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I enjoyed the show on the whole, but kind of like the original Shaggy Dog story, my takeaway was "ehhh, he wasn't that talented."

Maybe I'm being too harsh on old Tom, but it seems to me that despite his disdain for the upper class, and his striving to climb into it however possible, once he attains it he's subject to all the traits he despises: he's arrogant, lazy, and frankly pretty damn stupid. Going to Rome at all, keeping the ring,… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:09 PM on May 12, 2024

Watched it in tandem with my wife while housesitting/dogsitting. It was kind of fun, but felt weirdly inert, like it was a well-filled-in paint-by-numbers picture... it checks the boxes but there isn't much there there. I mean, what I think is the actual plot starts at 1 hour 20 minutes in, which is like the length of an actual movie.
Random observations:


So the world just acknowledges that ghosts are real, and the only… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:01 PM on May 12, 2024

I have taken to saying "Oh, Rip-lee" in the manner of Mr. Butlertron when our hero does something dastardly.

I say it a lot! It's fun!

One passing thought -- I'm not sure exactly when this is set, but I wonder if the "black and white means oldie-times" years are creeping up as we move forward into the future. Ripley is set in the 1960s, well after the advent of colour film. Has the '60s ever been… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 2:01 PM on May 8, 2024

I love that after Ripley murders Dickie, he is ostensibly on a path to a higher-class life, and from that point until the end of the episode anything that upsets him or interferes with his plan is invariably a working-class person doing their job; the mundanity of being one of the "little people" he so desperately wants to escape constantly knocking on his door, spooking him.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:49 PM on May 7, 2024

I loved this! I thought it was incredibly well paced and with the benefit of hindsight fits perfectly into the Ti West commitment to venerating the slow-burn horrors of days gone by. I tend to judge horror movies by whether or not they hit a tight 90 minutes, and this just runs a smidge over -- and despite the fact that it takes 30+ minutes for "stuff to happen," I think the relationship- and world-building is impeccable and I wouldn't change a thing.

I don't… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 9:52 AM on May 5, 2024

Really enjoyed it, and appreciate your comment, DoT, because I didn't know it was the Ready or Not people. It makes a lot of sense in retrospect: functional, witty, gets you in and out without too much dithering, does what it says on the tin. Nobody's reinventing the genre, but just doing something competent, tightly written, well executed.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:35 PM on April 21, 2024

Oh, and Dan Stevens' line delivery on "those are fucking onions" is a thing of beauty. A whole masterclass in how 99% of people would have loaded all the emphasis on onions and he made a meal of it by just shifting that around.

With Godzilla v Kong this seems to be part of a Dan Stevens sea change to "I play seedy guys and I might just be super high while playing them" that I am 100% here for.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:39 PM on April 22, 2024

I wanted to like it, and liked it in fits and starts, but in the end I think I was a bit overhyped going in. I was saying to Kitteh that it reminds me a bit of nut crisps: I like them a lot, but if you tell me it's a whole new snack experience, I'm going to think the coating is great but then realize oh, hey, it's just a peanut.

I liked the coating a lot, but the actual story, the horror elements, whether or not it actually scared or unnerved me... it was just a peanut,… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:33 PM on April 21, 2024

Just watched this the other night with a friend and found the dialogue and acting choices so grippingly low-key weird that I just sought out and watched another Riley Stearns movie, Faults, to see if it had the same general vibe.

It didn't, which means this is something he did just for this film in the scripting, or his direction boxed in Gillen and Paul and... everyone else, really... into overly flat delivery of dialogue that always seems to overexplain the character's… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:03 PM on April 20, 2024

I've only played the iOS game Fallout Shelter (and see a bit of resonance... radroaches, stimpacks... but not nearly as much as players of the 'big' games are getting). I tried Fallout... 15 years ago?... and wound up playing Wasteland in an emulator instead. No memories that stuck. Downloading '76 now because a Steam sale makes it cheap to check out.

