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VINYL, 1.2 – ‘Yesterday Once More’
The basic problem with Vinyl is that it’s like a really good three-minute pop song trapped inside a prog rock monstrosity. While this week’s episode, “Yesterday Once More”, was less ponderous than the two-hour opener, Vinyl still feels like an over-stuffed and baggy monster of a show; as excessive as the cocaine its increasingly out-of-control…
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MAD DOGS – Season One
“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” is the recurring line of the Noël Coward song, but the heroes are very American here. The source of the confusion stems from knowing Mad Dogs is an adaptation of a British series than ran from 2011-13, and presumably nobody could think of a more…
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SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE (2015)
Sleeping with Other People was self-deprecatingly pitched by its own writer-director as “When Harry Met Sally for assholes” when it debuted at Sundance. Yet Leslye Headland’s more sincere intention for her bawdy but bittersweet rom-com was to create an open dialogue about loneliness. Before they embark upon a decade of sleeping with other people, Jake…
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OUT 1 (1971)
Jacques Rivette is an ongoing revelation for me. News of the French director’s death broke as I was part way through watching Arrow’s release of his 776-minute tour de force, Out 1 (1971), for the very first time. It’s easy to mistake the extraordinary running time and its longstanding (often mythical) reputation among cinephiles as…
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THE FINEST HOURS (2016)
With Brooklyn, Carol, and now The Finest Hours, films set in 1952 are having a bit of a moment. Here, the story being told is that of the crew members aboard an oil tanker that disastrously splits in half, and the U.S Coast Guard team that went out into the dangerous storm to rescue them.…
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THE X-FILES – ‘Babylon’
Where to begin? I’ve perhaps been too kind to The X-Files this year, because it was a formative television show for me as a teenager, so I was prepared to cut it some slack. All of the episodes this series have had problems (with the exception of “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster”, which wasn’t…
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BETTER CALL SAUL, 2.1 – ‘Switch’
The shadow of Breaking Bad loomed heavy over Better Call Saul last year. I was quietly confident this spin-off would make for good television, and that proved to be true—thanks in no small part to the writers finding hidden depths to Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) during the years before he met Walter White. We learned…
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VINYL, 1.1 – ‘Pilot’
How you respond to Vinyl will almost certainly depend on your tolerance for that great staple of cable television: the heavily conflicted white male anti-hero. As Richie Finestra—troubled record label boss and lapsed coke addict—Bobby Cannavale turns in a powerhouse performance in this two-hour pilot: raging, rampaging, and raw. The problem is that it’s slightly…
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THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)
While the Oscars often overlook genre movies, horror movies, in particular, are rarely included among the Academy’s nominees. The exceptions tend to prove the rule, as with Psycho (which earned a handful of nominations but came up empty-handed), or The Exorcist (which was nominated for Best Picture but lost to The Sting). The biggest exception…
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DEADPOOL (2016)
Let’s start with the good news: this version of Deadpool is a hundred times more entertaining than the first outing for the offbeat superhero, in the atrocious X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland), director Tim Miller, and producer-star Ryan Reynolds know exactly what they’re doing with their version of this cult…
