some gorgeous scenery
- MORRIS
- loved the callback to the Mandarin mess from Iron Man 3
- Brie Larson cameo (I know the fandom has collectively decided to hate her, but I don't care, that was a treat for me and me only)
- Xialing effectively utilizing girl power by taking over her father's crime empire (I feel like there was definitely some comic book reference flying over my head there but who cares). My friend and I joked that she'll be getting a Disney+ series shortly
Overall, it was a treat. Strongly recommend.
Season One thoughts :
The Good - Decent special effects . Some CGI looks fine , other shots look like they were rendered on a Commodore Amiga .
The Bad - Terrible acting abounds , especially Katee Sackhoff . In this , she plays a poor man's Ripley (Aliens) . Her character Niko certainly didn't fall far from the Starbuck tree . The difference from Starbuck here is that Niko has more than three emotions . Unfortunately , Sackhoff's acting style doesn't support such range , her facial expressions and movements all are so contrived and fast changing I can't take my eyes off of her for the wrong reasons , it's too distracting . It's similar to watching Jim Carrey's exaggerated expressions as Ace Ventura , though Ace was always meant to be over the top funny and not dramatic . Niko and her husband have zero chemistry , he acts like somebody who's uncomfortable around children and gives off a weird uncomfortable vibe in scenes with his daughter . None of the characters are likable except William/Samuel Anderson who , as always , is a pleasure to watch .
The Ugly - The cinematography is dated , circa 2004 . Identical to Battlestar Galactica with loads of shaky-cam and awkward excessive snap zooming . The cinematographer from Another Life also worked on Battlestar Galactica so that explains that .
The music is amateur hour . Every time the cheesy music starts playing , it signals the viewer that something juvenile is coming .
I like just about anything Sci-Fi , I was a fan of the Battlestar Galactica reboot , but it's going to be a chore to watch any more of this mess . I'm hoping the aliens end humanity swiftly so that Netflix can spend the money on something more deserving .
Edit I managed to finish the series . The Earth story line is boring and illogical . The space story line is only slightly watchable with at least some action here and there . Both are filled with stupid actions and WTF moments . The writers should all be fired . I couldn't possibly nitpick everything wrong with the writing , there's simply too much going on here to even start . This show is second rate in every possible way .
Season One thoughts :
The Good - Decent special effects . Some CGI looks fine , other shots look like they were rendered on a Commodore Amiga .
The Bad - Terrible acting abounds , especially Katee Sackhoff . In this , she plays a poor man's Ripley (Aliens) . Her character Niko certainly didn't fall far from the Starbuck tree . The difference from Starbuck here is that Niko has more than three emotions . Unfortunately , Sackhoff's acting style doesn't support such range , her facial expressions and movements all are so contrived and fast changing I can't take my eyes off of her for the wrong reasons , it's too distracting . It's similar to watching Jim Carrey's exaggerated expressions as Ace Ventura , though Ace was always meant to be over the top funny and not dramatic . Niko and her husband have zero chemistry , he acts like somebody who's uncomfortable around children and gives off a weird uncomfortable vibe in scenes with his daughter . None of the characters are likable except William/Samuel Anderson who , as always , is a pleasure to watch .
The Ugly - The cinematography is dated , circa 2004 . Identical to Battlestar Galactica with loads of shaky-cam and awkward excessive snap zooming . The cinematographer from Another Life also worked on Battlestar Galactica so that explains that .
The music is amateur hour . Every time the cheesy music starts playing , it signals the viewer that something juvenile is coming .
I like just about anything Sci-Fi , I was a fan of the Battlestar Galactica reboot , but it's going to be a chore to watch any more of this mess . I'm hoping the aliens end humanity swiftly so that Netflix can spend the money on something more deserving .
Edit I managed to finish the series . The Earth story line is boring and illogical . The space story line is only slightly watchable with at least some action here and there . Both are filled with stupid actions and WTF moments . The writers should all be fired . I couldn't possibly nitpick everything wrong with the writing , there's simply too much going on here to even start . This show is second rate in every possible way .
[6.4/10] This was easily my least favorite What If? episode so far. Part of it is simply that I’m just more lukewarm on Doctor Strange than a number of other Marvel characters. I find him a little annoying, even post-transformation, and he doesn’t have the rascally charm that Iron Man does.
But some of it is that this doesn’t feel like much of a “What If?”. Instead it just feels like a...random Doctor Strange adventure? Obviously losing Christine is a big divergence, or it should be, except for the fact that everything we saw in the Doctor Strange movie pretty much happened as we saw it before. This is just an added mini-sequel, which doesn’t have much of a twist on anything we’ve seen previously or remix known stories in interesting/unexpected ways.
(The closest it comes is Dr. Strange walking into the street and seeing serious, potential world-ending events going down, a la Infinity War.)
It doesn’t help that I don’t care much for Christine. She and Strange had a pretty generic romance in the movie, so resting so much on his undying devotion to her doesn’t really track with my level of investment in the couple.
Still, there’s some cool stuff here to appreciate. I love the animation of Strange summoning various mystical creatures (including the same squid creature from Peggy’s episode?) and then briefly transforming into them. Likewise, his beleaguered look as he consumes more and more of them is striking. The look of the human characters is still a tad too janky and flat for my tastes, but once they start moving and things start getting a little more fanciful and impressionistic, the medium really shines.
I also appreciates that this is the first What If? story not to have a happy ending. The idea that if Christine died, Doctor Strange would be “half a man, living half a life,” accidentally destroy the universe, and get nothing more than a “You were warned, you idiot!” from The Watcher is a bold move. You can only pull this sort of thing off in an Elsworlds-type tale, so I appreciate the series going for it.
That said, I’m near the point of giving up on the MCU’s concept of time travel and alternate dimensions/timelines/branches etc. Endgame had a few headscratchers (mostly what the hell happened with Cap), but largely made sense, and Doctor Strange’s use of the Eye was internally consistent. But everything we’ve seen from there just gets fuzzier and fuzzier.
Why didn’t the TVA or He Who Remains get involved here? How was The Ancient One able to branch the timeline and make duplicate Doctor Stranges? (Doctors Strange?) Why is Christine’s death an “absolute point” in time, when obviously it’s avoidable in the mainline MCU timeline, with Stephen Strange still becoming the Sorcerer Supreme? I’m willing to grant the premise of the episode, and I hate to nitpick stuff like this, but it just seems like these MCU projects are getting further and further afield of consistency and a comprehensible framework the further we get into this multiverse business.
Overall, there’s still plenty to enjoy here. There’s an almost Twilight Zone-esque tale of obsession gone too far at the heart of the episode. But it’s centered on a lesser character with some peculiar story choices along the way.
[7.5/10] I appreciate that these episodes have been more in the vein of a mash-up than a simple twisted retelling of a preexisting MCU film. The basis for this one is “Fury’s Big Week”, or the stretch of time that comprises The Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Thor in quick succession. But it also has shades of The Winter Soldier with its conspiracy thriller elements centering Nick Fury and Black Widow. It loops in The Avengers with Loki’s arrival and eventual takeover of Earth. And of course, it invokes Ant-Man with a furious Hank Pym turning out to be the culprit.
The results are thrilling. For something that plays with familiar settings and characters, I was impressed at this one’s ability to surprise me. Hank Pym turning out to be the killer is a good twist. (I had expected it to be Bucky.) I guessed the reveal of Loki as Fury pretty soon after the mischievous god started doing things Fury never could, but it’s still an extremely fun reveal. And simple spins on the familiar like Fury considering using the Captain Marvel pager in his time of need help make this one a winner.
