• The Serpent Queen (2022): This is what House of the Dragon could have been, if they weren't fucking cowards. It has basically the same themes of marriage slavery, child brides and political assassinations, but it doesn't read like it was written by some sweaty gross dude getting off on how cool that all sounds. Also, not shot in the dark and doesn't have crappy CGI lizards.

• Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (2022): Girl wakes up psychic from a coma in the loony bin, busts out, befriends stripper, does crimes. It's a lot of fun.

• The Invitation (2022): This is fantastic. A black artist from New York takes a DNA test and finds out she's related to rich English twits. Things Are Not As They Seem! It takes a classic Hammer turn.

• Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo (2022): This is everything I wanted from a Scooby Doo movie; so much better than that 3D thing from a couple years ago. It is more self-aware than usual, and surprisingly anti-cop and anti-prison!

• Thor, Love and Thunder (2022): This was fine, I guess. It wasn't as funny as Ragnarok, and the whole Jane Foster thing was really poorly explained. Her character was kind of wasted, really. What does it mean to be "a Thor", anyway. It's a job description now? But isn't he supposed to be like two thousand years old?

• Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022): Idris Elba is no Robin Williams, but this was cute.

• Confess, Fletch (2022): A fun, wisecracking, low-stakes detective story. The opposite of grimdark. I've already forgotten it.

• Bullet Train (2022): Who let all these mother fucking assassins on this mother fucking train? It's dumb fun. I've already forgotten it.

• Meet Cute (2022): Someone gave Harley Quinn a 24 hour time machine and she uses it for repeating a first date. It's pretty funny.

• Emily the Criminal (2022): Aubrey Plaza does a low-key Breaking Bad. It's very tense, because you just know all of these bad decisions are going to pile up.

• Lou (2022): Alison Janney and June Smollett fuck up a bad dad and some commandos in the woods. It's fun.

• Fall (2022): Two women climb an abandoned radio tower and get stuck. I thought this would just be a forgettable Open Water kind of thing, and I also thought I wasn't afraid of heights, but this movie was absolutely terrifying.

• Clerks III (2022): Ok, objectively, this is a bad movie. But nostalgically, it's like slipping into a warm bath. With a bottle of whiskey and a straight razor.

• Andor (2022): This really is fantastic. It's often very slow, and pretty non-episodic despite being divided into episodes, which leads to some episodes feeling like not much happened, but it's more like: the episode stopped at 48 minutes, but the act break was somewhere else entirely. There's very little action for a Star War, though the action scenes are particularly intense. It's mostly about personalities and politics, which is a nice change. This show is not about "prop up the monarchy" or "find the MacGuffin", it is about the banality of fascism, and that is amazing.

  Also the sets are just gorgeous. I am constantly hitting pause to admire the backgrounds and architecture. And it's not just a re-tread of the designs we've seen in every other Star War. The soaring damp-concrete brutalism of Trantor Coruscant (sorry, I always forget which of those is Greek and which is Roman) just feels so much more lived in than any other depiction of that kind of world.

• Cyberpunk Edgerunners (2022): This is such a slog, and so bad. I have never played the game, so maybe if I had shot people as these people I would give a shit, but this was just a bunch of amazingly cliched characters doing cliched things, most of whom had no personality or backstory beyond "I'm big" or "I smoke a lot". Also the animation was so basic and boring. It made me pine for Altered Carbon and I hated Altered Carbon.

• Pantheon (2022): This, on the other hand, is fantastic! Characters with real personality, great voice acting, smart dialog, characters come into conflict not because one is just "evil" but because they have different ideas about how to deal with fucked up situations. It owes a lot to one of my all-time favorites, Serial Experiments Lain, but it is not as surreal.

  (By the way, if anyone has a torrent of an HD version of Lain with with both English and Japanese audio and non-hardcoded subs, lemme know. I've only found some of those things but not all four.)

• Little Demon (2022): Danny Devito is Satan and knocked up Aubrey Plaza? Shit man that's all you had to say. This is delightfully foul.

• The Midnight Club (2022): A bunch of kids in an implausibly-fancy hospice tell spooky stories. Interestingly this inverts the usual anthology framing-story structure, in that the framing story is the meatier story, where usually the frame is paper thin and just and excuse to do the sub-stories. Also, there aren't really any villains, except, like, cancer. They do a few fake-outs where they start setting up one of the characters as a heel but then that turns out to be no big deal.

• Cabinet of Curiosities (2022): The first four episodes were just kind of dull. Every character is shitty and when they get their shitty asses killed I don't care. Lots of screaming in the dark, and so, so much dark. It's the new trend: I can't see what the fuck is going on. I expected better from Del Toro.

