Blog Archives

The Twilight Zone was a cultural phenomenon, and ever since TV producers have been stealing the formula and making bad TV with it. Though, to be honest, I don’t get the feeling that Amazon’s Phillip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams is trying to be The Twilight Zone. It’s more ripping off Black Mirror, another British-made sci-fi-centric anthology show about […]

The latest in a long string of live-action remakes of Disney classics, Christopher Robin took a different tack because it would be absolutely impossible to duplicate in a live-action film the charming and whimsical frame of the Winnie the Pooh movie, wherein rain would (for example) cause water to spill out of the page of […]

Okay, that headline’s not QUITE fair, but I just couldn’t pass up the soulfully seductive sounds of a totally terrific triple alliteration. So sue me. Here’s something a little more fair (but which doesn’t make for as snappy a headline): Jack Ryan—the new Amazon Prime video series about Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst character—isn’t totally rotten, […]

Tom Cruise is back. Mission: Impossible Fallout—the sixth movie in the 22-year-old franchise—opened Friday, and if the news can be believed, it scored the highest opening weekend gross of the whole series (a cool $61.5 million domestic plus another $91.5 million worldwide). Given the somewhat cool reception to M:I 5 (aka Rogue Nation), the uptick […]

Since they first got big, Penn and Teller have been known as the bad boys of magic. Their acts did away with, and in many cases explicitly rejected, the familiar patter and psuedo-mystical trappings so common with magicians up until that point. Originally loathed by fellow magicians (irritated by the duo’s habit of revealing some […]

Here’s the story of a little movie that could, a really-real urban legend made by a legitimate cinematic legend, a movie never released in movie theaters, a movie whose reels were supposedly burned to ash by the Hollywood producer who bought the rights to it, a movie that somehow leaked to the public and (like […]

So, The Incredibles II: I didn’t hate it. And maybe that’s not surprising. Despite being bought by Disney—who’s run the Star Wars movies so far into the ground, they’ve plummeted underground and are now nearing the Earth’s core (and also The Core is a much better movie than the last two Star Wars flicks combined)—they’ve […]

YouTube Red is not great. It’s pretty pricey—$10.00 a month—and has a very thin roster of content. And the content it has? Not very good. Last week I reviewed Cobra Kai, the single best show on YouTube Red. So, just for the heck of it, I decided to watch some other shows and see how […]

Lost in Space, Netflix’s revamp of the classic SF TV series, is so abysmally bad that there’s no end to the possible critiques one could lodge against it. The biggest complaint—and, ultimately, the only one that matters—is that it’s boring. Tedious. Excruciatingly bland and stupefying. In fact, the only thing that broke up the boredom […]