As I said in my review of the premiere, I’m not reviewing the podcast on which this show is based, and I am absolutely not “reviewing” the life and death of the real Molly, or the experiences she shared with the real Nikki. Maybe this is exactly how things went down. Certainly no show is under any obligation to be a huge bummer just because a critic is goth and likes depressing sex stuff like In the Realm of the Senses better than the more uplifting alternative.

But let’s say it did all go down like this. Molly never had any need to earn a living during her illness. Her estranged husband kept her on his insurance, even as he formed a happy new family. Her “sex quest” was more or less effortless, guided by her palliative care counserlor, its culmination coincidentally living across the hall. Her best friend gave up everything for her but didn’t give up anything in the end — same great boyfriend, even better relationship with his quasi-estranged daughter, even better gig in showbiz as a skilled director instead of struggling actor. Her ex-husband is having a baby with his wonderful new partner. Her ex-junkie mother who never respected a boundary of hers in her life finally got the picture and was a helpful, warming presence instead of a draining one. Death itself was greeted with a cheery “Let’s get this show on the road!” 

Let’s say it all happened like it did in Dying for Sex. Again, no show is required to be bleak. But shows about dying from cancer, I think, are required to explore the ways in which they aren’t bleak a lot better than this one did. Money, beauty, a unflagging support system, legions of sexual suitors, a love that demands little of her but gives her a cure for her lifelong trauma — with one or two very obvious exceptions!!!, Molly has so much going for her, and Dying for Sex doesn’t address any of it as such even once. For all the skill of its execution, it’s half a show.

I reviewed the finale of Dying for Sex for Decider.

The deck is stacked from the start. As the new season of The Last of Us begins, survivors of a massacre bury their dead. They’re the Fireflies, members of a scattered network of rebels fighting the fascist government that took over in the wake of the cordyceps outbreak that killed or zombified billions. (Ah yes, those happy golden bygone days when we thought it would take an evil fungus for fascism to come to America.) The perpetrator of the massacre was no jackbooted government lackey, though. Nor was it the monstrous and powerful infected known as “clickers” for their method of echolocation. It was Joel (Pedro Pascal), our player character — ahem, our protagonist. 

And what choice did the writers — sorry, the Fireflies — leave him? Either he killed them or they would kill his adoptive daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Sure, if they did so it might enable them analyze why she’s immune to infection (she was exposed to a minuscule amount of the fungus during birth), and thus find a cure for cordyceps and save the world. But a real man does whatever he has to protect his family, or something. 

The whole killcrazy climax to the show’s first season was frustrating because it set up a false binary, a choice between individual and collective needs. Reality is not a zero-sum contest between you and everyone else — only fascists believe otherwise — and genre stories that make such a conflict their central moral dilemma are playing fast and loose with how morality actually works. 

We’re not five minutes into the Season 2 premiere when writer-director-co-creator Craig Mazin does it again. The surviving Fireflies are led by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who’s born-again hard from the ordeal. Not only does she want to track down and kill Joel with the other survivors’ help, she wants to kill him slowly. She repeats the word for clarity and everything.

Once again, The Last of Us is not-so-subtly nudging us in the direction they want our sympathies to go. If this were a simple case of a gaggle of survivors hunting down and shooting the outlaw who gunned down their kinsfolk, we’d probably still be rooting for Joel — he’s Pedro Pascal, for god’s sake — but we’d at least sympathize with their goal. Torturing Joel to death is a bridge too far when you’ve spent a season asking us to identify with the guy, in a story based on an art form where identifying with the protagonist is baked right into the game mechanics. We can’t root for Abby now. That’s The Last of Us for you: It’s always less complex than it looks.

I reviewed the season premiere of The Last of Us for Decider.