Plus, it plays the “for want of a nail” game better than any story we’ve gotten so far in What If?. The If You Give a Mouse a Cookie game results in an interesting line of cause and effect along the line sof “If Hope joins Shield, she’ll die in the line of duty, which will cause Hank Pym to come out of retirement to get revenge, which will lead him to take out the Avengers before they come the Avengers, which will cause Loki to conquer Earth unchallenged, which will bring Captain Marvel back to the planet a decade earlier and lead Fury to seek out Steve Rogers.” Watching the dominos fall there is entertaining.
The story is not without its weirdness. It’s nice to have Mark Ruffalo on board as Bruce Banner, but it’s kind of weird to see his likeness inserted into the lone Hulk appearance where he was played by Ed Norton. At the same time, some of the vocal doubles they use for folks whose live action stars didn’t make an appearance sound a little wonky. (Mainly Black Widow and Betsy Ross). But that’s to be expected with the shift in mediums and going back to a time prior to recasting. (Will we get Don Cheadle as Rhodey circa Iron Man 1, I wonder?)
Still, the show has fun with it. Samuel L. Jackson is a star, as always, finding ways to make Fury’s line-reads both dramatic and amusing. Likewise, Phil Coulson’s fanboying here is almost as endearing and amusing as Korath’s in the last episode. And as usual, Loki is a ton of fun, with a great dynamic between him and Fury in a pre-Avengers confrontation that echoes their ones in the main timeline.
On the whole, this one packs together an Avengers assissination mystery, a Phase 1 mash-up, and Fury-focused tale into yet another delightful What If? romp. There's enough seriousness with Pym’s anger to give the outing ballast, and enough oomph from familiar heroes being offed to create stakes, while still giving the whole thing a breezy vibe that makes the alternate universe yarn play like pure entertainment.
[9.2/10] Another great episode. This one was pretty perfectly paced, and everything unspooled nicely. The setup, with Dennis explaining his sociopathic method to seduce women, was a brilliant frame story to both lay the groundwork for the rest of the episode, and also to firmly establish the depths of the terribleness of everyone involved save for Dee (the “guy stuff” grunting and posing was hilarious in its awfulness).
The middle portion of the episode was great as the rest of The Gang misapplies the lessons and reveals their own methods. Dee screwing up her nigh-perfect, (or at least entirely self-serving) relationship with Ben because she’s worried she’s being DENNIS’d is a great tack. Charlie trying and failing miserably to apply it to The Waitress is hilarious. And Mac and Frank going for “seconds” and “thirds” on Dennis’s leftovers is amusingly pathetic and terrible all at once.
But things really kick into absurd, awful new gears at the carnival. The way everything intersects and falls apart in spectacular fashion is amazing. From Dee’s attempts to flirt with the carny, to Mac trying to do speed pitch and failing in his own schemes, to the ten car pile-up for Dennis, Mac, Frank, Kaylee, and Gladys in terrible turn after terrible turn, it’s a great exercise in things coming together but going completely wrong.
Overall, this is the show firing on all cylinders, finding something for everyone to do, and bringing the laughs.
[7.5/10] I love the concept here. Doing an Always Sunny-sized version of Waiting for Godot is softly brilliant. Having Dennis and Charlie as Didi and Gogo is a nice way to go, and setting it in a laser tag base is the sort of high concept absurdity I appreciate from the show.
And at the same time, I felt like this one didn’t quite hit its potential. It’s a big swing, and I admire that, but there were more moments that made me go “that’s neat!” than ones that made me laugh or left me lost and engrossed in what the show was doing.
Still, I like IASIP following Beckett’s tack and using a mundane situation as a metaphor for life. The notion of Dennis striving to achieve, in service of some nebulous reward, whereas Charlie (and to a lesser extent everyone else) wants to just do what makes them happy makes for a nice in-universe conflict. It also works as a broader representation of the tension between living a life in pursuit of instrumental goods vs. a life of intrinsic ones.
There’s plenty of neat touches in that regard. Dennis’s admiration for “Rutheford B. Crazy”, the mascot of this particular laser tag franchise, and his pursuit of success, only for him to realize that the real life equivalent committed suicide and declared it meant nothing, is a nice shock to the system. And the metaphor of following a prescribed goal and formula to stay on top in a fruitless competition versus the basic pursuit of happiness in the life we’re given finds a surprising amount of purchase as a basic existentialist concept wrapped in a laser tag strategy session.
I also enjoy the nuts and bolts aspects of the episode. Dennis keeping Mac and Dee angry and thus effective by denying and offering praise is in line with his scheming sociopathy. The same goes for him keeping Frank’s laser tag kit off, so that he doesn't sink their team. And all three deciding to just have fun instead is a nice rebuttal. At the same time, there’s some amusing, basic comedy in Charlie’s fascination with his “five-finger shoes” and inability to understand riddles (something that lines up nicely with the homage).
I also appreciate the subversion in the end, where it feels like the group has reached an epiphany and breakthrough, only to turn the whole thing on its ears and waste “Big Mo” with their laser tag guns. It’s a nicely fingers-crossed ending for this pack of degenerates.
There’s also a sense in which, beyond the whole thing being a metaphor for life, the episode is a metaphor for the group’s feelings about continuing with this show for fourteen seasons. That may be a stretch on my part, but I think there’s a bit of the subtext baked in there as well.
Overall, I like what the show was trying to do here, and the Becket pastiche mixed with It’s Always Sunny’s particular sense of humor and sensibility makes for a surprisingly harmonious mix. But it never quite reached that second level of greatness that the show’s best creative leaps often do. Still a good season and a nice way to cap it off.
[8.0/10] This episode is a lovely tribute to both the character of Black Panther and to Chadwick Boseman. The central premise is a little silly. Apparently Yondu abducting T’Challa rather than Peter Quill would not only have resulted in some key differences in the Guardians part of the ‘verse at key moments, but it would basically have solved all of the MCU’s problems.
Thanos would be turned into a humble gardener! Yondu would become one of the merry men in T’Challa’s intergalactic Robinhood operation! Drax’s wife and kids would be alive and well! Korath would be an encouraging fanboy of Starlord rather than someone who’s never heard of him! Nebula would be liberated and an operator in her own right! Those imprisoned by The Collector would be freed!
And that’s just for starters. Other stray comments basically make clear that T’Challa hung the moon, and the galaxy is a massively better place for having him in it. It’s a little over-the-top, but I’m hard-pressed not to enjoy the charm of it. Despite delving into some serious things, these What If installments have kept a largely light tone, and that helps some of the more exaggerated aspects of these fun thought experiments land.
To wit, while other episodes recreate prior MCU movies except with some big twists, this one makes more out of whole cloth. While it’s playing with the beats of the first Guardians movie -- assembling a team of misfits to stop a major threat with stops at Knowhere -- this is basically a heist film, with all the entertainment that comes from that genre.
Seeing Starlord T’Challa, Yondu, Thanos, Nebula, and the rest of the Ravagers team up to find the magic “embers” possessed by The Collector is a hell of a setup in and of itself. The show plays the Oceans 11 vibe to the hilt, with misdirects, twists, and diversions that bait the audience and spark the imagination. Seeing the various ploys and counterploys against The Collector is a blast.
