3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Supergirl

2026, Craig Gillespie (Fright Night) -- download

I can immediately say that I came out of this movie thinking, "I liked it." No exclamation mark. I liked it, it was alright, which is just this side of "meh" unfortunately. But, I am also the guy who liked Kraven the Hunter so, so what do I know. 

Now that I had said this so many times, I am recalling a time when "it was OK" was more than OK. I enjoyed the whole "experience" of film watching, small and big screens, and that experience was mine that I was happy, as long as it wasn't a total piece of frustrating crap. Am I now more discerning? Or am I just older and less satisfied with Just OK.

I immediately bump over to Kent's post, and then I am suddenly hand-waving, "This! THIS !" I suddenly have my exclamation marks.

"It's moderately successful, but it's absolutely clear from the first two fight sequences that Gillespie is not comfortable or confident with such sequences and they are neither clean nor easy to follow, and both are quite poorly lit (it's also quite possible that the theatre I was in was dimming their projector, the whole film seemed overly dark)."

I am only familiar with the source comic material in passing. I started reading a digital copy when this movie was announced, but ... never finished? But I recall it being a popular alt take on the Supergirl character, a romp in space, which I assumed was supposed to be in the tone of "Superman Man of Tomorrow" but I was actually thinking of "All-Star Superman". But, I know that the Supergirl comic was a stand-alone series, which I am not sure would allow for a good introduction to the character. I should let Kent comment on comics, as I don't really read them anymore.

And the editor says you should delete that paragraph....

But, as a good introduction to the character cinematically? If we are being setup for there being a "strongly into irreverence & binge drinking" Supergirl (Milly Alcock, House of the Dragon) in the Gunn DC-verse, then we got that. Its not  like the world at large would be widely aware of how Supergirl should be depicted, and really, that's beside the point. We do get that she is historically Kal-El's cousin, and she came from a city that escaped the destruction of Krypton and due to temporal mechanics, she arrived not much older than when she left Krypton / Argo City. Her city may have escaped the planet exploding, but it did not escape its fate. Kara also escapes the dying city, and is probably left pretty emotionally scarred; thus the binge drinking. Also, all this happens in a mid-story recollection.

Meanwhile, in the actual story, she's drinking on a planet with a Red Sun, which allows her to actually get drunk, when Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley, The Witcher), whose family was killed by Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts, The Old Guard) and his space brigands called The Brigands. Comics can elicit a lot from names and depictions in just a few short panels, setting tone and style. Strangely enough, it takes more in movies, and so the bar, the aliens/villains within, all end up feeling pretty generic, and most viewers will not be able to escape comparisons to Guardians of the Galaxy. Anywayz, Roothy comes in demanding someone help her avenge her family, is grabbed by a thug who wants to sell her, but Supergirl, despite being "powerless", intercedes. Apparently she's got mad fighting skills, super powered or not.

What proceeds is a series of "nope, not gonna help. nope, not gonna help" until "FINE, I'm helping!" inspired mostly by the fact that Krem poisons Krypto, who turns out to be Kara's dog, not Superman's -- explains the lack of discipline shown by the pup. Supergirl has only a few days to find The Brigands and steal back their antidote. And allow Ruthye to avenge her dead family. And... maybe free some captives?

As Kent said, the Superman movie had "spirit and humour", this one just seems to be trying to tailor itself for the doom-scrolling generations. There is a "human (girl) trafficking" sub-plot and its implied that Space is a lawless and dangerous, yet it has "bus" routes. And where are the Green Lanterns in all of this? Aren't they supposed to be Space Cops? At the very least, shouldn't there be some down-on-their-luck task force members trying to take down these slave traders and failing miserably? 

And yet, I began this write-up with a "I Liked It". I did, I guess I just don't like where it sits in Gunn's new DC-verse. I am blatant about my love for how the man makes a movie, and I shouldn't expect all the movies coming out of his stable to replicate that skill, but at the very least, I would hope he would take a Kevin Feige approach to making sure the movies are polished before they are released?

In the very end, I mostly liked Milly's depiction of the character; at the very least, I applaud the sincerity with which she played the role. The character of Ruthye is just pure supporting cast, with no definition and nothing memorable uttered. And the movie shoe-horning in Lobo (Jason Momoa, Aquaman) was superfluous and just an extended cameo. 

Maybe you need a rewatch and rewrite just so you can say something you actually liked?

1-1-1-KsMIRT: odds on endings

KsMIRT=Kent's month in reviewing television. This month, the definite end of one series, the probable end of another, the first seasons of two others, and one show I've been waiting some time to get eyes on.

This Month:
The Bear Season 5 - 2026, disney+ [8/8 episodes watched]
Deli Boys Season 2 - 2026, disney+[6/6 episodes watched]
Spider-Noir Season 1 - 2026, amazonprime [ /8 episodes watched] 
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Season 1 - 2026, appletv [10 /10 episodes watched]
Year of the Rabbit Series 1 - 2019, tubi [6/6 episodes watched]

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The Bear Season 5
[created by Christopher Storer]
Seasons 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

The What 100: Carmy has told Sid he's quitting The Bear, she's now head chef, so it's time for a change. But uncle Jimmy's made some bad investments and has no money left to prop the Bear up, and is looking to sell the property. The credit cards are cut off, the cupboards are practically empty, and a heavy duty storm is wreaking havoc in Chicago. This could be the Bear's last night, but nobody wants it to end, and they're all going to fight for it's survival.

[1 Great] There is a moment in the penultimate episode that had both Lady Kent and I sit up and say "holy shit!" A literal magic trick that blew our minds.  I don't know if this particular feat is something that's famous in the fine dining world, or if it's an invention of Storer (or someone on staff), but wow. If you're not immediately aware of what I'm talking about, well, Marcus (Lionel Boyce) totally big-times his estranged father, whom he invited to the Bear (as he said, because he couldn't invite his mom, who passed away last season), but also to show off his talent, to show up his father, and possibly even reconnect (but that seems far down the list) and with the Bear's impending doom hovering overhead, he doesn't have much opportunity. A pretty great arc for Marcus this season.

[1 Good] Last season had a literal ticking clock over its head, a countdown to profitability issue by Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), though his reasons weren't as clear as they are within moments of this season's start. In this season of eight episodes, seven of the eight episodes take place on the same day as the staff need to battle their own insecurities, their anger and disappointments, the weather, other failures in the building, and fight not just to make it through the day but to hold their family together. While Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) quitting was supposed to remain a secret through to the end of the day, it gets blurted out in the heat of the moment, and it just raises awareness to the fact that Carmen wouldn't be a bonding agent, but one of division. He's immensely creative, and assuredly talented, but the job brings out the worst in him too, and he recognizes that his heart isn't in it, not like the rest of them. "I can't stay", he says to Sugar (Abby Elliott). "Nobody's asking you to," she replies in the way only a sibling can. It's not to injure him, but it's a double edged sword that is both supporting his decision, and cutting down his egocentricness. This season is propulsive (as many of the seasons have been) but the "all in one day" motif really, really makes it feel like a necessary binge. It could have been a four hour movie, but I think it works well with chapter breaks, as each episode still has a distinct and defined segment of the day.

[1 Bad] There's a lot of great things happening in this final season of The Bear. Every main character gets their spotlight, but the secondary characters don't quite get the same spotlight. Uncle Jimmy becomes the comic relief as he and his investment manager/best friend Computer (Brian Koppelman) and Computer's business savvy niece Cheese (Elsie Fisher) try to sort out how Jimmy can get some money, any money, out of the only asset he has left (the Bear). Last season Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) had a subplot working with a mentor (the late Rob Reiner unable to return this season) to develop a plan to franchise out The Original Beef of Chicagoland, and this season Ebra spends his time fretting over presenting his pitch to Carmy and looking for a spoon thief. The scenes of him practising his pitch are great (the running gag about him being bewitched by Carmy's blue eyes was fantastic), and the resolution to this plot is satisfying, but it's Cheese who finds Ebra's proposal and then it cuts past what should have been a great scene of Ebra and Cheese talking, leading to Ebra and Jimmy and Computer meeting. Ebra gets so shortchanged, the only bad thing about this otherwise terrific season.

META: Finales are hard, but this one nails it. I don't usually like it when a series spends the whole final season acting as if each episode is a finale, giving each character a specific spotlight to go out on. I much prefer it to be business as usual with a big final episode, but season 5 of The Bear has it both ways, and it works. It mostly works because it's not trying to close out individual character plots one by one, it's teeing up each character arc in the first episode or two, working through it through the single day, and winding it down by the end of the day. It's all about pacing and it is so very well paced.  The finale then give us moments that follow. We know that pretty much everyone in the cast is still working at the restaurant, making it work, but it's Carmen's story that we need resolution on and we see what's next for him. But we also see hints at where everyone else is going, and showing them still progressing, and reinforcing the found-family dynamic of the Bear.  It's an uplifting, hopeful, and celebratory ending that actually satisfies. I wish I had written this out as a fine dining metaphor.

