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juushikaSupernatural, season 9, 2014-15
Rowena is a delight, and I enjoy Crowley's progression—bravo to the show for exploring how soft he's gone. Otherwise: a disappointment. The Mark is too reminescent of S8's post-Purgatory effects, but significantly less compelling. The big bad is a mess—is it Styne? Rowena? the Mark has no face and so makes for an indistinct and unsatisfying enemy, and the show fails to capitalize on the quandary of how to win a fight when the only face of the enemy is yourself. Charlie's death is as predictably problematic as this show can conceivably be; the sudden twist ending is transparent sequel bait, and the entire last episode has predictable pacing. This is midgrade, messy, unremarkable Supernatural.
Circle, film, 2015, dir. Aaron Hann & Mario Miscione
I'm a sucker for this sort of survival setup, yet this did little for me. What makes survival games work is the way that individuals react to life and death competition, but there's no room for characters here. Instead, Circle has soundbite distillations of "American values," cursory and unproductive caricatures of sexism/racism/homophobia. Tension sustains the film, but the staccato pacing doesn't allow for tension to build or the narrative to flow. It's constrained and frantic and small, distinctly not awful; the end is strong. But I'm unimpressed.
The Duke of Burgundy, film, 2014, dir. Peter Strickland
Beautiful, rich, but too self-aware. This is a gorgeous dreamworld of texture and sound and scripted erotic play, balanced by heavy emotional emphasis which is at times almost unpleasant to watch because the character's needs are so transparent. But it can get lost under artsy montage, the worst of which is a dream-sequence entered via a crotch close-up (I mean, really); it's too smug and too arty. I think of this better in retrospect than I enjoyed it at the time—great potential, a bit too much beauty, and it doesn't work with my sense of humor.
Cloverfield, film, 2008, dir. Mat Reeves
I went into this thinking it was a monster delay film—I suppose I was mistaken, because the monster is all over the place, and inconsistent, and too convenient—most especially the presence of the smaller parasites. As a found footage film, this is decent, although I never grew invested in the interpersonal elements which are necessary to ground the apocalypse. The scale of the disaster is nice, although the monster itself is bland. In sum: merely competent.
Broadchurch, series 2, 2015
The writing here is better than the first series: less episodic, more cohesive as a whole. The casting and character arcs remain strong, especially Ellie, both in her family life and in her interactions with Hardy. But the emotional register and atmosphere are banal. It's uncreative: compare to Tana French's In the Woods: similar dual cases, small towns, PoV even, but the atmosphere is much more intense and the emotional focus has more intent, simply has more to say. The circumstances here are strange, even contrived, but most of the dynamics are disappointing in their normalcy.
Black Mirror, series 1-2 & Christmas Special, 2011-14
The natural result of mainstream media picking up spec-fic with the self-satisfied smugness of one who thinks they've come up with something new while failing to realize they have no genre experience to support them. Slick, well-acted, and pointedly cruel—but riddled with plotholes and unable to do anything with the potentially interesting near-future scenarios other than to see their effects on the entirely uninteresting lives of mostly-white straight people. It's watchable but the satire grows tiresome, obsessed with the petty evils of social media, and it buries its potential in over-trod emotional ground. Everywhere, every day, I can see upper-middle class white marriages fall apart due to possessive husband and frigid wives; there's better vehicles to explore "everyone records every moment of their lives" and "I spoke with the avatar of my dead partner."
Rowena is a delight, and I enjoy Crowley's progression—bravo to the show for exploring how soft he's gone. Otherwise: a disappointment. The Mark is too reminescent of S8's post-Purgatory effects, but significantly less compelling. The big bad is a mess—is it Styne? Rowena? the Mark has no face and so makes for an indistinct and unsatisfying enemy, and the show fails to capitalize on the quandary of how to win a fight when the only face of the enemy is yourself. Charlie's death is as predictably problematic as this show can conceivably be; the sudden twist ending is transparent sequel bait, and the entire last episode has predictable pacing. This is midgrade, messy, unremarkable Supernatural.
Circle, film, 2015, dir. Aaron Hann & Mario Miscione
I'm a sucker for this sort of survival setup, yet this did little for me. What makes survival games work is the way that individuals react to life and death competition, but there's no room for characters here. Instead, Circle has soundbite distillations of "American values," cursory and unproductive caricatures of sexism/racism/homophobia. Tension sustains the film, but the staccato pacing doesn't allow for tension to build or the narrative to flow. It's constrained and frantic and small, distinctly not awful; the end is strong. But I'm unimpressed.
The Duke of Burgundy, film, 2014, dir. Peter Strickland
Beautiful, rich, but too self-aware. This is a gorgeous dreamworld of texture and sound and scripted erotic play, balanced by heavy emotional emphasis which is at times almost unpleasant to watch because the character's needs are so transparent. But it can get lost under artsy montage, the worst of which is a dream-sequence entered via a crotch close-up (I mean, really); it's too smug and too arty. I think of this better in retrospect than I enjoyed it at the time—great potential, a bit too much beauty, and it doesn't work with my sense of humor.
Cloverfield, film, 2008, dir. Mat Reeves
I went into this thinking it was a monster delay film—I suppose I was mistaken, because the monster is all over the place, and inconsistent, and too convenient—most especially the presence of the smaller parasites. As a found footage film, this is decent, although I never grew invested in the interpersonal elements which are necessary to ground the apocalypse. The scale of the disaster is nice, although the monster itself is bland. In sum: merely competent.
Broadchurch, series 2, 2015
The writing here is better than the first series: less episodic, more cohesive as a whole. The casting and character arcs remain strong, especially Ellie, both in her family life and in her interactions with Hardy. But the emotional register and atmosphere are banal. It's uncreative: compare to Tana French's In the Woods: similar dual cases, small towns, PoV even, but the atmosphere is much more intense and the emotional focus has more intent, simply has more to say. The circumstances here are strange, even contrived, but most of the dynamics are disappointing in their normalcy.
Black Mirror, series 1-2 & Christmas Special, 2011-14
The natural result of mainstream media picking up spec-fic with the self-satisfied smugness of one who thinks they've come up with something new while failing to realize they have no genre experience to support them. Slick, well-acted, and pointedly cruel—but riddled with plotholes and unable to do anything with the potentially interesting near-future scenarios other than to see their effects on the entirely uninteresting lives of mostly-white straight people. It's watchable but the satire grows tiresome, obsessed with the petty evils of social media, and it buries its potential in over-trod emotional ground. Everywhere, every day, I can see upper-middle class white marriages fall apart due to possessive husband and frigid wives; there's better vehicles to explore "everyone records every moment of their lives" and "I spoke with the avatar of my dead partner."