I'm enjoying the series okay, but have been confused from the get-go about proximity. I assume that Vaults 31-33 are… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:48 PM on April 13, 2024

I assume that the Shelter iOS game is less canon than the FPS games are canon, but those vaults start you randomized in a vault between 001 and 999 (it's a three-digit spinner). You can even set your vault starting number! So it definitely can't be canon, now that I think about it...
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:20 PM on April 14, 2024

I really liked this; it seems like the ideal intersection of Italian giallo and Carnival of Souls style flat surrealism. It's hard to parse what's dream logic and what's bad plotting, but the overall feel is haunting and overall I really liked it.

I loved, loved, loved the art in the house from the missing father, from the wall paintings of hardcore forced-perspective bridges to his own canvases with the amorphous faces. I'd love to get something in… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:07 PM on April 13, 2024

I have come here among you to praise the beard of Balisarius, King of the Universe, which appears mainly in the last few minutes of the movie.

The beard of Balisarius, King of the Universe, which has chosen to be borne by That Guy from Hawkeye, a thousand blessings on his name.

The beard of Balisarius, King of the Universe, clearly plucked in a last-minute frenzy from the face of a child playing a Wise Man in a third-grade… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:58 PM on April 4, 2024

Yeah, a huge part of the charm for me with OG Roadhouse was that it's clearly set in an alternate reality where bouncers are celebrities; I feel like we're always one zoom-out away from seeing that elections are decided with moped races, distance spitting is an Olympic sport, and diplomacy takes place through complex arrays of high-fives and fist-bumps. The goony surreal world of it is a huge part of the fun for me. Making Dalton 'plausible' by having him be an MMA fighter kind of takes me out… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:13 AM on March 22, 2024

Kitteh and I were kind of meh-watching the first season until Goat Therapist near the end, at which point we perked up, and boy, the second season really delivers on what Goat Therapist promised in the first! We're now catching up with alacrity and really enjoying it.

The Auditor Gang is second only to Torchwood in their propensity to blunder into situations beyond their ken, flail around for a while, then kind of shrug and walk away from complete… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:06 PM on March 20, 2024

I've been curious about this since I opened it on Shudder and saw a long run of one-star reviews by people that come across as MAGA goofballs calling it "woke" and "communist". Since everything they hate is good, I'm assuming this must be great.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:05 AM on February 25, 2024

Well, maybe I'm a big ol' dummy but I really liked the entire season; second favourite of the series after 1. Maybe a bit more than 1? I found it had more interesting characters and character development at the centre than 1, which did feature a lot of Rust and Cole barking at each other and wandering around for ultimately no great reason.

Things like "we don't know each individual scientist as a person" didn't and don't really bother me. I think the show… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 2:48 AM on February 20, 2024

I saw it original run in Toronto and would not shut up about it, to the point that my friends were getting kind of annoyed. I haven't watched since because I'm afraid it won't hold up. Based on the above, I might give it another whirl!
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:20 PM on February 18, 2024

Not to abuse the edit window, also spent some time afterwards trying to track down Dylan Dog comics -- not easy in the very early Internet days -- and ultimately either failed, or have completely forgotten reading them. I bet it's a lot easier now...
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:23 PM on February 18, 2024

There is such a specific and obvious digression early in the movie into Nic Cage talking at length about the Beatles, or a Beatles album, my memory isn't super great. But I was and am still convinced that there's an early draft of the script that has Connery having some sort of Beatles connection from his early days as something they bond over at a critical moment.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:17 PM on February 18, 2024

Ia! Ia!'90s Basic Cable Production Values f'taghn!

We found the first 1/3 a bit of a slog, with the Red Shoe Diaries sets and acting, and the doughy "sexy" kid vibing like Vincent Kartheiser and not bringing nearly as much heat as a jacked and oft-shirtless Johnathon Schaech, but once the bonkers hit, it rolled along really nicely.

I do wonder -- if you can just shoot the body-swap victim and… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:38 PM on January 28, 2024

Just finished this; I really, really liked it. I've got a huge soft spot for small/indie filmmakers who don't laze into gore or nekkid ladies as their raison d'etre, and this is up there with Hellbender and in an entirely different way Psycho Goreman as my favourite little horrors from the last while by people who don't have a ton of cash or marquee actors but a good idea, a bizarre but coherent world, and in this case a solid blend of comedy and horror.