Rob Delaney is for sure gonna break some hearts as the neighbor in this episode, and not on account of being sweet or sad either. The neighbor’s body is showcased in all its tactile, hirsute glory; the episode often feels like sponcon for chest hair. After however many years of smooth-chested Marvel hunks, it does a fuzzy fellow’s heart good to see this kind of masculine beauty — “so beautiful” is what Molly calls him in so many words, returning his compliment to her — celebrated on screen.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

In an attempt to honor what this episode of Dying for Sex was at least attempting to do, this review will not be mincing words about some of the roughest stuff there is to talk about. So please consider this a warning before proceeding.

I was sexually abused as a child. Like Molly, Dying for Sex’s protagonist, it only happened once, though what was done to me was nowhere near as severe and traumatic as what was done to her. Like Molly, I’ve been haunted by it on and off ever since, though again not to her degree. Like Molly, I suspect it’s cast a long shadow over my sexual life, including the kind of kink I enjoy. It’s not as present a presence in my life as it is in hers — I don’t see my abuser like they’re there in the room with me — but it’s there. It’s alright. It is what it is. 

At one point during this episode, Molly reads aloud to Nikki an account of that terrible night — how the man roofied Molly’s mom, how Molly saw this but didn’t say anything, how she was unable to rouse her mother for help, how she wound up apologizing to her abuser for striking him with a hairbrush in an attempt to escape. 

It’s hard to watch. It’s hard to listen to. As the scene progressed I found myself getting sadder and sadder — not for Molly and not for myself, but because we live in a world where something so profoundly unfair happens to so many children. We live in a world run by men actively working to make things less safe for the vulnerable, so that more children suffer. I felt discomfort, rage, despair, catharsis. I felt a lot of things.

Then Molly farts. 

What are we doing here, man. What are we doing?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

“I said if you help the Harrigans, the Harrigans will help you. You have not helped the Harrigans. Not at all. Okay? So now I, Kevin here, he’s gonna lose his family, I’m gonna lose my family, both of us are gonna die, and others, yeah? Thanks to you, okay, and Eddie. So I don’t think it’s very fair that you don’t share in some of that joy, you understand.”

Harry Da Souza has a strange way of speaking. Understatement is one of his primary rhetorical devices: “You have not helped the Harrigans” to a man who helped conceal a war-starting murder. “I don’t think it’s very fair” that you don’t die along with the rest of us. I keep circling back to that big in the first episode where he tells an eyewitness that unless he cooperates, either Harry “or one of my associates, depending upon my availability” will kill him for it. He’s a man with the power of life and death, but he talks like a slightly peeved Nando’s manager. 

He peppers his speech with little stops and starts, little marks of inquisition designed to give the listener no other choice but to agree with him. Look at that paragraph above, the way it’s dotted with “Okay? Yeah? Okay. You understand.” It sounds like he’s merely commiserating with his interlocutor, relating to him, saying “obviously you and I agree that this is simple common sense,” even as he’s threatening to kill the man and his wife and children.

I reviewed this week’s episode of MobLand for Decider.

So now, here, in the the tenth episode of the third season, Yellowjackets finally explains why none of this shit ever came up before now: the magic of memory suppression! All of a sudden, we start hearing about how hard it’s been for the adults to remember what happened to them out there — not because it was so bad, according to Shauna, but because it was so good! The experience of hunting and eating people to honor a Wilderness demon made them “so alive in that place that we lost our capacity for self-reflection,” according to Shauna. “We can’t or won’t remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun.” That’s why Shauna acted like a nincompoop instead of a sociopath all this time, you see. “I let it all slip away from me,” she writes. “It’s time to start taking it back.”

Long past time, if you ask me! It’s now apparent that Yellowjackets‘ own structure prevents it from working. It creates a scenario in which the filmmakers cannot be honest with or about the adult characters, because doing so would spoil the teenage material. This creates an obvious qualitative discrepancy between the two storylines. If this had been a show just about the kids, that would be something. If the adult material had been presented seriously, without holding back just what they did out there and why, and with the adult characters’ personalities existing in continuity with what happened back then, that would be something. What we got is neither. 

