Good looking show, right? Sheer image-making used to convey a range of emotions, from joy to PTSD. An overall sense that maybe there’s more to the Star Wars Universe’s magic than cameos of preexisting Star Wars characters. (I know the whales have been around before, apparently, but they’re new to me, and they’re not really “characters” anyway, even if the enormous blue eye of the mother of them all seems very wise.) And everything given ample room to breathe in dialogue-free silence. 

And, finally, there’s the rub. By “ample room” I mean “more than ample room.” I mean “Wembley Stadium” room. I mean “the lone and level sands stretch far away in ‘Ozymandias’” room. I mean “the distance between one point in space and another as described by an unfortunate passenger in Stephen King’s ‘The Jaunt’” room. I mean a writer and director and showrunner who keeps trying to stuff a 22-minute animated-series runtime of shit into a 50-minute live-action series runtime bag and, as you’d expect, coming up empty, over and over.

Take the two most impressive visual sequences in the episode: Ahsoka’s spectral and sad fog-of-war memories, and the flight of the space whales. Both phenomena are repeated, virtually identically from one iteration to the next. Ahsoka doesn’t just return to the Clone Wars, which she helpfully names in case anyone watching Ahsoka is unfamiliar with the Clone Wars (lol) — a needless idiot-proofing decision, echoed by the egregious of having Anakin occasionally flash into his Darth Vader outfit, as if we need the reminder and would be like “oh, right, that’s who he is!” 

No, she also returns to a second battle, one that took place after she and Anakin had parted ways, so they can rehash the same conversations they already had about violence and warfare and the need for soldiers and so on. Whatever magic was in the first sequence has the air let out by the unnecessary second. Moreover, constantly cross cutting from the dream world to the real one — a major plot point, given that we’re required to see General Hera’s Take Your Child to Work Day visitor Jacen use his Force sensitivity to hear the sound of Ahsoka and Anakin’s lightsaber duel so she can…be retrieved while floating unconscious under several feet of water. It’s a dopey idea that’s not worth the sacrifice of the mood and look otherwise maintained by the flashback/dream/vision.

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

Even if the show hasn’t yet gone far in either direction — it’s difficult to make a big point about The Power of Family when your scariest image is of an estranged father kidnapping his son — it does lean awfully hard on another kind of storytelling: meet-cutes, first dates, a library courtship straight out of The Music Man, a magical rooftop wedding, a quirky “we’re having a baby” announcement straight out of an Alexa commercial, a rapturously scored sex scene, a “the baby’s coming now” scene…romance, in other words. Big Hollywood romance. 

I’m not here for this either. It’s not that I don’t like romance as a genre…okay, so it is like that. But I could be convinced, I’m pretty sure, and if anyone could do the convincing it’s likely a pair of actors as charming and photogenic as LaKeith Stanfield and Clark Backo. 

The real problem is that I don’t see how you get from all that mushy stuff to a place capable of actual horror. It’s not just the nature of that narrative that’s an issue here, it’s all the techniques used to depict it, like the overactive score by Dan Deacon. I found myself pining for moments of silence in which I could decide for myself how to feel about the sweet or scary things on screen. As it stands, you can certainly deliver the occasional terrifying jolt — the faceless-father dream sequence is proof of that — but you’re not going to be able to build up the atmosphere of unbearable mounting dread that great horror generates if you’re constantly working at cross-purposes with it by telling everyone about twoo wuv. There’s a time and a place for that, and that time and place isn’t Spooky Season. 

I’m covering The Changeling for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere (the first of three episodes that debuted this past weekend).

But that’s where we’re at with “Long Ago, Not Far Away,” the penultimate episode of Foundation’s second season, and the latest in a series of back-to-back-to-back home runs. Written by Jane Espenson and Eric Carrasco and directed, as was its excellent predecessor, by Roxann Dawson, it’s TV genre entertainment at its grandest, sexiest, saddest, most mysterious, most violent, most spectacular, best.

I reviewed this past weekend’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

“Sabine…can I count on you?” “………You know you can.”

“Is everything alright?” “…………Be careful out there.”

“Best get underway soon.” “…………Is that a note of fear in your voice?” “……Experience.”

