There shouldn’t be any mistaking The Orville for a parody now, though I’m sure people still will. Last night’s new episode, “About a Girl”, is the third written by Seth MacFarlane, making that three more episodes written for The Orville than MacFarlane’s written for Family Guy in the past ten years. It presents the…
Your average fantasy story relies on some, at the least, improbable things being allowed to occur unimpeded, like the impetuous attractive protagonist and the virtuous attractive love interest having their relationship coincide with the precarious affairs of the state. So effective parodies often make hay by making…
Wikipedia quotes H.P. Lovecraft, about his Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, as worrying that “Randolph Carter’s adventures may have reached the point of palling on the reader; or that the very plethora of weird imagery may have destroyed the power of any one image to produce the desired impression of strangeness.”…
Is Ghostbusters 2 really so bad? Well, yes, it has some big, crucial flaws which a few virtues can’t make up for. But there are a few virtues. I’ve certainly seen worse. Like, the 2016 reboot, for example.
Many people seem to feel that the second episode of The Orville, “Command Performance”, which aired last night, is an improvement over the first episode and in some ways I agree. It had the first moment that really made me laugh thanks to a cameo by Jeffrey Tambor and Holland Taylor as Ed’s parents. The scene takes…
Vast American spaces and Harry Dean Stanton star in Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas, a lovely, easy-going, melancholy film about dislocated family. Wenders’ beautiful compositions benefit from a brilliant performance from Stanton.
The Eighth Doctor finally returned to the monthly Big Finish audio play range in late 2011 and he brought Mary Shelley with him. The Silver Turk picks up after The Company of Friends, a 2009 audio play which ended with the Doctor (Paul McGann) dashing off to adventure with the famous author of Frankenstein as his…
It’s a cool woman indeed who keeps her poise when her husband brings a mermaid home. Googie Withers manages to carry it off when her husband carries home the beautiful Glynis Johns in 1948's Miranda, a charming comedy that uses a mermaid as a metaphor for the foolish roving eyes of new and soon to be husbands.
In spite of everything, life carries on, a fact that’s both wonderful and horrible in 1937's Humanity and Paper Balloons (人情紙風船), the final film of Sadao Yamanaka—Yamanaka died of dysentery at the age of 28 the following year while serving in World War II. Set in 18th century Japan, it’s an ensemble film depicting the…
I’ve been kind of fascinated by the extreme gulf between critical and audience reaction to The Orville, the new Sci-Fi adventure comedy that premièred on Sunday. Rotten Tomatoes currently says the show’s scored 22% positive in critical reviews but the audience score is 90%. It’s not just on Rotten Tomatoes I see this…
The moral demands of youth may be untenably expensive, as seen in Mikio Naruse’s 1933 silent film Apart from You (君と別れて) about the son of a geisha who’s ashamed of his mother’s profession. The film is halfway between a melodrama characteristic of the silent era and one of the more complicated stories of financial…
A massive, run down Italian manor serves as a setting for strange murderous games in 1972's cumbersomely titled Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave). The second giallo film I’ve seen based on my favourite Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Black Cat”,…
Two new Twin Peaks soundtracks came out on Friday, one featuring mainly instrumentals and the other focusing on songs with vocals, mostly songs that were performed in the memorable Roadhouse scenes often featured at the ends of episodes. I didn’t need to see many episodes to know that Twin Peaks: The Return was going…
I’ve said before I’m a sucker for stories about groups of characters trapped in a house or a ship or some place else, preferably dealing with a haunting. So I liked the 2011 Doctor Who audio play The House of Blue Fire which begins in a house where four amnesiac strangers have been gathered. Ultimately, the story…
A new chapter of my infrequently updated webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah, is online to-day in which one of our heroines hatches a scheme with dubious ethical support.
If there’s one series that would really benefit from a remake it’s The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. There’s so much I admire about the original anime series, which I just finished rewatching, though. It’s really only one or two things that bug me about it.
One of the reasons Twin Peaks: The Return kept me glued to the screen is David Lynch’s seeming ability to read my expectations and then exploit them to provide a striking experience. It’s like he could read my mind and knew just how to pull the rug out from under me. So here’s a list of ten times Twin Peaks: The Return…
With all the rejoicing across the internet to-day over the news that Corey Trevorrow is out as director of Star Wars: Episode IX there’s naturally been a lot of speculation as to who’ll take over the reins. I say; get Gordon Cole! That is, David Lynch. He was, after all, George Lucas’ first choice to direct Return of…
Part of me wonders how I can go back to watching any other TV show after Twin Peaks, part of me feels like the brilliance of Twin Peaks has enhanced my viewing experience of everything else. As last night’s finale brought home, it is a show about experience, about contemplation of the moment and the potentials that…
It’s been really hot here in southern California lately, another year of record temperatures, and once again autumn is shaping up to be hotter than summer. Often in hot weather my mind starts to dwell on movies where characters complain about the heat so this morning I found myself watching Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 film …