• Hellraiser (2022): Having seen some Hellraisers in my time, this was... an adequate Hellraiser. I was not wowed but it was ok. You will be shocked to learn that it, also, is often too dark too see.

• Barbarian (2022): This was scary, and does not take the completely predictable path I expected from the trailer. I am, however, left with some pretty major questions about the dynamics behind the whole thing, though, particularly related to AirBnB customer support. It's hard to say more without spoilers, but I was left with an awful lot of, "but... wait... how??"

• Blade of the 47 Ronin (2022): Snappy dialog, good fight choreography, and most refreshingly, even the night scenes were well lit.

  There's a quote I've heard attributed to Peter Jackson: when lighting a battle scene, someone asked him, "Where will the audience think the light is coming from?" and he said, "The same place the music is coming from."

Previously.

• Night Teeth (2021): This was a great vampire movie, like if Blade had double the politics and none of the fights. There's a huge amount of backstory that is only mentioned in passing. I suspect they have the scripts for two prequels and a sequel already written, and I'm ok with that.

• Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021): Inspired by the Max Headroom incident and probably also the "I Feel Fantastic" videos, this is just great. It's a bit VHS-forensic, so it's very reminiscent of the first act of Videodrome, though it doesn't go body horror. So good. And the period tech! Hats off to the propmasters and set dressers on this movie, because wow.

• The Estate (2020): Gay failson and stepmom end up banging the same guy, decide to murder dad. Despite the porny setup, it's pretty funny. Stepmom is played by Eliza Coupe from Futureman, and she's hilarious. The ending is kind of weak, though.

• The Spore (2020): The first post-COVID zombie movie, maybe! It kinda freaked me out, might be just too soon. It's more of a series of vignettes about people dealing with the apocalypse. Some very creepy low budget body horror.

• Only Murders in the Building (2021): Somehow I had managed to miss that Steve Martin and Martin Short are in this. Why was I not informed? This was really funny.

• Violet (2021): Wow, this was brutal but really good. Our lead's internal monologue keeps cutting her down in brutal voiceover while her cry-for-help narration plays out in handwritten subtitles, so there are three simultaneous lines of dialog. It's very creative and I haven't seen anything quite like that before.

  My one complaint is that it's a "Hollywood" story, which... I know they say write what you know, but there has to be a limit. Every time I see a movie that centers a screenwriter or a director my reaction is "Please stop, I know you are in the most egotistical of all possible industries, but nobody wants to watch you licking your own asshole". This same story could have been told with characters who had real jobs, not breathing the same extremely rarified air as studio execs.

• Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021): This is a Nicholas Cage movie that has almost the same plot as the Rowdy Roddy Piper classic, Hell Comes to Frogtown but with extra samurai. Some of those words will either convince you to watch this, or to never watch this. And either way, I cannot help you, Sir. I cannot help you. This movie is bonkers even by late-stage-Cage standards.

• Multiverse (2021): Some undergrads build a magic mirror that draws some of their variants in from another dimension, which again, is why I keep saying that Mad Science needs to be a graduate level course. Anyway, it's very low budget and has some nice twists.

• The World According to Jeff Goldblum (2019): It's just Jeff Goldblum being fascinated about things that I don't care about at all, like sneakers and denim and RVs, but he's such an adorable goofball that he made me care! I'm not sure this show would be any different if the host was David Byrne. Or Mr. Rogers.

• Cowboy Bebop (2021): It's been ages since I watched the anime, but this felt exactly how I remembered it, like, almost to a Watchmen level of slavish detail. I really enjoyed the first half of it; the relationships between the three main characters and their small cons were really fun. But a show is only as good as its villain, and "Vicious" was boring as shit and I didn't care about anything to do with that subplot (including the ex-girlfriend who had no discernible character traits of any kind), which was basically the entire second half of the show.

  It's also striking, again, how much Firefly was 100% a remake of Cowboy Bebop with the serial numbers filed off. Whedon really brought nothing new to that party.

• Dexter, New Blood (2021): I was pretty over Dexter by the time the first show ended -- I thought the final season, and the series finale, were pretty poor -- but I am enjoying this revival a lot so far. First episode was iffy, but it's shaping up nicely.

• Hawkeye (2021): I think Renner's Hawkeye character in the Marvel movies is... just... the... worst. However, there have been some very good Hawkeye comics that I have enjoyed very much, particularly Hawkeye Vol. 4, 2012 by Fraction & Aja, and Hawkeye Vol 5, 2016 by Thompson & Romero (the Kate Bishop version), and this show borrows heavily from both of those. The Kate character in the show is exactly like the comics. So I'm sold so far.

