reviews - jwz https://www.jwz.org/blog/ Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:39:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Space Nazis https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/space-nazis/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/space-nazis/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:37:28 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk5i Superman (2025) was that Clark got a garbled answering machine message and didn't realize that his parents were Space Nazis who wanted him to take over Earth and eugenics-fuck his way to a new super-race (the plot of Invincible and also the plot of Elon Musk). But at the end Supergirl shows up, who left Krypton as a teenager. So couldn't the little blonde übermensch have just... told him about her time in the Krypton Youth and at Ku Klux Krypton rallies?

Anyway, the trailer for Supergirl (2026) looks alright. The miniseries that it is purportedly based on was really good.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/04/space-nazis/feed/ 13 Recent movies and TV https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/recent-movies-and-tv-33/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/recent-movies-and-tv-33/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:04:41 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk5A

  • The Bluff (2026):
    An excellent little pirate movie. Which isn't quite right, because though it's about pirates, there's not a lot of pirating, or even sailing. It's more one of those "I was retired and you had to pull me back in" deal -- you know, a Statham Situation. Bloody Mary's ex wants the gollllllld. Anyway, fun characters, very good -- and parsable -- stunts, and the stunts felt very practical. I saw a number of Texas Switches going on, so I think a lot of it was done old-school.

  • We Bury The Dead (2026):
    A decent road-trip zombie movie. The US accidentally nukes Tasmania with a zombie bomb, and people volunteer to clean up the corpses, including a bunch of people handling their grief in totally normal healthy ways, such as our hero who is looking for her husband and either hoping he is dead or hoping he is a zombie, it's not clear.

  • Greenland (2020) and Greenland 2 (2025):
    These are both stupid disaster movies with absurd physics and geology, but more than that, they are movies that hate people, and believe that people are fundamentally awful, vicious monsters. Their thesis is that if anything goes wrong, everyone will immediately fuck each other over as quickly and as hard as possible, and there's nothing wrong with stepping on someone's face if it gets you into the boat one second earlier. It does not brook even a second's reflection. It was very hard watching this bullshit during the weeks when the people of Minnesota were presenting us a realtime rebuttal to this cynical, evil worldview. Besides that, it's amazing how any time there are like, 10 people who made it into the boat/car/bus/whatever, the ones who are not the 3 main characters are just ... absent ... in the next scene. Did they vaporize? Did our heroes eat them? Such script writing wow. I hated the first one but I hate-watched the second one because I had to know if it got even worse and yes, it did. I need an intervention.

  • Cassandra (2025):
    Instead of haunted house stories, now we get them re-skinned as "smart-home automation turns evil" stories. The twist on this one is that the evil smart home is implausibly-vintage 1970s/80s tech. The show is just ok, and I really only even go that hight because of the retro styling. Which is pretty. Since it is Netflix, there's 90 minutes of plot dragged out to 5 hours over 6 episodes and it does the Episode Seven thing (but in ep 5) in the most predictable way. The writers for this definitely believed that you were half watching it while reading something else on your phone, so they have to repeat everything five times.

  • The Damned (2025):
    Trapped in the ice, shipwreck, possible haunting. I dug it.

Then I went on a Ghost in the Shell binge, because it turns out there were like twice as many serieses as I realized and I hadn't seen most of them:

  • Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex (2002):
    On a rewatch, this is still good! The animation is beautiful and the characters are well written. The Laughing Man is an interesting villain, and the signature move of being able to hide his face with a logo because every person and camera has mechanical eyes that are hackable is just epic. The eventual reveal of his identity is kind of weird and dumb, and overall the show suffers from several problems: A) it's a cop show and ACAB; and B) these C truly are B and have never met someone who told them "no" who was not a "terrorist"; and C) they do a whole lot of straight-up domestic political assassination; and D) it's weirdly racist for a cartoon where every character looks like a big-eyed Japanese pop star. You're all Sneeches! Much of the plot is about "immigrants" and "refugees" and how much of "our" taxes should be spent on "those parasites" and the difference between the "good guys" and "bad guys" seems to mainly be "should we deport them" or "should we murder them". So let's say that it doesn't age well.

  • Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex, Second Gig (2004):
    Also a rewatch. Also still good, but kind of more of the same. Same weird anti-immigrant plot; the big bad "Individual Eleven" starts off as the same kind of maybe-hivemind as Laughing Man but then does a fake-out to something else which isn't as clever as they wanted it to be. Much more fun stuff with the emergent-personality Tachikoma smart tanks, which was a fun sub-plot.

  • Ghost in the Shell, Solid State Society (2006):
    This was fine. At least they stopped shitting on immigrants and focused on billionaire vampires kidnapping children instead.

  • Ghost in the Shell, Arise (2013):
    I never saw this the first time around, and reviews led me to believe that the story and animation were both vastly inferior, a bullshit cash grab. But actually I think it's quite good, possibly even better than SAC. It's a prequel, "here's how we got the gang together". In SAC Motoko was what, 35 to 50?, so she was wearing a 25 year old big-boobed robot porn star body. In this one she's 25-ish? (how old do you have to be to get promoted to Army Major?) so she's wearing a 15 year old robot body instead. Oh, anime, never change. But since she's not old and jaded she's allowed to have emotions and make mistakes instead of just being an always-right killing machine. And they aren't bottomless-funded cops just yet, so out of self-interest they have to actually care about consequences and accountability. They are still all temperamentally murderers, but without immunity, and that's what passes for ethics I guess. Less immigrant hate. Not none, but less.

    I hate that current events have made it impossible for me to enjoy stories about righteous vigilantes.

  • Ghost in the Shell, SAC_2045 (2020):
    I never even heard that this came out, and... it's pretty bad. It's much more "3d" so it just looks like a video game cut scene. Section 9 has been disbanded and are working as vigilantes in Los Angeles, and The Major looks like a teen pop star now. Also the environments and especially the cars look very contemporary and out-of-place in the GitS universe. Someone involved really loves cars. The plot is... maybe not completely terrible but I really dislike the look of this show, and the character writing is just off.

    That said, S02 is better. The art is still jarring, but the plot is less "immigrants, amirite?" and more "super-cyborgs are freaked out by a secret society of even-more-super cyborgs." The plot hooked me, despite. Also there were some quite well choreographed fight scenes. Which feels like a weird thing to say about a cartoon but I assume it was a lot of mocap. But as always the Tachikomas are the real stars. The ending is confusing and incoherent, which is how you know it's a GitS show.

Ok, GitS diversion over:

  • Night Patrol (2025):
    What if the (real) gangs inside LAPD were actual monsters. Very strong first act! Bogs down a bit in the third. Mostly black cast and they start off setting it up as a "white savior" plot but (spoiler) then they're like, "LOL no". It's fun. Not as good as Night Teeth, which I keep recommending.

  • Primal S03:
    RAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

  • Shelter (2026):
    I have simple needs. "Jason Statham was in hiding but then the commandos found him" -- shit man that's all you had to say. This time he's in a lighthouse.

  • Monarch Legacy of Monsters S02:
    I continue to love everything about this show! Previously. Every time I tell someone this they say, "You're kidding." I am not kidding. It's great.

  • Whistle (2025):
    Aztec Death Whistle summons your fate. It's basically a Final Destination movie, with the same dumb rules-lawyering. It's alright I guess.

  • Umamusume Pretty Derby (2018):
    Ok wait hear me out. We have this recurring event at the club that plays "anime music", which is mostly indistinguishable from happy hardcore, and is some of the worst shit you'll ever hear (and I include "riddim" in that) and at the most recent event, everyone was wearing horse accessories and they left carrots all over the club, so I had to look up what the actual fuck this was all about. Anyway I watched like half of the first two episodes of this and it's some of the worst trash I've ever seen. It makes Sailor Moon look like Shakespeare. And like Rembrandt. Plot: sometimes genetic mutants are born with horse tails and once they grow into big-boobed teenagers they encounter a biological imperative to run in circles, very very fast; and then do karaoke. Oh anime, never change.

  • The Beauty (2026):
    I started watching this knowing nothing about it, and the first episode was like: "Oh it's X Files body horror, I'm down", followed by, "This is a straight-up rip-off of The Substance, stop reminding me of better movies that I'd rather be watching instead", and then I soon realized that it's by the American Horror Story guy, and yup, by episode 2 he's back on his usual bullshit: "The only way I know how to write women is as cunty drag queens, aren't they just the worst? Girlfriend!" But, it had body horror and some billionaires get murdered so I kept hate-watching. The season ended with literally nothing resolved.

  • Is This Thing On? (2025):
    Will Arnett and Laura Dern get divorced and he works out his trauma by doing standup. It's kinda just a romcom but it's really sweet.

  • Young Sherlock (2026):
    This is some bullshit.

    The first thing you need to know about this show, which should have been a damned title screen, is that it is not a prequel, it is an alternate history that in no way lines up with the books or any other Holmes story. And knowing that would have saved me so much frustration and annoyance.

    But it's still some bullshit.

    I appreciate how some people might be here for "will twentysomething Sherlock and Moriarty fuck" but I can't get past "they didn't meet until Sherlock was like 35 and Moriarty was like 70, what even is this."

    I have been a Sherlock fan for a little while now. I still have the copy of Hound of the Baskervilles that I bought on a whim at a flea market when I was like 9 years old, and it imprinted on me hard. I assume I paid 10¢ for it. It is absolutely falling apart to dust but the latest copyright on it is 1904. The thing about Sherlock is, there's only like 1700 pages total, that's barely 5 novels, but it launched a thousand ships. This ship though, this "shipping", this is some crap. I might have enjoyed this show if the characters all had different names like "Steve" and "Brian" instead of "Sherlock" and "Moriarty" but as-is, I JUST. CAN. NOT.

    One of the things about being a lifelong fan of Sherlock is that when you are a child you think "This guy is the greatest guy ever and I love him" and then when you are an adult you think "This guy is an absolute piece of shit and I love him" and if you never made that transition, everyone else in your life has my sympathies.

    Anyway, as movies and TV go,

    • The Cushing movies -- honestly I'm not into them.
    • The Seven Percent Solution -- pretty great and nuts.
    • The Downey movies -- first eh, second hard pass.
    • House -- yes to S01, strongly diminishing returns after. Probably didn't age well.
    • The Cumberbach shows -- mostly fun, overall unsatisfying.
    • Elementary -- middling.
    • Enola Holmes -- Fun and I appreciate it as criticism.

    It's not a great track record.

  • Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die (2026):
    A pretty fun low-budget riff on Terminator, but with the dirtbaggy lunacy of 12 Monkeys.

  • Scream 7 (2026):
    This was definitely a Scream movie. It was fine. Always good to see [SPOILER] again. Has some AI hate.

  • Scarlet (2025):
    King Hamlet's daughter (?) dies and goes to hell, which is somehow the Middle East but underwater, gets a 21st Century paramedic as a sidekick, and goes on a revenge-quest, fighting an endless series of Deadites. And then, I dunno, the planet explodes into love or something. The animation is great; it's a weird mix of photorealistic 3D-rendered backgrounds with cel-style anime characters, but the motion in the sword fights and dance routines (plural) feels rotoscoped, it has a twitchy Bakshi feel. Weird-ass incoherent movie, but pretty.

Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/recent-movies-and-tv-33/feed/ 33 Monarch title sequence https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/monarch-title-sequence/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/monarch-title-sequence/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:36:51 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk4D said before, I find the decisions about what stories they choose to tell, and under such constraints, fascinating. So every time a new season of a show starts, I pick them apart to see what subtle changes they made.

Monarch, Legacy of Monsters has a fantastic title sequence. Since the show takes place in two timelines, they split the titles between the past on the left and the present on the right, contrasting similar events in each timeline. And season 2 keeps up this conceit, but it was completely rebuilt!

So here are all four quadrants from seasons 1 and 2, stacked.

Also, this show is still killing it.

]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/monarch-title-sequence/feed/ 15 Whale https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/whale/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/whale/#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:54:48 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk2r Whale, one of my favorite 90s bands. They only had two albums but I have 14 CDs by them, which might be their entire output. So Pixies influenced! So sleazy! (Their grungey-slow-grind cover of Darling Nikki is just... *chef's kiss*.) Tricky co-wrote/produced half their first album, before Maxinquaye.

I finally got to see them live in 1998 opening for Tricky on the Angels with Dirty Faces tour at The Fillmore, and they killed it, and then I saw them again headlining the following night at Bimbo's, and nobody came, and they were clearly angry about that and kinda jerky. I forgave them and loved them anyway.

Eye 842. Eye 842.

]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/whale/feed/ 17 Recent movies and TV https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/recent-movies-and-tv-32/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/recent-movies-and-tv-32/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2026 05:25:36 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk2a
  • Pluribus (2025):
    Holy crap is this great. Rhea Seehorn is a treasure. I've watched it twice all the way though and loved it both times.

  • TRON Ares (2025):
    As expected, Jared Leto ruins everything. This was terrible. But it was not as terrible as I expected. Let's say that on the "Hellraiser" scale, I expected this to be "Hellraiser 3 Hell on Earth" bad but it was merely "Hellraiser 4 Bloodline" bad. The pre-credits intro had so much exposition in it, it was like we were looking at a slurry made of pulped previous drafts of the script.

  • Talamasca (2025):
    I mean, it wasn't terrible? Not as good as Interview, not as dreadful as Mayfair. Utterly forgettable protagonist. It's basically Three Days of the Vampire. Half the dialog is Forgettable Boy saying things like "Wait, ghosts are real??"

  • The Ick (2025):
    It's your basic Night of the Creeps / The Blob, in a world where all the dumbasses would inject bleach and claim it was the Deep State. Pretty entertaining. Terrible effects.

  • Nothing Sacred (1937):
    Absolutely classic Screwball. Girl should have had radium poisoning, can't admit she's fine, becomes a NY celebrity deathwatch. Technicolor in 1939!

  • Caught Stealing (2025):
    A perfectly acceptable dirtbags-running-from-the-mob movie.

  • Freakier Friday (2025):
    This was so, so stupid, but also pretty funny.

  • Killing Mary Sue (2025):
    Dad is trying to murder his shithead party-girl daughter, who can't figure out that this is happening, and who is apparently immortal via the cleansing power of stupidity. It's pretty funny.

  • Dracula, A Love Tale (2025):
    At first I thought this was just going to be a remake of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, of which I am not a fan, because it is doing that dumb reincarnation plot which was in neither the novel nor in Nosferatu. Maybe it first appeared in one of the Christopher Lee movies? I can't remember. Anyway, it's not that! This movie is great! The vampires are gleefully unhinged and sexy in a Night Teeth way, there are some inexplicable dance routines, and Dracula's primary superpower is that he smells really nice, I am not even kidding. There are also claymation-esque gargoyle sidekicks which have to be an intentional reference to Subspecies, they have to be.

    Side note, I had a 30 minute argument with Dr. Kingfish about this movie and how I loved it but he thought it was a boring re-tread snore, and eventually I figured out that we were arguing about completely different 2025 Dracula movies -- he thought we were talking about the Eggers Nosferatu, which I agree, was a complete snore. I didn't make it 30 minutes into that one. Likewise, the Del Toro Frankenstein lost me by minute 15. Zero fucks to give about Little Lord Fauntleroy-Frankenstein and his hard childhood and Sad Dad.

  • Abraham's Boys (2025):
    Dr. Van Helsing married Mina (!!) and moved to the California Central Valley. Their sons do not want to join the family business. It's actually just a "bad dad" story, but I'm going to include it on my "maybe worth watching" list just because it is such a radical departure from the usual fare of Dracula sequels (like that one that was about actuarial paperwork or whatever.)

  • Down Cemetery Road (2025):
    Reluctant suburbanite plays detective to rescue the MacGuffin. The plot is on rails, but it has good characters.

  • The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973):
    CIA hires a token black man, trains him, and then has him run the copier for five years. He quits, moves back to Chicago, and starts an insurrection, turning street gangs into the Viet Cong and murdering cops. Apparently this didn't get a real release back in the day for some reason but it's great!

  • Stone Cold Fox (2025):
    Some dirtbags dirtbag. I am always here to watch Krysten Ritter chew the scenery, and this is definitely that.

  • Rabbit Trap (2025):
    In the 70s, a couple go to the Welsh countryside to do field recordings for what sounds like a Chris & Cosey album, discover the secret brown note of faerie rings, and then things get weird. It's a bit slow but pretty great. "Folk horror" is not generally my jam but I liked this one a lot.

  • Keeper (2025):
    Tatiana Maslany (who is always awesome) goes away to a cabin in the woods with her boyfriend, and you assume he's gonna try to murder her, which of course he is, but it's way weirder than that and pretty great.

  • Man Finds Tape (2025):
    This is a found-footage / documentary-style copypasta kind of thing, and it's ok. I almost bailed 5 minutes in when I realized that's what it was, because I think the Blair Witch both opened and closed the book on found-footage, and generally my opinion has been that everything since has just been a lazy attempt to use that format to cover for a lack of budget. I never want to see a "Zoom" movie again as long as I live. Anyway, even given my low opinion of the format, I made it to the end of this and it was alright. The actual mythology they unspool is interesting. I wish it had been a "real" movie, though.

  • Kill Bill, The Lost Chapter, Yuki's Revenge (2025):
    Well I say god damn. That was just a delightful little snack. (Making of).

  • Good Fortune (2025):
    Keanu is a guardian angel who is an idiot. You should already be sold on this.

  • Eternity (2025):
    The Good Place but with less ethics lessons and more Hallmark romcom. It was funny.

  • Xeno (2025):
    Friendless nerdy girl who has pet spiders and snakes adopts a stray puppy and hides it in her basement, except the puppy is a Xenomorph. Predictable but fun.

  • Spinal Tap 2 (2026):
    This is a thing that happened that should not have.

  • Fallout (season whatever):
    This is bad. Nobody who isn't watching this out of nostalgia for a video game they used to play can possibly think that this is not bad.

  • Okja (2017):
    Korean farm girl tries to save her giant genetically engineered pig from the corporation that designed it. It's part Totoro and part Babe, with a dash of Cohen-esque "all these people are idiots". Pretty fun.

  • Predator Badlands (2025):
    In this wacky timeline, "The Elle Fanning Predator movie is fantastic" is a thing that I say. Prey was better, but this has great comedy and, ya know, heart. It has fambly. It has daddy issues. (And Mu/th/r issues.) So yeah they also rub some Weyland-Yutani on it, which means that even though all right-thinking people disavow the existence of the Alien vs. Predator movies, this is still a better Alien sequel than Alien Earth.

    Also after you've watched it, the spoileriffic Corridor Crew episode about the effects is pretty great.

  • Rental Family (2025):
    A company of actors that hires themselves out as a "make a wish" kind of thing to sad people. It is both creepy and surprisingly sweet. Japanese, but mostly in English.

  • Miss Scarlet And The Duke (2020):
    Victorian lady private detective. It is soap opera popcorn fun. It does violate my admonition against shows about doctors, lawyers or cops, but I enjoyed it anyway.

    (Like all such shows it is set in 1890-ish, and they are at least paying lip service to correct fashion, like, Detective Grumpy has sleeve garters even though his shirt is perfectly fitted. BUT Scarlet's dress has full sized modern pockets, and they show her using them all the time, but do not hang a lantern on it.)

  • Dust Bunny (2025):
    Little girl hires the assassin next door to take care of the monster rabbit under her bed. Which is pretty good so far! But it's way more interesting than that, because it's hard to tell what is real and what is a dream and the set design is Susperia-esque and I do not bandy that comparison about lightly. This is absolutely fantastic.

  • Starfleet Academy (2026):
    We are only 3 episodes in and already this is, without a doubt, the second worst Star Trek show of all time. Only Section 31 has been worse, and I am including in that assessment the rock-bottom outings of Prodigy, Enterprise and Voyager. I kinda don't hate Holly Hunter, Fake Teen Mia Goth or Fake Teen Anne Hathaway, but every other character is either despicable or I have already forgotten them entirely. Is hologram girl only in the show because there's a studio note that every Star Trek show has to have a Wesley or a Data as a lightning rod of hate to draw attention away from the terrible writing and acting of every other character? (I mean, the Betazoids were only the fourth most irritating thing on TNG.) Also, the entire show is plots about how main characters hate each other. Roddenberry would have hated this.

    Also also, setting any Trek show in the post-Burn-iverse is an unforced error. Nobody gives a shit about that world. It's awful. Disregard it.

    They missed the good lesson of DS9, "We stay here, the galaxy comes to us", and instead of Academy focusing on life in San Francisco (as seen from Sausalito) they made the whole school be a ship so they will presumably be doing away missions with entirely unqualified staff. Wow, I can't wait.

    Such laziness: It's like a thousand years in the future, NCC numbers are like 6 or 7 digits, but every name on the wall of fame is somehow someone who's been in a show that we've seen.

    For some reason "Starfleet Academy" and "War College" are in the same building and for some reason they are instructed to hate each other, but I don't actually know the difference between them except that one of them have black uniforms, so I assume these are like a Harry Potter sorting hat situation? I have zero fucks here.

    Underwear locker room scene. And they don't even have decon gel.

    Trash, it's all trash. It's the CW Network version of Star Trek. It's Gossip Girl Trek.

    I was excited to see Brit Marling in the credits but she's just the computer voice, instead of the Majel Barrett impersonator they have been using for decades.

    • Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/recent-movies-and-tv-32/feed/ 51 Recent books https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/recent-books-5/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/recent-books-5/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 2026 02:52:23 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk1I Once again it feels like I read more books than this, but the teetering tower of OSHA violations does not lie. Here are the books that I enjoyed this year, in desk-stack order:

    But! I now have a strong theory as to why my book reading has been down. This was the year that I finally stopped living in denial and bought reading glasses. After doing that I came to realize that I had been following all kinds of stupid rules that I hadn't even noticed, like, "I only read books in direct sunlight".

    Dammit.

    (Yes, I read books on paper, no, I don't want to hear about your Kindle.)

    Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/recent-books-5/feed/ 51 2025 music wrap-up, and mixtape 256 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/2025-music-wrap-up-and-mixtape-256/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/2025-music-wrap-up-and-mixtape-256/#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:09:15 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk1E Here is some new music that I enjoyed in 2025. Despite the absolute shitshow of everything about this year, it was a pretty decent year for music!

