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Happy Death Day 2 U (2019)
Time Looping (with very mild spoilers)
Though it doesn't have the shock of the new, this sequel is a clever and witty return to Jessica Rothe's endless reliving of a hellish groundhog day. This time we get an explanation - a science experiment gone wrong, making the film more sci-fi than slasher, though that's still there. Tree's frustrations with facing the same spoken lines and encounters day after day really shines through this time: she's like a character in a clunky video RPG. There are also a bevy of clever references - the obvious one to Back to the Future, the They Live! poster in Carter's room, the nicely setup game of Catan in the lab, the Connors science building (a references to the Lizard from Spider-Man), a number of one-off lines, etc. There are also false starts and false finales. In its own way, every bit as good as the original.
The X Files (1993)
Conspiracy is Fun Again
Contains mild spoilers.
As other reviewers have noted, the first episode is a bit let down by a first half of "catching up" and sloganeering, presumably aimed at new viewers who weren't X-Philes during the original run of the show. But once Mulder confronts Skinner in his empty basement office, the game's afoot.
It's a joyous return to the grim paranoid fantasies of the original series, complete with a re-enactment of the Roswell crash that leaves little doubt as to its reality. The pilot ups the ante by introducing a young right-wing version of Mulder, talk show host Tad O'Malley, who with Mulder crafts a whole train of new post-9/11 conspiracies that seem a lot more plausible today than did those in the original series. NSA spying, drones, Wikileaks, non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Patriot Act. These aren't science fiction. They're facts. Mulder's exposition of a massive global conspiracy near the end is classic X-Files, tying together the last fifteen years in a dizzying meta-narrative.
Mulder and Scully are a bit older and a bit slower, but there's no mistaking who they are, iconic heroes weighed down by a bevy of personal problems and doubts. Conspiracy is fun again.
Heroes Reborn (2015)
Just Too Much Tripe to Swallow...
WARNING! Mild spoilers up to episode 5 present... if you're past that, then no danger.
Being a fan of the original Heroes, I wanted to like Heroes Reborn. The atmosphere and music is there. HRG is there. Marvel mutants lite are there. But after four episodes, there's a bit too much tripe to swallow. Here are some weird events and anomalies and physical impossibilities that struck me:
* Why are there a half dozen 30-something men with dark hair and scruffy beards? I'm thinking of the mutant hunter Collins, the Gutierrez brothers, the hunted French vanisher, Dylan Bruce's character (should have stuck with Orphan Black), to a degree the priest. This speaks to lazy casting and a lazy makeup department. Did they get a discount on Marine corp electric shavers and black hair dye?
* I appreciate the Canadian setting of the weather witch character Malina, but when she "goes south" a bit, we see her walking through a forest with the worst spray-painted snow I've ever seen on TV. I had to stare at it to figure out it was supposed to be snow. It's not always snowing in Canada you know: forests up here look like forests below the 49th parallel. And why no Canadian characters given the show's settings and shooting location? Some of it's shot in KW and Hamilton, just down the road from where I live – are American audiences so narrow minded they can't swallow a Canuck character or two? The answer is no, by the way: Oprhan Black, Continuum, Stargate Atlantis and other SF shows prove that.
* How can "norm" Gutierrez jump out a second-story building wearing body armour and not break his leg (episode 4)?
* Why has Carlos never looked through the grate on the floor of the body shop at his dad's secret super-hero lair until well into the series? I know that if I had a grate in my basement from which strange sound and lights emanated, I'd check it out.
* Why doesn't Luke Collins have any inkling of his sun power prior to his bursting out?
* Why hasn't Tommy experimented with his teleportation power prior to the series' start? Why not take a can of Coke and try to teleport it across a room? He seems pretty clueless until his ice cream scooper gal pal shows up. Surely a teenage kid is going to be inquisitive about his powers and try to figure them out.
