Playing as much CK2 as I do, I took notice of this Netflix show when it first popped up. I love the Early Medieval Period as the Wild West of Europe, when kingdoms were new and ambition was the way forward. When I first tried to watch it, I was turned off by the low… Read More Quick Review: The Last Kingdom
I had planned to try and view this prior to recording our most recent Shallow & Pedantic podcast, but didn’t get around to it. Nevertheless, with the absorption of all things Shining, it was bound to happen. So we grabbed it at the library and gave it a watch. Sequels are a delicate business. In… Read More Quick Review: Doctor Sleep
Yes, I finally watched it. I’d had a hard time getting into it: first off-put by the banality of “LOL HItler” (World War 2 was eighty years ago), then by being bored during the first half-hour. Frankly, for a film that billed itself as a trangressive comedy, there weren’t nearly enough laughs (the most transgressive… Read More Quick Review: Jojo Rabbit
What can I say, sometimes my mood becomes very Russian. Dovlatov is a film about a Soviet dissident writer before he became well-known. It’s less a move than it is a portrait of the writer as a winsome rapscalion. Not very much happens except you spend a week or so in this guys’ life in… Read More Quick Reviews: Dovlatov and The Death of Stalin
It was boring. There. Actually, let me be fair. The first half is kind of boring. The second half describes the conflict between the mob and Jimmy Hoffa, and it’s more interesting than you’d think. Obviously it was dumb for Hoffa to get in bed with organized crime, and obviously that was only gonna end… Read More Quick Review: The Irishman
On paper, this is the sort of thing I should hate: an unnecessary exploitation of an excellent TV show several years after the fact, by a streaming service that just happens to still have the original on its platform. And far from being a movie, it’s really just a feature-length epilogue of the show. You… Read More Quick Review: El Camino
TV tropes are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they exist because they work: they create a kind of structural shorthand that writers can use to keep producing content reliably. On the other hand, used at the wrong time, or in the wrong show, they can smother any unique voices or angles. I believe… Read More Quick Review: Mindhunter Season 2
Weird little quirk of a film that somehow manages to condemn the age we live in, and the Matrix that we detest and fear and and cannot bear to be apart from (there’s no paradox there, the second thing leads inevitably to the first). Meet Ingrid. Ingrid is unhealthy. Ingrid obsesses with people she only… Read More Quick Review: Ingrid Goes West
I detest serial killers. By which I mean, I detest the attention paid to them by popular culture. There is a sickness in being as aware of them as we are, something concupiscent in our fascination with twisted pyschopathy. That being said, I am hardly less guilty. I regard From Hell (the graphic novel, not the movie)… Read More Quick Review: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile
This little NetFlick represents the third time Kevin Costner has played an historical lawman up against a famous criminal. In 1987, he did the Hollywood version of Elliot Ness, playing a bright-eyed young crusader forced to get rough to take down Al Capone. In 1994, he did the opposite of that, giving us the grim… Read More Quick Review: The Highwaymen
Content Blues 