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Yeah, I will forgive a movie a lot if it manages to set up a good atmosphere, and this one really did with its dreamy, desolate off-season beach town. I got strong Carnival of Souls vibes from it. The actual plot I was pretty meh on throughout, but that did not hamper my enjoyment.
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:57 AM on June 12, 2022

I agree about the book, which I read several years ago, but bounced off of so hard that I barely remember anything about it except the climax. I enjoyed this show though. I do rather wish they'd shown or explained the mechanics of how the time travel stuff worked, but the show still worked without that stuff, and I would have probably just looked for things to pick apart in the explanations anyways.
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:50 PM on June 4, 2022

This was unbelievably dull and slow-moving, there was no character development at all and most of the special effects were really bad. There's a scene where the kid blows up a building, but the camera happens to be pointing away from it so we only see some reddish-yellow light reflecting back on her, and if you're not going to spend a lot of time blowing things up and setting them on fire on camera, why are you remaking Firestarter in the first place?… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:38 AM on May 16, 2022

The thing that didn't quite work was that there was such a heavy emphasis on relationships, but there wasn't really any time to explore those relationships.

This has been the big problem for me with basically all the Marvel shows. I feel like they succeed when they lean into relationships and characterization, even when the rest of the show is a total mess. For me, the epitome of this is Captain America & The Winter Soldier,… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:51 PM on May 8, 2022

I really liked this! One nice thing about Ti West is that he's obviously a devotee of the genre, so when stuff like this happens you know it's on purpose:

- A woman breaks out of a door with an axe, neatly reversing the iconic scene from The Shining
- The nebbish director is a fan of Psycho; when he meets his untimely demise later in the movie, we see the same "knife goes up" shot from the shower… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:25 PM on April 14, 2022

Yeah, I also got a little less invested as time went on and they didn't seem super interested in progressing on the various mysteries in favor of piling up new ones. I don't need to see a flashback for every last detail, but at least give us some back-story on big stuff like the Colony House / Townie split. In the last few episodes they come up with a sort of origin story for the talismans, but that's not really anything like an explanation of what they are and why they function. And surely… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:55 PM on April 14, 2022

This was better than I expected. I can definitely see why some people would not love the darkness of the city but I thought it was pretty perfect for a "Batman vs Gotham" story where the city stands in for the endemic corruption and cruelty of humankind, which is itself a good setting for a more detective-oriented Batman (my own preference over a "punch a lot of dudes"-oriented Batman). I liked that this rainy, dark Gotham could be the place Se7en takes… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:58 PM on April 6, 2022

This season continued to be batshit insane, which I like, though nothing will probably ever equal the flying snake reveal at the end of the last season. For all its flaws, it's one of the most purely imaginative science fiction shows out there. It reminds me of a Moebius comic, where nothing really makes sense but there are a ton of cool ideas and terrific images.

The performances and characterizations continue to be a bit of a rough edge for me, too. I actually don't… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:36 PM on April 1, 2022

everybody in general keeps making dumb or unbelievable choices

Yeah, there's a fair amount of "carry the idiot ball" that's used to advance the plot. Overall I found the two sisters and their relationship to be kind of the least interesting thing in the series, which is unfortunate because that's what the whole show revolves around. But I liked the background characters and the history of the cult, and the police procedural elements were… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:06 PM on March 21, 2022

I found the plot of this to be borderline incoherent - it's just a bunch of stuff that happens, without really offering explanations or much in the way of character motivations - but the mood was outstanding. Someone in the recent folk-horror documentary made an interesting point about this movie, that the fear of a failed colony is a kind of primal American feeling at the root of American folk-horror stories, and you can definitely get that vibe from this movie (and The Witch, which seems like… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:29 AM on March 18, 2022

I really liked this, it definitely surpassed my expectations. I expected it to be "pretty cool, once you take the back-story about the film-making family into account" but it was just "pretty cool, full stop."

It pulls off the uncommon trick of switching the protagonist and antagonist, so that by the end of the movie you're rooting for the mother rather than the daughter. I also thought the effect when they are scrying, where it's an overhead shot… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:19 AM on March 18, 2022

I'm really liking this so far, it's like the corporate satire of a George Saunders story mixed with There is no Antimemetics Division.