Once again, the animation and design work is surprisingly effective here too. The colorful world of the Guardians translates well to the cel-shaded visuals. Seeing T’Challa do combat against The Collector with his arsenal of MCU Easter Egg toys results in plenty of neat moments. And watching his lair come alive, with the Children of Thanos taking on the remaining quasi-Guardians, is a blast as well.
(Plus hey, we get some more fun extended appearances from Howard the Duck and Cosmo the Spacedog, which is a nice treat for something easier to pull off in animation.)
And there’s serious stuff too. Yondo lying to T’Challa about his home being destroyed tracks well with Yondu withholding information from Peter, but with the exact layers being different due to T’Challa’s different bearing. Yondu recognizing T’Challa’s “heart of an explorer” makes the deception heartening in its way, and makes you buy their disagreement and reconciliation because there’s a believable emotional core to it.
Continuing the theme, I like that the episode sets up lingering resentment between Nebula and Thanos, with the Mad Titan (who gets a great line nodding to his unofficial title) putting his life on the line in order to save hers. It doesn’t wipe away what he’s done, but it’s nice evidence that the change of heart evinced here is genuine and not just superficial.
At the same time, it’s heartwarming as all hell when the battle’s won and T’Challa returns to Earth to introduce his old family to his new one. The combination of the two, and the way they mesh better than you might expect, is exceedingly sweet.
In the end, the lingering sentiment of this outing is that regardless of what far flung locale was lucky enough to have T’Challa, he would “belong anywhere” brightening the lives of all he came across. It stands as a lovely paean to the character and the man who breathed life into him, and a fitting final benediction on Chadwick Boseman and his contributions to this imaginative world.
[7.7/10] I was so pleasantly surprised by this! I didn’t really know what to expect, with this being Marvel Studios’ first foray into animation and the high concept premise of the show. But I really enjoyed what we got.
For a while, I expected that this was really just going to be the plot of Captain America: The First Avenger except with Peggy slotted in rather than Steve. And that would still have been perfectly fun! Watching this show hit the same beats of that film, except with small but significant difference thanks to Captain Carter being in the role rather than Steve Rogers would have been worthwhile on its own.
For one thing, I like how this episode, as Agent Carter did, focuses on how even with her accomplsuhments, Peggy faces discrimination because of her gender. Of all the people for the MCU to bring back, it’s funny that it’s Bradley Whitford’s returning from the all-but forgotten Agent Carter one-shot. But he makes sense as someone who always thought too little of Peggy, stepping into a leadership role after Col. Phillips is shot, and creating an internal impediment.
To the same end, I like how the episode flips the dynamic with Peggy and Steve, but tshowing how they still understood one another and would bond with one another, even if their situations were changed. The two still falling in love, only to have Peggy making the heroic civilization-saving sacrifice play instead, is still heart-rending, and a nice sign that even as major things change, some things stay the same.
But I also liked the places where this episode goes off the reservation! Howard Stark building a proto-Iron Man suit for Steve Rogers called “The Hydra Stomper”? Yes please! Captain Carter saving Bucky, thereby avoiding the Winter Soldier situation (at least with him)? Hell yes. Her finding the tesseract and bringing it back to the good guys on an early mission? Awesome!
The further along the plot of First Avenger that this episode gets, the more it diverges and makes its own rules and own story, and I really appreciated that. Her team’s attack on Red Skull’s stronghold made for a rolokcing conclusion. I don’t know who Red Skull’s “champion” was. (Hive? A Chithuri?) But watching Peggy fight a giant squid monster while the Howling Commandos rescue Steve made for a killer conclusion.
I was especially impressed by the fight sequences here. I have to admit that I had some reticence about the cell-shaded graphics. In truth, the vocal tracks didn’t always sink perfectly. But the action was surprisingly fluid and well-staged. The show uses the freedom of animation to add greater flow to Captain Carter’s badassery, and some of the combat has a more impressionsitic style that makes it top tier MCU fisticuffs. Even the use of lighting and color in these fights stand out. Going into What If...? my biggest concern was the visuals, but they came through like gangbusters.
Overall, this was an exciting start to this new show and raised my expectations for What If...? to be more than a shiny lark, and instead be a meaningful exploration of what these changes in the path might look like.
The first 90 minutes of this movie are absolutely fantastic. They build up Marla as such a despicable, horrid creature that I was actively begging for the Mafia to get sick revenge on her.
The last 30 minutes are Season 8 Game of Thrones level of terrible and ruin what was about to be one of my favorite movies this year. The steps they want to strain credibility were insane. Firstly her surviving after being drugged and put in the water were questionable. The mafia failing to kill her girlfriend was just...how in the world did they fail killing that girl?
Marla just fell in the water (and I'm not going into the 3 minutes she was able to kick in a glass front window underwater and maintain holding her breath), but she still has her wallet to buy things at the convenience store. She gets to her girlfriend literally just before the place blows up, which she had no control over because she literally waited for a taxi.
They complain that they have nothing left but the diamonds, and but they also apparently have a handy wig, a taser, some morphine knockout drugs to pull off some James Bond type of killing of Peter Dinklage. And then when Dinklage survives, he agrees to be her partner. Look, I get she's smart and was gonna kill it with the mafia. But the shit she did was unforgivable, and it strains my belief that Dinklage wouldn't just go out and torture her the first chance he gets. They did not present him as being a "money first" guy, so him overlooking the mother being thrown IN A PSYCHIATRIC WARD is nuts.
Look, I enjoyed 70% of this movie. It was an excellent horror thriller to that point. I would've loved if this movie went the route of Dinklage and the mob being mostly outsmarted by the crazy, maniacally, absolutely dastardly woman. But that movie NEEDED to end with Dinklage personally killing Marla. No if, ands or buts, anything but that ending ruins the point they spent the rest of the movie going for.
It really hurts me to trash this movie, because Pike was fantastic again in her role as a villain and Dinklage really made me want his character to succeed. But that ending was the worst type of cop out possible.
Started out alright, a bit different from usual Marvel movies. Continued to be alright, though definitely had its issues, but then the third act turned into a generic, uninspiring superhero movie. I liked Florence Pugh as Yelena, and I think she'll be good in the MCU going forwards. I was never particularly a fan of the Black Widow character, and I always felt that she was a bit out of place in the main Avengers line-up (same with Hawkeye). I'll feel the same if Yelena is put into that role, but at least she seems to have a bit more charm/sass to her that I think I'd rather have. I had mixed feelings about David Harbour's character. On one hand, I quite liked him, and I found him amusing. But I was annoyed that he was only ever used as comic relief and never really got a moment to shine. A lot of the action in this movie feels quite silly, and the main characters have really ridiculous plot armour, surviving horrible car wreck after car wreck. It makes sense when someone like Captain America survives these situations, but when a regular woman with literally zero super powers or physical enhancements survives, it's downright annoying. It's a superhero movie, I get it, it's not supposed to be over the top realistic. But this was just too much.
Overall, the movie wasn't a bad way to spend two hours. It was alright, and it's nice to see the Black Window character get her own movie as a sendoff. Just don't expect anything more than a generic action flick.
As much as I wanted to like this movie, and ESPECIALLY not wanting to throw shade on Dave Bautista, I'm afraid the words of none other than Macbeth are the most fitting as far as a review of this enterprise goes:
A.O.D. is but a walking shadow, some poor players
That strut and fret their two and a half hours upon the stage
And then are heard no more: It is a tale
Told by idiots, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
That having been said, the REAL shame here is, that, with just a little bit of re jiggering, and a little less stupidity on the part of any one of the panopoly of characters, and, this could have not only been an epic movie, but, possibly a even a (2 or 3 movie) franchise!
