Galavant is a dashing knight, loved and respected by all for his courage and honour. Blessed with looks, strength of arms, and a beautiful lover in the shapely form of the lovely Madalena, it seems Galavant has it all.
Or at least, it does until the supercilious, entitled and dishonourable King Richard kidnaps Madalena, intending to make her his bride. This cannot be allowed to stand, and - powered by the strength of his passion and the might of his sword-arm - Galavant cuts his way into the castle to free the love of his life.
Only it turns out that, when you get down to it, Madalena's feelings don't run as deep. She may not care much more Richard, but he's as weak-willed as he is pompous, and he has lots of lovely power and money. She spurns Galavant, crushing the knight's spirit. He descends into a melancholy of depression and alcohol.
Princess Isabella of Valencia, whose kingdom has been conquered by Richard, finally manages to stir the old flames of courage and heroism in Galavant's heart when she (falsely) tells him that Madalena has repented her earlier decision and now wants Galavant to rescue her after all. All he has to do is help Isabella first ... but can one single hero and his squire really save the day?
Galavant is a fantasy musical comedy adventure series. Which is something of a niche offering and may explain why, despite positive reviews, the show struggled to find an audience. At the end of its first season of 8 episodes, it was a favourite for cancellation - a fact that the show cheekily acknowledges in the opening episode of season 2, "A New Season aka Suck It Cancellation Bear".
I personally enjoyed the show a lot, particularly the first season. The show is helped a lot by having a talented core cast who seem to be having fun with the genre aware silliness of the story. Some of them were likely helped by having past experience in such material: Timothy Omundsun, who plays King Richard, had a recurring role in Xena: Warrior Princess, for instance.
The guest stars are also strong, with numerous recognisable faces turning up in one-off or occasional roles. I give the show particular props for looping in 'Weird' Al Yankovic as the leader of an order of monks who have taken a vow of singing.
As a musical show, it is of course important that the songs be fun and well written. There are no worries on that front: Alen Menken, who composed for Disney's The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, delivers his usual excellent work in combination with other talented musicians.
On the comedy front, the jokes certainly come thick and fast. Not every single one is a winner, but you're likely to laugh more often than not. There's plenty of funny moments here, including one or two sequences of such gleeful absurdity that I came close to having to pause the show and give us some time to recover.
I also liked writers' willingness to spend time with characters you might not have expected to feature much, and to develop arcs in unexpected ways. Characters do not necessarily end the show in the places you might expect, and I think this is a strength of the program.
So: that's all pretty glowing. Do I have any complaints? Well, two. Firstly, the breaking of the fourth wall .is perhaps a smidgen overdone at times. Secondly, the show's second season is a bit overstuffed in general and could perhaps have shed a couple of episodes. It feels to me like they started the writing for this season from the the ending they wanted to get to, and then kind of invented stuff to connect that up with where they ended the first season. To my mind, the stitching together of these elements is sometimes a little clumsy. For instance, things sometimes happen that seem like they should utterly change the direction of the show - but then ten minutes later they are fully resolved and have already triggered the next plot point.
Overall, though, this was 18 brief and breezy episodes of TV, packed with funny scenes, clever songs, engaging characters, and a few neat surprises. I'm definitely glad I watched it.
The film is set in the fictional nation of Sinonesia, somewhere in South East Asia. The President's Chief of Security has recently been assassinated. The regional head of British intelligence, Colonel Baisbrook, recruits two Americans to investigate. Why does he not use his own agents? Presumably either because he had an eye on the US film market, or because he knew Frankie Avalon couldn't do a British accent. Or both. Probably both.
Whatever the reasons for their hiring, the American duo - Nick and Tommy - prove pretty successful in their assignment. They soon identify that the assassination was the work of agents of a beautiful and evil woman named Sumuru, who plans world domination by having her all-female army eliminate male leaders and replace them with her agents.
Obviously, this sort of thing can't be allowed to go on. Now all Nick and Tommy have to do is stay alive long enough to stop it.
