20 Best TV Episodes of 2024

1. Who Dat, Life and Beth (Hulu)-The hidden gem of a show explores the relationship between a rustic outsider on the spectrum (played improbably well by Michael Cera) and urban sophisticate Amy Schumer as (for lack of a better characterization) Amy Schumer. The wedding episode exemplifies the taking-more-than-giving nature of Beth with regards to John, and the way the pair's compromises leads to its own sweet union. The wedding episode expands the world of the pair's circles, it's wild, it's funny, and it's achingly sweet.

2. Ill Somerso (Episode 3), Ripley-The show doesn’t provide much surprise if you’ve seen the 1999 film “The Talented Mr. Ripley” which is also adapted by the Patricia Highsmith novel. But in the hands of Andrew Scott, his steely exterior turns the murder of the object of his adoration (Johnny Flynn) into a complete shocker. Scott’s lightning-fast psychopathic instincts are here on full display and it’s chilling. The show is lit in a picturesque black-and-white setting while also being muted in its sound scape, which makes the experience of a drama in an episode like this more vouyeristic.

3.     High Potential-One Of Us (Midseason finale)-For a show that's never designed to be more than a serial with a snarky protagonist, it ramps up the pathos quite well between Morgan and her the daughter gives the episode real stakes. The kidnappers' dynamic as one of them becomes steadily more unhinged is a treat.

4. Sleep Hypnosis, What We Do in the Shadows (FX)-It’s more in ROFTL territory than plot movement, but how often is s Colin Robinson ever given the chance to do something this smart (hypnotizing Nandoor into talking up Colin in his native language)? And how much more random can one get than making a vampire believe he is Richard Nixon? The episode also makes great use of Guillermo in his “I’m so over this” mode.

5. Do You Get it Sports are Huge in this Town, Clone High-Frida Kahlo has a knacok as the star of "sport" of snorkeling (pointing at fish) with a hilariously on-point send-up of the VH1 style documentary on a past life of Scudsworth as a world-class snorkeler who's achilles heel was overconfidence and fast food. Anything that sheds light on Scudsworth's past is worth it in my book.

6. Krapocalypse, Krapopolis (Fox)-King Ty has to save civilization in Groundhog Day fashion. The entire day resets when a volcano kills him and he has to learn from his mistakes and bring everyone up to speed before the volcano devours them. In Krapopolis tradition, no one actually appreciates he king, and when they do, In another Krapopolis, the God who set up this hellish situation is driven by equal parts fickleness and boredom.

7. Halloween 5, Ghosts (CBS)-It’s hard not to love what the ultra-rigid Patience (Mary Holland) brings to the crew. She fits in less with the octet than any other character we've seen to date and I love those jagged edges. Namely, she scares everyone to death and bloodies up the walls. Bring on the chaos.

8. March Madness, What We Do in the Shadows (FX)-Shawnie gets obsessed with another sports phenomemenon in March Madness, and as usual, the vampires have no idea what’s going on. These are the same guys who attended a Superb Owl party. And in the B-plot, Guillermo is getting along in the corporate world when he blah blah blah Colin punches Guillermo in the face. Wow, that happens. Multiple times too. Guillermo and the crew interacting in the corporate world was an outstanding arc that bought along some of the crew’s best interactions with the non-vampire world -- especially, Nadja, who has the sharp-tongued insult catalogue for a finance bro.

9. Episode 5, Baby Reindeer (Hulu)ts-This is a show that's so hard to watch, that it's not gonna fully feel cathartic until the last episode when Martha is done away with, but this hope spot when Donny and his parents can release their demons together. What a sentimental gut punch.

10. Episode 2.2, The Tourist  (BBC ---> Netflix) Ethan obnoxiously inflicting both his aerophobia and his route to self-discovery on his seatmate is worth the price of admission for this episode alone. On top of that, this episode sets up the eventual collision course between leprechaun Norman Bates (he’s Irish and short, come on, it’s an easy target) and Helen. It also has the best dramatization of the Frog-Scorpion (the fable about the scorpion stinging the frog because it's in his nature) analogy TV has done to date.

11. A Shiksa Walks into a Temple, Nobody Wants This (Netflix)-The incompatibility between Jewish values (which discourages intermarriage, if not outright bans it in some sects) is never easy to reconcile with our modern-day conception of romance and free will. Throughout the first two episodes of the series, hunky Rabbi Noah seems to be broadcasting entirely different things between his head and heart. It's an episode where we have no idea what's happening. Why is he following her into a car on the middle of Shabbat. Even crazier, why is Sasha going along? Is this a date? It's also the start of Morgan and Sasha as sublime third and fourth wheels to this pairing.

12. Thor, Krapopolis (Fox)- It’s hard to get better than a cosmology crossover with the Norse gods. As someone who has completely skipped over the Thor franchise, my knowledge of these gods is a little thin, but the characters of Thor, Freya, Odin, and Loki came pretty ready-made with comic quirks that made the episode delightful. Besides, Scandanavian archetypes are pretty universal. Jealous Deliria was also a new shade to witness and the plot all got resolved on a nice brick joke.

13. The Killer Inside Me, The Caped Crusader (Amazon)-A very interesting retelling of the Harvey Dent story that leaves Harvey a bit more sympathetic. There's a lot of dramatic irony here--we know Dent is going to turn bad--that limits the possibilities of any of this, but the remorse on Harvey's part is something new.

14. Circle Sewn with Fate/Unlock thy Hidden Gate (Episode 2), Agatha All Along (Disney Plus)-The creation of the coven. I don't think Agatha All Along worked. It was too insiderish rather than what Marvel properties are at their best: Comic-book level knowledge serves as easter eggs, but otherwise the TV shows/films should be inviting to those outside the nerddom. However, this creation of the uneasy truce among former enemies and this realpolitik on Agatha's part of negotiating what these people wanted and needed. The scene of four wannabe witches and put-upon neighbor Sharon singing the Witches Road song in the round medley is also something else.

 15. Eunjangdo (Episode 10), Cobra Kai-For a show that used up all its plot threads by season 5's finale, it’s supremely impressive that the show gave us anything worth caring about in the final season. Season 6. It took us a little while to get there, though, but it found its groove by the end, and as per custom, we got an epic brawl. Though Terry and John Kreese continue their annoying habit of being part of the plot, they’re at least displaced from center stage to make way for fresh blood. With the fall of Kwon, the show left a gaping question mark of a cliffhanger.

16. Ice Day, Krapopolis (Fox)- it's a rare episode in which King Ty succeeds with a love interest and there are multiple late stage twists. It's not the most monumnetal episode, but it's sweet.

17. Lovebird (Episode 5), Resident Alien-Harry and Heather (Edi Patterson) fall in love and have an interspecies romp in the middle of a helluva awkward dinner party with Asta and D'Arcy, hard to get more riotously funny than that in this show that plays comedy straight.

18. Pilot, Interior Chinatown (Hulu)-The show had a distinct culturally specific noir feel to it at the start. Unfortunately, it became too much of a procedural with the preposterousness of the Josh Schwartz series Chuck (ordinary Joe Shmoe is useful to crime fighting), but it started out really strong. Jimmy O. Yang’s subdued voiceover drips with a sad semi-noirish pathos and there’s an outlandish tone is the show transitions between the mundane and a gnarly fight scene.

19. Episode 1.7, KAOS (Netflix)-The lengths of Zues's amorality and power lust are shown in their fullest extent here in the pool party frying. It's a penultimate episode that raised the urgency of the stakes

20 He Sees Dead People, Ghosts (CBS)-Jay’s sister Bella has turned a wheel from her penchant of bad boys and has shacked up with adorkable pushover Eric. Personally, I’m still rooting for her to work out the beyond-the-dead logistics and get with Trevor, but this will have to do for now. The episode takes a sublime twist when it’s discovered that Eric can’t really see dead people.
Eric’s pushover tendencies is a great source of comic humor and it drives the plot brilliantly as he is encouraged to throw himself down the stairs to sell his loss of ghost connection.