I like how the two stories that the office manager told our protagonist about her mother are completely contradictory -- in the first one the mother is an atheist and in the second she's a devout Catholic.
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:19 AM on February 22, 2022

I remember this getting a good bit of hype when it came out, but apart from some impressive monster effects and body horror it didn't do much for me. There were some good themes in there about familial trauma and poverty, but it seemed like the movie never managed to say anything about them. I thought the acting and direction were good, though, and I think people who go into it looking for a creature feature rather than something deeper won't be too disappointed.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:59 PM on February 12, 2022

The more I watch this show the less I like it. I am glad they got a POC to play the lead in this, but Temura Morrisson is like anti-charismatic; the longer he's on screen the lower my interest in the story gets. And it's not like the character of Boba Fett has amazing, scintillating dialog, but neither did The Madalorian, and Pedro Pascal managed to invest him with a full personality without even using his face 90% of the time.

Also, Fett himself… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:55 PM on January 18, 2022

I had somehow never got around to watching this one, but the new folk horror documentary got me interested. I do feel it kind of fits into horror of the "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" variety, where it's the common folk who are complicit in Hopkins's acts, or otherwise silently look on, that are the true forces of evil in the film.

I'm not sure I can say I enjoyed this, but there were definitely some flashes of greatness - I really loved the silhouette… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:09 AM on January 18, 2022

I like this (maybe apocryphal) story from Grangousier's link:

The story goes Price was so annoyed by Reeves continual directions to underplay that one day he turned on Reeves and said, “I have made 84 movies, how many have you made?” To which Reeves replied, “Two good ones.” Price laughed, and thereafter, did as he was told.
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:17 AM on January 18, 2022

Fett didn't sweep in, isn't on planet to bring the Good Word to anyone, and was really just minding his business when he was captured by this tribe, after being literally stripped of his identity.

I mean, same with the Dances with Wolves dude, and basically for Lawrence of Arabia. This still reads very "technologically advanced outsider enlightens the noble savages," and I find it pretty unpalatable personally. I did enjoy the hallucinogenic brain lizard, though.
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:05 AM on January 6, 2022

"Hey, I just wanted to let you know that Boba Fett survived, and you will see the continuation of his story in a weekly TV series about him. The show starts when you are in your fifties."

Oh wow! Who's Boba Fett underneath the cool armor? A cool alien? A swashbuckling bounty hunter? Does he have an interesting backstory?

Nah, he's just some bald guy in his early sixties.… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:02 AM on January 3, 2022

I haven't made it to then end yet, but I think I pretty much get the point, it's like Soylent Green but with water?

I'm definitely willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of a TV show's budgetary / etc constraints, but this one was really straining my credulity. You can just turn a switch that turns up gravity in the base to 1.0G, but you had to arrive in a 1984 space shuttle? The base seemingly has an unlimited supply of air? Ok, fine, whatever, the show must go on.… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:24 AM on January 3, 2022

Yes, precisely.
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:48 PM on December 19, 2021

I enjoyed this, having neither read the books nor played the games. A lot of my enjoyment comes from parts of it leaning in an extremely campy direction, like at the end when they meet up with the Wild Hunt and seem to have been transported into a 1982 heavy metal album cover dimension. I could definitely tell there was a big interesting plot behind everything, and the narrative was mercifully much more straightforward than the first season's baroque timeline jumping, but I still feel like large… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:45 PM on December 19, 2021

I really wanted to like this one as I'm a big fan of Ben Wheatley, but I actually found Gaia to be the superior mushroom-freakout movie of 2021.
posted to FanFare by whir at 4:50 PM on December 14, 2021

it tries to get artsy when it should be leaning into the absurd and the grotesque

Yeah, I couldn't agree more with this. The filmmakers obviously had some affection for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they would have been better off going farther in that direction.

Also, that Lisa Dunham cameo... why?
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:30 PM on December 7, 2021

YAY!

Cool - looks like the very last bit in the trailer is from "Strange Dogs", the novella between Babylon's Ashes and Persepolis Rising and maybe my favorite of the novellas.
posted to FanFare by whir at 2:24 PM on November 16, 2021

I love this movie. I don't know if a smarter meta-horror-comedy has been done, though it's a surprisingly full subgenre with little gems like Tucker and Dale Versus Evil and bigger movies like Cabin in the Woods in it. The strongest part for me is the extended scene of Leslie Vernon setting up the house and spouting lines about yonic imagery and the like that seem like they might have come directly out of Men, Women and Chainsaws.… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 6:50 AM on November 11, 2021

