Category Archives: TV

GOLDEN NINJA (1966) has an astronomer who’s discovered the rogue planet Icarus is hurtling towards Earth join a UN team that’s working to destroy the planet with a super-laser. Too bad the sinister Noza’s out to steal the laser and bring about Earth’s death — who can save us now?

Well, as the title tells us, it’s the Golden Ninja, a laughing gold-lame clad superhero who rises from his tomb in ancient Atlantis to battle Noza. This silly but engaging movie was originally Golden Bat, which makes more sense (he has a bat familiar he uses at key moments) — but then again, I can’t imagine anyone watching this movie was worried about the plausibility of Atlantean ninjas. I am, however, bothered that Noza’s weird outfit makes him resemble a four-eyed pantomime horse. “Humans don’t belong in this universe — this universe exists only for me, Noza!”

In BLACK PANTHER: Wakanda Forever (2022), the MU’s Atlantis is transformed into Talokan, an underwater haven where an indigenous Central American tribe fled (by means of a water-breathing potion) to escape Spanish colonialism. Now, though, American attempts to mine vibranium from the ocean floor threaten their existence so their leader, Namor (Tenoch Huerta) invites Wakandan Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and Shuri (Letitia Wright) into an alliance against the surface world.

Okay, he actually demands one, along with ordering Shuri to capture Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the teen genius whose invention makes the mining operation possible. Namor blames Wakanda because their refusal to share their vibranium with the world is what drove America to go looking. And if they refuse? “Our warriors are as numerous as the blades of grass in your kingdom.”

This Black Panther sequel had the challenge of the MCU T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) having died after the first film; one of the plot threads is Shuri dealing with her grief, and her ambivalence over stepping into the hereditary role. I don’t think it met the challenge. Part of the problem is that it’s got a lot to do: Shuri’s grief, more geopolitical conflicts, introducing Namor and Talokan, setting up Riri for her Ironheart series on TV, plus Wakanda vs. Talokan action scenes. The result is a 2hr 40 minute movie and while there’s no shortage of plot, there’s not enough drama for me. Fitting Namor into the Killmonger role — the voice of someone who’s suffered from colonialism and wants Wakanda to Do Something — didn’t work, and neither did Namor. For me, the essence of Namor has always been his arrogance and this version didn’t have that; while he’s imperious and makes demands he comes off more as a leader making tough choices. And while I do love them keeping Namor’s ridiculous ankle wings, why would a Mesoamerican merman say Namor’s catchphrase of Imperius Rex? “There is an entire YouTube channel dedicated to sightings of me.”

By contrast, the third season of MY ADVENTURES WITH SUPERMAN (S1 review here; S2 review here) succeeds admirably. The plot threads include Jimmy insisting he and Kara date other people (he’s convinced she only likes him because she hasn’t seen what other Earth boys are like); Clark talking marriage and Lois freaking out; their kids arriving from the dystopian future to change it; Luthor unleashing a superhuman of his own (spoiler: doesn’t go well); and Clark losing his powers for much of the season. I particularly love a scene in which the depowered Clark gets between a killer and some kids, takes a bullet stopping him and then beats himself up — those kids almost got killed because he didn’t have his powers! Of course he did save them but he just takes doing the right thing as a given and doesn’t consider it. I look forward to S2.“Your fear is a weakness — mine is a weapon.”

Cover by Curt Swan, all rights to images remain with current holders.

The first season of THE BAD GUYS: The Series, showed them climbing to the top of the city’s Worst of the Worst List. The second season switches from caper stories to character: Snake discovering his mother is remarrying, Wolf meeting his old mentor DB Cougar (doesn’t go well), the world’s first-ever criminal thawing out of suspended animation, plus new encounters with rival gangs (the Gruff Goats, the Night Owls).

Finally they get back to crimeing, launch the greatest winning streak since the legendary Crimson Paw (who plays a large role in the Bad Guys movie). Enter Tara Ripper, a vigilante who’s determined to take down the city’s #1 crimesters, and might be smart enough to do it. The series builds up enough added characters I’m surprised it ends here, but the meteor shower at the finish clearly leads into the movie. “I always thought goats fainting were a myth, like white pizza or chiropractors.”

The 2008-2012 series Leverage took a team of crooks headed by the world’s best insurance investigator (Timothy Hutton) to take on the kind of rich, powerful people who take what they want — against them, the team provides leverage. Which is not a new concept (“criminals the law can’t touch” have been the antagonists in multiple TV series and pilots) but here it worked. In 2021, the team returned, absent Hutton but adding Noah Wylie, for LEVERAGE: Redemption, which wrapped up its third and final season last year.