How Many Tim Burton Films Have You Seen? (Originally Published at The Solute)

Originally Published at The Solute

Overview: I’m a fan of Tim Burton but I can’t unequivocally say I’m a fan of the Gothic art that inspires Burton himself. In other words, if Tim Burton and I were to walk through an art gallery, I’m sure we’d be drawn to different paintings, but I would still want to see the world through Tim Burton’s eyes. Burton’s visual style can best be described as if a city’s architecture were modelled on the interior of a Halloween haunted house with a dash of German Expressionism thrown in.
Burton is one of the most visually distinctive directors of moviedom today. He is apologetically drawn to the same thematic and stylistic territory through roughly thirty years and counting, and his fans have mostly been onboard. Thematically, Burton loves stories of outsiders and estrangement. Negligent or completely absent parents are a common theme. In terms of source material, he’s chosen a comic series about a superhero filling in the hole of his dead parents (Batman), an orphanage for children (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children), a girl named Alice who must have some pretty free range parents if they leave her alone to her own devices so much (Alice in Wonderland), and Willy Wonka whose emotionally distant dad (Christopher Lee in one of his best roles) is posited as the source for his loopiness. On top of that, Big Fish is about a man who can’t separate the fact and fiction of his father which is sufficient meta-commentary on the emotional distance between a kid and his father.

The two least Burtonesque films outside of the ones done as studio favors (Planet of the Apes, Mars Attacks) were rich biographical examinations of artists that inspired the director: Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood and Margaret Keane in Big Eyes. Unlike his Planet of the Apes remake, which no one really thinks of as a necessary installment in Tim Burton’s filmography, these two films epitomize Burton’s vision but in a more personal way.

What makes Burton worth watching isn’t just his visual prowess or his singular vision, but he deserves credit for handling human relationships as well. Whether it’s relationships between people and their found families, romance, mentor-protége relationships or father-son, there’s a certain sugary sweetness that the fantastical nature of his stories can give him leeway to pull off.

A Brief Biography: Tim Burton was born to a murderous barber and a the Queen of Hearts—okay, seriously, Tim Burton was born in Burbank to a father who was a minor league player before settling to work in the parks and recreation department (probably not as fun as the 2009 NBC show) and a mother who owned a cat-themed gift shop (that sounds pretty interesting). Just like many of his characters, he found his suburban life bland, felt disconnected from his father, and was very much a withdrawn loner in school. He did play water polo at Burbank High School, however (anyone know where that places you on the social food chain in Southern California high schools?). Another commonality that he has with the protagonist from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was that from age ten to his high school graduation the left his parents to live with his grandmother.

Burton watched a lot of old-school horror films, B-movies, German expressionist films, and was especially intrigued by Vincent Price. He first gained notice for his artistic talent through winning a local contest by designing an anti-litter poster. After high school, he was accepted on scholarship to the California Institute of the Arts which was dubbed by the LA Times as the “Harvard Business School of animation.” Although the CIA has turned out directors like Sofia Coppola and James Mangold, the vast majority of its alumni are animators and a lot of them (at least at the time Burton graduated) went straight to work for Disney. Despite not having a style that meshed with Disney’s family-friendly vision, Burton took advantage of the job placement and worked at Disney. As one would expect, Burton clashed with colleagues but contributed to a couple of Disney features in the 80s and still impressed them enough with his talent that he got the green light to make “Vincent” with a $60,000 budget. “Vincent” is about a young kid who was obsessed with Vincent Price which, again, is pretty autobiographical. He then made his first live-action short, “Frankenweenie,” which was turned into a 2012 film. Then Paul Ruebens came along and eventually Beetlejuice and Batman and that gave him box office clout.

Throughout his filmography, Burton would be careful to keep an eye on pre-existing intellectual properties so he could justify big budgets because those ornate gothic visions don’t come cheap. Today, Tim Burton lives in Ojai and although he hasn’t spoken with his father since high school (although it’s possible that his father died since I read this), he has a younger brother, Danny, who’s a working artist and supposedly is more avant-garde than Tim. He’s also associated romantically with Helena Bonham Carter who he’s not technically married to (as far as my research shows). He is often recognized in public with his disheveled hair and dark sunglasses.

A couple more interesting bits of trivia: Burton revealed on the Batman DVD commentary that he was “banned” from comic con for his film deviating from the canon. Also, Joel Schumacher who many believe to have ruined what Tim Burton built with Batman is good friends with Burton. For two people with such different styles, who'd have thunk?

How many have I seen: Thanks to a Tim Burton discussion I attended at DC’s Cinema Lounge in which I was forced to up my game, I’m up to 8. It’s also possible that I saw Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure as a kid and don’t remember it. The others are Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Ed Wood, Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, and Big Eyes.

My Favorite: There are three films on this list I think are absolutely brilliant, but I’ll stick with the one that’s his most highly praised film (though I’m sure there will always be debate): Ed Wood. The concept  portraying history’s worst film maker as a success story because the man never knew who bad he was – is gold which gives the film a solid headstart. The execution is even better: There’s the scene in which he gets advice from Orson Welles and the decision to stop the film as they’re walking into the premiere (a la Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). As previously stated, this is a film with less visual showmanship, but the film still has its touches. One thing that’s a little disappointing on a rewatch I had a few years ago: Johnny Depp doesn’t really show as much range here as he usually does and his overeager naivette is a little overly reminiscent of the way he chose to portray Willy Wonka.

Underrated: I’m going to break my rule and go with a tie. I’m sorry! Because it was released on Christmas day of 2014 by the Weinstein Company, Big Eyes got a fair amount of Oscar hype but its bad box office cooled the movie’s awards season hopes significantly although it got some love at the Golden Globes. Too bad because this is a very unique experience. It’s a can-do story of underdog artists that pulls the wool over our eyes midway through as it morphs into a full-on domestic horror film. Christophe Waltz goes from sly opportunist to the husband from Hell and the culminating courtroom finale is a great female empowerment moment.

Batman Returns is a film I felt somewhat frightened of as a child, but as I’ve grown older and have seen more Burton films, I’ve come to see it as the most quintessentially Burtonesque work and a triumph of the man to be able to meld his style beautifully with a pre-existing story. The 1989 Batman suffers from the same problem that The Dark Knight did (at least in my eyes): The Joker is a villain that lends itself to actor bravado. Batman Returns, in contrast, (and the rest of Nolan’s trilogy) has a much more balanced story that allows the director to be more of the star. The film is fantastical, absurdist and strangely grounded in two origin stories that seem like more than just excuses to get the film from the first to second acts. Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer really own their parts but the exposition for Cat Woman and the slow creep of The Penguin into the scene are both delicious. (The Penguin is first revealed after the prologue, as a deformed hand jutting out of a sewer grate as a newspaper alludes to him in its headline. Later you see his lair and minions before seeing the Penguin in the flesh.) The design of Wayne manor and the playful villainy of the Red Triangle Gang are also highlights. The film ends on a tragic note but with its artistry, it’s a tragedy of epic proportions.

Overrated: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’ve always found the source material weird and kind of a misguided allegory, and the Gene Wilder version creeped me out as a child, so I might not have been the ideal audience for this. Burton handles the adaptation kind of well and properly highlights the holes the novel doesn’t really explore: Willy Wonka is kind of a cruel and weird person that children might not want to idolize so much just because he has candy. However, the visual scheme didn’t really do it for me. The bright colors looked kindergartenish, the army of identical little people was more aggressive-looking than charming, and I couldn’t tell if the film was trying to make commentary on Michael Jackson (who was kind of hated by the public at the time) and felt the film should have gone one way or another with it.

Blind spots: The three most acclaimed films I haven’t seen are Big Fish, Sweeney Todd, and Beetlejuice. My idea for this entire feature (the blind spots part) came about because a movie theater usher gave me one of those “You haven’t seen ____?! How can you call yourself a movie person without seeing ___” when I told him I didn’t see Beetlejuice. I think I’ll forever proudly define myself as the guy who has never seen Beetlejuice just to piss off my usher friend now. Sweeney Todd – the story of a murderous barber – sounds like the exact opposite of what I’m looking for in a musical. Other than that: I just saw the trailer for Mars Attacks! and that looks really interesting. The film apparently flew under the radar because Independence Day eclipsed it at the box office and gobbled up the “weird alien movie” press that year. Big Fish, I hear is a great great film, and I’m happy agreeing with that assessment without having watched it. I just have a hunch based on what I’ve read. I’d watch it too, but if I have to pick one, I would go with Mars Attacks!

