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I've been thinking aliens with a Prime Directive to follow or possibly time travelers who are trying to prevent something but not mess up the time stream too badly. The reference to The Thing last week would seem to point towards aliens, I guess.

I'm a lot more interested in the meta-story than the frankly kind of tepid surface detective story, though I'm enjoying the cast a lot.
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:46 PM on May 3, 2024

Oh, here's a trailer.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:54 PM on May 2, 2024

In all my years reading comics, I don't think I've ever seen somebody take Cap's shield and hurl it off into the distance purely to be a dick about it (and keep him busy for a while).
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:09 PM on May 2, 2024

and then they did Dark Phoenix again, and blew it again

Yeah, because they hired the same writer who had previously botched the same story in X-Men 3, and also invited him to direct it as well! I guess in fairness, he also did the screenplay for Days of Future Past which was way better than I expected it to be for what is a pretty esoteric and lore-heavy little corner of the comics. Then again, he wrote Apocalypse as well, so he's one for four.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:51 PM on April 27, 2024

I didn't make it very far in the first book, so maybe this is explained better there, but if the aliens see everything that's happening on Earth and they can prevent scientists from completing experiments and thus advancing science, why don't they just start putting the countdown thing on every character we see in the show who is making plans to resist the invasion? I don't get why they focus on humankind's theoretical advances when it's really advances in engineering they should be wary of,… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 4:39 AM on April 1, 2024

Well, I did it. I watched all 30 episodes of the Tencent adaptation. I think it would have been faster to just read the first book, and I had some trouble staying awake watching it late at night, because it mostly consists of various characters talking to each other in calm tones.

There are several marked differences from the Netflix adaptation, which I won't spoil, but it goes into a lot more detail about the inner workings of the ETO in a way that the Netflix… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:27 AM on April 26, 2024

I didn't realize this existed until now. Is it any good? The trailers don't give me a lot of hope, but I actually kind of liked the 2016 Exorcist TV show, and that was a show similarly designed to cash in on an iconic horror movie.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:24 AM on April 12, 2024

Just saw this and really liked it. I agree that it's very skillful at setting up the general comfy feeling of a 70s late-night talk show, which works tremendously to it's benefit once the spookiness starts to creep in. The kind of faux-documentary interstitials were definitely on the clunky side, but they did what they were supposed to do and kept the rest of the movie well paced. I found the exorcism stuff a little old hat, but the climax was awesome and exceeded my expectations. This is… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:57 PM on March 21, 2024

Suuuuure it did. I bet a lot of people also fainted from fright during the initial screenings.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:11 AM on March 29, 2024

I didn't get the impression that the people were jumping back and forth constantly between the different timelines, just that they had switched the one time, after the experiment happened, so Rapace's character is now suddenly in the timeline where her daughter doesn't speak Swedish and she's apparently been on the verge of dumping her husband for the project lead or whatever at NASA (or wherever). Presumably the dead cosmonaut also switched over at this moment and caused the accident. But I… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:05 PM on February 27, 2024

I admired the ambition this had in marrying a "spooky bartender from The Shining turns you against your family" scenario with a near-future conservative red-state dystopia, but ultimately didn't think it succeeded. Like, the racist ghost and the racist government obviously have things in common, but I'm not sure that either aspect really comments on the other in any meaningful way.

I think part of the problem is that we don't really get to… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:05 AM on February 26, 2024

I really liked this, having not seen the earlier movie. It's very sweet and has a kind of homemade feeling, along with a healthy helping of classic Japanese themes about work and the role of individual goals in society. The Vaseline-lens cinematography bugged me at first, but it works for the feeling of the film and I grew to enjoy it. Highlights for me were the protagonist's date and the sweded-out practical effects in the last act when we get a sort of explanation of why all this is happening
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:19 PM on February 20, 2024

I thought this was quite well-acted, for being basically a one-actor movie, and it touches on some themes I like a lot (doubles, unreliable memory, Pontypool-style mimetic shenanigans, etc). Once it got to the last act it was hard to see it as anything other than a metaphor for colonialism, though, and it started to seem a little didactic to me. I'm not sure whether that's the movie's fault or mine. Certainly things aren't spelled out in explicitly allegorical terms, I just… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:04 PM on February 20, 2024

