Jordan Ferguson is a lifelong pop culture fan, and would probably never leave his couch if he could get away with it. When he isn’t wasting time “practicing law" in Los Angeles, he writes about film, television, and music. In addition to serving as TV Editor and Senior Staff Film Critic for Next Projection, Jordan is a contributor to various outlets, including his own personal site, Review To Be Named (where he still writes sometimes, promise). Check out more of his work at Reviewtobenamed.com, follow him on twitter @bobchanning, or just yell really loudly on the street. Don’t worry, he’ll hear.
Most of Abbas Kiarostami’s films are structured around canny narrative omissions. His movies work to intrigue, pull viewers in with the promise of a resolution, and then do something entirely different. He makes his narratives a mystery as a way to get us to notice other things, as a way to coerce us into paying attention to…
Portrait of a Serial Monogamist is trying too hard in all the wrong ways. The film pushes hard on its specific milieu, the Parkdale, Toronto lesbian community, and on cultural signifiers (its main character is Jewish, but “Jew-ish” because the film is not putting much effort into its jokes), but does not spend the time necessary to make any of it feel ..
There’s a sadness to the Moffat-era Doctor Who Christmas specials that belies their casual broadness and often silly or nearly irrelevant holiday flourishes. “A Christmas Carol” is all about loss and it inevitability, the way it can harden us to the world or allow us to recognize its fleeting beauty.
The last two times The Doctor has regenerated, it has happened in a Christmas special. “The End of Time” was a two-parter, but it started at Christmas, and “The Time of The Doctor” gave The Eleventh Doctor his swan song in a town called Christmas on the planet of Trenzalore.
He comes shrouded in myth, a shadow lurking at the edges of your imagination. To most of the world, he doesn’t even exist; only a small subset of the superstitious believe in him, and even they might have their doubts. Yet they are careful, modulating their behavior, looking over their shoulders, wondering, worrying. He sees you when you’re sleeping.
Christmas exists at a weird middle point between beginnings and endings, at the sort of place where you can squint just right and absolutely believe in magic. The “reason for the season” is, of course, a birth, the most quintessential and obvious of beginnings.
Baked into the core of Orange is the New Black is the idea that prison doesn’t put your life on hold. It’s easy to think of prison as a pause button, as a chance to stop and think about your life and how you got there, and for the ladies of Litchfield Prison, it is often that.
Doctor Who is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is a show built on the iconic, trading heavily in iconography. It’s stories are always bigger than it can manage—that’s what makes them Doctor Who stories.
When this season began, I talked about “The Magician’s Apprentice” as “bad Moffat,” as an example of all of the ways the showrunner’s style could go wrong if tweaked in just the wrong way, to make an episode that is all spectacle and no import, engineered around meaningless reveals without much concern for any thematic undergirding.
First she was a Dalek who thought she was a human. Then she was a bar maid who could pass as a governess. Then she was an Impossible Girl. She was many, many things before we finally got to see who Clara Oswald really was. If Peter Capaldi holds the role of The Doctor for many, many more seasons, chances are slim he will ever have a more iconic companion than Clara Oswald.