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I haven't seen this since it came out, and think that it would probably hold up, although I do remember one mildly homophobic bit that probably wouldn't be accepted now.

In a better world, Robert Townsend could have had an Albert Brooks like career.

He's possibly had a better career than Brooks, since he's done a lot of directing. (Although the only other thing of his that I've seen was Meteor Man, which was... not good.)
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:30 AM on May 16, 2024

You can't just go to the mirror universe and not do something bold with it.

Hey, they can't all be alternate-versions-of-prime-universe-characters episodes. Even DS9, which did the most with the mirror universe before DIS, had an episode which featured Mirror-Bareil, of all the characters that they could have picked. (We could have had a Mirror-Winn who was an atheist freedom fighter dual-wielding phasers and smoking a cigar, or… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 7:22 AM on May 14, 2024

I really, really liked this episode. Yeah, it at first looked like it was setting up for a clip episode, but then they went with the idea that of course the crew would assume that Future-Burnham was a shapeshifter or something and that that's how she would have to prove that she wasn't. And seeing Past-Burnham was also very well done; their fight reminded me, of all things, of Captain America fighting himself in Avengers: Endgame. (One way that they… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 7:09 AM on May 14, 2024

Catching up on my DIS, so coming in a bit late. Liked this, although I'm starting to wonder if some of the bits in each episode (Grey and Adira here) are specifically about tying up loose ends with various characters. Agreed that Cruz did well with the zhian'tara thing.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 6:56 AM on May 14, 2024

I keep this mentally separated from Starcrash by thinking of it as "the one with the starship with boobs on it."
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:26 AM on May 13, 2024

Finished it last night and, as I remembered it from having seen it over twenty years ago, it's a very mixed bag. There were some interesting riffs on the basic idea in it; the idea that Murdock would have to sleep in a sensory deprivation tank and shotgun painkillers after a hard night of crimefighting, for example, and the bit where he could "see" Elektra in the rain was also very nice. But there were also bits that were odd or just dumbfounding. After establishing that his secret… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 1:23 PM on May 5, 2024

Ha! I wrote that up for FF as well, and pegged it as not "bad so much as aggressively mediocre," which isn't how I'd describe this; the closest similarity that I'd venture is that they both starred guys who really wanted to be those guys, but just weren't those guys.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 9:07 AM on May 9, 2024

Is this streaming somewhere? I remember seeing the trailer for it and I might have a look-see.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 12:57 PM on May 5, 2024

Finished it, liked it; not sure if I'm going to follow this with any of Sean Baker's other stuff, although I've also heard good things about The Florida Project. I will say that I tend to agree with the Wikipedia summary that the ending is Mikey's fantasy, not anything remotely like what actually happened (I'm guessing that Mikey probably went either back to LA or to some other town that he hadn't burned his bridges in and had another acquaintance to mooch off of);… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 8:33 PM on May 8, 2024

I got into the EC Comics horror groove pretty easily because, even though their rise and fall happened before I was born, I did get my hands on some of the early MAD magazine collections as a kid, which were done by the same writers and artists who had been on those horror comics; the groove was very different from the MAD magazine that was being published during my childhood (mostly movie and TV parodies plus whatever Don Martin and the usual gang of idiots turned in that month). Plus, you had… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:39 AM on May 8, 2024

"The Raft" has kind of an interesting story behind it; it was originally written and published as "The Float", and even though King got paid for it, he forgot to keep a copy of the story for himself, and wasn't in the habit of buying the men's magazines that published his work before he wrote and sold Carrie, so he ended up rewriting the story from memory, and that's what got published and used for this movie.

Agreed about… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:33 AM on May 8, 2024

There are a lot of other guys who became big action stars in the eighties and later, who worked that shtick until their mojo faded, who had neither the chops nor the willingness to play directly and deliberately against type once they started aging out of being able to pull off the action as well as they used to, and the ones who did probably did so specifically because Arnold was willing to do movies such as this, Twins, Junior, etc. Clint Eastwood can claim prior art with… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:22 PM on May 7, 2024

Very much not really the ending I was expecting, either; I thought that the Beebs would all go down getting Omega and the Force Babies out, but they decided that one death in the group was enough (although RIP Crosshair's hand). In the end, although I would have liked to see Tech again (and thought that they could have done at least one good scene with Tech coming out of the condiitoning), I respect that they decided to make his death permanent. (Although they could have had at least one of… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 10:33 AM on May 2, 2024

I have no idea who would fit the bill (other than Keisha Castle-Hughes?)