This was great, much more well-written and interesting than I was expecting it to be, though I have to admit I'm a sucker for a "movie within a movie within a movie" premise. I agree it didn't totally stick the landing, and actually I thought the actual horror bits were kind of the least interesting parts of the movie. Still, I thought it was kind of thematically unified by how the obsession sort of got passed from subject to documentarian every ten years.
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:17 PM on February 6, 2024

This show really took off at the end
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:32 PM on January 16, 2024

Here's Fielder and Safdie in conversation with Christopher Nolan about this show. They seem to be speaking fairly early in the season aired and so don't discuss the finale.

Some tidbits:
Part of the genesis of the show was that Fielder was asked for money in front of a supermarket and didn't have any, and the woman who asked him said "I curse you."
Fielder: when you have the tone right, everything falls into place.
The… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:47 AM on January 28, 2024

I liked this season a lot, but I also felt the "forgiveness of debts" epilog was heavily undercut by all the prison rape innuendo in the immediately preceding scene.
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:02 PM on January 19, 2024

I really like this so far. One thing occurred to me about the Ferris Bueller thing: it's a little odd that the movie is stuck on repeat but we only ever see/hear the Twist and Shout scene. I'm fine with that just being movie magic, though, I guess.
posted to FanFare by whir at 4:55 PM on January 19, 2024

This prequel series is ok, but the writing gets a lot better in The Expanse season 1.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:44 PM on January 12, 2024

the country which by decree of apple cannot be mentioned

I assume you mean China here - I know about how Apple dropped John Stewart's show when they learned he was going to do some stuff about China, but is there something more concrete than this in regards to mentioning China on For All Mankind?
posted to FanFare by whir at 3:13 PM on December 11, 2023

I really admired this, but it was hard to watch. Nathan Fielder seems to be going for the Michael Hanneke miserablist niche of Adult Swim alt-comedy. Slow closeups of the producer silently weeping alone?

I did think the bit at the end where Asher and Whitney have an honest moment of fun and then proceed to suck all of the life out of it by trying to recreate it for the 'gram was pretty inspired, especially with the subsequent mask-slipping descent into all-out… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:27 PM on November 30, 2023

I just binged through the whole series (it's available to watch, ah, for the resourceful) and I enjoyed season 2. They are definitely going deep into timey-wimey territory, and I'm here for it, but I appreciate that all the time-travel stuff is explicitly tied to character beats.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:11 PM on November 20, 2023

I thought this was great, and probably one of the most original horror films I've seen this year.

I thought the world-building and lore was pretty skillfully done, when the movie starts you have no idea what's going on, but the characters obviously do, and then you pick up drips and drabs of lore from context, and finally there's the requisite information dump to a naive character when the grandmother lists the rules to the child (maybe this last part was a little… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:20 PM on November 3, 2023

I think it's more that the Innocents was cold in its heart.

That's an interesting comparison. I was also a lot more disturbed by the violence in The Innocents than I was in this movie, despite it being in many ways less gruesome. Maybe it just seems more plausible for kids to torture an animal out of basic amoral cruelty than as a result of demonic possession.

I will admit I was kind of dreading seeing… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 3:47 PM on November 7, 2023

This is kind of tangential to Loki the show, but Variety has published an interesting piece on Marvel's current troubles which touches on Loki and Jonathan Major's role in the future of the MCU.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:20 PM on November 1, 2023

I actually just read this for the first time just a few weeks ago, it's amazing. I'm a big fan of the 1963 movie adaptation too. It's very faithful, right down to the queer subtext.

I have read that Shirley Jackson seems to have continually denied the existence of a queer reading of the novel, despite it seeming quite plain to modern eyes. I haven't really been able to track down a direct quote about this, though. Has anyone has read her biography who would care to comment?
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:50 PM on November 1, 2023

Victor Timely hiding out from gangsters in the Egyptian-themed exhibit was a nice tip of the hat to Original Formula Kang's origins as Pharaoh Rama-Tut.

