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Supergirl – Hostile Takeover

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Supergirl – Hostile Takeover
  • wiki: link

Supergirl - Hostile Takeover

Supergirl flies into its winter break with an episode that highlights Kara‘s (Melissa Benoist) relationships with the women in her life. In one storyline she works with Winn (Jeremy Jordan) and Superman’s black friend James “Don’t Call Me Jimmy” Olsen (Mehcad Brooks) to solve a hacking scandal that comes close to forcing Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart) to step down as the head of the company she built. In the other Kara confronts her aunt Astra (Laura Benanti) whose true motivations continue to be ill-defined.

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Supergirl – Human for a Day

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Supergirl – Human for a Day
  • wiki: link

Supergirl - Human for a Day

After blowing out her powers fighting Red Tornado, an occurrence the show could have done a better job explaining, Kara (Melissa Benoist) struggles with living a human life. Not only must she deal with a case of the sniffles and a broken arm but when the city is hit by an earthquake the guilt of not being able to help save National City proves to be nearly paralyzing. Of course eventually her body absorbs enough solar energy and with the added jump of adrenaline from the near-death of Superman’s black friend James “Don’t Call Me Jimmy” Olsen (Mehcad Brooks), our heroine’s powers return in the nick of time to do some good. (As to why the DEO didn’t simply bombard her with solar radiation, drastically reducing the amount of time it would have taken her to recover, is a pretty large plot point the show decides to ignore).

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The Assassin

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Nie yin niangn
  • IMDb: link

The AssassinIt begins with murder and a failed assassination attempt in stark black-and white. Set in China during the waning days of the Tang Dynasty, the film’s title refers to Nie Yinniang (Qi Shu), a young woman trained since the age of 10 to be an assassin. 13 years later when Nie Yinniang shows mercy rather than kill a corrupt government official in front of his young son her master punishes the young woman by returning her home to the northern province of Weibo with orders to kill the cousin (Chen Chang) to whom she was betrothed to as a child before her life took a very different path.

A far cry from the sleek, fast-paced, wire-effects-heavy, and often bloody kinds of films that the genre has been known for in recent years, The Assassin is a slow-paced character study about a woman who struggles with the morality of a calling she’s so obviously skilled at performing. Despite the lush setting of misty mountains, director Hsiao-Hsien Hou‘s film isn’t as polished as expected with several abrupt transitions and a mix of inventive but also bizarre camera placement throughout the film’s 105-minute running time.

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Supergirl – How Does She Do It? / Red Faced

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Supergirl – How Does She Do It? / Red Faced
  • wiki: link
  • wiki: link

Supergirl - Red Faced

Basically re-purposing a storyline from Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman “How Does She Do It?” pins down Maxwell Lord (Peter Facinelli) as the series’ Lex Luthor stand-in as the genius billionaire creates a series of disasters around the city to test Supergirl‘s (Melissa Benoist) abilities. Even going so far as to put himself and potentially thousands of others in danger just to test the Kryptonian hero’s abilities, it’s obvious Lord has bigger plans for both the city and it’s new hero.

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Mockingjay Part 2

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2
  • IMDb: link

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 concludes the adventures of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), a dead-eyed girl from District 12 whose only heroic action over the course of the series took place near the beginning of the first film. I don’t know if the original books on which the movies were based are any good, but the films themselves are one (small) step above torture porn with the least-interesting love triangle ever conceived thrown in for good measure. Do we care who Katniss ends up with? Not really. And because the movies have shown her to be largely unimportant as anything more than a symbol it’s hard to invest any emotion in her journey or its outcome.

Picking up immediately following the events of the last film, Katniss licks her wounds and plans her revenge against President Snow (Donald Sutherland) for turning one of the men she kinda, sorta, loves (i.e. leads on) into a brainwashed killing machine. The fact that Snow is the head of a corrupt government with the blood of thousands on his hands isn’t much of a concern for our heroine who has decided murdering an old man with her own hands is the only form of justice she is willing to accept.

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