Filmography as Director (20 films)
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)
Big Eyes (2014)
Dark Shadows (2012)
Frankenweenie (2012)
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (2005) (Co-Director)
Big Fish (2003)
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Mars Attacks! (1996)
Ed Wood (1994)
Batman Returns (1992)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Batman (1989)
Beetlejuice (1988)
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
“Frankenweenie” (1984)
“Vincent” (1982)

All 32 films I've seen in 2016 ranked from best to worst

1. Eye in the Sky, Gavin Hood-Extremely economic storytelling and theatrical in its execution, provocative in its dedication to showing the nuance of a military strike. If it was released at a better time of year, it could have been remembered years from now as the definitive film of the military-via-drones era.

2. Hello, My Name is Doris, Michael Showalter-Sally Field's sweet spinster character is the perfect remedy to check our own ageist tendencies but this is also a bit of a psychological thriller wrapped in a misplaced comedy of errors. This lady is really on a collision course with an embarrassing truth bomb and you can't look away.

3. Don't Think Twice, Mike Biribiglia-The film has a great balance between its ensemble and really captures that world (although why they couldn't just say "SNL" is beyond me). A very loving film with characters who organically reach their stories' endings in a variety of unexpected way.

4. Hidden Figures-An uplifting film but one that’s generally earned despite a couple moments where the film erroneously steers towards schmaltz. It walks that fine line between historically faithfulness, go-for-broke sentimentally and grittily realism. Taraji P Henson deserves accolades here

5. Hell or High Water-A great exercise in genre experimentation: Tackling the housing crisis by moving the Western forward in time 120 years.

6. Mascots, Christopher Guest-The best thing about this film is that it exists at all if you read the news article a few years back that Guest didn't feel he had anything more to give to the genre he practically created. This isn't a game changer but it's a joy to see so many rich comic stories merge together like this for the first time in a decade.

7. Lion, Garth Davis-The first half had a really dark look at life in the streets of a third world country like 1990s Calcutta. The second half could have done a better job or picking and choosing which scenes were most relevant and God bless Dev Patel for finally getting an overdue Oscar nom from Slumdog, but this felt like a casting mistake: He just had too much swagger and self-confidence to fit the narrative. I would assume what motivated him to find his family was a feeling of being an outsider but he seems like the most popular kid in class and picks up Rooney Mara as a girlfriend within minutes of meeting her. Still, this is the most emotional film I’ve seen regardless so the sentimental effect overflowed past any sloppy positioning.

8. Fences, Denzel Washington- Does Troy represent the popular image of the African-American man? Is he to blame for his ill fortunes or is he a product of society? The fact that he and his situation are complex enough that you can argue so well either way makes this such a provocative work of art. The film embodies what’s best about theatrical adaptations from the poetry in the dialogue to the thoroughness with which the actors do their legwork. The film also boasts the year’s best ensemble.

9. Star Trek Beyond, Justin Lin- Very much enjoyed the smaller scale in story as it allowed the characters more quiet moments of character development and pairings that showed new angles. This was balanced by special effects that wowed me in an era where every blockbuster has a budget larger than many 3rd world countries

10. La La Land-The romantic plot between the numbers felt kind of empty, but damn, the musical numbers were amazing. I still support it for a best picture win. It was extremely innovative and extremely thematically coherent and smart. Nearly every second is visually thoughtful and it is very clear that Damien Chazelle and his team used an encyclopedic knowledge of movie musicals to fashion its commentary.

11. Aquarius-It's a foreign film (I watch very few foreign films so this disclaimer is needed) about a woman in her 60's struggling in Brazil against a corporation who wants to tear her house down. A very solid character piece that like "Hello My Name is Doris" is a celebration of an elderly woman in defiance of the way society tries to (literally and figuratively) make her obsolete

12. Popstar: Never Stop Popping, The Lonely Island team- The film sails by more on cameos and side jokes than the character-based humor of Connor 4 Real but laughter speaks: It was just plain hilarious. Lonely Island can get random and scattered in 3-minute clips, so it works to their advantage to be able to develop their riffs over a longer running time.

13. The Lobster: Satirizing both the problems with pressure to couple up and overly conservative societies, the film has thematic currents against both sexual obsession and sexual chastity which is really interesting. Colin Farrell is really interesting and the ensemble is filled with all kinds of interesting characters. Has some wierdly dark moments.

14. Alice Through the Looking Glass: It’s kid-oriented, but surprisingly coherent and complex storyline-wise and works on a kid’s level. Visually quite wonderous.

15. Deepwater Horizon: I have a soft-spot for a good disaster film and consider the genre a form of art with a slightly higher purpose than the typical "things go boom" fare. Like "Captian Phillips"the film gets full-on emotional in the last act as its hero, Mark Wahlberg, starts suffering PTSD. Both films redefine the image of the hero in a larger way then the traditional view thats restricted to members of the military, inspirational teachers and fireman/cops.

16. Arrival-Didn’t appeal that much to me beyond the deep sciencey premise. If you buy Amy Adams’ performance, then you’ll feel the film on an emotional level

17. Now You See Me 2-Sleight-of-hand magicing is a great way to reinvent the heist genre (like adding history professors as in National Treasure). The story twisted and turned too much for me to care and the sexual chemistry between Lizzy Caplain and Dave Franco was forced (I don't think either of the Franco brothers has an easy time with romance) but it was pretty fun along the way.

18. Ghostbusters, Paul Fieg-Serviceably funny. It might be a bold statement here but a side-by-side comparion of this quartet of characters to the original shows how the UCB generation of comedy really goes a step beyond in developing comic characters from the inside out.

19. Tallulah-A Netflix film with Ellen Page and Allison Janney. I thought it's most interesting element was that this despicable character played by Ellen Page is unapolagetically the protagonist. The movie is kind of a ticking time bomb. You have no idea how long she'll get away w/this ruse of stealing someone else's baby but you're bracing for the explosion.

20. The Bronze-As an Olympics enthusiast, I enjoyed the exploration of what happens to Olympics stars after their big movement. The love story was sweet and I liked that Melissa Raunch's character had to grow but she never really had to bend her own personality that much to get to a happy place w/her dad, her gymnastics and her boyfriend. Some of the humor's bread and it had the grossest sex scene I've seen in a while

21. Special Correspondents-Ricky Gervais is curiously nowhere near as bold in film (Ghost Town, Invention of Lying, this) as he is with his TV work. I would be interested in reading an essay as to why, but I can't say that these films aren't pleasant if you don't take away the high expectations. Besides Gervais'

22. Sing Steet, John Carney: Not as memorable as the last Carney film I saw ("Begin Again") but a pretty sweet film about a kid reinventing himself through creating an 80's band. It has a strong sense of place backed by the authenticity of on-location shooting, and a sweet love story. The film has a bit more empty space (both in the band's logistical scenes and the love scenes) than ideal.

23. Captain Fantastic, Matt Ross-Stretches reality a little bit in the form of this superdad who can keep his kids extremely isolated and turn them into extreme geniuses with abnormal levels of obedience (except one of the six kids) but an interesting film. Some might call it artsy, but I found the camera work obnoxious.

24. Race: A pretty generic sports film but with a lot of chemistry between the characters and interesting historic detail

25. Batman vs Superman, Zach Snyder-I'd classify this as not awful. Tonally it was pretty consistent. Batman's kind of dark and Superman kind of got there too and Jesse Eisenberg was nice and playful with his part. I don't know if the film had much to say though but I've seen worse...

26. Eddie the Eagle, Dexter Fletcher-Pretty generic with a few sweet moments. The film curiously cares very little about history which is odd because the actual historical facts of Eddie the Eagle would have made a better movie. Taran Eagleton plays a mostly asexual klutz well and has just enough charm to keep this from being completely by-the-numbers. Also, Lake Placid is all wrong.

27. X-Men Apocalypse, Brian Singer-Because it is the sole superhero series I’ve ever gotten into as a kid, I watch every X-Men film as a general rule. Still, my loyalty doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to rip on it. Still, they are going through the motions here. Some of the criticisms of X-Men 3 (needing to decrowd the landscape) would hae been wise here and Apocalypse lacked personality. Why waste Oscar Isaac’s valuable time (as well as that of the make-up department) for something so lifeless. hey needed to decrowd the landscape a bit and have given Acopalypse some personality. Special-effects wise, Psyloche was one of the highlights.

28. Gold-The film's big twist had no foreshadowing and came way too late in the movie for me to care. The first hour of the film had no real point to make? The film could have at least tried to make the gold trade interesting but instead, it is capitalism porn: the stuff found in Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room and American Hustle.