I remain confused by what people's motivations are in this show, especially Loki, as someone else mentioned.
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:52 PM on October 23, 2023

Who was OB before the TVA?

I wonder if he's a variant of Kang, though I don't really want him to be. But showing alternate Kangs played by different actors would be a convenient way for Marvel to dissociate itself from Jonathan Majors.
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:16 PM on October 15, 2023

I kind of liked this, even while recognizing that it is, in many ways, a bad movie. The Straw Dogs parallels were so spot on through most of it, right down to the menacing builders, that it almost reads like a parody at times, just without the humor. At least this version is told from the woman's perspective.

The villains in this are so cartoonishly evil that they need to make the everyday Irish villagers cartoonishly kind to make up for it (in… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:38 AM on October 7, 2023

I thought this one was pretty rough. Setting the one short during the actual 1985 Mexico City earthquake seems pretty tacky, the actual event is already quite horrible enough without needing to add some Aztec gods into the mix. And in general these tended to lean a little too hard on the muddiness of the format to obscure the image. I did like the twist in the second act of the lake short, though.

Vulture's got a ranking of all the shorts from all six films that I mostly agreed with.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:23 PM on October 6, 2023

I thought this was a fine return to form; the first season kind of lagged at the end with its stunt casting, and honestly if your villain needs to deliver a twenty-minute monologue in the finale just to explain everything, something has gone badly wrong with your plotting. But maybe they were planning to explain Kang's role more clearly in this season all along, and they finally did in about eight lines of dialog, so that's good.

This was directed by Justin Benson and… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:54 PM on October 6, 2023

I'm fairly sure Ahsoka was able to send an SOS message to Hagrid via that owl in the last scene, looking forwards to the crossover
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:23 PM on October 5, 2023

This was fantastic, though I was a little dubious for the first few episodes (until Eddie makes the face turn). I was pretty upset by the final reveal of the killer and for once didn't see it coming. (I did wonder how he managed to march all those dudes up to the farm by his lonesome, but it doesn't really seem like a nitpick about the plot type of show). Anyways, all the main and secondary characters were fantastic, the writing was funny and the humor seemed like came from the characters,… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:01 AM on September 2, 2023

I finally got around to watching this and it definitely seemed like a Marvel movie versus an Ant-Man movie. A lot of the plot didn't make tons of sense and it seemed like characters with a little more seriousness would have worked better for the purposes of introducing and developing the character of Kang, which seems like the reason this movie exists.

Also, look, I get it, live-action M.O.D.O.K. is going to look dumb almost whatever you do. But at least give him hair!… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:26 PM on August 26, 2023

I've been enjoying this season so far. I'm also a big fan of Zahn McClarnon, but the first season of this seemed slightly overstuffed to me, with a lot of different plot threads that became a little hard to follow. This season has seemed more focused so far, maybe because it's only based on a single novel instead of two novels.
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:33 PM on August 14, 2023

This one has been provisionally on my to-read list but I never did read American Psycho and I wonder whether that will be a detriment to enjoying this? (I did see the movie, though. Actually, American Psycho isn't exactly Tolstoy, maybe I'll just go ahead and try to read this.)
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:51 PM on June 28, 2023

Ok, well I read this, without the benefit of American Psycho (the novel), and I liked it! Maeve was an interesting narrator, and I liked the Sunset Boulevard-during-Halloween ambiance. I also appreciated the full-throated defense of LA culture that was in there (although considering Maeve as the source of it, I'm not sure how much to consider it a sort of back-handed compliment to LA culture). I did notice she trotted out the "Patrick Bateman… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:05 AM on August 10, 2023

we don't actually get a reveal on Fury's feelings on the Skrulls

Yeah, this sucked. The thing is that Fury's speech, as given, is totally in character for him as someone who is often a sort of "ends justify the means" anti-hero, and I think it makes his character a lot more interesting. But now we'll never know if that was really what he thought.

relied on Gravik just deciding to turn the machine on while… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:08 AM on July 27, 2023

I'll also note in passing that the whole thing with the Skrulls somehow gaining powers that they really shouldn't be able to gain through DNA and super-science (like the Captain Marvel powers) is also there in the original Secret Invasion comic event that this was based on, where a Skrull would take on the shape of, say, Spider-Woman, and then have for no reason given all of Spider-Woman's powers and abilities. That comic series sucked, it was far more badly-plotted than… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:21 AM on July 27, 2023

why not just be Ghost every time your opponent attacks you?

