Disenchantment – Season 1 Review

Disenchantment

I’m glad that Matt Groening finally got to work on something other than The Simpsons or Futurama for once, but Disenchantment is easily the weakest of the Groening trifecta. And, yeah, that’s not very fair to say this soon, because his other works took a while to find their footing. I think Disenchantment has the potential to turn into something really funny and charming, though. Much like Futurama’s sci-fi setting, a fantasy landscape is perfect for random, zany adventures. Plus, with the story taking place in medieval times, that means no obnoxious “celebrity of the week” cameos. That’s already a huge improvement over modern-day Simpsons.

The problem with the show in its current state is that it feels so small-scale and empty. Bean and her two sidekicks aren’t intriguing enough to carry each episode on their own, and the supporting cast is pretty limited and seldom seen. John DiMaggio as King Zog is great, of course. John DiMaggio is great in everything. But he’s really the only side character that stands out and doesn’t always—and maybe to good effect—get much screen time. Nat Faxon as Elfo, on the other hand, is fun in small doses but is in the show a little too much. If they can find the right balance with their characters, then I think the jokes will start to fall into place and feel more natural. As is, I’m interested… but not a fan yet.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle Review

Mario + Rabbids

Well, this was an unlikely combination. Not only did the world not need a Super Mario / Raving Rabbids crossover, but you would have never guessed that either franchise would become a turn-based strategy game. And yet it oddly… works. Many people have compared it to XCOM, which I haven’t played, and that may be a good thing, since Mario + Rabbids most likely dumbs down the gameplay quite a bit. There’s not a lot of depth to the battles, but they do feel kind of puzzle-like as you try to juggle your characters’ strengths, weaknesses, and positions on the map. Later enemies also change the rules a bit, forcing you to experiment with lesser characters, which I actually appreciated.

The battles are definitely the highlight of the game, though I could see it getting pretty monotonous if it was just battle after battle after battle. So I understand the design choice of having an overworld with secrets to find and additional puzzles to solve. Unfortunately, 80% of the treasure chests you come across contain nothing but music and artwork, the lamest of video game rewards. And 80% of the overworld puzzles boil down to pushing a box or a button until something finally slides or rotates into place. It’s really not that interesting, and after a while, I dreaded these downtime moments and just wanted to jump right into the next battle. Like the name of the game itself implies, it’s a weird mash-up of ideas that doesn’t always blend well.

Crazy Rich Asians Review

Crazy Rich Asians

Full disclosure, I’m a white dude married to a Chinese immigrant. A lot of things in this movie should have resonated with my wife, but halfway through, she leaned over to me and said, “I’m bored…” There just isn’t a lot going on in this movie, less so than your normal rom-com. The central conflict is that our main character’s boyfriend’s family is super rich while Rachel is only kinda rich. I mean, she’s a professor at NYU, so it’s not like she has it rough or anything. It’s hard to enjoy a movie where everyone’s lives are varying degrees of perfect. Even Rachel’s college roommate, who she later meets up with in Singapore, is really well-off. Just not crazy well-off like her boyfriend’s family.

With the first half of the movie being nothing more than watching rich, super rich, and kinda rich people meet, eat, and party, it’s admittedly not that entertaining unless you like food and designer porn. The class disparity needed to be a bigger issue and needed to be an issue much sooner in the movie. Yes, the mother-in-law eventually says she doesn’t want Rachel to marry her son, but that conflict is too slow to boil and too quickly resolved. If this was supposed to be a Cinderella-like story, we really needed more Cinderella and less Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

So my wife and I left the theater feeling somewhat conflicted. On one hand, we’re happy to support an Asian-centric Hollywood movie, but on the other hand, we don’t want to support the idea that that alone gives it a pass. Yes, the production values were there. Constance Wu was a delight in the lead role. And Awkwafina as the obligatory loud, zany friend was actually pretty funny and arguably the best thing about the movie. Even though Crazy Rich Asians subscribes to a lot of rom-com clichés, it at least does them well. Unfortunately, the story was pretty thin and “boring” overall. But if this marks a new trend in Hollywood diversity, then so be it.