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Deli Boys Season 2
created by Abdullah Saeed
(Season 1)

The What 100: Brothers Mir and Raj Dar have successfully taken over their deceased father's business and are now the cocaine kingpins of Philadelphia. District Attorney and mayoral hopeful Andrew Chadwater seems all too aware that the impact the Dar family is having and, more than for the social good, just wants the good press of taking them down. The only problem the Dars have is they are making too much money and can't launder it fast enough. They approach mobster/casino owner Max Sugar, who hits it off with Lucky. And then Uncle Ahmad - who the boys discovered was responsible for their father's murder - winds up dead and Raj is arrested, and becomes the internet viral sensation, the "Fuck Me Felon". Mir wants to buy a golf course for some semblance of legitimacy.

[1 Great] Deli Boys is a farce. It's not taking the world of drug dealing, money laundering, corruption and murder seriously in the slightest. In fact it's perception is that it's all very silly. The trick is to have the characters take it seriously, even if some of them are buffoons, or hyper-serious to the point of ridiculousness. Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) are incredibly entertaining characters, with Mir being the more nebbish but also educated but also still out of his element, while Raj is very of-the-moment and, well, often high...and charming, but usually not charming enough. The show is not a joke machine like 30 Rock and its ilk, but instead is a character and situational based comedy, and the characters, pretty universally are wildly entertaining, and the situations are constantly surprising. It's an incredibly funny show which many might be put off simply by the premise (which requires us two root for two outsiders succeeding in doing everything illegal, including murder).

[1 Good]  I don't know that this write-up is much different than the season 1 write-up, just saying the same things in a different way. Of course Poorna Jagannathan is the show's superpower. She's a commanding screen presence, a gifted actress, and an absolutely stunning woman. It's almost unfair to put her in a relationship with Fred Armisen (playing Max Silver) because, at least in attractiveness, she's so far above him (she was paired up briefly with Common in Never Have I Ever and that felt more appropriate), but Armisen is a wizard of comedic characters and so she has to go toe to toe with him in these comedic situations and holds her own. I'm excited to see she's appearing in Lanterns this month.

[1 Bad] This second season of Deli Boys had a reduced episode count...and a significant one at that. Whereas season 1 had 10 episodes, this season only had a 6-episode order. Yeah, that's not good, but the real bad is that the first three episodes of the season feel like they're condensing five or six episodes worth of plot into three episodes and so the events of the show move so incredibly quickly. Raj is barely in jail for a full episode and so they don't get a lot of time to really build upon the scenarios that presents (plus we could have had more of Kumail Nanjiani guest starring as Raj's lawyer and Lucky's ex).  There feels like there was more story, more comedy to be had this season, but whatever plotlines were constructed between seasons weren't reworked but just compressed.

META: The reduced episode count in itself felt like a token gesture from Hulu, and less that they had any faith in the show growing their audience. Unless the series suddenly multiplied its viewership, I don't think it'll be back, which is a bummer because it's a super-talented cast and crew and a hilarious show which could really do with more room to breath and expand (there's so many wild characters they haven't had the time to build out or explore).

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Spider-Noir

[created by Oren Uziel] 

The What 100: In an alternate reality 1930's, Ben Reilly used to be a superhero called the Spider but is now a washed-up private dick who scrambles to make ends meet. The trauma of losing his fiancee Ruby still weighs heavy and he finds it hard to care about the world anymore. In the Spider's absence, mob boss Fin "Silvermane" Byrne has taken control of New York City, but the once meek mayor, seeking re-election, is now fighting back, and things are getting ugly. It only gets worse when new super-powered beings emerge. Reilly somehow winds up in the mix of it all after taking a case from lounge singer Cat Hardy.

[1 Great] Without resorting to heavy-handed exposition, the creatives involved in this series manage to build a world of the 1930s NYC that is recognizable from history but distinctly its own vibe. It doesn't shy away from the ugly nature of segregation and racism of the era, but also never makes it "a very special episode" material. It is just part of the underpinning of the world that these people live in. The sets, costuming, hair, and special effects are all constructed and displayed in a manner to evoke classic noir, all aided by the decision to let the audience choose their own viewing adventure: colour, or black and white. (The series was shot with b&w in mind, so this was the option I went with, and it looks fabulous.)  The aesthetics extend to the sometimes ham-fisted or melodramatic acting which feel very much of the classic noir genre, and the injection of superpowers into the whole thing may be much more advanced than what had been done in the serials of the '30's and '40's but at the same time, there's a baked-in bit of clunkiness to the make-up, the fights, the digital powers to give it a tangible charm even when it might not be so real (the b&w really helps to cover its tracks).

[1 Good] Spider-Noir is not a show meant for kids. It's got a bit of swearing, drinking and smoking, and some violence that goes just beyond the typical MCU cartoonishness. It feels very much like the superhero shows of the 2000s, where a character is either divorced from the greater universe he or she would normally exist in, or is made up from whole cloth. In this case, Spider-Noir has always been an alt-universe character who exists outside the normal "616" and the Spider also has a very minimal history in publication so there's really not much for the series to be beholden to. They pretty much had a blank slate to start with.  We basically know what a spider-man is, what his powers are, so we get a series that begins without necessitating an origin story (but we get that eventually anyway). That frees up exposition for world building. And like the superhero shows of the 2000s, it's able to employ the names and/or power sets of other characters onto pretty much wholly new figures, while still capturing the essence and giving the audience the charge of seeing an "Electro" or "Sandman" or "Black Cat" on screen without requiring fealty to source material. This felt both fresh and retro at the same time.

[1 Bad] Without Nic Cage, I don't think this show was getting made, and given that the actor voiced the character in Into the Spider-Verse and is a lifelong comics nerd (he named his son Kal-El) who really wants to be in comic book properties (eg. Ghost Rider, his ill-fated turn as Superman) it's clear he was putting everything his 60-something-year-old body could into this. It wouldn't be the same without him, and it's a role, once again, without much lore or history to it, that he can own outright and make it his. He sure does. In all honesty, he does a really great job 90% of the time.  He gets to be a smartass with a bit of a mouth, he gets to be a drunk, he gets to have trauma, he gets to act aloof or detached from repercussions (until they hit home)... and he delivers on everything...almost. There is a romantic sub-plot between himself and Cat Hardy that flows in and out of amenable chemistry. Sometimes there's a real flame cooking, and other times Cage seems in his own goofy world of amour. But the hardest part to accept in the series is that Ben Reilly seems like he should be in his late-'40's, not early '60's so no matter how good Cage is, there's always a bit of a disconnect when watching him in the role.  The show does do an excellent job, however, of making Ben Reilly a bit of a broken down veteran. He takes his damn lumps, over and over.

META: I really wasn't expecting to like this show, but honestly I was pretty hooked from the first episode. I watched it in two concentrated viewings, the first four episodes over a two day span and then all the remaining episodes in one sitting a few weeks later. It's a show that seems like it has very little fat on it, but that's just how good it is at hiding it. The flashbacks, and some of the side-quests aren't altogether essential to the story so much as understanding the Spider and where he came from, and yet, the way the show bakes in the origin story is as much about the supervillains the Spider is facing this season as it is about him. There's not much backtracking in this show, it maintains forward momentum excellently and it winds up in the end right where it should. It's quite satisfying in a way that, say, Daredevil was not. The pastiche really helps.  I hear a second season has been ordered. It doesn't need it, but it's not unwelcome.

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Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed
[created by David J. Rosen]

The What 100: Paula Saunders is an ace fact checker at a New York-based magazine. She's a divorced, friendless mother who puts all her energies into her job and her daughter, Hazel. With what little time she has left, she finds relief with a cam boy, Trevor, with whom she's intimate with both visually and emotionally. And then Trevor is assaulted on camera and Paula is called for Trevor's ransom. The police say it's a scam. Paula puts her researching skills to the test and tracks down Trevor, only to find him dead. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

[1 Great] Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is a very modern series, both in subject matter and in storytelling style. It's an exceptionally taut thriller, bristling with intensity, but also it has a wicked comedic streak that helps balance out its heavier impulses. And it's very well balanced. It's obviously a product of the streaming era where episode lengths can be whatever, but most of MPG clock in at around a half-hour. These shorter episode lengths make for a propulsive series that, more often than not, feature an final shot or sequence at each episode's end that just kind of slaps you in the face and makes you want to know what happens next. I honestly can't think of anyone other than Tatiana Maslany who can negotiate the tonal shifts of this show so effortlessly, and manage the many, many demands on her character to be an isolationist, to be snarky, to be an emotionally devoted mother, to convey the stress of the situations thrust upon her, but also find the resolve to quite literally work her way through them. Maslany doesn't make a single false step in the entire series. She's riveting, and the show, while, excellent, is twice as good because of her.