Any movie that starts from the jump with nekkid zombie stripper ta ta's is a go for me, just on the "Hmmm, I ain't seen THAT before factor alone. Now, throw in Siegfried and Roy's zombified Manticore' , and, you're going to hold my interest. Add super quick and agile "rage zombies, and a mix of your usual suspect "shufflin' and bitin' " zombies, as well as a full auto Drax the Destroyer, and a crew of mangey former tier one operators, who served their country honorably, but per current SOP, were promptly shat upon by the country that they so dutifully served, then, give them a chance to for once not just even the score but come out ahead, and, you HAD the basis for a pretty decent horror adventure flick.
But then SOMBODY had to go and try to grow a brain, perhaps thinking they could be "edgy", and, instead of delivering a fun, intelligent live action "Walking Dead" (first few seasons only), they decided to suck all the common sense from EVERY characters brain, and then have each one of them suddenly go mute at the most inopportune times, when a word, a note, or even a cryptic whisper, could keep someone from becoming zombie snackos'. Now add to that mix, a teenaged girl with one of the most full blown cases of narcissistic personality disorder ever witnessed on film, and have her played by an actor who every time she opens her mouth you just want to backhand her and send her to her room with no dinner. But, she's also a master of either guilting her father (team leader Scott Ward) for doing something she later admits "he had to do", or, forcing him to let her accompany the squad, (to "rescue the aforementioned STUPID friend) by threatening to run off and do it alone anyway, which is a certain one way trip. So, welcome to mercenary baby sitting, Z/A style.
All is not lost though as there are some nice bonding moments between Zen "man some of the shizz I've done" Vanderohe, and newbie merc / safecracker Ludwig Dieter, especially when it is discovered he doesn't even know Zombie 101 basics. Raul Castillos' "Mickey" who at first seems to be either a You Tube poser, or just a bit crazy, then actually turns out to be an honorable guy. Samantha Joe's "Chambers" is a formidable street fighter, but, sadly , her heroic last stand is wasted when in the end, she got a case of the mutes, when she could have saved the entire crew with a shouted warning.
Nora Arnezeder is believable as Lilly, The Coyote, even if she does let little miss prissy teen smack her around a bit, for helping another of Kates IDIOT friends do something stupid, that, in the end, does not bode well for the entire team. Tig Notaro I guess is OK, especially since she was a last minute "digital" substitute for Chris D'Elia, who was unceremoniously cancelled and erased from the movie due to misconduct of the sexual kind. It's not seamless, but, it's not distracting either. But, she too, got hit with the idiot stick at the last minute, and, her indecision literally was catastrophic. In BOTH their story arcs, Snyder chose to plagiarize, er, uh, be "inspired" by ENTIRE SCENES from "Aliens", then "edgily" flip the script, by declaring opposite day at their individual conclusions.
The longest walk of shame, IMO, goes to Bautista's character Scott Ward, for being either too blind of just plain dumb, to not see through the machinations of neither his Japanese Benefactor, nor his henchman sent along to fulfill the ACTUAL goal of the "heist". But, in his defense, a couple hundred million dollars tax free, can buy a mighty dark pair of rose colored glasses, and, even though he can't see the forest for the trees, nor, apparently when the passion fires of his former flame have burst into a bonfire. Her end was so telegraphed, that even as it occurred, you weren't really shocked, just saddened. Just as his end, and the way it came about, had one waiting for the sound track to cue up Alanis Morrissette, but, perhaps they couldn't get a music clearance..
ONE final chance at redemption comes in the form of the epilogue with Vanderohe, and, it could have played out the epic revenge scenario, but, alas it was not to be, and he, along with any chance at a sequel, was D.O.A.
So, in conclusion, I don't dislike this movie for it's short comings, but, because of it's unfulfilled potential. It didn't necessarily have to be all happily ever after, but, as you watch it, and the idiocy starts leaking out of the characters, see if you can glimpse the great movie that COULD have been.
One of Disney's classics, though after seventy-five years its reputation may have outpaced the film itself. After the financial disappointments of Pinocchio and Fantasia a year earlier, the studio tightened its belt on Dumbo in an attempt to make up for the losses. It worked in one sense, giving Disney the box office victory it needed, but that penny-pinching and corner-cutting hurt the finished product.
It's astonishingly short, barely weighing in at an hour including credits, which forces a sudden, jarring climax. The story's pace is quite smooth until then, taking its time to build characters and back-story, so by contrast the immediate rush to wrap everything up in a frenzied flash is disruptive. While it's cruising along in the first half, though, things are good enough. Speckled with colorful characters and a fresh circus setting, it bottles that classic, emotive Disney magic while still taking a few risks. The infamous pink elephant scene, in particular, is an unexpectedly surreal animator's playground that's several decades ahead of the curve. I was shocked to find offbeat similarities Danny Elfman's work in the film's score, too, which may suggest an even broader influence.
Playful and heartfelt, though deeply under-cooked, Dumbo feels like a breezy short story when compared to the richer, more complete films elsewhere in the studio's early catalog.
[Initial Impression] In this opening salvo for Apple TV+, M. Night Shyamalan gives us a slow reveal on a bizarre situation. Immediately, we discover the foibles of this couple making them not very likeable. I found the obscured camera angles, that I assume were done so to tell their own stories, to be distracting rather than facilitating the story telling. The pace teeters between boring and suspense. And even the suspense lead to a predictable outcome, but the set up for what will happen next and what is the real mystery behind this Servant, promises an underlying greatness to this series. Let's see if it pays off. I give the opening episode an 8 (potentially great) out of 10.
[Season One Verdict] That was disappointing. We put up with a lot, in hope of a season finale payoff: unlikeable characters, distracting camera angles, a preoccupation with culinary gore, all on the promise of unravelling the bizarre mystery. I think it is a crime to renew a series without fulfilling a seasonal arch. It was a waste of effort. No hidden depths here, just false teases. I won't be watching the second season and wish I hadn't watched the first. I give this series a 5 (disappointing) out of 10. [Mystery Thriller]
If I have to describe The Serpent in one sentence, it would be – a mess of casting and accents:
- The casting - Charles Sobhraj is Frenchman of Indian and Vietnamese parentage but Tahar Rahim is a French actor of Algerian descent. Close enough for BBC, I guess. :laughing: Several times in the series Sobhraj refer to himself as an ‘Asian’ and I was like, where is this ‘Asian’ he was talking about?!
- The accents – At first, I was very confused why all these British diplomats are concerned about two Dutch backpackers. Colonizers support colonizers? :thinking: Turns out they are supposed to be Dutch, German, Belgian. Oh! :open_mouth: Their terrible accents come and go, so you can easily tell they are all English actors. I hate when USA/UK make movies set in foreign countries but everyone conveniently speaks English instead of their native languages. :rolling_eyes:
Other problems I have with this show:
This series did not portray Charles Sobhraj accurately. In real life he was a mystique and captivating, but this is lacking in Rahim's portrayal. He plays Sobhraj in a very flat and dull manner. The constant blank stare into the distance wasn't enough to convince me he had any charisma.