[I know this is… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:31 PM on January 6, 2024

Jeez, I feel like the turd in the punchbowl, and possibly I'm outing myself as a soulless dolt, but when we left the theatre I turned to my wife and said that about 90% of the movie feels like somebody perfected an AI LLM called the "Miyazaki Bullshit Generator" and hit the button.

Gorgeous, no question, and touches on resonant themes of abandonment and post-war Japan and the contemplation of mortality and so on. But a lot of it just felt to me like playing… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:57 PM on January 6, 2024

Can we agree that Lamb and River are for all intents and purposes Rick & Morty? Old, boozy, food-stained know-it-all with plot armour and the ability to get out of anything; wide-eyed naïf blundering into perpetual danger.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:39 PM on January 5, 2024

er, fake-bait radiation signature; a fake bat would at least have been monster adjacent.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:06 PM on January 5, 2024

So nice to see you back, DoT!

I really, really wanted to like this, but at every turn I just felt a bit flat about it all. Bill is a shade too pathetic to give us a Clark Griswold level of self-delusion that pulls us through the comedy beats; the barn elf(ves) just aren't that scary and the tone is kind of wildly all over the place in terms of horror vs. comedy.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:03 PM on January 5, 2024

I really enjoyed it but was in the slight minority -- my wife was enthralled (while annoyed that some absolute potato brought his pre-reading age child to a Japanese monster movie and sat next to her, so the entire movie was either calming the kid down, or re-reading subtitles because the kid couldn't read them himself), as was our friend, while I got kind of dozy during the middle third.

Loved the Big Guy, and thought it was… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 2:04 PM on December 10, 2023

Just got back from Godzilla Minus Zero, a movie with at least a reasonable monster:drama ratio (and both good monster and good drama, which helps). I'm retroactively liking this episode even less than I did when watching it.

I'm just not that into the Monarch intrigue; I like the early-days stuff, but the travails of the character I can only think of as "Bill Pullman with a COVID beard" and French Ninja just don't matter to me, the kids… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:08 PM on December 10, 2023

I really liked it, but like Succession, I think it really depends on how much you're willing to spend time with people you hate just to feast on the drops of schadenfreude that leak out, and whether or not you're happy watching self-absorbed pretentious wealthy asshats roast on a spit of their own making and stoked by the flames of their own narcissism.

I am totally fine in delighting in the suffering of the (fictional) 1%-or-adjacent, and enjoyed… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 9:33 AM on October 23, 2023

I saw The Ring in the theatre long before I could see Ringu (pre-streaming, and living in French Quebec, foreign movies were hard to come by!) and have always preferred The Ring because it always felt more considered than Ringu; I strongly suspect had I seen them in the opposite order I'd feel differently.

Re-watched yesterday with Kitteh as part of an October horror movie challenge, and… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 9:59 AM on October 19, 2023

First episode preview here, as well. It's a great clip in that it really does capture the show -- if this isn't for you, you can save a lot of time and skip the whole thing.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 12:33 PM on September 29, 2023

Reserved at our local library! I look forward to dining heartily on schadenfreude.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:05 PM on September 25, 2023

Another person in the camp of "wanted to like this so bad, and felt let down by how dunderheaded everyone was."

I mean:

1. Local people deliver boxes and make a to-do about how they need to GTFO before sundown
2. Another local person, presented as a dog saltier than Lot's wife, sees the dragon crest on the boxes and screams and runs away
3. A woman, imprisoned in one of the boxes, says there's a monster on… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 2:54 AM on September 25, 2023

We watched it at home, then realized it needed to be seen on the big screen, so caught it at a local indie cinema that does some rep screenings along with arthouse films.

It really, really supports a second viewing -- every scene had little things that popped for me the second time around, from small asides to other details. One thing that we both agreed on in terms of the multiple versions is that we would both swear in the home screening the… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:30 PM on September 2, 2023

Also surprised that DoT hasn't seen this one yet! I double-featured it a while back with Ice Cream Man to get the full gamut of Clint Howard classic horror goodness.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:20 PM on July 26, 2023

Even with all of the above, what bothers me the most is the idea that Gravik shot G'aia, and -- brilliant tactician and military strategist that he is -- just kind of left, with her body and motorcycle there. In what seems to be the only road in and out of their camp. And, at least a day later, he's all like "yeah I took care of that" and... he didn't go back to pick up her body? He didn't send anyone to pick up her body? He just leaves Skrull… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:11 PM on July 15, 2023

The more I think about the whole premise of the series... Fury has space friends. He has tons of space friends! He has entire categories of space friends! Can't he just say "hey, space friends, seen any planets capable of supporting an incredibly adaptive lifeform, with no evident sentient life, or failing that some sort of melting-pot flying space heads where multiple species seem to just get along and groove?"