I reviewed the season finale of Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

You have an unusual screen presence. Your demeanor is a bit twitchy and unpredictable, and your look is striking. The cinematographer of “Mr. Robot,” Tod Campbell, once told me he had to change the lenses he was shooting with to better capture the beauty of your eyes.

[Smiling] No, look, I know I’m a very unique individual. My mannerisms are unique. My speech is unique. There’s a certain flicker behind my eyes that you can’t necessarily compare to anyone else — that’s what I’ve been told, at least. The camera has an ability to capture every essence of that. Perhaps it can see too much, at times. Perhaps it’s a deficit of mine. But I’ve found a way to embrace it, and the world has too, in a way. Most importantly, it helps the outcasts, the misfits, those who feel disenfranchised or alienated or just, for lack of a better word, different, feel more at home and at peace in their own skin, behind their own unique eyes.

I interviewed Rami Malek about his career and his new action movie The Amateur for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

When those trollocs and darkfriends come over the barricades obstructed by Perrin and his people, you can really see them coming, and you can really see what the people of the Two Rivers do to beat them back. The individual heroism of the townsfolk, the supernatural aid of Alanna and the local channelers with whom she links to fuel her ice attack on the enemy — it’s crystal clear.

Equally clear is the geography of the battlefield, which is a key element of successful combat filmmaking dating back to Helm’s Deep and The Two Towers. Perrin, Alanna, and the others have narrowed the approaches to the village down to just one, a narrow mountain pass that’s easily defended. When superior numbers and the temporary wounding of Alanna render the position untenable, the defenders fall back to the town gates and walls. When those fall, they retreat to the town square, forming an old-school phalanx and defending on all sides.

This renders the stakes of the battle easy to understandat all times. If we win, we hold our ground. If we lose, we fall back, until there’s nowhere else to fall back to. Clear, intelligible, physical consequences for success or failure in combat are crucial to building effective battle sequences, and Wheel comfortably passes that test this week.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

It’s a blue rose case.

The opening image of this week’s Daredevil: Born Again is taken straight from the iconography of David Lynch, in the form of the blue-colored flower used to designate paranormal investigations in the world of Twin Peaks. When the image resolves, we see it’s a flower in a garden, but that the garden is surrounded by the bars and towers of a prison yard. This feels like a play on another famous Lynch image, that of the verminous insects writhing beneath the pristine red roses and green lawns of the all-American suburb in Blue Velvet. This time, however, the darkness is on top. Maybe that’s appropriate these days.

This isn’t the only Lynchian moment in the episode. Several times, as we follow the mass-murdering marksman nicknamed Bullseye as he’s transferred to general population in prison, escapes, and arrives at Mayor Fisk’s black-and-white ball, the screen takes on a blue tint. When Matt Murdock takes the bullet Bullseye intended for Fisk, the screen is hypersaturated with red. It’s reminiscent of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, respectively. 

Lynch’s work ties to what writers Jesse Wigutow and Dario Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead are up to in this episode only in the loosest possible sense. Maybe you could stretch and say the dual personae of both Murdock/Daredevil and Fisk/Kingpin are just the superhero genre’s way of exploring the same fissures in identity that Lynch’s Hitchcockian doubles did in the two aforementioned horror masterpieces. Or maybe Vincent D’Onofrio’s raspy stop-and-start voice reminds you of Robert Loggia growling his way through Lost Highway as the similarly, let’s say, romantically possessive gangster Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway. 

But I don’t think you need to be doing the same kinds of things David Lynch did to borrow the tools he used to do them with. Indeed, that’s where many soi-disant “Lynchian” films and TV shows go wrong — aiming for his thoughtful, sensual surrealism and landing somewhere in the neighborhood of “whoa, that was weird” at best. Why not stick a blue rose at the beginning of a TV show about a blind lawyer’s blood feud with both a gangster the size of Shaquille O’Neal and an assassin who can spit out his own tooth hard enough to put an eye out with it? Why not do big beautiful things with color just because they’re big and beautiful things you can do?

