Spencer

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Spencer
  • IMDb: link

Set at Christmas of 1991, Spencer offers a peek into the holiday with the Royal Family during a tumultuous time between Diana, Princess of Wales (Kristen Stewart), and her husband Prince Charles (Jack Farthing). With her husband’s affair and her marriage at a breaking point, Diana is forced into the traditions and expectations of the holiday which she begins fighting in her own way to try and avoid a death of one-thousand cuts.

The movie is most notable for the lovely performance of the fragile Diana feeling trapped on all sides and even haunted by Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson), whose similarities to her own situation have become a bit of an obsession. Stewart is perfect here in a role that requires a tremendous amount of vulnerability to carry a film with very little actual plot through until the end.

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Cleopatra in Space – Mentor

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Cleopatra in Space – Mentor
  • wiki: link

In order to graduate to Level 2, Cleopatra (Lilimar), Akila (Katie Crown), and Brian (Jorge Diaz) are each given a younger student with a similar disposition to mentor. Akila and Brian hit it off with their matches quickly, but Cleo struggles with reaching the impulsive and annoying Philo (Gunnar Sizemore) who nearly get the pair killed on a mission on the Moon of Naqada (that they weren’t even assigned). The episode serves to help Cleo understand Khensu‘s (Sendhil Ramamurthy) exasperation with her behavior, which, of course, was the point of the exercise all along. Oh, and Cleo gets to fight a robotic dinosaur, which even Philo has to admit was pretty cool.

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Hit-Monkey – Pilot

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Hit-Monkey – Pilot
  • IMDb: link

How does a monkey become a hitman? That’s the question the “Pilot” episode of Hit-Monkey answers when a wounded assassin (Jason Sudeikis) takes shelter in the mountains after being double-crossed by his employer only to be taken in by a tribe of monkeys. When other killers arrive to finish the job the tribe and the assassin are wiped out, except for a single monkey who was against the tribe taking in the killer in and picks up his weapons to avenge his fallen family becoming… Hit-Monkey. Seriously, how did Marvel do Hit-Monkey before Fin Fang Foom!?

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Injustice

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Injustice
  • IMDb: link

Adapted from the 2013 video game and subsequent comic series, Injustice offers a look at a dark future where tragedy befalls Lois Lane (Laura Bailey) which changes the path of Superman (Justin Hartley) and the DCU. The game was far from the first to examine this idea.

Kingdom Come, in which the Joker (Kevin Pollak) is also responsible for Lois’ death, gives us a future where Superman retreats and a new generation of less-honorable heroes take his place. Justice League‘s “A Better World” gives us an alternate Earth where the League has become Lords of a dystopian future. Both are more effective versions of similar themes than what we are given here.

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The Blacklist – Benjamin T. Okara

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: The Blacklist – Benjamin T. Okara
  • wiki: link

The latest case, involving someone killing using secret DARPA technology to murder the scientists who designed it, takes a backseat to several ongoing B-stories involving someone framing Harold Cooper (Harry Lennix) for murder, Alina‘s (Laura Sohn) health and a bombshell dropped on her marriage, and trouble for Raymond Reddington (James Spader) regarding Dembe‘s (Hisham Tawfiq) work for the FBI. The later causes Red to question his return again when Dembe’s life is put in danger by a potential ally and he’s forced to choose whether to protect Dembe or allow him to come to harm. It’s unfortunate that the Blacklister and the invention get bumped for so many of these other stories that aren’t nearly as interesting (although the Dembe storyline does end in a tease as to what Reddington left his former comrade in a box).

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