2017, oh what a year it was (or "2017, oh what? Was it a year?")

I have this list of films (& tv) I watched, and yet did not write a review for.  I thought perhaps it was a list made up of films (and TV too) I watched in 2018 (the dark year), but in 2018 (the dark year) I actually did much of my film writing on ye olde Letterboxd account (no tv writings though).  Letterboxd was a dalliance with dark app magic that hasn't really stuck... not like this hire trusty blogge. But I digress... the list below represents many things watched, mostly, in 2017 (maybe a little before, maybe a little after [the dark year]).   Toast was keeping the blogge spirit alive back then, I was too mired in some bullshit or another to put thoughts to 1s&0s.  I may have made comments in the blogge about such movie (und T.V.) thinges hence, but perhaps not.  I am too lazy to do a search at this time.

Given the passage of time, most of these things will not have taken up much space in my memory, so I may not have much to say... but then again, I may have far more to say than I think.  So in this grande experiment, I present to you, quick and addled musings of mostly-forgotten experiences of 2017 (and beyonde!).

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Fast & Furious Franchise - I got into F&F with Fast Five, and was quite taken with its rather brazen tomfoolery.  It's big budget action filmmaking that started off as one thing, tried to morph into something else and then wound up becoming something much different, much bigger and much better than its origins would insinuate:

- The Fast and The Furious  (2001, d. Rob Cohen - blu-ray) - it started off as a knowingly cheesy Point Break knock-off with illegal drag racing and substitute penises instead of skydiving and other extreme activities.  Little wooden boy Paul Walker (RIP) goes undercover with Vin Diesel's criminal gang of souped up street race drivers as they steal truck loads of dvd players (yeah, it ages real well).  There's lots of car porn in here and a lot of short shorts and halter tops.  Cohen spends most of the movie using his camera to ogle tires and titties. Yet knowing where it's heading it's already got its stupid charms in place.  It's all about family, bro.

- 2 Fast, 2 Furious (2003, d. John Singleton - blu-ray) - yeah, fucking John Singleton directed this stupidly titled movie.  I honestly can remember what happens in this one (and if I'm being honest, I can't really remember what happened in the first one...as with most of the entries in this entire post, I won't remember most of what I watched), but I seem to recall enjoying it more than the first one.  I think it uses a lot more CGI, and the absence of Vin Diesel means the acting game is actually stepped up a little in this one (Diesel has screen presence, I'll give him that, but he's a terrible actor).  It goes against the grain but I think I would watch this one over the first one.

- Fast and Furious (2009, d. Justin Lin - blu-ray) - I skipped the third one (Tokyo Drift) because it's not really part of the series.  Not to get too stuck in the weeds but Tokyo Drift takes place after Fast & Furious 6, if you're trying to sort out the chronology.  But really Tokyo Drift is kind of the Halloween: Season of the Witch of the F&F franchise, the one where they tried to do a standalone anthology type thing that just didn't work....  BUT, with his feet already wet, Justin Lin was (ahem) fast figuring things out and set the real prototype for the franchise to follow with the murky fourth entry Fast and Furious, in which he tries to bring together all three of the previous films canonically, while also pushing forward into globetrotting espionage type storytelling with a gang of streetracing thieves with a code of ethics and a strong makeshift familial bond.  It's a messy, messy movie, but it certainly started something that Fast Five paid off like gangbusters (...you know, gang busting, like Paul Walker in the first film).

- Fast and Furious 6 (2013, d. Justin Lin - blu-ray) - Fast Five is a legit good time for anyone who has never seen any other F&F movie and it's the legit entryway into it all.  Viewing order of F&F should be 5, 4, 6, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8.  But anyone coming into F&F may immediately want out with F&F6 since it really ouroboroses it up.  Lin just goes for broke and makes a crazy dumb (yet fun) spy movie that brings almost everything from the past right back up front, including resurrecting the dead and tying things back together from Tokyo Drift.  It's a film that needs more out of Vin Diesel than he can give, and it overstretches itself with its universe building, yet still certainly enjoyable.

- Furious 7 (2015, d. James Wan - TMN) - And this is where the shit hits the alchemic fan and turns to gold.  Jason Statham and Kurt Russell enter the fray of an already ballooning cast.  Sadly, Paul Walker died while filming was ongoing and his specter looms hard over the proceedings, creating an honest to god sentimental moment about family in its finale.  It's a big, big movie and it goes for broke quite spectacularly.  Again it ties itself heavily with the previous three entries, but at this point this ongoing "family" thread is what gives these films connective tissue when otherwise it would just be ridiculously entertaining car stunts.

- The Fate of the Furious (2017, d. F. Gary Gray - TMN) - they may have lost Paul Walker but they gained Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren (yes, fucking Helen Mirren).  Never one to let a good adversary stay a good adversary, the bad guy of the previous film (Jason Statham) is reformed as a good guy here (setting up the Hobbes and Shaw spin-off) and it's easily the Statham/Dwayne Johnson chemistry that carries the bulk of the entertainment factor here.  Vin Diesel is blackmailed by Theron into being a bad guy who the rest of the team has to take down, and it's kind of a drag, because Diesel, the stunted bad actor that he is, can't play the character as a man trapped pretending to "break bad" but instead just plays a shitty heel figure in the proceedings.

These films, at this point, exceed James Bond levels of action set pieces, and this is the first one that takes major pains to kind of lose the car shtick.... to do other big action set pieces that aren't *only* about cars.  It's another turning point in an ever evolving and expanding franchise.  There's no way, looking back at that kind of dumb, DVD-stealing crew from the first feature that it would wind up in to the almost-superhero universe it's become.  I don't blame anyone for thinking these things are totally stupid dumb and not worth the time.  They are totally stupid dumb, but that's what makes them so entertaining.  They have absolutely no pretenses about them which is why they are so successful.

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It's been established that I'm not a big horror movie guy.  I can dabble but I'm not very entertained by the cruel nature of horror.  I don't get a lot of pleasure out of seeing people tortured or the gags of guts and viscera meant to shock and/or amuse.  So when I say that these two films are the best horror films of the decade, you have to qualify that as, like, the sentiments of a guy who really hasn't watched that many horror films this decade.  And yet, not only are these two of the best horror films of the decade, they are two of the best films, flat out, of the decade.  Two masterfully crafted productions that will stand up for decades to come.

Get Out (2017, d. Jordan Peele - In Theatre) channels so much racial tension, modern and historical, that it's at times unbearable and viscerally upsetting.  It's psychotropic horror, a film that doesn't so much as startle you as keep you in a perpetual state of uneasiness.  It's a masterful debut from Peele that may have been a big surprise to Key & Peele sketch comedy fans who weren't paying close enough attention to how often those skits descended into some kind of absurd terror.

It Follows (2014, d. David Robert Mitchell - Netflix), in the loosest sense, is about a killer STD.  But that's way oversimplifying things.  It's a metaphor for shame and guilt around sex, especially in teenage years.  Mitchell crafts a film that feels like it's part of the 80's horror explosion, a saturated blueish hue and very specific styles, locations and vehicles all create a bit of a throwback aesthetic with a pulsating synth soundtrack that is brilliant on its own but even more effective in combination with the film.  Yet for all its retro homage, it's still a very modern film, thoughtful, sensitive, yet still very, very frightening. An absolute classic.

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*Smooth transition from horror to children's movies*

Finding Dory (2016, d. Andrew Stanton - blu-ray) - Finding Nemo is a brilliant, beautiful, highly entertaining film with a huge heart, an animation classic.  A sequel was probably inevitable but hardly necessary.  While not quite the equal of its predecessor, Finding Dory does manage to hold up to Pixar's highest standards, delivering another beautiful, highly entertaining film with a huge heart.  Dealing with Dory's forgetfulness/disorder and retracing her past makes for a different experience than Finding Nemo while holding onto its structure.

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017, d. David Soren - in theatre) over the past dozen years of my kids' lives I've been exposed to the rather wondrous worlds of cartoonist Dav Pilkey.  The Captain Underpants series is absurd humour for younger readers, but still quite entertaining for adults reading along with their child.  The "First Epic Movie" has moments of real inspiration but exposes kind of how juvenile the concept is.  It seems to aim for a sort of Spongebob or Lego Movie vibe but misses the mark.

Despicable Me 3 (2017, d. Pierre Coffin, Kyle Balda - in theatre).  I haven't actually seen any other Despicable Me movies, so perhaps this one was just lost on me without prior investment, but I find the animation ugly, the minions annoying, and the humour tepid.  I recall asking myself frequently "who is this joke for?"  In a word: inessential.

Moana (2016,  d. Ron Clements, John Musker - netflix) There was a period there where my daughter was refusing to go to the movies, so we didn't see Moana on the big screen.  We didn't even wind up seeing it together.  She saw it at school or at a friend's birthday party, so I watched it without her.  I rather adored it, but the vistas and scale of the picture would have been so much more impactful watching on a big screen.  It's an absolute darling of a movie though, truly lovely and adventurous.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968, d. Ken Hughes - rental) I don't remember what the impetus was for watching this.  I think the wife and I were talking about films that scared us as a child (see next entry) and she mentioned how terrifying Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was for her as a young'un.  This is a weird 145-minute long (!) quasi-musical live-action children's film about a possibly sentient super-car that helps a family survive their ramshackle adventure through a despotic alternate reality.  From James Bond creator Ian Fleming, adapted to screen by Roald Dahl, it's fucking bizarre.  It's not great, but there's absolutely something surreal and captivating about it.  I can see how that surreality was terrifying to kids, for sure.


The Peanut Butter Solution (1985, d. Michael Rubbo - blu-ray) There was no tit-for-tat in our traumatizing childhood movie exchange.  I had to watch this one on my own.  But I did so happily.  To rediscover this film -- about a kid who goes bald after getting massively frightened when exploring an abandoned house, then receiving a mysterious recipe for hair-growth formula (the titular peanut butter solution) from a ghost, and then being kidnapped by his nefarious art teach so he can use his perpetually-growing hair to make the world's softest paint brushes -- was an absolute blast.  I saw this film many times as a kid, as it was frequently played on Canadian television, and it was great to be able to fill in the gaps of my memory on it.  It's a weird-ass movie, with typically Canadian production values which makes it almost more endearing.  It's like Cronenberg-for-kids.