[1 Good] The end of episode 6. I jumped out of my seat and applauded.

[1 Bad] The series spends 9 episodes putting Paula deeper and deeper into trouble and in the end she manages to work her way out of it, and never manages to feel like cheating (well, save for that one cliched moment in the penultimate episode). In the process she uncovers a whole other world of trouble that it seems like she manages to side step, but in the closing moment of the season, Paula receives an alarming text that indicates she's falling right back into the intensity. Hey, it makes sense for Paula to have found her way out of the hole she dug for herself, but not completely escaped it. The layers are many and we've only seen a few without full context. I don't have any issue with this. Really what bothers me is the video Paula was sent. It is confounding in its origin. Where did it come from? Why was it not unveiled before? We know exactly what trouble it spells for Paula and I'm keen for her to once again use her research skills and tenacity to keep her head above water and eventually find the shore.

META: I've watched a bunch of giallo films recently, and some commentary on the subgenre of Italian cinema. Giallos are horror-tinged murder-mysteries where there's a killer on the loose and a non-professional everyman (or woman) either gets thrust into the position of figuring out what's happening or thrusts themselves into the position of investigating. In some respects, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is a sort of Giallo, only the killer is a professional cleaner and not a crazed murderer. MPG has much in common with The Flight Attendant, a show with a magnificent season one and a middling season two, but had its title character launched into a Hitchcockian murder mystery but with a heavy side of humour. I genuinely hope MPG is able to avoid the second season curse and find its way into a stellar second chapter.

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Year of the Rabbit series 1
created by Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley

The What 100: In 1887 London, Rabbit is a police detective whose violent and self destructive impulses get in the way of his sometimes astute sleuthing skills. He's saddled with a new partner, the keen and upbeat new recruit Wilbur Strauss, as well as receiving the unsolicited aide of the Chief Inspector's adopted daughter Mabel, who wants to be a copper (but, you know, 1887+sexism+racism). Rabbit has a nemesis on the force in Tanner, makes enemies with public officials, and is only starting to see the signs of a secret society of puppet masters pulling strings around London.

[1 Great] It's always going to be Matt Berry. The man just has an incredibly distinctive way of delivering lines and the characters he inhabits are always a very Matt Berry type. Here Rabbit is boorish and dismissing and self-aggrandizing and hyper-sexual but also on the right side of gender and social issues (well, kinda) and ignorant of the advancements in technology and politics and the social contract around him. His ability to sleuth and deduce are sometimes very Get Smart/Inspector Gadget where he gets it so wrong based on assumption but the people around him direct him the right way. He's a delight to watch, even in the fithy surrounding of grimy 19th-century London.

[1 Good] For a sub-30-minute comedy series, the production values are pretty great at making a particular corner of Londing circa the 1880s look like an absolute shit hole (not to mention the amount of times over six episodes they drop into the sewers or meet filth merchants). But it's the setting that makes everything turn in this show. Playing with the realities of the era in juxtaposition against modern sensibilities is a great source of humour (there's a particularly incisive takedown of the anti-immigrants, the Brexiters and Nigel Farage joke throughout the series). 

[1 Bad] I don't know if making the "big bad" of the series a secret society of women seeking equality with violence and manipulation is really the message that we need today. But hey, Keeley Hawes makes for a great nefarious master manipulator and we get Sally Phillips adopting a deliciously ridiculous accent as a Bulgarian Princess.  Plus this main storyline gives Susan Wokoma's Mabel her narrative thrust and Wokoma is an excellent second lead, and Mabel the show's most interesting and well developed character ...in other words, not all bad.

META: I'm not sure why Year of the Rabbit didn't get a subsequent series. Perhaps it was scheduling with Barry in Canada working on What We Do In The Shadows for years. Maybe it was budget, as period pieces always cost more. Or maybe it was COVID related given the timing of the series 1 release. The show works, though, and it could do with another two or three. I've been wanting to watch the show since its initial release but as far as I know Tubi's the first North American streamer to pick it up. Happy to have finally seen it.

KWIF: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Back at it in cinemas, doing the after-work movie thing. The goal is to have an average once a week in theatres for the year (so 52), and currently I'm behind pace (27 screenings, 2 rewatches, 1 rep screening over 30 weeks). I'm going to have to push myself out of my comfort zone, like I did this week, and just try something out, rather than going by critical response or leaning into genre films, or basing desire on trailers I might have seen. It's nice to have a project I guess.

This week:
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026, d. Destin Daniel Cretton - in theatre)
Rose of Nevada (2025, d. Mark Jenkin - in theatre)
The Dink (2026, d. Josh Greenbaum - AppleTV)

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At the end of No Way Home - the previous entry in the Tom Holland era of Spider-Man movies - in order to repair a rip in space-time he had caused, Peter Parker (Holland, The Odyssey) had Dr. Strange erase everyone's memory of Peter Parker, including his girlfriend M.J. (Zendaya, The Odyssey) and his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon, Tarot). 

Brand New Day starts with an montage of what Spider-Man and Peter have been up to across a four year span, which is basically fighting super-villains (we see quick glimpses of a half dozen or so of Spider-Man's plentiful rogues gallery here) and following Ned and M.J. on social media, but keeping his distance.  They were all supposed to attend M.I.T. and dorm together, and Peter has missed all that. The death of his Aunt May in the prior film has him thinking that, if he's going to do the superhero thing then he needs to do it alone, or else the people he cares for might get hurt. His only meaningful connection is with a detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas, The Bear), whose innate compassion and empathy find her unwittingly playing as an Aunt May substitute for Peter.

The plot of Brand New Day, kicks off with a runaway tank heading for the headquarters of Damage Control, the governmental organization responsible for cleaning up after superhero battles and alien incursions. Spider-Man stops the tank only to find inside not a hardened criminal or military wing-nut, but a janitor who suddenly doesn't know where they are nor how they got there. Spidey tracks that someone is hopping bodies, and is after something within Damage Control. Spidey manages a meeting with Bill Metzger, head of Damage Control (Tramell Tillman, Severance) who, somehow, Peter doesn't clock is maybe doing more nefarious things beyond his department's mandate.

Peter's attempts to track down whomever this new supervillain is (with a bit of assistance from New Avengers Yelena Belova (an always welcome Florence Pugh, Thunderbolts)) prove difficult, in part because he's distracted by the fact that his body is mutating, deeply affecting his emotions. (He consults Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) for help on how to control his mutation). His fight with this new, unseen villain escalates, and they discover his secret identity and also his affection for M.J. and Ned. Threats on their life put them right back into the mess he was trying to avoid, but, he also finds the connections in his life that he's been so desperately missing.

The promise of the end of No Way Home was street-level Spider-Man, a guy with no connections to Tony Stark and all his resources, a guy with nothing but a spandex suit and web shooters doing his best to help out his city. Sony had been handed the perfect opportunity to detach itself from the flagging MCU, to have Spider-Man stand on his own, the golden goose of Marvel's pantheon. What's utterly clear with this film is that the Peter, M.J. and Ned dynamic is its emotional core and its greatest strength. If you just have those three in a Spider-Man film, it's going to work.

But instead producer Amy Pascal chose to continue the partnership with Marvel producer Kevin Feige and so Brand New Day not only keeps Spider-Man firmly tied to the great Marvel world, and also is used as a strategic launch point for yet another wing of the MCU (one which Sony has zero stake in). Here we get, as mentioned, appearances from Hulk and Black Widow as well as, surprisingly, teaming Spider-Man up with Frank Castle, the Punisher (Jon Berenthal, The Bear), which winds up turning into a sort of buddy cop-style dynamic of bickering and opposing world views, but also respect and fraternity. Plus, Peter still has a high(er) tech computer set-up with an AI (voiced by Naomi Watts) and a head's up display in his mask helping him out.

There's a totally spoilery element I can't talk about without spoilering, but its revelation (which will only be a surprise to anyone who doesn't watch or read about MCU speculation) threatens to derail the entire picture into some half-baked backdoor launch for more Marvel stuff. The character who winds up being Peter's adversary here is not much, if at all, a part of the Spider-Man real of Marvel comics, and soon could very cynically denounce the character's involvement in this film. But, credit to writers Chris McKenna and Eric Sommers whose script manages to thematically pull together this character's emotional arc with Peter's, and to use that character to accelerate Peter's naval gazing into action.

