September 30, 2020
There are two ways to consider Chris Carter’s Millennium, according to most people. One is to see it as an unofficial spin-off from The X-Files that ended up cancelled after it was never quite able either to find or to maintain its stylistic “feet” through its increasingly unpopular three seasons; the other is to see it as a show which…
August 25, 2020
After the jam-packed twisty delight that was season two of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, complicated as a Moebius strip ourobouros, season three — the climax of this luxuriant and decadent meal — can seem, at first glance, almost schizophrenic. On revisitation, the best way to approach it may be as two mini-seasons shoved into a single package, stuck together by Fuller’s…
July 28, 2020
Season Two of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal begins with Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) — framed as the Copycat Killer by Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), thus driving a wedge between Will and everyone (else) who loves him — imprisoned under the watch of Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza) in the Baltimore State Asylum for the Criminally Insane. There he stands either…
June 30, 2020
This month, all three seasons of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal re-appeared on Netflix, roughly five years after the show’s cancellation. To say it’s been one of the few uplifting moments for me thus far in 2020 probably says a lot about what sort of person I am, but then again, I’ve lived with Thomas Harris’s creations for longer than I’ve lived…
April 16, 2020
From its very inception, H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (retroactive spoiler alert for a book first published in 1897) has always been a story about how quickly people tend to stop feeling guilty once you remove all apparent possibility of them getting caught. The titular character arrives in the tiny British village of Iping, already invisible, and making a total…
February 20, 2020
Though I’m obviously saying it anyway, it almost goes without saying that much like its source material, any appraisal of Mike Flanagan’s 2019 film adaptation of the Stephen King novel Doctor Sleep can only ever be truly assessed under the looming shadow of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of its predecessor, King’s The Shining. This is because Kubrick’s version has become…
January 23, 2020
As you may or may not have heard by now, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat recently collaborated on yet another TV miniseries adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — three episodes, produced through the BBC, available right now on Netflix. And much like Gatiss and Moffat’s version of Sherlock Holmes (BBC Sherlock, admired and hated in roughly equal measure by fans…