Ballard – Library of Lost Souls

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Ballard – Library of Lost Souls
  • IMDb: link

Spinning off from the Bosch series, the opening episode of Ballard introduces us to Maggie Q as LAPD Detective Renée Ballard who fits the classic mode of a smart and tough cop whose obsessive search for the truth rubs some the wrong way. Something, alluded to multiple times in the episode but not yet revealed in full, got Ballard shunned to the ass-end of the LAPD. Newly demoted to head of LAPD’s Cold Case unit, Ballard works mostly with retirees and volunteers attempting to solve older crimes everyone else has given up on.

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Foundation – A Song for the End of Everything

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Foundation – A Song for the End of Everything
  • IMDb: link

It doesn’t take long into the first episode of the new season of Foundation to remind me of my problems with the series. “A Song for the End of Everything” isn’t centered around the Foundation, although we do get one scene involving a single character (Alexander Siddig) taking with the Hari Seldon AI (Jared Harris), which ultimately doesn’t add anything to the story (other than get the Star Trek actor on-screen), the focus almost entirely on the decaying Empire which David Goyer has used as a throughline for the series continually returning us to the inbred clones of Trantor. While less involved, other than her narration, the show also brings back the overused crutch of Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) as well who awakes from cryosleep in time to interject herself into events as Goyer’s deus ex machina rather than allow the next generation of the Foundation to fight their own battles.

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Superman

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Superman (2025)
  • IMDb: link

It may not be great, but James Gunn‘s first outing with the Man of Steel certainly outshines any recent depictions of the character. Not shying away from the immigrant story of an alien adopted by human parents making Earth his home, 2025’s Superman does what David Goyer and Zack Snyder struggled so mightily with every step of the DCEU – it finds the heart of the character who, despite being alien, is human in all the right ways.

Superman captures some of the feel of Richard Donner‘s original while also adding enough of its own touches (including teasing us with variations to John Williams‘ original theme) to make it stand out more than Superman Returns. It’s a bit too zany in places for me, and a bit too obvious in nods to current events, but when Superman stays focused on its titular character there’s an awful lot to like here.

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Rick and Morty – Ricker than Fiction

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Rick and Morty – Ricker than Fiction
  • wiki: link

After an extreme reaction to the latest sequel in the Maximum Velocitree franchise, Rick (Ian Cardoni) and Morty (Harry Belden) set out to prove they can do better. However, after the pair are pulled into Movie-lizer Rick creates to fix the movie script they are forced to make all their changes make sense and find a way to get back to a reasonable ending which is the only way they can escape the movie. With more of nod to Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Elementary, Dear Data” than the movie it steals its title from, a simple misspoken sentence by Rick leads to the trouble the pair find themselves in leaving Jerry (Chris Parnell) to try and right the script from the real world.

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