Are my expectations too high? Is it wrong to have high expectations of media? They can make magic… so why aren’t they? Why does it feel like everything anticipated in the last year/year and a half has been a disappointment? Why are they filling the void with Space Jam 2 and Trolls 3 and Five Nights at Freddy’s and another Saw movie and another Fast and Furious movie and Blue Beetle and Shazam 2 and another Indiana Jones and Disney live-action remakes and, of course, anything from Marvel. MOVIES Avatar 2 was more of the same, another bloated military rah-rah explosions and gunsfest. Lightyear puts its message before the story.…
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The Orville Begs the Question: Moclans and Their Gender/Sexuality Conservatism
The Orville was a dumb Star Trek: The Next Generation rip-off that felt like self-insert fanfic. I mean, they didn’t even do a good job filing off the serial numbers. They shamelessly refer to nothing but twentieth-century Earth pop culture like nothing in the past four hundred years made a difference. None of the characters act like they come from a military or a utopia. They’re more obsessed with petty gossip, bar tricks, and sex than exploring the galaxy. One of the episode’s inciting incidents comes from a character dry-humping a statue during a first-contact visit. This guy’s a senior officer. Seth MacFarlane is a blunt hammer of a writer.…
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I Can Pinpoint the Problem with The Mandalorian Season 3
So everyone’s been in debate whether this season of The Mandalorian was any good or not. Some people give it a thumbs up because it delivers an engaging adventure and characters. Others thought it abandoned the main characters for others’ storylines (ex. Bo-Katan, the pirates, Elia Kane) or that it violated “Show, don’t tell” or was aimless. I think all that could have been forgiven if this season delivered something the other two seasons did. Give us something unexpected. This season played it safe. Too safe. They didn’t do anything that broke open a mystery or risked offending fans or twisted established lore. The first season delivered two big chunks…
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Sweet Tooth Looks Great But Is Horrible
Oh my god, I can’t get out of my head how much I hate this show. The first three episodes make it look great, but then the next five A) drag it out like a motherfucker and B) have some characters I can’t stand. Most of all the kid. I hate this kid. Don’t get me wrong, the actor behind it is fine. The effects behind him aren’t great–his ears don’t look real, they look robotic. They don’t move like real deer ears. But that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that the kid is the root of all their problems. He’s the plot mover. Story slowing down?…
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What’s the Deal With The Masked Singer?
I’m trying to figure out the appeal of “The Masked Singer“. Commercials keep telling me it’s the super lucky happy number one most-liked most-popular show in the world and watching it will cure coronavirus. I see it all the time at the gym and it just looks shiny and stupid. First of all, it’s got Jenny McCarthy in it. Fuck her. Fuck her with a big unpeeled carrot up her ass. She brought all the anti-vaxxers upon us. She made it so celebrity hype gets a bigger voice than common sense and scientific accuracy. Fuck her. She should be blacklisted from anything in Hollywood (making her name ironic). And throw…
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I Learned Some Bad Lessons About Love from The Wonder Years
I don’t know what all this business about family togetherness and keeping fingers of phones at the table is about. My family watched TV at dinner. From six o’clock to seven, pre-prime time, were all the syndicated sitcoms from the house that Generation X built. Murphy Brown, Designing Women, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Empty Nest, Growing Pains, Night Court. And The Wonder Years. I didn’t know it at the time, but The Wonder Years was for my parents what The Goldbergs is for me — a sitcom that capitalizes on nostalgia and trying to convince oneself that the pop culture was more meaningful than it was (in this case, that…
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Disney, Please, Do the Muppets Justice
Disney, let’s talk. You’ve had one of the greatest, most nostalgic franchise in your hands for twenty years now. And you’ve done very little with them. What have we got? Rehashes of “what worked thirty years ago” like Muppets Tonight and The Muppets. Crappy made-for-TV specials based on existing material like The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz. And the worst offender yet — “The Office with Muppets Muppets”. People said “hey, this has Bill Prady and Steve Whitmire and Bill Barretta, all veterans of Muppet stuff. It’ll be all right.” No. As we’ve seen, it’s not all right. Did you test this with focus groups? Did audiences laugh uproariously at this…
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And Now My Confession
At first, I was like… But then I saw My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and I was like… Call me a brony, call me a nutjob, call me mentally deficient. All I know is I have two little girls. Either I can let them choose whatever trashy, shallow 20-minute commercial happens to be on when Daddy needs to pay bills, or I can choose for them. I choose MLP, and they approve. When I pop in the DVD, they fly around with their Rainbow Dash toys which we got from McDonald’s months ago, and had no context for until now. This is not a show I just set on,…
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Doctor Who In Review
“Doctor Who”. It’s the one major part of geek culture I sorely lacked experience in. Before I was introduced by a friend, I really had no idea what Doctor Who was. It looked cheesy. It looked low-budget. It looked stupid. It looked like all those science fiction movies MST3K made fun of + special effects from a live-action children’s show. Neil Gaiman said he (like other British people) watched Doctor Who sitting hiding behind their couch, peeping out. I never understood why. Now I’ve now finished four seasons of the new “Doctor Who” series (on to Matt Smith!), and finally feel sufficiently versed to give an opinion. I wanted to…
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My Top Ten Hottest Women Who Aren’t Real (10 through 7)
10. Rosalina I had some trouble with the number ten spot, whether to put Rosalina or Peach here (and for a time, it was Magica DeSpell. Jeez, what was I thinking?). Peach has some cute aspects, but ultimately I decided that A) Peach is still pretty damn annoying, always getting kidnapped and B) Peach has only gotten hot in recent years. Before that she was obnoxiously saccharine, bland, and no matter what incarnation, her voice was grating. She only achieved notoriety with me by donning skimpy bathing suits and tennis outfits in fan art. I probably wasn’t supposed to write that part. Rosalina, however, has always been hot. She’s tall,…