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I can't be bothered to sub-categorize the films any longer.  Hot takes a-comin:

Oh Hello on Broadway (2017, d. Alex Timbers, Michael John Warren - netflix) Nick Kroll is responsible for two of the best shows of the past decade, the hilarious coming-of-age-and-sexuality animated Big Mouth and the reality TV satirizing sketch comedy of Kroll Show.  The septigenarians New Yorkers George St. Geegland (John Mulaney) and Gil Faison (Kroll) emerged from Kroll Show (as well as other appearances online, in podcasts and elsewhere) as a fully baked comedic duo, telling ribald stories of past glories, and questionable decisions they've made along the way.  A stage show on broadway was a surprising next level for these hilarious and unlikeably charming characters... I wouldn't think the mass appeal would be there to sustain such a run, but toss in a loosely structured script for Kroll and Mulaney to bounce around inside of,  and bring out a surprise celebrity guest interview each show and it just started buzzing.  If filming it for Netflix has a problem, it's that one wouldn't want to watch the same show twice, but instead see as many of the shows as possible.  It was probably more fun live, but it's still a great time.

GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012, d. Brett Whitcomb - netflix) This doc cropped up on Netflix in the lead-up to their original scripted comedy-drama GLOW.  I watched and loved the first season of GLOW and was intrigued to see what they actually took from the source.  Not surprisingly, they took very little, beyond the comraderie, a few of the archetypes, and the sense of struggle.  But seeing the real performers reminisce and then reunite creates for a quite enjoyable and emotional ride.  It's a sweet documentary even if you're not sure how much wrestling matters in the grand scheme of things.  Mountain Fiji's story is the centerpiece of much of the movie, as she's so loveable and her struggles so touching.  There's never a wrong way to celebrate an absolutely endearing, wonderful, kind-hearted person like her, and where it could feel like it was focusing on her at the expense of the other performers, it actually brings them together and further exemplifies their sense of community.


Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016, d. David Yates - blu-ray) I thought for certain that I had already written at least once, if not twice about FB&WTFT, but no dice.  I only have a letterboxd entry for The Crimes of Grindlewald.  I like Harry Potter fine, but I'm not a huge fan, magic just isn't my thing, y'know.  And the first time around with FB&WTFT I thought it was trying too hard to be something different, and to be something bigger than it really was.  But the second time watching it, I actually responded rather intensely to the characters and their journey, to the point that I was really, really, really looking forward to seeing them again in the sequel.  Well, here's how that went.  Anyway, I quite like this first one.  It really grows on you.

Trump: The Art of The Deal (2016, d. Jeremy Konner - netflix) Johnny Depp plays Trump in this satire of the man's life and his business ethos.  It's not as funny or scathing as it needs to be, and it's only clever by half.  Perhaps if he didn't become president it would have been more amusing.

Girlfriend's Day (2017, d. Michael Stephenson, - netflix) A cheeky detective noir starring Bob Odenkirk about a down-on-his-luck greeting card writer who gets embroiled in murder and conspiracy around a new fake holiday, Girlfriend's Day.  There's probably a good short film in here, but it makes for a bit of a slog at full-length.

The Polka King (2017, d. Maya Forbes - netflix) / The Man Who Would Be Polka King (2009, d. John Mikulak, Joshua Brown - netflix).  Jan Lewan was practically a legend when his extravagent lifestyle and inflated ego started overtaking his reality.  Unable to sustain himself with his music or business, he starts grifting his fans and his community with a Ponzi scheme.  The Polka King is a lightly dramatic retelling starring a delightful cast -- including Jack Black, Jenny Slate,Jason Schwartzman, and JB Smoove --  while the documentary is a little dry but still heartbreaking when it affirms the reality of the hurt Lewan inflicted on people's lives (but also a little frustrating how trusting people were in giving him money to start with).  Not essential viewing but rather engaging as a pair (the doc runs just over an hour)

Don't Think Twice (2017, d. Mike Birbiglia - netflix) Comedian Mike Birbiglia is a very gifted storyteller.  He's a captivating and hilarious orator and author.  It's a bit surprising then that he's rather far from that as a filmmaker, but maybe it's just the story he's trying to tell.  Don't Think Twice is a story about an improv comedy troupe dealing with reality when one of their members becomes famous but the rest are left struggling.  It's such a narrowly defined reality that even someone like myself, who loves standup, sketch, improv comedy in all its different distributions, could care less about this story or the characters within it.  The cast is a great one, with Gillain Jacobs pulling the MVP role within it, but it has no real meat to it, not for lack of trying.

Keanu (2016, d. Peter Atencio - TMN) The transition from sketch to feature has been hard for almost all sketch comedy group, Monty Python excepted.  The more successful moves to feature-length scripting tend to find a coherent story formed out of what are effectively a series of sketches.  Unfortunately, with Keanu, Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele's first foray into the cinemas as a duo, either the sketches were too restricted by the story of the film, or they weren't intended to be sketches at all.  Either way, the film doesn't really work.  It's attempting to be a buddy action comedy, and it hits those notes, but they're almost all fairly mundane and and familiar notes.  Key and Peele aren't offering anything here that surprises or is memorably quotable, unlike so much from their sketch comedy.  It's not a terrible movie by any stretch, but it's missing the sparks of brilliance we had come to expect from the duo.

The Nice Guys (2016, d. Shane Black - TMN) This is Shane Black's thing.  Two kind of down-and-out professionals of a type, getting on each other's nerves but developing a respect and friendship along the way.  These two guys are Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling... not exactly the dynamic duo on the forefront of everyone's mind, but it works so well.  Both are quite into it and Black produced a hilarious and charming script about losers with more style and craft than any of his other outings.  A great little movie, worthy of rewatching.

The Late Shift (1996, d. Betty Thomas - TMN) Based on the book, a dramatic retelling of the tensions between David Letterman and Jay Leno following the announcement of Johnny Carson's retirement from The Tonight Show.  HBO has been investing in these niche stories for a long, long time, and while it looks painfully like a film made in 1996, it's still actually a very engaging watch.  There's no reason anyone should really care about what went on behind the scenes of the Tonight Show any longer, and yet, there's something legendary about this fued which makes this sometimes goofy imagining of it captivating. Kathy Bates playing a ball-busting agent is worth the watch alone.

Arrival (2016, d. Denis Villeneuve - blu-ray) Villeneuve announces himself here as the next great director of big screen science fiction.  Next he takes on Blade Runner and Dune, showing that he has little humility in the face of his ambitions.  But he produces beautiful looking movies, cast with amazing actors who he draws out commanding performances.  This is a procedural, of sorts, which finds linguist Amy Adams discovering how to break through and communicate with a very alien sentience that arrives on Earth.  It's not an action film, but the intensity is high, and the depth of emotion is perhaps even more suprising than the aliens.

Fire & Ice (1980, d. Ralph Bakshi - Amazon Prime) This type of fantasy, swords, sandals, beards and crystal balls is not my thing.  I find these types of stories tedious and dull.  But beyond the tedious story is beautiful hand drawn animation which kept me in admiring awe throughout.  There's a stiffness and lack of fluidity at times, but that's somehow part of its charm.



The Lost City of Z (2017, d. James Gray - Amazon Prime) Colonialist epics are a thing of yesterday, unless you can present a story that is absolutely aware of its place within modern cultural norms.  The Lost City of Z does have its cake and eats it too, by telling a story spanning three time periods, three adventures in the the Amazon, where explorer Percey Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) discovers evidence of an advance tribe from eras past.  The British aristocracy finds any intonation that any non-white civilation would have superior capabilities heretical, but Fawcett, more concerned with truth than politics obsessively forges forward to find further proof, with his family left behind to bare the brunt of his herecy. It's a very tranquil and meditative film, with moments of tremendous intensity, and a few moments of maddening truth regarding our forefathers' ignorance. Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Sienna Miller and Ian McDiarmid co-star.

Jim & Andy (2017, d. Chris Smith - netflix) Jim Carrey played Andy Kaufman in the 1999 film Man on the Moon.  It left him a little scarred.  This documentary examines Andy Kaufman's life through Jim Carrey's experience trying to completely inhabit another man's skin.  It's a fascinating if inessential documentary that provides interesting perspective on Kaufman, but also insight into the craft of acting and how it can be psychologically dangerous to pretend to be someone else for a while.  Now all we need is the meta-movie that is the dramatic retelling of this story.

Black Panther (2018 [the dark year], d. Ryan Coogler - in theatre) Turns out I actually wrote a review in 2018 but never published it (all I had to do was attach some pictures).  I corrected that and published it now.  I've watched the film a couple times since, and it's in my top 10 of all time superhero films. 

Creed (2015, d. Ryan Coogler - TMN) I saw at least some of Rocky III and probably all of Rocky IV when I was a kid, but I wasn't that big into boxing movies then, and I'm still not now.  I don't really care.  I skipped the chance to watch Creed for free on the big screen when it came out (well, actually, arrived late and was locked out of the theatre) but it was my hyped reaction to Black Panther that made it a must-see.  I love it.  It's a tremendous movie.  I've seen it a couple times now and I'll watch it again.  Michael B. Jordan is magnetic, his chemistry with Stallone and Tessa Thompson is incredible, and Coogler's direction is amazing (that seamless one-shot of the boxing match is viscerally engrossing).  It's a story about legacy, something I love in superhero comic books, and this is really just a comic book superhero of a different type.

The Cloverfield Paradox (2018 [the dark year], d. Julius Onah - netflix) - You can look elsewhere on the internet for the backstory on how this project came to be, and how it came to be on netflix.  My hot take is that its incredible cast - Chris O'Dowd, Gugu Mbuthu-Raw, David Oyelowo, Elizabeth Debicki, Zhang Ziyi, Daniel Bruhl - is kind of wasted on such an incredibly badly executed story about parallel dimensions.  It's a film that couldn't quite figure out what it wanted to be, sci-fi or horror, not doing either all that well with split focus, and then got shoehorned into a film franchise that isn't a film franchise.  There's a few inspired entertaining seeds here but it just doesn't come together.  Can we get the cast together again for a do-over?