“Relax.” “…Don’t worry about me.” “…I’m not.” “…Good.” “……Should I be?” “……What?” “……Worried.” “…………Nope.”

Imperial torture scientists toiling in the bowels of the detention level on the first Death Star for months couldn’t come up with a method of interrogation that would leave the human mind in the kind of state required to deliver the dialogue in Ahsoka. The endless pauses, the soporific delivery, the nature of the dialogue itself — my god, look at that last exchange; I honestly can’t believe Rosario Dawson and Natasha Liu Bordizzo were handed a piece of paper with those words in that order typed out on it — are all so bad that I kept waiting for Joel and the Bots from Mystery Science Theater to start dunking on it during every pause.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Ahsoka, which aside from some lovely imagery and a killer performance by Ray Stevenson is the most embarrassing Star Wars thing I’ve ever seen, for Decider.

The authorship of the Marvel Universe may remain an hotly debated question, though books by writers such as Tom Spurgeon, Sean Howe, and Josie Riesman have long supported the contention of Kirby and his heirs that he played a far larger role in the shared world’s creation and continuation than his erswhile collaborator Stan Lee — and the corporate hagiography recently served up by Marvel’s current owner, Disney — would ever admit. Yet even the movies that deal most directly in Kirby-heavy concepts, Thor and Black Panther and the Fourth World elements of DC’s so-called Snyderverse, look and feel little like the King’s comics. Indeed, years spent in the superhero comic trenches have taught me that many contemporary readers see Kirby’s cartooning as dated, even clumsy, compared to the genre’s current practitioners. 

You know what else was seen as dated, even clumsy, compared to the techniques of current practitioners? Physical sets. Actual costumes. Establishing color and lighting on set rather than through post. Reviving an aesthetic associated with earlier times. 

Barbie, in other words. Everything that Barbie did, it had to do while swimming upstream against a 15-year-old current of CGI slop, set loose by the establishment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the arrival of its many clones and knockoffs. I think it’s fair to say this has worked out for Barbie, no?

And it just so happens that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Six is slated to kick off with a Jack Kirby co-created superhero team — the Jack Kirby co-created superhero team — called the Fantastic Four, with a film helmed by TV veteran Matt Shakman. At the risk of sounding like Kirby myself, do I need to draw you a picture here?

I wrote about Barbie, Marvel, Jack Kirby, and the need for superhero movies to do go back to being bold for Decider.

When a television show gets on a real creative tear, something special often occurs. To me, anyway. Whether it’s a stone classic deep into its run, firing on all cylinders; a killer from jump, blowing you away right away; or — as is the case here, with Foundation — a formerly sputtering spacecraft that has achieved escape velocity and is now hurtling towards the stars, there comes a point when a regular review simply won’t do, and a litany of superlatives is all that can get the job done. 

In other words? There is simply too much shit to like in “The Last Empress.” Directed with total confidence by Roxann Dawson, working off a remarkable script by Liz Phang, Addie Manis, and Bob Oltra, it’s Foundation’s best episode to date. (Seems like we’re saying that a lot lately, no?) 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation, a success on every level, for Decider.

Ahsoka comes across as the bare minimum of Star Wars required to make Star Wars fans go “Sure, I’ll watch it.” It feels less like a television show, let alone a movie, and more like a Happy Meal tie-in toy. If you’re absolutely desperate to hold something from a galaxy far, far away in your hands, it’ll do in a pinch. But the better toys, and the imagination required to make them worth playing with, are found elsewhere.

I reviewed today’s episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

One element worth singling out: The deft, origami-like folding of Constant and Poly, General Bel Riose and his husband Glawen Curr, and Hober Mallow and the Spacer hive into one single elegant construction. In a sort of cascading series of scenes, Hober makes Hari Seldon’s big offer to the Spacers: an unlimited supply of a synthetic version of the compound that keeps them alive, heretofore controlled by Empire, in exchange for their support. The spacer queen, She-Is-Center (Brucella Neman-Persaud), decides the risk isn’t worth it and rats him out to her daughter, She-Bends-Light (Judi Shekoni), who serves with Bel and Glawen. Hober is handed over to their custody, but escapes thanks to his sentient navigator beast Beki and makes a jump right there within Bel’s ship’s hangar, thus proving the existence of Foundation’s advanced faster-than-light travel technology. As a result, Poly and Constant are brought before the Cleons and Demerzel, taunted, tortured, and returned to prison. It’s almost elegant, the way the pieces are put together.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

Instead, though, most of our time is spent with Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo. Man, I just do not know what’s going on there. Winstead’s delivery is completely undistinguished — où sont la Swango d’antan? — and Bordizzo and Dawson sound like someone forgot to wake them up. I don’t want to oversell this, mind you, it’s not like I’m outraged or appalled or upset, I’m just confused. I know these actors. How did this happen? What do you think? Post a comment.

