Is American Horror Story: Cult the television equivalent of Marvel’s Secret Wars event? Fan favorites like Evan Peters are turned into unrepentant fascists, characters like Twisty make unexpected and inexplicable returns, and as nakedly as Cult demonstrates its aspirations toward political commentary it remains unclear what the show is trying to convey. The complexities of the issues Cult is trying to take on may result in a season that is as in poor taste as Secret Wars, especially considering their shared ideological murkiness. Because the show seems to take aim at both Sarah Paulson’s left-leaning Ally (the name, as AHS always is, is painfully on the nose) and Evan Peters’s Kai, one might accuse Ryan Murphy of false equivalence. And yet, Ally is unquestionably heroic and Kai is unrepentantly villainous. This distinction is important. On a day when DACA is under threat, representing an existential horror far beyond what AHS is artistically equipped to depict, the perspective that “everyone is worried over nothing, ‘both sides’ need to calm down” is unwelcome. At least as of the first episode, I’m not immediately alienated by some poorly thought out centrism.
While Cult is a high risk (and, perhaps, low reward) proposition, it gets a lot right. I found this episode inspiring fear and dread in excess of other seasons of AHS. It’s not just the political drama, either. Peters is a menace on the screen, chewing scenery, firing off nonsensical diatribes, and committing heinous acts. The sinister nanny is also a powerful fear-generating machine. The powerlessness of Ally and Ivy to intervene on the life of their child and protect him from this intrusion is profoundly unsettling. But beyond on that, it’s slick camera work and memorable costuming that does the job. The monstrous clowns that terrorize Ally and her son and commit suburban murders are as striking as the returning Twisty.
I’m appreciative that the show verified Ally’s encounters with the clowns as “real” as opposed to long-playing the possibility of hallucination. Horror rarely treats mental illness with the nuance it deserves and Cult is no exception. Ally’s condition played up as an isolation based horror is crass, and her treatment by both the narrative and the other characters is unconscionable. The quicker the show decides to pivot away from this hackneyed plot device, the better.
Overall, I’m intrigued by what is on offer with this season of AHS. I don’t expect any groundbreaking political commentary. For some, that might be enough reason to dismiss the show at best or argue it should have never been made at worst. I’m sympathetic to those arguments. But there’s something about the craft of this first episode that has grabbed me. And I appreciate seeing the naked fascism of Kai on screen, rendered as incoherently and unsympathetically as it deserves. But I shudder to think what other viewers might take away from Murphy’s glib and over-the-top depiction of the entire political spectrum. The fact that Kai might affirm or embolden some white supremacist is a horror of which I don’t need to be reminded.
9.7/10. I am still amazed at what they managed to pull off with The Mother in Season 9. There was necessarily so much build to who this woman had to be, all the things she had to represent and all the ways that she had to fit naturally into this world and the lives of our protagonists. And she does! This is a woman who totally makes sense for the gang, and totally makes sense for this show, and totally makes sense for Ted.
But there's more to her than that. She's not just a pot of gold waiting for Ted at the end of the rainbow. She is a woman with her own journey from the past to the present, with her own stumbles and trials and tribulations, that makes Ted just as much a light at the end of the tunnel for her as she is for him.
I'll admit, I found it a little too neat, and a little too "small universe" how many connections there were between her and the various important people and places from the show's history. But at the same time, I appreciated how the show filled in the gaps with things we already knew about, like her night at the club, or Ted's accidental class, or the return of the yellow umbrella to her apartment.
More than that though, I really appreciated the story, that would have absolutely worked as its own show, of a young woman who lost a significant other very young and very tragically, and believed that she'd basically won the lottery on her first ticket, and wasn't likely to win again. Telling that story in 22 minutes is hard, but the episode did a nice job at showing a woman who was weird and nerdy in a way that makes her fit to be a Mosby, but also different and someone with her own important journey to "a little ways down the road." The story of her moving on past her heartbreak with Max was quite poignant, and Christina Miloti delivered that monologue to her dead beau like a champ.
And my word, if you can avoid being move by her rendition of "La Vie En Rose," then you're a stronger man than I. It's such a lovely little moment, conveying both the melancholy and sweetness of her love. Her philosophy on the universe giving you one person works as an interesting counterpoint or echo of Ted's own philosophy about waiting for The One. While Ted is still trying to find his soulmate and worries he never will, The Mother thinks she'd already found hers and will never get another chance at something like that again. It's a nice way to show that the two have the same perspective, and yet have different flavors of it. All-in-all, it's a wonderful format-bending, mythology heavy episode, that still takes time to make us care about The Mother apart from our heroes, which makes the inevitable meeting that this show has been building too all the more meaningful.
**SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE SERIES. DO NOT READ BELOW THIS POINT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE ENTIRE SHOW**
In hindsight, it's interesting how Tracy moving past Max and being mistaken in her belief that the universe only gives you one person to truly love foreshadows Ted eventually moving on from Tracy and going after Robin in the finale. I still don't care for that decision, and I think it undoes too much of what this season accomplished, but in retrospect, I appreciate that Thomas and Bays set up that choice thematically here. It's good writing, even if I don't like where they went with it.
I loved this episode so much, even though it was heartbreaking. Is it really bad to love the Devil? 'cause I do. I just wanted to give him a hug. I loved when Maze tried to walk Luci away from the pub when she saw how happy he was. Maze keeps on being the best character on the show. She's so well-written and portrayed.
I really, really hate mum. Not my own, don't get me wrong but the goddess of all creation. She's the actual Devil.
And what a philosophical concept they showed in the episode. The psycho doctor's gonna have one hell (no pun intended) of a meeting. I kind of was expecting something to happen to Chloe at the very end, ever since she sent that threatening message to our crazy professor. Now I guess Luci will have to have one hell of a hell intervention with our lovely psycho professor. I hope he goes to hell rather than to Heaven, actually.
Since last week's promo I knew that first scene with Chloe wasn't real. But I completely lost it when he said "those are my love handles". I had to stop and I couldn't recover until 3 minutes later. I think Chloe certainly suspects he's the real Lucifer. I mean it was only hell of a faith leap she made letting Lucifer handle the gas chamber and running after the psycho doctor.
Anyways, let's see how it all ends up and how Luci makes the doctor tell him the poison reciepe to save her, and how on Earth is Luci going to explain it to Chloe.
What is the line between insanity and brilliance? Is it broad or thin? Does the one bleed into the other? The Aviator, Martin Scorcese's epic look at the life and times of Hoard Hughes, suggests that the two are intertwined, at least in this one man. The film follows him from his first crazy moviemaking schemes in the California desert to his great aviation triumph at a time when his psychoses have started to overwhelm his senses.
It's a "Great Man" biopic, so it hits some the expected beats. There's casual "cameos" by celebrities and notable figures of the time, a "nobody believed in me" set of obstacles, and wild but flawed individual at the center of it, figuring out his path from neophyte to bigwig. But Scorsese has the right touch to bring out the best of the form, balancing the big moments in Hughes's life with quieter scenes to explicate his fears and neuroses.
At the center of it all is Leonardo DiCaprio's crackerjack performance as Hughes. I have to admit, I'm not always a big fan of DiCaprio's performances, which I tend to find technically sound but rarely unique or moving. But here, he is a man on fire, playing the noted eccentric with an almost rabid charm and head full of dreams, but also conveying the man's vulnerabilities, and the way his mental deterioration eats at him as he tries to barrel past it. Short of his turn in Wolf of Wall Street, this is the most I've seen DiCaprio truly inhabit a character, and he gives many different shades and layers to the man in both his grand successes and utter failures.
Fortunately, DiCaprio has an equal to play off of in Cate Blanchett's stunning turn as Katharine Hepburn. Going into the film, I'd heard Blanchett's performance derided as a mere impression, but nothing could be further from the truth. While Blanchett certainly does well to capture the distinctive tone and rhythms of Hepburn, she imbues the character with such life, with a zest for the thrills of the world, a fear that she'll be exposed as a "freak," and a supreme insecurity that her days in the spotlight are over.
Hepburn's patter in the film is reminiscent of the real life actress's exchanges on the screen, but Blacnhett gives new dimension to it with her subtle change of expression when Hughes shows her how to fly, when she warns Howard not to let the press eat him up, and most notably, when she tells him that if he looses his mind, she'll be there to "take the wheel." Theirs is the most multi-faceted and engrossing relationship in the film, and that makes it all the more heartbreaking when it dissolves. Hepburn's nervous, affected laugh when Howard accuses her of always being on is stunning, and Howard's anger, and his bonkers response to burn all his clothes, everything that he'd worn while being with her, is another stepping stone toward his insanity.
The film engages in strong symbolism when it comes to signposting Hughes's growing neurosis. The opening scene features his mother bathing him, quarantining him, instilling in him a fear of sickness and germs and the creepy crawlies he can't see. She washes him with a special bar of soap, and in that cleansing bath, he's surrounded by lights.
As the film goes on, it shows the effect this seminal moment had on him. It dramatizes his germophobia well, depicting him as unable to so much as take one bite of his steak after Errol Flynn steals a pea off of his plate, heightening his perspective as he looks at a what appears to him to be a diseased roast at the Hepburn estate, and most strikingly in the film, refusing to hand a disabled man a wash cloth because it would require him to sully his hands.
That what makes it so powerful in the few times when he overcomes his phobia. The film doesn't have to tell you that Hughes and Hepburn have reached an important level of intimacy, it shows you, by depicting Howard offering Katharine a sip from his milk bottle, and then having a drink of it himself. In the same way, his commitment to his company and well-being are palpable in his meeting with Senator Brewster, who serves him a fish that stares back at him, and a water glass with a smudge, meant to unnerve Hughes, but Howard soldiers on.
The Aviator does well to show these neuroses growing. He slowly but surely feels the need to use his own soap more and more, to where he's washing his own shirt in the sink and waiting in the restroom like a prisoner rather than put his hand on a filthy doorknob to let himself out. He finds himself repeating things, a problem that becomes more pronounced as the film wears on, and culminates at the end of the film. Then there's the flashbulbs of all those press cameras, bringing back the flashes of those spherical lights that surrounded him in that quarantine cleanse, reminding him where he came from and what he's afraid of.
Apart from the brilliant performances and symbolism in the film, it's a complete visual treat as well. Scorsese and his collaborators color-correct the film to a tee, giving it a sepia-tinge that communicates the lost time of the film's setting. But they also give it these beautiful splashes of color, turning the film into toothpaste -- a wash of muted reds and seafoam greens. Scorsese's camera cuts across the joyous tumult of a Hollywood party, or follows a flurry of planes swarming in the air as Hughes fills the sky for his Hell's Angels picture, or shoots his great men, be they protagonist or antagonist, from behind, leaving them imposing but featureless.
The Aviator depicts its protagonist as constantly pushing, constantly thinking and dreaming bigger than those around him can imagine, or at least would advise. It also shows him paying a cost for this, suggesting that there is a price for this kind of thinking that is extracted from one's mental well-being. Even Hughes's final triumph in the film -- his rebuke of Brewster at the Senate hearings, his defeat of the slimy Juan Trippe in his scheme to take out his competitor, and the flight of his Hercules, an embodiment of the scope and audacity of his ideas forged in rubber and steel, are tinged with the unavoidable onslaught of his verbal tic. In Scorsese's film, Howard Hughes is very much the way of the future, but that thought, and all the good that this mentality brings, eventually overtakes him, and tells us that even the titans of old can have feet of clay.
Season 4 was simply amazing. What a finish!