Would Brand New Day have been a better film had it found a way to tell the same story without the trappings of involving so much Marvel world building (which are just as often distracting as they are exciting)? Absolutely. But at the same time every incursion here of the MCU into Spider-Man's friendly neighbourhood has purpose. There's set-up and payoff to all of it. Plus, I'm still a comics nerd, and this connect universe shit I eat up with a spoon.

Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi) takes over the Spider-Man franchise from Jon Watts and...wow. It's not that Watts did a bad job at all. Far from it. Each of Watts' entries were supremely enjoyable, but Cretton uses his extensive budget to really, really push the visuals storytelling of how Spider-Man engages with the world. The web-slinging scenes add geometry to the equation which really give you the sense of Spidey's reaction time. We feel how fast the world moves by, the velocity of the swing and the spring of Spidey's webs. It builds upon what Mark Webb was attempting with POV webslinging in the Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man and goes much much further. And with Spidey's wall-crawling ability it's like Cretton watched the Spider-Verse movies and questioned why that kind of camera work couldn't be done in live action. 

It's visually an exceptionally playful movie, and its stars are all very game. Holland seems even more invested in the franchise now that Watts has moved on. He seems like he's very much committed to taking the lead here. No doubt he was the champion of the four-year time jump, as Holland, while still very youthful, does now look like a man. Zendaya is one of those performers for whom everything seems effortless. She can convey so much with so little and while much of M.J.'s character here rests on what came before, Zendaya gives everything you need to know where this character is (and more) without really any verbal confirmation. The Punisher here is toned down to PG-13 levels, so his severity from the Netflix/Disney+ runs is tamped down quite a bit, but this gives Berenthal a chance to be playful in the role in a way not afforded to him otherwise, and he's a damn delight. I've never enjoyed Frank Castle even half as much as I do here. Besides a few other MCU mainstays, the rest of the main cast is filled out with amazing performers from hit streaming series, and they all deliver.

The sum is a very entertaining, surprisingly emotionally grounded movie that fits with what came before but also pushes forward.

---

I ran into a friend at the theatre coming out of a late-afternoon screening of Rose of Nevada. He had only a vague awareness of the title, and was very interested in me sharing my thoughts and opinions of the film. Unfortunately, I really didn't have the time yet to process what I had seen. Not that it was anything scandalous or salacious, but Rose of Nevada is such a ... unique(?)... peculiar(?)... distinctive(?) film that I really wasn't sure how to receive it and equally unsure of my own reaction to it.

The opening minutes of Mark Jenkin's latest film are a montage of static images of the remote Cornish fishing village, its derelict docks, and run-down vibes. We see extremely brief glances at some of the characters in our films, and nobody looks happy.  The first half of the first act is somewhat perplexing, as we're slowly let in on the connective threads of the images we've seen, but even then, there's a real lack of exposition. Wherever in Cornwall this is, the people don't talk much. 

The score, intense with it's low registers tones, implies that there's something...haunted about this place, and there's just a whiff that something ever so slightly sinister is afoot. The images don't corroborate the tone, but the intention is there. It's like those youtube videos where someone recuts a trailer to a comedy or drama with new music to make it a horror film. This is low-key British drama that carries something else with it.

Jenkins films in a grainy 4:3 aspect ratio, so the movie looks like 1970's era British television, and it has to be intentional. Jenkin leans into the aesthetic with framing and lighting that seems like it would be at home on Coronation Street. And yet, it's not at all a made for TV production and very much feels like a film that yearns for some nostalgic trappings of times past.  There's an etherial quality to the camera choice, the editing, and the shot composition. Maybe it's recency bias, but I couldn't stop comparing it to Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, which would make for, tonally, an apt double feature.

The problem with even providing a loose plot of the film, it doesn't convey the equally fascinating and perplexing way in which the story is assembled and told. What I write herein is pretty straghtforward, but most of what's even laid out here is doled out in nuggets in the film's telling. 

The gist of the story is that this small town survived almost entirely on the service of a small fishing trawler named Rose of Nevada. It went missing about 30 years ago, its two crewmen lost at sea. The ship, however, has returned. The very same ship, barely the worse for wear. Mike (Edward Rowe) has been the longstanding money man and organizer for the town, is stunned by its arrival, and does everything to disguise the fact that it's the Rose. The only person who's in on it is Tina (Rosalind Eleazar, Slow Horses) whose husband was one of the lost crew.

Mike wastes no time setting up a crew to send the ship back out and get to work, and this includes handsome vagrant Liam (Callum Turner) and struggling father Nick (George MacKay), as well as a mysterious old salty dog named Murgey (Francis McGee) who takes on captaining the boat and teaching the boys the trade.  

Their three days at sea go fairly smoothly (though there's continued intensity in the soundtrack as well as the editing and penchant for cut ins that make you think anything can go wrong any second). The ship arrives to shore to find a party of people waiting, ready to get to work off-loading the haul and processing it.  But, Nick realizes, he's not home. He's 30 years in the past. His neighbours, whom in the future were still grieving the loss of their son, in 1993 think him to be their son returned from his fishing sojourn. He panics about being apart from his wife and child.  Liam, meanwhile, is believed to be Tina's estranged husband, and given his vagrant and solitary life from before, he's ready to settle into.

But the sea beckons, and the town can only survive if the fish come in. Everyone has a role to play, and so Nick and Liam are back out to sea for days on end. Each time, Nick hopes to return home, only to find himself in the past...where he has a role to play in the survival of this town if he can accept it.

It's a time travel story unlike any other I've seen, the fantasy aspect serving only as a mechanism to highlight how entire cultures have dwindled in the past 30 years. Here, the profession was what the community gravitated around, but it hasn't been like that since the disappearance of the Rose, and the community has suffered for it.

It's a methodically paced film, uninterested in the hows or whys, but instead focused on what it means not just for a character or two, but for the community and maybe society in macro. I still can't tell you if I truly liked it, but at least I'm certain I didn't not like it. I was captivated and intrigued constantly, unsure of whether Jenkin would drop the other shoe or not, or escalate the scale of the story at all. 

It's definitely different, and just as different doesn't have to mean bad, it also doesn't have to be good. But I'm pretty sure, at the very least, Rose of Nevada is good. I'll have to tell my friend.

---

I was writing last week about the sad state of comedies in North American cinema, and then, as if to accentuate the point, AppleTV released The Dink on their streaming service to minimal promotion and very little fanfare.  AppleTV doesn't release most of their features in theatres, at least not widely. They might get limited showings for meeting awards requirements but outside of F1, Argylle, Fly Me To The Moon, and Killers of the Flower Moon, I don't recall any others getting wide release.

The Dink has no aspirations of being awards bait, so it wasn't going to get one of Apple's token limited releases, but I would still be curious if a small-but-enjoyable little comedy like this could have gotten any traction in cinemas.  

The set-up is fairly standard sports-comedy fare: Dustin "The Hammer" Boyd (Jake Johnson, Let's Be Cops) was once a promising junior tennis champ who lost it all when, in his first big pro tournament, supposedly, Andy Roddick (also in his first big pro tournament) sabotaged the match, causing The Hammer a wrist injury costing him his career. Now he's a tennis pro at the racquet club his father runs. The club is getting hit with demand to increase their pickleball presence, to cede more courts to the low-impact racquet sport.

Most sports comedies, though, tend to be about that one final shot at glory, about the protagonist getting another shot at the fame that they lost. Here though, Dustin's just reaching for his father's acceptance. Chuck Boyd (an overqualified Ed Harris) has barely any affection for his son. He's mostly embarrassed by him, sees him as a failure, and doesn't trust him. Dustin always wants to prove himself, but he's never given the opportunity.  But Chuck, in trying to ward off the pickleball plague has found a by-law in the club's charter that allows decisions to be decided by a duel on the courts. Dustin, desperately, wants to be the guy in that duel, only to be ruled out after he injures himself trying to show off jumping over the net.  

Dustin's doctor (Ben Stiller) prescribes him pickleball as a low-impact rehab treatment, and also some dating service called Sticky Honey that he seems pretty intent on. Hiding his shame, Dustin joins some septuagenarians on the pickleball court and makes fast friends with Candace (Mary Steenburgen). 

Their unlikely friendship is the core of the film, less so tennis or pickleball. It's a sweet and funny quasi-May-December that, for all the sillier bits, remains pretty emotionally grounded.  This isn't a Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller sports comedy like out of the 2000s, it's not going to extremes or pushing the plausibility of what can happen to absurd levels.  Its characters don't lack self awareness, and their actions don't contradict their emotional intelligence. I hesitate to call it a smart comedy, but it's certainly not dumb.

