Wow?! Reminds me of my all-time favorite animation,Fantastic Planet, but with a nice touch of ecohorror added. First episode was a truly compelling watch, and I hope the rest of the season can maintain this high bar. The plot itself is more on the slow side, but this gives the show a contemplative quality. Just lie back, relax, and breathe in this truly alien world.
As with Quantumania,Kang's appearance here does nothing to make the character more compelling. Majors is a great actor, but his performance here was just so weird and off-putting.
Oh, my gooooood, that episode nearly killed my interest for this show. A long, tedious flashback that's completely against the tone of the rest of the series, concerning characters I care nothing about, wrapped in cheap sets, poor writing, and an attempt at '80s sitcom aesthetic that falls flat on its face. The only thing that got me through was practicing my Mandarin listening skills, and seeing the Monkey King himself in action.
I've just gone through the synopses for the rest of the season to make sure that was the last flashback. Whew.
Me: "Andor is a Star Wars show where a lightsaber would feel out of place."
Andor writers: "LOL spaceship lightsabers."
Weakest of a great season. The drug scenes went on too long, and when it transitioned into that whole catfish society nonsense, it just felt weird in a bad way. The emotional core is good, but the episode was a crap way to explore it that broke the usual tone of the series.
Julia is a comfy show, albeit not one with as much substance as it would like to claim. The portrayal of Julia feels a little hollow, as she's perpetually disarmingly charming and almost naïve in her pursuits. We never really get to know what makes her tick or what about her drove her to become a TV pioneer. There's also a tendency to put roadblocks in her way that are caricatural at best, and rely a lot on white men being assholes to women. They even did poor Paul dirty for a while, which is really sad considering how supportive and adoring the real-life Paul Child was of his wife.
Ah, but it kind of comes together in the end. And there are plenty of genuine, heartfelt moments that feel earned to make it a pleasant watch. The show kind of wore its welcome in the end, but it was short enough that I didn't mind too much.
I'm glad this is how they decided to end the show. No big dramatic turn, no death or anything silly like that... Just a feel-good slice of life as we say goodbye to beloved characters. We know there'll be other trials in their lives, but we also know that, somehow, they're gonna be okay.
Yeah... This is working for me.
It's got this cool focus on the food that the original Japanese show had, and it wastes no time with BS rivalries the way American reality TV shows usually does. It's fun, the chefs are respectful and crazy inventive, and the food is really out of this world in inventiveness and creativity. Some of the personalities (like Dominique Cress, my favorite) are big and boisterous in the most fun way possible.
My only complain, and it's a small one, is that I would have preferred to be a clearer underdog dynamic with the challengers and the Iron Chefs. Sometimes the contest just feels like two chefs going at it, instead of this basic idea of a contestant facing an impossible legend. This was most apparent with Samuelsson, who looks to be an amazing chef, but who played the underdog card by invoking how he came from humble beginnings. I know everyone in there is happy to be on the show, but I prefer the near-mythical contest of underdog versus legend that the original Iron Chef went for.
But that's a small quibble. The show is entertaining, Alton Brown and Kristen Kish are on point, the food looks amazing, and the rivalries are light-hearted and food-centric. This feels like a legitimate Iron Chef show.
(Plus, bonus, no Bobby Flay in sight...)
Stone and Crenn were robbed. They clearly had the superior dishes (that forest floor one was out of this world), but the point of this episode was to give a boost to Samuelsson because he got his butt handed to him over the course of his episode.
Seriously... Every one of Samuelsson's takes on medieval food was so out of left field. "Medieval food was all about being soft"?!
(Yes, I take Iron Chef way too seriously.)
Others here have already addressed a lot of the issues I had with this episode, but I just wanna say:
This episode made me feel how I felt watching some classic Doctor Who episodes that were bad, but which I felt I had to get through to get to the good parts. I've never felt like this in the modern era (except perhaps a few bad episodes in Capaldi's first series), but this... The previous Chibnall series were bad, but this just takes the cake.
