Mainlining Christmas

Watching Christmas episodes in context is a very different experience than tuning in for just a seasonal outing. Unlike most of what we review on this blog, The Flash is a show I watch religiously - it's a fantastic program that delivers classic superhero adventures on the small screen. If you're a comics fan and you're not watching, you owe it to yourself to get caught up. This is one of the best. I talked about the first Flash Christmas episode last year. Like that one, this primarily exists because the show unfolds in real time, and Central City - like everywhere else - celebrates the holidays. That doesn't mean they didn't go all-out for Christmas, though: even for a series where a psychic gorilla has a recurring role, this one just pushed the limits in terms of genre tolerance. When I say "genre tolerance," I'm talking about its willingness to incorporate tropes and tones from its source material. There are things you do in comics and anima

This is the tragic story of a couple, leading happy if unexamined lives, who get sucked back into the drama of their dysfunctional families and thereby are re-indoctrinated into old-fashioned scripts for what adults should want out of life. They make irrevocable choices based on the trauma of this experience that they will surely regret. Conveying the soul-crushing pain of acquiescing to their broken families' value systems is truly a masterful performance by both leads, and... Oh, someone is telling me this was supposed to be funny. Well, that's just sad. In seriousness, Four Christmases is a boring holiday rom-com that was dated when it came out. Now it's just painful, all the more so because it doesn't just suck. There could have been an interesting movie here, but it's full of missed opportunities: both narrative opportunities for the audience and health/self-care opportunities for the characters. In that spirit, I'm going to sneak a little internet th

I'm still a little unclear what we just sat through. I understood the basics, of course. It was an episode of a reality show about a wealthy family who somehow managed to catapult themselves into cultural relevancy without offering anything of real value - no art, no philanthropy, nothing but a series detailing their attempts to stay in the public eye. But I don't understand why it was put on television, or why anyone turned it on. Was it some kind of a freak show? The editing seemed to portray the Kardashians that way, though it's difficult to make that assessment after just one episode (and I have no intention of ever sitting through another). It was an hour and five minutes, and that's without commercials - God, how I longed for the sweet respite of a merciful commercial break. Every time the streaming paused to buffer was a gift. A GIFT. Are they really as vapid as they seemed, or were they simply acting like dimwitted socialites for the camera? I have no idea

The Santa Klaus Murder Mavis Doriel Hay, 1936, ebook reprint 2015 New Release! I received a copy of this book from NetGalley for the purpose of review. Premise: Part of the British Library Crime Classic series of reprints. Sir Osmund Melbury has gathered his fractured family for the holiday. There’s a lot of money at stake for remaining in Sir Osmund's good graces, so naturally he ends up dead, and everyone has a motive. I liked the first half of this book much more than the end and resolution. I don’t know whether it dragged on too long, or I just lost track of who said what to who when. But I did like the first half quite a bit. The book explicitly switches between perspective, especially in the first few chapters. These chapters each take the form of a narrative of events written after the fact by one of the characters. You learn a lot about what the characters think of each other and their descriptions are often amusingly snide. The main body of the narrative a

Grace Under Fire was a sitcom from the 90's, which already tells you a great deal about what you're getting into. This one was built around the comedy of Brett Butler, who stars in this as a divorced mother raising three kids in a Missouri. Watching this, I was immediately overtaken by a sense of deja vu. I remember these actors and sets, despite having no memory of seeing an episode. Keeping Faith (1993) The A-plot in this episode concerns Grace's sister, Faith, who's hospitalized at the start. Grace and her friend, Russell, drive to the hospital in Alabama to meet her, which leads to a series of run-ins with people who remember Grace from high school, despite her having no recollection of any of them. This is easily the weakest part of the episode: while the recurring joke is occasionally funny, the over-the-top characterizations of the locals gets a bit too cute. When Faith enters the picture, things improve. The sisters bicker constantly, and the actresses pl

It was awful. I mean, we expected awful. It's called "Bratz Babyz Save Christmas," and it's a sequel to a direct-to-video movie based on a toy line spun off of another toy line that was essentially a knock-off of Barbie: this was never going to be brilliant film making. But we weren't ready. I'm not sure anyone could have been ready. I'm going to do my best to prepare you, in case you're foolish enough to try and watch this yourself, but the task of trying to depict in words the experience we just endured is a daunting one. This thing, on all levels, in all ways... it was awful. Based on the four minutes I was willing to invest researching this, it seems to be the third movie in the CG Bratz Babyz direct-to-the-dumpster-behind-Best-Buy-because-no-one-was-actually-stupid-enough-to-buy-the-video series. Did I mention it was awful? It was. Let's start with the animation. You know how crappy attempts to create CG humans result in a doll-like qu

This episode might be a bit of a litmus test. Heck, this whole show might be a bit of a litmus test, but I haven’t seen the rest to be sure. If you communicate naturally in snark, if you sometimes hate people reflexively, if you have had an unhealthy, love-hate relationship with a job or a city or a family member, you might enjoy this show. I thought it was freaking hilarious. This is the first episode we've seen, so we had to figure out characters and their relationships from context. This wasn't a problem, and it even created a funny moment when one character was explaining her ‘suicide season’ surge pricing, and I said, “oh, she's a therapist?” right before the dialogue confirmed it. The story follows the two main characters, who are both friends and aspiring comedians, through their holiday stress. Billy has to help with his niece with his brother out of town, so he takes the opportunity to sign her up for dance classes at a specific studio in hopes of joining t