The Moor For Rodrigo Borgia, being pope isn’t easy. Despite being the most powerful person in Christendom, his family is out of money after buying the papacy, beset on all sides by enemies and, worst of all, the country’s artists are overcharging them for their portraits. Something is going to have to be done to raise funds, if the House of Borgia is going to retain its newfound power. Luckily, there’s always someone to take advantage of....
There’s a ton (and I mean a ton) of unbelievable shit in the once-lost-but-now-all-over-YouTube Star Wars Holiday Special, including interpretive dance troupes, Art Carney, and soft core Wookiee pornography (no joke). However, the show’s biggest crime (aside from neutering Han Solo’s ferocious co-pilot by giving him a stock family pulled right out of suburbia’s dullest sitcom) is the utter destruction of the two best pieces of music from that galaxy far, far away....
Yessir, it would have been one heck of a Graceland birthday celebr – wait, what’s that, you say? Elvis is… alive? He walks among us, wandering our supermarkets and hardware stores anonymously, generally unnoticed by the Youtube and frappuccino-obsessed masses? That may have been him in front of me in the Boston Market drive-thru last night, leaning out of the beat-up Buick Lesabre to make sure they heard his “extra gravy” request?...
A great example of why remakes by filmmakers who are completely devoid of good ideas should be banned from video stores. Except there’s no crash. What’s thought to be a meteor turns out to be a gigantic, lame-looking CGI globe. The military rushes into position, thoughtfully surrounding the giant marble (rather than establishing a clean line of fire to avoid missing the globe and hitting people on the other side) so that when the alien steps out, someone’s able to shoot him before he can deliver his message of peace and love....
The duo paired for one of the most beloved Justice League runs of all time, the Bwa-ha-ha era of Justice League Internationalwith Kevin Maguire on art. They’ve worked together a number of times since, including on books like Justice League 3000,Booster Goldand Larfleeze(yes, Larfleeze). And their true skill as writers often gets lost beneath the surface of their work. By all rights, this book shouldn’t work. It’s a dark post-apocalyptic zombie adjacent tale starring the Mystery, Inc....
The Flash Season 3 Episode 8 It’s tough to review these crossover episodes every year. There are so many moving parts to get the casts of two or three, let alone four shows together, right in the middle of their seasons, while they’re all right in the thick of their own storylines that it’s bound to cause problems. And The Flash‘s chapter of “Invasion!” definitely shows some signs of that. And yes, it was delicious....
The Good Place Season 2 Episode 10 Let’s begin with a peak behind the critical curtain. The “middle chapter,” this week’s “Best Self” is a slower-paced affair and initially struck me as the worst of the lot. After rewatching it this week, however, my feelings changed. It still might be the worst (next week’s is so good, you guys) but I see it’s value in a much clearer way now. “Best Self” seems like a narrative (and budgetary) calm down period that this show has sometimes been know to do....
So, on an obscure tangent from a previous mention of mobile phones and the possiblity of Annie Droid being translated into Chinese, I thought some talk about comics on the Internet might suffice as a substitute. I have, as usual, an ulterior motive for this… Yes! You guessed it: I’m producing one. Or at least I’m supposed to be. My good friend, John Ostrander, who I hope I’ve had the decency to mention before – and if not, shame on me – has spent the last two years producing the first nine pages of script for our new story....
Beginning in 1941, The Imitation Game introduces the 27-year-old Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose mathematical genius far outstrips his interpersonal skills. Stationed at Bletchley Park in the south of England, Turing leads a team of linguists, problem solvers and mathematicians whose job is to crack the unfeasibly complex communications code used by the Nazis. As conventional attempts to break the code prove fruitless, Turing proposes a radical new approach: construct a code-breaking machine – the most complex of its kind yet conceived – with the power to smash the Enigma code wide open....
Robin, an old friend from Essex, rang me and told me he was heading Richmond-way and would be dropping in. The last time I saw him he was displaying his incredibly life-like miniature, fully mobile model of a tank at a Military Fair in the Steam Museum in Chiswick. Naturally I thought I was in for a rundown on the improvements he had made and where he was exhibiting. I wasn’t ready for the sort of mechanical broom he struggled in with....