The surprise here is that this is a film at all, that AppleTV didn't ask to have this rather tightly constructed 90-minute script turned into a 8-or-10 episode TV series. The tide winds are changing. Maybe there's hope for more comedy movies, and more comedies in theatres coming.

KWIF: Supergirl (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
Supergirl (2026, d. Craig Gillespie - in theatre)
They Will Kill You (2026, d. Kirill Sokolov - crave)
We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021, d. Jane Schoenbrun - blu-ray)

When it comes to a superhero movie my longtime habit has been to go in feeling totally optimistic, hopeful, and rooting for its success. I want to be entertained, I want to see the comics characters I know brought to life, and I want other's to feel inspired.  I love comics. I love movies. I want this marriage to work.

I even felt this way going into the dregs of the 1990s like the Shaquille O'Neal-starring Steel and batnippled Batman and Robin all the way to modern lumps like Vin Diesel's Bloodshot or the Rock's superhero vanity project, Black Adam, and virtually everything in-between (and outside of)...  I just want the movie to do justice in bringing these things I like (or love, or even have no emotional connection to) to the cinema. Even if a comic book movie is not financially successful, then I'm happy to take the moral victory if it's a valiant adaptation of the character or story.

This is all to say that I went into Supergirl absolutely ready to champion it, to stand behind it and prop it up, even as critical feedback at large called it middling and muddy. I'm rooting for the James Gunn-led DC universe to succeed, and absolutely loved his Superman last year, so I was ready for another surprise triumph (especially having read the source material Supergirl was being adapted from...more on that later). 

It was once true that a nerd's tolerance for nerd shit tends to be much higher than your average film critic, but these days so many film critics have their nerd bona fides to back their opinions up that it's harder to just outright dismiss their commentary. Even without external critical voices, I have my own internal critical voice now, one that I have a hard time shutting off.

Supergirl opens with a montage of a girl and her dog. Kara Zor-El (Millie Alcock) and her pup Krypto are planet-hopping and bar-hopping for Kara's 23rd birthday. Getting wasted, making messes, just whooping it up to numb the traumatic memories that haunt her. Cousin Clark calls, wishing her the best, but can't hide his concern. Meanwhile Ruthye (Eve Ridley) witnesses the senseless death of her family at the hands of ruthless (no pun intended) brigands. Ruthye picks herself up, dusts herself off, and goes looking for someone who will help her avenge the death of her family. Kara's plastered in a bar on Ruthye's red-sun-baked planet (meaning her powers are waning), dancing to Wet Leg's "Catch These Fists" (piped into the space jukebox via a vintage ipod) when Ruthye announces herself and her intentions, only to be bowled over by some unsavoury dudes, and Kara needing to step in. Ruthye starts following Kara, imploring her to help her, but it's only after Krypto is poisoned by the Brigands as they steal Kara's ship (where did she get a spaceship from anyway?) that Kara and Ruthye's objectives align and adventure awaits them.

The first act of Supergirl, for the most part, is pretty solid. There are a fair amount of needledrops, some superb alien make-up work and special effects, and a largely agreeable and unique sequence aboard a space coach bus. There's life and vitality to this first act that ebbs slowly away as the film progresses past it. It's not a James Gunn film, so it doesn't have his sensibilities, but it almost feels like Craig Gillespie wanted the first act to parrot the James Gunn thing. It's moderately successful, but it's absolutely clear from the first two fight sequences that Gillespie is not comfortable or confident with such sequences and they are neither clean nor easy to follow, and both are quite poorly lit (it's also quite possible that the theatre I was in was dimming their projector, the whole film seemed overly dark). The quality of the action sequences only diminish from there.

The story in Supergirl comes from Tom King and Bilquis Evely's comic-book mini-series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which was King's sci-fi/superhero take on True Grit, but in a episodic format. This film, then, is a copy of a copy, translated from one medium to another and back again, and the degradation in fidelity is palpable. Having watched the Coen Bros. take on True Grit recently, it's a virtual masterpiece that even a dimmed copy should still wind up being somewhat good, possibly even great. While Supergirl isn't outright bad, I struggle to call it good. It's fine. It's a movie.

What last year's Superman had was spirit and humour -- as does True Grit -- but Supergirl lacks these, abandoning much of its humour quickly into the film and never quite finding its spirit. True Grit's tale, especially in the Coens' hands, relies completely on how the characters engage one another. Kara is Rooster Cogburn here, while Ruthye is Mattie, and even though Alcock does the work to make Kara seem like she's been through the wringer and having a tough time coming out the other side, the bond between these two characters doesn't ever get satisfactorily forged, at least not on screen. In True Grit the Coens got a lot of mileage out of Hailee Steinfeld's Mattie, for her primness and eloquence and impression of maturity, that is highlighted against Rooster's inebriated brusqueness ... something that is attempted here with Ridley's Ruthie against Alcock's Kara, but, it's not the focus of the script, so many meaningful things get lost along the way. The lightness of the contrast is lost.

The third member of the True Grit team dynamic was the virtuous lawman La Bouef, and I get the in-name-only joke of substituting bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa) in here, but those are two very different archetypes, and, frankly, Lobo feels kind of shoehorned in here. There's not really any meaningful engagement between Lobo and Kara, and the relationship between Lobo and Ruthye happens largely off screen. The need for set pieces (kind of ugly and muddy setpieces at that) takes the place of having these three characters sit and talk and drink and get to know each other around a (space) campfire. (Momoa's Lobo feels like Momoa doing a Beetlejuice impression... it's fine, but there's no character definition in the script).

The film also falls into repetitive patterns that become quite tiring by the third crest and fall. Kara tells Ruthye to stay behind and be safe only for her not to listen and for Kara (or someone) to have to help her as she gets in over her head.  Or Supergirl loses her powers (instantly) only to gain them back instantly, time and time again. I get it, the Supers are so over-powered that they need such mechanisms to make them vunlerable, but it's the abruptness and repetitiveness that both bother me. The powers should diminish slowly over time, a ticking clock mechanism, while a hail mary recharge may not bring them back full throttle it should always be enough. It's the writings of someone who hasn't spent enough time with the Super-family to understand this.

The main villain is head brigand Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), and he's kind of what everyone's chasing, the maguffin of the comic book, but here they half-heartedly try to develop him into a vile killer who does so for pleasure, and Schoenaerts tries to inject life into the character, but this character, really, should be largely unseen. The less of him, the better. And then the script adds in the fact that the brigands are a men-only club, who kidnap young (it should be noted, human) women to bear them children. It's a play right out of Mad Max:Fury Road but without consulting someone like Eve Ensler to tell them whether they should or not.

As a result, the young girl slave trade casts a pretty bleak pall over an already strapped-for-joy movie. It wallows in the trauma of Kara having lost her family (conveyed in a series of flashbacks that grind the film to a dead halt -- flashbacks are in the comics but handled very differently) and Ruthye's same-but-not experience (in spite of them both having these traumas, the film still isn't able to bond them very well on screen...there's, like, one moment where Kara, silently, realizes this).  Had the film not sidelined Krypto, there would have a been a comic relief chaos agent to make this whole pill easier to swallow. I realize he's also sidelined in the comic and his sidelining is the impetus for Kara to go on this journey in the first place, but comic books have years of character history to draw on and an established universe to traverse, while this film needs to create it all from whole cloth. They could have found something else to trigger Kara and keep Krypto in the picture. 

I wanted to love Supergirl.  As is, I don't really even like it. I do really like this iteration of the character, the attitude that Alcock portrays very well, but the film doesn't serve her too well. I came out of Supergirl feeling like I barely understand this character after spending two hours with her. At the end of the film, Kara returns to Earth, to Metropolis, uncertain of her place in the universe, but ready to find out. Yeah, that's a starting point, not an ending.

---

[Warning: spoilers within]

They Will Kill You starts with Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) and her little sister fleeing from an abusive stepfather. He catches up to them quickly, and Asia shoots him. The cops arrive, Asia runs, leaving her sister behind. Conceptually it's a pretty heavy, if quite brief, opening sequence that doesn't make the audience wait long to get to the point.

Asia got caught and served 10 years in prison for the attempted murder of her father, but has felt nothing but guilt over leaving her sister behind. Asia's hired a private investigator to track her sister down, he points her to the Virgil, a New York 9-storey high rise for the wealthy, where her sister was hired as a cleaner, but it has a reputation as being a place where people disappear. There is definitely insinuations of class and race disparities, and the rich being raised up on the the backs of the poor, which all sounds rather heady as subject matter.

