Posts

The Simpsons Season 33 Episode 11 After a three-episode, one of them a two-parter, rally of undisputed heavyweight wins, The Simpsons fail to cover the spread. Season 33 episode 11 “The Longest Marge,” is loaded with cynicism, bad sportsmanship, and subversive scrimmages, but the usually reliable, and equally economical, Monty Burns is shaving points. This is what earned Burt Reynolds the bad rep which preceded his character Paul “Wrecking” Crewe in the prison football classic comedy The Longest Yard, and it costs the installment the game ball....

Spider-Man: No Way Home successfully promoted its returning villainous ghosts (so to speak,) of Spider-Man iterations past, and implicitly teased even more universe-shattering surprises, on which it delivered—we’ll just leave it at that. However, the conception of the health-crisis-era release’s fantastical plot occurred at the height of a different kind of crisis, in summer 2019, during which a spat over shared profits saw character licensee Sony withdraw Tom Holland’s Spider-Man from the MCU....

The Stand is considered by many, to this day, to be one of Stephen King’s three or four finest novels. It is certainly among his most beloved by longtime readers, because of its sheer size (more than 800 pages when originally published in 1978, more than 1,000 in the unexpurgated version released in 1990) and the scope and breadth of its storytelling. A hybrid of horror, apocalyptic sci-fi and epic fantasy (King has said he explicitly wanted to create a sort of modern day The Lord of the Rings), it’s an eerie, surreal tale of the fall of civilization and the battle for the souls of those left alive in the aftermath....

For Eva Green, Vesper Lynd was the part that would cement her status as a name on the rise, but her acting career had begun just three years prior. With The Dreamers, in 2003, Green starred opposite fellow French actor Louis Garrel as artistically inclined siblings who become entwined with an American exchange student, played by Michael Pitt. The film was helmed by controversial director Bernardo Bertolucci, and in an interview with The Guardian after the release of Casino Royale, Green spoke about how both her agent and her own parents attempted to discourage her from taking the part considering Bertolucci’s reputation for not allegedly securing his actors’ consent (most notoriously with Maria Schneider on the movie Last Tango in Paris)....

If one needed a firm indication that AMC’s The Walking Dead is on a quick collision course with its climax, the announced casting of fan-favorite character Mercer should certainly suffice. Michael James Shaw has landed the role, which he will field on the upcoming eleventh and final season of the franchise-spawning series. While there have been major divergences from Robert Kirkman’s comic source material, it does seem that Mercer will be as crucial to the approaching endgame of the series as he was to the comic....

There’s nothing quite like a well-executed flashforward on a TV show. Plot growing stagnant? Ready for something new? Don’t know how to get your characters from A to B without it feeling boring? Well, just flashforward to the future, baby! Shows like Battlestar Galactica and Lost have deployed flashforwards to great success in the past, but no modern show has a stronger respect for the mighty storytelling technique than The Walking Dead....

The world is safe from an alien pathogen… for now. The four-part “My Struggle” saga has come to a shocking conclusion that has huge implications for The X-Files if the series is to continue beyond season 11. There’s no guarantee Fox renews the series, though series creator Chris Carter told us he’s optimistic there will be more X-Files stories to tell, even if Gillian Anderson is true to her word and has indeed made her last appearance as Dana Scully....

Now, in a still impossible-seeming trick of blockbuster origami, the trio of leads who came of age while leading their own Spider-Man trilogy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) are getting to work opposite Dafoe and Molina in Spider-Man: No Way Home (as confirmed via multiple trailers and other recent promos). And in their own way, they’re getting to go back in time while honoring what the Raimi films did....

Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous edited by Ellen Datlow Type: AnthologyPublisher: Tor NightfireRelease date: June 7 Den of Geek says: Several stories in this anthology have set themselves in stone as some of our most memorable reads this year, with Fran Wilde and Stephen Graham Jones adding particularly remarkable entries to the anthology. With this many stories there are inevitably ups and downs, but that also means there’s probably some flavor of monstrous for everyone....

“You’d be surprised,” says Peter Anderson, creative director of the studio behind the title sequences for hit ITV crime drama Unforgotten. “You can show something really on-the-nose, and people won’t get it until they’ve been told. We fret and worry about giving too much away but the clue is only triggered when you know the context.” Each 40-second title sequence for Unforgotten is a curated collection of purpose-filmed scenes designed to go where the drama can’t – namely, inside the characters’ heads....