• Hanna, S03: Again, I enjoyed this, but it has been so long since the previous season that I have completely forgotten which bits I am remembering from Hanna and which are from Treadstone because they had exactly the same plot.

• The Wheel of Time (2021): Stop me if you've heard this one before: it's the future of our Earth, but there was an apocalypse, and after the complete collapse of our society, the world recovered technologically to around 1500s England and then stayed exactly there for 10,000 years, and also oh yeah there's magic now or something. And some monarchist propaganda about pretty teens with a genetic predestination to rule. FFS, why do they keep making this same show?

• Venom, Let There Be Carnage (2021): With the caveat that I was pretty drunk at the time, I found this funny. It's definitely way better than the first one. And all of that gay subtext from the first one is just text now.

• Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021): This was pretty great. The MUNI fight is as good as you've heard. The first half of the movie is a straight-up kung fu movie, and it's fantastic. The second half turns into a Marvel movie, and that gets to be a bit of a slog, but overall it's worthwhile.

  Can someone explain to me, though, how this has basically the same plot as Batman: Soul of the Dragon? Like, the whole second half boss battle was, "Wait, didn't I just watch this?" Is it because DC and Marvel were just madly plagiarizing each other in the 70s?

• Last Night In Soho (2021): This is absolutely fantastic, and gorgeous. Without giving too much away, it's a mystery taking place partly in the 60s and partly today, and in the telling of the story, the two actresses switch places often, which is done with incredible choreography. There are some tricks with mirrors that rival Candyman, but I'm pretty sure this was all practical.

• Arcane (2021): Some poor kids do parkour and Fight The Man in Steampunk Land. It was pretty great. The character had personalities and the animation was awesome. It had a very painterly feel to it. Spiderverse pretty much showed that there is no longer any difference between "animation" and "3D animation" and this is a worthy continuation of that. Apparently it's based on a video game that I know literally nothing about, so it's fair to say that you don't need the backstory. Maybe I would have liked it less if I had ever seen the game.

• The Great S02: Just as hilarious as the first season.

Previously.

Taking a shot at writing up these reviews more often than once a year. Current technique: scribbling these down on my phone as I'm watching them instead of only obsessively playing Threes.

Future Man: They spent almost the entirety of the most recent season doing a Mad Max pastiche with almost no time travel in it, and I was totally not here for that. BUT the last episode snuck in so much fantastic time travel humor that it almost made up for the rest -- why wasn't that episode the whole season??

Deadly Class: I'm on the fence about this. On the plus side, I love shows set in historic San Francisco; the characters, though clichés, are charming clichés; the music is good. On the minus side: OMG clichés; they are doing nothing to make this organization or its mission make any damned sense. We're talking "less sense and less exposition than John Wick" and that's not a high bar.

Sex Education: Virgin teen becomes freelance sex therapist. Antics ensue. Much dong. It's pretty hilarious.

Russian Doll: First of all, it was bold to release it on Groundhog Day! I loved it, but apparently I'm a sucker for Groundhog Day movies. And I am happy that Groundhog Day has become a genre: Happy Death Day, Before I Fall, About Time, Groundhog Troopers or whatever it was called...

Anyway, I normally I can't get in to shows where I dislike all of the characters, and nearly everyone in this show was a deeply unpleasant person -- the lighter on the retractable keychain might be the most irritating affection of any character ever -- but I really liked this show and even rooted for them. Especially all of the cosmological theories that she kept throwing out while trying to work out why it was happening: "New theory! You're me!" And the REDACTED being used as a clock was nice.

Some review called it "the most New York show ever" but I think it might be the most New York hating show ever. Whoever wrote this has spent time at some absolutely intolerable parties.

Prospect: This was excellent. It felt like a small story set in the Firefly universe. Prospectors and double-crosses and missing the last train out. The tech looked very Nostromo and the MacGuffins were not over-explained.

Destination Wedding: This is the greatest. Keanu and Winona just snark at each other the whole time. Literally nobody else has a line. It is just so full of bitterness and bile, it's like if Hal Hartley or David Mamet made Before Sunrise. I loved it completely.

Replicas: Oh Keanu. Why. Things were going so well. Why. Why. Why did you make this.

Summer '03: A teen coming-of-age-disaster movie. It's cute and funny.

Juliet, Naked: A woman starts having a thing with a washed-up rock star who is idolized by her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend. It's a rom-com in the vein of Nick and Nora or High Fidelity, except the people are older and even more sad and bitter.

