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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

I am still absolutely agape at how unnecessarily bonkers and fun this show is. I'm up to S02E07, and it is just relentless. Why isn't everyone watching this?
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:08 PM on November 21, 2022

I've just cruised through the first season and am devouring what is out from the second on a free 30-day streaming trial (in Canada, so this is on a channel consolidator called Stack TV). Chucky is far, far better than I expected it to be, and frankly than it needs to be.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:13 AM on October 29, 2022

SLAM EVIL
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:59 AM on October 29, 2022

I am late to this but am totally stuck on how they pronounce "wizened". I've always done "whiz-end," and they're doing "why-zenned". Have I been pronouncing "wizened" wrong my whole life?
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:17 AM on October 14, 2022

I was super excited about this, then I, too, read the reviews on Amazon and GoodReads. I'd dabbled in other EMR Buckaroo stuff in the past (Return of the Screw) and... look, Buckaroo is super formative for me, I have the movie poster facing me on my wall right now, "No matter where you go, there you are" featured in the only art I've ever commissioned, and I'm frankly surprised I don't have a Blue Blaze Irregulars tattoo somewhere.

I think… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 2:39 AM on October 13, 2022

I am a bit of a Man-Thing dork so was thrilled to see the ol' muck-monster here, while a bit irked that he seems to have a much richer internal life and Ted-ness to him than the "classic" Man-Thing, which is a semi-inert piece of roaming swamp horror that kills things. And with all the messing around that Marvel has done with Manny over the years, it's possible this is from some point outside the Classic Gerber run.

I thought Elsa was fine… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:45 PM on October 9, 2022

I liked it more than most here, I think, but maybe my expectations were tempered by really not getting much out of the recent film that Grady Hendrix wrote (but wasn't based on one of his novels), which was kind of in the "solid C" territory I found this one in.

Watched with my wife, who had also read MBFE but had forgotten the bulk of it, so I tried to describe how the book ended, and while I don't think anything is unfilmable inherently,… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:24 PM on October 9, 2022

I had a great time with this! Great voice acting (I didn't really buy Marc Maron as Luthor at first, but it grew on me, especially if the conceit is that he's just very smart but coasting on the real brains of Mercy and the guinea pig. Some laugh-out-loud moments; I'm not sure why but the heartbroken robot actually had me pause the movie for a minute to catch up from laughing.

No complaints. Solidly in the category of "better than it needed to… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:18 PM on October 9, 2022

Tough room! Watched it with Kitteh just above I'd say it was my favourite Hellraiser movie, yes, even including the first ones, which I thought were muddily shot, sloggily plotted, and super try-hard with the fetish stuff. I've forgotten most Hellraiser stuff, so I thought the little intro was good -- there's a puzzle box, you mess with it, goopy leather demons come and chain-zap you to hell.

It's hard with these things where… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:14 PM on October 9, 2022

I really wanted to like this going in, but in the end it just felt like listening to a band that I know I should really enjoy; my friends seem to like this band, they get good reviews, and the bands I do like say this band is really good, but I just don't get why everyone likes this band so much.

It was a well crafted, well acted, conceptually cool movie, clearly dedicated to a singular premise and with a very good and hooky… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:11 PM on September 21, 2022

I'm the other half of "we" in the above comment and yes -- mad respect for making the (not, but it seemed like it for quite a while) protagonist such an unlikeable edgelord turd. Now that I've slept on it, it's actually interesting that for the first chunk of the movie, it was actually poseur vs. poseur -- upper-crust help-the-helpless who is actually a kidnapmurder dungeoneer, and fight-the-system rebel who is actually a privileged white kid aping "truth to power" aphorisms… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 12:48 PM on September 5, 2022

I watched this a few weeks ago and really appreciated that it was striving for something, much more than 90% of horror movies in this budget zone, but I don't think it ever got there; it veered into what felt like grim-for-grim's-sake territory a few times more than it needed to; the whole Eli subplot was... its own thing.

I think the big dark idea would have actually been more effective if it had happened in a less grimy cinematic world where not… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:43 PM on September 3, 2022

Saw it tonight with my partner; thoroughly enjoyed it. Lots of accolades for the main cast, but I thought Steven Yeun delivered something really haunted and nuanced.