    In only vague and fickle order of favoriteness:

    Please enjoy jwz mixtape 256 -- a nice round number.

    Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/2025-music-wrap-up-and-mixtape-256/feed/ 12 Xmas movies https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/xmas-movies/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/xmas-movies/#comments Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:33:12 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk05 in 2022, the elves did their work in one night and gave us two perfect Christmas movies. In case you're looking for something to watch with mom.

    ]]>     https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/xmas-movies/feed/ 9     RIP John Varley https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/rip-john-varley/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/rip-john-varley/#comments Sun, 14 Dec 2025 20:35:14 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk0b Michael Swanwick:

    John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.

    In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His "Eight Worlds" stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.

    We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like "In the Hall of the Martian Kings," which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or "Air Raid," which made air travel terrifying again. [...]

    Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'"

    And that was John Varley's moment.

    There are a lot of books and authors that I loved as a kid that, in hindsight, are not as good as I remembered. But John Varley is not one of those; he remains one of my favorite authors. I read Overdrawn at the Memory Bank in a second-hand "Best SF of the year" compilation when I was 10 years old and my head exploded. I read everything of his I could get my hands on after that. His vision of the future wasn't just robots and spaceships but it was optimistic and romantic about what we could become in a way I hadn't seen before.

    I am sad to report that almost all of his work appears to be out of print! The pickings on bookshop.org are slim. When evangelizing him to people I always recommend The John Varley Reader as a great place to start. That one is widely available on eBay. So go buy that. Go. Do it now.

    Which reminds me that one time in the 90s I loaned a friend my copy of the already-out-of-print-even-then Blue Champagne and they immediately lost it. I was so mad. This was before Amazon and eBay, but I eventually found some early online bookstore and ordered myself a new copy. When it arrived it turned out to be a signed first edition! So I was less mad then.

    His Eight Worlds stories from the 70s and 80s are my favorites. Decades later, he returned to them with Steel Beach, which is his riff on Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but slaps Heinlein around almost as much as Verhoeven did in Starship Troopers.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/rip-john-varley/feed/ 30 Cube https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/08/cube/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/08/cube/#comments Sat, 30 Aug 2025 18:51:30 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykua Rodney and Ezri agree.Cube (1997) is far more relevant to our 2025 shitshow than it has any right to be.

    "This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan."

    "What kind of fuckin' explanation is that? Somebody had to say yes to this thing."

    "I mean, somebody might've known sometime before they got fired or voted out or sold it. But if this place ever had a purpose, then it got miscommunicated or lost in the shuffle. This is an accident, a forgotten, perpetual public works project. You think anybody wants to ask questions? All they want is a clear conscience and a fat paycheck."

    "Why put people in it?"

    "Because it's here. You have to use it, or you admit it's pointless."

    "But it... it is pointless!"

    "Quentin, that's my point."

    Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/08/cube/feed/ 37 Recent movies and TV https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/08/recent-movies-and-tv-31/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/08/recent-movies-and-tv-31/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2025 18:35:09 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykuT

  • Sinners (2025): Absolutely glorious vampiring. Perfect, no notes.

  • Fear Below (2025): I thought this was going to be just another "divers encounter a shark" movie (which is fine, I like that movie) but it was way better than that. It was "Australian mobsters in the 1950s force divers to recover their loot", so it was all classic dive helmets and classic cars and classic racism. Also shark.

  • Deep Cover (2025): Improv comics get recruited by the cops to pose as drug buyers in a sting, "things get out of hand". It's pretty funny.

  • It Feeds (2025): A psychic goes into people's dreamscapes to fight a hunger demon and rescue her daughter. The demon makeup is pretty good. This is basically a very long Buffy episode.

  • Until Dawn (2025): Groundhog Day cabin-in-the-woods slasher. Pretty fun.

  • Clown in a Corn Field (2025): It's a traditional teen slasher, but everyone in the movie is aware of the tropes and can't believe this shit is happening to them. It's hilarious, the characters are good, and the effects are wonderfully gory.

  • K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025): I can't believe I'm saying this, but this was really fun. I don't think I need to explain the plot to you, it's right there in the title.

  • Bottoms (2024): A pair of loser high school lesbians start a fight club to meet girls. Most of the humor is incredibly cringey, but it has its moments.

  • Ironheart (2025): Genius teen fuckup and her supersuit and magical AI sidekick. There are witches. It's fun.

  • Thunderbolts (2025): As Marvel movies go, this was a lot of fun. I'd say that with the exception of Deadpool & Wolverine, this was better than the previous... nineteen? Marvel movies. I realize that is an exceptionally low bar in a collection that includes both Morbius and Kraven. But Thunderbolts made some of the franchise's absolutely least-interesting characters ok.

  • Ballerina (2025): This was definitely a John Wick movie. By which I mean: a gossamer-thin web of plot-shaped scaffolding from which hangs a showcase for some absolutely incredible stunt work. It does what it says on the can. I have already forgotten it.

  • The Old Guard 2 (2025): Not as much fun as the first one, but it was ok. The mythology gets in the way of the ass-kicking, to some degree.

  • Inheritance (2025) "My estranged dad is a spy and I need to get the MacGuffin." It's a solid entry in the genre. No super-spy shit, just a basic treasure hunt through fun locales. Remedial but fun tradecraft, good chases, a lot of oners.

  • Daniela Forever (2024) Guy gets in a lucid dreaming study and processes the death of his girlfriend in the least healthy way possible. It's a little bit Twilight Zone, a little bit Groundhog Day. Kind of slow, and a bummer, but not bad.

  • The Life of Chuck (2024): This was great. The first act seems like a "Don't Look Up"-style apocalypse, but then the second act flips it into something else entirely. It's very clever.

  • Predator, Killer of Killers (2025): Good animation. Pretty good historical predator killins', with vikings and samurai, and the framing / epilogue tied it together in a fun way.

  • The Occupant (2025): Mostly this is "Woman Versus Mountain" with the spooky stuff only coming in very late, but it's interesting spooky stuff. (Not relevant but weird: I think it used some of the same sets as Ballerina.)

  • M3GAN 2.0 (2025): Surprised to report that this was pretty funny. The "Xerox" stuff was hilarious, like finding out that your local taco truck was actually S.H.I.E.L.D. all along.

  • Alien Earth (2025): I'm only 4 episodes in, but:
    • The sets are very pretty. Slavish reproductions of the control panels from Alien.
    • "Baby Zuck owns all of Asia, isn't that funny?" -- isn't that funny.
    • Baby Zuck in general. Or are we going with "Lex Loser"?
    • I see we're doing "born sexy yesterday" again, huh? Sigh.
    • A whole-ass space ship hits a whole-ass city, and there are no air traffic controllers? No fighters followed it down? The only first responders are a single ambulance crew? WTAF man.
    • This is not a show that should be making me say, "Hey, this scene is straight out of Cleopatra 2525". Not once but twice.
    • It's set a few years before Alien, so... the timeline is stupid.

  • I'm a Virgo (2025): An 18 year old awkward black kid has been raised in hiding at home because he's like 20 feet tall, but makes his way out into the wilds of Oakland and tries to make friends. It's really funny, and they do a lot with a low budget. The effects seem to make heavy use of puppets, large and small. Eventually a Homelander-esque superhero shows up, and the plot takes a militantly anticapitalist turn!

  • Blindspotting (2018 movie) + Blindspotting (2021-2023 TV series): Oaklanders trying to stay out of jail despite the best efforts of their idiot friends. Somehow I missed these when they first came out, but they are both fantastic.

  • Baby Assassins (2021): What if Ghost World, but these absolute shithead dirtbag slacker teen girls were also Japanese hitmen? It's pretty funny, and has great Wickian gun fu.

  • Red Sonja (2025): When this started my reaction was, "What is this time capsule of 90s Canadian television cheese?" But I gotta say, by the time they were fighting the Harryhausen cyclops in the slave pits, I was fully invested. Now, don't get me wrong -- this is no Scorpion King 5. But if you are looking for a low budget Bulgarian Red Sonja that takes itself absolutely seriously in all the right ways, this is what you ordered. And she wears the outfit.

  • Nautilus (2024): Nine out of 10 episodes of this were fantastic. The interior sets on the Nautilus are great. Really, the detailing is out of control. The ensemble cast are interesting, and the villains were nice and scenery-chewing. I had questions about the tech, but this is also a show with sea monsters in it, so just let that go. I enjoyed it immensely, but I would recommend you hit stop at episode 9, just after they escape from Shieldmaiden Themyscira.

    Episode 10 reads like, "We were told we're cancelled, so here's a clip show of every idea we had for the next 3 seasons." I hate to harp on just one episode, but it's so bad, and I liked the rest of the show a lot. The last episode starts off as a heist, then turns into a courtroom drama, one which makes no goddamned sense, and also has nearly no submarine. Anyway, don't let that put you off, the rest of the show is great. It's pretty much assured that there will never be a season 2, since the history is that Disney shitcanned this without intending to ever release it, but then someone else bought it from the trash pile.

  • Together (2025): A clingy relationship turns into literally clingy body horror. It takes a little while to get going, but it gets genuinely scary.

    If there's one thing I've learned from horror movies, it is: never move from The City to a Quaint House Out In The Woods.

    • Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/08/recent-movies-and-tv-31/feed/ 35 Letters from the Dead https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/06/letters-from-the-dead/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/06/letters-from-the-dead/#comments Tue, 24 Jun 2025 19:05:54 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykqA My friend Isabella Valeri just published her first novel, Letters from the Dead, and it's fantastic! A girl grows up on the estate of her dynastic family, never setting foot on land her father doesn't own, until power struggles result in her being shipped off to a boarding school under an assumed name. In between there is tradecraft, statecraft, assassins, financial shenanigans, and a rogue's gallery of billionaire sociopaths.

    Go buy.

    I was fortunate enough to be a beta reader of this novel and its coming sequels, beginning almost a decade ago, so I got to see it evolve... Sometimes the road to publishing is a long one.

    You may remember Isabella from her 2003/2004 blog, "She's a Flight Risk", where she documented her time as an international fugitive, having embezzled a small fortune from her family and then gone on the run with smugglers and other small-plane enthusiasts. I understand that those years will be covered in book three.

    Now, I expect that right away some of you will get hung up on, "But is it true?"

    My friend, this is 2025. Nothing is true.

    It does say "a novel" right there on the cover, if that helps you out. She is fond of saying that her attorneys have made it clear to her that she is "no longer permitted to tell true stories."

    Are we still doing "truthy"? It's definitely truthy.

    And it's a great story.

    Previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/06/letters-from-the-dead/feed/ 14 W0rldtr33 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/06/w0rldtr33/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/06/w0rldtr33/#comments Sat, 07 Jun 2025 02:50:31 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykoy I am really enjoying this series W0rldtr33, which takes the positions that A) the Internet is very literally evil, and B) the Internet is a physical thing that can be blown up with bombs.

    This was certainly on my mind last night when I posted:

    The internet is down. Oh no. Our POS is down. Oh no. We are cash only. Oh no.

