Category: General

Movie Review: Ingrid Goes West

~ Metacrone

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Ingrid Goes West * 2017 * Rated R * 1 Hour 38 Minutes

At one point in Ingrid Goes West, Dan Pinto, played by O’Shea Jackson Jr., describes the life cycle of superhero crime fighting to Aubrey Plaza’s Ingrid Thorburn: Batman arrests people, takes them to Arkham Asylum, they possibly get out a few months later, and the cycle continues. It’s not that different from the cycle of internet fame and stalking, as the movie shows us.

We meet Ingrid as she’s sitting in a car outside of a wedding, watching the bride’s instagram feed in real time and crying. After a few minutes of this, Ingrid gets out of the car and storms toward the reception tent. She pulls out a can of mace and sprays it in the bride’s eyes, yelling that it’s payback for not inviting her to the wedding.

The groom tackles Ingrid as she tries to escape, and we see her next in a mental ward. We find out that she wasn’t even friends with the bride or groom, instead the bride had commented on her instagram feed once, and that was enough to trigger Ingrid to stalk her and consider them friends.

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The Gifted Season 1 Episode 10: eXploited Recap

~ Metacrone

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We lose some familiar faces on The Gifted this week, and gain some familiar faces as well. eXploited would have been the season finale under the original 10 episode order, and it feels very much like one. The stakes are high, loyalties are in question, and the game changes in the final act.

We start with a flashback to two months ago, when Esme was posing as a campaign aide to an antimutant senator, using the name Stacy. Or Stephanie, depending on who you ask. She’s just talked herself into a meeting between the senator and Trask Industries when she gets a telepathic distress call.

Her family has been discovered and captured. Sentinel Services knows where she is, and are on their way. Esme/Stacy scurries away from the Senator’s location as quickly as she can, while telepathic voices urge her to hurry and to find a way to rescue them.

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Agents of SHIELD Season 5 Episode 3: A Life Spent Recap

~ Metacrone ~ 1 Comment

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This week the team continues to learn how to navigate in the future. Blending in comes easier for some than others. Daisy doesn’t even try, leading to serious consequences. Jemma helps an inhuman girl and gathers intel, but also draws attention to herself, which could come back to haunt her. The rest of the team stays undercover while gathering information, although there are close calls along the way.

Jemma is on display in Kasius’ court, unable to hear anything but his voice, or to see anything clearly but him, thanks to the device in her ear. She still puts her spy skills to use. Kasius has a sumptuous meal laid out for an important guest, and is finishing his own preparations, when an emissary from the guest, Lady Basha, arrives to say that she won’t be attending the meal. Kasius is angry and insulted, but tries to play it off as no big deal.

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Mindhunter Season 1: Review

~ Metacrone

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In Which the FBI Learns to Think Like a Serial Killer

Mindhunter is a new 10 episode original series from Netflix based on the true crime book of the same name by John E Douglas and Mark Olshaker. Douglas spent 25 years in the FBI, many of them developing the science of criminal profiling. The series is a fictionalized account of  Douglas’ time with the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, where he worked with Dr Ann Wolbert Burgess and Robert Ressler to study and categorize the behavior of psychopathic criminals.

The first season starts before Holden Ford, the stand-in character for Douglas, and Bill Tench, the stand-in for Ressler, meet. Ford is an FBI hostage negotiator and instructor at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA. Tench travels the country teaching FBI methodology to local law enforcement agencies. He listens in on local concerns and occasionally assists with cases at the same time. Ford feels he’s wasting his time teaching a subject that’s too limited to students who don’t care, while Tench wants help carrying his slide projector, so their supervisor pairs them up.

While Shepherd, the supervisor, originally pairs the two as a way to get both to stop hassling him, it proves to be a stroke of genius. Local officers frequently approach Tench and Ford during and after their presentations with unique cases that seem unsolvable. These spark Ford’s instincts, leading him to seek out more information about crimes involving fetishes and repeat offenders: what would come to be known as the work of serial killers.

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Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 3 Episode 7: Getting Over Jeff Recap

~ Metacrone

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This week’s episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a mixed bag, continuing the trend we’ve seen all season. Paula takes center stage with the A storyline and, for the first time ever, the title, which refers to Paula’s lost high school love, Jeff Channington, rather than Josh Chan.

Donna Lynne Champlin and Paula are deserving leading ladies, and the show reminds us that they are both the types that Hollywood normally forgets can be more than best friends. By giving Paula her own hot ex-boyfriend, and letting her live that fantasy out, they acknowledge once again that romance isn’t limited to certain ages or body types. That message never gets old.

None of the other storylines can live up to the glory of Paula singing about Jeff’s penis in the grocery store aisles complete with back up singers and suggestive vegetables. Josh is still trying to grow up, Rebecca is still trying to please her doctor, and Darryl and White Josh are still at a crossroads that they can’t navigate through. Stuff happens during the episode, but, other than Paula, I didn’t feel like any of them had made any tangible progress by the end.

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Legion Season 1 Episode 1: Chapter 1 Recap

~ Metacrone

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Now that it’s back on HULU, let’s talk about Legion! THIS show is the Twin Peaks of the current era, if anything is, a groundbreaking, mindbending thrill ride that’s artistic and unpredictable, but full of heart, and characters you’ll care about. It substitutes Dan Stevens, who’s quickly becoming a sought after star, for Kyle MacLachlan, as the lovable pseudo-everyman in a topsy-turvy world.

