Change Your Image
crwilley
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Ms. Marvel (2022)
Love it.
Admittedly I'm a Carol Danvers fangirl who's been told to get her head out of fandom and into the real world on occasion, but I found Kamala very relatable and I want to know more of her story. I also love the visual style that blends animation in with the live-action footage.
Supernatural: Carry On (2020)
the only thing saving this from a 1-star...
Is that Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles acted the heck out of it.
In one fell swoop they threw out fifteen years of character growth for both Sam and Dean, disregarding everything that the show has ever said about the value of found/created family and free will and the toxicity of the parentified/codependent brotherly relationship. Dean, granted free will for the first time since before he was born... dies cleaning up a hunt his father didn't follow through on in 1986, not even killed by the monster he was hunting but by random happenstance on the hunt. We are then treated to a montage of Sam grieving alone when he should have been surrounded by friends, and then growing older, sadder, apparently having no relationships beyond a wife who's a blur (supposed, but not shown, to be his S15 lover Eileen) and a child he named after his dead brother, finding genuine happiness only after they're reunited in the afterlife, where Dean has only experienced a few hours but spent them mostly alone in the car driving towards that reunion.
(...plus a full minute of the episode was spent on a reappearance of a character from a season 1 episode, whose reason for being there from the perspective of the narrative was less than obvious, except that she also referred back to a hunt John Winchester arguably dropped the ball on.)
I can't think of a crappier story to tell about these two men at this point in their lives. They both deserved better. If Sam was supposed to have grown enough to let Dean go - that's not what we saw. And all we're shown of what Dean might have done with a life free of all external constraint is a job application that most viewers wouldn't've been able to read.
As a friend of mine memorably put it: We didn't need to see Dean die. We needed to see him live.
.
And as I put it, if they wanted to show us a happy, fulfilled Sam, they needed to do a better job of it.
Supernatural: Wayward Sisters (2018)
The most important difference
Claire is so much like Dean, isn't she? One parent ripped away by the supernatural, another lost to the inability to deal with the loss, adolescence spent under sketchy circumstances, became a hunter (a very good one) because that's the only thing that felt meaningful.
Everyone around Dean for basically his whole entire life has told him to "man up", get on with the work, plaster a smile on and go back to killing things, got a world to save out there, you'll be fine and if you're not there's always a bottle nearby. It's only in the last year or two that he's been able to say: no, there are things I can't cope with, I can't even pretend to cope with them.
Claire's got a whole family - related by love if not by blood - telling her: you go ahead, feel what you feel. We'll be here when you're ready.
Sam and Dean's story has been "All we've got is each other." The Wayward Sisters' story is going to be "We've got each other, and that's enough." So similar, but so very very different...
I love it already.
Supernatural: Man's Best Friend with Benefits (2013)
Mediocre episode of a totally different show?
...because it was a truly awful one of Supernatural. If I didn't know the writers credited for this episode have credits on episodes dating all the way back to the first season (including some I really liked), I'd accuse them of never having watched the show before. The "witch community" featured in the episode a) comes out of nowhere, and b) isn't consistent with what we've seen of witches on Supernatural at any point in the preceding 7.5 seasons... was this a script for a different show where witches do hang out in an underground bar and sling lightning bolts around?
And even if that were the case, putting it back into its "native habitat" wouldn't erase some highly troubling things pertaining to the character Portia.
If I were advising a friend who was starting the show from the beginning, I'd probably point out a few other episodes that fell a little flat and could probably be skipped. This is the one I'd tell them outright not to waste 40 minutes on. It gets a 3 based on "production wasn't too bad", but I kind of want my time back.
Sleepy Hollow: John Doe (2013)
Good, but...
I'll forgive Sleepy Hollow putting an occult/conspiratorial spin on American history - it's the show's premise, after all, and they're hardly the first to do it. I can't forgive them for being just plain WRONG on a basic fact that should have been obvious to anyone who ever passed high school English: Thomas Grey should have been speaking the English of Shakespeare, not Chaucer. Comprehensible, if archaic, to pretty much any random resident of Sleepy Hollow. And then they went to the bother of writing Middle English dialogue (it sounded plausible to me, at least), without noticing (or maybe without caring) that it was wrong? I'm not sure if that made it better or worse.
That made me so upset that I almost turned off an otherwise-pretty-good episode five minutes in. I consoled myself with a good rant at the ceiling instead.
Spy Kids 3: Game Over (2003)
Half a good movie
I think I'm glad this is the last in the series.
I enjoyed about half the movie - that half being the "eye candy" of the special effects in the action sequences, particularly the hoverbike and mech wrestling. I got a giggle out of the Tetris pieces used to make platforms, and out of how much one of the actresses resembled the artwork for the heroine of every one of the Final Fantasy video games...kind of appropriate.
The child actors were, in general, surprisingly watchable - I would've liked to have seen more of Alexa Vega in the film, honestly - and Ricardo Montalban and Sylvester Stallone were well matched against each other. They had to be, really, because despite top billing for Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino, they were barely on screen long enough to be noticed.
But the eye candy and the generally good acting couldn't make up for the overall level of stinky, stinky CHEESE that makes up the bulk of the film. I had the feeling that a couple big chunks of the film were missing - some exposition at the beginning would have been nice, and the resolution of the "video game" part of the movie felt very, very rushed. The video game plot
device itself is...umm...let's say it overloaded my disbelief suspender, and the overall tone of the movie was beyond absurd, a real disappointment in light of the first movie in the franchise. And the final scene seemed to just be an excuse to get every adult who'd ever gotten camera time in the first two films another 15 seconds in front of the camera.
My five-year-old loved it, of course, but I wish we'd waited to see it in second run.
Science Crazed (1991)
90 minutes of movie, 40 minutes of (bad) film.
And I may be being generous. The overwhelming majority of the movie consists of looped footage...the shambling monster, two women exercising, the shambling monster again, a bunch of people in the pool, the shambling monster again, none the worse for wear despite having been injured...you get the picture. I restrained myself from yelling "GET ON WITH IT ALREADY" on several occasions.
And it doesn't help that the footage they used was poorly produced. The sound is disconcertingly out of sync with the image. And in the one scene where they tried to get "artistic" with the lighting and camera techniques, the lighting guy, holding the flashlight that provides the scene's only illumination, is clearly visible in the shot.
My hope is that the production was the victim of some horrible disaster in which the original audio track and most of the footage was destroyed, but they decided to release it anyways, cobbled together from the editing room floor, in memory of the heroic crew members who gave their lives trying to save the *real* film - the one with the plot and the interesting dialog. Sadly, there's no evidence of this, and I'm forced to conclude that, in the immortal words of Joel and the Bots, they just didn't care.