    *Whispers* please don't come back.

    and that thing about credit cards a few months ago.


    <Hacker voice> "I'm in."


    Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/06/w0rldtr33/feed/ 3 Recent movies and TV https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/05/recent-movies-and-tv-30/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/05/recent-movies-and-tv-30/#comments Mon, 19 May 2025 06:44:31 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykoE

  • Freaky Tales (2025): I have watched this three times. It is four interleaved stories, happening simultaneously in 1987, and the first one is a bunch of Gilman punks absolutely eviscerating some Nazis. If you aren't already in, I can't help you. It is "Pulp Oakland". The attention to detail is fantastic. Whoever made this.... was there. Also the Easter eggs! The cameos! The film references! Chef kiss all the way through.

    This is now both the Second best punk movie, and the second best Bay Area movie, I will not be taking questions.

  • Andor: I have already gushed about Andor, and if you read this at all I'm sure you're already watching it, but. It sticks the fucking landing. It is the most powerful piece of antifascist cinema I have seen since Casablanca.

    As I said before, most Star Wars TV media follows the pattern of, "What if these two action figures I owned when I was a child fought." And then Andor comes out of the gate with, "The only rational response to fascism is violent insurrection." And it doubles down on that at every opportunity. ("Oh, here are three episodes about Privatized Prison Slavery and the fundamental weakness of the Panopticon! Buy some toys!") How did Disney let this antifa show slip through, twice?

    Also. I am absolutely mortified that none of the reviews I read even acknowledged the scene where the Space French were being slaughtered while singing Space La Marseillaise. FFS, read a book.

    (Look I know it's in black and white but if you haven't seen Casablanca watch Casablanca. It is genuinely excellent and you will understand so many jokes that went over your head before.)

  • The Gorge (2025): The first half is a surprisingly sweet long-distance romance between two snipers, but once the monsters show up, it's absolutely terrifying. Really great creature design. Perhaps a bit over-explained toward the end, but still a fun ride.

  • Cold (2025): A short film where Wynonna Earp contracts both menopause and zombie-ism, it's fantastic.

  • Improbably Poppy (2025): I had lost track of Poppy for a while, because her turn to metal wasn't very interesting to me, but she's started doing a "variety show", sorta, on her youtube channel and it is absolutely insane and brilliant. I hope she keeps going.

  • Shrinking (2023): I initially ignored this because of my rule against shows about doctors, lawyers or cops, but someone said it reminded them a bit of The Good Place, and that's not right, but it's also not wrong. If is pitched as a show about psychologists and their zany patients but really it's about messed up people trying to do better, and it's just kind of sweet. Also the jokes are filthy. There's a line it one episode that might be its mission statement: "You realize that the villain in your story is just a person who made a big mistake".

  • Twilight of the Warriors, Walled In (2024): Relentless martial arts ass-kicking set in the 80s in Kowloon Walled City. The stunts and effects are great, and the environment is a gorgeous apocalypse. "We spent $1 each on our wigs because the whole budget was wire removal and matte paintings"

  • The Electric State (2025): I have long been a fan of Simon Stålenhag and the character design in this mimicked his art very well, and that was almost enough for me. But, as Pitch Meeting said, "Oh it's based on a graphic novel. But that sounds like reading. So we just ignored all that and made a Marvel movie." So yeah. "Worst Chris".

  • Bloody Axe Wound (2024): It's the 80s, and an alternate universe where slasher movies are true, and the guy they're based on is a sad single dad who wants his daughter to go into the family business. Pretty cute. The unreality of the situation is kind of glossed over but that's fine.

  • Companion (2025): The trailer tries really hard not to give away the big spoiler (I guessed it within the first 5 minutes), but anyway, a woman goes on vacation with her shitty boyfriend and ends up murdering the absolute fuck out of his really shitty friends. It's fun.

  • The Monkey (2025): Killer organ grinder monkey toy. Nothing far afield from your expectations, but fun and really gory.

  • The Studio (2025): Did you wake up today and say to yourself, "You know what I'm looking for? Another story about the difficult lives of multimillionaire entertainment industry bureaccrats." There is nothing that Hollywood enjoys more than climbing up its own ass, and this is more of that. I will grudgingly admit that there were a few cringey laughs, but by the time I got to episode 3, I had that same feeling I get when I realize I've thoughtlessly eaten an entire bag of Doritos. "Why did I do that to myself? Oh, my stomach." This is trash.

  • Hacks S03: Still loving this. One might accidentally categorize them together, but this is the diametric opposite of The Studio. This show actually loves its topic. The Studio hates itself and hates everything about it.

  • In the Lost Lands (2025): Milla Jovovitch is an immortal witch on a quest through the future wasteland and either you've already decided to watch it, or you've already decided absolutely not to.

  • Mickey 17 (2025): Sad-sack gets a job on a spaceship being repeatedly killed and re-printed, then teams up with his Evil Twin to save The Bugs. The billionaire who owns the ship is Bruce Banner doing his Musk impression. It's pretty fun.

  • Ash (2025): Locked room alien parasite story that borrows a lot from Aliens and The Thing. It's very good looking: the visual style is cool, almost all reds and greens, and noir-ish lighting choices. The story is told in flashback because it hinges on an amnesia plot, which I always find to be eyerollingly lazy writing. Great squishy effects, though. And the Medbot is amazing, star of the show. So... not great, but points for style.

  • Death of a Unicorn (2025): Honestly I was pretty drunk and I barely remember this but I think it was pretty funny. Unicorns fuck up some douchebags. Though if you're looking for a unicorn movie, you should go with Unicorn Store instead.

  • Batman Ninja vs Yakuza League (2025): I try to limit this list to movies that I actually recommend, and limit the inclusion of movies that are only here for dunking on, but... wow. This is one of the worst things I have ever seen. Now, it is obviously doing a bit, and I'm not in on the joke. I assume the stilted dialog, breathless exposition, and karaoke interludes are references to trash anime from the 80s that I never saw... but like "X-Men '96", if you are ironically imitating something that was awful, you're still making something awful. Being crap on purpose is still being crap.

  • Murderbot: Boring. Just like the book. I only read the first one because it was boring. But I am already sighing that the existence of this show will result in more replies -- every time I refer to a Waymo or a Swasticar as a murderbot -- from someone herp derp referencing the show because that's so clever. I have watched the first two episodes and already unsubscribed.

    • Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/05/recent-movies-and-tv-30/feed/ 46 The numbers are mysterious and important. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/the-numbers-are-mysterious-and-important/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/the-numbers-are-mysterious-and-important/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2025 01:05:28 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykmm ExponenTile:

    ]]>     https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/the-numbers-are-mysterious-and-important/feed/ 32     Zero Stars https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/zero-stars/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/zero-stars/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2025 21:28:12 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykmI Walter Chaw:

    It's tempting to get knives out to hack at the hanks of the great beast. It's tempting to sharpen your tongue to shriek at it, how close we are now to Idiocracy's prophecy of Ass: The Movie being the most watched and awarded film in the land. I keep coming back to the image of Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, peering through the fourth wall to tell you it's too late. They're here already. The great beast will not feel you, and it does not have ears to hear you. It can't feel shame. As it was never alive, you can't kill it, and if you can't kill it, neither can you bury it. You can fight, but you'll lose. Not to the great beast, but to your friends and neighbours, who will urge you to forget it, take it easy. They will rationalize that some garbage piece of media was made for children, as if the things we make for children should be terrible. Feed them the rotten stuff, the maggot-infested stuff -- they won't know. Give them the chair with the splinters; the toy that takes eyes; the water full of lead. Why worry? It's just for kids. It's just for kids you don't think will grow up or don't care if they do. It's cheaper not to let them live. When they consume, that's less for you to consume. Maybe we should change our laws so they can work longer when they're younger, because they don't seem to last as long as they used to. Lie back and enjoy it. Pray you never get that direction outside of invitations to kid's movies. Your friends and neighbours are pods now. I know they look like people, but they're not. Your loved ones are dead. I'm sorry.

    Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/zero-stars/feed/ 12 Drunk Texts With Dr. Kingfish https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/drunk-texts-with-dr-kingfish/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/drunk-texts-with-dr-kingfish/#comments Mon, 31 Mar 2025 07:59:42 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykln

    < 
    i
    Kingfish
    I want to go to there
    Tall Slut No Panties.
    Tall Satanist No Panties.
    Oh wow, oh wow wow wow...
    Tall Slut No Panties was no mere coincidence, I am re-watching Bitch in Apt. 23 for gummy theater, and...
    S2E2, little blonde girl goes to the movies with her co-worker from the coffee shop, and, as you know, the show is set in New York City.
    Well, this, my friend, is the Paramount Theater in Oakland.
    Waaaaaaat
    It's like a 3 second establishing shot, and they cut immediately to the interior of the fake, tv show movie theater, but the eagle eye of The Old Professor caught it.
    Thank you for your service.
    I'm sure whatever 2nd unit director was in charge of gathering stock footage just googled "big ass old art deco theater."
    At least it wasn't San Francouver.
    Brookouver? Mancouver? Vanbronx?
    Right??
    It's like that "Always Be My Maybe" movie with Ali Wong where she's walking through "San Francisco" Chinatown, and the streets are pristine clean and as wide as a six lane highway.
    Yes just like Kung Fu!"
    Oh yes, I recall.
    So apparently that show did 3 seasons!
    Whaaaaat
    I did not keep watching just to see Trans Bay Tube 2 on Mission like in DS9.
    Bell Riots, Baby.
    2024 you failed us.
    Also the Irish Reunification.
    Again I say it all went wrong with that weasel that fell into the Large Hadron Collider. That killed Bowie, and all else followed.
    The John Wick timeline. Bill and Ted failed.
    My cat just ran into my office to LOUDLY announce that she just took the world's biggest, nastiest, smelliest shit. If she'd waited 5 more seconds for the stank to get here, the announcement would have been completely unnecessary.
    IM POOPIN
    I have to go deal with this... This is RJ Owens level.
    Wait, shit, remind me of the Ted Wick theory
    Oh, Ted's Dad was going to send him to military school (FORESHADOWING) if he failed his history test. If that happened, Wyld Stallyns would never happen, and as we all know, it was the music of Wyld Stallyns, and "Be Excellent To Each Other" that brought about 1000 years of peace and prosperity.
    BUT THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN..
    Ted failed his test, Wyld Stallyns didn't save mankind, and Ted returned from military school as JOHN WICK...
    That is solid. Dude that is solid.
    It also dovetails nicely with Say Anything → Grosse Point Blank. Lloyd Dobbler did not make his kickboxing dream happen and found his calling as a sniper.
    That's a good one!
    "Mama Hitler sick of all of these time travelers trying to murder her baby"
    In one of the Time Machine Hubbas, we did a joke where I say, "We could go back and time and kill Hitler as a baby!" And Alexa says, "Huh? Who's Hitler?" And I say, "Ohhhhhhmy gawd! Maybe we already did it!"
    Boom.
    Pitch meeting recently did BTTF3, It was brutal.
    Ha! That was great.
    "Unexpected beats are tight!"
    Steam nerd: I remember seeing that movie the first time and thinking, "Those locomotives had a top speed of about 45mph."
    Delivered
    O
    Send

    Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/03/drunk-texts-with-dr-kingfish/feed/ 7 Recent movies and TV https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/01/recent-movies-and-tv-29/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/01/recent-movies-and-tv-29/#comments Mon, 27 Jan 2025 22:05:42 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykgw

  • Afraid (2024): A not-bad entry in the Haunted Home Assistant genre. If you're like me the first hurdle you have to get over for a movie like this is that idea that artificial general intelligence is possible at all (it is not) but I also watch movies about vampires, zombies and werewolves and that's fine. The difference is that there are not currently grifters manipulating the economy with their fucking promises about werewolf futures. Anyway, viewed as a haunted house fantasy it works pretty well.