Ghost in the Shell (2017, d. Rupert Sanders - netflix) There's so much content in the world you have to make blanket concessions somewhere.  For me it's books and anime. I've never seen the original GitS so everything in this film is new to me.  I get the controversy surrounding it, and I do agree with it: ScarJo wasn't the appropriate casting choice.  Moving past the whitewashing (if you can, understood if you can't), the film is quite striking visually and I found the story is very engaging.  There's only really one scene, in which ScarJo meets her Japanese grandmother, where the whitewashing becomes so brutally flagrant, but otherwise it's not a constant offense throughout the film (unless to you it is, which is valid).
 
The Disaster Artist (2017, d. James Franco - rental) Is Franco now cancelled or can we still talk about him with some appreciation? I haven't been keeping up on all the cancel culture news.  I know The Room mainly from podcast talking about it and a few clips I've watched obsessively online.  Tommy Wiseau is a fascinating personality, and the story of his creation of The Room is bountifully as bizarre as he is.  Franco takes one step past impersonation here, capturing Wiseau's strange mannerisms and injecting his own sense of his personality, trying to creating a flesh-and-blood living being out of such an enigma.  Dave Franco then, playing Wiseau's de facto best friend and naive partner in crime Greg Sestero, has to do much of the emotional heavy lifting, but since it's a film based on Sestero's book of the same name, it's built for such a focus.  It's a very entertaining film about a film that's possibly way more entertaining depending on your disposition.  But it serves as a great entryway into The Room for the uninitiated and also a fun dramatization for fans of Wiseau (winking or otherwise).

I, Tonya (2017, d. Craig Gillespie - in theatre) If you were a teenager or older in the early 90's then you knew all about Tonya Harding.  Or, at least, you thought you did.  She was the "bad girl of figure skating", as the media liked to sensationalize her.  She came from lower-class rural America, she liked to perform to hard rock and wore outfits that weren't as refined or standardized as other skaters.  She was a curvy, muscular girl, with crimped dirty blonde hair that seemed borderline unmanageable.  Everything about her flew in the face of the sport's typical pageantry.  So she was stigmatized and villainized by the media, especially when compared to her chief competition, Nancy Kerrigan.  Kerrigan was a Disney Princess come to life, long and lean, with flowing, shiny brown hair, doing everything by the book.  Of course, as the story goes, Harding kept some pretty bad company (her domineering mother most extremely) and it eventually led to the legendary kneecapping incident that got Harding banned for life from the sport.  This is a tragi-comedy featuring both the absurdity and the abuse in Tonya's life, with magnificent performances from Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, Sebastian Stan and Paul Walter Hauser.

Annihilation  (2018 [the dark year], d. Alex Garland - in theatre) Perhaps the most intense and legitimately frightening film that isn't an outright horror movie.  It's a bit of a puzzle that when pieced all together still requires some thought on behalf of the viewer to get to a resolution.  It's got serene moments of beauty, and start moments of terror, with many emotional thoughts in between.  It's a film that demands rewatching, but may be too intense for some to actually want to.  It's wonderful, one of the best genre films of the decade.
 

The Shape of Water (2017, d. Guillermo del Toro - in theatre) My dirty nerd secret is that I don't really like del Toro's films all that much. The big benchmarks in his career, Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone are probably my least favourite entries in his repertoire. But Oscar darling The Shape of Water is a strange delight.  It's as much a tribute to the history of cinema as it is about a deaf lady falling in love with a fish-man, which explains why the Oscar voters keyed into it so much.  There's little else Oscar loves more than films about film.  There's just too many beautiful, romantic even, moments in this film to not get swept up, even when it gets cartoonishly heavy handed (intentionally so) and it's so precise (as all del Toro films are) in its details that it's such a marvel to behold.  Plus, it's basically an Abe Sapien from Hellboy spin-off in everything but name. 

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OH NO! Unwritten about TV shows.  Blerg.

11.22.63 (Hulu) - A mini-series adaptation of the Stephen King novel about a guy (played by J*cancelled*o) who finds a time vortex in his closet and goes back in time to stop Kennedy's assassination with disastrous consequences.  Kind of fun in the moment, pretty forgettable afterward.

The Night Manager (Amazon Prime) - A John LeCarre adaptation about a night manager (Tom Hiddleston) at a hotel who gets recruited into being a spy, infiltrating the organization of a previously untouchable global weapons dealer (Hugh Laurie).  Olivia Coleman plays Hiddleston's handler. Elizabeth Debicki plays Laurie's girlfriend.  It's a great cast and an interesting story, but it plays too rhythmically like a book, so it feels like it gets distracted frequently from the main thrust.  It would probably have made a tighter movie.

The Defenders (Netflix) - Blerg.  This was what five seasons and 65 episodes of TV was leading to, the uniting of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist.  But the most boring part of the Netflix Marvel was the ninja mob The Hand, and that's the main adversary of this series.  The show relishes every scene where characters meet characters from a different series but Elektra and the Hand have them dragging their feet through the mud.  Sigourney Weaver is also a main adversary in the show, but mostly separated from everything else going on as we get insight into her terminal illness and how it affects her...she doesn't ever feel like she belongs in this story.  What a waste of time and effort.

GLOW Season 1 (Netflix) I've written about Season 3 already, but going back to the beginning and remembering Ruth and Debbie and the gang as they were at the start, it's been a remarkable journey for them all.  It's really a show about camaraderie, about unity, feminine spirit, and it all starts with Ruth sleeping with her best friend's husband, getting found out, and then having to face that person every day in a challenging, close-knit environment, where failure would be the last straw for all of their careers.  There's comedy, which is great, and there's drama, which is even better, and there's wrestling, which is terrible, but in a very fun way.  It's ridiculously charming, the cast dynamic is perfect, and it doesn't shy away from having difficult conversations.  Its mid-80's trappings are painful reminders of a gaudy, ugly era of fashion, but it certainly gives the show a distinct feel as it leans heavily into the neon style.

Ghosted (Fox) Craig Robinson and Adam Scott join a secret organization to fight supernatural entities. It was a rough start.  I think I lasted four episodes.  I'm certain it could have gotten better (and apparently it did) but a rough start more often than not leads to cancellation rather than patience as it finds its footing.  The comedy wasn't sharp or original enough and the characters Scott and Robinson were playing felt like exactly that, characters they were playing.  Both leads were better than the material.

Runaways season 1 (Hulu/Showcase) I don't even remember at this point if I lasted out the season.  The joke about Runaways, now in its third season, is that it took them an entire season to become the titular runaways.  The show got way too mired in the dynamics of the parents and kept harping on the squabbles between the adults, and the tense and/or awkward relationships they had with their kids.  I loved the first run of the comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, and the show uses almost everything that was there but tries to build out and extend the story to exceptionally tedious results.

Mindhunters S1 (Netflix) I've already written about season 2, so looking back on season 1, I notice that we've completely dropped Holden's love life in the second season, which is great, because it had done all it needed in season 1.  Season 2 did drop the ball a bit on Wendy, Anna Torv's character, who was a real highlight of the first season. Season 2 had a more focused story, but season 1's building of an entirely new method of investigation, of criminal profiling, through the gathering of data by interviewing serial killers was gripping television, specifically the interviews with Ed Kemper, a massively imposing man with impeccable manners and a complete emotional detachment from the horror of his crimes.  It's not a show for the faint of heart, that's for sure.

Manhunt: Unabomber (Netflix) - a mini-series trying to fall into the American Crime Story vein, a modestly successful stab by the Discovery Channel to enter the premiere scripted television era.  It's an engaging story if told a little bit cheaply.  It's important to understand that Sam Worthington's character of Jim Fitzgerald is a bit of a lie...he is a real person, but in the show he represents a whole team's worth of activities, so a lot of the actions he takes and conclusions he makes in the show were performed by others in reality.  That said, it's certainly bingeable watching and Paul Bettany's Ted Kaczynski is pretty riveting.  It makes for a good pairing with Mindhunters, although the latter's production values are so much higher, making this look like a 90's TV show.

American Vandal seasons 1 and 2(Netflix) - I didn't know what this was until I watched it.  I had heard raves about it but still thought it was yet another Ryan Murphy or Ryan Murphy-type season-long anthology project.  While it is kind of a season-long anthology, it's also one of the funniest shows on TV.  Taking inspiration from all facets of true crime documentation and investigation, this show embraces and exploits the tropes to maximum comedic effect while still actually managing to create some genuinely interesting and engaging characters and a reasonable amount of dramatic tension.  The first season finds our intrepid duo of high school documentarians investigating the vandal who scratched dicks into the paint of every car in the school's parking lot.  One student was suspended for it, but did he really do it?  The second season revolves around investigating who put a laxative in the cafeteria lemonade, causing much of the school to poop themselves.  These subjects are very silly, and it's the treatment of them with dire seriousness that only heightens their hilarity.  It's a shame this only lasted two seasons, but at the same time it's better than none.  Worth revisiting.

Black Lightning season 1 (Netflix) you know, I covered season 2 already and that pretty much expresses my feelings about the show overall.

Toast of London seasons 1-3 (Netflix) Have you ever had to ask the question "Can you hear me?" And did someone respond, rather oddly, with "Yes, I can hear you Clem Fandango", leaving you quite puzzled?  Watch Toast of London to find out why and laugh yourself silly.  Matt Berry is the egocentric Stephen Toast, a thespian of ill-repute struggling to find meaningful work (or any work for that matter) in modern London.  This is an exquisitely crafted comedic persona, Berry infusing all sorts of vocal quirks, physical mannerisms, plus curious psychological and emotional boundries into the character creating for truly off beat and bizarre but always hilarious and usually unpredictable scenarios for the character to fall into. He has a chief nemesis in Ray "Bloody" Purchase (the cuckold whose wife Toast frequently sleeps with), an apathetic supporter in his agent Jane, and a confidant in fellow aged thespian/flatmate Ed.  It's hard to overstate just how commanding Berry is in this show, which offers the actor/writer/musician the luxury of a new song each episode to punctuate the emotional aspect of a particular scene but also to afford the show some sheer creative lunacy.  There's frankly not another sitcom like this. It won't be to everyone's tastes for sure (just seeing Berry's whinnying sex face is enough to put anyone off who doesn't get the hilariousness of it) but it's worth it for the Jon Hamm episode in season 3 and every Clem Fandango appearance.