29. Zootopia-I heard it had an interesting message but I wasn't really interested in being preached to by a Pixar-like cartoon. Found it uneventful with a few spare jokes here and there

30. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot-Is anyone else getting tired of Tina Fey playing Tina Fey? 40ish woman feeling down on herself bc she's on the verge of no longer being able to meet Mr. Right in time to have kids who is always surrounded by idiots. And this is supposed to be about a serious war film and not an episode of 30 Rock?

31. Keanu-I like Key and Peele a lot but this felt like swing and a miss for me. They've done stuff way more nuanced and complicated than here. So they're forced to act like gangsters?  That's a 5-minute skit, guys, not a movie.

32. Suicide Squad-Oh, the horror! Why did I watch this. It felt like a violent video game specifically made for 12-year-old boys. When the dialogue seems like filler to get to the action and the action seems like filler to get to the dialogue, you know you’ve got a problem. Still, Margo Robbie manages to dazzle and Jared Leto gives a brave performance.

If I had an Emmy Ballot: Lazy Edition Drama Picks

I preface the word "Lazy" with my Emmy predictions because I can't watch everything so I'm making speculative picks based on what I know of a show from past seasons or have heard of it.

For instance, although I have only watched two or three whole episodes of Mad Men, I know that it's the show's last run and I like Jon Hamm and Christina Hendricks enough that I'd be happy to see them rewarded with Emmys despite the fact that I can't possibly judge their worthiness. Why don't I just watch Mad Men so I can definitively say whether they belong? My schedule is too busy to start watching every single TV series just for a simple personal blog entry.

In other cases, I like the idea of Downton Abbey as a show and I'm happy it's being watched. I just made a decision not to watch it because, like I said, so many hours in the day. At the same time, I can say without watching Mr Robot that it doesn't sound like a show I want to see rewarded, and while it's not a well-founded decision you should trust me on, them's the rules of this exercise.

Lastly, there are shows that I watched in past seasons that I didn't get around to watching this season. Synopses and previews have helped me determine whether these are shows I'd want rewarded. In the case of The Americans, I quit the show because I found Phil and Elizabeth's ability to fool everyone around then unrealistic. However, this season I heard from general buzz that their daughter Paige discovered their secret identities. Now that sounds like the show I was hoping for. Am I gonna go and backtrack through a season and a half? Hell no! The good news is that this not watching everything method is something you can all participate in, so here we go:

Best Series:
The Bridge (FX)
Orange is the New Black (Netflix)
The Americans (FX)*
Mad Men (AMC)*
Empire (Fox)
Boardwalk Empire  (HBO)
Good Wife (CBS)*

Best Actor:
Clive Owen, The Knick (Cinemax)
Terrence Howard, Empire
Jon Hamm, Mad Men*
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul (AMC)
Charlie Cox, Daredevil (Netflix)
Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire

Best Actress:
Julianne Margulies, The Good Wife*
Lizzy Caplan, Masters of Sex (Showtime)
Dianne Kruger, The Bridge
Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black*
Taraji P Henson, Empire
Hayley Atwell, Agent Carter

Best Supporting Actor:
Jeffrey Wright, Boardwalk Empire
Ben Mendelsohn, Bloodline (Netflix)
Jussie Smollett, Empire
Andre Holland, The Knick
Nick Sandow, Orange is the New Black
Donal Logue, Gotham (Fox)

Best Supporting Actress:
Yael Stone, Orange is the New Black
Christina Hendrichs, Mad Men*

Katja Herbers, Manhattan (WGN)

Emily Mortimer, The Newsroom (HBO)

Deborah Ann Woll, Daredevil

Olivia Cook, Bates Motel (A&E)

Best Guest Actress:

Juliette Lewis, Wayward Pines (Fox)

Margo Martindale, The Americans

Franka Potente, The Bridge

Annaleigh Ashford, Masters of Sex

Barbara Rosenblat, Orange is the New Black

Alysia Reiner, Orange is the New Black

Best Guest Actor:

Pablo Schreiber, Orange is the New Black

Terrence Howard, Wayward Pines

Zeljko Ivanek, 12 Monkeys (SyFy)

Frank Langella, The Americans

Beau Bridges, Masters of Sex

F. Murray Abraham, Homeland*

Drama Writing

Good Wife*

The Americans

Orange is the New Black

Boardwalk Empire

Empire

Downton Abbey*

Directing

Orange is the New Black

Sense 8 (Netflix)

The Knick

Agent Carter

The Americans

Boardwalk Empire


An asterisk indicates a show I didn't actually see.

Capsule reviews of 2012 films: Pitch Perfect, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Dark Knight Rises, Trouble with the Curve

Pitch Perfect
Pitch Perfect is a surprisingly fun film that goes about as emotionally deep as it needs to without getting overly mushy. The storyline is of a reluctant college student (Anna Kendrick) who learns to open herself up more to people and possibilities through joining an a capella group. Anna Kendrick, who's been nominated for an Academy Award, is probably too good for a film like this, but thank God the producers were able to get her because she gives her all and elevates the film significantly.

The film, adapted from a book wherein the author spent significant amount of time with 3 college a capella groups, delves deep into the a capella world and it's clear that the filmmakers have done their research and this sets this film apart from the typical coming-of-age college film as we're taken deep into the world of this subculture. The music itself is also very entertaining..

Although there's a sort of love-hate romance (wherein the boy's primary method of winning over the girl is annoying her to death), the film is all about girl power and how this loner learns to bond with other females for the first time and (excuse the pun) make beautiful music.

With Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Skylar Astin, Adam Driver, Anna Camp, and Rebel Wilson, the supporting cast has a great chemistry despite the fact that it's difficult to believe some of these people are 18-22 years old (Anna Camp and Rebel Wilson in particular)

The film's screenplay is by Kay Canon (who has written for 30 Rock and is well-known in comedy circles) and while there are some laughs, it's not primarily a comedy. It IS a fun film.

Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

An Altmanesque ensemble piece exploring old age, wistfully weaving in and out of several story lines fluidly. The story centers around seven random British retirees (all feeling various stages of incompleteness with their situations) who get lured by an ad to spend their retirement in a hotel that's not as glamorous as advertised.

Tom Wilkinson shines as Graham: a gay man who grew up in the days of the Empire in India before moving to India. It's true what they say: Bonus points on your acting resume for going gay. Graham's storyline, involving reconnecting with his homeland and a lost lover lies at the heart of the story.

Elsewhere, we have a couple horny seniors looking for love for different reasons (one to feel young, one for financial security), a woman recovering from surgery (Maggie Smith), a hypochondriac, a marriage in flux, and a newly widowed woman taking her first job (Judi Dench). Each of these story lines all provide relatively satisfying layers of richness. 

Trouble with the Curve
An aging scout who looks like Clint Eastwood (who in real life, by the way, is over 80) is being pushed out of his job (hello, it's called retirement) and adopts an attitude of spunky rebelliousness, when in fact he can't do the job anyways because he's losing his vision. A movie premise based on a plot hole a mile wide is on some shaky ground to begin with. It doesn't help matters that every person who disagrees with him about retirement conveniently turns out to be an incompetent a-hole.

The film still has some nice moments and takes us moderately deeply into the universe of baseball scouting and going somewhere new is always interesting. At the same time, a more realistic film might have made us feel like we were actually experiencing the life of a baseball scout.

The film's other strong points are Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake. As someone who is not in the camp that Timberlake has previously displayed any acting skills, this is Timberlake's first role in which he could legitimately be called an actor. Amy Adams, who is always wonderful, showed here that she can actually be sexy on screen on top of all the other great character beats she bought with the character.

Dark Knight Rises
The Dark Knight Rises was the pivotal success of Batman if you consider that Batman Begins had too much exposition and Dark Knight was so focused on the Joker and his omnipotent brand of evil, that it made for more of a horror story than an event film. The Dark Knight Rises really was the optimal blend of ingredients that one would come to expect in a Nolan film. Like Inception and Prestige, it was an epic story with twists that unraveled satisfyingly. More importantly, the film really was about Batman which is a hard chore considering he is usually always upstaged by more interesting and colorful visions in pretty much every auteur's vision of Gotham city.