This film is based on a female supervillain created by Sax Rohmer, who is best known as the author of the Fu Manchu series of novels. What that essentially means is that it is based on stories in which Rohmer swapped his usual gross racism for ... slightly less gross racism and lots more egregious sexism.
Only slightly less racism though, as this film makes clear very early on. President Boong of Sinonesia (yes, that really is his name) is clearly a white guy in very peculiar make-up.
The sexism meanwhile mostly makes itself known through the twin vectors of (a) the whole plot basically being "only an evil woman would be unhappy with men running things" and (b) lots and lots PG-rated titillation: bared thighs, backs and midriffs, as a consequence of the fact that Sumuru apparently believes bikinis to be suitable attire for her army of female assassins.
So, it's racist and sexist; perhaps not surprising, given it is nearly sixty years old. How is the movie otherwise?
Not very good, frankly. The plot is weak and formulaic. And while Shirley Eaton is clearly having a good time vamping it up as the wicked Sumuru, she's rather undermined by the fact that the script makes the villainess her own worst enemy. Sumuru decides to kidnap the guy trying to thwart her. Sensible enough. Having done so, she then ... tells him all her plans. Yes, it's in the context of trying to blackmail him to work for her, but still, it's rather clumsy and an obvious way to avoid him having to do any actual investigation.
The film also features a fair number of efforts comedy. Many of these seem to have been directly inspired by Looney Tunes, including an obvious variation of Bugs and Daffy's classic "duck season"/"rabbit season" sequence.
The other source of 'humour' is basically 'Frankie Avalon's been in musicals!', which ... I mean, okay, I can excuse one gag in this line, given that he is your star. But the film returns to the well a number of times, which would rather be like if Deadpool 3 cracks a whole bunch of jokes about the fact that Hugh Jackman was in The Boy from Oz.
But at least the film will have a big action finale where the good guys (who are all men, of course) storm the beaches of Sumuru's island, right? A large scale sequence clearly inspired by the James Bond films of the period. That'll be fun, right? Well, it would be, if it was executed well. Alas, it is static and dull, with unconvincing action choreography.
The 60s delivered some fun, cheesy action espionage films. This aspires to be one of them, but falls far short of the mark.
Kirsten Clark is a brilliant but emotionally closed off Caltech student. Her seemingly cold demeanour is a symptom of her medical condition: temporal dysplasia. This (invented for the show) condition makes a person unable to sense the passing of time. This hinders Kirtsen's ability to form emotional relationships with others, as she does not seem to have normal reactions to events. An example Kirsten herself gives in the show is that when she was told her foster father was dead, then to her he had been dead forever.
Kirsten's medical condition is important because it makes her an ideal candidate for a secret government agency that employs a highly experimental process known as "stitching". This technology allows the subject to view the slowly fragmenting memories of a recently deceased person. The process is dangerous and can be unreliable, but it makes it possible to find the answers to mysteries that would otherwise go unsolved.
Of course, the government doesn't invest huge amounts of money into a process just to solve a few crimes. Nor is Kirsten's suitability for the process a mere coincidence. But you'll have to watch the show to learn the deeper secrets at play here: and you will also need to prepare yourself for not all those questions being answered, because the show as cancelled on a cliffhanger after three seasons.
The real question then is, is the journey good enough to survive the lack of an ending?
Well. There are a number of restaurants near my old house, many of which I visited while I was living there. At some of them I had great meals, at some the meal was a disappointment ... but the one that is relevant to this review is the one that was reliably 'alright'. I never had a bad meal there, but I also never walked out thinking 'I need to recommend this place to people'. It was the definition of 'adequate'.
Stitchers is that restaurant's TV show equivalent. The cast are likeable, the episode plots are fine, there's a longer arc at play that - although moving a little slowly, is at least recognisably moving - and I never once shouted at the TV in frustration. But it also never really rises above "an okay way to pass the time".
