by Thom Yee

Community images courtesy of Sony Pictures Television

For those of you who’ve missed out on one of the best sitcoms of all time (and for you, this, then, must be the darkest timeline), Community is ostensibly the story of Jeff Winger, an attorney disbarred for having a fake undergraduate degree who enrolls at Greendale Community College where he ends up forming a study group with six disparate students.  And as the years pass, these disparate students grow closer, as the study group becomes a surrogate family.

Really though, Community is about the conceits, tropes and conventions of mass media — movies and television especially.  Community is a satire of the sitcom genre, an examination of pop culture in general, and occasionally a profound critique of how we are all affected by the mass media we consume.  And it’s one of the smartest and most ambitious comedy series of all time. Or at least it was.

Continue reading →

by Grace Crawford

All images courtesy of MGM.

Back in 2001, Disney released a little movie called Atlantis: The Lost Empire. It did pretty well at the box office, though it got mixed reviews and isn’t generally considered to be one of Disney’s better animated films. It, along with Treasure Planet and possibly a couple of movies I still haven’t seen, is part of a select group of films that draws on old stories—not fairy tales—and brings them to life in a highly stylized way.

But wait—that’s the wrong Atlantis, isn’t it? There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the occurrences of Atlantis in popular culture, and it’s because we are fascinated by it. An ancient city sinks beneath the waves and is never seen again—it may have been pride, misfortune, war, greed, fear, or a whole host of other things that caused the city to be destroyed.

Continue reading →

by Grace Crawford

All images courtesy of AMC Television and Weiner Bros., Silvercup Studios, and Lionsgate Television.

So first order of business. I just finished my third year of university (yay me) and my fourth is my practicum. This was my first week at an ad agency (also yay me), and in honour of that I thought I would do a Mad Men review, because I was silly enough to think that watching Mad Men would be adequate research for the fast-paced world of advertising. Pro tip: it’s really not.

Continue reading →

by Grace Crawford

All images courtesy of HBO.

So apparently season 3 of Game of Thrones has started up again. Which is cool, I guess, except I only got partway through season 2 before I got slammed with school and had to stop, and I don’t remember anything that happened in A Storm of Swords except for the Red Wedding, and if you don’t know what that is I won’t spoil it for you (although seriously. The Red Wedding, you guys). I’m partway through A Dance with Dragons, though, which is shaping up to be a pretty solid book, so I figured I’d take a crack at the TV show that’s at least partly to blame for the deluge of medieval fantasy that’s flooded into the entertainment world.

I love fantasy; I always have. I began with Narnia, moved on to Hogwarts and Middle Earth, and am now quite happily ensconced in the Seven Kingdoms. Fantasy always has magic, which I love, and often has a medieval setting, which I also love. But what I don’t like is a world that’s meant to be medieval but just comes across as vaguely so. Continue reading →

By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of BBC

I’ve loved Sherlock Holmes since I was a kid. I read all the books, watched that CSI episode about the guy who killed himself and created a murder mystery around it, and I even own a t-shirt with Sherlock and the two Watsons on it. I don’t profess to be an expert, especially as it’s been a long time and I’ve forgotten quite a few of the details, but I love reading murder mysteries, and that’s because of Holmes.

Continue reading →

By Grace Crawford

Images courtesy of Shine Television and FremantleMedia

If you were following my Twitter or Facebook or peeking in through my bedroom window, you know that I had a pretty nasty case of the flu for a solid week. I have recovered (thanks for not asking, jerk), though I’ve now got laryngitis, so my life is just fabulous at the moment. At any rate, that was a seven-day stretch spent in bed, and because it wasn’t the fun kind of seven-days-in-bed, that meant I had to find some way to entertain myself. My sister suggested I watch Sherlock, so I did, and once that was over—too soon, I might add—I carried on with the BBC’s marvelous programming and started watching the first season of Merlin. Now stop whining about how Sherlock is such a better show and why am I reviewing Merlin instead when it’s not nearly as good, because shut up, that’s why. I’ll get to it when I get to it, so stop nagging me, woman.

Continue reading →

By Grace Crawford

Once Upon a Time images courtesy of Disney-ABC Domestic Television

SPOILER ALERT: … I spoil everything.

For the last year or so, I’d been meaning to watch Once Upon a Time.  I’m a sucker for a good fairy tale, and I’m not ashamed of it, because I’m a Utero-Canadian and I can do literally whatever I want.  It was actually a surprisingly well-kept secret.  I think the first time I heard of it was an ad in a magazine I was idly flipping through during a haircut, at which time I took note of it and went right back to judging the Kardashians, who I think may have still been relevant in late 2011.  Since then I’ve seen a couple of ads before other programs I somehow found the time to watch, but it basically flew under the radar for me, and probably for a lot of other people.  Then my mother went out of town for four days, and instead of doing my homework and keeping up with the housework, that sneaky voice in the back of my head piped up and said, “Screw that, let’s sit around and watch some motherf***ing fairy tales.”  So I listened to it, and I watched some motherf***ing fairy tales.  And I have to tell you…

Continue reading →