There were... four songs, maybe?.... that were prominent in the film, and it leapt out at me that two of them were Canadian '80s pop hits -- Gowan's "Strange Animal" was arguably the perfect fit as the Gordy's Home theme, given when the show was supposed to have aired, but a… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:24 PM on September 3, 2022

Way late to the party and this may never get updated again because the finale's aired, but I'm catching up, and one thing I can't figure out is why Kim was needed for this portion of the scam at all. She crouched across a park and yelled "Action!" a couple times. She left shoes in the shot and retrieved them. For this, she U-turned around from a key moment that could have given her everything she wanted in terms of making a difference in the world through effective… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 8:53 AM on August 19, 2022

I thought it was really interesting that in Netflix Sandman the superhero stuff is out, so Lyta Hall is not "The Fury," and her mother is not Wonder Woman, but they cast the closest approximation of Gal Godot I have ever seen, right down to a hard-to-place accent.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:18 PM on August 18, 2022

I really enjoyed it! It occurred to me early on that the Predator doing that chittering noise is supposed to be the Predator talking -- I think -- so now I just like the idea that the Predator is talking to himself all the time, "super sweet, I just totally killed that slithery thing and that barky thing, hey, what's that big growly thing, Ima kill it too, upsy daisy big boy, wow, I just totally killed that big thing, whoa, what's that over there, Ima kill it..."… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:29 PM on August 5, 2022

My wife (Kitteh) and I just watched it tonight -- we tried watching MAD GOD on Shudder, got about 30 minutes in and just couldn't handle its relentlessness, and on a dimly remembered recommendation decided to watch this (also on Shudder) instead. It is the heckin' best.

I don't think we entirely stopped laughing at any point from the first mention of "hunky boys" on to the end; we are definitely in the right age bracket (I was 15 in the… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:01 PM on July 3, 2022

Liked it, didn't love it.

I think the Stephen King backbone of the season is amazingly appropriate, because the mid to late '80s would have been the time when a young Stephen King, riding high on early successes and ripped to the gills on cocaine, shouted I don't need editors, screw editors to the world and went from producing tight, effective little horror novels to turgid, overstuffed, and overlong 'epics'.

I strongly… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:16 AM on July 2, 2022

I enjoyed that the secret exit to the secret base was about six feet from the actual entrance.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 7:22 PM on July 1, 2022

Juuust caught up with my wife, and we're both loving the season in general but our consolidated take:

Hopper shoulda died at the end of Season 3.

I like David Harbour just fine, but having Joyce being exasperated and conscripted into driving the gang around instead of introducing Argyle (who I also like fine, but introduces a very improbable element of... does he own a pizza shop? Does nobody care that he stole a… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:48 PM on June 24, 2022

(also irritating me: I am 99% sure the Watergate Gang did not dive into the water, swim down 40 or so feet, and burst through into another dimension with oars. I just rewatched the end of E6 and they did definitely not dive into the water with oars. Where did the oars come from? Why does everyone have oars? [Also, in the episode where they break into the Creel house and the door is locked, doors with standalone keyholes do not open if you just turn the handle from the other side, STEVE.])
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:52 PM on June 24, 2022

I can't rewatch it at the moment, but as I recall there was a boat with oars right where they popped into the other world.

I am probably spending far too much time caring about multidimensional oars but they just kind of appear with oars in the first few seconds of s7; it's possible that there is a 1983 Upside Down boat with oars and they came through the portal and then scouted around and found the boat from 1983 with oars and then grabbed the oars… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:52 PM on June 29, 2022

This whole series was like a phone conversation with my mom: there's a lot of love and history and I'm definitely not going to hang up, but a 30-second story like "the porch swing chair's chain broke but Doug from next door came over and helped us fix it" turns into a half-hour of reminisces of a chair I am barely aware of, the story of the chair's purchase and installation, a sidebar into anecdoes of dimly remembered distant relatives visiting and sitting on the chair, a recounting of… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:58 AM on June 6, 2022

Given the entire plot of Toast of Tinseltown is about Stephen Toast being (dubiously) invited to appear in "a Star Wars," I think the presence of Berry as the robot is just a complete goddamn delight. I have no idea how the two things interrelate, but it's wonderful.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:56 PM on June 4, 2022

I'm sympathetic to the people that feel like the show is breaking a bit too far in the surreal direction, but I'm not at the point where it feels like it's broken my faith with it. The AV Club recap has an interesting point to make about how bonkers the timelines for this episode (coupled with the one before it) are.

I'm all in on Barry and the gradual dialling-up of the over-the-top aspects don't faze me, but we've definitely moved from "could… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:28 AM on June 1, 2022

We just watched this, and Kitteh and I agree that the world could have done with a little Lessbius of this... thing. It apparently landed better with other people in the thread, but it felt weirdly inert to me -- the full plot laid itself bare in the first five minutes.

For some reason the first "kids in the hospital scene" hit me like the "Origin of Hector Boyardee" commercial and I spent a lot of the movie thinking of how much… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:41 PM on May 21, 2022

I did once walk into a hanging rig to which six hundred pounds of stage lighting was attached, contacting it at forehead level.

