Yearly Archives: 2015

Jessica Jones (Season 1)

19 Saturday Dec 2015

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Anyone ever heard of earplugs?

by Thom Yee

Jessica Jones images courtesy of Marvel Television, ABC Studios, Tall Girls Productions, and Netflix

Jessica Jones images courtesy of Marvel Television, ABC Studios, and Netflix

People ask me all the time, they ask me, “Thom, when’s this whole… superhero thing gonna end?” Well… they ask me that after the considerable time they’ve been forced to spend with me and after I’ve finally lightened up enough to let them practice a bit of their own free will.

After they’re pummeled to the point of submission by a group of my various bodyguards and henchmen for such impudence — the impudence of suggesting that superhero movies will go away and the impudence of speaking to me as if I owed them (or anybody) an answer — I tell them the same thing I tell myself:

Superheroes will never end!

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Creed

05 Saturday Dec 2015

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Can you take me higher?  To a place like Apollo Creed.
Can you take me higher?  To a place like Rocky III.

by Thom Yee

Creed images courtesy of Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Creed images courtesy of Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The Rocky movies are beloved by many, many people, across a wide variety of generations, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Speaking to an essential part of our shared human experience of fear, self-doubt, and our hope to one day just have a chance at success, they’re also one of the few series of movies that manage to transcend film itself with two statues erected in the character’s honour that can be visited in real life in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps the character runs up during his early training also acting as an important tourist destination for the city. But, as with a lot of movie series, the first was the best and it told a strong enough and self-contained enough story that not only can you easily argue against the first Rocky needing a sequel, it’s pretty easy to argue that every one after the first takes place in an entirely different universe. Continue reading →

The Walking Dead – Start to Finish

30 Monday Nov 2015

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by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC.

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC.

6×08: “Start to Finish”

For a variety of reasons, The Walking Dead can be a tough show to judge objectively. It’s really popular, there are a lot of things going on at once, some of which you might love and some of which you’ll just as easily hate, it’s not a situation most of us can fundamentally relate to (at least not at this extreme a level), and as a prestige-format specialty cable series, it runs on a shortened schedule that doesn’t stick around all year like most 22-24-episode shows on the major networks. For me, especially as a viewer of the show and a reader of the comicbook, it feels like we’ve been in Alexandria forever, but here at the midseason finale, it’s only been the last few episodes of last season and the first half of this season, and everything from this season has really only taken place over the course of a day so far. In that context, it’s kind of shocking the that things have changed so much in this little Safe-Zone since Rick and co. decided to drop in.

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