Sometimes the headlines just write themselves. I watched the Charlie Sheen interview/documentary, AKA Charlie Sheen, on Netflix. It was exactly as entertaining as I could have imagined. Somewhere in the second part, Chuck Lorre describes Sheen as having the kind of dark charisma that Dean Martin had. That’s accurate. Sheen, even at 60, retains the… Read More The Wasted Life of Charlie Sheen
No, not really. At least, not confirmed. But there are rumors, and not from Variety: Mindhunter star Holt McCallany just gave an interview where he talks about how the show might return and the status of director David Fincher’s involvement. The interview is with CBR promoting McCallany’s other new show, The Waterfront, and he addressed the season 3 issue:… Read More Mindhunter Season 3 You Guys!
I first saw Wicked on Broadway near the end of Idina Menzel’s run with the show. I thought then that the show was interesting technically, well-acted, had quality songs, and that I didn’t engage with the story in any way. Recently I watched the film of Wicked, Part One, and got pretty much the same… Read More The Thing With Wicked
Hollywood continues to profit from my generation’s entertainment conditioning. Warner Bros. and Tim Burton’s sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and Paramount’s animated “Transformers One” topped international box office charts over Universal and DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot.” -Rebecca Rubin, “Blah Blah Movie Titles Things You Know“, Variety.com I remain incontrovertibly annoyed at the existence of Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,… Read More Sequels, Legacy Sequels, and Human Robots
In 1983 a group of Neo-Nazis, calling themselves “The Order” (because of course) committed some bank robberies and stole cars in Idaho. I was alive in 1983, and this is the first I’ve heard of this, probably because they never made it outside Idaho before the FBI brought the hammer down on them. I suppose… Read More Jude Law Thinks Nazis Are, Wait For It… Bad.
Apropos of nothing, I had the theme song to Tiny Toons stuck in my head one afternoon this summer. I sang it, my wife sang it, we knew it, we remembered it. We are old. Back in the 1980’s one of the three networks had three hours of Looney Tunes Cartoons on every Saturday morning,… Read More Tiny Toons and Animaniacs: Exploitation vs. Creativity
If you’re one of our Patreon subscribers, you’ve had access to this episode of the Shallow & Pedantic Podcast for a little while. But if you’re not, why then… here it is. The habit now is to bust these episodes into smaller increments, less-than-an-hour: We are expecting to record a new episode this weekend, so… Read More New Old Podcasts: Shallow & Pedantic does the Second Dune Movie
I’m a fan of both Blood Meridian and the Coen Brothers film of No Country for Old Men, both by Cormac McCarthy, without fully understanding them. They are dense pieces of uncomfortable art that transgress what is expected, that show the world as it is, happy endings be damned. Over the long weekend, I happened… Read More Explaining Cormac McCarthy
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is one of those movies that I mildly disliked upon first viewing, but has come to grow on me. It is based on a Canadian comic book series that I have never read. I recently watched the first four episodes of the new animated series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, which… Read More Things That Annoy Me About Scott Pilgrim
It’s become a commonplace that streaming services are treacherous. You put your faith in them to provide you with content, and they pull it according to bean-counter whim and puritanical outrage. Physical media is the only way to preserve culture! Even directors are getting in the act: Christopher Nolan recently made headlines when he humorously urged fans… Read More Looney Tunes, Fandom, and physical vs. Streaming
Content Blues 