And the show still displays absolutely zero facility for action or suspense, an absolute dealbreaker for the setting. I’m trying hard not to constantly compare Ahsoka to its predecessors, but the heist of the hyperdrive by the bad guys has an apples-to-apples comparison in the form of the heist in Andor, while the double-bladed two-on-one lightsaber battle Ahsoka has with a droid and that mystery assailant is straight-up Duel of the Fates stuff. In neither case is the comparison a flattering one. It’s an embarrassing one, is what it is.

I reviewed the second episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

The costumes look like decent San Diego Comic-Con cosplay. The commemorative mural on display at a big ceremony in Sabine’s honor is laughably amateurish. The children’s drawings Sabine finds in a bunk on Ahsoka’s ship are so obviously an adult trying to draw like a child that it’s almost a provocation to include them. The opening crawl is a syntactical nightmare. The score is frequently dreadful — a ghastly guitar-driven rock song here, lugubrious and out-of-place string sections there. Two lengthy sequences involve puzzle-solving you normally think of as the domain of the parts of Tears of the Kingdom you don’t like playing.

The performances aren’t helped by the dialogue, naturally. There’s only so much anyone can do with clunkers like “May their courage and commitment never be forgotten” or “Mentoring someone is a challenge” or “Sometimes even the right reasons have the wrong consequences.” (Jesus.) The ne plus ultra of this combination of bad writing and bad acting comes in this exchange between Dawson and Bordizzo’s characters:

“I go where I’m needed.” “Not always.” “You never make things easy.” “Why should I? You never made things easy for me, master.” “There is nothing easy about being a Jedi.” “Well, then I should have made a good one.” “Yes, you should have.” It’s like listening to an AI voice chat program train. 

I reviewed the series premiere of Ahsoka for Decider. Dreadful.

You know, when it comes to this week’s episode of Foundation, I think Tim Robinson put it best: What the fuck?! What the fuuuuuuuuck?!?!

I’ve been OOO but I cannot let the weekend pass without drawing your attention to one of the most insane things I’ve seen on TV in a long time: this week’s episode of Foundation, which I reviewed for Decider.

Foundation is funny, exciting, lyrical, dazzling to the eye, epic in scope, and horny at heart, in service of the refreshingly non-pollyannaish goal of limiting humanity’s next dark age to a mere millennium. Even its hero’s journey involves getting off a few stops early and walking. That’s just one more thing to admire about the year’s best comeback.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation for Decider. More big-budget streaming-network SFF adaptations should feature plotlines in which the supreme leader is in serious diplomatic trouble because immortal robot lover never taught him that the cowgirl position exists.

If I’d blinked I might have missed it, and this was Friedkin’s intent. He meant for the shot to be nearly subliminal, and he would come to rue the technology that allowed people to rewind and freeze-frame on that ghastly visage. After all, it’s just Ellen Dietz, Linda Blair’s stand-in, wearing some corpse paint — a rejected design for how Regan herself would look when possessed, created by the film’s makeup-effects genius Dick Smith. 

I didn’t know any of this as that terrified teenager. All I knew were two things. This was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, and I needed to see it again immediately.

So I rewound that VHS tape. I watched the dream again. And I forced myself to look as that eighth-of-a-second view of the face of pure evil popped back up on my screen before disappearing back into the unnerving expressionism of Karras’s dream. 

To this day I couldn’t tell you exactly why, except to insist, contra Friedkin, that it was not to conduct aversion therapy on myself. This wasn’t a situation where I thought repeated viewings would leech the Face of its power. The exact opposite, in fact. I knew it would scare the living shit out of me all over again — like, real fear, not roller-coaster fear, not spilling-your-popcorn fear, but heart-bursting adrenaline-dumping fear — and I did it anyway. 

