"The Invisible War" - Film Review

The Invisible War is a documentary that succeeds at being both incredibly informative and incredibly engaging. There’s not a moment where my eyes weren’t glued to the screen, even as I grew more uncomfortable and disgusted.

Writer-director Kirby Dick is scathing in his examination but he rarely forces a reaction out of us. He largely lets the terrible truth about the sexual assaults of women in the military speak for itself through the testimonies of a number of former servicewomen who were the victims of rape and sexual assault. 

These stories form the spine of The Invisible War. Dick inserts intertitles with facts, and there are more information-heavy portions where experts lend information on the nature of the situation interspersed throughout, but more important than this is how Dick finds the human story. 

He draws us in, letting the interviews with the servicewomen slowly unravel the awful reality of the military’s terrible handling and concealment of sexual assaults.

The film is never overdone or heavy-handed despite the seriousness of its subject matter.  Dick also moves the film along at a fast clip, never getting caught up for too long in any one aspect of the problem. The way he manages to pull out unexpected pieces of information is another nice detail to the film, notably a brief tangent on the rape incidences for male service members. 

The film is provocative, enlightening, and powerful. It earns just how emotionally fraught it is and it treats its subject matter with the appropriate level of sensitivity. 

Grade: A

"Grand Illusion" - Film Review

Saying Grand Illusion is a prison break movie doesn’t do it justice. Much of the film is about a group of French POW’s attempting to escape from a war camp and later a mountaintop castle. But it’s also more importantly about the things people do in the face of the futility and pointlessness of war.

Grand Illusion frequently has little in the way of plot, but is content just to observe people as they live their lives and try to survive. It’s a joyously humanistic work that’s filled with all different sorts of personalities.Our two big protagonists Captain de Boeldieu and Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay) are French officers taken in as prisoners of war when their plane is shot down in First World War. They soon find themselves in the company of other French POW’s who have begun tunneling towards freedom. But when they’re not digging their way to uncertain freedom, they joke around, work in a garden and even put on a play. 

The film, for all its bleak undertones on the arbitrary nature of war, is rather funny. Soldiers use jokes as defense mechanisms, and different country’s soldiers throw jabs at one another. Julien Carette’s Cartier stands out as the clown amongst the bunch, always trying to lighten the mood. 

The film breaks down into three segments. The first two revolve around “prison breaks” at two very different holding centers. The first is a war camp, but the second is a chateau lorded over by commanding officer Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim – noted character actor). The third becomes something far more contemplative. The two soldiers, Maréchal and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) who have escaped try to make their way to Switzerland but find themselves starving and cold. Rosenthal has broken his ankle and the two of them are at eachother’s throats. A sweet German widow Elsa (Dita Parlo) with a daughter is kind enough to take them in until they’re prepared to move on. Maréchal falls for the woman which makes his inevitable departure all the more painful. 

Grand Illusion isn’t concerned with making a good versus evil conflict out of its story. The Germans and French see themselves as just playing their role in the war, and both sides complain about the pointless nature of the war. The French POW’s don’t seem angry at their captors and respect their position. Both prison escape attempts come from a motivation simply to pull it off, break the rules, and stave off boredom rather than some ill-will, grudge, or fear towards their captors. Much of this provides Grand Illusion with a lovely naturalistic quality. 

All of this sounds like it would be so obvious and forced but director Jean Renoir handles it with a simplicity, subtly and grace that puts other films who've attempted its sentiments to shame.

Funny, sad, and thrilling, and filled with great performances, Grand Illusion is a deeply humanistic film. 

Grade: A-

Doctor Who - "The Rings of Akhaten" - Review

“Is it true?” – Clara “It’s a nice story” – The Doctor

The second episode with a new companion is typically an episode where the Doctor takes them for a test run. "The Rings of Akhaten" is no exception to this rule. Much like in other episodes with this aim, the story is set on some alien planet to put the companion in a completely fish out of water scenario where they show their worth.

Much in this vein the Doctor is able to observe Clara and see what a really great person she is, and how she has many of the qualities a good companion ought to have. She sees a scared child and immediately decides she needs to help her (shades of “The Beast Below”). She questions him when it looks like they’re walking away from a problem (“We don’t walk away,” he quickly assures her). 

