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Author Archives: Andrew Bloom
Better Call Saul: Misdirected Anger, Urban Antpiles, and Broken Glass in “The Guy for This”
I could write an entire review just trying to decode all the little images that “The Guy for This” parcels out for the viewer. One of the things that sets Better Call Saul (and its predecessor) apart is a penchant for that type of symbolism. The visual conveys as much of what the audience is supposed to take away as the dialogue. So when an episode begins with ants slowly but surely descending on Jimmy’s ice cream cone, and ends with the aftermath of that miniature invasion, it’s clear that Peter Gould and company are trying to tell us something.
Better Call Saul and the Lines We Cross for Those We Love in “50% Off”
People will go to incredible lengths if something really matters. When someone or something important hangs in the balance, it stirs the blood, pushes us to take chances we wouldn’t otherwise take, and cross lines we wouldn’t normally transgress.
That’s certainly true for Nacho here. If he’s had one consistent character trait over the course of Better Call, it’s that he’s apt to keep things stable and not rock the boat unless he has to. He’s more thoughtful and more calculating than the hot-blooded Salamancas he answers to. But his other consistent throughline is how much he loves his father. That means Nacho will take chances and put himself at risk in ways that he wouldn’t normally do, if it allows him to protect the man who raised him.
Better Call Saul: The Beginning and End of Saul Goodman in “Magic Man”
Five seasons in, and I still don’t know what to make of the flash-forwards to Cinnabon Gene. I always think of The Wire’s approach to these opening vignettes, with the idea that they’re meant to be microcosms of the themes of the season. But that doesn’t seem to fit here, since Gene’s choices largely track with Jimmy’s in the show to date. The cold open shows Gene panicking, worrying that he’s in too deep and looking for a way out, only to decide to take matters into his own hands. That’s been Jimmy’s M.O. for basically the whole series, most recently and notably overcoming his disciplinary suspension despite some serious headwinds.
Watchmen Ticks All its Pieces into Place in “See How They Fly”
When I watched the first batch of episodes from Watchmen, I thought it tossed plenty of interesting balls into the air, but I questioned how and whether it would be able to catch all of them. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, showrunner Damon Lindelof (of Lost fame) is not necessarily known for delivering satisfying endings. His new series asked all sorts of intriguing questions about powerful institutions and those marginalized by them, and it threw in one eyebrow-raising plot point after another. But to answer all of the former and resolve all of the latter, seemed like too much for even the smartest [person] in the world to do in a satisfying way.
And yet, somehow, “See How They Fly” does it.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Damon Lindelof, Dr. Manhattan, Episode Reviews, HBO, Watchmen, Watchmen S01E09
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Parasite Exposes the Real Suckers in a Class-Conscious Thriller
Caution: This review contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Parasite
Parasite wears its themes on its sleeve. Director Bong Joon-ho chronicles the divide between rich and poor, between the class that has to scrape and scrap to make ends meet and the one that lives in careless largesse. He makes the gulf between them massive and eventually deadly. Within the confines of his feature, the wealthy enjoy the privilege of remaining oblivious to that divide and its attendant struggles, while the underclass must fake and fink and fight one another for a small cut of what their social superiors thoughtlessly squander.
Posted in Movies, Prestige Pictures
Tagged Bong Joon-ho, Film Reviews, International Films, Oscars 2019
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The Simpsons Plays the Old Favorites with Sideshow Bob and a Former Foe in “The Great Louse Detective”
The Simpsons has certain traditions that are never going away. As long as the series stays on the air (and in the good graces of the Disney corporation), there will always be Treehouse of Horror episodes. There will always be “the Simpsons are going to ____!” episodes. And, of course, there will always be Sideshow Bob episodes. The show may have changed a great deal over the past thirty years, but some things are too ingrained in The Simpsons’s DNA for the show to move on.
Thankfully, one of those indelible elements is Kelsey Grammer, whose mellifluous baritone has graced episodes both great and god-awful over his three-decade tour of duty. Fortunately, “The Great Louse Detective” leans more toward the former than the latter, if only just barely. As I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, this episode manages to inch its way toward quality, due in no small part to the presence of Springfield’s favorite attempted murderer. (But we like you too, Fat Tony!)
Posted in Television, The Simpsons
Tagged Al Jean, Episode Reviews, Homer Simpson, Sideshow Bob, The Simpsons Season 14
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Is Both Too Much and Not Enough
[CAUTION: This review contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker]
The Rise of Skywalker never stops. From minute one, it is utterly relentless, bringing back major characters, leaping across time and space, and blowing through plot point after plot point at breakneck speed. Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy recently speculated that if director J.J. Abrams had known he would be spearheading this final installment back when he originally signed on for The Force Awakens, he would have saddled up and directed the whole damn trilogy. The Rise of Skywalker bears that out, if only because it feels like Abrams tried to cram two movies into one here.
Watchmen and the Inscrutability of Love and Creation in “A God Walks into Abar”
The beauty of science fiction is that, in the right hands, it can tell stories that other genres can’t. Strip away the limitations of fact; tap into the power of imagination, and you can conjure scenes and situations the shabby metes and bounds of the real world couldn’t sustain. In the best hands, the absence of those limitations — the combination of fiction and abstraction — allows the author and their audience to reach truths that even the most poignant, most trenchant slice of reality cannot possibly match.
So when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons imagined a god, a living embodiment of quantum entanglement, they used him to explore the bitter ironies of causality. They traced the lines of cause and effect, jumbled up in one man’s life, to find the knotted ends of detachment and transcendence and omniscience turned predestination. Jon Osterman had, like others before him, come unstuck in time. And his creators, like others before them, used that temporal hash to shine a light on the human condition in ways that linear storytelling wouldn’t allow for.
Jeff Jensen & Damon Lindelof use the same approach to tell a story about love and creation, and about how each produces a yearning for something destined to leave us.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Angela Abar, Damon Lindelof, Dr. Manhattan, Episode Reviews, HBO, Watchmen, Watchmen S01E08
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Attack of the Clones Is Like its Protagonist: Rife with Potential But Deeply Flawed
The strange thing about Attack of the Clones is that there’s the ghost of a better movie within it. Its script is atrocious, and the visuals all but sink the film as its scenes grow progressively uglier. But buried within that mess is a noble effort to cultivate the root causes of Anakin’s turn, a solid mystery adventure for “Obi Wan Kenobi: Space Detective”, and even a minor bit of political intrigue. Its weaknesses far outnumber its strengths, but the best thing you can say about Episode II is that in different hands, or under different circumstances, it could have been great.
Why “The Frying Game” Is a Dark Horse Contender for The Simpsons’s Worst Episode Ever
Spare me your jockey elves. Forget your spring break alligators. Cast aside your amorous pandas and bar rags and even your Gagas. My poor lost souls, I beseech you to look upon thy screamapillar and weep — weep for us all.
Because “The Frying Game” may very well be The Simpsons’s worst episode ever.
As I discussed on The Simpsons Show podcast, I don’t make that pronouncement lightly. It’s hard to call “The Frying Game” overrated exactly — forgotten is probably more accurate — but it’s rarely brought up in discussions of the series’s nadir. And yet it deserves to be ground into the dirt like the fetid excuse for televised refuse that it is. What the episode lacks in the casual cruelty of other contemporary Simpsons outings, or the aimless racism of the show’s more regrettable international jaunts, it makes up for in being emblematic of everything wrong with the series at this point in its run. It is a nonsensical, irritating, embarrassing blight upon the face of what was once the greatest show on television.