* I get that Joanne Collins is out for revenge. But it seems unlikely she and Luke would go on the infinite killing spree we see them on. A deus ex machina to create "bad guys". Sure, Luke has his doubts, but it seems like these are partly based on being "a mutant like me".
* I can't wrap my head around Harris's multiple-man power. He's cloning himself: OK, but do the clones feel pain? It seems not. Does he feel their deaths? Does he have a mental link to each of them? Why do the dead clones turn to dust?
* Why does the Renautus Cerebro machine still work after Molly Walker's mutant-detecting power disappears? If I unplug my microwave, it doesn't still reheat slices of pizza, even if I put them right in the middle of the platter.
* As others have said, Ren and Miko are a bit too much Hiro and Ando, though minus about ten years. Her video game power is fun to see once or twice, but it lacks the hard sci-fi edge of Hiro's time-space shifting.
* More Mohinder please. Shouldn't have killed off Molly Walker.
Having said all this, Heroes Reborn aka Heroes Lite is fun to watch. I'm not a troll: I can easily make a list of a dozen SF and fantasy shows from the last decade or so that I think are great. But you have to turn off about 50% more brain cells to accept the world it creates – you need Sylar to steal about half your common sense and rationality. It's like the Saturday morning cartoon version of the original show: still entertaining, but not a show about "real" superheroes.
What kills me is that with our current economy of mass part-time low-wage work and systemic unemployment even among people with substantial higher education (including me), there are writers and script editors making a lot of money who missed all these obvious points. If the Dutch dikes had these plot holes, citizens of the Netherlands would go to work in scuba gear.
Sunnyside (2015)
The Sunny Side of Laughter
One of the basic reasons to watch comedy TV shows is to make you laugh. The many bland, formulaic American sitcoms that pollute our airwaves rarely do this. That's why Sunnyside was such a pleasant surprise – it's genuinely quirky and genuinely funny. A sketch comedy show with recurring characters set in the "Sunnyside" neighbourhood in a seedy section of the middle of Toronto, it's part of the absurdist, surreal tradition of British TV comedy (Monty Python, Big Train, The Mighty Boosh and Spaced) that's also seen in bit and bites in Canadian sketch comedy (SCTV, The Frantics, and Kids in the Hall, especially the laconic cops played by Bruce McCullough and Mark McKinney, replicated in this series). The other thing that Sunnyside borrows from this tradition is the idea of the world turned upside down – instead of celebrating the lifestyles the successful middle class, if not of the rich and famous (e.g. Charlie Sheen's sitcoms) – it's the phony aesthetes, the down and out and the working poor who make us laugh. They're all over the place in Sunnyside: the pretentious barista Shaytan, the skanky women fishing for money in a sewer, the woman who crashes an art exhibit to get free wine. There's also some social satire, as in the sketch of the man who is so reliant on Siri and his iPhone that he winds up on his back in an alley being robbed. And the surrealism is at times gut-bustingly funny, as in the episode "Australia", the title of which doesn't make sense until the last line – "It's like they've never seen an Australia moon!" If you prefer "Mom" or "Mike and Molly" or "Modern Family" to this show, we don't live in the same mental universe.
Schitt$ Creek (2015)
Up the Creek - With a Comedy Paddle?
I was cheering for show despite the fact that, unlike sketch comedy shows like SCTV and Kids in the Hall, and radio shows like The Irrelevant Show, Canadian sitcoms have tended to fall flat on their faces. The first episode started off little better than the typical committee-produced Hollywood sitcom, without a lot of laughs. But it grew on me by the second episode with its low-key quirky humour (somewhat disguised by the lack of a laugh track). Eugene Levy is a fine form as a fish out of water, and fellow SCTV alum Catherine O'Hara is effective (though a bit strident) as his freaked-out wife. Emily Hampshire is especially good as the grounded motel "concierge," playing off the stridency of the Rose family. With some good direction and writing, and a focus on keeping this an ensemble piece (and a reigning in the broader acting of the junior Roses), Schitt's Creek could morph into a Canadian Arrested Development. We'll see.