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

Dying for Sex has every right to be funny if it wants, and it’s often very good at it. The sight gag where Nikki pulls bloody gauze out of her mouth like a magician at a child’s birthday party is delightfully gross. Gail telling Molly that her ex-husband “said you were on some kind of ‘sex quest’” made me snort with laughter. The increasingly large and dreadful gathering around Molly’s chemotherapy, when it became apparent that Steve brought his new girlfriend to meet her under these conditions? Curb Your Enthusiasm–level stuff. I am not trying to sell the show short in that regard. 

I just question why 9 scenes out of 10 have to either tickle your funnybone or make you nod in approval when they end. With material about sex, illness, power, friendship, family, kink, love, and death this intense, it’s almost insulting for the show to add a little rimshot to the proceedings every now and then. Let me be blown away by this stuff. I think it’s got that strength.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

Kinks and fetishes are like a psychosexual itch on the small of your back. Under normal circumstances, no matter how you stretch and reach, it’s untouchable. Grab a back-scratcher or a wooden spoon or whatever’s available that suits the purpose, though? Ahhhhhh, what a relief! You just need to know what the tools are and how to use them, so to speak. (This is a metaphor, not a demand that you invest in some BDSM hardware.)

The best thing about Dying for Sex’s journey into dominance and submission this episode is that it shows Molly scratching an itch. Here’s a woman who’s lost her bodily autonomy for years at a time, as cancer attacks her body from within and doctors poke and prod and scan and irradiate and pump pills into from without. Her (ex?) husband, Steve, took total control of her treatment when he was around. Her best friend, Nikki, isn’t nearly so domineering and constantly encourages Molly to get involved — but Nikki’s primary mode of dealing with Molly’s illness is anger, which brings out Molly’s anger in turn, which makes her feel even less in control. The episode also alludes to the abuse she endured as a child — just briefly, just a good guess by a supporting character, but that’s a loss of control from which she’s suffered her whole life.

What better way to process all of this than by re-shaping it into something with the power to get you off?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

“‘Normal sex.’ Who decides what that means? You early millennials are so tragic. You think sex is just penetration and orgasms. Why? Because that’s what Samantha said. Sex? Sex is a wave. Sex? Sex is a mindset. Sex is the nonlinear emergent phenomenon that arises when two or more beings, they touch energy fields.”

Did you get all that, class? If not, the notes are up on the student portal. 

This huge gob of sex-positive pablum is hawk-tuah’d up by Sonya, Molly’s palliative care counselor. The whole time she’s talking about how sex is like a rainbow in the shape of the infinity symbol or whatever, I was sitting there thinking, “Not if you’re doing it right! Sex is the province of fucked-up perverts. Leave this crystal-energy don’t-yuck-your-yum bullshit for Obama-era webcomics and BuzzFeed personal essays — I’d almost rather fuck the guy who keeps demanding that Molly clasp his balls.” (Clasp, not cup. It’s an important distinction!)

Personal tastes aside, the problem with this kind of dialogue on Dying for Sex is an almost universal one when it comes to shows and films that use very direct therapeutic language to address their core conflicts. Simply put, that’s what we have therapy for. Fiction teaches us better by showing us how people behave and allowing us to reason out why for ourselves. Even on The Sopranos, Dr. Melfi’s insights were only ever half the equation; you had to see how Tony interpreted what she said and applied it, or didn’t, in his actual day-to-day life before drawing the lesson David Chase and company intended to impart in any given episode or storyline. You get a lot more out of that than you do from a fictional mental health professional simply describing best practices and calling it a day.

I reviewed the third episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

One thing I’ll say for this episode is that it’s some of the calmest filmmaking I’ve ever seen from director Guy Ritchie, once again working off a script from series creator Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth. There aren’t really any splashy images or flashy cuts, more just lingering shots of people aged 40-80 looking older and wiser than the various lads and louts who are giving them headaches. 

