Reached season 4 and the first half of season 5 in my Teen Wolf rewatch. Season 4 just drags. The "dead pool" plot isn't all that interesting (though the reveal of who is behind it and how is genuinely clever). They don't do a great job of setting up the new crop of younger characters, though they get better as it…

Yeah, I found the airplane sequence visually hard to follow. (I also didn't understand why the character had gone from "we must stay below the radar and not call attention to our business" to "let's steal from the most powerful people in the world in the flashiest way possible" in like two scenes.)

I loved Tron as a kid and rewatching it as an adult was struck by just how unapologetically weird it is - not just the visuals, which are dated but somehow still interesting, but also the strange quasi-religious allegory that seems to pop up at times with the whole "user" discussion. I'm still not sure if it's…

Saw Homecoming. Enjoyed it. Holland nails the nerdy and earnest part of Peter. The high school comedy vibe really works for the character here (though Sky High still has to be the champ in the weirdly specific sub-sub-genre of “superhero movies in love with John Hughes”). Keaton doesn’t have a whole lot to do but…

The Nightside books seem right up Carpenter's alley - kind of a bonkers combination of private eye cliches with a grab-bag of creatures from horror and mythology thrown in. I stopped reading about seven books in but who knows? Could be interesting.

Been rereading a bunch of Richard Matheson. Mostly short story anthologies, where obviously he's a champ, but also several of the novels - I Am Legend, A Stir of Echoes (fantastic book), The Shrinking Man. Reread Hell House this week. Not his best but still a fun read (it's the deliciously pulpy cousin to Jackson's…

"The End of Time" actually soured me a bit on the Tenth Doctor. For one thing, his story is clearly over at the end of "Waters of Mars" - he's gone too far, he knows he's gone too far, the only thing left to do is accept his death. For another thing, it's just such a lousy story - convoluted, badly paced, and yes,…

The solution to Bill's problem was a major cop-out but I really didn't care. I like Bill. I liked the performance. Her final scene in the TARDIS was the essence of what made the character work - sincerity, curiosity, basic decency, a rough kind of sweetness. There were a lot of moving movements - The Doctor's…

I know he's never going to win an award for it or anything but John C. Reilly in Skull Island may be my favorite performance I've seen all year. It's crazy but also deeply sincere in a way only that guy can manage.

The movie as a whole didn't work for me but Stewart is really good in it.

McAvoy is good in it. (McAvoy's pretty reliably good, though.) Other than that, it's a perfectly decent thriller. I wouldn't have much else to say about it. Didn't love the ending.

Favorite so far this year is easily Lost City of Z. Really strong performances (Hunnam is great in it, but so are Pattinson, Miller, and Holland in smaller roles), beautifully shot, best final shot of a movie I've seen in a long time. Wonder Woman is probably the most fun I've had at a blockbuster all year, though…

I love Near Dark. It's such a strange little movie. They're horrible, almost feral predators - and yet they're an almost-functional family at the same time. Henriksen's always a reliable presence, even in total crap, but he can also be weirdly charming in the right role.

The MST3K revival was unexpectedly delightful. Once I got used to the different pace for the riffing (my god are they determined to cram as many jokes as possible in) I loved it.

Bates Motel, Feud, and The Good Place would probably be the top of my list. A good show absolutely nailing its final season with excellent performances, a surprisingly empathetic and even bleak portrait of two legendary actresses, and a freshman comedy that blew me away with its humor, heart, and tricky storytelling.…

The Conjuring movies feature really strong lead performances and have an unusual dedication to their characters and atmosphere. Happy to have a third.

I actually thought about the whole underrated question watching It Comes at Night over the weekend. It seems to be gathering a huge backlash from audiences after a lot of critical love, partly because it doesn't neatly fit into a genre despite being marketed as a horror movie. Personally I loved it - great…

I am legitimately all in for Bollywood Star Wars.

I love Harry Potter but I can sympathize. Discovering that the movie Hocus Pocus was supposed to be part of my nostalgia - including meeting several adults who had pretty much committed the entire movie to memory and would still quote it endlessly - made me think dark, dark things about my own generation.

I once taught a literature in translation class for English language learners where we were reading a parallel text version of Alice in Wonderland - English on one side of the page, Spanish on the other. A book full of puns, made-up words, and intentionally ridiculous usages of existing words - that doesn't make a…