I was unfamiliar with the name, but she'd be ideal; she voiced Emerie, had a brief appearance as Apailana (one of Padmé's successors as queen) in the prequels, and also appeared as one of the Sand Snakes on Game of Thrones, although of course they ended up getting jobbed.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 6:53 PM on May 5, 2024

- It's been so long since I've seen this and Blue in the Face that I tend to conflate the two, and would have to see them both to remember which scene was in which movie.

- Wasn't this filmed in Park Slope? I lived there from about late summer of '93 to early winter of '94 and I'd swear that I knew (or used to know) that corner very well.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 1:26 PM on May 3, 2024

Quite good in a lot of ways, and the ways that it wasn't didn't really derail the movie. One of my complaints about X3--that they didn't seem to put a lot of thought into world-building--gets handled here, pretty well; Cerebro wasn't fully developed in a day, Magneto actually gets his helmet from Shaw, they need to develop relevant training, the government is more involved with the mutants at this stage, etc. Other things that I liked:

- Retconning Hank as being a… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 6:47 AM on May 1, 2024

Oh, and of course: Darwin dying. Doesn't make sense. (Oddly, his adaptive power would make more sense in terms of setting up the Sentinels in the next movie than Raven's, so he really should have survived this.)
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 6:51 AM on May 1, 2024

I liked this, mostly, until the big dumb fight near the end. The source material (i.e. Logan's various adventures and experiences in Japan) is a bit of a mixed bag for me, as some of it flirts with proto-weeabooism, but this mostly avoids that, and the version of Yukio in this is fun to watch. I also thought that having Logan sort of haunted by Jean Grey was an interesting choice.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 9:11 AM on April 30, 2024

I'm not sure a good Batman movie is possible.

I don't think that a Batman movie that makes everyone happy is possible. The Burton, Schumacher, Nolan, and Reeves movies all seem to scratch very different itches; I suppose that you could throw in the Snyder movies as well, although they seem very much more concerned with Cavill's Superman than Affleck's Batman. If they decided to do a true multiverse Batman: No Way Home movie,… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 8:42 PM on April 29, 2024

Same problem as with X-Men: The Last Stand IMO: trading quality for quantity, putting too many characters on the screen without really working out what to do with just about any of them. Danny Huston is a poor substitute for Brian Cox (I'm not sure who I would have cast as Stryker, although I think that Josh Helman generally did a good job in the X-reboot movies), and the less said about Weapon XI/Badpool the better. They even made short shrift of the Hudsons.* There has to… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 1:47 PM on April 29, 2024

Per my earlier comment about the first movie, this movie tries to do too much, and does little of it well. And that's really too bad, because the Dark Phoenix storyline could easily be hooked up to the cure storyline; what if someone suggested that they shoot up Jean with this power-dampening juice? And then, what if someone brings up the possibility that, if she misses one treatment (because it's heavily hinted in the mid-credits scene that the effect is temporary), she could Phoenix out and… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 1:22 PM on April 29, 2024

For my money, the best individual action scenes in the X-movies proper are both Quicksilver's, in Days of Future Past and Apocalypse (the latter being about the only good scene in that movie, period), but this probably does hang together as a movie better than any of the others. It's especially fun to watch John/Pyro and his recruitment to the dark side; for a telepath, Xavier doesn't seem to have a clue about what he's about, but Magneto gets it… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 3:44 PM on April 28, 2024

Before getting into the franchise as a whole, I'd like to comment on how good this movie is, which I think gets lost in the high points and low points of the X-franchise in general. With all of the dramatis personae that it felt necessary to introduce--including an entire supervillain group--it was a smart decision to center the movie around Rogue and Wolverine, and they got the casting exactly right, with Anna Paquin looking like she was ready to bolt for the exit at any given moment, and of… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 7:02 AM on April 27, 2024

I wouldn't lay money on any of the Beebs making it out. I think that it might occur to one or two of them that, as long as Hemlock is alive, he can just set up somewhere else and keep looking for Omega while he kidnaps more kids.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 7:38 PM on April 24, 2024

The premise reminded me of the O. Henry story "The Ransom of Red Chief" if Stephen King had written it.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 1:33 PM on April 19, 2024

Typically Imps have been shown with no facial hair other than a mustache.