And can I say? I really don't care for Whittaker's Doctor. I've been watching some clips with the previous modern Doctors, and they all had that magical energy about them, like they were excited about life and wanted to take us on a grand tour of all time and space. Whittaker has nothing of this energy. The writing's largely to blame, but there is something about her performance, too, that lacks a certain depth and quality. I was hoping that, like Capaldi, she would find her footing after a season or two, but her character is actually regressing as we head out into her last appearance.
I like to think that in a few years, when RTD has steered the ship right again, I'll be thinking back to this episode as another one of the dark periods of Who fandom.
This is more "Hell no" than "Halo."
This was... fine, I guess? I think I would have preferred more of a "Death of Stalin" treatment than outright satire, because when you see characters like the POTUS act like outright idiots, it takes away some of the bite. Although, the idea that they could have averted disaster but decided not to because there was a business opportunity was really excellent.
I thought the central moment of the "Don't Look Up" political movement, was sadly poorly executed. I think maybe because the idea was WAY too outrageous. It's one thing to hurt yourself and your country because you feel it will hurt the other side more, but it's another to, like, not look up at the sky.
Ultimately, with this film, either the satire doesn't land, or it lands with a crowd that already believes in climate change, and thus, people for whom the satire is facile. It also avoided very clearly exploring political lines (for instance, by making the POTUS some kind of female Clinton but with Trump-like nepotism) so it lost a lot of its verisimilitude by trying to not take political sides.
I don't know if there's a better way to explore this idea. Perhaps this was the best story possible for this exact idea.
This may very well be the quintessential "so bad it's good" movie. It's over the top, cheesy, and filled with moments that will make you gape in disbelief. Plus, it's got a smoking-hot Denise Richards showing just how much she wanted a Hollywood career by giving the best performance she possibly could under the circumstances, and a young Paul Walker who quickly gets replaced by a robot dinosaur once a lion mauls him. It's also got stuff like a T-rex doing charades, so yeah.
Honestly, it's absolutely a B movie, but its plot moves at 100 mph and is never boring. I've watched recent Hollywood blockbusters that held my attention far less.
The main actress and the actor playing the crime boss are really phenomenal and carry this show. That being said, this series' quality just went down and down from the very high point of the first episode. It went from a hard-hitting exploration of a grief-stricken woman on a path of vengeance, to a middling cop show, to bloody but very melodramatic soap opera with emotions turned to 11 and flashbacks every five minutes.
Also, while the music was fantastic in the first episode, by the time I had heard it 50 times I was very much done with it.
Wow, this has to be my favorite Psych episode to date. It has high stakes from the moment the episode starts, and it puts Shawn in genuine danger, which rarely ever happens on the show. All that, plus we get Lassiter and Henry teaming up, and Henry even gets to flex some of that detective muscle.
Yeah, this is a great one!
Okay, I'm out. The idea of showing us an alien invasion through multiple POVs around the world is fantastic, but they clearly didn't have enough material to fill a season, because all we get are tired character moments with little tidbits of alien action. To call it a "slow burn" is to overlook just how wet and slow things are. You'll find yourself wishing the aliens would kill the main cast already because there's no reason to watch otherwise.
It's too bad, because performances and cinematography are pretty good. But this show is an expensive nothingburger.
This is a tone-perfect adaptation of Herbert's novel, but even if it weren't, I could watch brutalist architecture take off and land all day. An absolute visual triumph.
This show is one of the most consistently funny on TV right now, but that cold open with the boat was one of the most hilarious things this show has put out.
After a very hit-and-miss season, this finale was nearly flawless and redeems even the poorer episodes. (Okay, maybe not that Dumb Thor one.) An unexpected coming-together of previous episodes gives us action on a cosmic scale never seen before in the MCU, including action moments that put your most over-the-top anime face-offs to shame. Really neat stuff.
A killer concept with a very bland execution. Featuring Ryan Reynolds in the daring role of Ryan Reynolds.
