There is a clear feeling going into the start of Community’s sixth season that the show may have outlived its usefulness. The audience knows it, the cast seems to know it, and the writers most definitely know it. This is a show which has lost its showrunner, reclaimed him, gotten cancelled, been picked up by a channel known primarily as a search engine, and lost three of its seven leads. Abed puts it best when explaining his apprehension to the premiere’s new character, Paget Brewster’s Frankie Dart: “My umbrella concern is that you, as a character, represent the end of what I used to call ‘our show,’ which was once an unlikely family of misfit students, and is now a pretty loose-knit group of students and teachers, none of whom are taking a class together, in a school which, as of your arrival, is becoming increasingly grounded, asking questions like ‘how do any of us get our money, when will we get our degrees, and what happened to that girl I was dating?’ as opposed to questions that I consider more important, such as ‘what is real, what is sanity, is there a god, where’s that Pierce hollogram?’”
Category: Reviews
Reviews of Movies, TV, and Games
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Community Yahoo! Premiere Review
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John Wick Review
(This review contains spoilers for the first 30 minutes of John Wick. However, it should not lessen your enjoyment of the movie)
John Wick’s plot is thus: John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a family man who is devastated by the loss of his wife to a long-time illness. She leaves him a puppy for him to care for, and he begins to bond with it. Then some Russian thugs led by Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones) show up, steal his car (a 1969 Mustang), and kill his puppy. So John Wick kicks ass and takes names for the next hour-plus.
Well, maybe there’s A LITTLE more to it. When Alfie Allen’s dad finds out about what he did and who he did it to, he immediately realizes his mistake. You see, John Wick isn’t just some schmuck with a puppy, a sweet ride, and a dead wife. He’s John Motherfucking Wick, Badass Extraordinaire. As Alfie Allen’s dad says, he’s not the boogeyman. “He’s the man you send to kill the boogeyman.” And Alfie Allen killed his puppy (a very Theon Greyjoy move, if you ask me).
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Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Review
Outside of Community, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has had perhaps the strangest road to release of any show this season. Schmidt was ordered as a new sitcom for NBC, riding on the network’s history with creator and writer Tina Fey. However, the NBC of today is quite different than the NBC of 2006-2013, when 30 Rock aired. After the end of The Office and 30 Rock, NBC decided to turn away from their comedies, which had always been critical darlings, in hopes of reaching a much broader and ratings-friendly audience with a focus on dramas. Since then, they have cancelled Community and put an end to Parks and Recreation, and the few broader comedies that they have remaining (such as About a Boy, Undateable, and Marry Me) are almost certain to be cancelled after their current seasons.This left NBC in a bit of a predicament: here they had a very strange show from a creative team whose past work had never garnered huge ratings, and absolutely nowhere to put it on their schedule. So, instead of cancelling Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt pre-air or leaving it to die in a bad timeslot, they agreed to skip the awkward “will this show get picked up somewhere else?” phase and offer it to Netflix. It was a win-win for everybody…at least until NBC decided to launch a comedy series online subscription service last week with no actual comedies to offer. C’est la vie.
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Sleepy Hollow Season 2 Review
(Spoilers follow for both seasons of Sleepy Hollow)Season one of Sleepy Hollow was one of the biggest surprises of the 2013-2014 TV season. Before airing, the series looked like one of the most sure-fire misses on Fox’s slate, a modern-day update of the Sleepy Hollow story involving time travel and a machine gun wielding headless horseman. Just watch the trailer below and tell me that it doesn’t look like the stupidest show you’ve ever seen.
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Kingsman: The Secret Service Review
For a director with only five films under his belt, Matthew Vaughn has done a lot to distinguish himself. His first directorial feature, Layer Cake, was a slick British crime flick that proved Vaughn was more than just a Guy Ritchie producer with director-envy. With Kick-Ass, he established himself as one of the most unique action filmmakers in the business, with brilliantly staged fight sequences that were as hilarious as they were violent. When handed the dying X-Men franchise, he almost single-handedly revived it with X-Men: First Class, a film that showed how spin-offs and reboots didn’t have to be slaves to their original source.
What’s immediately interesting about Kingsman, his most recent film, is the way that it initially feels like a mashup of all of Vaughn’s previous works. Like Layer Cake, Kingsman is a distinctly British film, and also delves a bit into British crime. Like Kick-Ass, it is a highly-stylized and ultra-violent action film that functions on its own terms and as a satire of a particular genre (superhero films for Kick-Ass, and early James Bond films for Kingsman). Like X-Men: First Class, a significant portion of the film is given over to a team of young new recruits and the dangers that face them while becoming part of a team.