Contributor, The A.V. Club. Caroline Siede is a pop culture critic in Chicago, where the cold never bothers her anyway. Her interests include superhero movies, feminist theory, and Jane Austen novels.
The most memorable sequence of (500) Days Of Summer plays out in split screen, with one side capturing the romanticized expectations of how a party will go and the other side depicting the disappointing reality. It’s an aching gut punch of a scene that uses the language of cinema to encapsulate a feeling most people…
Blinded By The Light is the latest in what writer-director Gurinder Chadha calls her “genially subversive” filmography, made up of feel-good movies that also tackle difficult topics like racism, sexism, class, and cultural divides. Based on the real-life experience of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor (who also co-wrote the…
Timing is everything when it comes to release dates for similar projects. Though Garth Stein’s popular 2008 novel The Art Of Racing In The Rain could be credited with kicking off a whole genre of tearjerking family stories narrated by dogs, W. Bruce Cameron’s subsequent cottage industry of dog-centric books beat it to…
The first scene of Moonstruck takes place in a funeral home and the final scene takes place around a crowded kitchen table. That’s the film in a nutshell—a romantic comedy where life and death are intertwined, where sorrow makes joy sweeter and the other way around. Or, as Nicolas Cage bellows at Cher while trying to…
From the late ’90s to the mid 2010s, Sanaa Lathan and Taye Diggs starred in five major romantic comedies, two of them opposite one another. Yet when people rattle off lists of the genre’s biggest stars, their names seldom appear alongside rom-com players like Kate Hudson and Hugh Grant. That’s partially because the…
Even if you’ve never seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it’d be nearly impossible not to be familiar with its big 11 o’clock number, “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend.” Marilyn Monroe’s exuberant ode to gold-digging has been homaged, reimagined, and satirized by everyone from Madonna to Moulin Rouge! to Crazy…
1995 marked a turning point in the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It was the year the FDA approved an antiretroviral treatment that would soon bring about a massive decline in AIDS-related deaths and illnesses. Yet 1995 was also the year in which AIDS-related deaths—then the leading cause of death among all…
That unexpected sense of lightness Erik described back in “A.K.A Hellcat” is exactly how I felt going into Jessica Jones’ series finale. That’s not just because Sallinger was officially off the table, although that’s definitely a big part of it. It was also the lightness of knowing that the series was freed of the…
Back in my review of Jessica Jones’ first season finale—the wrap-up to my first ever Marvel Netflix binge-review experience—I wrote about how conflicted I felt about Kilgrave’s death. On the one hand, it felt like the right thematic capper for the season and for Jessica’s arc. On the other hand, I…
After the big reveal at the end of “A.K.A Hero Pants,” my first thought was that I’d love to go back and rewatch the previous two episodes to track Trish and Erik’s arcs through this new lens. Thankfully, “A.K.A Hellcat” puts in the work for me! This episode is part clip show and part magic trick reveal. It travels…
Not only is “A.K.A Hero Pants” a compelling episode in its own right, it retroactively makes the previous episode more interesting too. Not the Sallinger parts, of course, those are well past saving. But it turns out we didn’t have the full context for the emotional arcs Trish and Erik were…
The good news about “A.K.A I Did Something Today” is that Jessica very much feels like herself again. She’s once again faced with an impossible, impossibly frustrating scenario, but she approaches it with intelligence, empathy, and ruthless practicality, rather than the one-note petulance that…
If you start an episode with a serial killer sending clues via Snapchat (sorry, InstaYap), it’s really hard to end it with the brutal murder of one of your main characters. “A.K.A Camera Friendly” is an absolute tonal mess, one that ranges from unintentionally goofy to unearned in its gruesome…
In our flawed criminal justice system, there’s unfortunately often a factor that’s more important than guilt or innocence: Narratives. How you spin a story, including how you spin it in the publicity around a case, can be as important as hard evidence. “A.K.A The Double Half-Wappinger” is all about…
For most of its runtime, “A.K.A Sorry Face” feels like a season finale. Erik’s kidnapping provides a high-stakes time clock. Jessica and Trish use their investigative skills to track him down and burst in just in time to save his life. It takes Jessica and Trish teaming up to take down Sallinger. They turn him over to…
Gregory Sallinger has a law degree. That’s about all the justification we’re given for why Jessica is adamant about treating his case differently than pretty much every other case we’ve ever seen her handle. Just a few episodes ago, she was pinning Andrew Brandt with a car to get him to admit to…
As someone who avoids watching trailers or reading too much about these Marvel Netflix shows ahead of their debuts, I was feeling smugly confident that Erik would turn out to be this season’s Big Bad. A charismatic man hitting it off with Jessica immediately set off all my mental red flags. But unless there’s another…
“A hero is strong. A hero is invulnerable. A hero has a goddamn spleen.”
Rather than pick up with the stabby cliffhanger from the previous episode, “A.K.A You’re Welcome” flashes back to fill us in on how Trish Walker went from instinctively catching a dropped cellphone back in the second season finale to becoming a full-on vigilante hero. This is an entirely Trish-centric hour, and we…
“A.K.A The Perfect Burger” opens with Jessica Jones on a beach in Mexico. True, she’s wearing her signature ripped jeans and combat boots, and she’s there working a case, but the sunny locale speaks to the slightly sunnier vibe that characterizes this season premiere. The lighting is brighter, the…
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