The story lines are and expertly juggled and the production quality is top notch. It's also fair to say that the emotional content of a Batman film has never resonated so well with me and I even found it more realistic (and slightly amusing) that the facade of Batman wasn't kept sacred and pretty much every character just said "screw it, he's Bruce Wayne." 

Eleven things I learned from reading Adam West's memoirs

This is what I learned from reading Adam West's book "Back to the Batcave" from 1994:


1. Adam West still defends his work in the original show to this very day, despite the fact that many adults look back at it and see it as melodramatic drivel. He says that Batman was slightly over-the-top but that it was less ridiculous than the comics of the time. He also did not like the use of the word "campy" and did not know what camp meant when reporters suggested it to him. He preferred the word "pop art" and likened the "pow"s and "oomphs" that would appear on screen to Andy Warholesque touches. He maintains that the light-hearted and fun version of the times was exactly what the public needed because it was a very stressful era and tumultuous time. He said that a serious version of a superhero comic would have failed, and he cites the fact that the Green Hornet only lasted one season as evidence of that. Most importantly, Batman would have been cancelled if it weren't for the popularity of the TV show. The sales on the comic were rapidly declining and DC Comics told Bob Kane to hang up his pen at the time.

2. At the same time, West was also slightly delusional. When it was time to reinvent Batman for the movies, West thought that Tim Burton made a mistake by not casting him, despite the fact that he was well into middle-age and the 1966 TV Batman was way behind the times.

3. Adam West also claims to be a serious actor who actually did research and devoted energy into making his part believable. This is particularly surprising because it looks like West was either a guy who didn't try very hard or a very poor actor whose overdelivery of the dialogue made the show hard to take seriously. But Adam West's overacting was all very calculated and came after months (not hours, I repeat, but months) of thinking about how he'd approach this character and came up with a list of 6 constants that Batman should have.

4. Despite rumors that Adam West was seducing costars left and right, West claims that he had mostly professional relationships with the costars because he didn't want to endanger the show. He said some of them like Julie Newmar were incredibly tempting and it was INCREDIBLY difficult for him to maintain professionalism on the set by Newmar, in particular. The book is rather vague about whether Newmar and West actually did do anything illicit. He does claim to have had a very active sex life having been approached with groupies everywhere who made it all incredibly easy for him. He dated Lana Wood, however, and it also sounds like he lightly dated Natalie Wood. He unsuccessfully pursued Jill St John (guest star from the very first episode). St. John and him are still good friends. Throughout the show, he still pined for his ex-wife with whom he shared kids.

5. Adam West claims life post-Batman was highly depressing because he could not get any work. It took him years to escape the clout of Batman. He was offered the part of James Bond and turned it down because he felt the role should have gone to an Englishman. This takes a great deal of integrity considering how desperate one might be for work.

6. Adam West enjoyed meeting a lot of great actors on set. He was good friends with the Riddler's Frank Gorshin. They went to an orgy once where they started acting in character just for kicks and got thrown out (what's the procedure for being throwing someone out of an orgy? Do you not get your parking validated or something?). He also really admired the worklike ethic of Meredith Burgess and Cesar Romero. He especially enjoyed meeting George Saunders (Mr. Freeze #1), Vincent Price (Egghead), Cliff Robertson (Shame) and Maurice Evans (The Puzzler, poor man's Riddler).

7. He did not enjoy Otto Preminger who played Mr. Freeze and his costars universally agreed. He hit on every woman on the set while simultaneously treating them like dirt. He also bossed everyone around as though he were the director when the show already had that part filled.


8. Many of the great actors who appeared on Batman didn't feel like it was dumbing themselves down to appear on the show. Classically-trained actors like Meredith Burgess, Cesar Romero, Maurie Evans (The Puzzler), David Wayne (Mad Hatter), George Saunders (Mr. Freze), Shelly Winters (Ma Parker), Cliff Robertson (Shame), and Vincent Price (Egghead) enjoyed being part of pop culture and gaining larger exposure and they also enjoyed taking a break from serious acting rules to be animated and comical.

9. Burt Ward (aka Robin) was kind of a brat. He insisted on being the last to leave his tstart at one point which led to a war of attrition between him and Adam West. He started out the show married but succumbed to the temptation of all the groupies and his marraige fell apart. He once came close to being beaten up by Bruce Lee during the Green Hornet crossover

10. Adam West had a few different careers before acting. He was a pilot in Hawaii and led airtours with a partner who later got him into acting on a kid's TV show with a chimp as his costar. He also met his wife in Hawaii- a Tahitian named Nga (short for Ngatokoruaimatauaia) and had kids with her. Despite his wild sex life, he still pined for Nga and was holding out for reconciliation with her

11. West was pretty uncomfortable in that outfit and that cowel restricted his lateral movement pretty intensely

How to watch Glee: Two Parts Camp, One Part Reality

This past year as I've made connections with the TV critical community and have read a lot of TV criticism (as a byproduct of being considered for the AV Club's TV Club), I've found it very amusing to watch critics try to make sense of something like Glee. Co-produced by Ryan Murphy, known for his past successes with Nip/Tuck and the cult hit Popular, Glee is a show that's impossible to ignore. The show has high ratings, accolades, and drives water cooler talk among both the young and the not-so-young.

The show is, at times, undeniably original, bold, entertaining, and capable of being brilliant. At the same time, it's a melodramatic mess. There are great problems with continuity with characters blatantly changing to fit whatever the episode's theme of the week is.

To an extent, I watch Glee the same way I watched the 1960's Batman TV series. The show was universally defined by anyone writing about it as "Camp." "Camp" has always been one of those words that is difficult to define and it's equally puzzling to understand why I like watching it.

Let me take a shot at it:
I might have been laughing at the over-the-top nature of the content but that doesn't mean I'd classify the show as a comedy. Laughing at an awful movie like the robots from Mystery Science Theater 3000 doesn't make me want to applaud the filmmakers. The humor was unintentional because neither I nor the filmmakers intended for the film turn out so badly.

Batman fails completely as a crime drama, but it's creators also know that the show fails towards that end. But the key is that Batman isn't aimed at us. It's aimed at kids and as my 8-year-old self can attest, it succeeds at convincing kids that it is a convincing drama. Because the show's standards of good/bad aren't specifically aligned towards me, there's no point in judging the work and I am free to watch with detached amusement.

Likewise, Glee invites the more educated viewers to detach themselves from the inconsistencies of the show as well. This isn't uncommon. It's just like how we're supposed to ignore how entirely unlikely it is for so many murders to occur in a small seaside town of 8,000 in "Murder She Wrote" (let alone how the town could avoid not becoming hollowed out by plummeting property values) or how Adrian and friends are always finding themselves bumping into murderers outside of their line of work (i.e. Randy's dentist is a murder, Julie's class speaker is a murderer, Adrian goes to his college reunion and finds his good friend married a murderer, etc.) on "Monk."

Glee's lack of consistency falls somewhere between camp and parody. It's creators are certainly aware that these characters have flaws, so we should detach ourselves from the exercise of complaining every week of how inconsistent the characters are. That would be like complaining about "Friends" upon discovering that Joey Tribbiani is really an actor named Matt LeBlanc.

Glee also has one other element that we're supposed to realize is not to be taken at face value: The reasons that characters on Glee break out into song are thinly plausible at best. But when you think about it, since the musical genre evolved past the backstage dramas of the 1930's (i.e. 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933), characters have never had any valid reason to spontaneously break out into song. Audiences have just been conditioned to accept that as a convention of MGM musicals (I previously wrote a very good blog post about this). Glee is just not shy about exposing these same conventions. Much like Austin Powers overpiles the dry witticisms after he kills someone and makes the audience more aware of the convention's ridiculousness, Glee has fun with the conventions of musicals. It's half-parody. It's also a good excuse for some musical numbers.

So, to watch Glee take the continuity and the song transitions with a grain of salt. The rest is legitimately good, wholesome narrative. It might be confusing to sort out at first but try it.