Jessica Jones season 2 (Netflix) Is there really a reason to continue watching a show where the lead character learns nothing and continues to alienate the people around her.  I mean, most shows with a toxic lead tend to have characters surrounding them who either enable that toxicity, dismissive of that toxicity, or absolving of that toxicity.  In Jessica Jones, Jess' toxicity does drive the people away from her and even though she could help it, she doesn't, and it's kind of heartbreaking but also extremely annoying.  Season 2 dives deeper into Jess' troubled psyche, some of which has to do with her mother, who reappears with superpowers and is a total murderer.  This causes Jess some more psychological distress on top of her already potent PTSD.  I struggle to understand just what the show is getting at with Jess, what they want us to glean from her... is it that it's okay to still look for the good in someone who acts so awful? Season 2 was a real fucking bummer, with all the performers killing it in their roles, but creating an end product too unpleasant to enjoy too much.  Jessica Jones is a great character, and Krysten Ritter excels at playing her, but the showrunners needed to find another note or two for her to play.

Lady Dynamite season 1 (Netflix) With this new golden age of television, so many comedians are being given the opportunity to create a television show with their own unique vision.  Too often those visions are too limited by what's come before, and there's a lot of redundancy or familiarity in the outcome.  But Maria Bamford's vision is so uniquely her own that it's amazing that Lady Dynamite was even a thing allowed to come into existence.  Bamford's comedy is one that explores the diverging topics of mundane life and mental health, and her show is a representation of that kind of schism.  It's a quasi-manic time-bounding story that takes place in at least three different time periods, one being the present day with a semi-successful Bamford finding love and cohabitation rather challenging, another time frame being her return to Los Angeles and the cutthroat world of acting and comedy after having a mental breakdown, and the third time period taking place at the tail end of that mental breakdown where she's in and out of the hospital and dealing with her well-meaning-if-not-always-helpful parents (a wonderful duo in Ed Begley Jr. and Mary Kay Place).  It's a hilarious but also challenging show to watch, as the time jumping isn't always obvious so it's left to the viewer to sort out what reality we're in, but I think that's a deliberate move on Bamford's part, just a simplified viewport into her brain. It's also got one of the best title credit sequences of the decade.  I've been watching this very slowly over the past few years, most of season 2 remaining, but not for lack of enjoyment.

Collateral (Netflix) is a murder mystery mini-series starring Carrie Mulligan as a sleepy London detective inspector trying to navigate a sticky web of intrigue after a pizza delivery driver is murdered.  I remember next to nothing about this story.  I recall I was somewhat engaged with it at the time, but even then I found the story overly complicated with not enough meat to Mulligan's character to get totally invested in it.  If it were any longer than four episodes I probably wouldn't have continued watching past the first episode. 

Star Wars Rebels season 4 (Disney XD) - if there are people out there convinced that Disney killed Star Wars, then they haven't watched Star Wars: Rebels.  What started out as seemingly a kiddie-fied cartoon set in the pre-A New Hope days evolved into a glorious action adventure drama starring a makeshift-family that grew and grew and grew in scale to something glorious.  If there was any burden for the show it was the expectation that it would ultimately dovetail into established Star Wars canon, be it Rogue One's climax or A New Hope's Battle of Yavin.  But it found its own path, and its ties to established canon ran much deeper than just, say putting the crew of the Ghost in conflict with the Death Star.  The character building reached its apex in Season 4, with each character continuing to evolve, or fulfil their ultimate destiny in exciting or heartbreaking ways.  The journey with the cast of Rebels truly is an epic one, as much the equal of any Skywalker or Solo family memeber, and perhaps even more rewarding.  This season continues to build upon the understanding of the force, as well as providing insight into the scale of the fight the rebels have against the empire.  It comes full circle, bringing together things learned in previous seasons to show that liberal fluidity is more powerful than conservative rigidity.  It's a show that further bridges the prequels to the original trilogy, it reinforces the importance of the Clone Wars cartoon in the pantheon, and it gives us some of the franchise's best characters (in a franchise already full of great ones).  Thanks to Dave Filoni and the creative crew for this amazing ride.

Star Wars Resistance season 1 (Disney XD) As one series ends, another begins.  This time however, it's set in the era of the sequel trilogy, season one ends colliding with the events of The Force Awakens.  But unlike Rebels, which seemed to have a mission to further explore the nuances of the galaxy it inhabits, Resistance is a small show with small dreams.  It's still spearheaded by Dave Filoni, but Filoni's interest here seems to primarily be channeling George Lucas' love of slapstick and physical comedy.  It's central character is Kazuda Xiono, a bumbling Jack Tripper-type who bumbles his way through his espionage mission aboard an outer rim refueling station that the First Order is courting influence with.  The selection of Kaz as their spy is the first of hundreds of absurdities that this show asks its audience to believe in. The supporting cast features few likeable figures, and it gets so mired in its sitcom-like setups each episode that it never feels high stakes.  The show works best when Poe Dameron shows up, Oscar Isaac's confident performance as an actual competent agent elevating everything about the show, and lending it its only air  of authenticity.  The First Order is full of threats, with scattered appearances of Captain Phasma, but the only actual menace they actually generate is when the show dovetails into Starkiller Base's destruction of an entire system.  The show, it's bad.  It's a bad show.  The animation is weird, but not unwatchable, which is more than I can say for the rest of the show.  I don't like it.  Season 1 basically ends where, all things being equal, it really should have began.

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And that's it.  The long list of 2017 (and a bit of 2018) in the bag.  Some good thoughts, but mostly half-hearted ramblings about things I've mostly forgotten.  But that's not all that unusual for this blog now is it.

Watchmen (2009) / Watchmen (2019)

Watchmen (2009 - Ultimate Cut), d. Zack Snyder - bluray [Rewatch]
Watchmen (2019), cr. Damon Lindelof

The Watchmen comic book/graphic novel is a masterpiece in the medium.  Writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons crafted a story that could only be told via the comic book form.  It 's a self-contained epic that presents a richly detailed world somewhat askew from our own, where costumed adventurers emerged in the 1930's, won the Viet Nam war for America in the 1960's and were outlawed in the 1970's, following which is where the story picks up.  But the superheroics are ancillary to the people under the costume, the politics of the world in which they live (this was written at the height of Reaganism/Thatcherism and the last scary gasp of the cold war), and weight of what the future might bring.  It's not dystopian, but it does cast a pretty bleak eye towards the nature of the "western world".

It's a sprawling tale that was originally told over 12 issues (at that point in the 1980's most single issue comics would use 26-28 pages for story, as opposed to modern comics which only contain 20 pages on average per issue).  Also at that time most comics featured a letters' page, for fans to write in and interact with the creators.  Since Watchmen was a mini-series, a proper letters' page wasn't established and Moore instead used the extra pages for prosaic backmatter, often in the form of in-world magazine articles or book excerpts that would flesh out the history of this self-contained superhero universe.

That dense backmatter is so integral to the Watchmen experience that it makes even the idea of adapting the comic to screen a real challenge.  Not only that, Watchmen didn't just tell an immersive superhero story that doubled as a critique of the times (and human nature) but Moore and Gibbons also were deconstructing the medium in which they presented their story (there is a comic-within-the-comic even, with the Tales of the Black Freighter read by an ancillary character in the story), they deconstructed the superhero down from childhood idols and icons to flawed people under masks, dispensing with melodrama and forming more psychological profiles.  It was revelatory and changed the medium of comics and the way superheroes were styled for decades to come.  There's no way to adapt that to screen and have the same effect.

For almost 25 years in the world of comic book fandom (and certainly before the world became engrossed in comic-book and superhero-based media) Watchmen was an untouchable property.  It lived a very pure form with no ancillary outreach save for a role-playing game handbook produced around the same time as the comic.  It was put on a pedestal, and there are a LOT of people who thing it should have remained there.  It was (and remains) a highly revered work, and DC didn't deign to touch it or alter it in any shape for so long, people forgot that it's just another corporate licensed property.  It's a comic book derived from other sources using analogs of more famous heroes to tell a very specific story.  It would be nice if Alan Moore didn't sign a crappy deal and still held rights to the property and had some say into it and made money from it, but that's not the case.  It's a DC/Warner Brothers/whomever-their-parent-company-is-today product, and since 2009 they've been steadily churning out action figures, video games, new prequels (and sequels), and media containing the characters and its stark iconography

Even in the height of Watchmen idolatry, adaptations had been tried a few times, most notably Terry Gilliam made a concerted effort to get a Watchmen movie made in the 90's, but ultimately determined that it was better served on television as a miniseries to allow the story to breathe.  But Hollywood has a hard time letting go of any idea, and certainly can't let go of any property that's steadily making money and garnering attention elsewhere.  Until recently, the Hollywood movie studio system was the ultimate destination for any story, the ultimate validation, the ultimate point of exposure.  It still sometimes just doesn't understand that some stories aren't meant for its medium.

While reports of previous attempts at Watchmen seemed like shady adaptations with ill-advised alterations, director Zach Snyder -- fresh off a very financially successful adaptation of Frank Miller's 300 comic -- promised to stick true to the source, effectively using the comic as storyboards for the feature with only a few tweaks (longer action sequences, wardrobe adjustments and very minor story changes).  It was still relatively nascent time in supehero cinema.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe was just starting, Christopher Nolan had just released The Dark Knight, and people were gleaning the real potential of big blockbuster superhero cinema that wasn't cartoons for kids, but deeply engaging, huge productions that offered up superheroes and their struggles as something legitimately worth investing into.  If there was a time for Zack Snyder's Watchmen, 2009 was it.

The cinematic experience of Snyder's Watchmen was a bit of a mixed bag.  He certainly captured the visuals of the comic book with striking, brought-to-life, slow-motion, moving panels that inspired familiarity and even a little awe in many fans (but by no means all).  The dialogue had ringing familiarity to those who had read the graphic novel, and the story presented itself, for better or worse, almost exactly as Dave Gibbon's panels broke it down.  It was far from a failure, but something was definitely off.