Let's start with the cast, which includes Alison Scoglietti of Warehouse 13 and Salli Richardson-Whitfield of Eureka. They're both solid hands and I wish they'd been given a little more to do: Richardson-Whitfield is just the tightly buttoned boss lady, while Scagliotti is largely just playing a slightly more sexual version of her Warehouse 13 character.
Two decades ago, Evelyn and her boyfriend Waymond eloped from China to the United States, where they got married and had a daughter, Joy.
It has all been downhill from there. Evelyn has a tendency to cope by avoidance, and her ability to duck and weave has finally been exhausted. She avoided filing correct tax paperwork for the laundromat she owned, and now the IRS is auditing here. She avoided dealing with the fracture of her marriage to Waymond, and now he feels the only way to make her talk is to ask for a divorce. She avoided acknowledging her daughter's sexuality and non-Chinese partner, and now they are estranged.
All in all, Evelyn really, really doesn't have time to deal with anything else going on in her life. But she's going to have to, because she's about to find herself at the centre of multiversal martial arts madness. It seems in a parallel reality to her own, another Evelyn invented technology that allowed people to transfer their consciousness between realities. Unfortunately, that Evelyn's disregard for safety splintered the mind of her best agent. Jobu Tupaki, as this agent is now known, experiences all universes at once and can verse-jump and manipulate matter at will. Alas, this has left her as filled with rage and madness as she is with power. She seeks to destroy the multiverse as the only way she can know peace.
How can this Evelyn; the greatest "failure" of all Evelyns in the multiverse, a woman who cannot even save her laundromat; possibly hope to save the multiverse?
Everything Everywhere All At Once was a surprise commercial success. It initially opened in only 10 theatres. By its third week, it was in over two thousand. It would ultimately recoup somewhere between five and ten times its production budget in worldwide box office. The variation in that multiple is due to conflicting reports as to what the film actually cost.
One number that is quite firmly known, however, is the number of Academy Awards the film won: it picked up an astounding seven Oscars. And not just the low profile technical awards, either. It was in fact shunned in those categories. Instead, it picked up Best picture, Best director, Best Original Screenplay and no less than three of the four main 'best actor' awards. It got a lot of love in other awards ceremonies, too: this is a movie that has an entire Wikipedia page just to list the nominations it received.
Clearly, a lot of people enjoyed the film, and I'd certainly count myself among that number. It is not, however, a movie that I would give an unqualified recommendation, because I definitely don't think it will be to all tastes. In particular, some people will not appreciate the film's absurdist humour. It gets very out there at times. Some viewers will be left entirely cold by this, and that will almost certainly spoil their enjoyment of the movie.
For my own tastes, not everything was a hit, but there were multiple moments I found extremely funny. I particularly liked the script's willingness to build on a joke. Things that seem like a passing, inconsequential gag like Evelyn's misunderstanding of the movie Ratatouille come back in unexpected ways. Ways that don't necessarily massively impact the plot, but which do serve to flesh out and illustrate the true diversity encompassed by an infinite multiverse of possibilities.
In fact, the film does has a consistent pattern of starting quite small with most of its concepts, and then growing more and more wild as time goes on. The 'improbable things' people must do to trigger their multidimensional powers, for instance, start with pretty minor stuff like 'wear your shoes on the wrong feet' but ... well, let's just say they escalate from there.
This is a clever structural decision since it eases the viewer in, step by step. Smart stuff.
Del lives alone. Not 'alone' in the sense that he's the only one in his household - though he is. 'Alone' in the sense that as far as he knows, he is the only living human left on the planet.
Everyone else in Del's home town died, in an unspecified manner, "on a Tuesday afternoon", and there have been no radio communications or broadcasts. Believing he is the last man on Earth, Del has set about leading a peaceful existence in his hometown, living in the library where he used to work and spending the day clearing out people's homes and burying the dead.
And then one night, he sees fireworks.