The constant jumping back and forth in time isn’t executed smoothly. I'm sure BBC thought this was a clever device to create excitement/dynamism, but in fact it’s simply lazy and cheap way of story telling. A sloppy way of creating the drama to avoid having to tell the story well in a single timeline.
The lack of dramatic tension. Only in episode 3 did I get excited about what might happen. The most moving scene of the series is Dominique getting home. No time was taken for the viewer to have any empathy with any of the characters/victims.
All the “Mary Sue/Marty Stu” characterization - from Knippenberg to Siemons, there are too many lazily written cartoon characters. Their sudden and unexpected outbursts of anger seemed way over the top. Next you have Nadine – too many scenes where she decided to scarify herself to help the investigation. It seemed way too exaggerated. Actually, the show focuses more on these characters instead of Charles Sobhraj, it should have been called, “The people who hunt the Serpent down”.
That leads to my next problem with the show. Since most of the show is for the “good” Westerners, there is no mention of all Westerners helping Sobhraj in his crimes. The French businessman named Jean Dhuisme was left out. Barbara Smith (Canadian), Mary Ellen Eather (Australian), Hugey Courage (Belgian) were shown in the last episode but for a very brief moment, and no mention how Sobhraj recruited them. For some reason BBC didn’t want to focus on them, probably not to show colonizers in bad light. Westerns that aren’t rich enough to be rich in their ‘first world countries’ love to move to poor countries to live out their millionaire fantasies. No mention of another Western criminal - Jacqueline Kuster (German), she met Charles while they were both in prison, she was 34, while he was 51 years old. They wanted to get married. Speaking of which, why was Nihita Biswas left out as well? It would have been interesting to see more about Sobhraj‘s life after he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The show is just facts of what Charles did only from the Wikipedia article about him, one would expect the writers to do more research.
One last thing - I do realize that people in the 70s smoked more, but still it is repellent to watch every character smoking heavily in almost every scene.
[8.2/10] What a blast this is. I’m impressed both at how well WandaVision is able to replicate the 1950s sitcom vibe, especially for supernatural-themed comedies like Bewitched mixed with The Dick van Dyke show, while also including a subtle but palpable sense of existential terror beneath the three camera confines of the show.
I really enjoy how this first episode plays on the classic sitcom tropes: a couple not remembering an important date on the calendar, a wacky neighbor, a boss coming over for dinner who needs to be impressed. The show does a nice spin on them, while also feeling true to the sitcoms it’s paying homage to. I’m particularly stunned by the cast, who are able to replicate that acting style, and the editors and other behind the scenes craftsmen, who are able to replicate the rhythm, to such perfection.
What’s neat is that the episode works pretty perfectly separate and apart from its larger MCU connections as a solid old school sitcom pastiche. There’s a lot of nice setup and payoffs of gags, like Wanda repurposing a magazine's “Ways to please your man” article to distract her husband’s boss and his wife, or Vision singing “Yakety Yak” after decrying it earlier. Even the lobster door knocker routine was a fun and comical grace note to an earlier bit. As cornball as it is, there’s something charming about this sort of thing, right down to the “What do we actually do here?” gag about the computer company. And despite the light spoofing at play, this works as a solid meat and potatoes sitcom episode.
But the show goes a step further and has real fun with the fact that its leads are a self-described witch and a magical mechanical man respectively. There’s tons of amusing gags, starting with the intro, about the pair using their powers in trifling 1950s household sorts of ways. At the same time, it does well with the jokes about hiding their true identities. Vision writing off Wanda’s behavior as “European”, Wanda reassuring her neighbor that her husband is human, and Vision taking offense when a coworker tells him he’s a “walking computer” are all entertaining bits that make the most of the weird premise.
And yet, what really elevates this episode is the unnerving hints that there’s something terribly wrong going on here. It’s not hard to guess that after the events of Endgame, there’s still concerns about what happened to vision. The show plays with the melodic rhythms of the sitcom form to suggest something off at the edges here, in a really sharp way.
For instance, there’s an interstitial commercial featuring a Stark toaster, and not only does it feature the only bit of color in the black and white presentation with the beeping light, but the toasting takes just a beat too long for comfort. Likewise, the fact that Wanda and Vision can’t remember their story or how they got married is initially played for laughs, but then it becomes creepy when Mrs. Hart demands answers.
The peak of this comes when Mr. Hart chokes on his broccoli and the artifice freezes for a moment, leaving everyone paralyzed by the departure from how things work in this sort of situation. It’s a great piece of work, of a piece with the likes of Twin Peaks and Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared in its quiet horror.
I’ll refrain from speculating about who’s watching the broadcast we see or who’s in the monitoring room we seem to have an eye on, but the hints at what's really going on, and how that influences the images the audience witnesses, creates a great organic mystery and another layer to the proceedings.
Overall, this is a boffo debut for the series, and I’m excited to watch more!
[7.7/10] Another really entertaining episode. This is more explicitly doing Bewitched and 1960s sitcoms, and there’s a lot of sheer entertainment to be had from a riff on tropes of odd couples trying to fit into their idyllic neighborhoods.
I also appreciate the recognition of classic sitcom tropes and how they’d evolved in the subsequent decades. That goes beyond just the different decor in Wanda and Vision’s home. We see them walk outside and go seemingly on location, beyond the confines of a single set. We also see many more people of color populating their white picket fence town. It’s small details, but they add up to show change.
The notion of Wanda trying to impress Dottie, the queen bee of the neighborhood (Emma Caufield, aka Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and Vision to get in good with the neighborhood watch, so as to further their joint initiative to fit in works as a great premise for the episode. There’s a lot of humor to be wrung from off-beat Wanda trying to fit in with the Stepford-esque ladies under Dottie’s purview, and awkward square Vision accidentally fitting in with the guys of the watch.
What’s more, the set piece of the two of them trying to pull off a magic act at the local talent show, where Vision is functionally drunk due to some literal gum in the works, and Wanda has to work to make people think it isn’t magic, is fantastic. There’s a great, frantic energy to the whole routine, and both Olsen and Bettany play it to the hilt.
This was also a great episode for stray lines. The running gag of people chanting “For The Children” in unison brought a lot of yuks. The poor mustached man from the prior episode going “That was my grandmother’s piano” when Wanda turns it into a wooden standee was a solid laugh. And one of the housewives in the audience asking “Is that how mirror’s work?” when Wanda uses them to try to explain Vision’s phasing hat trick had me rolling in the aisles.
But it’s not all laughs. There’s more horror at the edge of the frame that’s done quite well. The presence of an airplane that’s visibly Iron Man’s colors seems to shock Wanda as revealing that something’s wrong here. When Wanda assures Dottie that she doesn’t mean any harm, Dottie says “I don’t believe you,” in genuinely frightened tones, while a strange voice cuts through the radio, causing her to break a glass and bleed fluid that likewise breaks through the black and white color scheme. It’s another superbly done unnerving moment.
There’s also some interesting lines that have double meanings that are quickly glossed over, like their new friend saying “I don’t know why I’m here,” seemingly referring to the garden party, but also suggesting she’s been wrapped into this fantasy world somehow and doesn’t know why. There’s a lot of little bits of dialogue that work like that in this one, and it’s fascinating.
We also see and hear some loud thumping, played for laughs in the “move the beds together” scene (another wink toward classic TV changes), but also witness it used for legitimate scares. There’s some frightening imagery when the man emerges from the sewers in a beekeeper outfit and more “Who’s doing this to you, Wanda?” calls are heard, especially when Wanda uses the power to rewind the tape. The advent of a pregnancy is an interesting development, and the arrival of color with their kiss is some great effects worth.