I am a bit sad that the series hasn't picked up for a fifth season. Conversion therapy fallout and Betty's story would provide great frameworks for at least one more great season. But I sadly suspect this season finale is the series finale.
Libby: Caitlin FitzGerald really amazed me in her transformation. And this season is easily her very best, oozing confidence and sexiness. I am really happy that her character ended in a triumphant note.
Johnny Masters: Big claps to Jaeden Lieberher, who gave very surprising and poignant performance on this episode. He really played this under written character with a big heart, channeling a bit of River Phoenix in his teenager years.
Art: Art was totally played by Nancy, but he kept his dignify and my respect. It's sad that Art wasn't invited to stay. If the series is renewed, I strongly suspect he will come back either as an ally or as a foe joining Barton Scully.
Nancy: Every great series needs a villain and Nancy was a character that's all too easy to hate. But her drive is realistic and at least understandable. I am glad her character did not end in stereotypical total defeat. I suspect she'll thrive, although at far reduced capacity than she had hoped.
Lester: I am a bit disappointed that Lester did not get the full respect nor love he deserved. In a way, he dug his own grave, but he's a lovable loser and I was giving him a high five when he hooked up with a hottie caterer.
Betty: Betty has been absent in the last few episodes and her absence was greatly missed. She is by far among the most fascinating characters on this series, third only to Bill and Libby Masters (sorry Virginia). I hope she manages to regain custody with Austin, another great character.
Virginia: Virginia was never among my favorite characters, but she had an amazing run on the first season and her "shrink session" with Art this season was simply amazing. So I am very glad that this season finale returns its focus to Virginia, who simply glows and shines on this episode.
Bill: This series cemented my deep respect for Michael Sheen. Prior to Masters and Sex, I simply viewed him as a token British character actor who was born to play Tony Blair (in The Queen). But here in Masters and Sex, he plays a fascinating character with uncanny realism and attention to detail.
On a final note, writers did an amazing job this season with all the parallelisms, creating rich texture at very high efficiency. And the show looked really amazing, from set decoration, casting, and cinematography.
[7.6/10] Well, I guess I was wrong about last week’s episode replacing the improv-based interdimensional cable eps we’ve gotten previously. But I enjoy this entree full of bite-sized adventures for our heroes. It’s a throwback to Harmon’s “clip show but with new clips” bit from Community and fun to see the mini-stories thrown out rapid fire.
I particularly liked the opening pair of stories. Morty mistaking his new guidance counselor for a scary moon man is the sort of Bailey School Kids schtick with a Rick and Morty twist that really tickled my fancy. By the same token, turning the usual “humans trapped in an alien zoo” routine into a Contact-based hoodwinking is entertaining.
But I also really enjoyed the fact that Rick didn’t just zap away the memories of things that were too heavy for Morty to take; he zapped away his own minor mistakes, like the phrase “taken for granite,” not to mention things that implicate his family members, like Beth choosing Summer over Morty in her alien Sophie’s Choice scenario.
While most of the stories were amusing in that black comic way the show’s mastered, it feels like they’re all another brick in the wall of Morty getting tired of Rick’s bullshit, and the rest of the family’s bullshit too. The twist that both Rick and Morty lose their memories and have to use the vials to figure out who they are revitalizes the premise a bit, but also leads to the bleak realization that after seeing all that stuff, the pair want to have a suicide pact.
It’s played mainly for laughs, with Summer barging in on them and refueling their memories in a desultory fashion like she’s had to do this dozens of times, but like most episodes of the show, it finds the humor in something that, at its core, is pretty damn dark. (And then “no wonder you guys fight all the time and are always behind schedule” sounds like a not so veiled bit of self-commentary about Harmon and Roiland, which is a little discouraging.)
Overall, it’s a fun, rapid-fire premise for an episode that allows the show to deliver its humor and demented scenarios in quick hit format, but which still uses the form to offer a commentary on its two core characters, what they’ve seen, and the frustrations and vanity and ego that drives them to want to end it all. The fact that the show can wring comedy from that is just another pelt on the wall of its achievements.
"Here's Major!"
Wow, that writing and acting, especially Rahul (Ravi), was simply amazing these two episodes. Too bad the zombie hooker (Natalie) wasn't there but I have hope Major is going to search for her in S3. I was genuinely surprised that they get rid off the whole Du Clark story branch so quickly (but I called it that Du Clark will help Major). Well, kind of, the replacement is much worse, holding the danger up that Max Rager is.
I do think it's a waste in a sense, as they could have gone a bit further with the whole Du Clark/Rita story and the Rita character.
But the same goes for Drake but he had the same kind of "heroic" end for him as the other guy Liv dated besides him and Major.
Blaine being such a badass was surprising. But here his blanko character naure played out, I'd say.
While I was figuratively at the edge of my seat these two episodes, overall episode 18 had more scenes that I really loved (Ravi was excellent).
I wonder where exactly season 3 will take us. Now that Clive is in the loop, Du Clark is out of the picture, Drake is gone. It does make me a bit anxious about the direction. It seems it's about to get dark in S3. But I hope it stays, most of the times, rather lighthearted.
6.5/10. There were some positives here. The titular song and dance number (with unexpected but pleasant return of Angie!) was a lot of fun, and showed off some hidden talents from the cast. It's churlish to continue to compare this show to Buffy, but this is just the kind of flight of fancy that series would employ from time-to-time to liven up things a bit and show that beneath the genre-trappings of its premise and occasionally darker and more serious material, it could kick back and just entertain. The colorful costumes, the well-employed dream logic, and the hoot of an ending made the opening of "A Little Song and Dance" one to remember.
And what's more, the scene between Peggy and Jarvis as they were walking along a desert role is one of the best in the entire series. It felt true to those moments when friends are at their lowest and know how just what to say to hurt the other. Jarvis's statement that everyone around Peggy dies was coldblooded, and his immediately dismayed reaction after saying it perfectly underscored what a terrible thing it was to stay. And yet Peggy, paragon of strength, not only wipes away her tears and remains unshaken, but turns around and not only owns the uncomfortable truths and justifying virtues of what she does with her life, but rightfully spits it right back at Jarvis for the lack of any price he's had to pay for these adventures. And his confession to Peggy about his wife's inability to have children, about his cowardice and his unspoken guilt at having been the cause of it, it doesn't change the truth or honesty of anything Peggy's said, but it changes her perspective and attitude. Jarvis is having his first taste of this kind of loss, and finding it doesn't agree with him.
But the rest of the episode was fairly dull and uninteresting, even as it was attempting to be flashy. I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- I have little-to-no investment in the love triangle between Peggy, Sousa, and Wilkes. Sousa continues to be a sort of formless space-eater of a love interest, whose dogged agent routine was tired before the show kept trying to glue he and Peggy together. Wilkes is, at least, a bit more interesting with the way he's been affected by the zero matter, but despite his scientific background, he hasn't been able to conjure up much real chemistry with Peggy either. So when too much of the episode has Peggy stumbling over these issues, I tend to push back.
Still, those elements didn't overwhelm the episode like the boring and repetitive plotting did. Agent Carter hasn't proven itself to be particularly adept at layering crosses and doublecrosses on top of one another in an intriguing way. With all the attempts at betrayal and charades and attempts to discern where real loyalty lay, the episode felt jumbled. While the various twists and turns on that front were not especially difficult to follow, they just felt gratuitous and unnecessary, and not early as mysterious or intriguing as they seemed to be pitched as. How many times did we need to see someone unexpectedly hold someone else at gunpoint in this episode? Eventually, it becomes comic.
Of course, with my utilitarian leanings, I tend to side with Agent Thompson for wanting to blow up three dangerous people who have each shown themselves willing to take the lives of others (two of whom have nigh-uncontrollable superpowers) rather than risk their killing anyone else. I realize that Peggy wants to save Wilkes on principle (and her defense of her decision to save Dottie and accusation that Jarvis is a would-be murderer dovetails nicely here and served as another layer to their earlier argument), and I can appreciate the idea (played with in Jessica Jones as well) that bad guys need to be brought to justice rather than summarily executed by the people going after them.
That said, we know, and they know, the kind of damage that Whitney Frost has caused, could cause, and seems poised to cause. Any of it that comes to pass is on Peggy's head now, because she and her team had a chance to stop these people and refused to take it. Even if, as Peggy believes, Wilkes is a purely good and innocent man who's being warped by the zero matter, how many other good and innocent people will have to die because she could have stopped Whitney Frost, or at least allowed it to happen, and wouldn't.
But hey, that's network television for you, even with a show that's as adventurous, and occasionally script-flipping as Agent Carter. The rest of the episode was hit or miss. Jarvis's scene with Ana was another strength here, as Ana Jarvis, who started out as a collection of quirks, has been sketched out well in her brief time on screen as someone who believes in facing facts even if they're unpleasant, while not letting them get in the way of her and her husband's lives. The support and love shown between the two of them is impressive, especially considering "Mrs. Jarvis" was an unseen character in Season 1. And Samberly continues to hew too close to the irksome side of the annoying-endearing spectrum for comic relief characters.
"A Little Song and Dance" is the kind of episode that earns being just above the doldrums through one incredibly fun scene and one with incredible emotional weight and character moments. The rest of the episode falls into cheesier tropes and messy plotting, not to mention weak romantic angles, that do no one in the show any favors. While there's plenty of interesting elements that have been teed up for the finale (I suspect we haven't seen the last of Howard Stark's gamma cannon in relation to Wilkes's transformation), this episode doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence that the series will be able to stick the landing in terms of its plot, even if it can pull off a pair of superlative sequences that show of the show's creative side and display the amazing relationship and strong performances between its two leads.
Heard of the 80/20 rule? Okay, let's park that til later then...
Julia Roberts was as big a female star as we'd seen back in 1997. That was her decade. From Pretty Woman to Notting Hill, she was the world's sweetheart. She had some stickers along the way but nobody held them against her. She was untouchable.
The best evidence of that is this film. She plays an absolutely atrocious bitch in it - yet... it's deemed fine because it's her.
Every decade has an actress who tries to out-do Katharine Hepburn. The sparkle of Bringing Up Baby is what the editor of this film is looking to capture. Roberts is gorgeous in that girl-next-door-with-a-million-watt-smile way. And Dermot Mulroney provides that handsome but dumb male lead that all good rom-coms cast.
The problem watching 20 years after the fact is that the character Julia Roberts plays is a grade A bitch. First round draft pick bitch. And it's impossible to forgive her for her actions.she spends 80% of the running time being atrocious and the final 20% is spent accepting her actions and allowing redemption - with completely out of character reactions to her terrible deeds. Believability = zero.
The film has some positive points - a crowd pleasing rendition of Say A Little Prayer (one of life's perfect songs). And the standout high point of the movie by a clear margin, Rupert Everett's portrayal. The saving grace of this film without question.
At its release I loved this film for its witty take on a romcom. Watching now is a tough task.
6/10
[5.8/10] In the climax of Pirates at the Caribbean: At World’s End, a maelstrom erupts. Ships swirl around one another in the massive vortex. Indistinct combinations of pirates, British soldiers, and assorted mermen leap from one ship to another and cross swords. The combination of rain and cannonfire and whirling destruction makes it nigh-impossible to distinguish friend from foe or hold your bearings amid the supernatural skirmish.
It is an exhausting set piece: cacophonous, muddy, and endlessly busy without ever really finding a clear throughline for the action. Instead, it becomes a torrent of undifferentiated gray goop, flying across the screen with little point or purpose. That is, sadly, a microcosm of the movie itself.