And yet, this is just the place setting. This film really doesn't waste its time. It's only about 15 minutes before the first fight sequence happens, and it doesn't let up from there. Whatever inference of social commentary the opening few minutes might have suggested, for the most part they are pushed aside so that we can have a rollicking good time as Asia navigates the Victor's many hallways, passageways, tunnels and shafts, fending off it's blood-hungry elites.

Asia take a job with a fake ID to get into the Virgil, and instantly meets some of the fake-smile bearing residents, the head of services Mrs. Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette), and getting a very short tour of the servants quarters on the first floor. She senses she's being watched, so she secures her door. A masked behemoth finds his way into her room regardless and attempts to attack her... only Asia is prepare to fight back. Four more assailants find their way in and Asia defends herself, armed with a sawed off shotgun and a sword. 

When Asia lops off Tom Felton's head, the arterial spray is like a lawn sprinkler, just all directions everywhere. The fight with the remaining assailants is heated and brutal and bloody and very creative. Asia's taking her lumps, but she's surprisingly a warrior, and ready to take everyone on.

There are definite shades of Kill Bill here, not just in the fighting, but in the style, the edits, the pastiche, the title cards and flashbacks. And yet, it's not Tarantino-esque, because this plays as an even greater ode to Sam Raimi. 

The elite of the Victor are immortal devil worshippers who can't truly be killed. They will resurrect and reform if even a flake of skin remains. In one of the film's many incredible sequences, Asia is crawling through a between-floor tunnel system and encounters Sharon (Heather Graham) whose head she lopped off earlier in the film. After a scuffle, Asia blows Sharon's head off, and, moments later the headless body starts charging towards her (just grasping, but unable to see, hear or properly sense Asia's whereabouts). Eventually Asia finds her way to an upward shaft, but doesn't notice Sharon's eyeball, using the optic nerve like a flagella to propel itself through the tunnels to track her. Somehow Sharon's headless body is still receiving the intel, and attempts to charades the information back to the other elites. It's absolutely ridiculous and obscenely delightful. Just as the whole film is.

Much like a Bruce Campbell in an Evil Dead, Zazie Beetz keeps taking her lumps, but also keeps fighting back. She fights for herself, and she fights for her sister, but mostly, she's fighting for our entertainment. The film culminates with Asia fighting Mrs. Woodhouse with a devil-possessed giant boar's head Voltron-ed her own. Just insane, but delirously entertaining.

There's not a tremendous amount of story or character development here, there's no need for it. This is just a wicked fight movie that's having a good time going to comedic extremes, and I'm here for it.

---

It would be easy to mistake We're All Going to the World's Fair, which was released in 2021, as a COVID-era production. It's a small film that follows its protagonist, 16-year-old Casey, as she lives her life online, participating in "the World's Fair Challenge".  It's a social media trend that, according to other (in-world, off-brand youtube) streamers, changes you in unexpected ways. Casey films herself strolling around her town, talking to the camera about the changes she's feeling, the disconnecting from herself, the violent and or self-harmful impulses she's feeling. We see Casey dancing alone, or playing baseball by herself. We see her exploring the barn late at night, looking at her father's gun (we're talking an assault weapon here, not a hunting rifle or handgun), and eventually settling on the barn couch, watching not-youtube on the big screen, when a video autoplays a message that is directly for her. It features a still of Casey's face, distorted and melty, alternating with a hastily scribble warning that she is in trouble, and she needs to reach out. 

Jane Shoenbrun's I Saw The TV Glow was my favourite film of 2024, an exploration of how media can impact one's sense of identity, and an powerful closeted trans-allegory disguised as a horror film. This, their first feature shows they definitely have a grasp, and maybe even a penchant for media-identity related storytelling (their third film, this year's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma looks to be yet another, different and provocative take on this dynamic).  We see Casey not just through her videos, but also as she's making her videos, and when she's not making her videos she's engaging with other "World's Fair" content.

Schenbrun has fun building out the online world of "the World's Fair Challenge", some disturbing content from creators describing (or showing) how the Challenge has changed them. It's almost like an infection, but the symptoms differ from person to person.

The aforementioned warning comes from "JLB", and Casey decides to Skype with this stranger. JLB expresses that they're concerned about them, and asks Casey to just keep making more videos. The film's greatest move comes following this call that ends the first act, switching us over to JLB's perspective for a period of time. He is a thin, bald middle-aged man with a very hang-dog expression, and we just don't know what his deal is. He lives in a very big house, so he's obviously successful at whatever he does, or did, but he primarily hangs out and sleeps in what looks like a teenager's bedroom. There are pictures in the house but we never clearly see them. We don't know if JLB lost a kid to this "Challenge" or if he's just an online creeper, or if he's just a lonely guy looking to platonically connect with someone who also appears lonely, or if he's a psycho who has murdered the family in this home and is now operating out of it. He does spend a lot of time disseminating Casey's content though.

Beyond Casey's video in which we see her wander through a crowd at a New Year's celebration, we never see her with people. Her father, we're only aware of him because he yelled at her once (for listening to something loudly at 3am), but there's a half insinuation that she's scared of him...or avoiding him...or both. But there's so much Schoenbrun doesn't show us here that everything is up for interpretation, right through to the finale where the rug isn't so much as pulled out from under us but the fog is lifted.  

The events of the movie are recontextualized, but the question is...does it make a difference? However we view Casey, isn't the end result that she's lonely, sad, and perhaps depressed? 

"The World's Fair Challenge" is Schoenbrun interpreting the Creepypasta realm of online horror storytelling through collaboration, the realm that bore such fruits as Backrooms and The Slender Man and Channel Zero, but through a very grounded, human, individualistic lens. It very much feels like Schoenbrun is asking "is this how I would be if this type of communal storytelling was available to me when I was a sad, awkward, lonely teenager", and I feel very much the same way, that the whole Creepypasta thing would have been totally for me had I grown up in a different time.

It's eerie how much ...World's Fair is in sync with what pandemic living felt like (according to Schonebrun, it finished filming March 1, 2020) but it's not an intentional pandemic allegory. It's message is not bound by time, as a result, it is a story of loneliness, and the horror here (if you can call it that...it's more just a slow, simmering dread), is equally grounded in sadness and the truly unknowable strangers of the internet.

1-1-1-KsMIRT: not enough and too much

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month(ish) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  It's back(!), because I'm feeling too scatterbrain to think unfettered.

This Month:

Fallout Season 2 - AmazonPrime [8/8 episodes watched]
Daredevil: Born Again season 2 - Disney+ [8/10 episodes watched]
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 - AppleTV [10/10 episodes watched]
Scrubs Season 9 - Crave [13/13 episodes watched]
Widow's Bay Season 1 - Apple TV [10/10 episodes watched]
Dark Winds Season 2 - Crave [6/6 episodes watched]

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Fallout Season 2
season 1
[created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet]

The Plot/What 100: Lucy travels the wastelands with the Ghoul, looking for her father who has run off to Las Vegas to enact the next phase of the plan. Whatever that is. Maximus tries to prevent a war, and in the process, probably starts a war. Stephanie, now overseer of Vault 32, seems to have her own machinations in play, while Betty in Vault 33 finds resources dwindling and an inbred uprising fermenting. Lucy's brother Norm has awakened the management, and finds his leadership skills wanting. Something big is about to start, and it probably can't be stopped.

[1 Great] Often flashbacks in a TV show serve as information dump or as a means of exploring a character's backstory a little more thoroughly. It's often aside from the main plot, maybe thematically connected, but having little bearing on the progression of the in-world story of today. The flashbacks in Fallout have served to show us the world before the wasteland, and the life of The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) back when he was a famous movie star, war veteran and pitch man for Valut-Tec. This season, though, Cooper Howard is brought in through the back door of the conspiracy to blow-up the world...you know, for profit! And he has to navigate not only the twists of the shady people involved in the conspiracy and those trying to prevent it, but also his wife's part in all of it. It's actually pretty gripping, and since it's largely all from Coop's perspective, we only really know what he knows and so the rug gets pulled out from us both multiple times. It's pretty awesome and Goggins is fantastic.

[1 Good] Since I don't play the games, all of the world of Fallout is new to me. So I never knew that there was a war between USA and Canada, as the U.S. tried to annex my country. Toasty filled me in that this has long been a part of the lore of the games, so it's not just a reactionary bit to the Trumpian whim of terrain expansion. It's not explored too deeply in the season, but we learn that Stephanie's nefarious machinations are all in the service of Canadian resistance, and while the show tries to play her off as the bad guy, I'm firmly on her side. "Don't think of them as human beings, think of them as Americans...." That line gave me chills and really speaks more to how the teaching of American Exceptionalism others everyone else to Americans, rather than any desire for Canadian aggression towards our neighbours to the south (many of whom are really good human beings).

