On the Season 2 DVD, Joss Whedon says “Dollhouse” was a pebble he could’ve turned over for as much as seven seasons. Unfortunately, we only got 26 episodes, but “Epitaphs” (2011-12) – a six-issue comic book series from Dark Horse – turns over the pebble of this great concept a little bit more.
So I’ve finished my rewatches of all the Joss Whedon series between 1997-2010 except one – and it’s the most unusual one. “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” (2008) is three 15-minute web episodes that add up to length of one TV episode. It was penned by Whedon and his brothers Zack and Jed and Jed’s wife Maurissa Tancharoen […]
The Fall 2016 season is Exhibit A in the case that TV is running low on original ideas: “MacGyver”(8 p.m. Fridays, CBS, Sept. 23) is a straight-up relaunch with a new cast, hoping to capture some of the popularity of the ’80s hit. Even though the movie franchise petered to a close 18 years ago with […]
As longtime fans are well aware, the “Star Wars” films as we know them from the 2011 Blu-ray release are different in several small but noticeable ways from the 1977-83 releases – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And even “Episode I” is different from its 1999 release. Sometimes George Lucas made changes because technology […]
Movie commentary: Here’s the in-universe explanation for why Anakin appears as a ghost of his younger self in “Return of the Jedi.”
To round out the “Star Wars” movie reviews on my blog, here’s a look back at my 30th anniversary essay for “Episode IV: A New Hope,” published in the Brainerd (Minn.) Dispatch on May 24, 2007, one day short of the 30th anniversary of the film’s premiere. Although my views haven’t changed much as we approach the […]
To round out the “Star Wars” film reviews on my blog, I thought it would be fun to look back at my review of “Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” from May 20, 2005, in the Brainerd (Minn.) Dispatch. This was my first “Star Wars” movie review for a professional daily paper, so it’s written for a […]
Just for fun — and to round out the “Star Wars” film reviews on my blog – I decided to look back at what I thought of “Episode II: Attack of the Clones” upon its release in the summer of 2002. I wrote the review for my college paper, the NDSU Spectrum. I went on to rank […]
It started as an anthology show that allowed Eliza Dushku to play a different character every week, but in its second season (2009-10, Fox), “Dollhouse” embraces its identity as a serial story exploring what makes a person a distinct individual. It approaches this theme from dozens of different angles, but rather than running off the rails, it’s […]
Among the films, the original trilogy is clearly better than the prequel trilogy, but among the novelizations, the opposite is true. It’s not because of anything Alan Dean Foster, Donald Glut and James Kahn did wrong; rather, it’s because the nature of novelizations changed. In the ’70s and ’80s, they allowed moviegoers to relive the […]