    But an altogether better (and less mean-spirited) version of this story is Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer, which was expanded into the novels Catfishing on CatNet and Chaos on CatNet.

  • Levels (2024): But what if it's all a simulation, man? It's ok. Rodney from Stargate is in it.

  • Never Let Go (2024): Halle Berry lives in the woods with her kids after some kind of Rapture Apocalypse, but once you figure out (it's not hard to figure out) that actually she's just crazy as shit, it's just cruelty-porn.

  • My Old Ass (2024): Girl gets high and hallucinates her older self who is Aubrey Plaza. It is charming and funny.

  • Doc of Chucky (2024): Look, I hesitate to recommend that you watch a FIVE HOUR documentary covering every Chucky movie, but I did and I do not regret it. Previously.

  • Dark Matter (2024): Not to be confused with the Canadian space-amnesia trash of the same name, this is a Sliders kind of deal where a guy is lost in the multiverse and trying to get home. It's good! It sticks the landing, and does some pretty wild things with the premise.

  • Heretic (2024): Two teenage Mormon missionary girls debate theology with psychopath Hugh Grant. It's pretty talky but also scary.

  • Earth Abides (2024): I wrote the following having watched the first 4 episodes: I feel like this show looked at Walking Dead and made the (completely accurate) observation that none of the problems in that show were zombies, all of the problems were that every one of these people are just massive fucking assholes. So this is what I guess you have to call "Cozy Apocalypse". Everything is so low stakes. Anyway, it's fine.

    Then in episode 5, their Negan shows up, and it turns into the same old crap.

  • Times Square (1980): A couple of 13 year old girls break out of a mental hospital, go completely feral, and start a cult. Tim Curry is a voyeur radio DJ. How had I never heard of this movie? It's extremely punk rock and has a great soundtrack.

  • Landman (2024): If you were interested in the answers to two questions: "How do oil billionaires feel about climate change, alternative energy and OSHA regulations?" and "Given a massive budget and 10 hours to do so, how would an incel write female characters?", then look no further. Take a little brain-vacation to the worst place in the world with the worst people in the world, written cartoonishly. Enjoy.

  • Alice in Wonderland (1933): This is a trip. Pretty impressive live-action effects for 1933! The costumes are absolute nightmare fuel.

  • Mononoke The Movie, Phantom in the Rain (2024): The plot snaps back and forth between "watching paint dry" (slaves arguing about manners and propriety) to "utterly incomprehensible" (gay elf fights the wallpaper?), but the animation style is like nothing I've ever seen before. It looks like watercolors on top of wheat paste. It's no Spiderverse, but it is incredibly visually dense, and a fascinating look. Apparently it's part 1. Apparently they think the're more to tell here.

  • Star Trek Section 31 (2025): I've got good news for you! Enterprise S02 is no longer the worst Star Trek!

    "Hey, we're making a Section 31 show!"

    "Oh, 'Special Circumstances', I love it! This will be an exploration of the dark underbelly of Utopia, what it does to preserve itself? Since Trek has always largely been 'powerful people sitting around a conference table arguing about ethics', this will be a rebuttal to that, or at least a counterpoint? This will be Trek's Andor?"

    "No, I thought we'd do a comedy heist show for children instead. Like Skeleton Crew but worse in every way. With fart jokes."

    "Wow. Wow wow wow wow."

  • The OA (2016): I loved this the first time, but on a rewatch, I'm upgrading that to "obsessed with". It's so completely bonkers. Apparently they had a five season plan to keep escalating this madness, but to the shock of nobody, Netflix killed them after two. I'll say: "People who liked Starfish (2018) will also like." I am that people.

    I wanted someone to tell me, "Oh yeah, Marling and Batmanglij made a few other completely batshit scifi-magical-surreal shows too" but that appears to not be the case. The East and Sound of My Voice are both culty and show some of their obsessions, but don't have the high weirdness of The OA. (And A Murder at the End of the World was Muskian trash.)

  • NOS4A2 (2019): I wasn't crazy about this the first time around -- it starts pretty slowly, and I guess I wasn't feeling it -- but on a rewatch, I love this. Well-drawn characters, and nicely creepy. It keeps feeling like it's about to make Stephen King-like bad decisions but does not.

    • Complaining about YouTube is a waste ("it is a video archive in the same sense that a supermarket is a Food Museum") but I can't help myself sometimes:

    So, amongst my many scripts is one that tells me when links have gone bad on this blog. By far, the majority of those link suicides are the ones linking to YouTube trailers in these review posts. I always link the movie to its official trailer, typically to the one posted by the studio's official account. And very often, after around two years, they delete the video. Not just unlisting, but deletion.

    And then I dutifully remove the link, rather than searching for a new one, because if they're not interested in you seeing their show, I guess I'm not either. It is so dumb. But welcome to oblivion, if that's how you want it.

    (Some of you are already warming up to tell me your Well Actually theories about why some studio marketing choad might think that this is a good idea, and I implore you to keep your very smart theory to yourself.)

    Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2025/01/recent-movies-and-tv-29/feed/ 66 2024 music wrap-up, and mixtape 249 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/2024-music-wrap-up-and-mixtape-249/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/2024-music-wrap-up-and-mixtape-249/#comments Mon, 30 Dec 2024 23:24:09 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykfR

    Here is some new music that I enjoyed in 2024. These are pretty good. Honestly, none of these really rose to the level of: "I am obsessed with this album and can't stop listening to it", but not every year has one of those, I guess. But these are all worth your time.

    In not really any particular order:

    Six of these bands performed at DNA Lounge within the last few years, so hooray for that!

    Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/2024-music-wrap-up-and-mixtape-249/feed/ 4 Recent books https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/recent-books-4/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/recent-books-4/#comments Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:42:51 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykfO Despite the evidence presented by the OSHA-violating precarious tower of books on my desk, it seems like I read kind of an embarassingly small number of books this year. Of those, here are the ones that I enjoyed, in desk-stack order:

    I gave up on writing book reviews a while ago, but I have a story about 1984.

    Julia is a recent re-telling of 1984 with you-know-who as the narrator. It takes the positions that A) Winston Smith is kind of a shitty person, and B) fascists are not nearly as smart as they tell you they are. Though it contains a few credulity-stretching coincidences, I enjoyed it a lot.

    Before reading it, I thought I should re-read 1984, and that was a good call, because the way the plot, and even some of the dialog, line up between the two novels is well done.

    Re-reading 1984 just after the 2024 presidential election probably counts as self-harm. "But I went ahead and did it just the same."

    I last read 1984 when I was a teenager, but imagine my surprise when I, a book hoarder, went to my shelves and did not have a copy of it! This means that either I read it while sitting on the floor in the library stacks, or it was assigned in school and I had to give it back. So I went to bookshop.org and ordered the first copy there.

    Even though it had been like a thousand years since I last read it, I still remembered every particular of the plot vividly. But the one thing that I didn't remember was, it's actually a great book! I expected it to be a constant bummer and kind of a slog, but it's actually really tightly written with interesting characters. And it goes hard.

    So here's the weird part: as I'm reading it, I keep noticing all of these odd typos. Newlines where they shouldn't be. Missing paragraph breaks. An extra "f" at the end of a line for no reason. For a book that's like 80 years old, you'd think the copy-edit phase of its life would be over by now, right? So I flip to the colophon, and this book is copyright by some company in India, not by the notoriously litigious Orwell estate!

    OMG, did they just pirate this shit? Are these typos trap typos, like trap streets on maps? Is this OCR slop? Julia, of course, worked in Pornosec, producing books "composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator". This all felt just a little too on-the-nose, so I gave away that obviously-accursed copy of the book and ordered an ancient, yellow, dog-eared copy from eBay whose cover looked familiar.

    This one smells right.

    Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/recent-books-4/feed/ 29 Recent movies and TV https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/recent-movies-and-tv-28/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/recent-movies-and-tv-28/#comments Thu, 31 Oct 2024 19:26:08 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykcE

  • Mars Express (2023):
    Fantastic French take on Ghost in the Shell. This has a great economy of story-telling that is rare these days, with so much of the world being implied or shown rather than spelled out for you. If this was a series, there would have been a whole episode about how these three people knew each other in the war; instead, one character looks at a photo for 4 seconds and we understand the relationship just fine. They don't beat you over the head with the tech and the prejudices against cyborgs, it's just there in the story.

  • Kaos (2024):
    Jeff Goldblum reprises The Grandmaster but as Zeus in a time-shifted version of Orpheus and Eurydice. It starts off strong, but bogs down about halfway through. It's basically Percy Jackson for grownups. I had so many questions about the world-building and time-shift, like: Medusa died in the ancient past, but Daedalus is a currently-living mortal, so... the Icarus tattoo that Orpheus has is not referencing an ancient story, but something he saw on the news no more than 30 years ago? And someone was listening to an Elastica song. Not like, it was on the show's score: it was an in-show thing that existed. How does this Greek world end up with the colony of Britannia producing an Elastica? I'll wait. Also there were a lot of empty seats at the table: why are there only 5 Olympians? Anyway, they didn't really stick their foot in it, but I kept waiting for the shoe to drop in a "Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding" kind of way.

    And, because it's Netflix, the least surprising thing in the world happened: it was summarily cancelled after one season, so we'll never know the answers to any of these questions.

  • Venus (2022):
    A stripper robs a drug dealer and goes on the run, but meanwhile there's a whole new planet that appeared in the sky, and meanwhile, she's hiding in some kind of haunted apartment building, and meanwhile, there are some witches doing a Rosemary's Baby or something? It's all over the place, but pretty fun. It's Spanish, and I found it because it's produced by the guy who did the amazing 30 Coins.

  • Night Teeth (2021):
    I rewatched this for the 3rd or 4th time. It's so great! Comfort food, really. The. I checked the wiki page to see what those folks are up to now and saw that this movie was critically panned. "Bad world-building", "no plot". WHAT? Did we not watch the same movie?? This is the best vampire movie since Blade.

  • Blade (1998):
    Blade still kicks ass. Even though the whole "blood god" thing at the end sounds like they were writing it on a napkin on set. "And then like, a blood god or something, name TK TK".

  • Apartment 7A (2024):
    I expected this to be terrible, because prequels are always terrible, but it's pretty good! It's kind-of a prequel to Rosemary's Baby but actually timeline wise, co-linear with about half of it. It has more explicit "magic" in it than the other. The hallucination dance routines are great. Someone really loved Suspiria and that's fine because I also really loved Suspiria.