I really liked this. As a huge book nerd I was delighted by how many story beats they managed to stick in competently from the first half of the first book, including awesome flavor stuff I didn't expect to make it in like the Atreides sign language. I thought Paul's vision showing him and Jamis as best bros in one possible future was a good way of showing that he sees many possible futures, not just the one that's going to happen, though I'm not sure how easy it would be for non-book readers to… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:02 AM on November 2, 2021

I'll also chime in and say that the truism that each of the Dune novels is worse than the previous one is not really accurate, in my opinion, and while it's hard to live up to the grandeur of Dune proper, there is a lot of really awesome stuff in the next two books. Gholas! Face dancers! Abomination! Much as I loved it as a younger person, though, I have to admit that on my last read-through I came to believe that God Emperor is a bad novel, despite… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:11 AM on November 2, 2021

I was astonished to see Anthony Michael Hall, I guess I hadn't really been paying attention to him since The Breakfast Club. Overall I thought this movie was pretty bad in every scene when nobody on screen was dying, with the exception of some reasonably funny comedic bits at the bar. The dialog was generally atrocious whenever it wasn't trying to be funny, and the attempts at social relevancy were ham-fisted and dumb.

This isn't really my favorite… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:04 AM on October 25, 2021

A hurricane has no motivation or personality, either. But you can tell a good story about the human beings caught in its wake.

I totally agree, I guess I'm just waiting for that movie to come out of the Halloween franchise (zing!). I mean, one of the defining characteristics of the subgenre (set by Halloween 1! But then made concrete in the 80's slasher explosion) is having disposable characters that just hang around waiting to… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:54 AM on October 25, 2021

I just saw this again on the big screen last night. It's by far my favorite of the Halloween movies, despite the first two being pretty unimpeachable slasher movies. The main actor looks more like a retired football player than a doctor and doesn't exactly have the leading-man charisma that you'd like him to, but I've seen much worse acting in horror films. Without the elaborate kills, this could be a military-industrial complex paranoia movie akin to The Parallax View or… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:19 AM on October 25, 2021

Oh, also! I love what a shitty dad the protagonist is. Take the kids? Fuck no, I just got a six-pack! Time to investigate mysteries with this recently-bereaved hottie!
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:11 AM on October 25, 2021

This is definitely one of the most smartly-written comedies on the air right now, and I'm glad they changed the status quo so much in this season. I like how the beginning of the final episode switches things up so that Chase and Pat are the eponymous Other Two, which makes a kind of sense since we haven't really seen much of them before then.
posted to FanFare by whir at 5:29 PM on September 23, 2021

I thought this was pretty awesome and it's made me want to read the book. It definitely took a few turns I wasn't expecting, it starts as a kind of Faustian "be careful what you wish for" story, but then by the end it's more about combat with an ancient magician. Lisa reminds me of a classic anti-hero protagonist in the vein of Walter White or those other Golden Age of TV types in the way that she starts off sympathetic and kind of irascible but driven, and then as the story goes along… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 6:17 PM on September 20, 2021

Also, I agree about Channel Zero - the first season didn't do it for me at all, but I really like the rest of them and how unpredictable they seem.
posted to FanFare by whir at 6:22 PM on September 20, 2021

I loved this, truly a head-spinning premise. I pretty much put the pieces together pretty early on, and then the movie experience changed from "surely this will get better soon" to "they aren't really doing Basket Case 2021, are they?" Then by the end the whole thing morphed into a sort of action movie / superhero origin story. I found my enjoyment was in direct inverse proportion to the degree to which I took the inane story at all seriously. I wouldn't… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 6:06 PM on September 20, 2021

I finally watched this, what a great little movie! I really loved the bits of wry humor throughout, like the Satanists meeting in the back of a public library and the one guy living in his mom's basement.
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:20 AM on July 29, 2021

I thought this was pretty solid, with Pugh's deadpan comedy being a high point. I'm also a low-key fan of Taskmaster in the comics and was a bit disappointed to have that character replaced by this one, but I did enjoy the bits of choreography where the movie Taskmaster was using fighting techniques we'd previously seen from Black Panther, Captain America, etc, and I thought the overall fight choreography was good and well-directed..