Ghost is another super who gets his powers from the hi-tech suit he invented. (I'll stop with this flavor of comment now at the risk of becoming repetitive. I do think it wouldn't have taken that much hand-wavy super-science dialog to restore my suspension of disbelief about this stuff, though, and the show just never bothered to include it.)
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:25 AM on July 28, 2023

This was good, there was some surprisingly good acting in it, especially from the actors playing Dolores and Luis. I liked it way better than the podcast, which I remember thinking was fine but basically forgettable.
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:17 PM on July 20, 2023

Olivia Coleman remains an absolute delight throughout.

I totally agree, but she's doing all the super-spy stuff that Maria Hill should have been doing throughout the series instead of being fridged in episode 2.

About the DNA stuff, given that there are still no mutants in the MCU, it seems of dubious value. Steve Rogers famously gets his powers from a serum, not his own weakling DNA. Dr Strange is master of the mystic arts.… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 4:22 PM on July 20, 2023

I really liked this. It's funny, but I wonder if I would have liked it as much if I hadn't spent a lot of the film thinking "this is what Skinamarink was trying, but failing, to do" in the back of my head. It's not really fair to either film to compare them like this, but I really did feel like Skinamarink was a failure and this movie demonstrated how it could have worked, or at least worked better.

One big part of that was establishing a… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 6:48 AM on July 5, 2023

Oh, awesome, thanks for the interview link.
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:33 PM on July 5, 2023

One thing my partner noted in this episode is that the beginning of the baby-cannabilism dream sequence is a pretty direct homage to the analogous scene in Rosemary's Baby when Mia Farrow wakes up and can't find her newborn.
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:50 PM on May 13, 2023

Fans of this book may wish to know that Netflix quietly released a film adaptation a few years back, which is still available for streaming (at least where I live, in the US). The adaptation is extremely faithful to the book and Schweblin is credited as a co-writer. I thought it was quite well done, though as a movie it necessarily loses some of the ambiguity of the book.
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:28 AM on May 2, 2023

I just finished this and I'm still not sure if I liked it. There were definitely aspects that were good, but then the last quarter of the book takes a sudden swerve (being a little vague to avoid spoilers as this is one of the first comments here). At that point I started to question whether I'd been reading the book correctly. It sort of seems to be a satire, in hindsight, somewhat in the vein of Sorry to Bother You? But it didn't have the usual trappings of satire, and for… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:33 PM on April 23, 2023

I got around to reading this finally, and I like it a great deal. (I did skip past some sections on specific films that I haven't seen and want to go in fresh for, though.) I'm a fan of horror in general, but like quatsch, I don't usually enjoy the specific brand of horror that Janisse talks about most here (chiefly 70's exploitation films, though there are also a lot of movies that I already knew and liked in her catalog). The book definitely gave me more of an interest in examining these from… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:41 AM on April 13, 2023

Just watched this, it's pretty good for a tiny no-budget movie. I thought the director's 2009 adaptation of the Clive Barker short story Dread was pretty good, too, and it similarly relies on decent acting to carry the day. I did get slightly weary of all the "this was just a hallucination" rug pulls by the end and it seemed like they could have trimmed a good ten minutes or so of footage and come up with a leaner, tighter movie. Still, I thought this was well-done overall.
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:57 AM on April 1, 2023

I basically agree with that review, yeah. I did think Lauren Ambrose's acting was a continuing highlight, she's really good at that "trying to hold it together" look, and Toby Kebbell as the husband did a good job of grounding the story as the sort of skeptical straight man.

I think the biggest problem with the series was that Leanne's motivations were never really defined, even when they shoehorned in a "Leanne has been stalking Dorothy since she was nine… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:57 AM on March 26, 2023