At World’s End does contain good stories and good ideas. Jack Sparrow having a taste of the afterlife and wanting to avoid a repeat engagement at all costs is a good motivation. Will Turner being forced to test his loyalty to his fiancee against his loyalty to his father is a good moral dilemma. Elizabeth Swan seeking revenge for her father’s murder is a good driving impulse. Commodore Norrington trying to earn his redemption after his earlier betrayal is a good character beat. Davy Jones and Calypso as supernatural jilted lovers is a good concept. The fall of piracy and rise of commerce on the open seas is a good animating theme for the picture.
But by god, you just cannot do them all at once or, at the very least, you cannot do them all justice, even in the span of a bloated, nearly three-hour movie. Despite that overextended runtime, and all of that ground to cover, At World’s End still can’t justify its length. For a movie where there is constantly something happening, usually something that’s theoretically important, it is a remarkably boring film.
That’s largely because with so many plots and schemes and shifting alliances, the film still lacks the time or the real estate to really explore any of those ideas in depth, let alone find inventive ways to blend them with one another. Everything has to be done in shorthand. Major plot developments happen in a few quick scenes before it's onto the next thing, leaving each event feeling weightless. There’s plenty of incidents in the movie -- it hardly takes a moment to catch a breath -- but each feels more airy and threadbare than the last.
The one saving grace in the thing is Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbosa. Liberated from the burden of having to play the villain, he’s free to chew scenery with abandon. As a comic side character an ally, Barbosa is just too much fun, leaning into the pirate speak and faux-grandiosity with aplomb and livening every scene he occupies.
Were that the same could be said for Jack Sparrow. If you thought the character was overexposed after the last movie, just wait until there’s literally a dozen of him on screen at the same time. Depp’s tic-filled performance was a breath of fresh air when the first movie came out, but here he’s a reminder that not all side dishes should be the main course. There’s something to the idea of him being extra mad after his stop in Davy Jones’s Locker, and his anxiety-ridden quest for immortality has some juice, but after nearly eight hours of movie, his act soon starts to grow tiresome.
That’s almost impressive in a movie with far too many characters for any one to really command the screen or the script. Beckett is nominally the film’s big bad and gets an implausible but artsy demise, but it doesn’t mean anything since all he’s done for two movies is spout villain clichés rather than become a full-fledged character. Calypso and Davy Jones’s romance is one of the few compelling romantic angles in these films, but it ends with minimal closure as the former essentially just disappears and the latter dies after about a half-second of crying over her precipitation. Even Will is sidelined for much of the picture, more passenger than driver in the third chapter of what was once a trilogy.
Maybe there would be more time for trifling things like character development if there weren’t so much damn plot and additional lore. While there’s something to be said for engaging in some additional worldbuilding for the age of pirates, halfway through movie #3 is a little late in the day for a historical exposition dump. Who’s secretly in league with whom, and who’s working on a hidden agenda, and who’s about to dramatically change sides leaves the narrative here even more convoluted than the one in Dead Man’s Chest, robbing the story of any force and smothering the movie’s charms in byzantine plot.
Some of this might be more tolerable if the damn thing were just more fun. But no, this is Serious Business:tm: now and must be treated as the epic it’s intended to be. Every once in a while, the irreverence and swashbuckling joie de vivre of the original peaks through (see: the mid-fight marriage), but this is largely a slog. Even the action set pieces, a highlight in Curse of the Black Pearl, are overblown and less-engaging this time around, as the combination of familiarity and overreliance on the usual CGI hodgepodge renders most of the big moments all but inert.
That absolutely extends to the film’s climactic final fight, where every major character is scrambled together in a wash of cutlasses and cannonballs. It’s nigh-impossible to follow the action from moment-to-moment, trace cause and effect, or maintain that type of energy for a half-hour of indiscriminate explosions.
But by god, At World’s End tries, not just in that overdone closing battle, but in the movie as a whole, which succumbs to the same problems on a larger scale. If it could be broken into its constituent parts and provide each with enough time and space to be developed, there’s at least three or four solid flicks that could be wrung from all Gore Verbinski try to pack in here. Instead, we get an ungainly film that loads far too much onto what was once a sleek, zippy ship, until it can do nothing else but sink.
Watching through Buffy for the first time recently. I missed it the first go-round as i would've been too hardcore goth for such bubblegummy fare when it was first coming out. It's good timing, actually, i feel like the ensuing 2 decades have put me in a place to appreciate Joss Whedon's campy vision.
I feel like Teacher's Pet is the episode where the series starts to hit its stride. The main characters seem to be establishing their chemistry, which is excellent and worth watching for that alone. Secondarily, it's good, goofy late 90s fun. While this show could easily veer towards the obnoxious, somehow it toes the line and is charming instead. I feel like if this came out even 3 years later, it wouldn't have worked, as i imagine they'd have been tempted to use CGI instead of practical effects and the whole thing would've been rendered dated and cheap. Instead, Buffy has kind of a timeless quality, in lines with weird, goofy teen horror romps, from Eerie, Indiana to The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina.
I also like to imagine a world where teenagers go out and watch live music almost every day. Makes me miss going to shows.
[7.3/10] Well, that was bold. I have to give the show that much.
Let’s start with the big mystery reveal. I suppose I have a bit of egg on my face after my last write-up when I railed about how Penn couldn’t be the real bomber. The show gives him a good bit of motive and opportunity. We see him having been harassed and disrespected by all the Spring Breakers, which gives him reason to hate them and want them gone. And his interest in true crime gives him the understanding of how these investigations proceed to be able to (a.) potentially get away with it (b.) feed the investigators what they need and (c.) understand how the explosives work, something he’s been working up to.
You can also see how the whole Murderheads thing makes him love the spotlight, idolizing killers, until the two combine and he realizes the best way to hang onto the spotlight is to become one of the murderers he so admires.
But I don’t know, at some point it just requires too much contrivance to really make complete sense to me, less from motivation and more from action. Can you really picture Patton Oswalt lugging the body of his “friend” Don or getting the neck bomb on that kid? And at the same time, for his plan to work, he had to be able to play Veronica and Keith to a degree that feels impossible, requiring them to pick him up at just the right time so he could leave his bag in their car, and lead them to Don, and all this other stuff that just seems kind of implausible.
Beyond Penn turning into a Bond villain and delivering monologues to Veronica at the end (which you can at least attribute to him watching true crime shows and aiming for their same sense of grandiosity), beyond the sort of visceral implausibility of Penn managing to stage all these crimes, it just requires too much to go right for him for everything to work out the way it did.
Granted, I think of the 7 major mysteries the show has done at this point, I think I only found one of them fully satisfying, so there’s a fair argument that this sort of thing is just the show’s M.O. and a decade and a half after the series’s debut, you’re either on board with it or you’re not. I like Veronica Mars for the great humor and dialogue, the strongly-written character relationships, and the fun and twists of the mystery along the way, regardless of whether the answers make complete sense.
But man, those character relationships take some pretty big blows here! I admire the show’s boldness in killing Logan right when he and Veronica are at peak happiness. This show was often compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its early days, and that’s a very Buffy move. The ethos for this show has always been that in Neptune, where everything is rigged, even when you win, you lose. To have Veronica solve the mystery, marry the love of her life, and get a clean bill of health for her dad, only to see the bomber take one last pound of flesh, and to have the corporate and gentrifying interests take over the beach anyway, feels true to what the show is and has been.
I’ll admit, though, that I don’t really like the fake out with it seeming like Logan was going to bail on the wedding. I understand needing to have some stakes in these moments, but it just came off cheesy to me, as did the whole “last recorded voicemail” shtick. Still, as a BSG fan, it’s always a thrill to see Mary McDonnel pop up, and I appreciate that the silver lining to all of this is Veronica accepting that she needed to deal with some shit and going to therapy.
I also neglected to mention that however contrived the situation is, I really like the scene at the heretofore unmentioned Kane High School commemoration. For one thing, it’s just fun to see Veronica show up and crash another Kane event (almost literally). But there’s legitimate tension when Veronica has to watch Keith stand there and try to convince Penn to confess and defuse the bomb before they’re both blown up. Say what you will about how the show crafts its mysteries, but it knows how to pull off a suspenseful scene.
Otherwise, I like where things land for the most part. I appreciate the reveal that Maddie is the one who stole the ring (Vinnie was right!), which establishes her rough-around-the-edges bona fides that makes her fit to fill Veronica’s shoes at Mars Investigations. I like that in the end, Keith still can’t abide what Clyde did, despite how endearing their bromance is, and I like that Clyde ends up with his girlfriend and his car dealership, underscoring the anti-”evil never prospers” message of the show. And I like that maybe, just maybe, Veronica is genuinely ready to move on from Neptune, to go see what else is out there, now that the best life she was living there has been ripped away from her.
Overall, I’m not entirely satisfied with the answer to the big mystery, but otherwise I really liked this season. It definitely had the tone and sensibility of the show right. It had some good personal developments with the main characters, and brought in a slew of interesting new fresh faces. And it made some bold moves here, that challenge our hero, and live up to the show’s perspective rather than sanding it down. Good, bad, and otherwise, this season was still very much the Veronica Mars that I remembered, and that’s a good thing.
So there it is, the worst thing HIMYM had ever done, or would ever do. "The Robin" was once my breaking point on this show, the point where I stopped harboring any illusions that it might one day return to being the show and I had known and loved and accepted that, instead, it had metamorphasized into a pale imitation of its former self. HIMYM had previously had bad episode, bad characters, and bad storylines, but none of them was so fundamental to the mythos of the series, so bafflingly wrong-headed, and so essential to the show's past and its future, as "The Final Page."
But before we explore the horror, let's take just a minute to chat about the things that are okay, even good about the episode. The comedy subplot about Marshall and Lily having their first day off since Marvin was born gets pretty broad, between their minute-by-minute list of activities, to their cartoonish lullaby, to their immediate separation anxiety, but it's pretty standard HIMYM Season 8 comedy, with a few cute moments, and that's enough to give it a pass.
What's more, Ted's speech to Robin about the virtues of making an ass of yourself is a lovely little scene, that manages to delve into Ted's fairly unrealistic view of what loves means, and yet draws it back to something sweet -- that even his wildest misfires have helped him to find a great friend. I've never really bought into the show's thesis, first presented in Season 7, that what was holding Ted back from finding The One was that he needed to get over Robin. But accepting that premise, his words are heartfelt and the gesture of taking Robin to the WWN building is meaningful.
With that out of the way, let's talk about the event that manages to wreck one of the show's foundational relationships, botch its romantic-arc storytelling over at least the last season and a half, practically ruin two of the show's main characters, and infect nearly everything that came after it: The Robin.
The result is simple -- essentially everything from Barney's profession of love to Robin in "Splitsville" has been part of a play, a scheme on Barney's part prime Robin for his proposal. The drunken kiss, the dating Patrice, the whole kit and kaboodle, were one grand effort at manipulating Robin into loving him.
Let's address the first problem with this whole plan -- it's tremendously implausible. The problem with a lot of works, be they dramatic or comedic, aping the Tyler Durden-esque twist that reshapes everything you've seen previously, is that too often they require all too much convenience in order for these sorts of byzantine plots to work. Too much of "The Robin" requires people to react in just the right way, at just the right time, on just the right schedule, or the whole thing falls apart.
