“I am getting a taste of what Agent Scully must suffer.” Boy, this season is one wild ride. Ups and downs have abounded and here on the precipice of its foreshortened run there’s still no clear thrust as to where it’s all heading and why any of it was dragged up from cold storage for […]
“Yeah, Mighty Monarch. My wife invited me.” Nothing in The Venture Bros is merely exceptional. If there’s one thing the show does consistently, it’s portraying a world where even the most astonishing lives are riddled with fear, insecurity, fuckups, and tedium. ‘Faking Miracles’ is a quiet case study in how the glossy exterior is maintained through hack-work, […]
“YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE” ‘Home Again’ is a parable about how we deal with our garbage. It births this metaphor via a gooey canal, giving us a garbage golem who kills to protect the homeless, or at least to punish those who oppress them, and a bluntly mirrored plot centered on Scully’s struggle to accept her […]
“Where am I? Hell? Or a children’s TV show set in Hell?” There’s a blurry line between the everyday and the exceptional. Plenty of superhero flicks have made fodder out of the murkiness of that division. Think back to Mr. Incredible’s super-powered midlife crisis, his inability to reconcile his power and ability with what he […]
“It’s a reminder that no matter how overwhelming our anxieties might be, they will soon be resolved when we are dead and buried for all eternity.” Thus does the preposterously Teutonic psychiatrist prescribe a walk in the graveyard as a cure for life’s angst. Even life’s most terrifying and mysterious questions, he asserts, have answers. […]
“It’s a Sicilian thing.” It feels like the Earth was young the last time The Venture Bros was on the air, but here we are again at the start of a brand new season. Season 5 ended in flames, death, and an accordion-driven rendition of The Crash Test Dummies’ ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ along with the […]
“Note the letter-opener sticking out of his head.” ‘Founder’s Mutation,’ a much stronger episode than last night’s The X-Files premiere, finds a balance between mythology and the human condition and then hums along in that sweet spot. If the story of an egotistical scientist conducting experiments on his own children is perhaps a little shopworn in the […]
“If I’m putting my ass out there, I need to know it’s hanging by more than just a very slender thread.” After eight years of radio silence, the number stations are spinning back up. Returning to the air with the inauspiciously-named ‘My Struggle,’ The X-Files manages to wed frenetic pacing and herky editing to David Duchovny’s affectless […]
“If I can just keep this up for the rest of my life, no one will suspect a thing.” Steven Universe is not made for me. This is good and correct, as it is made for children and the alternate Earth where it’s packed full of references to Hellraiser and soundtracked with deep cuts from Godspeed You! Black Emperor‘s discography is […]
“There’s still time!” “That is a nice thought, but no.” Love is a key component of the fabric of Steven Universe, a force the show treats as both weapon and comfort. It’s also a subject the show has displayed immense maturity in dealing with, but there’s very little to get into when it comes to ‘The […]
Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Demian Bichir, Michael Madsen, James Parks, Lee Horsley, Zoe Bell, Walton Goggins, Bruce Dern | Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino “You only need to hang mean bastards, but mean bastards you need to hang.” The Hateful Eight is, as its title suggests, a sort of inverted Magnificent Seven, its […]
“I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do it.” This review contains spoilers. A lot of spoilers. Kylo Ren’s anguished plea to his father, Han, might as well be the logline for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a movie acutely conscious of its place in cinematic history. J. […]
“Aaaand this is worse than the apocalypse.” Escape From Reality is officially the penultimate episode of Gravity Falls. The series will come to an end sometime in early 2016 with an hour-long finale, not a cancellation but a planned conclusion by creator Alex Hirsch. Here’s hoping the last hurrah has a little more oomph than this one. Escape From Reality is […]
“Now go out there, and fuck ’em in the heart.” Scorched Earth gives the largest single bite of its extended running time to Claire actually dancing Toni’s Dakini. It’s a gutsy choice, hanging a season finale on a play within a play, but while it delivers moments of transcendence it also edges out all possible resolution for loose ends […]
“A little pain is a fact of this life. To feel it is a choice. I choose no.” Paul said it way back in the premiere: a ballerina’s job is to make the arduous look effortless. Full Dress takes that thought and runs with it, giving us a full hour of people trying desperately to […]
Ross: “Which movement do you want?” Paul: “Childhood.” F.U.B.A.R is messier, less visually stimulating, and broader than the hard-hitting ‘M.I.A,’ an unending procession of gloom and doom which spends far too long showing us how fucked up each and every character is when it comes to work, love, and family. The holidays, stressful even for […]
“There are many girls, Angel. Who can keep track of them all?” The third act of ‘M.I.A’ is wrenchingly confident in its pacing, a tense and ugly progress toward a muted tragedy in the backseat of a luxurious private town car. If the first two acts spend their time in puzzling ways, branching into multiple […]
“A rumble comes. The ground opens up. A black tongue reaches out. Bodies get pulled down, down, down. Swallowed, whole, before they even know they’re dead.” Flesh and Bone has been showing stress fractures since its premiere. Four episodes in there’s a pervasive sense that the messages the show espouses, the martial succinctness of the title […]
“‘There is no ‘there’ there.’” Reconnaissance, the third of Flesh and Bone‘s eight episodes, is as preoccupied with spying, interrogation, and information as its title suggests. The hour of inquest and mystery has its ups and downs, but the strange Hitchockian climax to which it builds is worth the bumpy ride. The dizzying sprint down the […]
“Your brain plays all kinds of tricks on you when you’re overseas. Tells you all kinds of fucked-up shit.” The motormouth veteran unlucky enough to pick Bryan as a seatmate on the bus to New York, a man who both looks and sounds like the voice track in a Godspeed You! Black Emperor single, knows exactly what […]
“It’s no big deal. I lost a toenail.” The smeared boundary line between art and obsession has been rich storytelling fodder since long before Darren Aronofsky’s bloated Black Swan – perhaps the most obvious point of comparison for Flesh and Bone – plié-d joylessly into movie theaters. A new eight-episode Starz miniseries from Breaking Bad veteran Moira Walley-Beckett(writer of Ozymandias, maybe the most viciously […]