This is very much a Clara episode. When she comes across the scared Queen Merry, the episode spends a long stretch of time watching her calm down the child, drawing upon her own experiences with her deceased mother (a character who's influence will presumably be a major part of Clara's identity and story as the series goes forward). The episode begins with the Doctor popping in on significant moments in Clara’s life, trying to suss out what her mysterious deal is. In the process we witness a touching, sweet and sad story about Clara’s mother and father meeting (fate landed a leaf on his face and she saved him from being hit by a car). They have their first date, fall in love, have Clara, and, before her time, Clara’s mother dies. It packs a surprising wallop for such a short little tale and it leads to another teary moment at episode’s end (one of those deeply moving moments that Doctor Who excels at - but more on that later). 

Though it starts out strong featuring Clara's backstory and introducing the alien world nicely (lots and lots of different aliens abound), the episode gets stuck and a little convoluted in the middle for a while once the ceremony takes place and Merry starts singing to please the “god” (Grandfather? The Old God? - there's a reveal upon a reveal upon a reveal to the point that it's over done, but it's all in service of that ending which is, to be fair, a marvelous ending) that the people of this planet worship. It’s all cool in theory but it takes way too long to get its point across. However, once Mary is sucked into the temple by the displeased “god”, the episode kicks into high gear, the action is fun (if not pushed past too quickly), and the story uses the tiny details accrued about this world smartly (“psychometry” where currency is embodied by items with sentimental value is a great idea). 

The supposed "god" is an alarm clock for the real "god" who turns out to be planet sized "god" with a pension for feeding on people's souls/stories (like I said: slightly convoluted). The Doctor provides the lovely little notion that souls are a collection of stories; the Doctor, of course, offers himself and his boundless stories up as a sacrifice, which gives Matt Smith one of those soul-crushing, heartbreaking monologues he constantly nails. But Clara steps in last moment and offers up the leaf that landed on her father’s face: to the days that never were; infinity of lifetimes Clara’s mother will never get to live (Jenna Louise-Coleman sells the hell out of this moment). It’s a story that even the parasite can’t handle, and the day is saved. 

As a whole the episode is mostly a letdown, but it’s filled with lovely little moments that make up for it. Most of them center on us discovering just what it is that makes Clara, well, Clara. I like Louise-Coleman’s performance and she works well with Smith, but that’s not enough to make a character. Clara’s inability to decide where to travel to first is such a nice, telling character detail, and so are other occurrences throughout the episode from Clara’s sitdown with Mary to her initial refusal to abandon and later decision rescue the Doctor.

I wish they'd do more with a new character early on in their presence in the show and not plop them down in a needlessly complex story that has a lot going on (the story of the parents takes away from story taking place on Akhaten later which is partially why it gets messy). But I like this new character and I look forward to what she has to bring to the show. 

Grade: B-

"Butter" - Film Review

There are movies that strive to be something special, and then there are those films content to pick the path of least resistance. They aren’t ambitious, they’re not doing anything innovative or creatively striking, and they’re often pretty cliché. Butter is one such film.

Butter isn’t a bad movie, but it always fails to go one step past the sentimentality and satire. It’s a funny movie carried by some strong performers, but its satire feels like it’s never specific enough and never goes far enough to earn how unnecessarily mean and smug it occasionally is towards some of its topics and its characters. The sentimentality also largely comes off as being tacked on in a very forced way (there's a black foster child who can't help but be nice towards others).

The film never chooses to settle on where its ire is meant to be aimed at. It’s a very broad attack on conservative culture. But in spite of this, some of its jokes are so over the top that they have an amusing absurdity to them and some are well-delivered enough that they overcome their shortcomings. Though in the end it's all too surface level.

Structurally the film is uneven. The film starts off with voiced-over back stories for two different characters with such disparate backgrounds that initially the film awkwardly handles jumping from one story to the next. After these introductions the film can’t seem to settle on what it wants to happen, burning through several potential stories before sticking to one.

The motivations for many characters aren’t worth bothering to question (the angsty teen daughter is treated like an afterthought). Most tend to do things simply because the plot demands it of them, which would be fine if the film didn’t have a concept that were pretty much a one-off gag. 

The film is set in the cultural landscape of butter sculpturing, a subculture with enough weirdly specific details to fuel the satire at first. But soon the satire fades and muddles away for a predictable, uninteresting winner takes all competition between a clear protagonist and antagonist. 