In the painstaking effort to lovingly recreate the panels of the comic, Snyder forgot to invest real time in the characters.  There's a roteness, a going-through-the-motions to almost every performance in the film.  There's little sense that the performers (most of whom have gone on to become quite familiar faces) had a real understanding of their character, and their emotional connection to each other (the unfortunate result of which was I thought for some time that Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode and others weren't that good at acting).  They're exceptionally attractive people, in amazing costumes, perfectly lit, directed it seems more to recreate a scene that worked on paper rather than create something that works for the screen.

The 163-minute cinematic experience was beautiful but hollow.  It was certainly the story of Watchmen but it didn't do what it should have.  Where was the "wow" that reading the comic delivered.  I recall seeing (or reading) an interview with Snyder where he pointed out that the film was going to deconstruct the superhero movie the same way the graphic novel deconstructed the comic book superhero.  Aside from a few visual winks -- like Adrian Veidt's (Goode) costume, complete with Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin-inspired nipples -- there seemed to be no other thought put into this sense of deconstruction.  There would have been real opportunity to take apart the "origin story" sensibility that guided most superhero films until the MCU era, and likewise Snyder could have really worked through visual aesthetics from various superhero films of the 70's/80's/90's in a pointed way.  It would have taken real vision to do that and (as we've seen from Snyder subsequently) that's not really his style.  Instead, what Snyder added to the Watchmen was just more fight sequences, and they're probably the least likeable aspect of the film, even more distracting than Dr. Manhattan's big blue penis.


There was a direct-to-DVD animated adaptation of Tales of the Black Freighter which seems like such an odd thing to do.  In the comic, the Black Freighter story is told in small, brief sections throughout the 12 issues, so presenting it as a whole seems incongruous to its origins.  A director's cut of the film emerged on DVD, adding an additional 20 minutes, but it's the Ultimate Cut of Watchmen, released around Christmas in 2009, that makes for a more definitive Watchmen experience.  This Ultimate Cut, clocking in at 215 minutes, takes the director's cut and seams in the Black Freighter in pieces throughout (as was originally intended).  The film does feel more whole with the Black Freighter and director's cut footage included, but it also feels like it should be more episodic rather than a barely-unified whole.  Gilliam was right.

In rewatching this ultimate cut, I found the first hour the most engrossing.  This is Snyder (and by proxy Moore and Gibbons) in world-building mode, and if anything the world of Watchmen is fascinating.  It's sense of alt-history, how things differed because of the presence of costumed vigilantes and, moreover, Dr. Manhattan, is riveting.  It was smart of Snyder to revert the production back to its mid 1980's setting if he was going to so literally translate it.  It wouldn't have worked otherwise.  And yet, there's a sense of anachronism between the costumes and the era its set in. 

Snyder's opening title montage -- the slow-motion retrospective through the history of the Minutemen in the 1940s all the way through to the Keene act barring masked vigilates in the 1970s, all set to Bob Dylan's "Times They Are A-Changin'" -- is easily his greatest contribution to the Watchmen legacy.  Snyder's seems to have more of a gift for music video storytelling than actual cinematic storytelling.



But after the first hour, once the world is well established, Snyder has to live with the characters, and the message of Watchmen and he couldn't seem less interested in them.  I have to say that the most vital parts of the film are the Black Freighter sequences.  They snap the viewer out of the lull that Snyder can't otherwise escape.  In Snyder's live-action, the characters say all the right words, the actors move with notable intent, they are framed as if posed, the shots all look right out of the comics, but it doesn't flow like a movie should.  It's only in the Black Freighter animation that the film escapes this need to "panelize" its shots.  What works best is it takes the conceit of a comic-within-a-comic and instead makes it an animated-film-within-a-film, which is the kind of thing an adaptation is supposed to do, adapt to the medium, and use it to its full advantage.

I honestly don't know anyone personally who loves this movie, and I know only a few who like it.  I do like it, but it's only effective as a "Cliff's Notes" version of Watchmen.  It doesn't even come close to replacing the graphic novel, but at the same time it does absolutely nothing to harm it.  Even the overblown sex scene and the unfortunate, overly elaborate, "bone-breaking" fight sequences aren't all that egregious.  I do have to say that Dr. Manhattan's glowing blue genitalia are utterly distracting every time they're on screen.  Whether prosthetic or CGI, it was someone's job to work with those things, either gluing them to Billy Crudup's suit or animating the movement of the phallus and testes as Dr. Manhattan moves around the scene.  It's just a bizarre thought to me.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I think the ending of this Watchmen is even tighter. more realistic to the reality of Watchmen than Moore's original ending.  Framing Dr. Manhattan as the bad guy for the world to rally around seems like a far more elegant solution than dropping a giant space squid on New York. 

The big box set the Ultimate Cut came with also includes a great 40-minute in-story "news programme" that investigates the former heroes of this world.  It covers some of the backmatter material that Moore had in the comics, and one could see how, were this an episodic TV series instead of a film, the post credits of every episode could feature a shorter 5-minute news segment akin to this.

Well, it's 10 years later, and we have a new Watchmen TV series.  I was initially worried when I heard about it because I was afraid of another adaptation of the graphic novel.  I think it was already proven that it can't be easily translated to any sort of screen, nor should it really be.  So it was to my relief to hear that Damon Lindelof, a year or two separated from the excellent The Leftovers (and still-beloved Lost) was spearheading this as a sequel, and a sequel to the graphic novel, not the film.  The Leftovers was such a richly envisioned world that I could only imagine what it is Lindelof wanted to do with the world of Watchmen 30 years later.

Halfway through the first episode of Watchmen I leaned over to my wife and said "I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't this...and I'm so thankful for it".

Let's state it blutly, Watchmen is amazing.  It's uncomfortable, shocking, upsetting, striking, funny, exciting and invigorating.  It's definitely got that "Prestige HBO" vibe,  and it once again reiterates (like Game of Thrones and Westworld before it) that television is now capable of producing cinema-quality stories in a serialized format.  The times they are a-changin' indeed (callback).

The pilot opens brilliantly showing a silent film, fans of the comic will recognize instantly what the film is referencing, but the story pulls out of the film and into the reality of 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the prosperous black community of Greenwood was massacred by white supremacists.  I didn't even know this was a thing, and apparently it's a part of American history that's been forcefully swept under the rug.  I think it's bold that its been given such a high profile awakening, and that it serves as the primary backdrop for this show in many different ways.  It's a brutal historical reality which deserves to be remembered and addressed.  Just one of many mortally deep wounds in America's long history with racism.

This show could be its own thing, just dealing with the legacy of the Tulsa massacre, but those sorts of stories don't quite get the same eyes on it, the same response.  Lindelof, co-writer Nick Cuse, and director Nicole Kassell have taken this buried shame and displayed it boldly in front of their new "prestige superhero drama".  They're doing what Snyder and team didn't do with the film, which was adapt it for the medium, and for the times.  It's perhaps thanks to Snyder's film, though, that the pressure is off for Lindelof and co. to redo Moore and Gibbons' story.  Instead he gets to use Watchmen as a brand, and as a surreality to set his story in.  It's doing the same thing Watchmen did for Reagan/Thatcher-era and holding a reflective surface up to it to stare back upon it.  It may look different and distorted, but things are all too recognizable to the world of today.

The craft of Lindelof's Watchmen is in using its comic book history sparingly, nuggets that readers familiar with the graphic novel will catch and have greater meaning, but serve as curiosities for the inexperienced.  These tidbits, like the note that Viet Nam is an American state, or that the presidents can serve more than 2 terms now, or that whole raining squid thing, or even the "American Hero Story" segments...they all nod back to the comics and mean quite a bit more with the background knowledge, but they don't detract from the main story and they serve as intriguing world building on their own merits even without further elaboration.  This isn't our reality, it's warped and different, but not unrecognizable.

Another brutal massacre, this time a fictional one in the show's history, saw all of Tulsa's police department murdered by a racist terrorist group that sport Rorschach masks as their main iconography.  This has led to the police being masked and unidentified, and by the show's second episode, tensions have escalated into a war between the Seventh Kavalry and the police.

When I saw the commercials for this series, with the police in masks, it struck a note of "this is wrong", as in "what would the police get up to if they were anonymous, not held responsible"?  There's a credible threat in a masked police force for sure, but the show weaves that narrative trickily into understanding the necessity, but it never sits comfortably with that decision.

There will be "purists" (ugh) who don't want any other Watchmen other than what Moore and Gibbons created.  That's fine, nobody is asking them to read, watch, or play anything else, but this is vital TV right now, and Lindelof, Cuse and Kassell negotiate this unexpected superhero playground deftly, investing in all the right aspects, teasing all the right components and creating immensely engaging and thought provoking television in the guise of a comic book adaptation.

This feels like a comic book series properly adapted.  One which uses what came before as a launching pad, not a bible, not a story to tell over and over.  Its greatest success is with Regina King's Angela Abar as the show's focal point.  It teases out her family life, her professional life, her trauma and her competency.  She's a badass, in costume and out.  Louis Gossett Jr. is a 105-year-old wheelchair bound stranger who imposes himself upon Angela's life in the most shocking of ways and the revelations he has to bring to her are personal in so many ways (and likely bigger than what she already imagines).  There are cutaway scenes to Jeremy Irons' Adrian Veidt, living in isolation with only his genetic anomalies to keep him company.  What his deal is 30 years later is still anyone's guess.

I'm already excited for Watchmen week-to-week.  It's the first show in a while I'm making appointment television, not wanting to wait to watch it on demand or from the digital recording.  Netflix and binge watching has trained me to be restless when there's something this good that I have to wait for.  So I sit with anxious anticipation for episode 3.

31 Days of Halloween: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

2019, André Øvredal (Troll Hunter) -- download

This movie will always be about that scene from the trailer, the one where the girl pokes and prods at a massive blemish on her face, a white-headed pimple from which emerges a tiny waving spider leg. 

*shriek*

Body horror to the max, a common urban legend, pure nightmare fuel. Yes, this movie was adapted from the popular children's books of the same name, that often dealt with such tales, the same kinds of tales we saw in those 70s large format comics, short stories that always give the main character a terrible lesson to learn. But how do you jam an anthological concept into a 1.5 hour movie, and keep the characters connected to it? One antagonist, multiple consequences loosely pulled together, is how.