The Best Films of 2008

The best of films of 2008 that you most likely have heard of, and some that you might not:

1. Australia:
The most underrated film of the year. It upsets me so much that critics would tear this film apart, just because it had "too many endings" and "the director was trying too hard" and "It was just another Gone With The Wind". Of course Baz Luhrmann was trying too hard; he attempted to make a film that was so epic and melodramatic in order to reconnect us with the golden age of Hollywood filmmaking. In a time when films are trying to be faster with quicker takes and lazy photography, you have to give him credit for that at least. That point aside, I thought this film had tons of breathtaking cinematography. One of my favorite aspects of Baz Lurhmann's directing is that he works so well with his music supervisors in order to create a whole atmosphere between the music, sound, and visuals. This film is no exception. At many points throughout the film, I felt as though I was in a dream-like state, apart of the shot. Luhrmann and his photographic/art team do a wonderful job of capturing the awe and beauty of Australia's landscape.

2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button:
One of the best made films I have ever seen. A cinematic masterpiece that will never be forgotten. I had been waiting to see this film for a long time, and it surpassed all of my hopes and the hype given to it by the media. With most films I see, there are usually a few shots where my reaction is "Oh, wow, thats a very nice shot". However, with this film, every single shot of the film my reaction was "Oh, my god. This is an amazing shot", and shivers would run down my spine. It was as though every single shot of the film were a beautiful painting. I had never seen that before from a film. Maybe it was a mixture of the genius cinematographer, the director David Fincher's perfectionism and his choice of using an all digital photography and editing process. Fincher is bound to win Best Director at the oscars for this film. His extremely strong direction with the film can easily be seen throughout the film. For example, there's a point in the film when Benjamin Button's love interest played by Cate Blanchett returns to see Button after he is grown (backwards) quite a bit from the last time they saw each other as children (and old man). Blanchett arrives at the house and sees Button, not recognizing him at first. Once she gets a better look at him, Blanchett's reaction change of recognition was so life-like and beautiful that it could only have been achieved by countless takes during shooting and a genius choice of a buy take by Fincher.

3. Let The Right One In:
A Swedish vampire horror film. One of the creepiest and most elegantly shot films I have ever seen. Based on a book, this film centers around a 12 year old boy who falls in love with a vampire who looks around the age of 12, but it turns out, is actually an elderly man who is a eunuch and has seemed to have gone through a sex-change to look like a 12 year old girl. Wooops, gave away too much. And the boy still falls in love with him/her/it by the end of the film. Yeah, its a messed up story. But that aside, there is some amazing photography with tons of genius uses of visual framing from tunnels, windows, and anything square. The director definitely knows how to shoot an amazingly shot creepy vampire film.

4. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist:
Stop calling it this years Juno! Just because its a love story with Michael Cera and the plot directly involves music, doesn't mean that this film can't stand on its own as a refreshingly original love story that is so much fun to watch. The director, Peter Sollett, creates such a true portrait of New York City teenager nightlife that it never feels fake for a second. Like Baz Lurhmann, Sollett works really well with his music editors to chose not only great alternative rock music, but music that fits so perfectly well with the great cinematography of a fast speed night in New York City.

5. Zach and Miri Make A Porno:
Yes, this film is all about the low-brow humor. But at least this film actually has great acting, and some great cinematography and art direction, unlike the low-brow humor film The Pineapple Express. Zach and Miri turns out to be a touching love story that is absolutely hilarious at the same time. Not to mention that I need to rep this film because I have a friend who worked on the art department for this film.

6. Cloverfield:
An absolute genius film. Just the whole idea of it was so original: a monster film shot from the point of view of a group of characters with a camera filmming the event as bystanders. Not to mention the genius marketing scheme with internet secrets and fake websites. I loved this film. So entertaining.

7. Be Kind Rewind:
Hilarious film that is just a gold mine for film enthusiasts. The whole movie is about people who start a business where they make their own versions of films sold in a movie store. Interesting commentary on the film and video business as well as on cinema as a media source. The end of the movie shows the power that film has on its viewers and its surrounding communities. Interesting side note, the film was shot in Passaic, New Jersey, where I lived for two months in the fall.

8. The Dark Knight:
Everyone agrees: This film was just amazing. Amazing cinematography, amazing acting performance by Heath Ledger (not so much Christian Bale or Maggie Gyllenhaal) and amazingly complex plot line and themes for a Batman film. One scene that really sticks out in my mind is when Gordon figures out that the Joker is going to kill three people that evening and then arrives at Bruce Wayne's fundraiser for Harvey Dent. Amazing use of music and increasingly fast editing as the scene progresses to create a perfect sense of suspense that literally ends with a bang. Just a great film from a great director.

9. Slumdog Millionaire:
Such a refreshingly original film. Incorporates some history lessons, a love story, a thriller, and a comedy, all in the context of a non-linear plot line involving flashbacks during an episode of the Hindi version of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire", where every question is a reference to some past experience by the main character Jamal. Besides a great plot, there is some great photography, with probably the largest amount of canted shots I have ever seen in a film. Finally, the ending before the credits provided a great ode to Bollywood films including a whole song and dance number.

More to come....?

Buy the films:

Artistic integrity can't interfere when tentpoles are at stake

Three is no longer the fitting number for movie sequels when it comes to maintaining artistic credibility. It's now a matter of how long the studios can keep making money from these sequels because Hollywood is just too addicted to tent poles and the instant stream of revenues they create to be able to maintain any artistic integrity anymore. What comes to mind when I say this is the fact that Shrek, Spiderman, and Pirates of the Carribean are all going to be releasing a fourth installment of their series in movie theaters, despite the fact that despite great starts and sophomore outings, most critics and viewers agree the franchises all sputtered out of gas by the time they hit the back-ends of their trilogies.

What most viewers don't know is that except for the two Star Wars trilogies (the prequels and the originals), Shrek, Pirates of the Carribean and Spiderman have been the three biggest trilogies ever to hit the box office, boasting a combined four films in the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time and 8 in the top 30, so far. Even when the quality of their films declined heavily in poorly reviewed third installments, they were still able to gross monstrous amounts based on name recognition alone, when viewers set massive opening weekend records in May of 2007 when all three film trilogies came out. Before anyone qeven had time to tell their coworkers when they got back to work on Monday, just how bad the films were, these films made their money back in three days, and that's likely what will happen when the franchises come back again in part IV, until people wisen up and break their moviegoing habits.

Even worse in this trend is that studios can't afford to give their star properties much breathing room anymore. Look at The Incredible Hulk, Star Trek, James Bond, Batman and the previously mentioned Pirates of the Carribean in comparison to Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones and Star Wars were films that essentially stopped after their stories were done being told. Due to fan demand and an appropriately long enough hiatus, these two franchises came back 16 years later in the case of Star Wars and 19 years later in the case of Indiana Jones. Part of the justification was that the stories could be introduced to a new generation. Although neither one of these franchises were particularly good when they were rebooted, one can't deny that the hype, anticipation, and ultimately, their opening weekend grosses, were far greater than that of any of the films in the first category.

In the first category of films, there was virtually no time to wait until a generation had passed. Hollywood tides move much faster than they used to and no one can afford to wait 15 or more years to not capitalize on a hot property of theirs. Thus we have:
-James Bond rebooted after a measly four years (Die Another Day 2002-Casino Royale 2006)
-Star Trek reappearing in theaters after only a 7 year break (Nemesis, 2002) and a 4-year break since the Star Trek franchise dissapeared on TV (Enterprise in 2005)
-Batman taking only a seven year break between Batman and Robin (1999) one of the decade's biggest failures and Batman Begins
-Hulk rebooting after only a five-year break without even pretending to be any sort of sequel or prequel. It was simply marketed as a "do over."
-Pirates of the Carribean set to appear only three or four years after Pirates of the Carribean III was lampooned by most critics

Moore: The mean-spirited and distasteful Bond?

I was recently watching some of the Roger Moore films from the Bond retrospect and a couple moments really stuck out to me. The first is in The Spy Who Loves Me where Bond is fighting a henchman who is about to fall off a tall building and grabs Bond's tie to level himself. Bond asks the henchman where his contact can be found, and as soon as he tells him, Bond flicks him off the hand, and allows him to fall off a two-story building.

The second scene is the finale of A View to a Kill as James Bond is Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), the main villain, is engaged in an axe fight with Bond. He drops the axe and is hanging off the ledge of the Golden Gate Bridge. Zorin reaches out for Bond's hand, and Bond lets him fall off the Golden Gate Bridge to his death as his mentor/father figure is watching.

These are two examples of moments that I find distasteful in the Moore Bond films. Don't get me wrong, I like the Moore Bond films. They usually had the most exotic locations, the best-looking and most competent girls, some of the most imaginative villains. At the same time, some of these moments make me truly cringe becasue they aren't explained in the context of what's going on.