As with Twin Peaks, viewers seem to either love this show or hate it. Going in with an open mind and letting go of the need for linear, mundane storytelling is crucial. We spend time in a mental institution this season, trying to determine what’s reality and what isn’t, for some very good reasons. Unlike Twins Peaks, the writers of this show actually know where they’re taking us, so don’t worry, just strap in and enjoy the ride!

Chapter 1 begins with a montage of the infancy and childhood of David Haller, otherwise known as Legion. It’s set to The Who’s Happy Jack. By the time he’s a teenager, David is drinking, doing drugs, and involved with petty crimes, in addition to the auditory and visual hallucinations he’s dealt with for his entire life. And he occasionally moves things with his mind.

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Marvel’s Runaways Season 1 Episode 5: Kingdom Recap

~ Metacrone

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This week on Runaways the characters reached some major turning points. The kids all banded together for the first time to fight off a common enemy. The Pride accomplished the goal they’d been working toward for 15 years, and revived Dr Doom. We found out more about Geoffrey, Catherine, Victor, and Tina, giving us more insight into their characters, and possibly the future timeline of the show. And we might have met Karolina’s real father.

The cold open shows us a flashback to a prison in LA, eighteen years ago. Geoffrey and Darius are incarcerated together. Geoffrey has a visitor. They assume it’s his lawyer, but it’s a man named Jonah. He makes a $5 million offer to buy a run down strip mall that Geoffrey owns in Compton, one of the worst parts of LA.

Catherine has arrived during the conversation, and she helps Geoffrey work out a deal to sell, but retain partnership rights with Jonah to manage the property, since it’s in a poverty-stricken black neighborhood. Geoffrey just has to find a way out of prison in the next month. He talks Darius into confessing to the murder that Geoffrey committed, in exchange for Geoffrey promising to take care of Darius and his family for life. Darius will do a minimum of ten extra years in prison for Geoffrey’s crime.

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Riverdale Season 2 Episode 8: Chapter Twenty-One- House of the Devil Recap

~ Metacrone

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On the roller coaster ride that is Riverdale, this episode is the lowest the show has ever taken us. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is echoing his old boss Ryan Murphy, and his old show Glee, with epic levels of character and plot inconsistencies, misogyny, sheer contrivances, and using audience manipulation in place of actual storytelling.

The Berlantiverse is known for many of those things as well. Just take a look at any character that the writers decide is mainly a love interest, whether it’s Mon El on Supergirl, Caitlin or Iris on The Flash, or Felicity on Arrow. Betty and Cheryl seem to be meeting the same fate on Riverdale, as their characters erode from the complex women that they were in season one into inconsistent caricatures.

This episode, Veronica and Archie continued their sexathon relationship the way it had always been, complete with sex montage. After a particularly romantic tryst in front of her parents’ fireplace, Archie, overcome with endorphins, told Veronica that he loved her. She conspicuously didn’t reply, so they did the discomfort dance and decided that Archie should leave.

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Agents of SHIELD Season 5 Episode 2: Orientation Part 2 Recap

~ Metacrone

 

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The second episode of this two parter slips in much more information than Part 1, and brings up even more questions, chief among them, WHERE IS FITZ??? One postcard in two episodes is not enough. While the world could always use another Nazi zombie movie, especially when JJ Abrams is involved, Fitz is sorely needed in the future, rather than the past. Shouldn’t Steve and Bucky be taking on the World War 2 era Nazi zombies, anyway?

Alas, the rest of the team is left to cope with the news that the monolith flung them 90+ years into the future, where the earth has been blasted into a debris field and a piece of shell, without the one member who might be able to work the problem. On second thought, maybe those sneaky showrunners sent him off to do a movie for a reason. As Jemma says, she’s not the kind of scientist who can whip up some time travel at a moment’s notice. But Fitz just might be able to do it, after working with Aida and Radcliffe. They needed to leave Fitz behind to slow the plot down a bit.

Part 2 picks up immediately after the end of Part 1. Jemma and May try to wrap their brains around what they’re seeing through the trawler’s windows: about a third of the earth’s surface remains, with atmosphere on top, some crust, and glowing red under the eggshell shaped curve of its underside. The rest of the earth has become the debris field we’ve been watching since the tag at the end of last season.

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Agents of SHIELD Season 5 Episode 1: Orientation Part 1 Recap

~ Metacrone

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Agents of SHIELD is back! In space! The one thing they haven’t done yet, TM Mack. With the Kree, the most vicious Blue Man Group impersonators known to this, or any other galaxy. And without Fitz. 😭 Jemma and I are nearly inconsolable, but it’s not our first rodeo time in space, so we will soldier on and use the scientific method to make the worst decisions possible, damn it.

But first, let’s rewind to discover how the team got into space. We follow a bald, middle-aged man going through his morning routine at his home, including going for a swim, drinking one of the peanut butter flavored nutritional shakes that are the sole contents of his fridge, and peeling off his human skin suit so that he can take a shower in his alien nakedness.

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