I can buy The Snap being… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:23 AM on July 16, 2023

Just watched it with my wife (Kitteh, here), neither of us knowing anything about it except she really likes Del Toro and I'm hit-or-miss.

About 10 minutes in, I said "I hope there's more to this than just two and a half hours of Sad Times at the Shit Carnival", and... well, I guess there's the bit in the middle, but yeah. ~45 minutes in, I asked out loud "what is the plot of this movie?" and we both really struggled with that for… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 2:12 PM on July 4, 2023

Great episode, watching it much later.

I think when your mobster boyfriend who has just murdered a bunch of dudes literally around you and invited an international gang renowned for mass violence into your home says "you can't leave, you know too much" multiple times in a conversation, it's pretty obvious what's going to happen if you leave.

Whether Cristobal believed Hank would go through with it is another… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:22 PM on June 19, 2023

Well, I liked the hat.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:21 PM on June 12, 2023

Kinda tough room! I thought it was perfectly serviceable, mind you, I went in with less-than-zero expectations so mere competency was enough to impress me. Way way better than Black Adam and about on par with Bullet Train IMO.

Random notes/quibbles:

1. My spaceship is destroyed and I am stranded, please help me being met with "great, just fly off-planet to this rendezvous location" seemed like… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 9:28 AM on May 1, 2023

The bon mot in our house when the number displayed on the screen was "well, that sure felt like 572 days."

I don't know. I'm glad somebody is out there swinging for the fences and I'm glad that somebody did this as opposed to, say, another Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot.

On the plus side, at points it got closer to House of Leaves than I ever expected… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:44 PM on April 2, 2023

Oh, and I'll never stop loving his Sailor Moon-esque transformation sequence -- "Sword, Make Me Better!"
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 12:53 PM on March 8, 2023

Is the vibe "BtVS only a middle-aged guy and the Scoobies aren't necessarily friends?"

That's pretty dead on, actually. And while Buffy proves to be innately a good and heroic person, Gary is just... some guy with the particular quirk of being the Chosen One. Being "chosen" doesn't seem to rely on any other great attributes here, it's just an accidental quirk of birth.… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:12 PM on March 9, 2023

Watched it on the strength of this post, and both Kitteh and I really enjoyed it! Walter Matthau is 40 going on 65, and at one point I turned to Kitteh and asked if this was the first feature film to focus on somebody we would now know as asexual. Matthau is so disinterested in women (and men, as far as I can tell) that it's almost fascinating in and of itself.

We thought George Rose as Manservant Harold really stole the show. Hooray for the gentleman's gentleman!
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:24 PM on December 5, 2022

Wayback Machine link to the defunct Jughead Hat article. Amazing stuff!
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:54 PM on December 1, 2022

I love this movie! My wife literally refused to believe me when I told her that I was a huge fan of a movie where Charles Bronson played a peaceful melon farmer who just wants to tend his melons and hire the melon-picking crew of his choice.

I haven't seen it in a long time and I'm sure it's problematic in the way that most things from the early '70s are unavoidably problematic, but as I recall the plot driver is Bronson is sticking up for Mexican… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:48 PM on November 30, 2022

(Death Wish here, apologies for the derail, back to the melon farming)
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:03 PM on November 30, 2022

On the strength of this post, I started listening to the first one, then actually paused to watch peebeetoo as requested, and... like they say off the top I didn't wholly hate it, but man, it was not good. But I'm looking forward to the podcast now!
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:17 PM on November 24, 2022

Been curious about this since I saw it briefly in the Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched folk horror documentary on Shudder -- I'll try to make time for it soon!
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:13 PM on November 21, 2022