I wrote about William Friedkin, The Exorcist, and the scariest shot in movie history for Decider.

I didn’t even realize Lee Pace wasn’t in this week’s episode of Foundation until after it was over. How’s that for a high compliment? 

I reviewed today’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

Right there you can see that Cloud’s range is astonishing, and this is what the contention that “he’s just playing himself” gets so wrong. Cloud and Fez may have had a similar vibe in casual conversation. But to access the comedic timing required to pull off that blackly hilarious interrogation scene, in which he conveys the largely accurate idea that the Jacobs’ lives are even more fucked up than his own? To convincingly portray a guy so thoughtful and attentive that a good girl like Lexi would grow closer to the town’s top drug dealer than to any of her own girlfriends? To voice the audience’s anguish as the adorable little psychopath Ashtray goes down in a hail of cop bullets? And to seem like exactly the right person for the job in every scenario? Any one of these tasks requires real talent, real effort, real work as an actor. Cloud did it all, and did it so seamlessly and so absent of ostentation that many viewers didn’t even notice his labor.

And when I say he’s the gateway between Euphoria-as-melodrama (complimentary) and Euphoria-as-thriller (also complimentary), I mean it. Take a look at the episode I consider to be the show’s masterpiece, the fifth ep of Season 2, “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.” It’s a showcase for Zendaya first and foremost, as she first has a mortifying emotional battle with her friends and family when, first at her house and then at Lexi and her sister Cassie’s, they attempt interventions to get her clean. It’s absolutely savage work by Zendaya, as raw and riveting as any of the New Golden Age dramas of yore.

But by the end of the episode, all the manipulation and gaslighting and guilt-tripping is over. Rue’s no longer lambasting her mother for being a shitty parent or accusing her best friends of betraying her or airing out other kids’ dirty laundry to take the focus off of her — she’s on a high-speed foot chase with the cops, breaking into houses, jumping over fences, landing in catctuses, and generally participating in crime thriller antics. Again, the transition is so seamless that you barely realize you’re suddenly watching a different kind of show until you’re knee-deep in some unsuspecting family’s backyard with the police on your tail.

What happens in between? Fez. When Rue has exhausted all of her family and friends, it’s Fez she turns to. When she tries to rob Fez’s grandmother’s meds, it’s Fez who turns her away. She approaches him via the show’s first brand of ugliness, the reality of addiction and confrontation, and departs him for a journey deep into the second variety, the heightened kill-or-be-killed reality of a Boogie Nights, a Pulp Fiction, an American Psycho. Fez is the fulcrum.

I wrote about the late Angus Cloud and his crucial, wonderful work on Euphoria for Decider.

All art has an element of the autobiographical. It is not special in this regard. Art has this in common with all fields of human endeavor, in which past experiences influence present actions. A teacher revises his lesson plan based on the previous class’s response, an Uber driver takes a different route because she ran into construction the day before — or a nuclear physicist designs the most dangerous weapon in the history of humankind because his brain is uniquely wired to understand the process, and because his Jewishness and left-wing politics drive home the terror that if he doesn’t do it, the Nazis will. In all cases choice is involved, and the work you make, including creative work, is not simple regurgitation; talent, skill, and imagination all come into play, and can be honed and sharpened to make better work over time. 

So I think it trivializes neither the hard work that artist Christopher Nolan poured into Oppenheimer — nor the grievous actions depicted in the film itself — to suggest that Oppenheimer, too, is reflective of the life of its creator. (He did cast his own daughter as the woman whose face peels off in the title character’s horrific vision of what he has wrought in an admittedly unconscious expression of his horror of the bomb, so I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb.) Here, after all, we have the story of a brilliant technician, preeminent in his field, successful in ways few of his colleagues can hope to emulate. He is tasked with the completion of a tremendous project that will change the world forever, which he completes with nearly (but not quite—ask Jean Tatlock) monomaniacal furor even when the need that initially drove him to do so subsides. Unleashed upon the world his project is an even bigger success — from the perspective of his bosses, if not that of humanity in general or the people of Japan in particular — than he imagined. And for one reason or another, he will regret that success for the rest of his life.

I wrote about Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan, and the explosion (and implosion?) of the superhero boom for Decider.