I’m nursing a theory that this is all part of Wanda coping with the loss of Vision, feeling sick or afflicted and unwittingly creating this fantasy world out of some kind of grief, wrapping more and more people into it. Whatever the answer, color me appropriately intrigued by the mystery, charmed by the pastiche, and appropriately disturbed at the hints of something deeply wrong with all of this.
So we reach the end of Phase Three, and what an ending this is. Not as epic in scale as Endgame and not as good as it either. But, this to me, is better than Homecoming. Better arcs, a better realisation of character and overall an excellent way to represent story through visuals.
For some Mysterio has been poorly represented in recent media. But here, he is done so well and the abilities are Doctor Strange visuals of good. While still not copying anything we've seen yet. This allows for great tension and using trust against the characters that I don't think has been seen in the MCU since The Winter Soldier.
Tom Halland is Spider-Man. There's no denying it, he was born for this role as Robert Downey Jr was for Iron Man. Which makes this story sink so well into the narrative when it all comes down to loss and how to avoid falling into stress and anxiety's grip. Which makes this an important movie to follow Endgame. Wrapping everything up nicely and even starting some great elements for the future.
So yes, there are end credit scenes in this movie. Two of them. But instead of not caring about a bit of strapped on humour, stay. These scenes are vital for the future of this series of films. Plus, there is an added bonus for those who are fans of the original Sam Raimi trilogy.
So yes, it is a good movie. But there are flaws. For one, there is the whole convenient timing and placement of things. Which I thought they were going to explain but never did. The story does feel like a bit of rehash of Homecoming and how the motives of some are shown, and that was my biggest gripe.
This film is funny, has good action, pretty well-done CGI and amazing performances from all its cast. This movie deserves to follow Endgame and closes Phase Three fluently. Spider-Man: Far From Home is a great movie and has given me hope for the future of Marvel's plan.
8.6/10
Only in the most vague way is this related to Train to Busan. This is a zombie movie based in South Korea set 4 years after the outbreak we saw in Train to Busan. I can admit that Seoul Station wasnt that good either, but at least they tried even with the choppy animation.
But here they go full ham on terrible, terrible CG and law-breaking physics. 4 years of disuse and the cars work, the roads are totally clear, there is electricity and functioning machinery. It just can't be.
This movie is clearly targeted towards fans of the original because there are some lines in English, awful awful cheesy dialogue that belittles the experience of living in a zombie infested wasteland and just contextually makes no sense at all.
And everyone in this movie is ugly and mentally insane. I liked Captain Seo, great character that makes sense, but Hwang is just bad to be bad. The military went full evil and now they're doing death matches. You also can't start a movie with heart wrenching scenes and expect us to care about the characters. Motivation for the main group also isn't really developed or explained and only really is justified by a flashback or singular line here and there.
All the English casting also makes no sense. I just can't understand why this film was made this way.
Large sections of the movies are completely in CG, they're actually awful and they look so bad. Skip this film, it just ain't worth it.
[9.2/10] Every season, BoJack Horseman does at least one format-bending, stylized, impressionistic episode. And almost every season it blows me away. I don’t know if this tops “Free Churro” or “Fish Out of Water”, but it at least sits comfortably with them, an allegory for the act of death, the process of letting go and reckoning with your life and its end.
There is something very Sopranos about this, not only the implied demise of our main character, but also in the dream space he occupies, one where the ghosts of his past return to haunt him. This isn’t quite “The Test Dream”, but it fits into that same liminal mode that David Chase’s show (and again, also Mad Men) would go to when they wanted to make their points in a roundabout way.
It is a frightening, beautiful, challenging episode of television. It is frightening because it treats the act of death as a horror movie, where a big pile of sentient black tar goes after you, where the bystanders melt into avian husks, where there’s nothing on the other side. It is beautiful because it conveys the act of leaving this mortal coil as one of art, where true to BoJack’s psyche, each of these deceased people in his life goes out putting on a show, plying their trade in one form or another, until the time is right.
And it’s a challenging episode because it asks us what the value of life and the value of death are. It asks whether there is “good damage” that means something or if that’s just a way to treat being happy as something selfish. It asks if valorizing sacrifice makes us less fulfilled in our lives. It asks if the best parts of our lives justify the worst parts. It asks if the choices we make in life add up to something in the finally tally of our days and nights. It asks if it’s worth it to care, if there’s any sort of reward or self-justification for putting so much effort into our projects and plans.
And it asks whether it’s all worth it, what the best way to live and the best way to die are. It doesn't answer these questions. It only presents contrasting views spoken over a dinner table, one where old wounds are reopened and the faces of death BoJack’s scene and heard and internalized play out his own internal dilemma as he waits on death’s door.
It does all of this with words and tones and images that catch the eye and pierce the heart. The way that the episode presents these debates works because each of these characters feel fully-formed and represent different perspectives. Each captures both a contrasting view of what the best life is, while also reflecting the people that BoJack has known and mourned, in one way or another, in his past. That gives their conflicting points weight, sheathed in the personas of the losses that have shaped his life.
It accomplishes its heights in the shows that each puts on. Sarah Lynn sings a haunting rendition of “Just Keep Dancing”. Her song suggests a guilt still dripping from BoJack’s soul, from bringing her into this business and teaching her that continuing to perform is the only way, until it killed her. Corduroy, not one of the more poignant deaths in the series, dies doing an acrobatic rope trick, one that befits his method of death.
BoJack’s father performs a poem, one where we understand in greater depth not only his suicide, but his wish that he could take it back, that his mid-air clarity was doomed by the choice he made seconds before. And yet, before he takes the stage, he tells BoJack that it didn’t matter, that he wished he’d cared less, and that he put up walls because he didn’t want BoJack or his wife to know how much he did care. Maybe that’s just what BoJack wants or needs to hear right now, or maybe it’s the confession of a man more complicated than BoJack quite understood until he became a xerox of a xerox of him.
BoJack’s mother performs the routine we heard about in “Free Churro” accompanied by the uncle whose death helped spin her life out of control. Her ribbon dance has a haunting quality to it, with moves that seem impossible, accompaniment that floats in the air, and a contrast between the hard part and the easy part that leaves her long alabaster prop irrevocably stained with the mark of black death.
And then there’s Kazzaz, the master of ceremonies, there to rundown BoJack’s life: what he did, what he didn’t do, who he was, and who he wasn’t. When it’s all over, the goop takes him too, killing him slowly in contrast to his compatriots, eating away parts of his body like the cancer did, until the drip-drip-drip finally ends. Each has a performance, and each leaves through that door to oblivion in a way that’s befitting.
The show captures the dream logic of all of this wonderfully. Without a wisp of transition, Sarah Lynn goes from being the little girl BoJack met on the set of his show, to the adult performer who succeeded later in life, to the drugged out starlet who died sitting next to him. The man who represents his father has Butterscotch’s voice, but Secretariat's body, nicely representing the way that BoJack conflated his real life dad with the one he imagined filling that space as he sat in front of the television screen. And Beatrice goes from being the younger, vibrant woman BoJack once knew, to the sick old woman he left in a home.
