Tag: Alison Pill
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With “Devs,” writer, director, and creator Alex Garland manages to be at least twenty-one years late to be original with what he’s going for. Though he’s also apparently in the zeitgeist because the big twist is also another show this year. Does he bring anything new to the table? Not really? It’s not the point.…
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Lots of “surprises” this episode as far as how the show’s going to go into its final episode. Like three deaths surprises, as writer, director, and creator Alex Garland starts paring down the cast to something more manageable. The funniest thing about the death scenes is how anticlimactic they all are. Everyone on “Devs” acting…
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This episode introduces “dumb Jamie,” which is writer, director, and show creator Alex Garland’s way of making Sonoya Mizuno clearly smarter than Jin Ha. It just requires Ha be really dense all of a sudden. Even though he just got done doing the superhero move of breaking Mizuno out of a mental hospital. Doesn’t matter…
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So last episode ended on two pretty significant cliffhangers for intrepid hero Sonoya Mizuno and her loyal sidekick Jin Ha. This episode opens with a “stylish” composite shot where involuntarily psychiatrically held Mizuno remembers life in her apartment with ex Ha as well as recently deceased boyfriend Karl Glusman simultaneously. Different versions of Mizuno walk…
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I believe the technical term for what writer, director, and show creator Alex Garland does with the “cold open.” Artsy-fartsy. I mean, it’s not bad or anything, it’s just blandly stylized. Though in a somewhat different way than usual. It doesn’t have that “compare it to Kubrick” desperation Garland fills the rest of the series…
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About three-quarters through this episode, when I was wondering if Alex Garland had indeed both written and directed this episode as well because it sure doesn’t have as much of the directorial flourish as the two previous episodes, I also realized the show’s closed its open questions. Three-quarters of the way through episode three of…
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The start of the episode introduces some more of the Devs at work—there’s also a concerning assault in a garage—before getting to Nick Offerman’s Stallman-bearded tech giant telling lead Sonoya Mizuno she’ll have a job and secure income forever. Her boyfriend lighting himself on fire in front of the giant statue of a little girl…
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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a director more desperately want to be compared to Stanley Kubrick than “Devs” creator, writer, and director Alex Garland. The show’s a stylistic mash-up of 2001 and The Shining, maybe with some Eyes Wide Shut thrown in (for the street scenes). It takes place in San Francisco at a…
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Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon is writing solo again this episode and, I mean, there are some bad scenes but the cringe factor is gone. Of course “Picard” is going to have poorly written and acted scenes, what else would it have; there’s no surprise in them anymore. This episode has Picard (Patrick Stewart) running…
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This episode of “Picard” has a Vulcan in cool sunglasses, who non-consensually mind melds, which used to be a thing, and talks about 300 gigabytes of data (hashtag details), a Romulan in a Battlefield Earth fighter jet, discount Han Solo sucking on a cigar, a 23rd century Alexa, the Black woman in the cast calling…
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This episode… really doesn’t impress. It ought to impress because it finally gets things moving—Picard (Patrick Stewart) heads to the Borg Cube to rescue Soji (Isa Briones). Briones is an android but doesn’t know it. Her lover, Harry Treadaway, knows she’s an android and wants to kill her for being an android because he’s a…
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I wonder if the “Picard” producers tried to track down Brian Brophy to appear on this episode. He originated the Bruce Maddox role on “Next Generation” Season Two, in 1989. I don’t have particularly good memories of his performance but whatever. Did they at least ask? Though he doesn’t have a credit since 2011; he…
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Let’s get the elephant out of the way: show co-creator, episode single credited writer, and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon. He’s really, really, really bad at writing dialogue. At some point in this episode, I realized Akiva Goldsman—the profoundly hacky screenwriter of Batman & Robin, iRobot, and I Am Legend who is also a…
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This episode ends where the second episode should’ve ended, with the Jerry Goldsmith Star Trek: The Motion Picture theme (i.e. “The Next Generation” theme) and a starship going into a very boring warp. It took Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his band of sidekicks all episode to get into space; apparently you can teleport everywhere in…
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I was expecting a lot of fan service this episode and it definitely did not provide. But instead of doing fan service—outside confirming Riker, Work, and LaForge are all still alive—this episode just kills forty-five minutes or so until the next one. “Picard” has a ten episode season and Maps and Legends is utterly disposable.…
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The most peculiar thing about “Picard” is how much it plays like a sequel to Star Trek: Nemesis. Not because Tom Hardy guests as Patrick Stewart’s unlikely Romulan clone or… wait, what else happened in that movie? Oh, yeah, Troi got mind raped… again. No Troi (Marina Sirtis) in this episode, thank goodness. Not thank…
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To Rome with Love is sort of hostile to its viewer. Allen sets up three (or four, depending on how you want to count) plots and plays them all concurrently. However, these three (or four) plots don’t necessarily coexist in the same Rome, certainly not at the same time they linearly play out in the…
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As Milk‘s opening titles ran, it occurred to me Danny Elfman scored it. It doesn’t sound anything like Elfman’s norm–you know, the modified Batman music–but it sounded like the kind of score Danny Elfman should be doing (and should have been doing for years). Milk‘s a biopic–and always feels like one, thanks in great part…
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Is there a dearth of WASP family dramas right now? I guess there must be. Dan in Real Life certainly fills the void–and is probably the only time I’ve ever thought about a movie in terms of it being a WASP affair (that accusation against Wes Anderson is, for example, one I find unfounded). It’s…
The Stop Button 