Goodbye to Cynicism
The 58th – and second-to-last – episode of The Wire, David Simon’s sociological HBO drama about Baltimore, is titled “Clarifications,” and one scene succinctly serves that purpose. When McNulty takes his faked serial killer of homeless men to FBI profilers, they nail the detective’s character in a few sentences based on his “evidence”: The murderer, they say, is a high-functioning alcoholic who works in a bureaucracy and has a problem with authority. McNulty – in Dominic West’s performance, always lacking self-awareness – can barely cloak his petrified amusement. He seems to be thinking: Am I that easy?
Tagged: David Simon, HBO, Reviews, Television, The Wire
Depending on how you choose to count, there are either three or four Batman resurrections in The Dark Knight Rises.
The Academy Awards’ process for choosing its Best Picture nominees isn’t broken, but it could easily be better. A system that 
In David Cronenberg’s The Brood, the monsters have the size and shape (and snowsuits) of little children, but everything else about them is off. You could point to their foreheads, or their noses, or their skin tone, or the color of their hair, or the way they move, but that misses the bigger picture. There’s no single element that makes these creatures grotesque. It’s the collection of features and details that approach being normally human without ever getting there.
We finally have a good point of comparison for the comic-book titans DC and Marvel: Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. They were released less than two years apart; they both represented the first solo vehicle for a female superhero in their respective universes; they were both directed or co-directed by a woman; and they’re both origin stories that largely stand apart from ongoing narratives. In a narrow test of brand strength, they strongly support the idea that Marvel drinks DC’s milkshake.
I am admittedly writing mostly from ignorance, but I can’t see any way that the 