What really hurts this movie is the way the real-world game concepts take second seat whenever the plot needs something to happen, and no amount of stupid Twitch streamer reaction shots can save the verisimilitude. There's also a really bland romance subplot shoehorned in that brings nothing to the story and is so blindingly obvious its resolution feels more like relief than payoff.
Also, those Disney "Easter eggs" were dinosaur-sized. Disney really, REALLY didn't want you to miss them.
That being said, Taika Waititi makes a really excellent Disney villain, even when his material kind of sucks.
MAN, this show is so uneven. After last week's awful attempt at comedy, we're now getting a no-holds-barred, intriguing cosmic episode with fantastic stakes and awesome action. Not only was the multiversal fight visually cool and exciting, but it's also the very best we've seen of Hawkeye in the entire MCU. (At least to date! Fingers crossed for the Disney+ show.)
Let's hope the next episode delivers on this fantastic setup.
"What if Thor had reality-bending dumbness powers?"
A failed attempt at humor and a complete waste of time. Special shout-out to this episode's Darcy for being the most painfully unfunny character in the history of the MCU.
I don't know what it is exactly about this show, but it's just not compelling TV. I loved the comics (it's one of the best comic series ever), but whatever magic was there didn't translate to the screen despite the series sticking pretty close to the tone of the original material.
I watched 4 episodes and I'm just... bored. Agent 355 is interesting, but only marginally so. Yorick, while charming in the comics, is like a Shia Labeouf imitator who goes "No no no no no!" every three sentences. And so far, it's mostly just people walking from point A to point B through the woman-only post-apocalyptic landscape.
I'm chalking this one up to another proof that creating a faithful adaptation doesn't always mean you capture the magic of the source material. Read the comics instead!
Season 3 has been great so far, but this episode was off the charts. There's so much going on here, so many little quotable moments and hilariously unforeseen turns of events, and every character gets their moment to shine.
That was leagues ahead of the crappy zombie story last episode. The premise is intriguing, and the places the story go are fresh and unpredictable.
Unfortunately, the episode just kinda... ends. Like it ran out of time to tell its full story. Unless there's a second part coming that I missed?
It's a pretty good start, with decent dramatic writing and solid performances. The inciting event is dramatic and well-done enough. That being said, I don't think the unique setting had a chance to shine in this first episode yet. Still, this looks like they're gonna handle the source material with appropriate heft, so I'm quietly optimistic for it. Slow burn, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Ugh. After last week's excellent episode, this was a major step down and makes me reconsider following this series. The writing was atrocious, with every other character quipping at the worst of times. (Worst offender: Sharon Carter quipping "Blam" after blowing Happy's head off.) Not only that, but the third act turn hangs on a supremely illogical and shitty character decision.
This, to me, is an example of what happens when the MCU "formula" is handled by bad writers. You get this illogical mess that thinks it's way funnier than it is. Hope this is the low point of the series and not a sign of things to come.
This is very much a one-joke indie SF film that doesn't really end. I thought the girl's performance was great, and some of the writing around two clueless Millennials trying to disconnect was fun, but overall the movie was a big waste of time. One thing that stands out to me, though, is how genuine the relationship between the leads felt. It really felt like they loved each other despite their mutual limitations.
Can't say I recommend it, though.
The comparisons to John Wick are inevitable, and they're not in this movie's favor. John Wick is just a tighter, more stylish, more visceral version of this story. That being said, Bob Odenkirk is fantastic, and arguably better than Keanu Reeves. Not a bad way to spend a hour and a half.
Marketing really dropped the ball on this one by letting everyone assume it was "Nicolas Cage as John Wick but with a pig." It's a smart, forlorn, reflective character piece about a broken man who deeply cares for something authentic in an empty world. I'd say this is Nicolas Cage's best performance since Adaptation, but honestly, this understated and quiet film blows everything he's done out of the water.
Do NOT go into this one expecting an action flick. This is a slow indie film with a relentless focus on its main character. The most unclassifiable movie I've seen in a long while, and one that stays with you long after the credits roll.
