Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
The first two Why Did I Get Married? movies were about couples trying to clean up trouble they had made for themselves. The third movie has a more interesting reason to bring this group back: their children are adults now. A wedding in Lake Como puts the people who grew up around Marcus, Angela, … Read more
Mr. T’s pastor sat for two days of interviews. About thirty seconds of that ended up in the finished film. That number comes from Mr. T. He was telling reporters it was garbage before it had even come out. Untold Mr. T: I Pity The Fool arrived on September 8, runs forty-eight minutes, and … Read more
I keep going back to one number on this movie. Not the Netflix chart, where Those Who Wish Me Dead has now spent sixteen days and sits at number two on the American film side. The other one. When Warner Bros. put it in 3,188 theaters in May 2021, it took $880,000 on its … Read more
So does anybody actually get an answer at the end of The Perfect Lie? No. The seventh episode stops in the middle of the thing you most want explained, and if you went in expecting a tidy Dutch murder mystery, that is going to sting. Netflix has not announced a second season. The show … Read more
“I’m watching Jason Statham’s new movie Mutiny, streaming on Amazon for free right now. This has to be a huge mistake, right? My theater has showtimes starting this week!” It was a mistake. On August 19, two days before Mutiny opened in American theaters, Amazon posted the entire ninety five minute film to the … Read more
Malcolm Spellman never wrote an episode of Snowfall. FX handed him the spinoff anyway, and what he came back with is not a tour of familiar streets. The Drop: A Snowfall Saga opens in 1990, four years after the parent show signed off, and it keeps South Los Angeles while swapping out the product. … Read more
A construction crew in Paddington digs up a bomb the Luftwaffe dropped on London eighty-odd years ago. The device is live. The city empties the blocks around it, and while a bomb disposal officer lies on his stomach over the thing, a crew several streets away walks into a bank the evacuation has emptied for … Read more
Chuck Lorre flew to Knoxville, sat on a back porch, held a stranger’s grandbaby, and asked her if she wanted to make a television show. The stranger was Leanne Morgan, a stand-up comic in her fifties who had been told for twenty-five years that she was not edgy enough and too plain. Netflix heard … Read more
Why would a filmmaker make the five-hour version first and the ninety-seven-minute version second? Brian Knappenberger did. In 2021 he released Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, five episodes running an hour or more apiece. On September 2 he returned to the same subject with Turning Point: Generation 9/11, one film, ninety-seven … Read more
Netflix built eight forty-five-minute episodes around fights that already went viral. Ashtin Earle throwing her sister out of a New York apartment. Alex Cooper daring Alix to say something back. Both of those played out in vertical video months ago, free, to millions of people. Two of the three published reviews call the series … Read more