Television | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On How the Bad Batch Are the Worst Part of “The Bad Batch”…

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist last week. With the release of the second season of The Bad Batch, it seemed like a good opportunity to review the series.

The Bad Batch is an interesting series. It is essentially a spin-off from The Clone Wars, but one that rejects the anthology nature of that show for a fixed central cast and a linear series of episodic adventures. This is somewhat frustrating, as it strips the most compelling part of The Clone Wars in favour of a generic riff on The A-Team or Kung Fu. Still, when the show gets out of its own way, The Bad Batch is a surprisingly compelling and thoughtful addition to the Star Wars universe, a meditation on what happens to soldiers at the end of a Forever War.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: clone wars, disney, escapist, star wars, streaming, Television, the bad batch, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Willow” Finds Itself With “Prisoners of Skellin”…

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of Willow at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Wednesday evening while the show is on, looking at the legacy sequel as it progresses from one episode to the next.

The sixth episode of the season struggles to recover some of the ground lost during the season’s fifth episode. Wildwood slowed the series to a standstill in order to run through a checklist of serialised streaming television tropes, in a mechanical and unengaging fashion. Prisoners of Skellin has the burden of getting the show moving again, in a way that is often clumsy and inelegant. That said, Prisoners of Skellin is an episode that has some measure of charm to it, in large part due to a winning guest performance from Christian Slater.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: Christian Slater, divorce, escapist, prisoners of skellin, the escapist, trolls, willow | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Modesty of “Kaleidoscope”…

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. This weekend saw the release of Kaleidoscope, Netflix’s big interactive heist drama. The hook is that the viewer’s experience of the show is randomized, with different viewers watching in different orders.

It is a very modest experiment, particularly when compared to something like Bandersnatch from a few years back. Kaleidoscope is much more interesting on paper than it is in execution, a high concept that feels somewhat half-executed. There is something about streaming as a medium that lends itself to experiments like this, to viewing experiences that are truly singular and unique, where each viewer ultimately consumes their own version of the media in their own way, in a way that challenges the idea of mass media as a communal experience. Kaleidoscope isn’t quite that, but it hints at the possibility.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: adventure, bandersnatch, choose your own adventure, communal, in the frame, kaliedoscope, mass media, media, netflix, random, streaming | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “The Witcher: Blood Origin”, and What Happens When Television Becomes a Six-Hour Movie…

Posted on December 29, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist this week. With the release of The Witcher: Blood Origin on Netflix, it seemed like a good time to discuss an unsettling trend in modern television: the idea that modern shows are really just super-extended movies, and the consequences of that.

Blood Origin demonstrates what happens when a studio treats a television show like a movie. The series was written and filmed as six episodes, but was horrible cut down in the editting bay. Two whole episodes were stripped out of the show, leaving it incoherent and nonsensical. In many ways, this was exactly what happened with Joss Whedon’s cut of Justice League, which was similarly cut down to have a runtime of under two hours. If television shows are just films now, they are subject to the same sort of meddling.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: blood origin, cutting, executive meddling, films, justice league, media, Movies, structure, studios, Television, the escapist, the witcher, the witcher: blood origin, trimming | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the HBO Max and the Future of Disappearing Media…

Posted on December 26, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist last week. With the recent chaos at HBO Max and the removal of content from the service, it seemed like a good time to discuss of film and television have suddenly become ephemeral again.

One of the big selling points of the streaming age was that everything would be immediately available to audience members at the click of a mouse; vast libraries of content would be made available to stream via these services, representing a boon for conservationists and archivists everywhere. Nothing would be lost, because everything would be at hand. However, the removal of entire shows from HBO Max illustrates that these projects are as intangible as they have ever been, and that they can removed and even destroyed without any warning whatsoever.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: access, archiving, availability, HBO Max, history, lost destroyed, preservation, record, streaming, Television, westworld, wiped | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Willow” Got Lost in the Wildwood…

Posted on December 22, 2022 by Darren

With Willow officially past the midpoint of its first season, the show hits a sizable bump in the road. Wildwood is the first episode of the show that feels purely functional rather than narratively engaging on its own terms. It’s a very mechanical piece of television, with the plot grinding to a halt so the series can run down a checklist of character and plot beats that it needs to articulate for the audience before moving any further. It does a lot of necessary place-setting, but stalls the season and the show around it.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: escapist, exposition, Narrative, show, stakes, streaming, structure, the escapist, wildwood, willow | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Avatar: The Way of Water” is an Archetypal James Cameron Movie…

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the looming release of Avatar: The Way of Water, it seemed like a good time to take a look at Cameron’s aquatic, which might be his most personal and intimate movie ever.

Cameron’s filmography is interesting and varied, working in a number of genres and registers across his career. However, he has a set of familiar preoccupations: water, industrialisation, militarism, environmentalist, parenthood, feminism and so on. However, it’s fascinating that one of the most consistent threads across Cameron’s filmography is an evolving idea of family. Cameron’s epics are often stories of families pulling themselves together in the face of crisis. The Way of Water is no different.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: aliens, aquatic, avatar, avatar: the way of water, family, fatherhood, filmography, found family, james cameron, Movies, the terminator, themes, True Lies | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Review! On “The Witcher: Blood Origin” as a Bloody Mess…

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist earlier in the week, a review of the upcoming Netflix show, The Witcher: Blood Origin. It is a live action four-episode miniseries spinning directly out from the streaming service’s fantasy hit, The Witcher.

Blood Origin has had a famously troubled production, with the show being cut down from six episodes to four in the editing bay, and undergoing fairly involved reshoots to work around this truncation. The results are as muddling and disheartening as this back story suggests. Blood Origin is a show that is filled with lore and backstory, but with no interest in its characters or their motivations. It’s a frustrating mess, a show that has clearly been hacked apart and reconstructed to hit a pre-determined runtime.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: blood origin, editting, escapist, meddling, netflix, streaming, studio, the escapist, the witcher, the witcher: blood origin, witcher | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Willow” Gently Plays with Fantasy Tropes…

Posted on December 14, 2022 by Darren

It is too much to call Willow a deconstruction or a subversion of classic fantasy tropes. Certainly, the show is often a celebration of the trappings of high fantasy, and a much more old-fashioned take on the genre than contemporary shows like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power or House of the Dragon. At the same time, the series is written with an understanding of the tropes and conventions of the genre, and a willingness to play with those ideas in a way that deepens and explores its own themes. Given that this is a show about divorce, Willow eagerly dives into familiar fantasy tropes about blood and lineage.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: Blood, escapist, fantasy, lineage, magic, purity, streaming, Television, the escapist, tropes, willow | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The Spookies Podcast – “Fanboy Industrial Complex II: With Darren Mooney”

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Darren

I was thrilled to be invited to join the wonderful Michael and Stephanie Little for an episode of their new podcast, The Spookies Podcast.

It was a fun conversation, if a little bit chaotic. We got to talk about everything from Aquaman, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: Way of Water, through to the state of the Star Wars brand, and even to the differences between Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

You can listen directly to the episode below or by clicking here.