And sexier, too. From Tom Hardy and Lara Pulver as the extinguished flames Harry and Bella to Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan as IGILFs (Irish Grandparents I’d Like to Fuck) Maeve and Conrad, there’s a lot of simmering going on here for actors of various demographics that can be sadly underrepresented in the simmer department. You love to see it. 

I would, however, also love to see this show make a stronger argument for its existence. MobLand is very entertaining while it’s on, with a bunch of fine, fun actors making the crisp tough-guy dialogue sing. It’s just that the recipe is so familiar that the taste doesn’t linger when the meal is done. I’m looking for something that’ll make me say “Ooh, new MobLand is out!” instead of merely “Oh hey, new MobLand is out.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of MobLand for Decider.

“I want him. I want him to rub that beard on my face. I want him. Oh God, I want him right now. I can’t wait anymore.” Molly thinks this to herself as she looks at the man (Chris Roberti) she’s just picked up at a bar for a one-night stand as they ride home in an Uber together. She asks him if he wants to kiss her, and he does. The camera films his rough hand on her face and hair in close-up. Both Sheila Callaghan’s script and Chris Teague’s direction are keenly observed, focused squarely on desire and the things that trigger it.

Then the guy cums after a five-second handjob, groaning and spasming for like a full minute, like a character from a Farrelly Brothers movie. He gets thrown out of the Uber for it and everything. Is it funny? Sure — my notes read “lol” and everything. Is it as funny as the moments that preceded it were sharp, sexy, and vulnerable in how they exposed Molly’s hunger for contact with this man? Not by a long shot.

I reviewed the second episode of Dying for Sex for Decider.

Yet for all its reliance on the finely observed details of human interaction, both inside and outside the bedroom, there’s an element of unreality to the proceedings. Part of that is its nature as a sitcom-length dramedy: There’s gotta be a joke every 90 seconds or so, and by god the story and the characters will do whatever it takes to hit that mark. (This is an anti-comedy bias of mine, I freely admit.)

But it also has to do with the character of Molly. White, thin, blonde, and beautiful, she has a smart, successful, attentive (except in one important way) husband who dotes on her. She has a quirky yet dependable friend who does the same. She has no job or calling the show seems to even find worth mentioning, yet she has no apparent worries whatsoever in terms of insurance or medical debt.

Molly has just gotten the worst hand she can possibly be dealt, and that’s true regardless of your socioeconomic status. But her situation is unusual, and the show doesn’t seem interested in examining this. Maybe it’ll get around to it — it’s early yet. But I get the bad feeling that this show is gonna be, ugh, life-affirming, and I’m not sure exploring the ways in which even dying itself is easier on the white and wealthy than it is on others jibes with that overall vibe. (It’s probably going to be easier to get laid looking like Michelle Williams than it might be otherwise, too.)

That said, there’s something honestly admirable about a show that asks its audience to embrace a woman who jilts her husband for being too nice and caring, while not wanting sex enough. That’s pretty much the inverse of what the classic ideal husband delivers, and what the classic ideal wife wants. But pleasure is important, truly and sincerely, much more so than society typically allows us to admit and embrace. Life is too short for anyone to live otherwise — much too short, in Molly’s case. Dying for Sex essentially asks the audience how willing they are to prioritize their own pleasure in far less dire circumstances. That’s a hard question, no pun intended, to answer.

I’m covering Dying for Sex for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. Since its inception, the existence ofYellowjackets‘ dual timelines has been its biggest weakness. Though the stunt casting of beloved actors who cut their teeth as troubled teens in the ’90s covered it up for a time, the present-day material, following the lives of the castaways as adults back in civilization, has been dead weight since at least its first zany murder mix-up. As time has passed and we’ve seen the situation for the teenagers grow more dire, it’s been increasingly difficult to square the grim-faced cannibal killers of the past with the whoopsie-daisy-we-killed-someone-again shenanigans of their adult selves. The teenage material remained strong, at least, but the adult stuff has been on the verge of collapsing under its own absurdity for some time.

