Category: Broken Girl Media

Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming

Rambling Randomly

  • I had the opportunity to watch the cinema broadcast of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s stage version of Fleabag, and I’m glad I went. The TV show fleshes out the world and gives everyone clearer motivations, but the stage show has a climax that hits even harder. On TV, Fleabag herself is along for the ride with us, breaking the fourth wall and finding her disaster of a life as entertaining as the audience… when it’s just Phoebe out there by herself, sitting in a chair, the whole thing reads more like a desperate, improvised confession.
  • Speaking of Fleabag, I finally watched S2, and holy shit, it was weird how much Kristin Scott Thomas’s monologue reads like a couple of my posts smashed together.
  • Has there ever been anyone in reality TV history who has undergone a bigger life turnaround than Mike Sorentino? I mean, look… Sitch is still a hard-on in many ways, but I am stunned at the vast difference between Mike 2010 and Mike 2019. I suspect knowing him would still be exhausting —dear god, the affirmations!— but watching him eat his feelings and seek positivity in his world is awfully endearing.
  • Preacher is such a disappointment. The crew took the story off the rails at the end of S1, meandered around doing nothing in S2, tried to get back on-book in S3, and then just completely lost their minds in S4… I honestly don’t even care to finish the season. Casting tiny Dominic Cooper as Jesse Custer was a bad idea to begin with, so the show was always built on a shaky foundation, but this sloppy-ass mess wasn’t inevitable.
  • The Circle is a lot of fun, if only because it gives me the opportunity to get to know Tim, a sweet, caring, super-gay ex-monk with the fashion sense of a Vegas pimp and the pop-culture awareness of a curious, gregarious squirrel. (Watching Tim squeal with delight when someone explains what “WTF” means was almost as fun as watching the younger folks’ puzzled reactions when he called himself a fairy.)
  • Good Eats is back. I love Alton Brown. Bring back Lucky Yates. That is all.
  • I’m very impressed with the Apple Arcade launch… there are enough very good games in there —I’ve played a lot of Grindstone the last couple weeks— to make the $5/month seem like a bargain.
  • The Delta emulator for playing NES, SNES, GBA, and N64 games on iOS was released last week, and after playing with it a bit, I’ve been reminded of a few things. First, with the exception of Super Mario Brothers, NES games were painful to play… I fucking loved Koei’s Genghis Khan in 1989, but just listening to its sound effects in 2019 is annoying as hell. Second, the N64 had the best early lineup of any console, ever. Third, is it just me, or were we all really, really bad at analog-controlled 3D games in the ‘90s? ‘Cause I can now breeze through the still-utterly-delightful-23-years-later Waverace 64 with ease, while I remember it and Mario 64 both being challenging to control at the time. (Speaking of M64, it has aged almost as well… the Mario aesthetic meshed with the N64’s hardware capabilities so perfectly that the result feels timeless.)

Titans & Doom Patrol

In a reasonable world, there is no way Titans and Doom Patrol should be this good. No wonder Kevin Feige killed Marvel’s Netflix/ABC shows… ‘cause outside of Daredevil’s exquisite fight choreography, DC’s TV series make Marvel’s look cheap and kinda timid.

Also, I think we can officially call it: Natalie Portman in Leon is the most influential look of the last 30 years.

The Boys

The Boys doesn’t make a flawless transition to television, but damn is it unexpectedly good.

I mean, Karl Urban’s attempt at Billy Butcher’s accent is occasionally awful, much of the degrading sex and sexual violence from the source material has been toned down or inverted, the limited budget means there are no insane, large-scale fight scenes, and virtually all of the most disgustingly funny stuff has been left out for the sake of delicate stomachs and sensibilities.

But what’s left still works, and works well.

As you’d expect with a #metoo-era version of The Boys, the female characters have all been expanded, but unlike something like American Gods, that expansion pays off. Gender-swapping Stilwell and casting Elisabeth Shue was a great move; the character becomes a slightly more nuanced corporate scumbag. Erin Moriarty does well with an iteration of Annie Jupiter that isn’t an impotent victim, and while I miss the decadence and disinterest of the original Queen Maeve, Dominique McElligott’s more subtle depiction gives the character room to develop.

And Chace Crawford as The Deep is a surprise. First, because Gossip Girl never gave me any indication he had the comedic chops for such a role. Second, because the writers found a clever way to take a woman’s predictable Traumatic Descent Into Self-Loathing and transfer it to a shitty man who actually has it coming.

But holy shit, the real coup here is Antony Starr’s Homelander. With a host of subtle facial expressions and line readings, Starr paints a portrait of an omnipotent egomaniac who is completely fixated on every slight he’s ever endured, great and small. Forget the banality of evil… this is the pettiness of a god.

Is it for you, though? Well, that depends. How do you feel about a man using a newborn baby to murder a room full of armed assailants, or an ersatz Aquaman comforting a captive dolphin with promises to lovingly fuck it later?