  • Rosemary's Baby (1968):
    So of course I had to watch the original. This holds up! Mia Farrow's progressively unhinged performance is fantastic. Once it goes Full Satan at the end, it gets kind of dumb, but that part is at least brief. (And yes, it hopefully goes without saying that Polanski is a rapist piece of shit. But Farrow is amazing in this.)

  • Salem's Lot (2024):
    This was basically the same plot as the Buffy movie, without the charm or Peewee Herman. I didn't expect much going into this, because I hate everything Stephen King, but I did not expect that.

  • The Penguin (2024):
    This show is shockingly good. It is not a Batman show at all. It's The Sopranos with the barest pinch of Bat-Salt on it. Even less bat-flavoring than Pennyworth had. Colin Farrell's physical transformation is unbelievable, and Cristin Milioti / Sofia Falcone is amazing.

    (I wanted more of this Penguin, so I rewatched The Batman (2022) and that was a mistake. I remembered absolutely nothing about that movie for a reason. I especially forgot that it is three hours long.)

  • Agatha All Along (2024):
    Kathryn Hahn is always fantastic, and now Aubrey Plaza? You son of a bitch, I'm in. The story is.... Just ok. But the characters are great, and a special shout-out to the wig department, because I have never seen so much wig technology deployed in such a short show. They must have spent half the budget on wigs.

    Much like Wandavision, this is a great-looking show with interesting characters, and it just completely squanders the ending. With both shows, the last 3 episodes felt like a waste of my time. "Ok, psychological drama is over, here's some listless superhero shit."

  • Azrael (2024):
    This is good and scary. Samara Weaving murders her way through the woods after The Rapture. There's no dialog.

  • Killers Game (2024):
    Dave Bautista is an assassin in love. Absolutely relentless ass-kicking. Great fun.

  • Wolfs (2024)
    Buddy assassins. Clooney and Pitt are funnier guys than most people give them credit for.

  • Hellboy, The Crooked Man (2024):
    This really feels like a fan film. It appears to have had approximately the budget of Evil Dead. The first one. But it's a decent little fan film.

  • Alien Romulus (2024):
    The set design alone makes this movie worth your time. Whoever built these sets was an obsessive fan of the original. The detail is incredible, right down to the C64 keyboards and on-screen typography. This is Typeset In The Future catnip. Plot-wise: the first 2/3rds of it is a pretty solid xenomorphy romp. It loses its way when it tries to introduce some bullshit from Prometheus, which I am still trying to forget existed, and a super-soldier serum or whatever. The use of a CGI-resurrected Ian Holm was nearly unforgivable, as were the several tag-lines inexplicably quoted from other, better movies. There was entirely too much "Look! Here's as thing from that other movie! You liked that other movie, here's that thing again!"

    The sets, though. The sets. And the creature design. Lots of lingering close-ups that give you a great look at Giger's designs.

    So this is the third best Alien movie, which is kind of like being the third best Exorcist, or the second best Rosemary's Baby, or the second best Blade, or the second best Robocop, or the second best Casablanca (which is Algiers).

  • Sweetpea (2024):
    Bullied nerd decides to start murdering bullies. I enjoyed that after a brief dalliance with justifying her actions, they lean way into, "No, she's just a psychopath." Starring Ella Purnell from Yellowjackets and Fallout who is great.

  • From S03:
    Why am I still watching this plot-blocking trash re-tread of Lost. I hate it. Stage an intervention.

  • Darryl In Paris S02:
    Season one was great, but season 2 has lost me. What I loved about the first one was the road-trip through a completely different apocalypse and all the weirdos they met along the way. Season 2 is just, "two tribes go to war" and it's back on well-tread ground that I don't particularly care about.

    Also why does it have this "Magical Christ Child is immune to Zombies" nonsense? That was the plot of The Last of Us. We've already seen it.

  • Tomb Raider, The Legend of Lara Croft (2024):
    I wanted to like this, because Agent Carter's the voice, but it's kind of a snore. Were the video games 100% about her daddy issues? Because every filmic version is 100% about her daddy issues and that's boring.

  • Twilight of the Gods (2024):
    Some vikings decide to murder Thor because he's as prick. Extreme ultraviolence and an animated style that reminds me of Primal. It doesn't quite wrap up the story, but almost; and it's Netflix, so don't expect them to.

  • The Substance (2024):
    This is a surreal masterpiece. It's the most terrifying body horror I've ever seen. It makes The Thing and Videodrome look like wee little babies. It looked at Poor Things and said, "Hold my beer." I was blown away.

    It's a lot, but it's probably the best movie I've seen this year.

    I don't want to give away too much, but... A friend criticized it for being just more "Hollywood climbing up its own ass, oh, how hard it is to be Famous", which is certainly the kind of script that I often hate. But while the plot could have been characterized (in an unreliable-narrator Ferris Club reading) as, "Actress gets old, has bad facelift, commits suicide" -- or something -- that's like saying Chicago has a thin plot. Yeah! It does! But there is much more going on there.

    Also, I immediately recognized Margaret Qualley as being the dancer in one of the greatest music videos ever made, the Kenzo World commerical by Spike Jonze. (Watch the stairway mirror scene. Then watch it again.)

  • Chip 'n' Dale, Rescue Rangers (2022):
    When this was recommended to me I was sure I was being pranked. But no, this is actually pretty great! It is basically a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit set 80 years later. Toons are still mostly actors, but now they're out in the suburbs instead of the ghetto. The animation is fantastic, lots of good physical gags, and the mixture of styles (cell, 3D, video game, etc.) is both funny commentary and plot-relevant. Anyway, two washed-up actors try to break up a kidnapping ring. Many of the jokes are of the form, "Hey, remember that thing, here's that old thing you recognize!", but they're pretty good jokes.

    The thing that's technically fascinating about this, though, is that because of the age of the various properties involved, this is the kind of movie that anyone could have made if we lived in a world with a functioning public domain. But since we don't, only Disney could have made this, because they do have a functioning public domain. If you're inside the event horizon of the Disney black hole, you have access to everything again, because they own it all. ("I'm so rich, everything's free.")

  • Time Cut (2024):
    This is not good, but it's a time travel movie, so I was obliged to watch it. Girl goes back in time to the distant past of 2003 to stop a masked slasher. So it's exactly the same movie as Totally Killer but not as funny. Partly this was because I was supposed to be laughing at the crazy retro fashion in the makeover scene but I honestly could not tell the difference between the terrible 2024 fashion and the terrible 2003 fashion. "They're the same picture." Besides the clothes, the jokes are again mostly "you can't say that any more", but fewer of them.

  • Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984):
    If you want to know where The Phenomenauts got their entire bit, it's here. Presumably the best Pia Zadora movie?

  • Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024):
    This was completely unnecessary. I'll just hand this over to Pitch Meeting. He was too gentle.

  • Wynonna Earp, Vengeance (2024):
    This is definitely more Wynonna Earp. So if you were looking for that, this is that. At least, it delivers on that better than Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did.

    • Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/recent-movies-and-tv-28/feed/ 27 Hillbilly Cinematic Universe https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/hillbilly-cinematic-universe/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/hillbilly-cinematic-universe/#comments Wed, 16 Oct 2024 19:32:35 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yka9 On today's episode of "TV Yelling with Dr. Kingfish", The Hillbilly Cinematic Universe:

    < 
    i
    Kingfish
    Do you ever just remember that... *The Dukes of Hazzard* was a thing that existed? This show was about racist, tax-dodging, insurrectionist cousin-fuckers and the country just... let it run for hundreds of episodes. How???
    I remember watching that as a kid, and OMG every other kid did, too.
    You may recall that there was a entire "movement" of yuk-yuk-snort Southern States Peoples' shows that started in the 50s, and ran alllllll the way into the early 80s; Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Petticoat Junction were all in the same TV Universe. Likewise Andy Griffith and Gomer Pyle, and the whole thing got a fresh shot in the arm when a peanut farmer/nuclear engineer from Georgia became President (even Marie Osmond was, somehow, a little bit country.)
    I had completely forgotten about those other shows!
    The whole phenomenon was a weird example of identity politics in culture before that was even a thing. Yokels were already being identified as "Real Americans" despite the fact that all of it was made up Hollywood bullshit. Nevertheless, people bought into it as this charming sanitized myth that somehow sidestepped all the gross racism, ignorance and incest and poverty that I assume were in the backstories of all those shows/characters.
    In the original version, the Dukes were absolutely petty criminals, even though they were cast as the good guys. Once the suits realized what they had on their hands, suddenly the show became Bo, Duke, Daisy and Uncle Jesse helping widows and orphans, and not so much racing Roscoe to the county line with a trunk full of White Lightning.
    There were other failed spin offs of both of those Hillbilly Cinematic Universes, too. Not to mention things like "Hee Haw" and other variety shows.
    Wait, was the Hillbilly Cinematic Universe the same thing as the Laverneverse, that included Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy, etc.?
    I think those were separate Cinematic Universes.
    There's probably a wiki.
    There's definitely a wiki.
    Oh there was also Blowjob and the Bear! Because I guess in the 70s, every 9-year-old wanted to be a long-distance trucker?
    10-4 good buddy!
    At least his pet monkey didn't have the slaveholder flag on it.
    *Five minutes later* We regret to inform you that the monkey is racist.
    Delivered
    O
    Send

    Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/hillbilly-cinematic-universe/feed/ 46 Recent movies and TV https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/09/recent-movies-and-tv-27/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/09/recent-movies-and-tv-27/#comments Wed, 04 Sep 2024 21:21:07 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykYy

  • The Final Programme (1973):
    By the director of Dr. Phibes based on a Michael Moorcock book that I never read. WTF did I just watch? It's like Captain Kronos meets Zardoz. I am baffled that this came to be.

  • Zeta One (1969):
    Again, WTF did I just watch? This sounded like it was going to be a Barbarella knock-off, and it kind of was, but the first fifteen minutes are literally two people playing strip poker. Was this a porno, like an actual stag film? Maybe! But then after that it has an awful lot of plot, bonkers plot about immortal amazons from a pocket dimension. There's a lot of fighting while wearing pasties, and then a couple interludes with torture scenes, and not like 1960s "smack me on the ass" stuff, like Abu Ghraib. What even is this? If you told me that this was written by Philip Jose Farmer or Michael Moorcock I would have believed you. Multiple Mathmoses. Multiple theremins.

  • The 10th Victim (1965):
    In the far future of 1998 or something, the world has solved war by running a game of live-ammo Killer where you can win a million bucks. (It's literally the same Steve Jackson rules we played in high school.) Some good fashion and Brutalist architecture, but it doesn't go anywhere you don't expect. Notable for having the first on-screen appearance of a stripper murdering someone with a bra that fires bullets from the nipples. This is the kind of movie that Our Man Flint was a parody of. (Austin Powers was not a parody, it was simply a rip-off of Flint.)

  • Madhouse (1974):
    This is the stealth third Dr. Phibes movie. Vincent Price is a washed up horror actor whose fictional character is murdering starlets. So it's basically the Phibes-verse version of Wes Craven's New Nightmare and it's fantastic. Rathbone and Karloff appear posthumously in flashbacks. And Dr. Kingfish points out how quickly things were changing in the 70s in that Peter Cushing appears in this just two years before principal photography began on Star Wars. It's like realizing that Chuck Yeager met Orville Wright (this is true).

