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I sat down to read The Kaiju Preservation Society, the latest novel from one of my favorite authors, John Scalzi. Right away, the protagonist is introduced as Jamie, an ambiguously gendered name. No hint right away whether the character is male or female. No problem, I’ll just keep reading, and I’m sure it will be […]
This was an okay episode. The writing and the acting for the feds was pretty bad, though. The guest star for this episode was Bruce Willis, before “Die Hard” or “Moonlighting” or anything else that made him famous. He played an asshole.
An all-around decent episode. I believe we have reached the point of having worked out all of the kinks in the production of “Miami Vice”. In particular, one of the kinks that has been worked out is the lieutenant that the department reports to. Lt. Castillo is a dignified, quiet-spoken, serious leader, and he is […]
They make some strange budget choices on this show. The episode starts out with some beautiful footage of the cigarette boat in the ocean. It was shot aerially, which in 1984 means by helicopter. Then they slapped together a montage of reused footage several minutes long to fill time. They figured out how to combine […]
The writing, directing, and acting are getting better. A natural bit of comedic relief, but otherwise a fully serious episode. This one revives the Calderone character from the pilot, and it also leans heavily into Crockett’s divorce situation. Gregory Sierra’s character got killed off in this episode. His was the worst acting, not to mention […]
This was the first episode that had a significant comedic deviation, mainly in the form of “Noogie”, a character with a ridiculously over-the-top persona. I don’t know if the show was trying to find itself or what. It wasn’t very amusing, and it didn’t really fit the rest of the show. Instead of car chases, […]
Another essentially serious episode. However, there seems to be some attempt to make a couple of the regular supporting characters some kind of comedic relief. It isn’t very good. The direction for the supporting characters in general is really bad, which makes the story feel disjointed. Some of the dialog was pretty bad, too. A […]
The pilot episode would have aired as two hours. There’s almost no comedy, and it was satisfyingly serious. It establishes an origin story for Ricardo Tubbs, and it characterizes “Sonny” Crockett as coming out of a failed marriage with a six-year-old son. (I didn’t recall the ex-wife and son, and I assume that means they […]
I’m not sure I would say that “Miami Vice” was formative for me during my teenage years, but it was certainly iconic. Don Johnson was for me the embodiment of cool. Jan Hammer’s synth-heavy music resonated with my soul. All those shots of cars driving down night streets were the kind of cinematic imagery I […]
When Russia invaded Ukraine, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Russia would have its way. A Goliath pushing around a little nation. However, Ukraine’s resistance has been surprisingly effective, and Russia is revealing the limits of its power. Russia rebounded after the cold war, and it again considered a “super power” in the world. Russia […]