This isn’t a show that’s typically particularly well-designed or animated. There’s creative material in the visual presentation for sure, but normally the actual animation is fairly basic. But here, BoJack Horseman’s production team really challenges themselves. The flooding of the black gloop, the impossible geography of the home where BoJack meets his dead friends and family, the perspective changes as he runs through it and ends up back where he started, all have an immediacy and shifting perspective that the show doesn't always go for.
But the most haunting image is the glimpses we get of BoJack in the pool, an image that connects to the show’s intro, and hints at what’s really going on here. There is a boldness to all of this, not only killing off your main character, but doing so in a way that breaks with the formal limits of your series, that confronts him with the death he’s been a party to, and presents his brain seeing and doing what it needs to in order to make peace with that.
It ends on a note of nihilism, on the possibility that none of this mattered, that there’s nothing he could do to stop it, and that the best and only thing to do now is die. But when he does, he wants to be on the phone with Diane, he wants to know how he’s doing. BoJack is dying, but even in that, he cuts against the nihilism. If none of it matters anyway, even if it all ends anyway, he wants to die caring, caring about someone he loves, someone he wants to be happy and whose joys make him happy, whether he’ll be around to see it or not.
Okay, it's another silly holodeck episode quite soon after 'Take Me Out To The Holosuite' (and aired fairly close to Voyager's 'Bride of Chaotica'), but DS9 somehow made these work. There's a sense of full commitment from all involved and the way they come together is quite creative, and now far removed from the typical "holodeck gone wrong" scenario. In this case the stakes are very low - the holodeck safeties are even working! - but it's a nice testament to the crew's friendship with Vic.
I also just enjoy heist stories, and even though this is as formulaic as they come it's clearly doing it on purpose. All of the cast just fit into their assigned roles (and how good does everybody look?). Sisko makes a welcome argument about the race issues of the time which is similarly countered well by Kassidy.
The episode also managed to get a great bunch of supporting actors to play the gangsters, and they are absolutely perfect. Trek often falters when filling these kinds of roles and we end up with watered down cartoon character bad guys, but everyone here just adds some sparkle to their roles as well as coming across as natural.
It's a dumb episode too. The fact that the holodeck program can't just be fixed isn't really given any proper due and the whole thing could be seen as a waste of time given the whole war thing that's going on. But it can equally be viewed as a breather before the storm. Despite my dislike for the swing music that keeps featuring in these Vic episodes, we do find out that DAYYMN Avery Brooks can sing, and "the best is yet to come" can certainly be seen as a message for what we're about to get into with the remaining episodes.
One thing I can say about this, is that when DS9 decides to do something strange then it fully commits to it. This episode is one that almost fails but pulls through due to its charm and the rich history of the characters and relationships on screen. The pairing of Kira and Odo is one that I've read a lot of viewers discontent with, but I actually found it to work despite the somewhat manufactured nature of it.
A lot of the odds are stacked against this one. We are introduced to Vic Fontaine who I have to admit is a character that I never quite clicked with, but he somehow manages to not grate too badly with me (once I get past his annoying use of dialogue). The 1960s swing music is a a bit too much - and we have to sit through complete songs - but the whole setting somehow seems to nestle comfortably into the show. I'll feel similarly annoyed when he makes future appearances, but I'll also warm to him as the episodes continue.
It's also a far more natural holodeck environment than anything Voyager has done by this point in time. I can understand why the crew would come here to relax.
I remember watching this episode when it first aired and feeling a bit sideswiped by the whole thing. I think that's just because I wasn't expecting it, and I've found myself warming more to it with subsequent rewatches. It's due to the journey we've been on with both Odo and Kira that I feel very invested in what happens between them, but the show could have done a bit more to build up to this naturally.
The dinner between Kira and Odo is genuinely tense and exciting stuff due to the way it's arranged, with Odo not realising he's speaking with the real Kira. We as an audience are waiting for everything to crash and burn in ruins, but simultaneously delighting in seeing Odo really doing well and wanting it to work out. The final moments between them on the promenade manage to be both silly and gorgeous, and I can't help smiling. I'm happy they finally get together.
There is a truly awkward moment during the dinner scene where Vic randomly begins singing and is just staring at Kira and Odo. It's weird and creepy.
Not my favourite. I love angst in love stories, I don't mind the uglier side of relationships, but not when it feels like the characters absolutely cannot stand each other. The arguments were too petty and too annoying and too cliché to actually build any sort of meaning or commentary beyond what we were given at face value. Yeah, alright, the movie proves love isn't a bed of roses, but it does so in an uninspired way in my opinion, then trying to salvage itself by throwing a few callbacks and clever dialogue about the relationship between love, life and time that all just mostly fall flat (even if there's some genuinely good moments in the midst of it all). Jesse and Celine work as a fleeting relationship, not as a long lasting one. In the other two films you could see they got on each other's nerves but it worked cus they were only in each other's presence for a brief period of time. This film wants so hard to be realistic, but there's nothing realistic about these two staying together for this long. The creator of this trilogy should have realised this worked better as a succession of one night stands.
[5.5/10] It’s impossible to process Justice League without considering Batman v. Superman, the film’s literal predecessor, and The Avengers, its spiritual one. Justice League is so much in conversation with these films, so much reacting to them and responding to them and in the twin shadows of them, that the movie almost doesn’t make sense without them.
It was The Avengers, the 2012 superhero team-up film, and its billion dollar box office take, that sparked Hollywood’s current fascination with cinematic universes and builds to franchise-wide crossovers. It is the seismic event in superhero cinema that moved D.C. from making siloed, solo flicks for its best-known characters, to packing as many recognizable faces and logos into each movie as possible, and promising more interconnected adventures to come.
On the surface, Justice League borrows plenty from The Avengers. Both films feature an alien invasion led by a helmet-horned antagonist who promises to pave the way for a bigger bad to come. Both feature the occasional extraterrestrial cube which some want to use as a power source and others want to use as a weapon. And both feature a collection of heroes who are not on the same page, and bicker and take sides with regularity, and need a grand event to reunite them. Having Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon on board to help pinch hit for Zack Snyder (the director of Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and this film) as needed just reaffirms the inevitable parallels between the first big superhero team up film and Justice League.
But just as Dawn of Justice felt like a reaction to Man of Steel, Justice League feels like an attempt at course correction from Batman v. Superman. Critics complained that BvS was too self-serious, so Justice League has plenty of jokes, light-hearted moments, and the sort of meta winks that have Whedon’s fingerprints all over them. Fans groused about Batman v. Superman’s runtime, so Justice League comes in at a crisp two hours.
And yet, this attempt to imitate the movie that started it all, and course correct from the predecessor that disappointed audience, just leads Justice League to make its own, brand new mistakes, which will no doubt be fodder for some third new direction in the next DCEU team-up film.
The most tangible of these issues is the awful CGI. Steppenwolf, the film’s computer-generated antagonist occupies an entirely different world than the flesh and blood characters in Justice League, and anytime his pre-rendered domain intersects with the nominally real world, there is a sharp dissonance that takes the viewer out of the picture. Everything from the villain’s uncanny valley visage to the fact that the climax of Justice League takes place an off-the-shelf Playstation 2 environment signals phoniness to the audience and makes all the action feel miscalibrated and inconsequential.
But the deeper problem is how underdeveloped most of the characters here feel. One of the advantages of the first Avengers film is that four of its six heroes had already had their own introductory films to establish who they were and what they were about, and the other two had played significant roles in those films. That meant that a handful of scenes to reestablish everyone was all you really needed.