The premise is that in the years since the first series, the team — led primarily by master thief Parker (Beth Riesgraf) — have expanded into an international operation (they have the money). The second season stories focus again on corporate wrongdoing that ruins the lives of regular people, from peddling bogus woo as miracle cures to greenwashing. Plus oddball cases such as a writer presenting himself as the mastermind of the team in a new book — what’s up with that? And what happens when someone kidnaps the guy to make use of his (non-existent) skills? It’s a fun season that lives up to the original show. “Squirrels and other indigenous wildlife chewing through wires have caused 1,300 blackouts in the United States in the past five years.”

After I finished By the Bomb’s Early Light (details tomorrow) I rewatched 1982’s THE ATOMIC CAFE, an antinuclear film assembled out of sections of 1940s and 1950s pro-nuclear and Cold War films. Bikini Islanders smiling happily as their friend Uncle Sam relocates them before the atomic test. Someone explaining how shopping malls mark the difference between Americanism and Communism (“With plenty of free parking for all the cars we capitalists seem to acquire.”). County and Western songs about the bomb (there were a few) playing in the background. Cartoon character Burt the Turtle showing kids the infamous “duck and cover” drills — I’d forgotten that if they don’t have a desk to hide under, simply curling up in a ball on the ground was supposedly the solution. And assuring soldiers radiation is no threat — if you were close enough to get radiation poisoning, the blast would have killed you anyway (if you want more on the government’s myth-making about radiation, I recommend the horrific The Plutonium Files). The documentary does a good job situating all this in the framework of the Cold War, however cynical (justifiably) it is about some of the snake oil the government peddled in that era. “I am not an ‘atomic playboy’ as one of my critics labeled me.”

All rights to images remain with current holders.

When I blogged that the third season of UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS was eventful I had no idea the fourth season would go “hold my cuppa!” Given that it’s all taking place in WW I, I probably should have anticipated that.

James (Simon Williams) and Edward (Christopher Beeny) go off to the front as respectively an officer and an enlisted man. Georgina (Lesley Anne Downe) goes too, as a nurse; for years I thought a sequence where she lights a dying man’s cigarette came from an adaptation of Testament of Youth, but nope. Richard (David Langton), as an MP, has to deal with the political and strategic side.

Among the servants, the staff has to deal with tight rationing, shortages and Rose (Jean Marsh) going to work as a bus conductor as a second job (manpower shortages were chronic then, as in WW II). There’s a clash with a terrified Belgian refugee family, James and Edward returning on leave scarred by what they’ve seen, Hazel’s (Meg Wynn Owen) charity work, Edward and Daisy getting married and a tragedy as the war ends in the season’s final episode (I’d correctly pegged that death would strike on the home front but now how). As always, great viewing. “It wasn’t very dignified — fighting for my husband in a ward full of injured soldiers.”

Following 2022’s superb Prey and the animated Killer of Killers, PREDATOR: BADLANDS (2025) continues the winning streak. I missed hearing about it when it hit theaters last year but as soon as Camestros Felapton blogged about it streaming, I caught it.

The protagonist is Dek (Dmitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a Yautja (Predators’ name for themselves) runt of the litter, thereby deserving of culling. His brother sacrifices himself to give Dek a shot at redemption — hunting and killing the Kalisk, a kaiju no Yautja has ever overcome. Arriving on the Kalist planet, Dek discovers every lifeform on it, even the plants, is hostile. Fortunately he encounters Thia (Elle Fanning), a synth (android from the Alien franchise) who lost her legs trying to capture the Kalisk. She knows this planet; if Dek takes her along, together they might have a chance (“I know the Yautja hunt alone — but they also die alone.”). Suddenly we’re in the Predator/Android buddy comedy I didn’t know I wanted. Of course, Dek is hardly a fun or trustworthy travel companion but it turns out Thia’s got a few secrets of her own … Two thumbs up. “I’ve never been thrown before — what a thrill!”

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Another pick from the Leonard Maltin book TYG got me last year — AURORA BOREALIS (2005) stars Joshua Jackson as Duncan, a Minneapolis twentysomething who’s stubbornly resisting adulting: he works dead end jobs, sticks with the same group of friends he’s always had, and lets life continue in much the same vein it has since he graduated high school.

As the movie starts, however, Duncan’s just lost his convenience store job. His brother is using Duncan’s apartment to bang women without his wife knowing (inspired, Duncan says, by the Jack Lemmon movie The Apartment). And now his beloved grandfather, Donald Sutherland, is suffering both Parkinson’s and the onset of dementia. Can Duncan get his shit together enough to help both grandpa and grandmother Louise Fletcher?

Things change when Duncan meets Kate (Juliette Lewis), his grandfather’s home healthcare worker, a free-spirited vagabond who never stays long in one place. Sparks fly, they become lovers and she begins nudging him to become more than he is — but will the lure of keeping everything the same make a difference?