There was Agent Kallus in Rebels with his somewhat Wolverinish muttonchops; maybe it's something that is occasionally allowed an officer who shows sufficient Imperial...ness.

A good entry, although if they only go sixteen eps for the season, we only have three left. Bummer, but I was cheered up by Omega forming the Kid Resistance… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 6:04 PM on April 18, 2024

I was very happy with Burnham pointing out a couple of times, both with Saru and with Rayner, that she didn't take her second chance for granted and is willing to extend that to someone else.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 7:45 PM on April 13, 2024

You've already covered most of the points that I was going to make in your list, so I'll just say that I was happy to see this crew again, although it was kind of bittersweet, wondering if this was the last time that we might see Tilly, Saru, or Book, since they all seem headed toward careers away from Starfleet.

Also, my main speculation is that the Progenitor tech could be used either against all humanoids, or against all non-humanoids*. Trek has generally steered… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 2:22 PM on April 5, 2024

I assume that the season will go for the full 16 episodes as the previous ones. I'd certainly hope that they wouldn't end on basically the same cliffhanger as last season.

I'm also in the "the operative is Tech" camp. Not just being able to destroy the Marauder with a few little limpet mines, but cracking Phee's encryption; those go beyond being a carbon copy of Crosshair.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:42 AM on April 4, 2024

Ventress is back, baby! She was my favorite character from TCW and although she had a noble death, I always wanted to believe that she was only mostly dead. (She's from the same planet as Maul, after all...) And she's not necessarily still with her "fella", so who knows. At one point, she was going to show up in the sequel trilogy, although that ended up not happening. It would be pure awesome if she popped up in one of the live action things, say… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 6:42 PM on March 27, 2024

Monday, stony Monday: there are some guides online that list her appearances, although they can be confusing (the Wookieepedia article has her appearances in video games and comic books as well as the TV episodes). AFAIK, her first appearance was in the Clone Wars cartoon mini-series by Genndy Tartakovsky; then she's in the The Clone Wars movie, then in the The Clone Wars series proper.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 9:49 AM on April 2, 2024

The film is at 55% on Rotten Tomatoes, and... it's much better than that. The closest thing that it reminded me of was an old movie titled Safe House, starring Patrick Stewart, about a former government agent with Alzheimer's, although it's not that much similar, really. Everyone's great in this: Keaton, Marsden (this might be my favorite performance of his that I've seen), Pacino, and Suzy Nakamura as the police detective who's starting to connect the two murder scenes that… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 8:30 AM on March 24, 2024

It was a very quest-chainy type of episode in that they had to talk to Phee to get to Fennec who had them go after Kermit the Assassin or whoever that was. But it was a bit of fun to have them take the river boat up the Mekong DeltaSpace Alligator River to go after the guy; you half expect to hear "Fortunate Son" during the big croc battle. My main disappointment was that I was expecting the bounty hunter to be someone else who appeared in the teaser for this season.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 6:48 AM on March 22, 2024

This operative, who can’t seem to follow orders, makes me nervous that he’s going to turn out to be a Winter-Soldiered Tech.

Wowwwwwww... he even went out like pre-WS Bucky, falling out of sight into an abyss. And this operative did a lot of sapper stuff.

My vote for the "dies for real" choice is Crosshair. If there's going to be a fix for the loss of his sharpshooting skills, we haven't seen it so far.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 7:45 AM on March 20, 2024

Wow--incredible, trashy/pulpy in the best way. I'd had a crush on Katy O'Brian since seeing her in The Mandalorian, and she and Kristen Stewart burn holes in the screen. Not sure if I've ever seen Ed Harris play a villain, but he was great in this as well.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:57 PM on March 17, 2024

This is one that I'm really on the fence about watching, and have been for a while. On the one hand, yes, the people who think that this is the Best Film Ever are people that I tend to avoid; on the other hand, the same is largely true of diehard fans of Fight Club, which is genuinely interesting in various ways, albeit probably not for the reasons that the diehard fans are fans of it. Maybe I should look up Overnight instead.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 1:44 PM on March 17, 2024

Oh hell yes.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 9:12 AM on March 17, 2024