Now HIMYM has always been a show that runs more on emotional logic than on real logic. To some degree, you accept the level of willing suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy this show, or you pretty much have to give up on the whole thing from the beginning (or chalk it up to Future Ted as an unreliable narrator). I'm generally okay with that idea, and the other contrivances that are necessary for the grand gestures that are the stock and trade of HIMYM to work. But this one stretches the reality of the show too far. Maybe it's just that there's too many moving parts; maybe it's that the plan stacks implausibility on top of implausibility until the whole bit is too unwieldy to pass even the most generous of B.S. detectors, or maybe it's that I don't like what this routine is in service of and that colors my willingness to accept it or not. Whatever the reason, "The Robin" feels like a bridge too far in terms of the coincidences necessary for Barney's ploy to work, and while that's far from this episode's greatest problem, it does sincerely damage the effectiveness of the twist.
So let's get into the greatest problem, which is really two fold: that Barney would do something like this and that Robin would accept it.
The first part is arguably, devastatingly in-character for Barney. There have been several episodes to rehabilitate Barney as not just some sort of Lothario on the prowl, but as an actual human being with real feelings and a desire to love and to be loved. The results have been mixed, and all too often the show falls back into the idea that Barney is basically a sex-minded wizard, conjuring spells on unsuspecting dames at the bar with little moral compunction.
So then it's not crazy that Barney would offer this bizarro version of something Ted might do. Barney too goes in for the big gesture, for making an ass of himself, but he does it in the most deranged, cruel manner imaginable, that plays into the worst qualities of the character. Manipulating someone that you claim to love, knowingly putting them through the pain and humiliation and instability that Robin has been suffering from over the past few episodes, doesn't amount to a grand profession of love; it amounts to the revelation that Barney doesn't really understand what love is.
Because what's striking about "The Robin," and what is supposed to ease the audience into accepting all of these horrible things, is that Barney has no malice in any of this. Barney isn't trying to hurt Robin; he's not trying to trick her into loving him; he's not trying to be an amoral monster about something as sacrosanct as two people pledging the rest of their lives to one another. He just doesn't understand. "The Robin" unintentionally reveals that the Barney's arc from, at a minimum, the end of Season 2, where he slowly develops from a sexual predator into a mature human being, is a failure. It leads to a person who believes he loves another person, and maybe, in his own way, he does, but through his twisted methods, shows he has no concept of what love really is.
Love is not torturing someone so as to catch them off guard with your proposal. (I'm also looking at you, Friends.) Love is not intentionally driving someone "nuts." Love is not toying with people's emotions. Love is not spying on your friends. Love is not pretending to date the object of your heart's desire's worst enemy just to get to them. Love is not an elaborate game where if you lie and cheat and steal enough along the way, you get a human trophy at the end.
These are not the acts of someone who truly cares for another human being. These are the acts of a sociopath. This is the best Barney can do. This is him playacting as a romantic. This is him trying to replicate the rhythms of the Mosbies of the world while having no facility, maybe even no idea, about what truly loving another person means.
And this is the point where Barney crosses the moral event horizon. It is telling that the show's creators patterned Barney's "long con" after a similarly elaborate plot from Breaking Bad's Walter White (occasional HIMYM guest star Bryan Cranston). That moment in Breaking Bad is arguably the point where Walter White goes from being a man with good intentions and bad impulses to being the monster he would become. "The Robin" presents a turning point for Barney as well. This is where he goes from being a character who does some pretty terrible things that you can write off as an exaggerated, nigh-satirical take on "pickup artist," buoyed by the character's accumulated vulnerabilities and affections, to becoming someone who would enact this horrifying, violating scheme and view it as a sincere expression of love.
Maybe it is. Maybe this is the closest Barney can come to expressing the emotions that he believes amount to love. But if so, that's terrible, and speaks volumes about the fissures in the foundation of a relationship HIMYM doesn't just wants us to be on board with, but which has been, and will be, at the core of the series' final three seasons.
But perhaps even more insulting is the idea that Robin accepts it. Robin herself has deteriorated a bit as a character since the beginning, becoming more and more exaggerated herself as the late season dearth of places to take the show's characters became more pronounced. And yet there is little in her history that suggests the cynical, pragmatic, independent woman we have seen over seven-plus years, would not only excuse Barney's deplorable behavior, but accept it as a sign that the two of them should be together.
Robin herself offers the most convincing and powerful rebuke of Barney's inherently messed-up gesture. "Seriously, Barney?" she asks. "Even you, even someone as certifiably insane as you must realize that this is too far. You lied to me, manipulated me for weeks. Do you really think I could ever kiss you after that? Do you really think I could ever trust you after that? This this is proof of why we don't work, why we'll never work. So thank you. You've set me free because how could I be with a man who thinks that this trick, this enormous lie could ever make me want to date him again?"
That should really have been it. Robin should have walked away, resolved never to talk to or let Barney into her life ever again, and recognize him as someone who could not trusted to be honest, to be open, to be a mature human being in an adult relationship. Instead, she realizes that this is all, in fact, leading to a proposal, and convinces her to have a complete change of heart about the whole thing.
And it makes absolutely no sense.
How that sense of betrayal becomes instant acceptance of the offer to marry this cretin is beyond me. The most charitable interpretation is that Robin appreciates this as Barney being all-in as only he can be. But that doesn't erase the horrible things he did to her to get there, or offer any indication that he couldn't or wouldn't twist noble ends into terrible acts once more. The less charitable interpretation is that Robin has been left so off-balance and messed up by Barney's machinations that she's in a bad enough place mentally to be willing to accept this sort of thing. The even less charitable interpretation is that no reasonable human being would ever look at what Barney did as a genuine sign of love, or at least as a sign that someone can be trusted to be a committed, loving partner in life, and the show just fiats Robin's emotional acceptance to get us to an end point it not only hasn't earned, but which is the antithetical result to all that we've seen thus far.
Or maybe there's another explanation.
The version of Robin Scherbatsky we've seen over the last handful of episodes has not been good or decent or likable. She is pointlessly horrible to Patrice. She selfishly tries to sabotage what she thinks is Barney's relationship with Patrice. And she only returns to wanting Barney after his declaration that she cannot have him. This too, is not the foundation of a real, committed relationship, or the kind of person with the maturity to be in one. Robin has always been much more of an adult than Barney, and even within the heightened reality of the show, felt like more of a real person. But the version of her we've seen in the lead up to "The Final Page," presents a discomforting possibility.
Maybe these two people deserve each other. Maybe they both have such a fucked up view of what it is to want and care for and love someone that they are made to visit these types of violations of trust and of conscience upon one another again and again, in a spate of co-dependence rather than legitimate connection. Though Barney's missteps are much greater in magnitude here, both he and Robin act terribly in the lead to this mid-season finale. They mislead, don't consider the genuine happiness or well-being of the other (not to mention innocent bystanders), and above all act with wanton disregard for anyone's interests but their own. Perhaps that level of myopia leaves them unexpectedly well-matched, even if not portends a thoroughly unhealthy relationship to follow.
But that's not what How I Met Your Mother seems to want its audience to take from "The Final Page." It wants us to take this all as the act of genuine devotion rather than of hopeless narcissism, as a moment filled with true love than a reveal of psychopathology, as two people who belong together beautifully and finally joining as one than as an implausible acceptance premised on falsehood and manipulations.
This, more than any prior missteps, more than any previous faults in the characters or the plot, more than even the justifiably polarizing finale, is the moment that broke the show, that proved it had truly and fully lost whatever tenuous grasp it had on its understanding of its characters, their stories, or how love and romance work. It's the point at which we were asked to accept the product of a depraved act of betrayal and manipulation as an enviable celebration of true feeling.
There was no turning back from "The Robin." No retcons could save it, and no amount of attempted rehabilitation could rescue the show in its wake. It is the point at which How I Met Your Mother ceased to be a series that had always had a certain rom-com view of romance but which grounded it in genuine human emotion and moments of real feeling, and instead became one simply playing out the string to its unsatisfying endgame, increasingly fixated on relationships that hadn't and didn't work, and which were founded on so much betrayal -- of character, of love, of common sense -- that it could no longer have even the force that came from the years of good will and myth the series had crafted for so long. "The Final Page" is, without question, the worst thing the show ever did, and true to HIMYM's non-linear bent, its ripples are felt in both the past and the future of the show.
[7.3/10] Far be it from me to turn my nose up at the imaginative, scifi-fueled tete-a-tete between Rick Sanchez and a president voiced by the inimitable Keith David. But I have to admit, this was a bit of a disappointment as a finale. Too often, “Rickchurian Mortydate” gets lost in admittedly inventive and amusing dick-wagging contests between Rick and the president, and doesn’t spend enough time grounding it in Rick or the Smiths’ personal issues or character flaws like the show does at its best.
The Beth story certainly does though. There would be an existential horror to wondering if you’re a clone, and there would be so few ways in Beth’s situation to reliably determine whether or not you are. But her story finds the beneficial side of that magnificent ambiguity in the prior episode. It doesn’t really matter to Beth whether she’s the “real” Beth or not. Being this Beth, being someone who loves her husband and her family, makes her happy, and in a nice counterpoint to last season’s finale, she’s willing to put up with not having her father around if she can preserve that.
What that means for Rick is that he’s not the center of the universe, or at least the Smiths anymore. Morty, the grandson who tags along through all of his adventures, is willing to tell his grandfather to leave him alone so that he can have a happy family once more. And contrary to the ultimatum from the Season 2 finale, Beth is willing to pick Jerry over her dad.
That leaves Rick unable to enjoy his victory over the President of the United States and the onslaught of toys and weapons and other technological doo-dads the Prez has assembled to be able to combat him. It makes Rck’s victory hollow, to where he’s willing to sacrifice his victory, the respect that comes from having bested the leader of the free world, in order to be a part of the Smith family once again.
He sees the rest of the Smiths’ happiness and tries to spit on it, to tell them that it doesn’t matter, but it does to them, and though he has trouble admitting it, it matters to him. They’re happy and whether that’s flawed or fake or just one petal on the swirling sunflower of infinite multiverses, it’s their pleasant and fulfilling subjective experience and they couldn’t care less if it’s unimpressive from a cosmic standpoint. While Rick, who’s achieved the most of what could be achieved from a cosmic standpoint, debases himself to have a piece of that, to be proximate to it, when he has all the talent and ability to just jump to some other universe if he wants to.
Maybe I liked the episode better than I thought. Part of it are too indulgent. Rick and Morty being blasé about their adventures evokes a sense of ennui in the writer’s room (or at least from credited writer Dan Harmon who’s not been shy about expressing when his passion for a project is waning.) That colors the hijinks between Rick and the President trying to one-up each other. None of it’s bad, but it’s Rick and Morty going through the motions. A crazy techno-fight here, a hilarious vulgar aside there, a well-placed pop culture riff some place else. (The South Park reference is particularly exemplary this week.) None of it’s bad, it just doesn’t hit the transcendent highs the show is capable of when it’s at the top of the game.
But the Beth story comes closer. Jerry reminiscing about the first time he kissed Beth is the most endearing, relatable, and understandable Jerry’s seemed in the whole series, and it’s enough to make you want to root for this pathetic man to get back together with his wife, and to understand why they made some modicum of sense in the first place. And Beth realizing that whether she’s real or not, she wants to like that night, to be happy with where she is, is a subtle but powerful statement from the show.
I don’t hesitate to say that Season 3 has been the best season of Rick and Morty yet. It’s been as consistently creative and inventive as any prior set of their adventures, and the level of emotional depth and self-examination the show’s engaged in on a weekly basis is nothing short of remarkable. From the surprise season premiere, to the infamous “Pickle Rick”, to toxic versions of our heroes, to Wire-inspired adventures, the show has continually topped itself with the places it’s willing to go and how well it goes there.