[1 Bad] There's nothing really bad about this show. I found myself pretty enthralled by this entire season. I was maybe a little frustrated at nebbish Norm and his inability to level up, not at all like Lucy did. But that's Norm's character flaw, he's just not very good at stuff. Lucy on the other hand wants to remain an optimist but boy does the world grind her down. It's a little tough to watch, but her confrontations with Hank (and the Ghoul) when she's finally had enough, well, pretty great.

Meta: It had been over two years since I watched Season 1 and I had forgotten how richly constructed the world of this show was, all the different threats it weaves together in a way that may feel loose but is surprisingly cohesive.  The addition of Justin Theroux as Robert Edwin House, the billionaire Coop is told is going to blow up the world is an excellent addition, and the character's impacts both in the past and future are deeply felt. Funny, gross, and richly satirical about both capitalism and totalitarianism, it's a surprisingly deep show for how ludicrously fun it is.

---

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2
Season 1
(created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord)

The Plot/What 100: Daredevil attacks a secret shipment of weapons through New York's harbour, a deal Mayor Wilson Fisk had made with the CIA (?), and now it's causing headaches. Anti-vigilante laws are enforced with brutality, anyone suspected of allying with a vigilante (or anyone Fisk just doesn't like) is rounded up and caged. Bullseye has turned "friend" to Daredevil, but his violence is too extreme for his liking (and people get caught in the crossfire). BB Urich manipulates Fisk's protege, Daniel Blake, in to revealing classified information, which she then uses as anti-Fisk propeganda. It's not going to go well for either of them.

[1 Great] I still think Charlie Cox is the perfect Daredevil, even if he's not written so perfectly.

[1 Good] Jessica Jones is back. Loved seeing Kristin Ritter back, if only for a minute.

[1 Bad] It's all just so goddamn tedious. It's a show that just keeps hitting the same points over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It's so damn exhausing. Matt doesn't want to kill anyone, but he's always debating with people whether he should. And debating with people whether he should let them kill. His conflict is now not even a religious one but one of a guy who has to decide whether he believes in the law and legal institutions of the country in the role he performs, or, you know, puts on a costume and doles out concussions on a nightly basis. We've seen it all before. And it's a show that just teases and teases and teases out it stories and threads as if it had 25 episodes to fill. It doesn't and there's so many of these characters we don't really care that much about (sorry BB, sorry Daniel, sorry Heather, sorry Karen, sorry to the rest of you...) mostly because  they're so boring. The sombre, sober tone of the series, the smug self-satisfaction over even attempting to comment on modern times and governmental descent into fascism, it's all so off-putting.  Fisk needs to be put aside for a good long while. He's not Daredevil's only villain, but outside of the Hand in season 2, it's been nothing but Fisk, and it's gotten stale. Nothing new is said about their relationship this season. And they totally mishandle Jessica, severely underusing her and ...depowering her in fits and starts? Why? Ugh.

Meta: I really gave Season 1 a pass. I decided I liked it because I was happy it was back. I really, really like Cox in the role and was just so plussed to see him again. But, in hindsight, Season 2 only highlight that Season 1 was just as much of a drag. I recall Lady Kent and I taking a day off work, ordering enough pizza for two meals and just binging 16 episodes of a season of Daredevil. It was exciting to us. By the third episode of this season, watching Daredevil felt like a chore, like something we had to do, and it was definitely not something we were enjoying. We were counting down the minutes until Jessica Jones' arrival and that little baloon of hope deflated almost instantly.  Cox's best appearances as Matt and Daredevil were not in the 17 episodes of his own series but in an episode of She-Hulk and a cameo in Spider-Man:No Way Home. 

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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2
Season 1
(created by Chris Black and Matt Fraction)

The Plot/What 100: Keiko Mura has been rescued from Axis Mundi, 60 years after she disappeared into a wormhole, and she's only 60 days older than when Shaw last saw her. Her world is rocked to be reunited with her son and meet her granddaughter and grandson having missed most of their lives, but Monarch, the organization she founded with her husband Bill Randa, is not what it once was, and faces some stiff private sector competition.  Not just competition, but organizations looking to control the kaiju for their own agendas, and developing the technology to do so. But the immediate crisis is the reappearance of Titan X, last seen by Keiko, Bill and Shaw a lifetime ago.

[1 Great] It's never not awesome watching giant monsters fight, and the show does a pretty decent job of showing scale when it's happening.  Obviously the show doesn't have the budget of a Godzilla x Kong feature, or even the budget that Season 1 had, so the fights are few and far between, but pretty great when they happen. 

[1 Good] There is an episode where Shaw, in trying to figure out how to lure Godzilla out of Axis Mundi, winds up receiving an S.O.S. from himself decades before when he was briefly trapped in there. Since Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell are playing the same character, there's no reasonable way that they could share the screen together, but this is the next best thing. A novelty episode but still kind of great that has some real emotional elements for both performers to work through in completely different times in their characters' life. The show does a pretty good job throughout this season finding consistency between the Russels' performance of the character. 

[1 Bad] Much like Daredevil: Born Again this show frustratingly treads water because it needs to bide its time between its big budget setpieces. This results in some incredibly stupid (and sometimes very confusing) character threads where certain characters go off and do their own thing for reasons that never truly feel justified, and then return to Monarch for reasons that never truly feel justified, only to get into arguements that never truly feel justified, and then to do really stupid things that never truly feel justified. Most of this shit is our young cast of Kentaro, Cate and May. They make my eyes roll involuntarily far too often.

Meta: Monarch is not a good show. It's wildly inconsistent and seems to lack purpose other than to be an in-world flourish to the Legendary series of Kong and Godzilla features. The characters amble so much one has to often ask what they're actually contributing to the story.  The scenes set in the 1950s and 60's are far more interesting, as the setting gives a pastiche for the series to play into and often it seems like it would be a better program had it firmly set itself in that time and explore the Kaiju with their technological limitations.  I honestly don't know if I would watch a third season should it return (maybe if they get Bill and Lewis Pullman to play, like, an adversary to Shaw...that would be enough to get me back in).

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Scrubs Season 9 (aka Scrubs: Med School Season 1)
(created by Bill Lawrence)

The Plot/What 100: Sacred Heart teaching hospital now has a whole campus, where we see J.D., Turk, and Cox all hold classes, and Elliott is pregnant so she's on light duty. The new batch of recruits includes Lucy Bennett, a midwestern, daydreamy "horse girl" who's naive and optimistic, which Cox wants to drum right out of her, lest he wind up with another John Dorian. Drew dropped out of med school a half decade ago, had a rough bit of life experience, and is back with reinvigored focus, only Cox has taken an unsettlingly deep interest in him. Cole is a SoCal-bro all the way, a prototypical rich kid whose parents funded half the wings in the hospital, so despite how annoying he is, he's teflon (he finds a friend in retired and sexually rambunctious [to the point of sexpest-ery] Dr. Kelso), and Dr. Denise Mahoney, the sarcastic, and jaded T.A. It's Scrubs but with new people, and some of the old people.

[1 Great] I was honestly surprised at how quickly the Scrubs formulae worked being reworked like this with a nearly whole new cast. I think having some of the old guard around some of the time works quite well (especially John C. McGinley whose Perry Cox is maybe the most critical ingredient to the show, though Eliza Coupe as Denise certainly could have filled the void in the eventuality of McGinley's departure). Dave Franco nails perfectly the irritatingly entitled dirtbag Cole but never fully as the villain, and the writing staff find ways to round down his sharpest edges to make him pretty much a likeable character. Kerry Bishé as Lucy is and isn't just a female J.D. And putting them side by side for a few episodes early in the season (before Braff departed) was the perfect way to highlight both. The new cast, gels pretty quickly, and it helps that they're all pretty talented performers (Coupe and Franco, obviously, go on to bigger and brighter things) who settle into their roles quickly and the writers find a voice for really fast. It's basically Scrubs-by-way-of-Community just maybe a year too early. 

[1 Good] My favourite part of the season was the blossoming relationship between Denise and Drew. Denise is a Tough.Nut and is such an Eliza Coupe role that's perfectly suited for her. Drew has a hardened past and his own embarrassing secrets, but can almost go toe to to with Denise in the cynicism department. They find very quickly that they have similar world views, and yet they're two quite different people that have a real challenge with compromise or, you know, emotional vulnerability. Watching them actually negotiate being together is the biggest joy of the season.