While I’m not fond of coming of age/New Adult books, I can enjoy the tropes in a movie and this was a good one, well-acted and well-written. The special features reveal it was based on a stage play which explains why, despite the title, we never see the Northern lights. Curiously, everyone insists the closing scene is open-ended because we don’t know how Kate/Duncan will work out in the long run; as you can say that about most HEAs, I don’t find this striking. Still, thumbs up. “Do you realize you sound like Don King when you use big words?”

A friend of mine used to be a huge fan of THE CLOSER, a 2005 TNT series staring Kyra Sedgwick as Brenda Johnson, a former CIA interrogator turned head of a major-crimes unit in Los Angeles. As it turned up on Netflix recently, I gave the pilot a look; it’s solidly done but I don’t know I’ll bother to watch more.

Johnson’s team aren’t thrilled about having an outsider in charge, she has a messy personal life, and in this episode she’s facing a headscratcher: An unknown women has been found murdered in a prominent plastic surgeon’s office. The surgeon’s vanished. The victim’s fingerprints are all over his home while the surgeon’s are nowhere to be found. How does it make sense? Like I said, it’s a solid job, fitting into the subgenre of cops who have One Simple Trick for getting to the truth. The Mentalist and Lie To Me both have someone who can read people like a book; Psych has a guy who’s hyper-observant about everything, HPI has someone who’s hyper-observant and can match up what she sees with a storehouse of knowledge. Here, Johnson’s a genius interrogator; having figured out what’s going on, she calmly guides the killer to a confession.

The results are good and if I were more of a fan of cop shows I might keep up with it. If I had more time for TV (and lately I don’t seem to) I might try a couple more episodes. As neither of these is the case …

All rights to image remain with current holder.

I was planning to write a movie post for today after I emailed the book off. But Friday was supposed to be a no-work day and I didn’t feel like it. So here’s a movie-analysis post from 2009, when I was working on Screen Enemies of the American Way (my working title was The Enemy Within).

For those who don’t remember, that was my book about political paranoia in American films, the belief Communists/Nazis/Japanese/ETs/etc. were infiltrating us to destroy our way of life from within. My chapter on the Red Menace films of the 1950s made me notice how they approached civil rights:

“Watching anti-Communist films for The Enemy Within, I’m struck by how many of the fifties films make an issue out of race.

It’s not surprising. The Communist Party made civil rights a platform plank at a time neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted to risk it. And when the civil-rights movement really got going, a standard charge against it was that it was a Communist plot, with Red “outside agitators” stirring up the Negroes who were otherwise perfectly happy and knew their place (this theme still has some pull on the right, it seems: One columnist wrote last year that only Communists crossed the color line back in the pre-Civil Rights days, so that proves Barack Obama’s parents were Reds—and therefore, of course, he grew up indoctrinated into Communist doctrine) The movies reinforce the second point while making it clear the Party’s support for civil rights is a myth:

•In I Was a Communist For the FBI, a Red speaker addresses Negroes with “a hellbrew of hate cooked up from a recipe written in the Kremlin.” He tells the hero afterwards that he’s hoping to spark black-on-white assaults or even killings, after which the Party will defend the accused and use the incident to make America look bad. The same man also uses the n-word to refer to his black audience after they’ve gone.

•In Red Menace, a priest preaches the glories of the melting pot—it doesn’t matter if you’re Irish, Jewish, black, once you become American you’re welcome—in contrast to which the Communist party emphasizes how minorities are discriminated against (which is equated to promoting separatism and anti-Americanism). When an Italian-American Party member questions official doctrine, a Party leader dismisses him as a “dago.” Later in the movie, a black writer for a Communist newspaper is told by his father that where America has freed its slaves, the Communist keep thousands in slavery behind the Iron Curtain.

•In one episode of I Led Three Lives (American citizen, Communist agent and FBI counter-agent, in case you were wondering), the Party buys up a newsreel company that will present distorted views of America, for example falsely showing that people living in the slum districts are afflicted by poverty and racial discrimination.

•In Trial, Glenn Ford becomes second chair to showboating Communist attorney Arthur Kennedy on a racially charged murder case. While Ford is clearly shown to be sympathetic to the defendant (a Hispanic kid involved with a white girl), the only organized support for the defendant comes from the Communist Party—and we learn that the donations Kennedy is taking for the legal costs are going right into the Party coffers. Not only that, he plans to lose the case, making the kid a martyr to American racism.

This sort of thing shows why it’s important to watch movies wherever possible, not just read synopses in movie books. There’s a lot of stuff. I probably wouldn’t pick up if I did it that way.”

All rights to cover image remain with current holders.