Despite my personal opinions, the reception to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was nothing short of disastrous: A Razzie for Worst Picture, derision across the board, enough fallout to kill the career of producer Harve Bennett and stop William Shatner from ever directing another movie. But Star Trek: The Next Generation fortunately found its feet not long after, and the franchise survived. But what of the aging original cast?...
Star Wars is famous for its alien languages. Even in the original film, audiences heard Chewbacca speak in Shyriiwook, Greedo speak in Rodese, and Jawas speak in, uh, Jawaese. Because the series eschews the universal translators found in Star Trek or Doctor Who, new aliens bring with them new speech styles. You would think that inventing new languages would put a great demand on writers and actors, as when Troy Kotsur helped create Tusken sign language for Book of Boba Fett....
But in 2006, there was just our first look at The Force Unleashed, an action-adventure game that promised to unlock the full potential of the Force, whether that meant launching massive waves of electricity from your finger tips, destroying the sci-fi environments around you, or bringing down an entire Star Destroyer from the sky. And at the center of this new vision of the Force was Starkiller, a mysterious dark sider, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice tasked with purging the last few Jedi in the galaxy in the years after Order 66....
Unlike The Mandalorian and other chart-topping Disney+ offerings, Andor has largely trailed behind its streaming competitors, according to Nielsen’s streaming ratings, although that metric only tracks TV viewing and not folks who watch streaming series on laptops and other mobile devices. Still, Nielsen shows how Andor struggled to rise up the list of top streaming shows in the US in October. And as pointed out by IndieWire, audience demand for Andor may also be down from other Star Wars shows....
One sure crowd-pleaser is “Rendezvous Point,” a Rogue Squadron tale by Jason Fry. This is a fun jaunt back into the spirit of the old X-Wing books, down to the pilot slang, jokes, Z-95 Headhunters, and “uglies.” The dialogue is funny, sincere, heartfelt, and expresses exactly what it means to. It also provides a sweet look at the leaders of the Rebellion, whose disappearance after the Battle of Hoth in the movie provides the stakes....
In the first episode of Stranger Things, Will Byers goes missing on Nov. 6, 1983. Because of this, Nov. 6 has been declared as Stranger Things day by Netflix, and it’s a day where they try to bring fans together in person and online. This year, for the first time, Netflix brought Stranger Things to the big screen with theater screenings of season 4 part 2 across North America that featured costume contests, trivia, and giveaways....
Superman & Lois Season 2 Episode 6 One of the best things about Superman & Lois is its ability to deftly balance a half dozen competing plots and character arcs at any given moment. The show somehow manages to pivot from stories about family drama and smalltown politics to deep cut superhero lore and teenage romantic angst without missing a beat, ultimately creating something that feels utterly unique to any previous version of this story that we’ve seen on screen before....
Tyler Hoechlin has been playing Clark Kent in the former-Arrowverse since Supergirl Season 2, when he won over audiences and longtime Superman fans with his easygoing charisma that showcased much of what has been missing from live action portrayals of the character since Christopher Reeve hung up his cape in 1987. But even though Hoechlin’s performance has always been on the mark, the costume he wore through various appearances on Supergirl and in crossover events like Crisis on Infinite Earths (where we were treated to an absolutely perfect Brandon Routh Superman costume) was faithful and evocative in its own ways, it never quite felt at home with some of the suits worn by his superheroic co-stars....
The former Man U right-back’s words, directed at the political rulers of a country riven by Brexit, tap into a modern craving for decency. Fed a diet of self-serving narcissism from our public figures, we hunger for more wholesome fare: moral character, humility, honesty, kindness. In the year of horrors that was 2020, that appetite was temporarily sated on TV by fictional football manager Ted Lasso. Played in the Apple TV series by Jason Sudeikis (who, in true Ted style, wore a shirt to the Ted Lasso season two launch in support of the three young Black England footballers who received racist abuse after their team’s eventual loss to Italy in the final), Ted’s thoroughgoing decency won everyone over to The Lasso Way....
But the group left it to Peter Jackson to bring an ornament: the sneak peek at his upcoming documentary, The Beatles: Get Back. It’s as happy and silly as any of the annual Beatles’ Christmas greetings the band released when they were together. “Peter Jackson has released an exclusive sneak peek of his upcoming documentary “@TheBeatles: Get Back” for fans everywhere to enjoy,” McCartney wrote as he hung out a five-minute clip on his Twitter....
