“One must be like water.” ‘The King and I’ is a fucking frustrating episode of Vinyl, which is turning into a fucking frustrating show. There’s that Elvis cameo, lightning from a clear sky, and to either side of it are fields of mayonnaise. Events play out like someone’s checking off squares on a prestige drama bingo card. […]
“A youth spent coaxing an already-outdated dial-up modem into letting you log on to your favorite MUD, following friends you’d never met from server to server.” Internet Murder Revenge Fantasy is a raw, trippy memoir-cum-comic anthology from Canadian author, game developer (retired), and podcast host Merritt Kopas. Written by Kopas and illustrated by a dizzyingly talented slate of […]
“Are you sure about that?” Jimmy and Mike are very different people going through very different things, but the beats of their stories often share a theme. It’s the glue that holds their parallel tales of corruption together, especially since season 2 has them walking paths that seldom intersect. ‘Bali Ha’i’ gives us two stories in […]
“The logo looks like a toilet.” Bobbie Cannavale and Olivia Wilde are spitting blood, soul, sweat, and venom into this show. With a strong supporting cast (aside from a few weak links like James Jagger) working around them, they form an energized dynamo of human dysfunction that beats and thumps at the heart of the show. For […]
“My marriage is falling apart and I’ve been masturbating to hentai because I can’t connect to real people.” ‘Red Means Stop’ is a frustrating conclusion to a frustrating season of television. It introduces a monstrously enjoyable new character in Clancy Brown’s Red Death, a sort of perverse apotheosis for the show’s ideas about the impossibility […]
“It’s like he was born without the gene for it.” ‘Rebecca’ is a slow burn, an episode in which as much attention is paid to the lighting around Chuck as to the scramble faced by Kim and Jimmy in their respective legal purgatories or to Mike’s dawning realization that half measures leave loose ends. The […]
“Inside every man is another version of himself.” Julie’s just running up to firing Clark when he says it, but his bullshit bit about dopplegangers doubles as a cruelly insightful observation on what’s going on all around him. Clark begging his way into a job as a gofer to avoid his father’s belief that he’s a […]
“This is exciting, like when we were young and dumb and everything was dangerous and pointy.” It makes perfect sense that a fictionalized Christopher Lambert, the former Highlander himself, is the height of celebrity in the fictional universe of The Venture Bros. His bargain-bin mediocrity is exactly the kind of pitiful societal apogee characters like Rusty […]
“That’s a bell you don’t un-ring.” The secret to not living in a state of perpetual regret is, of course, to make the right choice in the first place. Witness Jimmy scrambling to correct his eminently preventable error, one that saw Kim banished to document processing in the basement of HHM, and you have all the […]
“Put it into the couch, not your marriage.” ‘The Racket’ is loud, angry, and fucking hilarious. It begins with Richie taking his anger out not on his and Devon’s relationship but, at his glacially calm therapist’s suggestion, on the couch. With a tennis racket. His subsequent golden-boy claim that he’s worked out his shit is […]
“We’ll know how cool we look.” I think the Monarch just murdered Andy Warhol. Or Wes Warhammer, anyway. Who may or may not have been Andy Warhol. ‘It Happening One Night’ sadly repairs the hole in the floor of Venture Tower, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of the season’s best entries so […]
“Feels like something’s up.” Using your hour of airtime to tell parallel stories with no point of intersection is a risky proposition. Jimmy and Mike may both feel the pull of older, easier ways of moving and surviving in the world, and they’re both muddling through half-assed attempts at turning over a new leaf, but that’s […]
“You know that’s actually Devon in the portrait?” Looking in the mirror and realizing you don’t know who’s looking back, and that no one else knows either, sucks. ‘Whispered Secrets’ ends with Richie staring at a hole in the world where his wife’s portrait used to be, its pale spot on a wall a blocky […]
“I know who my enemy is.” That hole in the lobby of Venture Tower is really racking up a body count. Assuming Battle-Ax and Think Tank (voiced by the incomparable Jeffrey Wright of Boardwalk Empire fame) both bought it in that crash, that’s three shots, three kills for Chekov’s unusually enormous gun. It’s an accretion leading directly […]
“Are you still morally flexible?” ‘Cobbler’ follows a simple thread, observing the lives of the brothers McGill as they proceed absent one from the other. For Jimmy it means an end to the moral code he tried to follow to win Chuck’s favor, something he now knows he could never obtain. He’ll keep being a lawyer, […]
“You don’t want to believe.” A chunky, inelegant piece of opening exposition plays us in and serves to highlight the fact that there was virtually nothing between season 10’s finale and premiere that was of any consequence to either. Excusable, maybe, in a procedural content to hum along indefinitely, but grueling in an episode of television […]
“Reach up my ass and grab my heart.” The cast of The Venture Bros is engaged in a constant struggle to determine who and what they are. This myopic personal rat race consumes their lives, even though they almost never manage to actually change or learn anything, and the slapdash enthusiasm with which characters like the Monarch […]
Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Bathsheba Garnett, Sarah Stephens, Julian Richings, Wahab Chaudhry | Written and Directed by Robert Eggers “Dost thou remember that I love thee?” The Witch is a searing emotional calamity of a film. Its scope is at once frighteningly vast and achingly intimate, its themes of societal […]
“Who you are ain’t gettin’ signed.” Richie wants to believe that, like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, his skills amount to more than a good ear and a practiced mind. His return to the arms of addiction has him convinced that what he heard when the New York Dolls brought that building down was a […]
“You’re all hearing this the same way?” It’s 1973, and the streets of New York are swamped with the morning upchuck of a hungover sexual awakening. Vinyl, brainchild of Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese, Terence Winter, and Rich Cohen, climbs deep into the world of record production in the skin-submersible of one Richard “Richie” Finestra, protagonist and (briefly) narrator. […]
“SG WAS HERE” It starts and ends with the same conundrum. When the rules say no to us, whether it’s an alarmed security door barring our escape or a seemingly purposeless warning label on an otherwise normal light switch, what do we do, and why? How do we maintain our identities in a world trying […]
“Thank you for being my people.” Gravity Falls, after two seasons of the best-looking backgrounds, liveliest characters, and all-out most infuriating production schedules of all time, is off the air. It isn’t a perfect finale, nor is it a particularly daring one, but it has heart, horror, and an end-of-summer bittersweetness that gives its many indulgences […]