Its the 60s and a bunch of teens are being tormented by bullies, they bump into a drifter named Ramón, and they all end up at the local haunted house. Inside the house they find the book, a book full of (you guess it) scary stories one tells in the dark. BUT, the hook is that NEW stories start appearing, ghostly fountain pen written, tales about the teens and the bullies themselves, stories that come .... TRUE !

With some help from the mind of Guillermo del Toro, the guy who did Troll Hunter does a movie that has some great ideas, but never really takes off. The premise is weak, and the idea waffles between the Bad Kids Being Punished, and... well, just about anyone being punished. Some of the monsters are scary, especially the fat, blobby "pale lady" (really, more a troll/hag creature than a human female) but for the most part, everything is dimmed down to the expectations of it as a kid's movie.

31 Days of Halloween: I Remember You

2017, Óskar Thór Axelsson (Black's Game) -- download

Thus another in the posts I finish writing the previous year's posts, left unattended and quickly forgotten. And yes, still post it as if it was written In the Past (ominous music).

This is an Icelandic mystery wrapped in the shroud OF a ghost story that is as much about the loneliness of isolation as it is about death and ghosts. The movie is broken into two stories, one involving three young people who move to an isolated island to renovate an abandoned house, the other about Freyr, a doctor helping the police investigate a mysterious, disturbing murder with connections to a missing boy.

The structure of the story telling came in the style of a familiar Scandinavian murder mystery, all dark & broody, with a weight of emotion about it. The ghost makes an appearance almost immediately, and through it we learn of tragedy and connection and loss. Freyr (Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Atomic Blonde), who suffered his own loss years prior helps the police investigate a series of suicides & deaths linked to an older crime. As he digs further, he is more & more haunted by what he learns, both figuratively and literally. On the other story, the three renovators suffer their own haunting, as one, Katrin, recently lost a baby. She is haunted by her grief, until more than that manifests.

This kind of story comes with an unravelling, one that wants you to revisit the tropes. It ended with a twist, that while not entirely unforeseen, was a rather nice conclusion to lots of cliches.

31 Days of Halloween: Valley of Shadows

2017, Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen (Everything Will Be OK) -- Amazon

Thus another in the posts I finish writing the previous year's posts, left unattended and quickly forgotten. And yes, still post it as if it was written In the Past (ominous music).

Brooding. The Scandinavians have the market cornered on that, with their fjords, and high fog enshrouded hills and pensive, somewhat intimidating forests of tall conifers. A TIFF entry, considered by many a Gothic fairy tale of sorts, but really both those phrases are over-used these days when referencing horror movies, especially movies that set themselves aside from the jump scares and death, but serving you mood and setting.

Something in the woods is killing the local sheep. Perhaps a big bad wolf ? We are carried through the experience via Aslak, a young boy with his own family trauma. Its a slow go to explanations and reasons, but not really sure if slow did it best. It was OK, is what I remember thinking.

31 Days of Halloween: Lifechanger

2018, Justin McConnell (The Collapsed) -- download

Thus another in the posts I finish writing the previous year's posts, left unattended and quickly forgotten. And yes, still post it as if it was written In the Past (ominous music).

Yeah, what was this about again? Oh yeah, indie-ish movie about a shapeshifter who has to steal new identities once his/her current one begins to decay, literally. Shot and set in Toronto, the movie hands the ball from one body (and one actor) to the next, as "Drew" adopts each life. Until he is stalled by making an actual connection with a woman he meets in the Monarch Tavern.

Rather skillfully done for a micro-budget movie, it makes good use of its multitude of characters, some familiar Toronto faces, as well as the body-horror and gore that smacks of Cronenburg fascination. Going from the interpersonal interactions of monster and man, to a voice over relating to us the challenges of being a monster with no understanding of who and what you are. But in the end, how can we sympathize with a monster mass murderer, no matter how broken up they are about love lost.

31 Days of Halloween: The Love Witch

2016, Anna Biller (Viva) -- download

(i really should finish the 2019 posts before the 2020 posts begin, not ignoring that 2020 was one long horror movie unto itself)

Sometimes the Top Lists lie, and boy, did they on this one.

In pitch, this sounded like a great movie. It's stylized like a 60s/70s schlock witchy-poo movie about a murderous but lovely witch trying to find love. Few men survive her standards. On the outside the movie is rather stylish and well executed, doing an incredible job of being set in the past and the present all at once. But once the shine of the gimmick goes dull, it's just boring as fucking hell.

Elaine, the lovely young witch is heading to San Fran, after the mysterious death of her husband. Mysterious, but pretty obvious she did it. Elaine wants to find Love, and performs rituals (icky wimmin magic) not only to draw needy, clingy, requiring to be murdered men toward her but also a police detective, who starts to catch on, while also falling for Elaine. Oh noes!

As I said already, the movie is stylish, but in some ways that while obviously intentional are grating AF. It almost felt like they were drawing upon the clueless ineptitude of The Room or seeking to intonate a porn movie, but maybe after it was edited for prime time viewing. But despite the fun aspects of the period styling (clothing, attitudes, colours, hairstyles) all the (again, probably intentional) z-grade acting and directing choices ended up being more off-putting than fun.  So, no thanks.

10 for 10: telehell

[10 for 10... that's 10 consumables which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?   ]
 
In this edition:

Mindhunter Season 2 - Netflix
The Boys Season 1 - Amazon Prime
The Wire Season 1 - HBO/Crave
Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus- Netflix
Swamp Thing Season 1 - Showcase
A Black Lady Sketch Show Season 1 - HBO
rewatching Cougar Town - ABC Spark
Arrow Season 7 - Crave
Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 - Crave
Black Lightning Season 2 - Netflix

 aaaand....go go gadget blog

---

Mindhunter Season 2 was great.  But also problematic.  And weird.  Though touted as a "season" this really felt like the middle of a season.  If Mindhunter were an old school detective show on network television it would be cranking out 22-26 episodes a year, and this "season 2" would be the middle chunk of it.

And that's just what it feels like...a middle chunk.  It doesn't have a proper start, really, nor does it have anything close to approximating a conclusion.  That's the "weird" part.  It doesn't feel whole.  It's incredibly captivating watching, but I think it will perform much better if watched immediately following season 1 and immediately followed by season 3.

It took me a while to remember some of the dynamics of Season 1, some of the internal hardship at the FBI Holden and Bill faced at the FBI, some of the personality politics at play.  Season 2 finds a new director in play (the awesome Michael Serveris joining the cast), one much more supportive of the psychology division...almost too supportive if that's a thing.

Holden and Bill get involved in the Atlanta Child Murders and it's the center focus of the season.  It's not presented as such but organically becomes it...and it's this simmering on-again/off-again nature that's both scintillation and frustrating about the season.  It's too true to life, that Holden and Bill would keep jumping back and forth to Atlanta without real consistency and often without real support.  It's a gut punch examination of how the system fails its people, and a reminder that not much has gotten better today.

Bill meanwhile is dealing with some family issues, which turns his wife Nancy into that horrible trope of the nagging wife.  I think the show angles for a more sympathetic view of her, but it doesn't quite get there.  The most unfortunate part is with such a keen focus on Atlanta and Bill, Anna Torv's Wendy takes a bit of a side-seat.  She gets some personal drama and a bit of something to do, but she disappears for whole episodes and her storyline is tacked on with an abrupt conclusion in an equally abrupt episode 9.

[11:50]

---

I like the recreation of the classic cover image..."classic"? Really?  I guess

I wasn't too fond of the comic The Boys.  Created by writer Garth Ennis and illustrator Darick Robertson, The Boys allowed Ennis to get his cynical frustration with superheroes out onto the page.  It was his critique that superheroes steal the limelight of comics culture, that there's an egocentricity around them, and that they need to be spanked into submission by more hard-edged, down-to-earth characters.  It was edgy and biting for many, but for my liking, tedious and sour.

So I had planned to avoid The Boys adaptation on Amazon.  The distaste of the comics wasn't even close to fresh in my mouth but the bitter sense memory remained.  After a few podcast and a bit of positive reinforcement from Toast, I gave it a shot.

I was astonished at not just how much I liked it, but how feverishly I wanted to consume it.  The characters in Amazon's The Boys are complex in a way that's very intriguing.  The titular Boys led by Karl Urban all have their own baggage, some of it paints them in a bad light, and some shines a better light on them.  But even the supers, like The Deep, Queen Maeve, and A-Train, all have their own baggage too.  These are somewhat despicable people, but then we see that they maybe don't want to be.  The corrupting power of having powers is certainly what's at play. But also there's a searing commentary on capitalism and structures which seek to exploit and taint what's good for greed.  It's this look at how corporate superheroes and the structures put in place to control them (and their image) that's most fascinating. 

At 8 episodes, it's actually perfect length to be satisfying without being overwhelming.  Hopefully Season 2 is as thoughtful and measured.

[21:30]

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more like "pay attention", this show moves quick

Hahaha, how many years have I been telling people that I've never seen The Wire and people saying "What do you mean you haven't seen The Wire yet?  Get on it!"

Well, this summer we finally got on it.

And, well, this is a show that looks every bit like it's from 2003.

Imagine if that's all I had to say about The Wire?

But no, it's great.  The first episode we found to be extremely overwhelming.  That pilot (if it was even a pilot) is so dense, navigating the structures of the police, the political hierarchy of the criminal justice system, and the street level drug operations.  I likened it to the nuts-and-bolts of it all as seen in The Sandbaggers (a classic British espionage series from the late 1970's that is a frame of reference to, like, a half dozen people in the world).

Subsequent episodes get less nuts-and-boltsy.  It's still pretty nitty gritty but it follows the path via the personalities involved.  The characters of the wire are what make it so great.  The way things shake down aren't just standard operating procedure, they shake down the way they do because of the way the people in the procedure operate.  And the show does a great job of distinguishing how they operate.  This isn't Law & Order, there's no formula at play.  The characters dictate how things go down.

This leads to a lot of unexpected situations, and a genuinely exciting series.  It is, however, kind of alarming seeing a very young Michael B. Jordan as a drug runner in the yard.  He's a significant player in this story (filled with almost a Game of Thrones density of cast) and a tremendous actor even as a young pup.  Also, Micheal K. Williams Omar is one of the best characters on TV ever, and Andre Royo's Bubbles is so loveable, the guy you root for the most. Sonja Sonns' Greggs is such a badass, and now I know what the hell a McNulty is.