It felt like there was something… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:56 AM on July 10, 2021

I liked this as something which was more about mood and atmosphere than plot; the house was a nice creepy setting and I found the protagonist empathetic (which is a testament to Jonathan French's acting, as it seems like there's barely a character there at all in the script itself). The sound design and soundtrack were also pretty great. That being said, while I like an ambiguous movie, a lot of things just didn't quite come together for me and the pacing seemed to get worse over time. What… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 3:38 PM on June 12, 2021

The Umbrella Academy has been beating this drum throughout its entire run

Yeah, I also thought the TVA was extremely inspired by the look of the Time Cops or whatever they are in that show. (As others have noted, it's also easy to pick out Brazil as a common ancestor of both.)
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:28 PM on June 11, 2021

For what it's worth, I thought this show was really good on average and I don't much agree with the Bastién review. There were definitely some extraneous elements - the whole milkman subplot and the closeted hubby don't really do much for the story; I guess I see what they're trying to do with the "violence begets violence" cyclical nature of trauma theme, but it seems like a distraction more than anything else, and as Catblack noted, it's a little late to be introducing sympathetic… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:14 AM on April 20, 2021

I'm pretty bummed out to have Battlestar graduate from "voice of moderation and counterpoint to John Walker" to "person of color who has died so a white dude can have character development." Beyond that, I keep having to check my expectations with this show when I'm hoping for something a little more well thought-through than the average superhero comic. Nobody has ever laid out the basic state of the world on this show, like what is the GRU actually doing? Why do the Flag… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:58 PM on April 9, 2021

I thought this was well paced dumb fun, and I especially enjoyed the ease with which various villain characters who nobody cared about were dispatched. I do wish there were a few more "civilians fleeing from the wreckage" shots, and the "conspiracy nut who hosts a podcast" trope is one that is much less sympathetic than it was a few years ago, but overall I was fine with the hand-waving and wooden dialog since it was all in the service of rapidly moving us to the next monster… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:00 PM on April 3, 2021

sunlight shining in the core of the center of the earth

Ha, that got me too, and I was taunted in the exact same way. In fairness, you never actually see the sun. Maybe it's just exceptionally bright bioluminescent fungi.
posted to FanFare by whir at 6:45 PM on April 6, 2021

I actually really enjoyed this, in kind of a cult-movie way, and think it may well be a work of secret genius because of its overall batshittedness and willingness to cram every idea its writers had into the movie. It doesn't really make a lick of sense when you think about it, but I thought there were some great weird little moments, like the bonfire scene and subsequent chase, and the protagonist's repeated insistence that he grew up in San Francisco, so...
posted to FanFare by whir at 11:42 AM on March 30, 2021

I really liked this, although in retrospect I find that I liked the early uber-gothic portions a lot more than the eventual revelation and climax. Noemí is an awesome protagonist and I enjoyed spending time with her, and I thought the colonialist themes were well done, if a little blunt at times. One thing I found interesting was how Moreno-Garcia is writing a book that is specifically opposed to English colonization of Mexico in a genre and style I associate heavily with England. I have to… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:38 PM on March 20, 2021

Also, re the kill rate of that admittedly impressive opening action scene: kinda weird that it's followed up with Bucky's vivid nightmare about killing people, and his earnest attempts to make amends! Like, are we going to draw a line connecting these two things?

These were my thoughts exactly. I definitely think you can draw some interesting examinations of patriotism out of Captain-America-adjacent storylines (although it's not as easy to do it… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:33 PM on March 19, 2021

I liked this, though I read a few too many stellar reviews which maybe raised my expectations too high. I found it to be good, but not fantastic. I did appreciate that it treated the religious aspects of the story seriously (something that is usually missing, oddly, from horror movies that are ostensibly about a struggle between God and the devil). And I enjoyed the inherent seaminess and spookiness of the run-down English (Welsh?) seaside town.

I sort of regretted that… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 7:49 PM on February 17, 2021

that movies where characters have elaborate hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality present a major problem for me

I feel the same way, for all the reasons you stated. It seems like this trope of "protagonist has a personal or family history of mental illness, so maybe the movie is full of spooky happenings or maybe it's largely hallucinatory" has become more and more common in the past several years, especially along the… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:24 PM on February 18, 2021

Currently when you have Star Lord, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Falcon, Thor, Rocket, and Hawkeye standing in a circle it's like the early 60s comic where every character has an identical voice and just sounds like Stan Lee in a different spandex suit.

That's a fair point, though the obvious snarky answer is that it's more like a late 2000s comic written by Brian Michael Bendis (who has a tendency to turn the banter up to 11). I think this is what… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 12:12 AM on February 7, 2021

For those interested in a deep dive on Scarlet Witch and Vision's back-stories in the comics universe, I found this article at ComicsXF to be a pretty good survey, touching on various writers who have had their hands in, corporate meta-shenanigans behind the retcons, and a list of relevant issues and story arcs.
posted to FanFare by whir at 1:49 AM on February 10, 2021