Nick at Nite

Full spoilers ahead        2010: The Social Network comes to theaters. Great movie, incisive, foreboding. Occasionally met with the criticism that Mark Zuckerberg can’t really be that bad, can he? This must be a hyper-dramatized version of the story for film that needs Zuck to bring about his own tragic downfall.       2013: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance releases, featuring a climactic sword fight with a roided-out American super senator. This is seen as over the top, camp, an observation of American politics from a famously idiosyncratic outsider auteur.       2013, later: The Purge releases. Reasonably successful, but surely way too heavy handed to take seriously. The Romney-like Young Republican bad guy puts on a mask and does snarling monologues about how much he loves killing poor people? Come on.       Here in 2025, these and more have gotten their due as ahead ...

      In the past five or so years, the band Paramore has made a huge comeback. They have a new sound and are bigger than ever, but when they go on tour people still want to hear the breakout mid-2000s hit that made them famous, “Misery Business.” “Misery Business,” a pop punk inversion of “Jolene,” is a gloating anthem about sticking it to The Other Woman after the singer character successfully waits her out and re-secures the affections of a man. The singer character also calls the other woman a “whore,” and Paramore endured a controversial uproar over the line where lead singer Hayley Williams eventually resolved to stop saying the word live.     A theme that defines Final Fantasy 7 Remake (FF7R), then, is the next evolution of this impulse. Not a version of “Misery Business” with one word excised, but a rewrite of the song where the singer character and Other Woman overcome their differences. I’m not the first to say this, but Final Fantasy VII (1997) i...

                                            (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...