[31:46]

---

you can tell there's a lot of yelling just
from the poster

It's kind of hard to believe that the last time we saw an original episode of Invader Zim was 2006.

I came into Invader Zim as a fan of its creator, Jhonen Vasquez.  He made some very darkly comedic and absurd comics called Johnny, The Homicidal Maniac and Squee, and was certainly excited to see what he would do for, effectively, children's television.  Invader Zim wasn't nearly as dark as Johnny  or Squee but then again, being a show for children (well, let's face it, it was made for college kids), Zim in some ways is so much darker.

But as much as I loved Zim and had friends who equally loved it, and we would shout Gir quotes at each other all the time (I still do!) I didn't watch Zim all that often.  I don't know Zim inside and out like, say, the early years of The Simpsons.  As such, I can pop in almost any episode of Zim and watch it with only a little familiarity (and in some cases, no recollection at all).  So in some ways, Zim always feels fresh to me.

An so, 13 years later, we have a new Zim movie.  The animation is a little more refined, and we're talking one big 70-minute episode (where most Zim stories were 11 minutes), and it all still works, and works damn well.  It's Zim but just EPIC-sized, and it's just as great as it ever was.  Vasquez hasn't missed a beat, and the voice cast is in prime yell-y form.  Those Gir lines are just as great as ever "I shot that pug into space."  Yes Gir, yes you did.

I don't want a full Zim revival, I have too much else to watch (and too much rewatching of original Zim to do].  But more of these movie-length specials, even once a year, would be so, so great.

[40:56]

---

the show looks good, but never this good

Cancelled before it even really got a chance to prove itself, deciding to invest in watching Swamp Thing was a definite decision on my part.  I mean, the details that first the show was cut from 13-episodes to 10 in mid-production, and then cancelled outright after the first episode aired on the fledgling DC Universe streaming app, how satisfying could this be.  It seemed like the executives certainly didn't have much faith in the show, so knowing that it could all end in huge disappointment, why should I even bother.

Truth was, I wasn't going to.  I heard that it wasn't really connecting with any other DC TV properties (like Titans or the Arrowverse), and Swamp Thing isn't really a character I connect with in the comics.  But then I heard there was more DC connectivity within the show... Madame Xanadu, the Phantom Stranger... Blue Devil!?!  My nerd brain was severely teased.

The opening episode introduces the world of Marais, a small town deep in the Louisiana bayou.  The local industry magnate, Avery Sutherland, who supports the town is trying some revitalization efforts to his slumping business.  This includes basically sticking steroids in the swamp in hope of finding (or creating) some sort of industrial, military or pharmaceutical byproduct.

Instead it creates a contagion which brings CDC agent Abby Arcane back to her home town and back to some serious drama.  She meets Alec Holland - a scientist brought in to help Sutherland in his discoveries, then fired for getting too close to uncovering Sutherland's dirty deeds - and the two have  a connection, a brief flirtation before Alec is killed for finally discovering the dirty secret.

Of course, Alec becomes Swamp Thing, and you would think that Alec's transformation would be the focal of the show, but no, it's really Abby's navigation of the world of Marais that takes center, and the unraveling of Avery Sutherland's dirty deed which is the over-arching narrative glue.  The whole Swamp Thing of Swamp Thing is kind of a side product.

So it's actually a testament to how finely crafted the show is that it's immensely engaging even when it's only dealing with the supernatural and metaphysical about 15% of the time.  It keeps the budget down, I know, and it is disappointing that Swamp Thing doesn't just morph up out of the ground or keep changing shape.  It's also kind of sad that the grand romance between Swamp Thing and Abby isn't really put in focus either (which was always the main centerpiece of the comics, their relationship).

The show wants to be a suspense-horror first and foremost and does a pretty decent job for what's effectively mainstream TV.  Lots of cool little effects, creepy and disgusting references to John Carpenter's The Thing.

I find all the night boating in the swamp to be excessively tedious, and a little absurd, but hey, maybe real bayou folk do so much night boating, I'm not in the know.

It has some real problems, repetitiveness and spinning wheels, mostly, but it's well made and gets fairly comfortable in its own skin fairly quickly.  Oh, and Madame X, Blue Devil and the Phantom Stranger are all very disappointing representations of their comic book counterparts, and yet, they work for the show (though Ian Ziering's Blue Devil's larger purpose is never truly fulfilled).

[57:50]

---

I've said before that reviewing sketch comedy is a difficult task, since the tendency is to want to review every sketch.  That would take forever, certainly longer than 10 minutes.

A Black Lady Sketch Show is named as such because it's never existed before, at least not in North America.  There haven't been many all-female sketch shows, nevermind one whose cast consists entirely of black women.  It's pioneering, and it would be easy for something pioneering to be lazy and pandering.  But this is HBO, it's got to be another level of quality.  And it is.

Robin Thede, Quinta Brunsun, Gabrielle Dennis and Ashley Nicole Black are the show's primary performers, but behind the scenes Issa Rae, Amber Ruffin and more have their hands in the pie.  And they also pull in some great names in black lady celebrity, like Angela Bassett, Jackée, Marla Gibbs, Lena Waithe, Gina Torres, Yvette Nicole Brown, Nicole Byer and one glorious sketch about a break-up featuring Patti LaBelle.

I love the show's opening credits, which feature the quartet as muppets, I watch it every time when I could easily fast forward.  There's a recurring interstitial sketch throughout each of the 6 episodes of the first season which find the quartet dealing with life after the apocalypse as the only survivors.  Mainly it's drinking and talking shit, but little aspects of the outside reality do seep in.   There's a great sketch in the church where people use the open mic for asking for prayers to hawk their wares, perform stand up and try to arrange a date for their lonely daughter.

The great thing about A Black Lady Sketch Show is obviously perspective, seeing things from a point of view that isn't very prominently represented in comedy or on television.  But that perspective is backed up by actually being funny, and with production values that heighten the entertainment.

It's not legendary comedy at this stage, but there are definitely a few classics in the offering.  The production by episode six seems to have gelled and the cast certainly has chemistry to keep this thing going.

[1:15:39]
(that took a long time because I had to look too much stuff up)

---

bad poster, good show

I don't know how I came to watch Cougar Town the first time around.  It's hard to remember a time when we weren't so inundated with content, and with new about content that we already had our viewing time planned out.   I'm assuming that when Cougar Town came out back in 2009 that I was looking for things to watch.  For many years I would investigate all the new offerings television had to offer in the fall, and pick out the ones which seemed intriguing.  In 2009, the big highlights were obviously Community and I would have to say Cougar Town as well.

While Community would be an immediate favourite, Cougar Town was something I stuck with.  It was just funny enough to start.  I wasn't a huge Friends fan so Courtney Cox wasn't the biggest draw, and Bill Lawrence's Scrubs was a series I enjoyed quite a bit...for a time... so I did think there was something possible here.

But the coneciet for Cougar Town was Cox, newly divorced, would be prowling around her small-town oceanside Florida community preying upon men 20 years younger than her.  By the half way point of the first season, it was obvious that the writers, performers, and creators weren't really feeling that.  The cast dynamic (Brian Van Holt, Busy Phillips, Christa Miller, Dan Byrd and Ian Gomez) was pretty phenomenal pretty immediately, so the show wisely started twisting more into that friendship.  By the end of the first season the show was starting to regret its title (and in subsequent seasons there would be some joke made over the opening title card at the title's expense).

The phrase "Cul-de-sac Crew" is coined in Season 2 and is basically the center of the show.  It's a group of goofballs who are more family than friends that love to sit around drinking and doing a lot of goofy shit for their own (and our) amusement.  As much as any show, Cougartown grew to be one of those things my wife and I would quote in our daily life.

So it was always disappointing that the show only ever emerged on DVD for Season 1, the weakest season.  But finding out that Showcase  ABC Spark(?) in Canada was airing 2 episodes daily, we set the PVR and have dived right back in, remembering things we had forgotten and discovering the origin of in-jokes that we hadn't remembered. 

We love this show.  It's comfort food.  We started our rewatch at episode 11, which is the halfway point of Season 1.  We weren't too sad to miss the floundering first dozen episodes.  By this entry point, the show is on its way to becoming its silly self.


[1:28:49]

---

It starts out very strong in jail, but once he's out, moof

Season 7 was a pretty wild ride for Oliver Queen, but for the most part made for pretty lousy viewing.  Arrow has been a wildly uneven show throughout its run and Season 7 typifies both the good and bad of the show.  It opens with Oliver Queen in jail, which made for some very entertaining stories.  But then he got out of jail, and he retired from being Green Arrow... again.  But then he had to come out of retirement because someone was impersonating him, and not doing the most stand-up job.  Then Team Arrow got deputized.  But that deputization was a tenuous relationship.  And then it turns out the new Green Arrow was Oliver's half sister he didn't know exist and she still has daddy issues and wanted to take it out on Oliver and his city.

There's so much cycling nonsense in Arrow, overpowered characters with silly motivations that are doing big damage to Olver and everything he loves.  Oliver has wrestled with fighting his family and friends so much that at this point it's exhausting to see him go through it again and again and again.  Especially when he's come to a resolution on an issue, like his no killing policy, only to wrestle with whether he should kill again, and again, and again.  So many dramatic moments are revisited that 7 seasons in its tired and lagging.  At least Oliver in prison had stakes, had some of that magic of revisiting his past and dealing his present sensibility.

Consistency of chracterization was never Arrow's strong suit, but it's at its worst in Season 7... just a thoroughly frustrating ride with moments of inspiration.  The "flash forward" this season takes place about 20 years in the future, and follows Oliver and Felicity's adult daughter Mia in a dystopian Star City.  It brings Roy Harper back into the fold and is generally filled with some fun ideas.  Its story is actually far more fulfilling than the rest of the season (even though it mainly takes up about 7 minutes of any given episode...if it appears at all).

The biggest problem with Arrow is its episode lenght.  Sustaining things for 20+ episodes a season is too big an order.  It survives not on story (which, as noted, can vary wildly) nor character (they do wrong by these characters just as often as they do right) but by sheer charisma of the performers.  Stephen Amell primarily went from being the weak link of season 1 to the show's MVP pretty much the rest of the series.  He's a very captivating, charming, likeable performer.

