Population: One

We started a new year of glorious movie-going with Sherlock Holmes. It was better than I expected, but it did not rise to brilliance. The raw material is pretty raw. Checking — yeah, fairly inexperienced screenwriters who haven’t written anything great; I don’t imagine the script gave anyone a lot to work with. I give [...]

I just read the debut novel from Harry Connolly, Child of Fire. It’s urban fantasy/horror with a crime fiction feel: if you’ve ever read a book where a couple of investigators roll into a small town and clean up some corruption for their own reasons, you know the approach. There’s an excerpt available. I’ll give [...]

Susan and I caught the So You Think You Can Dance tour last Thursday. I’m not sure I’d shell out for the season 6 tour, but I had more fun than I expected at this one. As expected, it was relentlessly full of tweens and parents, with a scattering of oddballs like us. The overall [...]

In episode 3 of FlashForward: The Center for Disease Control requests money from the Department of Homeland Security. In 1991. Which is somewhat prior to the date the DHS was founded. The only person in the world who notices all the crows in the world dying during the flashforward blackout is a Nazi prisoner. After [...]

The season two premier of Dollhouse got lousy ratings, which it deserved. The problem’s highlighted in the climatic scene, where Eliza Dushku is flipping through identities. You can’t really tell the difference between them. Which kick-ass identity is the meaningful one? Kind of sad, insofar as Fran Kranz and Amy Acker knocked their scenes out [...]

Rose Madder? Nah, probably not. But spoilers, definitely. Mad Men is back. As the Anglophile in me decrees, everything’s better with Brits. The office politics are going to be sharper and, probably, meaner. And funnier, since we’ve now got a world of misapprehensions and bad cultural assumptions to play with. Since this is Mad Men, [...]

That was a very loyal adaptation of the comic book, which did not improve on or shed new light on the source material. So hm.

Ack, I never wrote about The Wrestler. Well, there’s not that much new to say, really. It’s fundamentally a simple tearjerker, which is where Darren Aronofsky does a lot of his best work. Like Pi and Requiem for a Dream, he’s telling a story about outsiders. I think that’s his niche as well: people who [...]

Backlash time! Slumdog Millionaire was pretty fun and I can always lounge back and watch Danny Boyle get all flamboyant with his camera, but it wouldn’t find a place among my ten best films of the year. Also I’m going to say snide things about its relationship to City of God. Problem one: I’m too [...]

I saw the Che roadshow down at the Kendall Square Theater in Cambridge this last weekend. Quite the experience. It started with a nice glossy program book, which I’ll have to take a picture of, since I can’t find any out there on the Web. As the very serious posters on the wall explained, it’s [...]