Remember a week ago when I claimed that comedy pilots were impossible to judge? It turns out the number one way to counteract that whole “we have to know characters before we can love them for their foibles” thing is to have it be Michael J. Fox in a thinly disguised autobiography. The moment that […]
Congratulations, friends! It’s official: you guys have made it impossible for me to watch Breaking Bad. In fact, I can now, semi-officially, say that I might HATE Breaking Bad, admitting entirely that I have only watched the first two episodes and will probably love it when/if I ever actually watch it. But right now, I […]
I am going to keep watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I will watch it until I become so enamoured– with its characters, with a weekly dose of Whedon (or Whedon-esque) writing, with the overarching plots– that I can’t turn it off. I will probably one day even consider it one of my favorite shows currently on […]
First Published: July 12, 2013 There’s something about spectacle. The book version of World War Z was all about the literary spectacle, taking the normally claustrophobic zombie story and blowing it up, writ large across the worldwide campus. I’ve always described it as Contagion with zombies – a world wide, political thriller that just happened […]
Reviewing comedy pilots is a notoriously difficult endeavour. Lots of comedy comes from the familiarity we have with people and their expected rhythms and it can be incredibly hard to jump into one episode of a comedy and immediately pick that up. For example, I pretty much hated the New Girl pilot, but when I […]
First Published: May 25, 2013 DISCLAIMER: I really, really liked Star Trek: Into Darkness. I’d like to start off just saying that. But my feelings about it are a bit complicated, so complicated they’ve ripped this very review in half. Check out HERE for the other half. Star Trek: Into Darkness is an exciting, smart, […]
I’m not sure why I love The Mindy Project so much. It’s not the hang-out sitcom perfection of New Girl, the pulsating heart and comedic absurdity of Parks and Rec, nor the envelope pushing experimentation of Community. In fact, for most of the first season, The Mindy Project seriously struggled to define what exactly it […]
As Rachael already found out when she tried to read it a few years ago, The Mortal Instruments (movie) didn’t start out with particularly great source material. Like a certain sparkly vampire story before it, City of Bones was under-written and under-imaginative, with occasionally funny characters and semi-intriguing plot, but completely undone by the author’s […]