Justice League, on the other hand, has only really introduced three of its characters in prior cinematic outings, and one of them spends most of this movie in a box (the film opens with the equivalent of a Superman flashback). That means Justice League’s hurried attempt to reintroduce its crew in the first act has more work to do, on top of introducing the major conflict, themes, and villain. Only Wonder Woman’s intro can coast on having a full film’s worth of exploration and coast on a thrilling action set piece. That leaves Aquaman to make abbreviated sarcastic comments to Bruce Wayne; Flash to have his entire situation explained in exposition by either Batman or his dad; Cyborg to banally brood in shadows and middling graphics, and for Batman himself to skulk around a cutscene from Arkham City. The result is that only Diana feels fully realized by the time they’re all ready for a team-up.
It also means that everyone comes off caricatured rather than developed. There’s not time in Justice League to really tell Cyborg’s story, so the film ups the brood factor to try to compensate. Flash goes from being the compelling, untested kid finding his way through all of this to being just a superpowered Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. And everyone, but especially Aquaman, starts spouting catchphrases and rejoinders so cheesy, I half-expected the King of the Atlanteans to blurt out “Cowabunga!” There’s interesting threads of stories for each of them, but it’s all either rushed or discarded as the film plows forward.
Despite those mistakes, Justice League finds its own unique, laudable moments, which are entirely separate from its predecessors. The peak of these is the “save one” sequence, where young Flash starts to get cold feet when things start to heat up in terms of the big fight. Batman tells him to simply save one person, and let it all unfold from there. It’s a simple idea, but one that blooms nicely as the sequence goes on, and provides the optimistic bent that had been so demanded in an organic way.
And as much as it follows the Avengers blueprint, Justice League also finds ways to distinguish itself. If there’s a single self-contained arc in Justice League, it’s the same one the Marvel equivalent had -- that these superheroes could be a powerful force for good when working together, but that they needed something important, something that was missing, to unite them. For The Avengers, that was a major death, but for the Justice League, it’s a resurrection. needed a death to reunite them. For the Justice League, it takes a resurrection.
To that end, the film manages to make good on some of the promise of Batman v. Superman that was lost in execution. In many ways, Justice League is the other half of BvS, the answer to the questions that the prior film was asking, and both films come out looking better for it.
It’s a creditable twist that when Batman seeks to revive Superman, and cautions Alfred to have the “big guns” ready, that saving grace turns out not to be a superweapon or a dose of kryptonite, but simply Lois Lane, there to remind Clark Kent who he is. It’s a clever moment, and an echo of that much-maligned “Martha” scene, which reveals how Batman now understands that the way to get to Kal-El is not through weapons of technology, but through their shared humanity.
By the same token, BvS wondered aloud and often if the world really needed Superman. and the closest thing to an overall theme Justice League has is that the world is broken without him. There’s a conviction in the film that Superman brought the world hope, and without him there’s only fear. He is a unifying, reassuring force, for his mother and the woman he loves, for the team that needs him, and the world at large. There’s new threads to pick up, and future teases galore, but the best thing to say in favor of Justice League is that it takes care to resolve much of what its predecessor set up in a satisfying enough fashion.
The only issue is that in trying to split the difference between its lead-in and its competition, Justice League turns out to be a fine but unavailing outing for what is supposed to be the climax of D.C.’s Cinematic Universe. It is not nearly as fun, enjoyable or clever as The Avengers. It is not nearly as contemplative or thoughtful as Batman v. Superman. Instead it’s stuck in a strange middle ground, taking a team-up that fans have been salivating for for decades and making it into a reasonably enjoyable, roundly generic superhero action flick, rather than the world-beating crossover the movie-going public has been waiting for. In trying to find a middle ground between those two approaches, and those two aesthetics, Justice League comes up with a film that’s lesser than either.
It's definitely a batshit-crazy story for our times, and I enjoyed the mad ride. However, the producers really had an agenda going into this, and I find myself resentful of their overall editorial approach. A few points:
Joe Exotic is a bad guy. He's charismatic and fascinating to watch, but the show does a lot to gloss over his actions. The series does its best to gloss over what he did and let him express his own side of the story, but come on. The guy was being harassed by Carole Baskin for legitimate reasons (exploiting and breeding exotic animals) and reacted in the most insane way. This is a guy who manipulated straight guys into marrying him in exchange for a steady supply of drugs.
The series does a huge disservice to Carole Baskin. Is she insane? Hell yeah she is. But crazy isn't a reason to send someone to prison. Yeah, she's as obsessed with big cats as the rest of the cast of crazies, but the huge difference is that she RESCUES exploited animals. She doesn't breed them. She doesn't sell them for profit. That the big takeaway of the series is "Well, she is as insane as the rest of them" really does a huge disservice to a significant difference between Baskin and the exotic pet breeders.
The series really overplays the "Baskin killed her husband" angle to prop up Joe Exotic and for the shock of it. It presents a lot of "facts" as-is to support this without exploring the arguments against them. For instance, Don's Power of Attorney included the activation clause for disappearance because Don Baskin was legitimately concerned he might disappear without a trace in Costa Rica.
So. A cool story, overall, and a crazy cast of characters, but it's unfortunate that people are taking this series as definitive documentary truth when it's a well-spun fiction with amplified craziness for the sake of shock value.
Dax is such an interesting character with the multitudes of lifetimes to explore, but somehow I thought that DS9 managed to make her the least developed character. Terry Farrel was great in the role and when the show gave her something really good, she flourished. This is not quite one of those stellar moments, however important it is to her character development.
The revelation that one of the past hosts was a murderer is a big one, but it doesn't feel like it's made as big a deal of as it should be. This should be a character-changing moment for Jadzia, but the effects of this episode seem to have zero bearing on her future. We see an angry and confrontational side of her personality develop here, but it will seemingly be kept under wraps from here on despite the revelations she has. DS9 was usually a bit better at allowing characters to change with big events (although, fair enough, it's not ignored entirely in future episodes).
The episode has some great moments, though. Odo stirring the souffle is quite charming and it's great to see that Bashir has matured enough to be a doctor rather than a womaniser, as demonstrated when Jadzia comes to sleep in his quarters. Also, how fantastic is it that Sisko has his entire senior staff over for dinner and cooks for them? Picard would never do that.
I think it's a great story and I love learning more about the Trill, it just falls a bit flat in the execution for me.
We've heard a lot about the Cardassian Occupation, but this is our first chance to see some of it thanks to some detailed flashbacks. The station looks like a very different place and it's a wonderful transition from the comfortable DS9 we're used to to the dirty and brutal Terok Nor. It's easy to forget that it was an ore refinery.
The changes in characters past and present are also a joy to see. Kira is a different person, younger and angrier and with a lot of reason to be scared. Odo is unsure of himself and we are shown a great contrast between his questioning skills in the past compared to how they are now (complete with a Columbo moment). We get to see what Dukat was like when he was in charge, with all the arrogance and power it brings. Even Quark is different, playing his part to fit in alongside the Cardassian's rule.
Besides giving us a solid crime investigation, this is an important character episode for Odo and Kira. Their friendship has been built on Kira covering up the murder she committed, and Odo seems to be able to forgive her for it. That seems out of character for him until later revelations (he's in love with Kira), but I doubt that storyline had been thought up at this point.
It's a reminder of what a dark place many of DS9's characters are coming from, and firmly guides the show along this path. There's even room for a little bit of comedy. Great stuff.
