Stranger Things Ends with a Shrug
Friday, January 2, 2026
The finale of Stranger Things is a mixed bag, balancing character resolution with structural flaws and criticism over inaccessible storytelling.
Longform Reviews & Essays
The Weight of Failure (When Failure Costs Nothing)
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Lola Kirke’s memoir reveals her struggles with failure, familial expectations, and the harsh realities of the arts while exploring themes of privilege and personal identity.
Oliver Sacks’s sin wasn’t the literary license he took with patient accounts, it was allowing his exaggerations and fabrications to be treated as medical fact. He had a responsibility to his profession and the scientific community. He shirked it.
Not in Kansas Anymore
Saturday, December 6, 2025
The Wizard of Oz reformatted for the immense 16K wraparound screen of the Las Vegas Sphere is a technical marvel. Very flawed, but worth seeing.
To start with, the screen is amazing. It’s not a full hemisphere but as your neck won’t go back that far without you falling out of the seat it doesn’t matter. It produces enough light to illuminate the entire space and that first moment you see the sepia coloured skies of Kansas expand around and above you it’ll bring a smile to your face. It did to mine. The sound is clear and feels hefty. All of this comes together well in the immersive tornado sequence that delivers Dorothy to Oz.
re:Invent 2025: Treachery, Cunning, and Werner Vogels
Friday, December 5, 2025
Inside AWS, re:Invent starts sooner than you’d expect and you end up working on it for longer than you’ve planned. Through treachery and cunning, I avoided going for years. There was always someone else to pass my ticket to until 2024, when there wasn’t. After an extended professional breakup, which I initiated, Las Vegas and I were back together again. I swore the place off years ago after too many other tech conferences, but Vegas and its infinite hotel beds are inescapable.
Dracula: A Love Tale
Monday, November 17, 2025
“Dracula: A Love Tale” presents a visually appealing but ultimately shallow romantic narrative that fails to capture the depth of female empowerment found in the original story.
F for Fake
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Orson Welles’ docudrama “F for Fake” explores themes of authenticity in art through the charming yet deceptive stories of fraudsters, blending soulful monologues with moments of self-indulgence in a creatively low-budget production.
The Institute
Sunday, November 2, 2025
Television adaptations of Stephen King’s works often struggle with character development, but the engaging cast in the new series The Institute provides a refreshing take on familiar themes.
Talamasca: The Secret Order
Monday, October 27, 2025
The show fails to deliver a compelling supernatural spy thriller, lacking tension and engaging storytelling, ultimately making it unworthy of viewers’ time.
Tron: Ares
Friday, October 10, 2025
Tron: Ares features a simplistic plot with underwhelming action and characters, failing to live up to its predecessors while lacking memorable elements.
Thomas Harris: Red Dragon
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Media has made killers cute. We've given them sardonic voice overs in TV shows. Some have become "I can fix them" characters in books. They'll kill only the bad people, or so the authors would have us believe. That's not how these people work. The reality is that everyone around a serial killer will be in some way damaged or destroyed by them. Other people's pain is their point.
Red Dragon, written in 1981, doesn't do cute. In this book anyone who brushes by evil or confronts it ends up in a worse position afterwards. How could it be otherwise when facing sociopaths and sadists? Someone has to take the blows from these people and in FBI Profiler, Will Graham's case it's him. Graham is intelligent, empathetic and a sacrificial lamb.
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
When Dante wrote this narrative poem he did so in Italian instead of Latin to make it as accessible as possible. Alas, I can't read 14th century Italian so I have to depend on translators and their copious amount of footnotes. Over the past 700 years the footnotes have piled up at the bottom of the page like centuries of snow. Dante would be horrified.
Ignoring the opinions of academics and slogging my way through the translated poem, this is a groundbreaking piece of creativity. Dante the author was convicted and sentenced to death by burning on invented charges. He fled his native Florence and never gets to return. In the poem Dante the character, one of literature's most famous self-inserts, considers suicide because of his miserable circumstances. The spirit of the Roman poet Virgil appears to Dante at the request of Dante's great unconsummated love, the deceased Lady Beatrice.
The Naked Gun (2025)
Saturday, August 2, 2025
In 1996, Liam Neeson starred in the historical drama Michael Collins; likewise, Pamela Anderson was in Barb Wire. If you had told me at the time that they’d reboot The Naked Gun franchise together, I’d have laughed at you.