Van Helsing Season 2 Episode 11 After last week’s revelatory bottle episode in which Vanessa learns some harsh truths about her past at the Farm, Van Helsing goes the stripped down route once again. And yet, the adventures of Sam and Mohamad no longer hold enough allure to carry the evening by themselves. Directed by Jonathan Scarfe (Axel Miller), “Be True” finds itself in an awkward predicament. In isolation it presents a compelling character study that uncovers some of the dark layers of Sam’s childhood, and at least partially explains his deep connection with Mohamad....

Harry Nilsson’s song “One” appeared on his 1968 album Aerial Ballet. The album title was a tribute to his grandparents, who were highwire circus act performers. It was the follow-up to his Pandemonium Shadow Show album, which got everybody talkin’ about the singer-songwriter from Brooklyn. When John Lennon and Paul McCartney were asked to name their favorite American group during their highly-covered 1968 press conference to announce the formation of The Beatles’ Apple Corps, each of the songwriting duo independently answered “Nilsson....

Well, that got complicated fast. After two action-heavy instalments bracketed by exhilarating ‘Brace! Brace! Brace!’ emergencies, episode three switched gears for some old-fashioned gumshoeing that left us with a truckload of information and new characters. If anyone felt like requesting a paracetamol from the medical officer after that one, you’re not alone. Best check it for tampering first though, eh? Wouldn’t want to end up like Burke – in a body bag, being slid in and out of a torpedo tube every two minutes like a human swanee whistle....

Watchmen episode 3 is perhaps the biggest, most explosive (in at least one instance literally) episode of the series yet. Not only do we meet a legacy character from the original book, in the form of FBI Agent Laurie Blake (the former Silk Spectre, brilliantly and perfectly portrayed by Jean Smart), but we finally learn the answer to the mystery that pretty much everyone has known the answer to almost since the very first Watchmen trailer was revealed: Jeremy Irons’ character is Adrian Veidt, Ozymandias....

Westworld Season 4 Episode 1 At the end of season 3 of Westworld, things looked fairly bleak for humanity. After all, there were still fires burning and riots in the streets, hundreds of people were either killed or killed themselves, and humanity’s social order had been thrown into chaos by the revelation that Incite’s AI program Rehoboam controlled everything about every person’s fate. That seems like the kind of thing that would indeed kick off a melt-down of society and full-scale revolution, right?...

New anime hits emerge every year, but staggering levels of love have surrounded Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man. The anime’s inaugural season has already become one of Crunchyroll’s biggest 2022 additions. Audiences have been quick to commend the anime’s ultra-violent atmosphere as it chronicles Denji’s journey as the blade-wielding monster known as Chainsaw Man. However, beneath the grisly gore and heightened aesthetics, there’s a real heart and humanity to Chainsaw Man’s characters and their world....

Some big MCU actors have returned to lend their voices to Marvel Studios’ first animated project, What If…?, but before the show started streaming on Disney+ it became clear that not all the major players were up for being in the mix. Chris Evans, who left Steve Rogers/Captain America behind after Avengers: Endgame, did not reprise his iconic role in the new show, so the creators looked to established voice actor Josh Keaton to take up the mantle in the multiverse-busting season premiere, ‘What If…Captain Carter Were The First Avenger?...

A read-out appears on its screen, detailing everything that led to this point. The replay stops on the image of a human face: it’s a face audiences know all too well from a decade of action movies. Right here and right now though, they know him as Maj. Alan “Dutch” Schaefer. Without saying a word, the Predator knows this is its next target. As ideas for opening scenes go. The one dreamed up by writers Jim and John Thomas for their follow-up to the original Predator was an enticing one, setting in motion a sequel that most insiders in 1989 assumed would star Arnold Schwarzenegger....

By now, you’ve probably heard about Diablo Immortal‘s microtransactions and the many ways those microtransactions have hurt the game’s reputation. In order to understand how bad things can get, though, you need to understand why some gamers are spending thousands of dollars on in-game items known as Legendary Gems. Legendary Gems are…confusing. Indeed, some players are speculating that Immortal‘s Legendary Gem system was made as confusing as possible in order to incentivize people to spend money and skip some of the confusion....

And now it’s being turned into a 10-part Netflix series. It’s a story that, at least on the surface, appears to lend itself quite easily to screen adaptations, and in fact it’s already been turned into two films: The Haunting (1963) and, um, The Haunting (1999). The first, directed by Robert Wise, is appropriately creepy and subtle; the second, by Jan de Bont, tries to make Hill House’s manifestations bigger and more obvious, and completely loses sight of what’s actually scary about the story in the process....