Moore's Bond does something cruel and distasteful by allowing an unarmed man to die rather than bring him to justice and there's an extreme juxtaposition between these cruel acts and the light-hearted tone that's being conveyed. Him finishing it off with a light-hearted joke and a smirk makes it even worse. It would be like if Adam West's Batman allowed Burgess Meredith's the Penguin to be boiled alive in a lava pit before making a lecture to Robin about the deeds of fighting evildoers and buckling your seatbelt in the batmobile.

I think Dalton and Craig might do similar things, but it makes more sense in context. They have their conflicted moments where they might do cold-blooded things but the film acknowledges that it might have been hard for the villain to do it, or there was inner conflict. In part, this is because Dalton and Craig are classically-trained actors who take whatever material they're given and seek a human element to it. Brosnam, at his best, was portrayed as someone with that level of inner conflict. In Goldeneye and World is Not Enoguh he had personal connections at stake, first to his former colleague who was like his brother, and second to a family friend and his daughter. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Brosnam was similarly merciless, shooting an unarmed psychiatrist/torture specialist and reigning bloodbaths on workers at a newspaper mill, whose job duties probably did not include a be-prepared-to-risk-life-and-limb-fighting-a-secret-agent-to-the-death-should-one-ever-break-into-the-printing-room clause.

Critical Temperature of films and The Dark Knight....

It's amusing to watch how the response and enthusiasm Dark Knight has shaped since the film's release. Part of these proclamations that this film suddenly deserves a place next to the best films of all time and can even rival Citizen Kane might have to do with where we are in terms of Web 2.0 and the state of film criticism.

Many moviegoers have long been aware of the massive expanse of film history. Ten years ago, the thought that for approximately 100 years, masterpieces have been coming out and the average moviegoer hasn't even seen or heard of a great number of them, prevented the moviegoer from thinking that that amazing picture he just saw must have been the greatest film of all time or close to it. When a film comes out that people think is great, they are generally aware that as great as this film was, the odds are that a number of films they haven't seen were better, simply because there are so many.

The increase of film retrospectives (the AFI 100, for example) and distinguished film historians, successfully solidified that amorphous category of "great films from the old days that i haven't seen" into a concrete, slightly flexible block of films with names and faces like Rebel Without a Cause, On the Waterfront, Graduate, Citizen Kane, All About Eve, etc. which continue to be solidified by subsequent "Greatest Films Ever" lists produced by every major publication (Entertainment Weekly, Time Out, Guinness, Premiere, Rolling Stone) that deals remotely with films that echoes the original choices.

At the same time, this community of people doing the film retrospectives and putting in the thought about what the great films are has become far more interactive. In the past five years there has been a major growth of people with film blogs, registrations on websites like imdb.com and flicker. This might be why there is some sort of shift and enthusiasm to challenging the notion that a recent film is better than all the classics, because as one of the people proclaiming its praises, you are taking some small degree of ownership over that film. I think the Dark Knight's brief appearance on top of the imdb.com's 250 and it's potential chances to knock off Titanic (the last time this sort of phenomenon happened) at the box office, alerted the film community that they could seize this film and proclaim their own "Citizen Kane."

The truth, however, aside from whether the film is Citizen Kane is not (it is not because it doesn't really revolutionize the way filming is done unless you count shooting it in IMAX or the marketing, which is coincidentally what all the people who are proclaiming it so great are slightly influenced by) is it's, by definition, impossible to tell if a film is worthy of being a classic until years down the road. That's why The Searchers, Hitchkock's best work, Citizen Kane, Nashville, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Raging Bull all failed at the Oscars: because their historical value wasn't apparent at the time, and why would it have been?

To people watching Citizen Kane at the time, the way it's cinematography and story telling methods would be used later by so many other film makers would not have been known in 1941.

Could the Dark Knight be a potentially dangerous film?

I saw The Dark Knight the other day and found it too disturbing of a film for me to really think that it was worth watching. I'd give a review of the film (unlike some other critics, I certainly wouldn't give it 4 stars, even on the basis of whether it's mismarketed), because I think there are a couple more pressing issues.

One thing that worries me heavily about this film, is that it's a PG-13 rating, it's basically the silence of the lambs or seven disguised as a comic book film. It's more a horror film than it is a crime drama, and it's certainly not in the spirit of a comic book film. And I can understand people applauding the film for being a good film, but i get the sense that people are applauding the film for succeeding in pushing the boundaries of the comic book genre to make it dark, scary, psychopathic, etc., but has anyone ever thought that perhaps those boundaries were there for a reason? I think people who are not used to seeing violent films and parents taking children should be plenty forewarned about it.

At the same time, I'm concerned about potential violence that the film could spur and I know I'm now one of those anti-violence-in-the-movies advocates, but I maintain what I'm saying:
Remember back in the days of the Hayes Code when Hollywood didn't want a portrayal of unglamorous lifestyles because they wanted to promote a moral society? Obviously, we think that that's far-fetched and restricted a great number of artists back in those days from telling things in stories, but I do believe that there could be a such thing as too much. There are some examples of how some films have promoted copycat crimes, and issues like that. Studies have shown that on some occasions, the line between reality and what you see in the movies gets blurred and I can see that being blurred here because the film is real. We are influenced by what we see.

I am profoundly worried that with all the excessive praise lavished on the Dark Knight, and the cult following that has grown around the character of the Joker, that the message might be lost on impressionable youths with violent undertones that the Joker's actions were completely reprehensible and disgusting in this film. I could see some guy who's treated like a freak in some high school somewhere get inspired by this film to get the idea that if only he inflicted twisted and sick enough terrorist acts of violence among those who picked on him, than he'd have their respect.

This is what happened on screen in this film: The Joker was a freak, one that a select few might have empathized with when he walked in the room and the mob was picking on him and not taking him seriously, by unleashing reprehensible acts of violence and practically torturing people, he became highly revered and respected. As implausible as I found this, the mob swore allegiance to him and Harvey Dent chose not to shoot him after some small little diatribe. I raised the point in one discussion thread that I think one flaw of the film was that unless there was a direct threat on your life at that very moment, it would have never been in any character's interest to follow him, for any character to have truly wanted Joker to have been in charge, except the mentally derranged people he had at first. I think the mob would have really wanted to see them gone and would have turned on him at any opportunity, especially when he was in prison, they wouldn't have underestimated him, and they would have not cared about what he could do for them if he represented a direct threat to their establishment. They would have gotten to work on bringing him down. The joker is also portrayed as somewhat omnipotent, he knew more details about what and when things would happen in each plan that would have been plausible, and if the script was true to life, the Joker would probably have been killed quicker. It's not relevant whether you agree with the plot holes or not that leads to the Joker getting away with as much as he does, but what is important is that the film makes the Joker such a dangerous and scary villain because it presents us with that illusion that simply unleashing sinister enough acts of violence will get you anything you ever wanted. The film portrays everything in a very realistic setting.

What I think makes this all worse, is the celebration that's going on in response to the Dark Knight's success and the way that some disturbed people might misinterpret all of it. As a result of what we think is a good performance, we've sort of championed the character of the Joker a lot. We have kind of treated the character of the Joker as we would traditionally treat the hero of a film, a lot of us have adopted imdb names with the Joker in them. Maybe we'll all be wearing joker costumes on halloween or wearing joker costumes at one of those conventions. The truth is that what is being glorified is artistic freedom: The fact that the film broke free of the conventions to sugarcoat the violence inherent in comic book films.

At the same time, that's not being explicitly stated: What someone could get the message from it is that not only do you all love the Joker, you love the character, you would secretly love it if someone in real life decided to kill and torture people, and take a town hostage. There's not enough of a message I'm getting out there from all the whirlwind of media and every other source that some young person can be exposed to of "We love the character as a moviegoer but we'd hate for someone to act in this manner in real life." The viral marketing kind of makes it even worse.

I'd be eager to be proven wrong, but I think that's at the heart of what worries me and I'm afraid for some violent school shooting that could potentially happen because of this film. I think the magnitude of response to this film might make it a bigger disaster than any other film.