In this reboot of a franchise that first started in 1982 with the six-episode Police Squad!, Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr. takes on Danny Heuston’s reverse effective altruist green technology billionaire. Anderson’s crime writer has a family connection and a score to settle, which brings her into Drebin’s life.
Superman (2025)
Saturday, July 12, 2025
Superman (2025) isn't a movie by someone who studied Richard Donner's Superman. It's a movie by someone who studied Christopher Reeve's performance in Superman. David Corenswet gives Clark Kent/Superman a Reeve's like charisma even though he falls short of giving his Superman a Reeve's like presence.
The cast here outstrips the dialogue. Unlike prior Superman movies everyone can act. Rachel Brosnahan is a modern update to Hildy Johnson's fast talking 1940s reporter in His Girl Friday. She's sharp, a bit spikey, and wants the scoop. Her chemistry with Corenswet sparks on the screen. Nicholas Hoult impresses as the malignant narcissist Lex Luthor. This is Luthor as a long term strategist. The Luthor who looks at Superman and sees the end of human progress. Why strive and claw your way forward as a species when entities with the powers of the gods of legend can solve your worst problems? If they choose to, that is. Luthor is evil but his argument that in a world of super beings the future of humanity bends towards decline and helplessness gnaws away at you when the movie focuses on it.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Monday, June 2, 2025
The Devil’s Candy doesn’t need a review. People set out with the best intentions and a lot of money. They made an unloved movie from a popular novel. That’s it.
But I’ll mention that Melanie Griffith puts in a better performance in film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities than Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. Needy and damaged in the book, but dynamite on the screen.
Tom Wolfe despised the characters he wrote about in his novel. De Palma is ambivalent about the characters in his. Perhaps that’s why the book reading audience rejected the movie. The movie characters weren’t reptilian enough.
The Phoenician Scheme
Friday, May 30, 2025
A stronger entry than Asteroid City, but it’s smaller scale than The French Dispatch. It’s a three-hander film where the interplay of three characters drives the narrative.
Benicio del Toro gives a charismatic performance as magnate Zsa-Zsa Korda. A shrewd entrepreneur of strategic foresight who is amoral. But he’s a striver, and he’s so likeable that even enemies who want to see him dead can’t help but like him.
Liesl, Korda’s 21-year-old estranged daughter played by Mia Threapleton is the morality absent in the Korva genes. Threapleton plays the role of a pipe smoking trainee Nun deadpan and it works. She has moments where she looks like her mother, Kate Winslet. That passes when she pulls a knife on someone while giving them a dead eyed stare down.
When The Going Was Good by Graydon Carter
Friday, May 30, 2025
I finished reading Graydon Carter’s memoir “When The Going Was Good” last weekend. Committed to getting the most value out of the least amount of personal effort, he succeeded. Carter’s lazy ambition is impressive. I couldn’t guess to how many hours of the week he spent eating at some work related event. The man’s social battery appears endless.
The book, true to its title, recounts the magazine industry’s fall from influence and subscribers. Tech’s peak: TikTok boasts of free workplace wine. In publishing before the 2008 crash, it was how many months a writer may need to spend living at the Beverly Hills Hotel to cover a courtroom case.
Regardless, the title “When the Going Was Good” reflects some current tech industry sentiment. If AI holds even a quarter of the promise hyped, a lot of executive types in tech will pack a cardboard box the way executive types in glossy publications had to. Having destroyed so many industries, AI will speed up tech's self-cannibalization.
Until Dawn
Friday, May 30, 2025
Horror movies done well are cheap to make, pack in viewers and make much more money than they cost. The good ones leave an impression. Neither "Death of a Unicorn" nor "Drop" left enough of an impression for me to write a review but Until Dawn is different because it doesn't try to adapt the source material. It does its utmost to ignore as much of the source material as possible.
The Monkey
Friday, May 30, 2025
This movie is a surreal and absurd look at death. Deaths so terrible that sometimes you can only laugh. It doesn’t make you uncomfortable, nor does it look to hit you with jump scares. It’s a typical cursed MacGuffin movie that knows its to be laughed at no matter how high the body count gets.