I loved it, and the thing that I loved most about it was how Villeneuve manipulates the sheer scale and scope of what happens in the movie, and addresses the central conceit of the space opera: that human beings can and should affect matters not only on a human scale, but on a planetary/interstellar/galactic/universal scale. Lots of times, though, that ends up with a couple of people having a duel with laser swords, or your moon-sized battle station having an Achilles heel that luckily you know… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 11:04 AM on March 11, 2024

I found it to be not so much funny in some aspects as just making really pointed comments about things. For example, the robot doctor making an emotional connection with the guy slowly coming out of cryo via the brain-hookup-thing and not realizing what will happen when he fully wakes up. Or Klak's mom being kind of a narcissist who's become a celebrity by writing about her daughter's anxieties growing up, and how she can't seem to see her daughter, even as an adult (and apparently a really good… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 12:25 PM on March 4, 2024

It took me a few days to finish it, but I thought that it was surprisingly sharp in its criticisms of corporate health care (via the big conglomerate that owned what I suppose was the best hospital in the galaxy) and their role in the overarching season plot. I also note that the music for the show was done by Wendy and Lisa, formerly of Prince's The Revolution.

Alex404, I watched the first episode of Scavengers Reign, and I'm… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 8:02 AM on March 9, 2024

I feel like the later volumes become so baroque and obscure with their references that I at least just don't get them, most of the time

That, and Moore seemed increasingly alienated from comics, and from popular culture in general because of the rise of superhero movies. The last LoEG book that I really liked was The Black Dossier; Century looked promising, but ended as a rant against Harry Potter (not so… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:02 AM on March 7, 2024

I haven't watched this episode, nor shall I (I tend to catch up on SNL via individual sketches on YT), but the descriptions here remind me a lot of when Andrew Dice Clay hosted SNL, which unfortunately I did watch, back in the day.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 3:11 PM on February 27, 2024

The thing that really stuck out for me about Clay's appearance (which otherwise could be described as aggressively mediocre) was that he whined when he got heckled--and it was just a little bit of heckling, and not at all unexpected, given that Nora Dunn and Sinead O'Connor skipped the show in protest--instead of having a comeback, which is death for a real comedian.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 7:44 AM on February 28, 2024

John Mulaney?
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 1:54 PM on February 29, 2024

I just finished this last night, and thought it was great, although I might be interested in watching the miniseries; one of the things that I kept expecting to see, until it was suddenly 2003, was the effect that 9/11 had on the company fortunes, because I'd always read that 9/11 was a watershed moment for the device because it continued to work in Washington and New York when the phone system was overwhelmed and crashed. I also expected to see the Handspring (then Palm, after Palm bought the… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 8:25 AM on February 29, 2024

Elektra: Assassin certainly was something; maybe the best collaboration of Miller with another artist, and well before his pet tropes and personal shortcomings ate him alive, and also probably the best thing that Sienkiewicz did that was close to a conventional narrative, next to his work on The New Mutants. (Stray Toasters was interesting, but I always got the impression that it was basically just Sienkiewicz fucking around.) But… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 4:52 AM on February 23, 2024

I've read that the director's cut of Daredevil is a substantial improvement over the theatrical release. That hasn't been on FF; I may try to hunt it down online just to refresh my memory.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 9:19 AM on February 23, 2024

I mean, if people hadn't har-har-harred so much that Morbius became a hit

Thor: but did it, really? Wikipedia says that it barely doubled its budget, which has been the traditional break-even point, although I've seen some people claim that it has to be more than that. The re-release was their thinking that the memeing of the film would translate to box office numbers, which it apparently didn't. I think that the real… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 8:20 AM on February 22, 2024

It's been somewhat fashionable to revisit a lot of John Hughes' 80s films with a focus on their more problematic elements; I should know, because I've done probably more than my share of that. (Even Molly Ringwald got in on the act.) But the reason why they worked, and still work for a lot of people, is that relatively pure fantasy at the heart of them, that it would be great if you could just have an honest conversation with your peers without all the bullshit of the stereotypical roles that… [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 9:43 AM on February 16, 2024

Bowie was the best part of this. The particular emphasis that he put on Ed's name when he said it is one of the things that stuck with me.

Agreed on it not being a great, or even particularly good, movie. Jonathan Demme came out with Something Wild a year later and did this sort of thing so, so much better.
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 11:10 AM on February 10, 2024