  • I Saw the TV Glow (2024):
    This was very creepy and disturbing. A pair of cringingly poorly socialized kids bond over their obsession over a Buffy-like TV show, then one of the disappears. Years later, she re-appears claiming she's gotten in to the show itself and all it takes is suicide.

  • American Society of Magical Negroes, The (2024):
    This is hilarious! And coincidentally stars the same guy from TV Glow.

  • Sting (2024):
    Remember, giant spiders are for life, not just for Christmas.

  • Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023):
    French Wednesday doesn't want to eat people, finds depressed boy. It's very cute.

  • Greedy People (2024):
    Some small towns can support two incompetent hitmen. This is pretty funny, and the various stupid plots are un-rolled in parallel in a fun way. It's got kind of a Fargo vibe.

  • Terminator Zero (2024):
    This is excellent. You saw the words "Terminator" and "anime" and you already knew whether you were going to watch it or not. So instead, I'll just say, Pantheon is better and you should watch that too.

  • The Artifice Girl (2022):
    Guy accidentally turns Spicy Autocomplete into a human-level AI who then spends years arguing with him about ethics. It's not bad for this sort of thing.

  • Sunny (2024):
    In an alternate world where everyone has little kawaii Dalek home-bots, the yakuza are trying to turn them into murderbots. Actually that's not a good plot summary, the plot is all over the place but the characters are all a bunch of well-written weirdos, even the robots. The robots make no kind of sense, they are clearly fully human-equivalent but still slaves and like all shows with AI in them this goes completely unaddressed, and that's even before you ask how do they get up stairs. But I really enjoyed it. The ending is a bit abrupt.

  • The Acolyte (2024):
    With both Star Wars and Marvel extruded entertainment product, I am used to most (not all, but most) of their shows being solely about moving pieces around the board to set up the next thing, rather than actually telling a story. This one is worse than most, though. It spends 4 episodes introducing a large ensemble cast then summarily executes all but one of them. Oh, was I supposed to care about any of these people? Nevermind. A quarter of the show seems to be aimed at pre-adolescents who want to watch cute twins sneak around and frolic in the forest, then the rest of it alternates between brutal murder and Senate politics. Who was this show for? Also, you thought midichlorians were dumb? This show says "hold my beer".

  • Alienoid 1 + 2 (2024):
    Deceptions come to Earth to store alien prisoners inside peoples' brains, they accidentally unleash the Oxygen Destroyer, and also travel back in time to medieval Korea where magic exists? There's a lot going on here, and honestly I was pretty drunk, but the fight sequences and effects are basically Avengers level. Money Was Spent. Beware, this is actually a single 4 hour movie.

  • Oddity (2024):
    Locked-house murders, weird haunted mannequin, cannibalism, evil bellhop ghost for some reason? It's moody and unfolds in a way that wasn't obvious.

  • Seize Them (2024):
    Idiot queen is deposed and goes on a road trip. Starring some folks from Derry Girls and Sex Education so that tells you what kind of comedy you're getting.

  • Kite Man, Hell Yeah (2024):
    It's more Harley Quinn, with the B Team, including Bane. It's great. Also, it's about the struggles of owning a bar. So, you know...

  • The Rings of Power S2 (2024): Previously, previously.

  • The Wind in the Willows (1984): Previously.

    • Previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/09/recent-movies-and-tv-27/feed/ 59 "So, you've got a Lord of the Rings prequel for me?" https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/so-youve-got-a-lord-of-the-rings-prequel-for-me/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/so-youve-got-a-lord-of-the-rings-prequel-for-me/#comments Fri, 30 Aug 2024 19:57:43 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykYl

    How it started:

    How it's going:

    I feel like they could have padded this series out with a couple episodes that really dove into what it was like for Slug Sauron when he was spending al that time just... floomping around and sighing deeply. We never got a lot of backstory on Gloop and Gleep in The Herculoids, and they could have explored that here.

    Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/so-youve-got-a-lord-of-the-rings-prequel-for-me/feed/ 6 ykYa https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/13256218/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/13256218/#comments Thu, 29 Aug 2024 19:28:09 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykYa Rings of Power had subtitles in 36 languages and none of them was Elvish. Come on!]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/13256218/feed/ 35 Engineering excellence on the Books of Face https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/engineering-excellence-on-the-books-of-face/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/engineering-excellence-on-the-books-of-face/#comments Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:49:40 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykYP The Crow) pointing and laughing at reviews of the remake, and instead of receiving that, Facebook tried to give me epilepsy:

    Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/engineering-excellence-on-the-books-of-face/feed/ 9 Mr. Toad https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/mr-toad/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/mr-toad/#comments Mon, 19 Aug 2024 09:21:03 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykXz I saw The Wind in the Willows roll by on The Torrtents and it occurred to me that the only thing I know about it is that I love Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland, so I grabbed it. I like the part where he crashes through the wall and he goes to hell. That's great.

    But apparently I found the version where David Lynch's kids are asking him why he asked The Brothers Quay to direct the elementary school Christmas pageant? This is some nightmare fuel. Posh, posh nightmare fuel for public school boys who will someday be Prime Minister.

    Previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/mr-toad/feed/ 16 ykXo https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/13256168/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/13256168/#comments Tue, 13 Aug 2024 06:20:50 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykXo https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/13256168/feed/ 23 Recent movies and TV https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/recent-movies-and-tv-26/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/recent-movies-and-tv-26/#comments Sat, 15 Jun 2024 06:02:17 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykVT

  • Poor Things (2023):
    This movie looked at the weirdest stuff Ken Russell had ever done and said "hold my beer". It's absolutely incredible. Full of relentlessly weird choices in acting, sets and especially cinematography. Why is it suddenly fish-eye! We will never know! And surprisingly filthy! How did this win Academy Awards? This movie is the kind of thing that the Academy hates.

  • The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971):
    This movie is absolutely amazing. It had been so long since I saw it that I had forgotten it almost entirely. I remembered the murders, the mask, the hapless detectives, but what I forgot was the sets, the dancing, the fashion, the clockwork orchestra, the absolute lunacy! This is a movie made in 1972 and set in the mid-20s, so the look of it is this insane mixture of 60s high fashion and Art Nouveau. Every scene-change comes with a costume change. Every murder comes with a little dance from Phibes and Vulnavia. This movie is an absolute treasure.

  • Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972):
    This movie is... lesser. It still has amazing sets, and costumes, and the dancing, but it also has an antagonist, and a smidge more plot. And that does not work in its favor. With the first one, you could just let the mood of it wash over you. This one leads you to ask questions like, "But how did he ship the clockwork orchestra to the pyramid?" and if you are asking questions like that, you have fallen out of the trance.

  • Lisa Frankenstein (2024):
    A goth girl and her reanimated corpse boyfriend. This is basically: "What if Edward Scissorhands was actually good?" It's set in the version of the 80s that is what people who weren't alive in the 80s think they 80s must have been like. (And even with that, I am embarrassed to admit that I didn't get the joke in the title until the next day. "Ohhhhhh....")

    In terms of set dressing and fashion, I wonder if people who lived through the 1980s feel about this movie the way that people who lived through the 1920s felt about Dr. Phibes.

  • 30 Coins (2020):
    This show is absolutely wild. There's a small town in Spain, a creepy priest, and some Satanists trying to collect the Judas McGuffins, and you think, ok, standard Catholic pea-soup fare, I know how this is all going to go. And then there are giant babies, spider monsters, mirror people, shoggoths. Every episode has a "what the fuck did I just see" moment. It's fantastic. And that's just like, the first four episodes! The S02 finale was just chef's kiss. I hope there will be a third season.

  • Giri Haji (2019):
    Japanese cop's dead brother was a mobster, and then shows up in London murdering people, so both the cops and the yakuza send him there to bring him back. Ass kicking ensues. It's mostly set in London, but about 1/3 in Japanese. I liked it a lot, despite my aversion to cop fare.

  • Death and Other Details (2024):
    Locked-room murder mystery on a cruise ship. It is fantastic, in the manner of Knives Out.

  • Parallel (2024):
    A neat little the-multiverse-sucks story where the spooky woods are a portal. Low budget but well done.

  • Extraordinary (2023):
    In a world where everyone gets a superpower at around age 18. Except it's usually a really lame, mostly useless power. This is very funny, in that very specific, cringey British TV way.

  • Ghosts (2019):
    A couple inherit a haunted house, and only one of them can see them. Extreme British Cringe. It took a couple episodes for it to grow on me, but it did.

  • Dune 2 (2024):
    Since part 1 wasn't really a movie -- it was the first two acts of a movie -- I was kind of reserving judgement on the whole thing until this came out. Part 2 is better, and as a whole, I guess it holds up pretty well. I enjoyed how they leaned in to the whole Bene Gesserit colonial thing: that the Fremen's religious beliefs had been done to them intentionally. Paul's character was certainly less flat than he was in the book. I still contend that nobody who hadn't read the books would have a god damned idea of what was going on.

  • Stopmotion (2024):
    Stop motion animators have a reputation for being complete weirdos to begin with, but when they try to work out their shit by going full Brothers Quay with roadkill... antics ensue. Anyway, this is creepy.

  • 3 Body Problem (2024):
    I tried to watch the 90 episode Chinese version and only made it to like episode three before I ran entirely out of fucks. When I heard that this version was by the Lost people I thought "Oh god no" but at least since this show only gave them eight episodes to make something of themselves, they showed some restraint. This wasn't entirely awful, but out of the gigantic cast there are only like two people to give a shit about. The Giant Cheesegrater scene was an amazing effect, but it defies any kind of sanity that it was the first tool in the box that someone would reach for.

  • Late Night with the Devil (2024):
    A 70s late-night host invites a possessed girl on for an interview. "What happens next might surprise you." This is pretty great. Even though it's mostly shot faux-documentary style, they don't go all shaky-cam.

  • Fallout (2024):
    Hyper-competent Mary-Sue has to go on a quest to find her missing dad, Kyle McGuffin. I'm led to believe that this was based on a video game. It certainly has video game logic and physics throughout. The sets are gorgeous, several of the characters are interesting, and much scenery is chewed. It bogged down in the middle and could have been shorter by 50%, but it was fun popcorn.

  • Night Shift (2024):
    Spooky goings-on at a mostly-empty motel, chock full of Checkhov's Handguns. It starts off seeming like it will be predictable but it has a good twist and a satisfying ending.

  • Rebel Moon 2, Something Something Subtitle (2024):
    I had some not-entirely-negative things to say about the first one but WOW is this a snore. While the first one at least took a tour of some goofy space-locales, this one had a 30 minute montage of harvesting wheat. Wheat. This was a major plot point. Because when you have FTL, antigravity, resurrection machines, and a Star Destroyer, apparently the Empire can't function without flying to another planet and bullying a village of literally 50 people into harvesting wheat by hand. Sure that scales. That scales.

  • Humane (2024):
    The solution to climate change is paying people to commit suicide. At the worst family dinner party, antics ensue. Between this and Antiviral, I'm starting to think that growing up in the Cronenberg household must have been pretty fucked up.