Ed Wood Review

I’m starting to learn that I usually find one work that I love from every director. I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Lubitsch and have no idea why a far superior director, Billy Wilder, felt that Lubitsch was a good. But I absolutely love Ninotchka. I don’t think the Coen Brothers are the great ushers of comedy in the post-modern era that others make them out to be, but I feel the same way about Oh Brother Where Art Thou. For Stanley Kubrick, that film would be Paths to Glory and for David Lynch, Mullholland Drive.
I can understand Tim Burton’s cult following but it’s just personally never been my cup of tea. I like his two installments of Batman and have appreciated them more in retrospect but his offbeat visions in Edward Scissorhands, Beetle Juice, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were too bizarre for me, and although I can appreciate a good animated films as much as the next casual film goer, I’m personally not a film connoisseur of film animation which explains why I didn’t go gaga over the animation innovations of The Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Ed Wood, however, is a brilliant idea for a biopic and it’s a celebration of film making and a justification for it, even if the results are less than stellar. The subject of the film is a moderately eccentric man (played by Johnny Depp) who has attracted a cult following after his death by virtue of being considered the world’s worst director. I know that’s a hard title to place when you have guys like Michael Bay and Raja Gosnell still floating around along with countless film school graduates who have never even made it out of small-town film festivals. What separated Wood from the directors who spew out commercialized crap, however, was that Wood aspired to be Orson Welles and (in the film’s portrayal of him, at least) he was so optimistic and upbeat about it that he thought he was well on his way to becoming him. That’s what the film’s about. It’s that life isn’t about success or failure but rather by creativity and how much you love what you do. Wood is portrayed as a winner because he dared to direct films and there’s no better way to celebrate filmmaking than finding merit in the worst filmmaker.
I think it was also interesting that with the exception of his first girlfriend, Wood had a creative team (i.e. Bill Murray’s character, the wrestler) that followed him through all of his creative pursuits and acted as a quasi-support system. If this story weren’t based on fact, I would be left to wonder why these people would keep working with him despite the fact that he failed so often and I think that’s another way that the film highlights Wood’s optimism. Perhaps, this is a parallel to Orson Welles’ consistent use of the same people and his famous repertory company called “The Mercury Players. Of course, Wood’s relationship is closest to Boris Karloff, his idol as a kid, who he later befriended and had the privilege of directing him in film after film. The relationship between the two and the chemistry between Depp and Martin Landau is at the heart of the film. Landau, by the way, is stellar and very deserving of his award.
As for the question of what separated Wood from the many people who never made it far past film school, there was surprisingly little. Wood’s films were mostly independently produced and he was largely an unknown commodity when he died. He gained fame when his film “Plan Nine from Outer Space” won a book-sponsored contest in 1981 of the worst films of all time. It’s a film that was shown in the first week of my first film class and it’s high number of inconsistencies and bloopers are very easy to spot. The movie answered questions for anyone whose watched this film about why it was made so haphazardly: Apparently, it was simply made as a way for Wood to appease his landlord and Burton’s film has this great sense of dramatic irony as Jonny Depp’s character says, “I know this is the film I’ll be remembered for,” but not in the way he wanted.

Review of Batman Begins

Whatever you think of Batman Begins, you kind of have to give more credit to X-Men and Spiderman for getting it right the first time. The execs at Warner Brothers have changed their minds over what they want to do with this superhero franchise of theirs that they go and retool it every two movies.

So it’s kind of disorienting watching this one, in ways good and bad. For one, I feel a little disappointed in the batmobile: it’s more like a bat tank. Mainly, though, the story’s a lot more complicated with its humongous cast of characters. If I didn’t know any better, I’d guess there’s a rule that anyone who’s ever been nominated for an Oscar gets a coupon for a free role in a Batman movie that everyone’s cashing in on (if you want to know the exact stats, which I hope you do because I spent 10 minutes researching this, 5 actors in this movie have earned 12 oscar nominations between them), and they had to try extra hard to find parts for everyone., which led to some characters who just didn’t need to be there.

Like Morgan Freeman, for example, is a scientist who designs Batman’s gadgets. I love Morgan Freeman but what exactly is he doing there? Doesn’t Q belong with James Bond? Also, who’s the real villain? Aside from making the story confusing, I think part of the fun of Batman is that you have this whacked hero dressed up as a bat and then you have even wackier villains with themes of their own, like a guy who dresses like a Penguin or the Riddler. With the exception of the Scarecrow, this movie doesn’t really have that here. Unfortunately, I didn’t really see the scarecrow that much, anyway. I think the reason for adding someone like crime boss Carmone Falcone was to show us how bad of a place Gotham is. Now Tim Burton didn’t ever need to resort to that. He created such a dark tone that he could show us what Gotham just by showing us a frame of it. I will add, though, that most people who see this movie will probably agree that Commisioner Gordon and Alfred are both two really strong characters in this movie and they add a lot, unlike the other movies where they kind of stand around and look like idiots next to Batman.

So, as I say, the story’s different but as it stands on its own, it really works well. It had the same piecing-together-of-the-puzzle element that the Star Wars III prequels had, which is real cool. If you’ve watched any Batman TV episode or watched any Batman movie, then you can’t help but be intrigued by a movie that answers the questions, where did Batman get the idea for Batman, how did he get the batmobile or the batcave, where did he learn to fight?, etc.

In defense of Batman Forever

Thinking of extending that trilogy past its prime? I think it's important to realize how an especially bad turn in a film series can hurt the legacy of the entire series to the point where it might damage the director's reputation and the retroactive reputation of films that come before it.

As a 12-year old kid, I loved Batman Forever and I recently went to look up reviews of it. Before looking them up, however, I had a preminition that because of the disaster of Batman and Robin, Batman Forever would be seen as much worse than it actually was.

While Batman and Robin extends those "campy characteristics" to an extreme, without extending any substance to them, I think it's important to note that Batman Forever had a stopping point to its corniness before it ever interfered with the story at hand.

Furthermore, It's important for everyone to realize that since Batman's creation in what I believe was the 1920s, there have been two parallel versions of Batman going on. One is the "dark knight" Batman, the mysterious force of good who no one knows about, and then there's the "camp" batman, who's more family-friendly, and more colorful, put it that way, his costume has blues and purples in it, rather than just plain black. The key difference, when you think about it, is Robin, because with Robin in the picture, Batman is nowhere near as mysterious and extraordinary because there is at least one other person doing the same things he is and there is at least one other person who is fighting the same battles he is, and also because Batman has to watch out for someone else, you know he's not selfless and evil. The people who like the "dark knight" Batman, are probably people whose prime hobby is comic book collecting over film watching, because that's where the dark knight first appeared.

Me, on the other hand am a film watcher who was born in 1983, so when Batman Returns came out I was 9, and while the depth of Burton's dark urban vision was so extraordinary even i could be amazed by it, I had a hard time with all the violence, seeing so many of Penguin's henchmen killed (a couple at the hands of Penguin, himself) or the scene where catwoman robs a store and kills a guy with her fingernails, etc. I'm not saying I needed a happy ending, but all the characters, even Batman, were just very depressing.

When Batman Forever came out, I was 12, and unlike its predecessor I really got on board the ride, because the movie had really great heroes and villains, which i could be engaged rooting for or against. In Batman Forever, Batman and the villains are all equally perverse and dark, I really didn't care much who won at the end, and maybe people who are harsh on Schumaker's films fail to take into account what these Batman movies are like for a kid's perspective.Visually, the movie was a marvel to watch. Tommy Lee Jones' make-up job is so great, i'd like to see someone tell me they weren't blown away, the first time we see the left side of his face in the film. Some people say that Tommy Lee Jones' portrayal of Two-Face wasn't true to the original character, who was a less hysterical individual, but I think a more composed and cool villain wouldn't have been as fun, simply put. The Riddler/Two Face partnership is the best mildly deranged villain/completely deranged villain chemistry in the series, I found (especially considering the other two partnerships never really had very much interaction with each other). Just look at the movie poster for this movie and the colors of the riddler's green, two-face's purple, robin's red, batman's dark blue/black. Like a John Williams score associates musical themes with each character, those colors with surreally bold hues draw out the characters throughout the movie. Also, Nicole Kidman blew me away too. This was long before she was in a stage where every movie role she took was basically crying out, "give me an Oscar." And as for Val Kilmer vs. Michael Keaton? Well, I think the best person to answer that question would be original Batman creator Barry Kane (did I get the name right?) who aid that Val Kilmer was the actor who played Batman closest to the vision he originally conceived it to be.