But “Rickchurian Mortydate” isn’t quite the perfect capper to so much greatness. It fits well enough as the culmination of a lot of things the show has been wrestling with this season: Morty wondering whether he needs his grandfather in his life, Jerry figuring out his place in the world in relation to his father-in-law, and Beth taking some time alone and figuring out who she is, whether or not it’s really who she is. It all comes together in the family deciding to reject Rick, and Rick sacrificing, in his own sideways way, to not be cast aside. That’s strong stuff, but at times, the finale of the show’s best season so far is more interested in laser-coated mayhem than that deeper, emotionally complex material that marks it as more than just a collection of wacky escapades.
Ah well. Still damn good. I’ll see you all in however long it takes for Mr. Poopy Butthole to grow a big Santa Claus beard. Don’t just screw around in the mean time!
7.4/10. Batman Returns is a firm step up from the Batman film that precedes it, but it’s also a firm step away from the character’s source material and toward Burton’s ethos and aesthetic. Batman’s no killing code has been scrapped; his enemies’ backstories and personalities have been changed, and major foils are invented for the film out of whole cloth. But at the same time, Burton creates his own imaginative world from these comic book inputs, one that fits with his penchant for collections of oddballs, gothic imagery, and protagonist and antagonists who are equally fractured in their own ways. It produces an enjoyable and original film, albeit one that is more Burton than Batman, and which can’t sustain its unique energy through the third act.
The film’s greatest success is the relationship it portrays between Batman and Catwoman. True to Burton’s style, both Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle carry their own particular damage, and that makes them attracted to each other, in-costume and out. Returns not only has the decency to take the time to write off Vicki Vale from the last film, but does so in a way that dovetails nicely into why Catwoman makes more sense for Batman as a love interest. Bruce describes the problem with his past relationship as stemming from there being “two truths” to him, with those being hard to reconcile. But though Bruce doesn’t know it, Selina is uniquely positioned to understand that, to be able to reconcile the idea of who he is in the boardroom and on the rooftops of Gotham.
So when the two of them make reciprocal excuses to Alfred for why they have to cut their date short, while attempting to smooth things over out of fear of losing someone electrifying, the point is clear -- these two people are insane, each racing off to confront in The Penguin’s maelstrom of terror, but it’s the same type of insanity, one that makes them enemies in one world and inexorably attracted to one another in the other. The film uses the dramatic irony of the audience knowing Bruce and Selina’s alter egos, while the characters do not, to blur those lines nicely.
The peak of this is the charged moment when Bruce and Selina are dancing together at the masquerade ball, and as is appropriate for such a gathering, the masks start to slip. A line of repeated dialogue changes their sharp-edged flirtation to a revelation of who each of them becomes when the sun goes down. The push-and-pull of that, whether Bruce Wayne can have a real life, a real love, apart from his Dark Knight mission, and whether anyone who would love or understand him would be healthy, or whether it would just further fuel his own issues, is a venerable area to explore with the character. For all that Burton departs from the source, his realization of that idea here gives Returns a complexity and a tragedy that warrants inclusion in the pantheon of examinations of The Bat.
Batman Returns is also, somewhat oddly for its genre, a very sexual film. The obvious fulcrum for that quality is Catwoman herself, who slinks around in a skintight outfit, trades innuendos with Batman, and isn’t shy about getting physical in her own feline way. Though Selina Kyle starts out timid and unlucky in love, her trauma and cat-transformation turns her into a confident, powerful, sexual being. It’s hard to tell how much of Catwoman’s persona works as liberation and how much of it is mere titillation, but it’s a distinctive ingredient in the film.
But she’s not alone. Danny Devito’s Penguin is every bit the antithesis to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in terms of conventional standards of attractiveness, and yet he too is (at least an attempted) sexual being here. Oswald Cobblepot is a letch, groping supporters, lusting after Catwoman, and turning bitter when his advances are rejected. There’s an undercurrent of sexual desire, even in the comparatively repressed Batman, that’s firmly present throughout.
Even when he’s not making offhand comments about female staffers, Devito’s penguin vamps it up with reckless abandon. Taking a page out of Nicholson’s book from the prior installment of the franchise, Devito goes full ham as the menacing former circus freak, abandoned to the sewers by his parents. There’s a mild tragedy to Penguin, a child of privilege left to neglect by the people who should have cared for him. Despite the loving farewell he receives, there’s little humanity in this version of The Penguin, a character who is instead filled with snarling threats and duplicitous come ons. Occasionally, it’s too much, but for the most part, the performance fits with the outsized world Burton has full control over in this sequel relative to its predecessor.
Penguin is just one of the four main characters of the film who are emblematic of the theme of duality that runs throughout the film. For him, that comes to the fore in his mayoral campaign. The political commentary of Batman Returns is mild and shallow--only stooping so far as to note that politicians may not always be on the up-and-up and that the public can be swayed by propaganda--but it’s in keeping with the motif of the idea that people are different in public than in private.
Penguin is a magnanimous media darling in the papers, but is exposed for being the brutish wretch he truly is, full of resentments and anger at a city he feels is his birthright denied. Max Shreck (Christopher Walken, in his natural habitat) is a generous Gotham magnate when in the public eye, but behind closed doors, he conspires with Penguin and attempts to strongarm the political machine to favor his business interest, even resorting to casual murder when necessary. And both Batman and Catwoman lead double lives, destined to struggle to serve each of them and have some semblance of normalcy in the balance.
All that thematic intrigue, however, falls apart in the third act when Burton, having realized he’s thrown so much into the air, can’t quite figure out how to make everything land properly. Instead, he offers a bizarre climax with rocket-strapped penguins, a thematically appropriate but odd Moses-inspired revenge scheme, all four major characters converging and disappearing at convenient moments, with deaths, fake outs, and explosions that feel straight off the standard Hollywood assembly line. The narrative choices are strange at best, and incoherent at worst, and the whole thing is an unsatisfying capper to a film that otherwise manages to hold the audience’s attention throughout.
It all feels very Burton-y though. The combination of a yuletide setting and a gothic aesthetic would be further realized by Burton and Returns composer Danny Elfman in The Nightmare Before Christmas. The fractured oddities, looking for acceptance or peace in a world that doesn’t quite know what to make of them, is a recurring motif in his work. And even the film’s arch sense of humor, though sometimes cheesy, feels true to his other films. Batman Returns is more of Burton grafting the Batman mythos onto his own sensibilities than the other way around, a choice that both helps and hurts the film, but which makes it unique among superhero movies, offering an off-kilter holiday classic for the mildly deranged child in all of us.
5.7/10. Someday, possibly in the near future, we’re going to get a gritty, documentary-style Batman film about a regular guy who dresses up like a bat and gets into ugly fist fights with criminals. And when that happens, we’ll turn around and laugh at how cheesy and unrealistic the Christopher Nolan Batman films seem now. Today’s cultural sensation is tomorrow’s hokey relic. So it goes.
But until that happens, it behooves us to look at Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film, which comes off pretty corny and even rudimentary relative to the Dark Knight Trilogy, with some perspective. After the semi-grounded approach to the character in recent years, it seems odd that Burton’s film was praised for its serious approach to the source material. But contemporary critics were comparing it to William Dozer’s Batman ‘66 the overtly comedic, Adam West incarnation of the caped crusader. So while much of what Burton does in Batman feels broader and even goofier than the bat-stories people think of today, it’s important to keep it in the context of the wide spectrum of portrayals of the character and his world, whether on the page or the screen, that have taken place over the last eighty years.
Even with that thought in mind when approaching the film, it’s hard to reconcile it with the gut response to a film made almost three decades ago under very different standards and expectations for superhero films and blockbusters in general.
Some of what dates the film is easily forgivable. The effects are not up to today’s standards – CGI or no – with models or miniatures standing out fairly clearly, and even details as minor as Batman’s costume contribute to the “just playing dress up” vibe. Between the two-piece cowl, or the curtain drapery bit the Dark Knight does with his cape in an attempt to create an intimidating silhouette for the criminals he’s attacking, the entire enterprise feels chintzier than the polished (even overly polished) visuals of today.
And yet, that contributes to the feel of the film. If there’s one thing about the film that feels both entirely appropriate to the source material and yet also makes it harder for a modern day viewer to connect with the film, it’s the overall atmosphere of Batman. Burton embraces the cartoony, four-color roots of the genre in the visuals and overall tenor of the film, even when it includes more intense elements like gangland hits and dead parents.
Part of that comes from the film’s setting, which takes place in an interesting amalgam of the 1940s and the then-contemporary Reagan era. Certain elements of the film – like the cops and robbers motif and the production design as a whole place Batman in an old version of New York City that seemed to only exist on the silver screen in the first place. But things like Vicky Vale’s glasses or the breaks in the action for the Joker and his goons to dance to Prince songs, or even the particular energy of the Alexander Knox character, root the picture squarely in the late-eighties. It’s a blend that serves to make the film very specific, timeless, and dated all at once.
The set design contributes to that sense as well. It feels like Burton literally shot a movie with oversized play sets. Everything in Batman feels larger than life. The world of Gotham is a fantasy land, a theme park, that captures the unreality of Batman’s comic roots while also putting it at a remove from the audience. In effect, these choices make Burton’s Batman feels truest to those roots among the various Batman-related films, even as he departs from standard continuity and characterization. Even though Keaton’s Batman doesn’t feel pulled from the pages of Detective Comics, there’s a real sense of Burton taking the toys out of the toy box, moving them around his elegantly constructed play set, with all the bombast and silliness that goes with it.
The problem, then, is that little of it has any weight. Not every superhero movie needs to be a mediation on hope or morality or vigilantism, but Burton’s Batman comes out feeling like empty calories, with really only The Bat himself the only character who offers any sort of inner life. There’s fun to be had here – giant balloons and cartoony gadgets. But it doesn’t quite capture the pure sense of joy or investment that can come up in the lighter Marvel films of recent vintage. Burton’s Batman, instead, feels appropriately enough like a Saturday morning cartoon come to life, with the same commitment to whiz-bang action but also lack of depth.
The irony is that the actual Saturday morning cartoon inspired by Burton’s work on the screen, Batman: The Animated Series distills the character and his world down to a much more coherent and compelling version of the same ideas present here. It’s rare that the characters in Burton’s Batman feel like real people rather than four-color abstractions and broadly-sketched archetypes.
The peak of this is Jack Nicholson’s Joker. There are hints here and there at a unique conception of the Clown Prince of Crime. The most promising of them is the idea of Joker as a conceptual artist whose medium is homicide. It’s appropriately out there for the character, and accounts for the theatrical flair in his capers. But Burton’s Joker has little true motivation in the film beyond some quickly completed revenge. There’s reason to give Burton the benefit of the doubt, and take his Joker as the result of when someone with little empathy or control to begin with goes insane – unpredictable, almost random cruelty – but the bumpers of the film’s exaggerated atmosphere keep that idea from landing with any force.
That leaves Batman with a semi-incoherent antagonist, with a rushed origin story, and only Jack Nicholson’s charisma to save things. Nicholson doesn’t just chew the scenery here; he gnaws on it like a dog with a bone. That leads to some enjoyable line reads (“where does he get those wonderful toys” is still a nicely arch bit from Nicholson) and some amusing dances from the three-time Oscar winner, but mostly leads to the character feeling as though it lacks an anchor or a purpose beyond dutifully moving the conflict along and giving Nicholson the space to do a handful of off-the-wall, unconnected comic sketches. Nicholson’s Joker is over the top, as he should be, but also rudderless and showy, undercutting any menace or threat he’s supposed to pose.