Yes, the clock work driven, drum playing, malevolent looking toy monkey of the title is evil. But the monkey itself is a means. The main character gets bullied in school by a gang of girls. Girl cruelty is different to boy cruelty, but here they are cruel in a way that boys are to one another. He’s hurt and wants to hurt the source of his school problems. The monkey doesn’t make the main character turn the key in its back. It makes sure it is around when he might consider turning the key. Whatever happens after the key turns and the drumming starts, happens.
The deaths, when they occur, are bizarre, sometimes nonsensical, and often hilarious. There’s unexpected and expected torrents of blood. Immolation. Explosions. Decapitation. There’s even a death in a sleeping bag that doesn’t involve the hockey masked killer, Jason Vorhees. Which is a change because sleeping bag murders are a Friday the 13th thing.
This is a 90 minute dark comedy that falls apart in the third act but ends strong. For those wanting a slasher movie that speaks to their inner teenager, last week’s release, Heart Eyes, might be a good choice. For your fill of ludicrous death scenes, there’s a new Final Destination on the way. But if you want to laugh at death and have death laugh with you, go see The Monkey.
The Gorge
Friday, May 30, 2025
Two charismatic leads can carry a lot. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller are two charismatic leads and the burden they carry is the flimsy story of this movie.
There is a mist filled gorge somewhere where two concrete observation towers face each other from opposing sides. Opposed geographically and politically. Each tower has a top tier shooter responsible for maintenance of the automated defences preventing what is in the gorge from escaping. These lethal maintenance people are not to have any contact with each other.
The Last Dangerous Visions. Edited By Harlan Ellison.
Friday, May 30, 2025
By the time I had read Harlan Ellison’s work, his talent had deserted him. A lifelong career isn’t guaranteed, but watching one’s career fade must be a terrifying, waking nightmare. The Last Dangerous Visions, the irrevocable part of a once ground breaking trilogy of short story collections, explains why the talent evaporated and for those 60 pages it’s worth the read.
In this book, I found two interesting pieces under glass in a museum of the mediocre. Short story anthologies are like that, but "Dangerous Visions" was a career making anthology for emerging writers. It was such a success its sequel, “Again, Dangerous Visions”, had established authors knocking on the door to get their story in. This third book has none of the cachet of the first two and, as Straczynski points out, some people he reached out to did not want their work included.
Wolf Man
Friday, May 30, 2025
Vampires one week, werewolves the next. Unlike the highly cinematic Nosferatu, Wolf Man is merely a good-looking streaming movie. It could be psychological scarring from Covid, but monstrosity because of disease has taken root in the mind of horror writers.
In fiction, lycanthropy has been everything from a pact with the devil to a supernatural curse, but here we return to the idea of it as an illness. This is a movie where the werewolf is neither calculating nor 8 feet tall on two legs with a great coat of computer generated hair. Here instead it is rabid, deformed and has lost comprehension of humanity.
Nosferatu
Friday, May 30, 2025
There’s a silver undertone to this movie that reminds me of vintage black & white film stock. But then everything about this movie is looking to remind you of something vintage. Once again, a couple opposes a personification of evil. A misshapen, diseased creature of catastrophic power.
Of the other times I’ve seen Nosferatu told on screen, this couple is the best looking. Genetic super lottery winners, who I’m sure have real people's problems, but the only problem we are concerned about here is the murderous Count Orlok. The copyright holders had control of Dracula when the original Nosferatu was made. So here we have a Count Dracula knockoff called Count Orlok, with Jonathan called Thomas and Mina called Ellen.
The Godfather Part II (4K UHD)
Friday, May 30, 2025
If you want to tell a good story about a man, show him fail. He can recover but there needs to be a journey into darkness. Part II of the Godfather trilogy is Michael Corleone’s journey into darkness.
By the end of the movie he’s lost his wife, his mother, the trust of his adopted brother and his last brother by blood. His enemies are dead by their own hand or by his. But Michael has failed. He destroyed his family.
Secret Level: Episodes 1 to 8.
Friday, May 30, 2025
While lacking a 6’ tall sword wielding heroine in boob armour riding on a flying reptile, Secret Level still gives off Heavy Metal movie vibes.