Yet, at the end of this “slow” year, we were still left staring at a list of about 50 games that are more than worthy of being considered the very best of both 2021 and many other recent years. In a strange way, that combination of certain major games getting delayed and others falling short helped reveal the depth of talent in the modern gaming industry. In a year where it felt like those annual franchise installments stole less of the spotlight, it’s easier than ever to appreciate the sheer number of incredible gaming experiences that were out there waiting to be discovered....
Chess is as fun as it is ancient, but if you want to get in on all the knight and rook action, the sheer number of chess playsets might be intimidating. With that in mind, we’ve gathered together some of the more interesting, colorful, and collectible geeky chess sets for your perusal. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with your traditional black and white handcrafted wooden chess set. If you’re going to be geeky about a new thing, however, you might as well bring some of your older geeky interests to it as well....
The Texas-born actor first became well known to TV audiences thanks to a handful of superhero adjacent roles in the early 2000s. First he portrayed super soldier Alec McDowell a.k.a. X5-494 on Fox’s ahead-of-its-time Dark Angel and then acted opposite none other than Superman as Lana Lang’s love interest Jason Teague on Smallville. He would go on to voice Jason Todd in animated film Batman: Under the Red Hood and the Dark Knight himself in Batman: The Long Halloween....
Samit Basu didn’t expect for The City Inside to connect with audiences outside of his home country of India. “When I was writing it, it was so local to me,” says the 42-year-old author, when we talk from different sides of the planet via Zoom. His “anti-dystopian” novel, out today, is set in a near-future Delhi where corporate and government entities track everything you do and the attention economy has found even more invasive, thorough ways to commandeer our lives....
In a Reddit AMA, Cage said, “I think many of the choices I’ve made have been inspired by film stars from the silent era, as well as cultural expression of performance like Kabuki and some of the Golden Age actors like [James] Cagney, so I don’t know how to say I’ve done something new because those elements are always on my mind.” What you may call a “crazy Cage performance” is just an expressionist interpretation inspired equally by Kabuki theater and Douglas Fairbanks, okay?...
When independent developer Studio MDHR released Cuphead in 2017, gamers all over the world were astounded by the daring art style and fluid gameplay the title offered. Controlling the titular Cuphead and his brother Mugman, players became entranced in a world where they could control a 1930s cartoon that doubled as a video game. Many of the trademark animation techniques of the decade are imitated in the game, namely the rubber hose style....
The Expanse Season 2 Episodes 1 & 2 As long as the hiatus may have seemed, it didn’t take long for The Expanse to answer some of the key questions left over from season 1, but the results may leave viewers unsettled by the end of the two-hour premiere. And that’s likely the point. Much of the promotional material for season 2 urged fans to “pick a side,” and the different political powers in the solar system are locking horns almost right from the start....
Bucky is an interesting part of Marvel history. He predates most characters in the MCU, created during World War II in Cap’s very first appearance by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a blatant Robin knockoff. When Captain America was thawed out and joined the Avengers, it was established that Bucky died in an explosion. It was mandated that Bucky would never come back. He was as permanently dead as Ben Parker and Gwen Stacy....
The Flash Season 8 Episode 12 The Flash returns from a week off to pick up the pieces in the wake of one of its biggest cliffhangers in recent memory: the revelation that the mysterious Black Flame isn’t, in fact, Ronnie Raymond resurrected and returned, but Deathstorm, a monstrous being that feeds on grief and seems more than a little obsessed with his widow Caitlin. Though Deathstorm clearly comes from the same long line of colorful, outlandish comic book villains Team Flash has often been tasked with facing, this story is, at its heart, one about very real and recognizable emotions: Love, grief, loss, the idea that some part of us will always miss those who aren’t with us anymore, no matter long they may have been gone....
The Flash Season 5 Episode 9 It’s pretty crazy that an episode of The Flash that started with John Wesley Shipp wearing his classic 1990 Flash TV series costume actually managed to get better from there. It’s even crazier that it wasn’t the most extreme piece of Mike-specific fan service that the episode pulled off. And the craziest thing of all is just how damn good “Elseworlds Part 1” is. OK, maybe it’s not that crazy....