Fire Emblem Warriors Review

Fire Emblem Warriors

Of all the Warriors-style games I’ve played (One Piece, Hyrule, Orochi), this one was probably the weakest. A big part of that is because I’m, frankly, not much of a Fire Emblem fan. But you gotta admit that these aren’t exactly unique/iconic characters, anyway. Many of the characters look pretty similar. Gameplay-wise, they also play similarly. It’s kind of annoying to have two characters with the exact same skills and moves. On top of that, several characters are horseback riders who feel out of place and simply aren’t as fun to control. So when all is said and done, there were maybe 5-6 characters I actually enjoyed using.

To be fair, though, those six were pretty damn cool. I liked that you could switch between characters mid-battle and pair up with different support characters or even give those support characters marching orders. It just wasn’t intuitive at first how to swap out who’s going into battle with you or how to play local co-op. There’s a lot to be desired here, a definite need for better menus, voice acting, and a map that isn’t so frustratingly difficult to read. But I’m a sucker for hack ‘n slash RPGs, and once I got into the game—past the halfway point of Story mode, unfortunately—I had fun and expect to continue with the extra History mode for a few more hours, at least.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Review

Jurassic World

I really did not pay enough attention to the marketing for this one. What little I did see suggested that the movie was going to revolve around trying to save the dinosaurs from a self-destructing island. In actuality, that plot point only takes up about 10 minutes. And, unfortunately, those 10 minutes were the best part of the movie. Trying to save a bunch of dangerous, wild animals from going extinct (again) with an active volcano in the background in itself would have been a great story to watch slowly unfold. So I was a little peeved when, in the most cliché of clichés, the military escorts quickly turned out to be the villains who were just there to tranquilize a few dinosaurs and ship them back home to auction off.

Thus, the rest of the movie—you know, the majority of it—takes place on a small, cramped boat and then in the small, cramped hallways of a mansion. What’s the point of even making a dinosaur movie if you’re just going to restrict your dinosaurs to chains, cages, and hallways? It felt like an intentional way to cut costs and manufacture suspense. Ooh, look, there’s a dinosaur in the girl’s poorly lit bedroom! Isn’t that scary?! Except said dinosaur is another GMO dino in the same vein as the Indominus Rex. Come on, people… we don’t go to Jurassic Park movies to see new monsters. We want to see the dinosaurs we memorized as kids come to life. Certainly not relegated to friggin’ chains and cages for 90% of the movie. Yeesh.

Arrested Development – Season 5 Review

Arrested Development

It’s hard watching one of your favorite TV shows grow old. While it’s pretty neat that services like Netflix are willing to resurrect 10-year old properties (and even more miraculous that the original cast and crew are still willing to be a part of it), I think I would have preferred for Arrested Development to rest in peace after three perfect seasons. 2013’s Season 4 was definitely messy. It was a fun experiment and had its moments of greatness, but it clearly struggled to get the cast all in one room and tried too hard to tell a cohesive story. Five years later, Season 5 struggles again to pick up where Season 4 left off, weighed down by some of the plot points the prior season unfortunately set up for it.

Season 5 works best when it’s not trying to be a sequel. Once we get into newer storylines—like Maeby pretending to be a senior citizen or Michael finding out about the family’s beach cottage—glimpses of the original Arrested Development start to shine through. This is also helped by the fact that the cast interacts with each other more. This isn’t a hodgepodge of character-specific vignettes anymore. Scheduling conflicts are obviously still at play, though, since some characters seem to rarely run into each other, and Lindsay is altogether banished to green-screen hell. Honestly, if Portia de Rossi can’t be there in-person, they should just write her out. It was really distracting how fake her presence was.

At the end of the day, Season 5 is a lot better than Season 4 but isn’t nearly as good as the original run. The cast just feels worn out, and the writing isn’t as snappy. Young Arrested Development excelled at setting up jokes in early episodes that paid dividends later on or slowly escalating recurring one-liners until they became old hat. Season 5’s running joke about Michael not knowing about the beach cottage was funny but was the only joke that felt truly “Arrested.” Other times, it seemed like the show was setting something up but would then deliver the punchline during the same scene. In the era of streaming, it feels weird for a once progressive TV show to dumb down its long-game cleverness.