That extends to the film’s biggest break with the source material – making the Joker, as a young Jack Napier, the one who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents. It creates a certain poetry and connects the hero and the villain in the way that so many stories, superhero or otherwise, like to. (See also: the first season of Netflix’s Luke Cage show.) But it doesn’t amount to much, beyond turning Batman from a crusader for justice into a bog-standard seeker of revenge.
It’s a shame because Keaton’s Batman, while hamstrung by some of the movie’s shortcomings, makes for an intriguing version of the character. He doesn’t brood exactly, but he seems quietly tortured nonetheless. It’s a choice keeps Keaton’s Batman from the taciturn glumness that overly dark modern adaptations have taken too far, but still portrays him as a man who doesn’t quite feels comfortable with who or what he is, shutting people out and working through his problems by skulking through the night and protecting other little boys whose parents wander into the wrong alley. Beyond the “wanna get nuts” interlude, it’s a nicely unshowy take on the character that succeeds in ways even the Nolan films struggled with at times.
It also gives the film its only real bit of emotional weight, especially Bruce/Batman’s relationship with Vicky Vale. Kim Basinger’s Vale is a thin, if noble for the time to put a female lead with some oomph into the narrative. She shows some modicum of cleverness and resourcefulness during the film, but still devolves into standard damsel-in-distress tropes that make her feel more like a prop than a vital part of the story. Still, the film never feels more human and real than in the moments when Bruce and Vicky are flirting, or worrying about one another, or shutting each other out. The film goes back and forth, but in their scenes set in and around Wayne Manor in particular, there’s a chemistry there that buoys the film, and gives another layer to Keaton’s performance as his Batman is only willing to let someone so far into his life.
There are other smaller elements that make the film enjoyable. Danny Elfman’s score is, to borrow the title of the film’s aborted sequel, thrillingly triumphant, with an operatic bombast that perfectly matches the tone of the film. On the other side of the coin, Michael Gough brings warmth and kindness to his portrayal of Bruce’s butler and confidant, Alfred Pennyworth, that helps give the movie what little emotional grounding it has. In between is the film’s palette, which is garish and at times even lurid appropriate to the newsprint origins, balancing the darkness of the setting with an exaggerated color scheme.
Still, Burton’s Batman can’t help but feel like a half-measure to the modern eye. Halfway between the tongue-in-cheek cheekiness of Dozier’s Batman ‘66 and the pot-boiling grit of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Burton’s Batman can’t quite manage the balance of weight and whimsy that the animated series he inadvertently spawned nearly perfected. Instead, the film is a muddle of Batman’s sensibilities and Burton’s, presenting yet another one of Burton’s troubled loners, amid the painted cardboard world and cartoony figures, that leave the sense of a fingers-crossed adventure where everyone’s just playacting.
Batman is not quite a lark, not quite a thrill, and not quite an achievement. It’s a curiosity, an evolutionary step for the caped crusader on the silver screen, having not fully shed its previous form, and not yet worked out what the character might be. The film is a toy box come to life, with all the good and all the bad that the description conjures.
Great wrap up to a wacky season! It was bound to happen, but still, I am sad to see Blum go (yes, I'm aware I'm in the minority, though I understand the Blum hate), but I am happy that he took Maia with him (I still don't like her). Judging by her last scene, he seemed to have ruined her, anyway, so nothing's lost, there.
Between the absurdity of the ASMR testimony and the silly Brooks Brothers riot re-enactment, that has got to be the most ludicrous trial we've ever seen in The Good Fight! And I'm glad for it, this show does not spend enough time in the courtroom, unfortunately, so I treasure every moment that it does. And this one trumped them all!
I did not understand if the whole ball lightning was supposed to be a metaphor for something. Nothing burned up in the end, Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart won the trial, so... What was that all about? Same thing goes for that cliffhanger... What the flying fuck?! I'm guessing Kurt will be charged for something. Or maybe Diane. Or both! Maybe the Book Club has something to do with it, like someone suggested around here. I hope we'll get to see the reason behind that scene by early 2020.
... Until then, enjoy Donald J. Trump, everybody!
8.2/10. Almost every story about robots ends up being about humanity and personhood. The most unadventurous among them only confront the luddite question of whether an android could ever be sentient, could ever be a person, even though they’re made from circuits and gears rather than flesh and blood. (It’s a question that many great works, most notably Star Trek: The Next Generation have convincingly answered in the affirmative.)
But the best works don’t just interrogate the question of whether a robot can be a human, but rather use the idea of the mechanical man to try to answer the question of what makes us human. Films like A.I.--and make no mistake, it’s a quality film—ask deeper questions about what defines humanity, what qualities, practices, traits do we possess as a species that makes us unique, and uses an outsider and imitator to do so, in the same way that learning a foreign language can help us to better understand our native tongue.
Thus A.I. tells us the story of a young “mecha” child who wants to be a real boy. The film wears its Pinocchio influences on its sleeve, and to that end, offers an updated, sci-fi-infused version of that story. In it, David, an android child, wonders what it takes for him to become real, for him to become human.
The answer offered is an intriguing one – love. What distinguishes David from his mecha counterparts is the fact that he can “imprint” on his mother, that he can have an innate attachment to her beyond his own control. But it’s not the trite Hallmark Holiday version of love. The film presents something far more melancholy, far more heartrending, in its conception of “love” as an essential ingredient in humanity.
In essence, the film posits that what makes us human, our distinguishing feature, is our ability to love something so much that we yearn for the unobtainable, that we reach for simulacra and last gasps of things we can no longer have. The kind of love that makes us human is the one that makes our attachments run so deep that they survive the people we were attached to, that they drive us to try to recapture things we know are lost and can never be recovered.
That is the crux of this film. It repeatedly shows us individuals who reveal their humanity through attempts to revive their loved ones, to find something to fill the holes in their hearts left when they lost those closest to them. Monica, David’s would-be mother, accepted David as a fill-in for her own son who is in suspended animation after some disease or accident that ripped him from her. She is reluctant at first, but soon finds that David is a means to ease her pain, to make this inevitably misguided attempt to bring her child back in a fashion.
That motif is repeated when David finally makes it to his creator’s workshop, and discovers that he himself was made in the likeness of Professor Hobby’s dead son. He too is living monument to the attempt to hold onto something lost, because the love imbued in that person is too much for to allow his maker to let go.
Of course, A.I. is also interested in the morality of creating something that can love, that must love, and which we may not love back. The film’s opening act--which centers on the process of the Swinton family learning to love David, having their flesh and blood son come back to life, and then slowly but surely coming to the decision that David, for manipulated but understandable reasons of safety, no longer has a place in their family—is the tightest of the film. It tells a heartbreaking story of a young man becoming a fixture, becoming a part of a home of love, and then being put out when he no longer makes sense there. In particular, the scene where Monica abandons him in the woods, and he offers impassioned pleas and promises that he’ll be better, than he’ll be realer, to no avail, is utterly devastating.
But it incites the middle act of David’s Pinocchio-like adventures, which prove to be the weakest part of the film. There’s thematic meat in the “Flesh Fare” portions of the film, which communicate the fears of a human population concerned that they’re being replaced by technology in a way that feels terribly prescient now. It also explores the way in which children are uniquely situated to earn our sympathies, that they speak to an innate sense of protection and preservation that manage to cut through even the chauvinistic prejudices of a bloodthirsty crowd desperate for mecha torture.
For the most part, however, these scenes feel like simple ways to fill in struggles between David being kicked out of his home, and him becoming a real boy. His adventures with Gigolo Joe and Teddy (who work as his companions in the vein of Jiminy Cricket) make gestures toward the larger themes of the film, and offer some red meat to science fiction fans both in terms of world building and gorgeous, otherworldly set pieces and sequences that still look superb despite being a decade and a half old, but mostly feel like less compelling detours to the larger story being told. Flesh Fare, Rouge City, and the sunken bones of Old New York are entertaining enough as standalone pieces, but don’t have the thematic coherence of the rest of the film.
That coherence comes in the film’s much maligned end game. While a 2,000 year wait and the presence of aliens may have been off-putting at first, they work as the true equivalents to the blue fairy that David is so desperate to find – the effectively supernatural force that can intervene and grant David’s wish.
And they do. What David wishes for more than anything in the world is to return to his mother, so the aliens revive her for one more day. It is in that final montage, where David gets to celebrate his birthday, to tell his mother his life’s story, to share in the joys and the pains of love and loss, that he truly becomes a real boy. What makes him so is the way that he shares in the efforts of Monica Swinton, and of Professor Hobby – his desire to recapture something lost, because he loves someone, and he can’t turn that off just because they’re gone.
His revival of Monica, his desperation to enjoy one last day with her, one last simulacra of where his love led him, shows that David has a soul, however you’d like to define that term. As the similarly precocious Lisa Simpsons once put it (via writer Greg Daniels) some philosophers believe that a soul is not something we are born with, but rather something we earn, through suffering, struggle, and acts that reveal our humanity. David has done all that and more, coming close to death, traveling great distances, showing his devotion and futile hope for millennia, in the hopes of being able to return to his mother.
So when he does, when he gets to spend that one last glorious day with her, it’s not just the culmination of the story, it’s his reward for his steadfastness, and the confirmation that he is a human being, in every meaningful sense of the term. It is moving when he hears the words he so desperately wanted to hear ‘lo those many years – that his mother loves him, that she’s always loved him. It is then that he not only becomes “real” but becomes whole, the gaping hole inside of him is filled. In the end, David wants without reason, he wants beyond reason, and like the little wooden boy who inspires him and those telling his story, eventually, his wish is granted, and he knows the profound pain and immense joy that comes with being a human being. The boy who was treated as much like a child as a person, turns out to be the last bastion of humanity, the legacy of our sins and our aspirations, at the end of the world.
Perfectly good episode. The highlight was the story between Jarvis and Ana. The clear distress in Jarvis's otherwise prim and proper visage drove home the severity of what had happened, and his string of promises to bring her back to consciousness was a sweet and charming moment between the couple. I'm sure the Jezebel crowd will have a field day with the infertility development (and in truth, it feels fairly unnecessary), but Jarvis's care for his wife and anger at Whitney Frost were the most firm and resonant thing in the episode, and it showed.
The rest of it was good enough, if not particularly inspiring. Ken Marino is always a hoot, and the scene where Peggy storms into his restaurant and has a sit down with him was great comedy. There's also some thematic material in Frost's conversations with Wilkes about not resisting and using what's happened to them for their own ends. Again, the mystery of what zero matter is and does exactly isn't exactly compelling, but the characters are fun and the show has a light enough air about it to keep things interesting.
I continue to be pretty tired of the romantic stuff between Peggy and Sousa. Without beating a dead horse, the best part of it was Peggy challenging Sousa on his declaration that she needs to be dispassionate, and calling on him failing the same test with Wilkes not an hour earlier. If they're going to force these two characters with little-to-no chemistry together, at least they're not making Peggy into some goo-goo-eyed baby doll for him.
And Jack Thompson was pretty funny here! I've gone back and forth on the whole "battle for Thompson's soul" line, but Peggy's steadfast refusal to be blackmailed by him, and then admonition that he's better than that were the best exchanges in the episode this side of Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis. The Vernon Masters stuff hasn't seemed to go much of anywhere beyond this, but it worked well enough for what it was, and Thompson himself adds a spark to otherwise dull moments shared by Peggy and Sousa.
The scientist continues to be a fairly cliche, mildly annoying character, but he serves his purpose and the big special effects-fest in the desert was as shallow as it was entertaining, especially when Jarvis went full-on Wesley Wyndham Price on Whitney. The show at least maintains a sense of whimsy even if its storytelling and character beats are a bit all over the play.
