I have no idea if Jean-Claude Van Johnson has enough storytelling potential to fill a full season of television, but the strength of the pilot episode demands it be given the chance. One of the three shows featured in Amazon’s latest Pilot Season, this single episode is one of the funniest pieces of television of seen … Continue reading
Hey, I didn’t know Lois Lane showed up this early in Smallville! Quite the bizarre origin story they gave her, though, what with the terrible fat suit and the Kryptonite-laced protein shake turning her into a meteor freak. On top of all that, “Craving” has her going by a completely different name, probably hiding her … Continue reading
Simple stories get a bad rap these days. In an era of big blockbusters that constantly crossover with one another, telling increasingly complex stories, films that instead choose to focus on a straightforward, familiar narrative structure sometimes get ignored for not doing enough to shake things up. On some level, I understand the sentiment; it’s … Continue reading
Mr. Robot, Season 2 Review: “eps2.2_init_1.asec” There’s a quote near the end of “Init 1” – the fourth episode of Mr. Robot’s second season – that sums up my feelings on the current state of the show: “What you have…it can be divinity, if you let it.” And although Ray is speaking to Elliot at … Continue reading
However else I may feel about an episode of Smallville, I think the show is always better when a guest star is someone who’s actually gone on to have a career. “X-Ray,” for example, was helped a lot by casting future star Lizzie Caplan as that episode’s meteor freak. And while it’s impossible for the … Continue reading
Sometimes, movie trailers just speak to you. Regardless of if you’re the demographic a film is going for, or if it’s even the sort of movie you don’t normally go for, a good trailer can tick all the right boxes to get you interested in a film. Such was the case with Nerve, a film … Continue reading
Look, let’s not mince words on this one: Ben-Hur is an atrocity of a video game, a garbage attempt to build hype for the upcoming movie by slapping together the quickest, dirtiest collection of assets into a barely playable chunk. There’s less content in this title than in most game demos; it’s generous to even … Continue reading
So, fun fact, this is one of the few Smallville episodes I can remember seeing, and may well be the first time I ever saw the series. Other than that? Well… “Cool” wasn’t the most thrilling hour of television. It’s an episode that continues the show’s trend towards the more generic freak-of-the-week focus that defines … Continue reading
Expanding a short film into a full-length feature is a tricky proposition. What works over the course of a few minutes can just as easily fall apart when given an hour-and-a-half runtime. As such, I remained cautiously optimistic about David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out, despite how much I enjoyed his 2013 short film of the … Continue reading
So far, Smallville has done a good job of giving me something to latch on to in each episode, but the closest I found to compelling material in “X-Ray” was the appearance of an actress who would eventually have a career, Lizzy Caplan, in the role of antagonist Tina Greer. It’s not that this was … Continue reading