I have experienced vasovagal reflux twice (made famous by the George W. Bush "choking on a pretzel" story, IIRC) and both times it was just me eating something followed by me lying on the floor in a perfectly uninterrupted flow of consciousness: no precursors, no blip, just I'm eating something standing… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:39 PM on May 20, 2022

I am very, very late to this party but recognized Fletcher's voice and looked it up -- it's worth mentioning that Fletcher is voiced by Tim Robinson, whose I Think You Should Leave is (IMO) one of the funniest things of the past few years -- his whole deal is "white dudes with off-the-charts levels of unearned confidence operating out of their depths and ruining everything, sometimes plunging into horrifying but shallow bursts of self-recrimination."… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:14 AM on May 6, 2022

My wife (Kitteh, above) and I watched it tonight; she stoned, me straight, and I think we enjoyed it in equal measure. I jammed this up on Twitter:

Studio heads: well I guess that’s a wrap for today
Roland Emmerich (emerging from a mountain of cocaine): WHAT IF THE MOON IS AN A**HOLE
Studio heads: is there Donald Sutherland
Emmerich: FORTY FIVE GODDAMN GLORIOUS SECONDS
Studio heads: *sold*… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:53 PM on April 7, 2022

I don't know why this movie hits so perfectly but every minute of it hits so perfectly with me. I honestly think it's one of the best comedies ever made.

"Cool beans" gets a lot of play but I don't think it's even in my top 20 of things from this movie.

"I am green with jealous rage right now!" and "because it's super badass" and all of Bill Hader. The whole acid trip. The… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 3:43 PM on April 6, 2022

I am the other part of "we" in Kitteh's comment above, and I think I was a bit less into it than she was; a good time for sure, but I couldn't stop thinking of what a talented microbudget crew could have done with these resources if they'd been invited to the sandbox.

It's a fun curiosity and I don't regret it being made or the time spent watching it, but it really felt like one pass through the script, and an experienced editor with enough gravitas to win the… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 6:37 AM on April 1, 2022

It seems like there is a divide here between:

1. Intentional, limited physical violence (i.e. a single slap, a punch, maybe throwing something) is warranted when a taunt or behaviour directed at you or somebody(ies) you care about is sufficiently inciting.

2. Phyical violence is never okay, regardless of the provocation or who it is directed at.

I was all in on whoever gave Richard Spencer a good smack for being a… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 1:47 PM on March 28, 2022

Oh wow! I used to own this on VHS, some sort of crazy $1 bargain basement thing. This was... not the cover; I vaguely recall a kind of "hippie tie-dye" vibe to the box, with bright colours, those big goofy Grateful Dead style block letter titles.

I don't remember much of the movie except it was not scary as much as deeply weird for a teenager who liked horror movies but didn't know much about the English counter-culture of the 1970s.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 8:44 PM on March 26, 2022

I've caught up in a frenzied burst with the whole show over the past week or so, and boy howdy am I enjoying the second season more than the first. And I've never liked Q! I find dream/reality-warping/time-travel storylines generally dissatisfying because there aren't really stakes, because anything can be reset. Character dies? Meh, it'll probably get reset. Epochal change in a long-standing persona? Ehhh, it might be reset or fade away when they wake up.… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:37 PM on March 21, 2022

Oh, and I originally came in to post this and forgot: Alison Pill is amazing. Just killin' it in a role that's demanding a ton of pivots from the script from naive to goofy to brainy to traumatized to terrified.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 2:58 AM on March 22, 2022

I am just here to say that Paul F Tompkins settled Cake v Pie definitively about a decade ago and it is well worth your time.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:39 PM on March 21, 2022

As everyone above is saying: I barely made it to the second episode, but once it clicks, it clicks, and I'm all in by the end of the first season.

The only thing that bugged me a little -- maybe more than it should -- is that while Swedish people are not generally an equity-seeking group who need better media representation, it's a tetch aggravating that they got Nat Faxon to play The Swede for what seems like no particular reason. I like Nat Faxon! But I remember… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:28 PM on March 21, 2022

Thanks for posting this! I saw this on Netflix... a while back, I guess. The most surprising thing for me was the heavy presence of Gene Simmons, who I wouldn't normally expect to have a key part in what I assumed on the way in was a documentary about hip-hop sampling. But there y'go. I'd already seen a documentary at some point about the Amen Break, and this was a great complement.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 11:58 AM on March 20, 2022

I did the thing on my PC where I asked if it could run Elden Ring and my BIOS speaker laughed for five minutes and then my CD tray punched me in the face.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 10:02 AM on March 11, 2022

Yeah, we watched it tonight. It was great; honestly, it sometimes takes me a while to get past a certain kind of... vibe?... to low-budget movies*, but after the first 20 minutes or so I was immersed enough that it had pulled me in. It unrolled kinda how we were both expecting, but was well paced, well acted, and for the budget really well made.

I am thrilled to find out that H6LLB6ND6R's music is on Spotify! We were both saying… [more]
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 4:54 PM on March 6, 2022

Also, this is my first time in Fanfare adding a new show, so I screwed up the "season/episode" -- this is meant to be a full-season discussion.
posted to FanFare by Shepherd at 5:01 PM on March 3, 2022