Yes. Everything Is Rubbish.

So, I’m watching season 2 of Severance. And as I post this, the ninth episode of the season “The After Hours” has just aired. And I really wanna talk about it. Well, I wanna talk about one moment in particular — Milchick and Drummond’s lil’ chat. Probably one of my favourite moments of the episode, which felt like the culmination of lots of Milchick moments diverging — adding a new wrinkle to a story and a world which already has more wrinkles than a newborn Shar Pei. Severance has made a commentary on a lot of things. Corporate shenanigans. Abuse of power dynamics. Sexisism. Homophobia. Religion. Consent. Control. And now I guess we can add race to the mix. Full disclaimer. To fully pre-empt and prevent being branded a liar and being misleading — the images in this post with subtitles are not official subtitles from Severance. They are subtitles I slapped on the images for extra effect and humour’s sake, in the vein of ‘What would these characters want to actually say’. I am including...

The sequel to the Marvel Studios film which did over a billion dollars at box office but everybody hated, now has a sequel. Why though? Because that money talked louder than the haters. When I review stuff, I really do try to not let the thoughts of others and the drama surrounding the release have too much of a focus. But it really is difficult to talk about a Captain Marvel movie without any mention of the hate campaign which has driven so much of the discourse and straight-up toxicity around it. And it’s really unfortunate for Marvel Studios that it’s reached a point that this is going to hang over anything they put out with Captain Marvel. But some of this is of their own doing, and we’ll get to that. Not only was The Marvels having to release knowing there was a hate train for the first film and Brie Larson, it also had the unfortunate fate of releasing during the SAG-AFTRA strike. And it also had to release in the wake of the fallout caused by the critical and commercial pannings...

An issue with a fair few of Marvel Studios’ films and shows as of late, is that they are tonally all over the place. There’s no real sense of what each of them ultimately wants to be. And this was even a problem with one of phase 4’s strongest offerings; Shang-Chi and The Legend of the 10 Rings. Quantumania is very sure of what it wants to be, but ends up not being what it should have been. An Ant-Man movie.

When I first saw the trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in theatres having watched Spider-Man: No Way Home, I was excited. But when I started reading reviews of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, I dropped my expectations significantly. But what also tempered my expectations was how much I was not enjoying Moon Knight on Disney+. And also remembering that Phase 4 of the MCU has been as patchy as the edges of  Cynthia from Rugrats . Marvel Studios has a real problem with its fourth phase of the MCU. Most of its shows and films thus far has been a case of a great story buried in typical Marvel Studios-isms, smothered with lots of things to make the film as generic and wide-appealing as possible. Whilst simultaneously being so tied to a decade worth of movies, that you can’t even fully enjoy the damn thing if you’ve not watched at least five of the films that had released prior. Phase 4 has given us a taste of Marvel taking some pretty big swings, but Wa...

I went into The Morning Show not knowing anything about it other than it starred Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. I hadn’t seen a trailer. Hadn't read anything of the show. Had no idea of the context of the title. Nothing. ‘Then how did you even land on watching it?’ I hear all two of you ask. Ted Lasso. I was fresh off of a two season Ted Lasso binge. Adored the absolute hell out of it. And so I figured I’d see what other gems be lurking on Apple TV. And thus, The Morning Show. Only it’s far from a gem. It’s a mess. The mess is what kept me watching. But the mess is also what makes this show so bad, because it wants to focus on just creating mess, more than it does trying to tell a good story which involves mess. It’s also the complete opposite of Ted Lasso. Where-as Ted Lasso is a show with lots of heart, characters who learn life lessons, and every episode imparts something meaningful; The Morning Show is cold as all fuck, with characters who learn not a damn thing, and ...