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This is the only one of Mike Flanagan's TV projects that was meant to continue, but it was immediately cancelled so for better or worse it ended up being another of his horror miniseries. (That's why this review isn't on Letterboxd, where ongoing or meant-to-be-ongoing shows aren't listed.) I liked two of the earlier ones a lot, another more-than-a-lot (I'll write about Midnight Mass eventually), and another not as much. It's obvious right away that this is the same guy, working in a similar style, doing another mashup of multiple works with an ensemble cast—but instead of his usual ensemble (except for a few cameos), it's a bunch of teen characters in adaptations of young-adult books by Christopher Pike. And it's great—one of his best I think, although the material is so different that it's hard to compare.
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Watching the current shockingly well done TV adaptation of The Sandman*, I figured a lot of things would have to be reworked to set it in 2022 instead of 1989; those were mostly handled in pretty reasonable ways. Only one thing has really made me feel old though, and it's this: in episode 9, the creepy serial-killer-fan dude now writes a blog instead of a zine.

It's not that that makes any real difference; it's just that that particular brief subplot always stuck out in my mind due to a combination of two things, which are really one thing:

1. I got very grossed out as a teenager in 1988 by running across a copy of Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture anthology—a mishmash of transgressive outsider art and horrible edgelord bullshit, which was framed by pseudo-scholarly ruminations about what it all means, even though Parfrey pretty clearly just thought the horrible edgelord bullshit was cool.**

2. This subplot in The Sandman—where fascist incel ultra-creep "Philip Sitz", author of Chaste, manages to finally meet some real monsters and regrets it very much—is the only bit I know of in the series that's a gleeful Dante-style personal attack on a contemporary writer. That's Peter Sotos, who put out only two issues of Pure in the '80s and then got busted for possession of child porn, but got a worshipful profile and interview in Apocalypse Culture (so it's possible Gaiman found out about him the exact same way I did) and some ironic art cred out of it. Gaiman was clearly not amused.

I'm aware (due to the Internet) that other people figured this out too of course, but in 1990 I felt like that comic book was aiming this inside joke directly at me, in a friendly way, like: "Hey, sorry you had to find out so dramatically early on that there are a lot of unbelievable assholes mixed in with the kind of art-weirdos you're curious about. Would it help if I make one of them ironically die?"

Vida, season 2 (Starz, 2019)

There's an inevitable falling off from the wild energy of the first season just because we already know these people and their environment now, and it meanders a little with the increased number of episodes, but I'm still really loving this. Just to continue with my strained analogy to comics from the previous review, I think something the show gains from its half-hour format is a willingness to compress story and character developments in ways that a typical dramatic series wouldn't do but a good cartoonist often would—choosing just a key moment to convey what's changed rather than playing it out in a whole scene, and letting you sort it out later. So for instance when Emma's lover, who had seemed like an interesting person who might help her loosen up a bit and get more comfortable in queer social circles, turns out to be kind of an asshole when she's with certain belligerent friends, it's a jarring turn... but it doesn't contradict anything we've seen and it doesn't require any justification, it's just one of those things where you realize you didn't know someone as well as you thought, and in hindsight you can see why she perceives Emma the way she does. Ser Anzoategui as Eddy continues to be the heart of the show, even though she's somewhat sidelined till things get hectic toward the end. Roberta Colindrez and Raúl Castillo are adorable and immediately seem like they belong here. This deserves to be way better known.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, season 3 (Netflix, 2019)

As I suspected, most of the stuff that was soft-pedaled in the previous mini-season is back with a vengeance now: there's a whole lot of action and cool SF/fantasy imagery, and a lot of stuff about Shadow Weaver and Entrapta, and the fate of the world and/or universe. Catra continues to become a worse person but there's still a lot of sympathy for the villains in general, surprisingly including Hordak who isn't by any means a nice guy but does have an understandable motivation. Also, Geena Davis plays a giant barbarian who is unapologetically super-butch, and she's great. I have no complaints except that they didn't repeat the full She-Ra transformation sequence even once.