Season 8, with the Crisis on Infinite Earths looming, is only 10 episodes and I thing should be a much tighter, better executed, more entertaining story that is Oliver Queen's swan song ending with someting spectacularly epic.  I'm actually super excited for it, and hopefully will not be too let down (as I always want something more out of these Arrowverse shows and crossovers that I never seem to get, but Crisis seems determined to deliver)

[1:42:14]
(I should be done by now but ...superheroes)
---

this poster is sadly more exciting than the show

I'm not sure what to say about Legends of Tomorrow at this point.  Season 3 took a big turn for the weird and I embraced it for it.  It got very silly at times but it understood how to use that silliness to provide maximum entertainment.  I mean, the giant Beebo fight was one hell of a payoff.

But season 4 continues on a path I wasn't really thrilled about for the show.  What should have been a huge showcase for bringing live-action versions of DC's B- and C-list pantheon to the big screen has instead become about goofball magical creatures and can't-take-it-seriously demonic bullshit.

The draw of having Matt Ryan's John Constantine seems to be the impetus for the show's direction the past two season.  But where as last season had the cast having to adjust and deal with their new magical reality, this season they seem way too comfortable within it.  And it get's corny, very very corny.  Like, 90's syndicated TV corny.  With effects to match.

The show doesn't want to be a superhero show anymore.  Things that would be logical for a superhero with superpowers to do seem to never cross the characters' minds in this show, and it's utterly frustrating.

The cast now consists of over half original Arrowverse or Legends creations, like Ava, Gary, Nora Darhk, Mona, Charlie... who are these people infecting my "DC's Legends of Tomorrow" series?  There's fewer and fewer references to the DC universe and when they do they tend to botch it (this season's take on Neron was duuuulllll).

The time travel element has become a cheap and easy mechanism for the show and it doesn't really have logical purpose anymore.  And it's not that I don't sometimes enjoy the show (the cast is very, very fun) and characters like Gary and Ava are actually my favourites on the show, the whole thing just seems aimless, and not really what I'm looking for.  It does a lot for representation, which I love, but I wish it represented in a less chintzy package.  If not for the looming Crisis, I would be out for Season 5.

[1:54:33]
(...I like talking about superheroes...)
---

Thunder...the best superhero character on TV

Because I pretty much took the year off from reviewing in 2018, I don't have a write-up of Season 1 of Black Lightning.  It's a superhero show on the CW, but it's built outside of -- or at least to the side of -- the Arrowverse proper.  If we're talking multiverse theory, it's an alternate Earth in the Arrowverse and therefore unlikely to interact with or be interfered with by the events of Arrow or Flash or whatever.

That's probably for the best as Black Lightning builds its own reality in the city of Freeland.  If Metropolis is Chicago, and Gotham is New York, Freeland is Atlanta (where they shoot the show).  It's a city divided by race and having a black superhero has some real meaning.

Season One established the city, it established its struggles with violence, it established its politics, its police, its crime.  It established Black Lightning as a retired superhero who must come out of retirement, it established his family dynamic as Jefferson "Black Lightning" Pierce successfully reconnects with his estranged wife and his daughter.  It establishes his daughters discovering they have superpowers, with Anyssa becoming like her dad, a superhero, while Jennifer's powers are beyond her control.  It established Tobias Whale, a ruthless gangster with super strength who never ages who has been running the town for 30 years.  It establishes Jefferson's role in the community, as a leader and principal of a high school.  It established a lot, even more than all that.  But by the end of it, the show has turned so much of what it established on its head, and season 2 has to deal with that.

Season 2 deals with the ASA (some secretive government thing) that was responsible for giving Jefferson his lightning powers, and the discovery that there's more like him, some out on the loose in society, some still contained in pods after 30 years.  Tobias has a keen interest in obtaining these "pod kids" and using their powers for his profit, but as always Black Lightning is a thorn in his side.  Lynn Pierce starts working for the ASA to protect and help the pod kids, which is its own world of trouble.  Anyssa, starts moonlighting as another Robin Hood type hero, Black Bird, stealing from the mob and giving to those in need, while also dealing with the disappearance of her girlfriend, Grace.  Jennifer has an encounter with her childhood crush Kaleel who has since become the mob enforcer Painkiller, only for him to about face and the two go on the run, but not before Jennifer learns to control her powers...somewhat.  Gamby (Jefferson's foster father) fakes his death as he becomes the target of a mysterious organization.  Meanwhile Jefferson has lost his Principal job, and the new principle is...difficult.  Oh, and Markovians, a rogue nation with a lot of black book metahuman projects, is starting a war in freeland.

A lot happens this season, and it's actually pretty great.  The show structures itself in "books" with multiple chapters, so it makes binging a contained effort, with starting and stopping points.  It's generally well constructed and doesn't tread familiar ground too often, which is a real problem for these CW shows.

The acting is hit or miss, with the Pierce family, thankfully all being incredible with a fantastic dynamic that feels like real family, with them supporting and fighting with each other with knowing familiarity.  Some of the other cast though, like James Remar as Gamby or Marvin "Krondon" Jones III as Tobias Whale being a little iffy, if not sometimes really really bad in their roles.  Jones I can understand, as he's not a very experienced actor who has to hold most of the scenes he's in on his own, so it's a lot.  But Remar, man, has been around forever, and with Gamby it's never close to believable that he's a bad-ass superspy, nor someone who is intimately connected with the Pierce family.  The Pierce's sell it on their end at least.

Season 1 was good, but season 2 was exciting.  The show negotiates the drama of superheros and family and relationships exceptionally well.  It deals with the community of Freeland also very well, with the Church playing an important part of guaging the impact of crime and superheroes on the community.  If there is a weak spot in the story, it's in believing that Tobias Whale is a really good mobster.  He's to impetuous and prone to some stupid ideas that should have found him in jail a very long time ago.

By the end of the season the show has gotten deeper into its superhero mythology without taking its boots off the ground. It's introduced a lot of familiar concepts from the Outsiders comic book but in its own way, and it does so with a clear focus on representing the African-American experience in so many of its facets.

It's a very good show, close to being great.  It's still genre television, but it's smart and cool.  Looking forward to season 3, and to Cress Williams showing up in Crisis.

[2:19:37]

(...so much for 10 minutes per...but you got me talking about superhero shows,man...)

31 Days of Halloween: Little Monsters

2019, Abe Forsythe (Ned) -- download

[ed note: November 21, 2019 -- brief hiatus while i struggled (again) with why the fuck do I even do this?]

A zombie comedy feel good movie. I didn't know how much I needed this movie until I watched it. I guess it goes along with my current attraction to the unbearably cheesy formulaic romantic movies that come to us by way of the Hallmark channel but run on network TV during the weekends. My brain just needs something like my belly needs cheesy corn chip products after leaving work. It just fills some void.

Dave (him, not me. shaddup) is a loser, a loser who thinks he can keep his girlfriend no matter how little he tries, no matter how much he tries to delude himself into believing he will be a successful musician. He does lose her, her does end up sleeping on his sister's sofa and he does end up almost getting kicked out of that refuge. But he connects with his little nephew, a little scaredy cat, and joins the kid on a school trip to an outback animal park.

Did I mention the movie is set in Australia? The movie does its best to play it down, especially considering the two leads (besides Dave) are Lupita Nyong'o and Josh Gad. Yep, two Lupita movies in one season --- I am not complaining (*swoon*). Lupita plays the teacher that all the dads are hitting on. No shit Sherlock! She's bubbly, beautiful and in complete control of her classroom of little monsters. Get it, little monsters? Yeah, when the American base next to the animal park happens to lose control of its zombie soldiers, the true monsters are released.

The actual playthrough of her class and Dave surviving the zombie hordes (which are full of bitten kiddies and parents) is pretty formulaic, so the fun comes in Miss Caroline proving she is more than a pretty face and a yellow dress, and Dave proving he can care for someone other than himself. Gad has a blast playing the kid show host who out-assholes Dave. Unlike most zombie movies, they don't lose character after character until only a few survive (as most are kids) but with some satisfaction, we do get to say goodbye to Gad before Miss Caroline's singing saves everyone.

31 Days of Halloween: Les Affamés

2017, Robin Aubert (Tuktuq) -- Netflix

See below's commentary on taking the usual and doing something fresh with it. Nothing can be more the usual than a zombie movie. It's a great challenge to take such an overworked genre and do something that could satisfy both zombie AND general horror movie fans. I am glad to see that most of the audiences enjoyed it, though admittedly it would be considered a slow challenge for some.

The other thing that makes this movie really stand out is that it is from Quebec. I really wish I had more exposure to the Quebec film industry, but unfortunately only rare entries actually leak out. I have always had a feeling that the industry there is so strong, Hollywood skilled strong, that it doesn't need the rest of the world. But I believe the rest of Canada is missing out. The few I have seen are just so distinctly Quebec, very much a product of their environment, not like the generic Toronto or Vancouver movies that are often trying hard to be milquetoast, appealing to anyone from anywhere, washing out the distinct natures of the regions.

In rural Quebec, the zombie apocalypse is in deep throes. Two men laugh it up, telling cheesy jokes as they burn bodies. They are armed and cautious but bleeding off tension with the terrible juvenile humour. On their return they see some zombies they recognize, or are they just lost neighbours? Investigation requires caution and silence, but alas, these are fast zombies, more the infected attackers of sub-genres, and one of the men goes down quickly. The other man moves on. A chilling little bit, in that the man who dies sees a small child in a tree, before he goes down. He does not tell the other man. What becomes of the child is unknown.

The story is thin, a moving "road story" that follows Bonin, the survivor above, as he connects with and loses other survivors. I am not sure they really have a destination, but are just moving away from the ravenous hordes that attracted to sound and movement. Along the way they begin to see something strange, weird towers built by the hordes, towers of random ephemera like electronics or chairs. There is no rhyme or reason, just ... a strangeness. It reminded me of the programmed zombies from Stephen King's Cell.

Viewers have accused the movie of having no story, but I actually really enjoyed that aspect of it. It ends up being more about the characters, the people and just survivors. One of my many many novel sketches involves telling a zombie story as the bite passes from person to person, carrying the story forward as one person changes and we focus on the next person. At the end of this movie little is explained, but I found myself very satisfied.