This is a character driven show that has to hook you fast. Some episodes are less than 15 minutes long. Stories with famous actors get a bit more time, but you’ll know if you’re in or out in the first three minutes.
The quality of the anthology stories in the first 8 episodes ranges from “this is a series pitch” to “this is a cut scene” to “could you give us another 90 minutes of this story, please?” When it’s good, it’s great, when it’s poor, it’s CGI filler. The fresh take on Pac-Man pleasantly surprised me. I wouldn’t have thought of the story that way, but the writer did.
Like a Dragon: Yakuza. Episodes 1 to 3
Friday, May 30, 2025
Are “honourable criminals” lying to themselves? Is servitude worse than death? Less a criminal drama and more a criminal soap opera Prime Video’s Yakuza has thoughts on these questions.
Focusing on four orphans, two male and two female, on the cusp of leaving their orphanage the four protagonists here walk themselves into a nightmare of a heist gone awry. Gangsters who come looking for stolen money don’t shut up. The assassins who will kill them at their leader’s whim don’t talk. And the one who makes the room go silent when he speaks is now speaking to them. What’s it going to be, kids? Death or servitude to the Yakuza? You can have a bullet now, or you can work yourself to death at manual labour or in the sex trade.
Megalopolis
Friday, May 30, 2025
I commend Francis Ford Coppola for taking an idea he wanted to do for 40 years, putting his money into it and bringing it to the screen. But this is an experimental movie overstuffed with his fancies which does not resonate with an audience. He brought it to life through his will, but he is the intended audience. It may not matter to him if no one else watches it.
Joker: Folie à Deux
Friday, May 30, 2025
This doesn't work as a musical or a villain movie but it held my attention for most of its running time. The massive flaw in the production is that it's not supposed to be this horrific a musical.
The wasted life is a goldmine for an operatic performance. That's what Arthur Fleck's (Joaquin Phoenix) life is. A grinding misery that gets more miserable in increments. Every day the sun rises life takes a razor blade to Arthur's soul and shaves off another thin slice. But then there is love, and music, and comedy and tragedy. Or there would be if this was a better written movie. This is where it all falls apart. The love isn't love. It's someone who wants you to be your worst self. The musical numbers neither fit into what's happening nor propel the story forward. They're well lit karoeke numbers. Nothing here is funny. Even when we step into Arthur's inner life, where he should be everything no one else sees, he remains as unfunny to the viewer as he is when shuffling along Arkham's halls.
Your actor won an Oscar for an interesting take on a tired comic book villain. The hit movie you made had nonsense ideas about wounded men and their fragile egos projected onto it. You think to yourself "we don't want to encourage this." So you, correctly, say this broken man can't kill six people and expect to prosper.
But does it have to be so shallow? I'd have read this script and sent the writers off to watch Pagliacci. Several times. And if an opera about a tragic figure in deep emotional pain who swings from manic clowning humour to powerful murderous rages in a gritty setting can't improve the script? They've failed.
This should have been a musical about a tragedy. It's just a tragic musical. A big movie that's too oppressive to be anything but small.
The Substance
Friday, May 30, 2025
The Substance
About 25 minutes into The Substance we're introduced to Sue. A younger version of Demi Moore's network television fitness goddess. It's a writhing in pain, blood-stained introduction. I sat there in the dark and thought to myself, "The third act is going to be wild." It was. Because this is a movie of ludicrous escalation.
Sue (Margaret Qualley) is so refreshing she's the condensation on the Coca-Cola can. Her firm buttocks enter the shot several times before she does. Her breasts defy gravity. Everything is tight. But she has the arrogance and appetites of youth. While this movie is positioned as a feminist body horror it is a movie about a parasitic system.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Friday, May 30, 2025
A female-centric movie for the Wednesday Addams audience, this film is overstuffed and unfocused. The team seem afraid of never getting another shot at this. So, they crammed as many plot ideas as they could into the running time. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t.
The Deetz women are not having an easy time of it. Lydia (Ryder) has grown from a flourishing teenage goth girl into a timid celebrity medium. Seeing ghosts is not a gift. Beetlejuice has been tormenting her from the periphery of her vision for decades. Lydia is an unusual protagonist for a movie like this. There is no expectation that her life will get better here. It did in the first movie, but now we find a woman weighed down not by a problem but by the disappointments in her life.