Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
Death walks away because Puss has stopped treating his life as disposable. The wolf survives their final fight, recognizes the change in his opponent, and ends the pursuit. Puss gets to keep living, with one life left. He has neither killed Death nor won his missing lives back. That distinction, supported by the ending accounts … Read more
The chalkboard gag reads: I did not predict any of this crap! That is the show swatting away thirty years of people posting old screenshots and insisting it saw the future. Then it goes ahead and does an episode about screens ruining people, which is exactly the territory that meme lives in. Yellow Mirror … Read more
Most movies have a shelf life you can feel. They arrive, everyone talks about them for a week or two, and then they slide quietly down the list while the next thing takes their spot. KPop Demon Hunters never did that. As of this week, the animated film has done something no title in Netflix … Read more
You have seen this story. A small kid with a big dream, written off as too little to compete, gets one improbable shot at the big leagues and has to prove the doubters wrong. GOAT, the animated sports comedy now climbing the Netflix charts, does not pretend otherwise. Its plot is the underdog template in … Read more
The story of David and Goliath is approximately three thousand years old. Every person reading this already knows how it ends. The shepherd boy wins. The giant falls. And yet David, Angel Studios’ animated biblical epic, arrived on Netflix on June 3rd and is already the number one film in the United States. It spent … Read more