  • Godzilla Minus One (2023):
    I enjoyed this a lot; like the original, it was mostly about trauma rather than a rampaging lizard, though the lizard scenes were outstanding. My criticisms are: it could easily have been 25% shorter (the last third is mostly crying) and even though the sets, costumes and framing were excellent, every single shot was god damned teal and orange. No other colors exist in this universe. I'm told that the black-and-white edit is better, and that is utterly believable. If you haven't seen this yet, pick that version.

  • The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024):
    This is great. It's basically Inglorious Basterds but funnier and without Tarantino's weird tics. You wanna see a feel-good romp about some Nazis getting fucked up? Oh yeah you do. How does Alan Ritchson just keep getting larger? (Watch Blood Drive!)

  • Ghostbusters, Frozen Empire (2024):
    It's cute and fun. It suffers from having too many characters and the writers wanting each of them to get their solo. A bunch of it doesn't make a lot of sense, but the sets and the spectacle did a good job of making me not think about it too hard. (Watch I Still See You.)

  • Abigail (2024):
    This starts off as a solid heist movie, adventure party having fake names and all, and then when it pivots to some locked-house vampire shit, it really kicks off. Loved it.

  • Baghead (2024):
    Extremely solid ghost story. Reminded me a bit of the also excellent Talk To Me.

  • True Detective, Night Country (2024):
    Jodie Foster investigates some murders in Alaska, which also wants to murder you, and every single person is a piece of shit. This was pretty great -- about as good as S01. (I didn't much like, and barely remember, S02 or S03.)

  • Whiteout (2009):
    After the latest season of True Detective I was in the mood for more stories where the antagonist is the weather. In this, there's a murder in Antarctica, the night before everyone is shipping out before winter-over. I still really like this movie. There are human villains, bad people making bad decisions, but the primary villain is the environment, which vehemently wants you dead, and it is done really well. This is based on a fantastic comic by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber, which is better, but the movie is still solid.

    Fun fact! When I was 12 or 13 I thought I might grow up to be a comic book illustrator. Problem was, I went to high school with Steve Lieber, and when I saw how good he was at it I thought, "Yeah, this is not a realistic goal, maybe I should be a computer-toucher instead."

    Billy Porter was also in our class, but fortunately I didn't have any musical theatre ambitions for him to inadvertently quash.

  • Civil War (2024):
    Not bad. I had a bad feeling about this when all the press was this sniveling, centrist, both-sides-ism, "but it's not political!" nonsense. But actually -- it's not political. It's a road-trip character study of a handful of war photographers. The war itself is just set dressing.

  • The Fall Guy (2024):
    Oh no, a stunt man has to solve a murder. Ryan Gosling Ryan Goslings all over the place. Dumb fun.

  • New Life (2023):
    The trailer gives too much away, but it opens with: girl gets infected with a weird disease, goes on the run, and now people are trying to murder her. I liked it. Solid ending.

  • Love Lies Bleeding (2024):
    Extremely trashy 80s noir. People who liked Blood Simple also liked.

  • The Primevals (2023):
    Full Moon Features are still making movies (yes, the Subspecies and Puppet Master folks) and this movie has all the quality of writing and acting that you would expect from their 80s fare, which is to say, abysmal. But! It's a mixture of live action and stop animation and I don't mean a bunch of digital stuff, or a bunch of digital stuff trying to look like stop animation, it seems to be the real deal. They were aiming for Harryhausen but landed on Rankin-Bass, but still, it's charming in its own way.

  • Wipeout 2097 Soundtrack: Noclip Documentary (2024):
    If you are a Wipeout obsessive like me, you will enjoy this brief retrospective and interview with Cold Storage.

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  • The Lazarus Project S02 (2023):
    Groundhog Day Black Ops. I am so happy this got a second season! It is so timey-wimey and great. Brutal and unpredictable, really well done. This might be my second-favorite time travel show (after Timeless.)

  • Apocalypse Clown (2023):
    Shakes the Clown meets Shaun of the Dead but without zombies. It's funnier than I expected it to be. (However, I will note that in the month that passed between when I wrote those words and when I read them a second time, I have not only forgotten the plot of the movie, but that I have seen it at all.)

  • Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (2023):
    This is fantastic. Not only did they get the band back together, including people who have bigger careers now than to be slumming in this, but they managed to both tell the same story and a different story at the same time by making the script of the live action movie be a contrafactual thing that exists within the world of the series. It's also pretty much Ramona's story instead of Scott's, which is a nice perspective shift. They do not shy away from Scott being kind of a piece of shit.

  • The Creator (2023):
    This is a "get the MacGuffin" movie with some great locations and pretty good special effects, that makes no god damned sense. It is yet another "AI" movie that has no AI in it. The robots are all 100% human. They are not faster, slower, smarter, or stupider than people. They have the right number of arms and legs. They are just as easy to kill with bullets. They cry and drink tea. They don't go, "Beep boop, what is love?" But some of them have metal faces, and some of them have an absurdly-positioned off switch right on the back of their heads. And the geopolitics of it all are record-scratch incomprehensible. Apparently we're to believe that, while the US is the only place in the world where AI is outlawed, the US is also the only nation that has a Helicarrier (just one!) and can get away with indiscriminate aerial bombardment in Asia because I guess China and Russia don't have nukes any more?

    So, if you were able to tolerate District 9 or Humans, probably none of that will bother you.

  • The Idol (2023):
    This piece of shit is about people who are all pieces of shit. Mercifully, it is only 5 episodes long, so after fast-forwarding through each interminable dance routine and boring sex scene, I probably only had to watch two hours of it before getting to the end at which we find out that the pimp/rapist villain was the protagonist all along.

  • Ghost World (2001):
    I hadn't seen this since it came out, and I remembered liking it. It's a good movie, but wow, I had forgotten how absolutely shitty every single character is. This thing is mean.

  • A Disturbance In The Force (2023):
    A documentary about the Star Wars Holiday Special that puts it in the proper context of "what 70s TV variety shows were like, before the VCR had been invented". It's really interesting and goes deep!

  • It Lives Inside (2023):
    This was a fun, standard, teen girl haunted by an ancient demon thing (a bit of an It Follows vibe), but getting some of the Indian mythology was unusual.

  • The Sacrifice Game (2023):
    It's the 70s and some ritualistic Mansonites do a home-invasion of a private school and the few people staying through Christmas. Antics ensue. The characters are good and there's a nice twist at the end. It was basically an R-rated episode of Supernatural.

  • Bodies (2023):
    Four naked corpses show up on the street across two centuries, and four cops investigate. It's not a bad potboiler timey-wimey mystery, except that: A) the Big Conspiracy turns out to be exactly the same as the "Rittenhouse" plot from Timeless season 2,; B) it's twice as long as it needed to be; and C) you've really got to be working at it to make Episode Seven be the unnecessary flashback when the show is already timey-wimey!

  • Rebel Moon (2023):
    Ok I was all ready to hate the latest Zach Snyder trash, but I actually kinda liked this big dumb Warhammer pastiche. It wore its references transparently, it was not surprising at all, but it was fun. It was not an original movie, but at least it was an original movie. "I'm putting together a team to save the farm from Space Nazis! We're gonna need a thief, a Conan, a Jedi..." You sonofabitch, I'm in. His most watchable movie since Sucker Punch, take that how you will.

    Also there was a spider-lady with tits, but no nipples. As you do.

    At least it was slightly more coherent than Jupiter Ascending, which was the last time that someone with more money than God and no one to tell them no decided to make their own David Lynch's Dune.

  • What If...? S02:
    Several great episodes, but overall less good than the first season. The Nebula and Captain Carter episodes were the stand-outs. They seem to be trying to build a "mythology" out of this instead of just doing standalone stories, which is ignoring the entire point of the series.

  • Dream Scenario (2023):
    Nicholas Cage is a Sad Boner Professor who keeps showing up in peoples' dreams. It's kind of Being John Malkovitch but not funny. It started off ok but I kind of lost interest about halfway through.

  • Obliterated (2023):
    Some super-spies have to save Vegas from a nuke while high as fuck. It sounds like the stupidest concept in the world, but this is filthy, and way funnier than it has any right to be. Also nearly the entire team gets naked, and I have not seen so much dong in a TV show since Gen V. There's also a really good heel turn that surprised me.

  • Echo (2024):
    This was pretty good! It's a standalone story about Kingpin's deaf assassin from Hawkeye. The heavy emphasis on both Native American culture and on sign language was interesting. It was also nice that they made the decision of: "We have 5 episodes of story, so that's how many episodes we're going to make" instead of giving us 3 to 5 extra episodes of filler.

  • High Desert (2023):
    Patricia Arquette is an eldery complete fuckup who decides to become a PI. Antics ensue. It's funny.

  • Night Swim (2024)
    Haunted swimming pool. Pretty good!

    I realize that's a minimalist review, but it was a minimalist concept.

  • Monarch, Legacy of Monsters (2023):
    I am shocked to report that this is excellent. Nearly every previous Godzilla property has been sub-Transformers-level trash, but even though this is set in the same universe as all that Thule Society hollow earth nonsense from the recent movies, it's really well done. Kurt Russell's son does an amazing impression of Young Kurt, and both of them are doing Jack Burton.

  • A Murder at the End of the World (2023):
    This started off seeming like it was: Glass Onion but what if it wasn't a comedy, we're just playing it straight, not hanging a lantern on what idiot buffoons these billionaires and celebrities are, and, oops, there's a corpse! But no. It took quite a few episodes, but this show takes the position that Colonel Mustard and Mr. Boddy and the rest of these celebrities are exactly as clever and important as they think they are. This show is vile. The plot is basically that Grimes tried to steal Elon's eugenics babies from him when he was just trying to do the right thing for the fambly by building an apocalypse bunker for them all. But wait, then it turns out it wasn't her fault, a naive AI did all those murders instead. Yes, an AI. Yes, a spicy autocomplete done did it. Oh, did I spoil it for you? Oh I'm so sorry. As a large language model, I couldn't help myself.

    Also the flashback subplot where Nancy Drew and Truck-Stop Face Tattoo do a third rate Silence of the Lambs was boring and unnecessary. Did not give even a fractional fuck.

  • The Beekeeper (2024):
    Jason Stratham does a vengeance. There are no surprises in a movie like this but I still enjoy them.

  • The Tiger's Apprentice (2024):
    Pretty standard "teen is the chosen one, must train" story, but it's cute, the animation is cool, and there's a boss fight on top of the Transamerica building.

  • I.S.S. (2024):
    There's a war, and the astronauts are stupid and descend into some game-theoretic "but you were going to kill me first" nonsense. It's very tense and very bleak. The constant zero-G physics is very well done! No "mag boots" here.

  • Mr. And Mrs. Smith (2024):
    Oh no, super spies are forced to share a bed, will they or won't they? I am shocked to report that four episodes in, this is great fun.

  • Monsieur Spade (2024):
    Sam Spade retires in France, antics ensue. The plot is way overly-complicated, but Clive Owen does a fantastic Bogart.

  • Slotherhouse (2023):
    Sorority gets a sloth as a mascot which then murders all them bitches. The sloth is an incredibly fake puppet, and it intuitively knows how to use TikTok and to drive a car. This movie is exactly what I hoped it would be.

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