Penny Dreadful, that glorious bastion of subtext-made-text, ended this past weekend, bringing a three-season fascination with Vanessa Ives to a close. The series finale was…a disappointment. I wrote about the problems with this arc in a piece at Salon, so we don’t need to rehash all of it here, but I do want to dig […]
There has never been a fictional wedding/funeral ratio more to my tastes, has there? The wedding happened on BATES MOTEL, which I covered for AV Club; you could not have picked a better week for me to drop in on a show than the week two characters with a deeply repressed slow burn have to […]
How belated? Well, I hope you’re following me on Twitter if you want news, that’s all I can say for myself; the first thing on this list is from January 5. (I tried to alert everyone to the live-action drinking game that is the Shannara Chronicles.) I’ve been keeping more regular tabs on Reign, which […]
Well, only sort of. But I realized the last thing I posted here was the Catwoman announcement, and not any of my nonfiction work directly before or since. Obviously I’m still stoked about Catwoman, but I didn’t realize how much time’s gotten away from me in the last few weeks. Yikes. (I don’t think I […]
It was a good week for movies over at Philadelphia Weekly! I enjoyed both the claustrophobic character study of Locke and the 18th-century period piece Belle, which is otherwise so good about addressing its various long-simmering tensions that it felt like overkill whenever someone gives a heartfelt speech nearly drowned out by the orchestra. (That […]
This week, I had the opportunity to write an editorial essay for Clarkesworld that was meant to be something of a personal take on my approach to movie reviewing, with an undercurrent of, “Because sometimes you like bad movies a lot and you should probably explain that.” I ended up writing a love letter to […]