The person responsible for this turns out to be a young woman named Grace. Although Grace is noisy, and somewhat erratic in her behaviour, Del can't quite bring himself to force her to leave. Instead, he slowly becomes used to her presence, and when he teaches her his methods for clearing the homes of the dead, it provides am opportunity for her to help him, and for the pair of them to bond.
Which of course means that things are about to get complicated ...
This post-apocalyptic drama relies very heavily on its two main cast members, particularly Peter Dinklage, who plays Del. Much of the first act is just him; while the second act is entirely about how Grace's arrival turns his very structured life upside down and how the two of them must learn to live together.
Fortunately, in Dinklage and Elle Fanning you have the actors to meet this kind of challenge. Dinklage in particular is great, especially at the non-verbal aspects of acting. For instance, there's a sequence where only his eyes are visible, and you can see the emotional pain. It's really great work.
I think the script also does a good job of balancing the two characters. There's a hood dynamic, as Grace is
feasibly both the kind of person who would drive Del crazy, but also the
kind who can thaw his icy exterior.
Unfortunately, after all this solid establishing work, the script lacks a bit on the follow-through. For instance, there's a sub-plot involving a disagreement about a stray dog - Grace wants to adopt it, while Del wants it gone (possibly because he thinks Grace will also go, if it does). Del gets his way, and then the sub-plot just kind of stops; there is never a real acknowledgement of Del's actions, and he and Grace never mention the animal again.
Also, while it has been obvious all along that Grace has not been completely honest about her background, and there is another shoe to drop, the dropping of that shoe is a bit ... fumbled.
As you might have expected, there are more survivors, and they come looking for Grace. But little about this sequence makes much sense. How did they find her? Why did they go to the immense effort it must have taken to do so? The film doesn't present any convincing need or motivation.
On the plus side, I did like that the newcomers' sinister scheme of sinisterness is, in their minds, benevolent. They're wrong, of course: what they are doing us deeply misguided and quite frightening. But they're not the usual 'evil for the sake of it' monsters that we often see in post-apocalyptic stories. This does result in a rather more low-key denouement than might be expected. Some people may find it a little underwhelming, in fact. Still, I appreciate the effort to try to do something a little more nuanced than normal, in this regard.
I Think We're Alone Now definitely has its flaws, but it has enough strengths that I don't regret seeing it.
As the people of Emon gather to celebrate Vox Machina's heroic adventures in Whitestone (last season), the city comes under assault from four dragons who call themselves the Chroma Conclave. Even one of these beasts alone would be a terrible danger to Emon. Combined, they completely obliterate the city's defenses and inflict heavy casualties, including the Sovereign.
Hopelessly outmatched, it is all Vox Machina can do to escape alive. They flee first to their keep, then when that it razed by the 'weakest' of the dragons, all the way back to Whitestone. A conference with their allies there sets the adventurers on a new path: seeking powerful artefacts called 'Vestiges' to assist them in facing the dragons.
Of course, finding people willing to go up against not one but four such powerful creatures is far from an easy task, and the dragons themselves aren't about to simply sit idle while some ragged bunch of would-be heroes tries to collect super-weapons to use against them.
A great many adventures - and dirty jokes - are sure to follow.
This is the second season of the animated show based on the events of the first of Critical Role's Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. I very much enjoyed the first season, and was looking forward to this series. So did it live up to expectations?
Not entirely.
There is a fair bit to like about the show, still. The opening dragon rampage is a really quite intense sequence, effectively underlining how overwhelming this new threat actually is. Vox Machina have defeated a dragon once before, but it was both complacent and ill-prepared, and even with some very useful advice on its weak point, they nearly died. This first encounter is merely a desperate race to escape alive, as scores of other characters die around them.
The show's biggest problem is that opening sequence is probably the strongest part of the whole season. A big contributor to this, I think, is that the rest of the season is over-stuffed with content. There is just so much going on as Vox Machina not only visit multiple new locations in search of the 'Vestiges', but also encounter a host of new (to the audience, anyway) characters. Many of the newcomers prove to have history with our 'heroes', and between explaining what all these new places are and how all these new faces fit into the characters' backgrounds, the show ends up bulging at the seams.