[1 Bad] I haven't watch original flavour Scrubs in a very long while, but did it have so much gender-based "comedy" as well. There's so much name calling and put-downs, mostly to the point of calling someone (usually a male character) a "girl" or a "bitch" or something more clever insinuating that the guy is soft and/or feminine. There's also one episode that has a B-plot rotating around Turk and Cox dealing with a lesbian couple (both played by very attractive actresses of course) and being total children around the idea. It's pretty embarrassing for the show and the characters.

Meta: Having just watched the reboot of Scrubs earlier this year, I was curious about the ill-fated season 9 that was intended to be an independent spin-off but ABC chickened out in letting it be its own thing. I don't know if it was ever going to be successful, as people had a certain idea of what Scrubs was and that centered around Zach Braff-related silliness, of which this is in shorter supply. Maybe it is just having watched the reboot, which, quite frankly, feels more like a reboot of this season of Scrubs: Med School than it does of Scrubs proper, but this went down pretty smooth (dated jokes aside). I had a really great time with this and would have liked another couple seasons with this crew.  Maybe it's because I knew half of this cast already from elsewhere or maybe it's because this season of television the writers pointedly made a decision to focus on the new crew (as opposed to the reboot, where it's more than half about the old crew, and less than  half about the new crew) but I think I like this season better than the reboot. A little bit more at least.

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Widow's Bay Season 1
(created by Katie Dippold)

The Plot/What 100: Tom Loftis is mayor of the remote New England island town of Widow's Bay. Unlike most people who live there, Tom wasn't born there but married into island life, his wife having died during childbirth 17 years ago. Tom has lofty ambitions of being the new Martha's Vinyard, and rallies the town behind his new tourism push. The only real objector is Wyck Crawford, a grizzled fisherman who vociferously insists that the island is cursed and that outsiders should definitely not come. He is correct on both counts. 

[1 Great] It's so very hard to choose one single thing that is great about Widow's Bay since it is uniformly terrific. Merging horror, comedy, and emotional drama the show very ably builds a small island community where it makes sense whenever any two or three cast members share the screen and the personalities are so well defined without being too trope-y that we kind of know exactly who these people are, until we get to know them more. Any character can be given a spotlight and ably hold it, the performers on the show all very keenly get the assignment, while the directors (including Atlanta's Hiro Murai and horror director Ti West), writers (including comedic performers Colton Dunn and Neil Casey) and crew all seem to be completely enthused to be  working on the show that lets them toe so many lines, and step over them, and step back. By the show's third episode there was already a stand-out episode, and then they deliver another, and another.  It's still very much a genre show, but it's doing it as if it were Parks and Recreation crossed with Midnight Mass, and it's even been told that creator/showrunner Katie Dippold originally gestated this idea as a script for Parks & Rec, but just couldn't make it work).

[1 Good] The music by David Fleming is incredible, absolutely nailing the assignment. He's able to strike a tone that is ominously lighthearted when it needs to be but can go strange, mysterious or intense when necessary. His score leans into the conventions of scores from the more mass-audience friendly horror of the past like Poltergeist, Jaws, the Omen, or the Exorcist without ever directly referencing any of them. He's found the vibe, the tone of those scores perfectly, and using their most cliched aspects as much for terror as for punctuating the humorous or absurd. It's a very deftly conceived soundtrack, one that makes me take notice without pulling me out of the moment. 

[1 Bad] The premise of the series is sort of a Jaws scenario, where there's danger lurking but the mayor won't sacrifice the town's economic prosperity for the possibility of danger. There's also an X-Files set-up where certain people in the town are aware of its curse, and are pretty comfortable with it, in fact, but Tom wants to just shrug it off. Within three episodes, though, Tom can no longer shrug it off. As we get deeper into the season Tom may be in denial at points, but it's clear he knows deep down what's true about this island. And then it's staring him plainly in the face...

I don't generally agree that TV was better when it was 25 episode seasons, as that type of American TV show created a lot of bloat. What we lose in going down to 10 or 8 or 6 episode seasons is the ability to focus more intently on secondary characters, or sometimes, as with Widow's Bay things move a little bit faster than you had expected. Tom's journey from disbeliever to skeptic to true believer happens in about 7 episodes and while I wouldn't want this season to be split into two to slow the pace of his progression, if the season were longer, with more time to expand its focus to the town at large it could really have benefitted from such a scope increase, even just three to five more episodes. The "bad" is, basically, I want more.

Meta: Widow's Bay is probably the best season of television this year. Just a lightning bolt of a show that comes out episode one firing on all cylinders and then injects the nitrous oxide into the tank in the second episode. Matthew Rhys has had a trio of prominent dramatic series over the past 15 years, but this show lets him step out of being miserable and deadpan and instead into a funnier misery, and he absolutely excels at it, both physically and verbally... he has great comedic timing...who knew? While he's been a revered dramatic actor for years, Kate O'Flynn, playing Tom's assistant Patricia, steps out of small-time character actor shadows and into the limelight, and completely destroys. Patricia can be weird and off-putting to start, but O'Flynn is able to elicit deep compassion and sympathy for Patricia, eventually turning from loser to unlikely hero (though Patricia is still incapable of going full badass).

Episodes 4 and 5 jockey for best episode of the season, with episode 4, "Beach Reads" putting Patricia and her high-stakes party planning front and centre, while episode 5 , "What to Expect on Your Trip" finds Tom accidentally getting dosed with mushrooms and blinking in and out of consciousness (I don't think I've ever seen an episode of tv told from a POV like this, where it just keeps jumping ahead in time, the viewer as disoriented as the character). It's like season two of The Bear all over again ... "Fishes" or "Forks"?

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Dark Winds Season 2
(created by Graham Roland)

The Plot/What 100: Jim Chee has left the feds to be a private investigator, and gets called to look in on a robbery at a wealthy landowner's home by his wife. Jim's case dovetails into a truck bomb investigation Joe Leaphorn is investigating, the clues to which lead him to believe Jim's client is somehow tied into the murder of his son. Joe's deputy, Bernadette, looks elsewhere for growth opportunities, while Emma and Sally ward off a white reporter from L.A. looking for a story around the heinous eugenics practices at medical clinics and murdered and missing indigenous women.

[1 Great] Each season is adapted from one of Tony Hillerman's series of Tribal Police books. Much like Slow Horses six episodes seems to be the perfect length to fluidly adapt the story without any padding. It does lead to the feeling that time has passed between seasons/stories, and I really enjoy how the first episode works as both catch up on what's happened to the characters in the interim as we as the place-setter for what the thrust of the season will be. The only one who doesn't seem like they're on a different path this season is Joe Leaphorn, who seems all to settled in his ways. But a pretty serious blow-up with Emma as well as confronting the man who may have killed his son sets him on a new path by the season's end, and his relationship with everyone in the show is different by the end (or at least our understanding of those relationships is).

[1 Good] People take their bloody lumps this season. It's a pretty taxing and brutal affair that Leaphorn and Chee get caught up in, and they pay the price. But determination, resiliency, stubbornness, and, in Joe's case, pure blind rage, get them through. It's a little harrowing to be honest, but the fifth episode trek through the desert is an epic 40 minutes of TV.

[1 Bad] I do not begrudge the series at all for attempting to tackle some of the horrific and disgusting practices that indigenous women have been subjected to, past and present, in America (and most of the colonized lands of the world, frankly), it's pretty necessary to put a spotlight on it. It's only "bad" in that it's unfortunate how tertiary this story line is to the show. Despite having not read the books, it's still evident that this plot doesn't come from the source, as it just doesn't fit with the rest of the events of the show and is of a different tone entirely. It gives something for Emma (Deanna Allison) and Sally (Elva Guerra) to do this season, but it almost feels more like that (needing to provide a story for the characters) than to hit hard on raising the awareness of these atrocities. Such a thing deserves its own central spotlight

Meta: Such an easily consumable, enriching and entertaining show. The three leads, Zahn McClarnan, Kiowa Gordon and Jessica Matten, are all incredible performers and have such a great rapport.  McClarnan's face is one of the most captivating on TV, while Gordon and Matten are just so damn good looking, and ridiculously charming together you just want to see more of them as a romcom (although the show's just looking for reasons to keep them apart). This season features Jeri Ryan in a guest-starring role and she's superb as a middle-aged femme fatale who may or may not be playing games with Chee. Veteran character actor A Martinez also turns up as Sherriff Gordo, Joe's friend and mentor. We also meet Joe's father (Joseph Runningfox) this season, an ex-cop and a hard man who Joe's still trying to live up to. Joe tries to fight his father's influence while also actively emulating him. It's a fascinating dynamic which we need to see more of.