But that’s just it: This a documentary about a current WWE wrestler, produced by WWE. That means you’ll be hearing a lot of the bizarre, cult-like lingo developed by Vince McMahon to describe the product he’s been selling for forty-plus years. For example, both the narration and multiple interview subjects, from Cody on down, use the sanitized word-salad phrase “sports entertainment” in place of “professional wrestling”; it’s a McMahon innovation you will never hear a human being not on WWE’s payroll say, unless they’re doing a bit.

Similarly, the adversity Cody faced during his initial WWE stint — bad gimmicks, bad ideas, writers and executives who refused to listen to him — is treated like some kind of natural phenomenon rather than the result of actual decisions made by people with names and addresses. The result is an onslaught of passive verbs that would make reporters about “police-involved shootings” blush, in which Cody is repeatedly fucked over by figures unknown.

But it’s a documentary’s job to make the unknown known, right? Like, when Cody says his demand to revert to “Cody Rhodes” from “Stardust” after his dad’s death “was met very much poorly” — met very much poorly by whom? Elsewhere, Brandy describes the situation that kept her husband down thusly: “Somebody said to somebody, ‘Not you.’” Who said it? To whom did they say it? Who are the somebodies? If “they” wouldn’t let Cody do what he wanted, who are “they”?

The answer, of course, is Vince McMahon himself, the man who for decade after decade has overseen WWE’s creative decisions on the most macro and micro of levels alike. The documentary treats this man like Zeus, a figure of might and legend who occasionally descends from his Stamford Olympus to bestow his blessings upon the worthy. Cody gets there eventually, but the years in which McMahon — who it’s widely believed bore a grudge against his one-time rival businessman Dusty Rhodes to the man’s dying day, even during the periods during which Dusty worked for WWE — kept him down are glossed over.

This is to say nothing of the well-documented series of incidents in which McMahon engaged in illicit sexual conduct with his own employees, then paid millions in hush money to cover it up. Or about how he “retired” when this news broke, then forced his way back into the company to oversee its sale to perhaps the only potential buyer willing to leave him in charge, Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor — which also owns UFC, run by the similarly politically reactionary and personally abusive Dana White. Or about his Succession-like power plays against his daughter Stephanie and her husband, former wrestler Paul “Triple H” Levesque, both of whom hold (or held, in Stephanie’s case) executive positions within the company. 

McMahon’s conduct (and of his years-long track record of creative bankruptcy; whatever juice the guy once had, it dried up 20 years ago) got me to swear off watching WWE shows unless and until he’s gone for good. Stand-up guy though he might be, the same cannot be said of Cody. All of this is worth exploring in a way an official WWE documentary can and would never do, yet it’s exactly this stuff that would make the doc worthwhile.  

I had a grand old time writing about American Nightmare: Becoming Cody Rhodes and the ways it both does and doesn’t escape WWE’s weird gravitational field for Decider.

Time and again, Reubens and company picked up on the kinds of incidents that would haunt little minds well into adulthood. Think about it: However old you are now, do you not remember suffering a humiliation as mortifying as a whole crowd of tourists laughing at you because “There’s no basement at the Alamo”? I sure do! In my case, it involved mistaking a “Chinese yo-yo” on a Memorial Day fair prize table for a bottle rocket, only for an adult I didn’t know to sneer “Firecrackers are illegal!” at me, Jan Hooks–style. God, how I hated that for Pee-wee! How I wanted there to be a basement at the Alamo after all!

In honor of Paul Reubens I wrote about the horror of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure — of its exploration of children’s fears both real and imagined — for Decider. This piece is for former kids who were scared by both Large Marge and the prospect of a bunch of adults laughing at you because you didn’t know there’s no basement at the Alamo.

I’m about to say the most “I’m a professional television critic” thing I’ve ever said, so please bear with me: This week’s episode of Foundation was a hell of a good time, and I have my reservations about that.

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

I’ve often said that all I’m looking for when I go to the theater is “a fun time at the movies,” and the same can be said of television. Transcendent experiences are nice, but being solidly entertained by serious people at the top of their craft for six episodes is, as I said above, plenty. It’s a circle I don’t mind standing in.

I reviewed the finale of Full Circle for Decider.