It's all a bit of a whirlwind, but also at times it seems like there's lot of activity that isn't actually accomplishing all that much. I think this is in large part because the show too-often stops all forward momentum to have extended fight scenes. The many battles with the black Umbrasyl, in particular, ultimately got a bit wearying for my tastes.
As for the new characters who get introduced: most seem interesting, but they generally get only a limited amount of time to shine because the show is galloping through so much plot. There's also the matter of Anna Ripley, a minor antagonist in season one who returns here but whose role in the story lacks much context or any resolution - I suspect that she is mostly on screen to remind us that she exists, and that she will play a bigger role in season three.
I also don't think this season is as funny as the first. Not because there are fewer jokes; there are just as many, maybe more; but because they are pretty much exactly the same jokes.
Finally, I have some minor visual quibbles. This season features a lot more "really big monsters" - dragons and sphinxes and such - all of which are done in CGI. I don't feel that these always integrate all that well with the traditional-style animation used for the main cast and other "human scale" characters.
Overall, I don't regret watching this: it's still a pretty fun fantasy adventure show. I will definitely tune in for season three when it appears. But I definitely think this season was not quite as enjoyable as season one.
Frankie is an Italian American pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter with her band. Frankie's life suddently becomes a lot more interesting than usual when she discovers a dead body in her rental car and turns it over to the police. It turns out to be the corpse of a mob boss, and at the urging of her mafia-obsessed sister Heather, Frankie somehow finds herself attending the dead man's funeral.
There, Frankie meets Nicolette, a charming, confident, beautiful woman who, unbeknownst to Frankie, is also the daughter of the new mob boss.
The two women begin to spend time together, which quickly starts to complicate things. Some of this is complication is because of the emerging romantic interest between them. Nicolette clearly wants more than friendship, while Frankie - who has a boyfriend, though admittedly not one who enriches her life her very much - struggles to process her feelings.
The rest of the complication, however, comes from the fact that neither the cops nor the mob believe that Frankie has innocently stumbled into Nicolette's life. Troubles of the heart could soon be the least of her concerns - her freedom or her life might be in danger ...
This is a pleasant little romantic comedy about two women meeting, falling in love, and - as often happens in romantic comedies - dealing with quirky, unexpected complications along the way. It's definitely comedy with a lower-case 'c', though: there are few outright laughs here. Instead it's mostly humour of the 'wry smile' family drama variety ... with added mobsters.
Speaking of mobsters, one theme from which the film manages to find several of those wry smiles is interplay of the pride Italian-Americans take in their culture and heritage, and the less-than-enthusiastic feeling they have for the popular culture depiction of the mafia.
The film profits from a solid cast. There's no "big stars" here but the cast are all capable, and several are
recognisable in an "I know I've seen them somewhere before" kind of way.
Frankie herself is played by 2004 American Idol runner-up Diana DeGarmo. Transitions from such shows to scripted film and TV can sometimes be rocky, but there are no issues here. I'd definitely include DeGarmo's performance in the "capable cast doing solid work" category. Likely it helped that she had done a variety of musical theatre and film and TV work before this movie.
Not surprisingly, given DeGarmo is playing an aspiring musician in the film, she also features on three tracks in the movie's soundtrack.
So do I have any complaints? Only one, really, though I do think it's a somewhat important weakness. This is that the central romance seems very quick. Frankie and Nicolette don't interact all that much before they are kissing - and remember that Frankie, at least, is at least supposed to be "taken". Even if she is clearly not satisfied in that relationship, she hasn't ended it. Both the main players are likeable enough that it's fairly easy to let this slide, and it's certainly not the only film that I've seen where this is an issue - people understandably want to get to the romantic heart of the story, after all - but it was still a bit of a niggle for me as I was watching the film.
Overall, though, this is decent lightweight fare. Solid lazy afternoon or evening, "just want something undemanding and fun" kind of stuff.