Not that special effects aren’t part of the mystic of movies – it is just that at the moment some directors forget that it is the actors and not the effects that the fans come to see. When colour first became common on the screen it was a magical mystery tour to cuddle up in the back of the 1/9d’s to watch the likes of Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart etc....
Poor Gallinger. He should be the shining star; I mean his life sure looked perfect on paper. Handsome young surgeon with the pretty, spitfire, young wife. He was right on track, about to play second fiddle to Thack as a Knick physician. And then everything went to shit. Within a matter of weeks he loses his lofty position, his cool in the surgical theater, and finally his baby girl. Talk about horrifying....
The Last Man on Earth: Season 2, Episode 14 A lot of stakes were lying on this episode. We’ve all been waiting for the Tandy and Mike reunion as soon as we saw Mike teased in space at the end of season one. Now we’re finally there and it’s a wonderful way for the show to mix things up again, right when it feels like it has started to settle down a little....
4.12 Day Of The Colossus & 4.13 The Last Stand Finales are tricky things. They’re both a story in their own right as well as a summation of everything the writers want to say. Even more so with Legend Of Korra, which is itself a finale of the Avatar universe. Barring another spin off (which I do not see happening, given the way Korra has performed and been treated by the network), this is the last thing the writers are giving us in this entire world....
Taking it one further is a new television special, LEGO Star Wars: The Padawan Menace, airing on the Cartoon Network on July 22. This original animated production will feature the “signature family-friendly fun, spirited action and irreverent humor” seen previously in the immensely popular series of videogames. “A routine Jedi Academy field trip is turned into a rip-roaring comic adventure in LEGO Star Wars: The Padawan Menace. Tour guide Master Yoda leads a group of rambunctious Jedi younglings through Senate chambers when he senses a disturbance in the Force....
But it’s a really good film. It’s a well made piece of work, built on a small budget, that fleshes out interesting characters, and puts them in unpleasant, but authentic-feeling circumstances. The film is written and directed by Dan Turner, and he wastes little time setting up its unrelenting style. Mixing in broad cityscapes and often discomforting close-ups, a culture of violence, in a modern British community, is quickly established....
Suddenly finding himself inebriated and on a cruise ship after fleeing yet another dead-end job, Freddie discovers his rudder in the avuncular, preening form of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). A self-styled master of a small yet slowly growing movement he calls The Cause, Lancaster promises to give Freddie a meaningful line of work, if only he’ll continue to churn out his peculiarly intoxicating brand of hooch. Lancaster has charisma, but not necessarily all the power in this particular relationship....
Newly-single Schmidt realizes how nauseated he is by Nick and Jess dating, and decides to take affirmative action to end their relationship. Nick prepares Jess for Schmidt’s conniving and unorthodox tactics, admitting that after Schmidt saw Titanic, he started a Billy Zane fan club, The Zaniacs, which makes Jess unreasonably angry. Schmidt lauds Nick’s romance, congratulating him on his second longest relationship to date. After Nick starts to assess his feelings, he also starts having trouble performing in the boudoir;what follows is a gut-busting fail montage of Jess trying to break Nick out of his funk that is, to invent a word, Smurftacular....
Four months later, and Dinner Party marks a welcome return – and launches straight into the fray as if nothing’s happened. Indeed, it’s quite disconcerting to be coming into it after such a long break and not picking up a cliffhanger to match those that capped the previous two seasons – but it’s also interesting to note that, unusually, the pre-credits sequence ties into the main plot, as Michael puts into play an unsubtle scheme to finally get Jim and Pam to agree to come to dinner....
2.18 Night Has A Thousand Eyes He’s got protecting himself down to a fine art, his paranoia ensuring that anything that could be a threat now or in the future is eliminated as quickly as possible, but protecting someone else – especially someone as seemingly helpless as a baby – is entirely different. We’ve seen all year that he’s struggled with sharing that responsibility with Hayley and Jackson, pushing back against any strategies they may have and sometimes only putting up with Hayley out of necessity, but now the biggest threat yet to Hope’s safety has landed in New Orleans, and all bets are off....