The New Romantic: A girl decides to be a "sugar baby" for an older guy and eventually realizes, hey, this guy's not really boyfriend material and is kind of a piece of shit. It was decent. Also, love is dead.

Double Indemnity (1944): A great "let's do a murder" noir. The plan seems really solid. Spoiler: it doesn't work out.

Don't Bother to Knock (1952): A Marilyn Monroe movie I'd never heard of. Damn, this is dark! Without spoiling it, I enjoyed how they messed with your assumptions about who the villain was going to be.

Lifechanger: A story about an obligate bodysnatcher. It has first person narration, and yet the protagonist is a murderous stalker, which was an interesting choice.

Mandy: The fuck did I just watch? It was stylish but there was nothing there.

Overlord: Nazi zombies. Yawn. Was this written by a bot? I'm going with yes.

Prince of Darkness (1987): This movie still rules. This is such an excellent example of taking goofy Christian mythology, and goofy quantum physics theories, and even a hint of time travel, green vomit, and Alice Cooper as a creepy homeless zombie dude, and managing to put it all together in a way where the audience says, "With you so far, do go on." Bravo. "I've got a message for you. And you're not going to like it..."

Mortal Engines: Rarely have I heard worse dialog or more pathetic technobabble. What a nonsensical, hackneyed piece of shit. Even the effects didn't keep my attention for five whole minutes through the entire movie. This is exactly the kind of movie where you might be saying, "Ok, but the effects were good" but, no. Just no. I had to go and rewatch Howl's Moving Castle just to get the bad taste out of my mouth. (Howl's Moving Castle is still excellent, BTW.)

Tales from Earthsea: A Ghibli movie that I somehow hadn't heard of. I don't remember anything about the Earthsea books, besides liking them as a child. This was ok.

Monster Party: A fun locked-room twist on a family of psychos (subclass "millionaire" rather than "hillbilly"). I liked the "we are recovering addicts" aspect of it. Not to be confused with Murder Party, which was also fun.

The Nun: Honestly, I only watched this because I saw someone do a really good Halloween costume of it. It was forgettable, but it has some good scares and makeup. I gather it is set in some "Amityville" timeline? Is that the same as the Fast and Furious timeline? It must be. It also must be as loose a connection as the Hellraiser timeline.

Into the Dark: This is an anthology series, and mostly it's garbage. It's odd how each of the episodes seems interesting for about 10 minutes and then becomes completely hateful and annoying. The Body was ok (but too long). The Pooka was particularly bad. The "trapped in an elevator" one started out ok then reminded me, oh wait, there's literally only one story to tell about being trapped in an elevator. Then they told that one.

Episode 4 was pretty good, though: New Year, New You is on the theme of, "Instagram Influencers are awful, awful people". It was not terribly predictable and had a great ending. I like that "Instagram Hate" is a genre now. That has a future. See also A Simple Favor, Ingrid Goes West.

Patient Seven: An anthology where a doctor talks to some evil patients. Some of the stories were good but all were mercifully brief: only about ten minutes each. The framing story was well acted, but didn't make a whole lot of sense in the end. Oddly, one was a repeat: The Body was the same story as in Into the Dark! It was done much better here (proving that Into the Dark took ten minutes of story and stretched it to 90.)

After my last trip to Disneyland, it occurred to me that I barely remembered a bunch of the movies that the rides are based on, so I spun through a few of them:

Mary Poppins: I'm pretty sure that somehow I never saw this movie at all, and wow, it's pretty great! And it has a decidedly anticapitalist bent. Enough to make me wonder if Walt was secretly a Red. (Yes, I am aware of the revisionism of Saving Mr. Banks.) (No, I haven't seen the sequel yet.)

Peter Pan: Daaaaaaamn this is racist. Every character except Tink is a horrible person, and she's a pretty nasty piece of work, too.

Sleeping Beauty / Snow White: Why do these two movies have exactly the same plot? What the fuck are the dwarves? No wonder I get the Evil Queen and Maleficent confused all the time. These movies are Pretty but Not Good.

Pinocchio: I would say that mostly this is just unnecessarily long. (See what I did there. Yeah but it's true.)

The Gong Show: (2017) I love all incarnations of The Gong Show unrepentantly. This revival came out a year and a half ago but I've been making my way through it slowly, like gum stuck to my headboard or an everlasting gobstopper, because I don't want it to end.

Now let me be clear: the acts are great! However, the weird-assed mutant that Mike Meyers is playing as the host is intolerable, and the judges mostly aren't that funny -- but they are, at least, not overly mean. And that's an important feature in a Gong Show judge. It's too easy to just go mean.

Previously.