Still, all-in-all, this may not have been Agent Carter's best outing, but it worked as a nice bit of movement from hear to the season (and sadly, probably series) finale.
[6.1/10] The glory of the original Pirates of the Caribbean movie is that it took itself just seriously enough, without taking itself too seriously. There was enough action and drama for there to be stakes, but also enough humor and levity to make it a fun romp of a film. It left room for more stories, but it also worked as its own thing, with scenes and motivations that built on one another.
Dead Man’s Chest throws all of that out the porthole. Suddenly, the Pirates franchise now has epic lore involving souped up versions of the antagonists from the last movie, with grave implications for every new development. The humor is reduced to the broadest of shtick and takes a backseat to tedious speechifying about destiny and the “true nature” of this or that character. And the movie is a fifteen-car-pileup of plots and callbacks and character beats, stopping not because the film’s reached any kind of natural endpoint or even intermission, but because that’s just where director Gore Verbinski and his team happened to hit the pause button.
About the only good element that survives from Curse of the Black Pearl into Dead Man’s Chest is the production design and effects. Say what you will about the movie’s contrived reasons for sending our heroes dotting across the map, but it at least finds some scenic locales to shoot them in. Likewise, Davy Jones, while showing a bit of age as an effect, is still a marvel of on-screen wizardry, able to move with weight and have distinctive expressions as he interacts with the flesh and blood characters. His ship shares the same realness and creativity of design, a waterlogged battleship that looks appropriately worn by both time and the sea.
And yet, even there, the visuals are hit or miss. While Jones himself is convincing and Bootstrap Bill has a distinctive look, the rest of the crew of the Flying Dutchmen feature unique designs but dodgy looking CGI realizations. The famed kraken is poorly composited into the live action sequences, making our heroes appear as though they’re fighting a big cartoon character rather than a threatening piece of calamari. What’s more, in places like the waterwheel fight or Jack’s own standoff with the kraken, the green screen effects are painfully obvious, breaking immersion.
All of that could be forgivable, especially for 2006, if trifling things like plot and character and motivation were better than “mildly passable.” In contrast to the thrill-heavy clarity of Curse of the Black Pearl, this sequel is convoluted and overstuffed. Nowhere is that more evident than in how many MacGuffins there are in a single two-and-a-half hour film.
There’s Davy Jones’s heart. Then there’s the chest that holds Davy Jones’s heart. Then there’s the key that opens the chest that holds Davy Jones’s heart. Then there’s the drawing of the key that opens the chest that holds Davy Jones heart. And that’s before you get to the jar of dirt that might hide Davy Jones heart, or the compass that might lead you to Davy Jones’s heart, or the letters of mark that you might be able to bargain for Davy Jones’s heart. This film has no shortage of random, mostly uninteresting objects that various characters are after in various combinations, with only clumsy throughlines for how one leads to another.
That extends to the characters’ wants and goals here. Again, in the original film, each major character had a fairly straightforward but nevertheless strong motivation. Dead Man’s Chest, by contrast, makes an utter hash of it. Beyond just the endless quest for the various MacGuffins, who’s trying to rescue whom or sell off somebody to somebody else, or get back into a random third party’s good graces becomes bewildering at some point.
Even for a bloated, two-movie narrative, there’s just too many characters with too many objectives here. Will Turner wants to save Elizabeth Swann again, except he gets sidetracked with a promise to his dad. Former Commodore Norrington is back despite not really having a place in the story, and is gunning for redemption or at least a chit he can use to regain his former stature. Two new villains, and their seconds, and Will’s dad, and Elizabeth’s dad, and the old pirate crew, and the voodoo priestess, and more familiar faces still each have to get their moment in the sun with jumbled up schemes and wishes. Even Jack, the last film’s agent of chaos, is torn between trying to hold off Davy Jones’s claim on his soul and pursuing Elizabeth himself.
Therein lies arguably the worst element of the film. Depp’s Sparrow was an entertaining side dish in the first movie, but here, after so much fanfare and adoration over his performance, he becomes not only the main course, but a romantic lead. Not only does his shtick wear much thinner when it’s the focus rather than one piece among many, but Verbinski and the writers feel compelled to inject a needless love triangle to ensnare Jack, Elizabeth, and Will, despite it adding nothing to the proceedings.
Needless addition is the unofficial theme of Dead Man’s Chest: more plots, more characters, more power plays, and more overextended (and sometimes shockingly racist) action sequences, which lack the prior film’s thrills and panache. Only the big second act set piece manages to channel the energy that drove Curse of the Black Pearl, including enough wry jokes and swashbuckling fun to keep things light yet exciting. That’s a rare moment though, and even it gives way to the film’s “too much, too quickly” pacing problems eventually.
If that weren’t enough, the film is awash in callbacks to the first film, constantly elbowing the audience in the ribs and trying to see if it remembers the franchise’s earlier, better effort. There’s a Star Wars prequel level of embarrassingly on-the-nose references to the prior movie here, and at least there, the franchise went sixteen years between releases, rather than three, before it started eating its own tail.
The real problem is that the original Pirates of the Caribbean was built to be a breezy, exciting lark of a film, not a franchise-starter. So when Disney and Verbinski try to reverse engineer their way into a grand tale with enough mythos and high drama to turn Pirates into some epic quest, the effort looks like so many boats in these movies -- creaky, haphazardly built, and full of holes. Trying to force Jack Sparrow and his cohort into that mold leaves Dead Man’s Chest feeling like just another disappointing, overblown blockbuster, losing the spark and glimmer of the movie that accidentally started this series, like so much sunken treasure.
It's been more than 5 years since I read the book, but I don't remember it being this bad!
The whole movie was so awkward and cringey. The dialogue was weird and stilted, the transitions between scenes were abrupt and made no sense at all, and the overall movie felt like badly written fanfiction (so many things were left unexplained!).
I know the novel wasn't a masterpiece, but this adaptation was absolute garbage. Whoever the screenwriters were, they have no business adapting novels into screenplays. So, so bad.
The actress playing Luce could never have passed for a 17 year old. And both her interactions with Cam and Daniel were so forced and in your face. The scenes where her face was mere inches from one of the guys' faces and they just stared at each other for a full minute without saying anything were so uncomfortable. Like, stop trying so hard to convince us she has chemistry with them. The relationships were overdone to the point that they felt painfully fake and plastic.
Because the screenplay and dialogue were so bad, it made it seem like the actors were terrible. But since I've seen a few of them on other stuff and know for a fact they can, actually, act, I won't criticize that aspect of the movie.
Judging by how bad this movie was, I don't think we'll be getting any more movies from the Fallen saga.
First things first: MILLIE BOBBY BROWN IS A FRIGGIN' REVELATION AND SHE DESERVES AN EMMY!
The finale Episode showed once more how good the set-design was. You could see that the Upside Down was full of real props. Also the Byer's house had a real development. I told the story of the whole show in the background. It was like a focal point of the whole plot. Furthermore it showed the strength of the series storytelling: Chief Hoppers backstory was hinted in some previous episodes and one could already think, that his daughter is dead. So the flashback didn't feel forced but natural.
On the other hand the finale showed how bad the CGI was. It begun with the CGI flies in Episode 1 and continued through the whole show. It's sad, that they didn't try to make more with physical props. Like the portal. Did it have to repair it self and therefore needed CGI. I don't think so. It would be fine, even better without.
The last scenes in the Byer's house gave me last one kick in the gut. There are so many unanswered questions: What are those slugs. We saw them in Barb's corpse earlier. Why put Chief Hopper food in that box. It is obviously for Eleven. Where is she? Who and where are One to Ten?
Some thoughts on season 2: Now that the expectations are so high i fear that season 2 will feel worse, even it isn't. This show hit me from nowhere, this advantage will season 2 don't have. Maybe a time jump? (But i want to see the actors again). I really hope the Duffer Brothers will take their time and won't become the Wachowskis (Matrix --> Matrix 2+3).
Conclusion: Stranger Things showed us that you can build on existing themes and tropes and at the same time do something completely new. I think Netflix will learn something from this: Don't just continue an existing IP (Full House, Gilmore Girls). Nostalgia is prevalent in today's pop culture, but that doesn't mean viewers want to see old things with a fresh color. In building on a whole decade of cinema and Zeitgeist, the Duffer could develop new ideas. It's like: We like the 80s but we don't want to retell them. There are still new stories in this period that cinema and TV just hadn't time, money or motivation to tell. For that i am eternality grateful.
Good Night, readers, good night.
How far can excellent costume design carry a film? A long way, it turns out. Kate Winslet stars as a dressmaker in the 50s, returning to her childhood village in the Australian outback. Secrets from the past are revealed as she uncovers the truth behind a murder she allegedly committed as a child.
Along the way she gets to wear outstanding outfits, as well as make some for the whole town. The high-fashion costumes clash wonderfully with the barren backdrop of the Australian wilderness and the bucolic village sat in the midst of it.
Winslet is good in the role, she manages to nail down the accent without making it the central part of her performance. It’s a well written part, which helps; part fish out of water, part daughter-coming-home, her character always has a sense of mystery yet opens up when it counts.
The story and structure is a mess however. At various moments you wouldn’t be forgiven if you’d thought the film had ended. The tone and even the genre pivot a couple of times, and it can be jarring. It’s particularly frustrating when things start to get boring.
Without going into spoilers, I might also question the order in which certain events unfold; something about the pacing and timing of the major plot points is way off.
It’s a funny film though and the sense of humour chops and changes between warm, gentle moments between characters, physical comedy and black-as-night gags. The drama hits too hard for this to be an out-and-out comedy but The Dressmaker is definitely good for a laugh or two.
This is an odd film. Some very poor decisions were made as to how it was put together, but the great lead performances, outstanding costumes and beautiful direction all make it worth your while. Not a must see, but a solid piece of work nonetheless.
http://benoliver999.com/film/2016/03/05/thedressmaker/
After a couple of superficially entertaining but broad and Michael Sheen-infected episodes, The Good Fight bounces back big time with its best episode in... ever? Yeah, this might be my favorite episode of the show. It's not only that Blum's presence is only strongly felt, not seen, but also that this episode is super-focused on the firm in every plot. And they really perfect the show's balancing act, between contemporary politics and character dynamics, between big picture theme and minute personal consequences.
How Lucca's video sparks off the rumination of the firm's racial bias (or its "supposed" lack of, depending on where you stand on the corporate ladder) is complex, difficult, and so damn exhilaratingly incendiary in the way it pushes our character identification of certain favorites against the important movement that needs to be pushed forward. It's all captured in how legitimate the grievances of Jay and Lucca are about this issue, but so too are the feelings on their faces for Maia when they learn she will be caught up in this. Even the sideplots of Julius/Marissa and Diane/Liz tie directly into this gray area, with all characters learning what needs to be done is never black and white, or that simple. This is The Good Fight at its best, really.
In terms of pacing, this episode feels like it slowed down a bit. Moving in chunks rather than flowing. Overall it's still a great episode with loads of things.
1. It's beautiful to see the relationship between these two. Post-wedding night, we see an intimacy we rarely see in shows, we see them opening up to each other. Jamie asks Claire if what they feel with each other is normal, do other couples have it? It's a bearing my soul moment and it's beautiful. Though Jamie can be considered a traditional masculine man (built like a tree, strong, fighter, works with his hands, one of the boys, etc), he is also soft in unexpected ways (he's always asking for permission from Claire, he's thoughtful, considerate of her, earnest, emotionally open even when he knows it could be embarrasing, etc).