The Boys, season 1 (Amazon, 2019)

Most of what I would have said about this was said much better by this guy. It's a super-violent cynical superhero satire where most of the superheroes are awful and a nebbishy guy becomes part of a plot against them, and that could be good, except the writing is so, so bad. Plot points and characterization are just made up and forgotten about for no particular reason except that they feel like it's time to do something gruesome now, or have someone freak out now, or throw in some spy/mercenary/assassin stuff because that's cool; the only thing that's surprising about the big plot twist toward the end (when we find out how all these super-people came to be) is that apparently no one was the least bit curious about it before. I defy anyone to explain why they keep sending nebbishy guy on secret missions when 90% of the enemies know who he is, or why an ultra-powerful evil corporation is somehow able to freeze all the heroes' assets as soon as their cover is blown and yet is unable to catch them when they go home to their families. There's a slight gesture toward saying something about superheroes, corporations, violence, sports, sexism, revenge, etc., but mostly in thuddingly obvious ways. It doesn't matter, the main point of this is just style, and it does have a lot of style: it looks great, the scary stuff is scary, the gore is gory, and the cast is way better than it deserves—especially Elisabeth Shue as the world's most reasonable and empathetic corporate villain, and Antony Starr as the evil Superman, although Starr gets less interesting once they make him into a total psycho instead of just an unethical guy who's kind of lazy and smarmy and immature. Karl Urban is badly wasted on a generic tough-guy role that illustrates everything I can't stand about Garth Ennis's writing. I did enjoy it from time to time, but then it kept pulling more stupid shit so I just hated myself for doing so.

I've never liked reading about or hearing about the British royal family. I do like historical dramas, but they usually work less well for me in TV series form because the longer the story goes on, the harder it is to corral actual history into a narrative shape. Whether The Crown works so well for me just because of the high level of craft in terms of acting and writing and production design, or if there actually is something interesting about the monarchy after all, I'm not sure, but I never would've imagined I'd be so into this.
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(Disclaimer: I'm two degrees of separation from Tanya Saracho, whose show this is.)

I'm a little nervous about comparing Vida to Jaime Hernandez's rightfully famous Locas comics in Love and Rockets, because that could just be a pointless way of saying that I'm unfamiliar with other serialized fiction about Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles (also, a comic is not a TV storyboard, duh). But what I mean, besides that Vida is really really good, is that the writing and directing(*) in both of them share some distinctive qualities that work especially well for the stories they're telling. I'll get to that in a minute, I just wanted to put it up front because as soon as I realized what this was slightly reminding me of, I was pretty much guaranteed to like it.
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It took me a while to warm up to this show; by the end of the first season I was at "OK, it's fun, let's give it a chance" but it wasn't until the end of the second that I was fully on board. ( Read more... )

In a few decades (if we still have genre entertainment) the idea of characters stuck in a time loop will be either completely forgotten, or one of those strangely long-lived subgenres that most people aren't familiar with the origin of, like "zombie apocalypse" or "people flying around inside giant robots." I've seen it done half a dozen times and you basically always get the same story beats, where the person accumulates a lot of information about people and has to repeat a series of actions to get toward whatever the goal is and make it all stop. Usually, unlike the original version in Groundhog Day where the limit is the end of the day or death, they just go with it being death (which kind of parallels how the zombie idea evolved from Romero: he had every dead person coming back and also it's contagious, but now it's usually just that it's contagious). And usually, unlike Groundhog Day, there's some attempt to explain why this is happening other than "because you're a jerk and it's funny." And usually I just don't see the point, except for Edge of Tomorrow which is great.

Anyway, Russian Doll deceptively looks at first like just another one of these things. ( Read more... )

I wanted to see this show because Kiernan Shipka is in it; more about that later. The basic setup comes from the recent Archie Comics thing, which was a scarier version of the long-running Sabrina the Teenage Witch and its many spin-offs (I haven't read or seen any of them), so this isn't exactly a case of trying to come up with a new take on a supernatural youth series.

Still, there are a few things that set it apart from Buffy, Charmed, etc. ( Read more... )

This is sort of an anti-nostalgia show, in that it wants to remind you how scary and disgusting it was to be 13. I didn't feel I needed that, so I hadn't really been tempted to watch it. Well, it's pretty great.
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