This week on Yellowjackets, the collapse finally comes, and it tears the whole thing down with it. Having painted themselves into a corner with the adults — Shauna, our heroine, begins this episode in the process of forcing her long-lost ex-girlfriend to eat a part of her own arm at knifepoint — the writers seem to have, at long last, given up. Across the board, from the 2020s to the 1990s, they’ve come up with a single solution to their problems: Make everyone, adult or teen, a whacked-out murderer. But rather than create the much-needed sense of psychological continuity between kids and grown-ups that the show has lacked for so long, this only drags the messy, half-assed feeling of the present-day story to the previously strong flashbacks. 

The result is an ugly thing to witness. It’s a show falling apart before your eyes.

I reviewed this week’s dire Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.

In the episode’s final sequence — set in an Italian restaurant lit by director of photography Hillary Fyfe Spera in as effective a simulation of Gordon Willis gold as I’ve seen in a long time — Buck executes the boss of the Irish mob, whom Vanessa cannily determined was out to overthrow Wilson using herself as a proxy. The whole bit is soundtracked by “Please Stay” by the Cryin’ Shames, an eerie slice of early Northern Soul, an inspired choice that emulates the throwback sound of a Martin Scorsese gangster film without aping it outright. Why does this sequence whip as much ass as it does? No reason other than “because it can” that I can determine, but that’s reason enough.

Also there’s a Charlie Cox shower scene. Again, “because they can” is reason enough.

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil for Decider.

A rowdy, bawdy drinking song is always gonna win me over. I’m too big a fan of Les Misérables and ZZ Top to feel otherwise. So when The Wheel of Time stopped short — more or less, I mean, this is The Wheel of Time and they had to cram a few other storylines in there just to be safe — to watch Ceara Coveney’s princess-in-waiting, Aes-Sedai-in-training, Black-Ajah-hunter-in-bad-disguise character Alayne perform a little ditty about the quality of the local titties with the double-entendre title “The Hills of Tanchiko”? My notes read, in bold caps, “IT’S VERY WICKER MAN AND IT RULES.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

I’m very happy to have returned to Jesse Hawken’s terrific pop culture podcast Junk Filter, and this time I didn’t come alone! My wife Julia Gfrörer and I joined Jesse in the wake of Gene Hackman’s death to discuss The Conversation, one of our favorite films of his and in general. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Running through the plot just now, the whole thing feels rather breezy and entertaining. When your top-billed cast are Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine, and Joanne Froggat, it’s hard not to be entertaining. I’ve seen shows squander strong casts — Zero Day, cough cough — but MobLand is not one of them. I’m not a hundred percent sold on what Mirren’s doing just yet, though she certainly looks incredible doing it, but Brosnan tears into his bombastic crime boss character with grinning ferocity. The moment where he mimics the pigs to whom he fed the gangster who both mentored and molested him is unexpected and delightful. 

Hardy, for his part, fully understands that the innate seriousness projected by his hangdog handsomeness is also innately funny in some way — just as it was when he played Bane, or Venom, or Mad Max. He brings that same blockbuster-role energy to this crime tale, and it matches well with the crisp direction of action veteran Guy Ritchie, who mined much the same vein in his surprisingly strong black crime comedy The Gentlemen on Netflix last year. Both shows even end their premieres with the same inciting incident: somebody shooting someone to death in front of their family in a poshly appointed room in a country house. 

But that comparison doesn’t flatter MobLand. The Gentlemen brought a madcap brio to its story of aristocrats, the original gangsters in most respects, turned actual gangsters, and is maybe the best thing Ritchie ever did. Meanwhile, Paramount+’s fine prequel series to the Jonathan Glazer British gangster classic Sexy Beast, also from last year, had heart-on-sleeve romance and genuine terror that MobLand so far lacks. It’s pretty good, sure, a classic “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like” situation. It’s still got time to prove itself to be something more.

I reviewed the series premiere of MobLand for Decider.