Nick at Nite

                                            (Content warning: discussions of suicide, which is doubly true for Inside itself)      An interesting thing happened when Hannah Gadsby blew everyone away with Nanette , which is that I cried a lot. But in a wider context, a bunch of newly minted comedy scientists lurched out of their hovels with joke-ometers in hand to insist that Nanette was bad because it didn’t have enough jokes in it. I can already foresee the same obtuse criticism being levied against Bo Burnham’s new special, Inside , so I’m here telling you to please ignore those people until they dissolve back into slime. Inside was shot and edited by Burnham entirely within his house during the pandemic, so I promise that A) it is a piece of media about the pandemic that is actually good and B) most people (understandably) wouldn’t expect ...

       With two posts we’ve officially got a  series cookin’, baby. My last one hinted at this, but the next of HBOMax’s underappreciated all-stars is another Cinemax show, Warrior . Based on a treatment written by Bruce Lee before he died and even produced by his daughter Shannon, it tells the story of Chinese immigrant Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) coming to San Francisco during the Reconstruction and infiltrating the criminal underworld of Chinatown to find his estranged sister. He joins up with the heir apparent of a local gang, Jason Tobin as Young Jun, to investigate. Meanwhile, the crucible of turn-of-the-century America is heating up San Francisco as the rest of the cast try to take control of the city.      True to Bruce’s legacy, this struggle involves no shortage of beautifully constructed ass-beatings every single episode. Andrew Koji carries the lead role extremely well through the show’s intricate fight choreography. Warrior brings us everyt...

  Finally, a video game movie that captures the feeling of handing the controller off to your older brother to beat the hard level. Mortal Kombat (2021) has a few genuinely interesting ideas and decent looking fights that it has no idea what to do with. It was all downhill from action legend Joe Taslim blood knifing Scorpion in the trailer. His involvement had my interest from the moment I heard about it and his resume is undeniably stacked, but unfortunately it fails to cohere into a sensible film.     The story follows MMA fighter and loving family man Cole Young (Lewis Tan). He’s an underdog and he cares about his daughter a lot but we spend very little time with this part of him before his his Mortal Kombat birthright, foreshadowed by a prologue sequence and the best action setpiece in the film between Sub Zero (Taslim) and Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion, comes home to roost. He’s attacked by the very same Sub Zero and rescued by Jax (Mechad Brooks), who tells him w...

       I’ve found in conversations with my friends and online that people seem to discount HBOMax as a streaming service. Everybody has Netflix or knows somebody who does, most people can find a Hulu login, if you’re into Star Wars or the MCU you’re shelling out for Disney+, but people don’t see the same necessity in HBOMax. I think that’s ridiculous because it provides such an incredible collection of high quality movies and TV, not even counting their deal this year to collect all of Warner Brothers’ theatrical releases. It’s the service I watch most by a wide margin. So I’m here to convince you to check it out one show at a time and maybe convince HBO to pay me because streaming services of all flavors are in serious need of curatorial input to help people wade through their flood of stuff.     First up, The Knick . The Knick is a historical medical drama whose strength lies in brilliantly leveraging all three aspects. It’s an ensemble story that fo...

              Wandavision has wrapped and left me with a lot of mixed feelings. I will say that I generally enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It of course has its ups and downs, which is unavoidable with something so large, but on the whole I look forward to their output. What gets under my skin about Wandavision is that it toes the line between the broadly fun middle of the pack MCU and its few great standouts, and in the end it just couldn’t break away to the top no matter how well it was set up.           First of all, the good: no property from the MCU has been as interested in a character’s interiority as Wandavision . The sitcom recreations gently humming along in full denial or warping and cracking as problems crop up directly reflect Wanda’s own grief. The show within the show is a loving recreation/expansion of a historic long running media giant inside the MCU, a loving recreation/expansion of a histori...

 Content Warning: Suicide “Suicide becomes the story, the mythology, the cautionary tale.” Like a lot of metaphor-heavy art, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is happy to sit down and tell you what it’s actually about. Charlie Kaufman’s latest abstract exploration of how the stories we tell ourselves shape who we are is the defeated antonym to Synecdoche, New York . Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard explores the highs and lows of human experience and expressing the story of oneself, whereas Jessie Buckley’s lead is shifting, unable to face herself, denied at every turn, and inevitably consumed by the narrative of another. Her identity is dissolved into nothing by the inability to literally be herself.                The point-of-view protagonist, credited as “young woman” and called many names over the film’s run, contemplates the title statement, which seems to be about ending her relationship with a kind but uncertain Jake (play...

     Under the Silver Lake is a movie which certainly wastes no time letting you know that this is Andrew Garfield’s horny, paranoid, wild ride. The first moments of Garfield’s character Sam are of him casually and then more formally creeping on women. Sam is a vaguely defined out-of-work creative hopeful living in LA, and the main plot, such as it is, revolves around him trying to find a woman named Sarah that he almost had sex with and then didn’t. But really Under the Silver Lake is about the problem of being a guy who can only understand himself through the things he likes, and Sarah, and the several other women he almost has sex with and then doesn’t that crop up, and even the one that he does, are all just more of those things. Garfield’s performance is commendable here, as the movie would be nothing without him. He gives so much range and humor to this gross creep that makes him fun to watch, and this gross creep is in so far over his head that it’s still wi...