2. We meet a friend of Jamie's and I'm surprised to see that he is mute (his tounge was cut as prisoner) and he has a physical handicap from an injury (walks with a stick/cane). And he is treated with the same friendship and respect Jamie offers to all. There is no pitying him or making a mockery out of his handicap/difficulties. Jamie speaks in a version of sign language and translates to Claire so she may also understand him. This friend is treated by the writers with decency and respect, no played for laughs or pity, and not treated without dignity. It's rare to find a person with a disability in period drama that isn't there for comidic effect or as a sob story.
3. I did found it hard to watch the two instances Claire was/was almost raped. But I do respect the writers for not sexualizing it, but rather focusing on the trauma of the situation and Claire's emotional state. Also the men who committed the offenses where seen as villains (and within their villanious characters).
4. Claire is almost seconds away from going home, something she has been longing to do, but I wonder if she could break the bonds she has created with Jamie if she had been able to go back. Having experiences Randall, would she be able to look at Frank the same way as before. We do get a glimpse in this episode that Frank is capable of the same/similar cruelties his ancestor was known for.
5. My favorite part of the episode was seeing the Mackenzie men showing Claire how to defend herself and fight back. It's endearing to see the caring they have for her, which she recipricates. These sequence creates a light moment within an emotionally heavy ep.
7.8/10. Two quality episodes in a row despite a few clunkers preceding them! I can't say I loved the presence of Darren (man, HIMYM was really into broadway standouts at this point in its run), but I did enjoy the idea of a firestarter who brought to the fore issues between Robin & Lily and Ted & Barney respectively. Delving into the issue of how Marshall's dream vs. Lily's dream would affect the group (with Robin admitting that she selfishly wants Marshall to win because it would keep Lily there) is a nice beat for those involved, and Ted establishing that "The Dream" is going to jail for a bro, and then risking that very thing on Barney's behalf works really well in addition.
Plus, Cristin Miloti continues to absolutely own the role as The Mother. It's nice to get a brief reprise of "Marshall vs. The Machines," but Miloti pairs with Segel quite well and shows how The Mother fits with the gang before she and Ted ever actually cross paths. The way Marshall advises her to stand up for herself against Darren when it comes to keeping her band is a nice touch (not to mention her driving gloves). Plus, her fretting over karma, only for Ted to punch Darren (thereby letting The Mother become lead singer of her band again) and leading her to buy "whoever the best man is" a drink of expensive scotch is a wonderful way to have Ted and his future love's paths cross without them actually meeting.
Overall, it's a nice little upswing for the show this season after a few prior stumbles.
9.3/10. I really enjoyed the conceit of Ted's story here. The parallel blind dates happening at different points in time was an interesting device to look at how Ted and his date had changed over the years, at the various signals and cues that they'd misinterpreted or didn't pick up on at all, and the way that going through those motions again was a sign to Ted that he was looking for someone who appreciated those goofy or semi-offputting things about him. The best little narrative devices on the show are used for both drama and comedy, and this absolutely fit. Plus, the story had those little well-observed quirks of dating and friendship that the show does so well.
The Stripper Lily story is also a comic classic. Marshall's elaborate fantasy to be able to actually imagine himself sleeping with another woman is 100% classic, as is Lily's dismay that he "kills her off" in these daydreams and her enthusiasm for her stripper body double. Barney brought the laughs as well, between his blind belief that Robin wouldn't have a problem with his going to strip clubs, and his Chewbacca-related ruse and his protestations of innocence while the Lusty Leopard treats him like the regular he is. Robin had less to do, but even she had some good lines, (e.g. "Is that what your whores told you?")
Overall, it's an excellent episode that has a cute story to tell for Ted in an interesting way, and a lot of silly fun with the rest of the gang. Plus, I had forgotten that this is the doppleganger season!
Despite my rating, I have some mixed feelings about this episode. So let's take the good and the bad.
Good: CBS hyped the heck out of a then-notably crazy Britney Spears appearing on the show. The episode, accordingly, got record ratings, and from that point on How I Met Your Mother turned the corner as a successful show that was no longer in perpetual danger of cancellation and could build toward the future.
Bad: Britney Spears cannot act worth a damn. It's not like her role was so well-written or anything, but she had an awkward delivery and added nothing to the episode itself. It's strange because she acquitted herself well enough on Saturday Night Live back in the day, but maybe she just didn't fit with a sitcom setting.
Good: Sarah Chalke is delightful. As Scrubs fans know, Chalke is a consumate pro, who knows how to be charming and likable and also carry some more emotional material in a comedy environment. There's a brightness and sense of fun to her as Stella, and it boosts the episode tremendously. The way she sells both her reasons for not dating Ted and how much her daughter and her career mean to her is great.
Bad: There's something mildly troubling about the entire "turning a no into a yes" motif. It feels generally fine here because we know that Stella does like Ted, there's just something holding her back. Still, there's the fact that whatever her reasons, she turned Ted down pretty unequivocally (as Robin amusingly points out), and the fact that he keeps pressuring her and trying to woo her despite that is a little uncomfortable, at least in principle, even if it works alright in the heightened reality of a sitcom. Plus he's pretty awful to Abby in the process.
Good: There's so many tremendous jokes with a delayed payoff here and gags that play with the nonlinear storytelling of the show. From Barney being the one who made Abby cry, to Marshall being the one who left the self-help book that prompted Ted to devote himself to it, to Lily rubbing Marshall's injured neck. There's some tightly-constructed humor and it really works.
Great: The 2-minute date. Again, there's something a bit uneasy about the whole idea, but damn if the 2-minute date is not an incredibly romantic gesture and one of the top moments of the show. It's Ted at his sweetest and most creative, and the little joking asides through the whole thing are remarkably endearing. If there's one thing that helps wash the sour taste of the "no becomes a yes" idea of my mouth, it's a payoff this inventive and with a great energy and real emotion to boot. A good finish goes a long way.
Kind of a strange twist on the, "axolotl tanks," from the, "Dune," series of books. I wonder if it was intentional.
There's a scene where Lucy goes to level twelve. She watches a VCR tape. A pregnant woman is show to be strapped to a metal table in a tank of water. She gives birth to a dozen or so, "Gulpers," which proceed to eat her. In the show, "gulpers," appear to be genetically mutated, "axolotl," which are an amphibious salamander native to the underground waterways of Mexico City. Axolotl's distinctive gills are located outside of their bodies.
In the series of books by Frank Herbert referred to as, "The Dune Trilogy," there is a race of men known as the Bene Tleilax who are famous for their cloning technology. They can create a clone from just a few cells of a cadaver which can later recover their full memory[1], or create, "Face Dancers," among other things. It is eventually discovered they enslave their females, whose wombs are used to grow the clones in. Thus, the name, "axolotl tanks" of Tleilaxu.
I understand in the game "Fallout 3" the "gulpers" with fingers in their mouths are mutated salamanders, but in the T.V. series they appear as axolotls. I am guessing a writer is a fan of Dune and changed the salamanders to axolotls to create a, "literal," axolotl tank. Kind of a creepy homage to just as creepy an element of the Dune trilogy.
[1] In Dune lore the full memories of you and your ancestors are encoded in your DNA at a cellular level. (It's Science Fiction, and just supports the real thrust of the story. Spoilers, it's a story about how you shouldn't trust charismatic leaders.)
[7.4/10] Everyone sucks here. Some people suck to varying degrees, but everyone’s in a bad way to some degree or another. It’s a weird episode, one that isn't bad by any stretch, but plays in spaces that don’t do as much for me as a viewer.
Let’s go with Tony, since he was prime on my hate train after his debut episode. Let’s list the shittery in (vaguely) ascending order: 1. Saying unkind things to Margaret when he knows she’s in a vulnerable place 2. Allowing for snipes behind her back 3. Marrying her just to earn his mother’s admiration and 4. Cheating on her constantly, to the point that he knocked up one of his friends, and didn’t say a word about it (so far as we know).
In truth, I feel a little bad for Tony. They give him some pathos here, with the revelation that he was the unloved son, left behind by his social climbing mother , with the implication that he was disdained for his father’s actions and for his disability which he hides. The guy is messed up from all of this, and it doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it helps explain it.
Margaret’s in the same boat. She says many an unkind thing to Elizabeth. She wants to have the wedding to end all weddings so she can top her sister. And while she never cheats (so far as we know), she’s essentially only getting married because Peter Twonsend is, and she wants to beat him to the punch out of a sense of revenge
But she’s also hurt,and people who are hurting do stupid things. She’s not wrong to be bitter at her sister, even if her words can be cruel. And the prospect that after everything else, Margaret had to wait six months to announce her engagement because Elizabeth is pregnant struck me as utterly absurd. The Church of England won’t let her marry? Stupid, but whatever, the Queen’s hands are tied. But some issue of “protocol” preventing dueling announcements is just ridiculous.
Suffice it to say, I continue to feel the way I’ve long felt about Margaret on The Crown -- that she’s an overgrown child in how she acts, but also one who has plenty of legitimate grievances and reason to feel sad.
That just leaves Elizabeth, who occupies her usual more ambiguous role here -- does she want to look out for ehr sister or support her, or knock her down as part of the cold war they’ve been having? It’s interesting to see her be outwardly supportive, but also watch Tony’s bohemian friends mock the dignity and tradition of the palace (which, in fairness, is something I’d probably do), and so look to nip this whole thing in the bud. Her hunting for dirt on her sister’s fiance allows her to occupy both spaces.
I’ll admit, I find the implication that the stress of finding out all the cruddy things that Tony has done causes Elizabeth to go into labor a rather odd thing. But the show does the ensuing sequence well, making points about the strangeness of the process to modern eyes without having anyone vocalize it.
I appreciate that, because very little in this episode is subtle. It lays on the bit with Tony’s issues with his mom very thick. It doesn’t hide the ball with Margaret’s motivations for the marriage in the slightest. And Elizabeth’s disgust for the whole thing is made pretty plain as well.
But what I do appreciate is the ambiguity of the closing scene between the two sisters where Elizabeth sidles up to telling Margaret what she knows about Tony, but can't pull the trigger. Some mean words are exchanged. Elizabeth rubs it in that Margaret could have had what she wanted but wasn’t willing to give up the privilege. Something tough but fair, which ties into one of The Crown’s recurring themes -- The Queen wishing she could just be a comparatively normal person and wife and mother rather than having to become The Crown. And Maragert turns the comment around, saying it’s ironic that her sister enunciates a desire to be invisible because e she’s somehow able to pull that off despite wearing the crown, a comment that ties into Margaret’s own need to “shine”, as her mother puts it, and her pride in doing so, that's been a recurring theme for her too.
Despite the harsh mutual insults, Elizabeth doesn't spill the beans on Tony infidelities. I initially took it as a kindness, or at least an act of measured forbearance. Elizabeth already feels blamed for the dissolution of Margaret’s first pseudo fiance. She doesn’t want to be the slain messenger again. And so maybe, she holds back because, even though she could blow up Maragret’s engagement and relationship, she doesn’t want to. She wants to let Margaret live her own life and doesn’t want to be seen as the culprit for another relationship down the tubes.
But my wife suggested a more sinister explanation. Maybe her non-commenting is a “you deserve this”-style fuck you to her sister. Maybe it’s not a kindness, but a means of damning Margaret to this life she’s defiantly choosing, with the knowing expectation that she’ll have to suffer the consequences for her own poor judgment.
It’s fair to read it either way, and in truth, there's probably some of each, which is a sign of solid character writing. This is certainty a strange episode, focused on more melodrama and adults acting like teenagers than The Crown usually indulges in. But there's also no one to quite root for, which is, in a story about the pampered clucking at the slightly-less pampered, usually a good sign.