The film is not without its charms. Its cast is really strong and they have a lot of fun in their different roles, even the bit ones. But the film is largely so light (you might even say light as butter) that it's mostly forgettable.

Grade: C+

Mad Men - "The Doorway" - Review

By this point in time, we’re not watching Mad Men to learn about these characters and who they are. We know about as much about Don Draper as we’re likely to know about any character. But Mad Men once again proves that just because you know everything there is to know about someone, doesn’t necessarily mean you have them all figured out.

For most of this episode, Don by all outward appearances looks like a man who’s accepted his marriage to Megan. He’s not completely satisfied by his marriage, but he comes off like a man who has accepted dying on the sword he’s thrust into himself. 

We start this episode in Hawaii: paradise. Hot, sunny, perfect. We end in brutally cold New York on New Year’s Eve. Don is reading “Dante’s Inferno” when we first see him lounging on the beach. As Dante goes further into Hell, we learn that Hell doesn’t get hotter as we head down its many levels, but much, much colder, until the worst sinners are frozen into a sheet of ice.  

The episode is a long descent into the state of being of Don. The more the episode carries on, the clearer it becomes that Don is more out of sorts than ever. Megan was supposed to be his saving grace. The cliffhanger from last season’s finale “The Phantom” has been answered. Perhaps Don didn’t say yes to the question “Are you alone?” right then and there, but now after some time has passed Don has started up his adulterous ways once more (with Lisa Cardellini no less). 

He loves Megan, much as he loved Betty. But she’s become less and less of the ideal woman he built her up to be. She’s continuing her acting career, starring in television shows, and maintaining her generally independent, youthful ways.She has him smoke pot, she makes fondue, and she gets up and dances with the Hawaiian announcer. 

It’s become clichéd to ask “Who is Don Draper?” It’s also become clichéd to say, “Don is a different person to everyone he meets”. But they remain defining aspects that the show continues to mine more and more. Don knows there’s something wrong with himself. His New Year’s Resolution: stop having an affair. An affair he was convinced he could avoid this time around in his second marriage.

Don isn’t the only one questioning their sense of self though. Betty, though she’s lost some weight, is still on the chubby side. We see her snacking at a play (the Nutcracker – I’m guessing there’s some relevance but I’m not sure what it is). Sally has a friend who is a gifted violinist, Sandy, and Betty quickly takes offense when the girl dismisses the suburban housewife lifestyle Betty has taken up in two marriages now. Matt Weiner learned at the feet of David Chase (creator of The Sopranos) and Mad Men has been keen on the idea that people don’t change. Not in real life anyway. They may want to, but damn if it isn’t difficult. Sandy lies about getting into Julliard, and Betty follows her to the city to try to discover where she is. She ends up missing Sandy but she does find her violin case. Though she fights so hard to get the case away from a young man who insists that Betty can’t accept his rebellious ways (Sally Draper ain’t too far off from this guy), she eventually leaves behind the violin case. Betty is like a petulant child at times, and her refusal to take the case is like a pointless act of defiance. 

She does change by episode’s end but it’s in the most superficial way possible. Betty dyes her hair. But that’s not proof positive of change. 

Betty refuses to accept growing old. Her Grace Kelly (now Elizabeth Taylor) good looks will only get her so far (well, I guess with the weight gain, have only gotten her so far). In one of the more bizarre scenes, she kiddingly asks Harry if he’d like to rape Sandy. It’s uncomfortable and messed up, but it speaks again to Betty’s inability to accept aging and her frustration at young, attractive people stealing her thunder. This is precisely why she becomes so set on helping Sandy out.  She doesn’t really want to help Sandy, but she thinks if she can save Sandy, in a way she can save herself. 

One character, Roger, is finally admitting there’s something wrong with themselves even if he has a difficult time confronting his problems. His LSD laden experiences from last season have opened his mind up to how he hasn’t exactly been the best person in life. He’s even started taking therapy but he ignores the most important points the therapist makes, such as the fact that his constant joking conceals a hidden problem. Roger’s mother dies and yet Roger feels nothing. He tells his first ex-wife that he looked at the women at the funeral and all he saw were people he’d disappointed. Roger can only see one thing ahead for himself: death.

Death is a reoccurring theme throughout the episode. Don seems to be obsessed with the notion of death. His fear of death and his infatuation with the idea of death leads him to drink excessively (more so than usual) and puke at the funeral. In his drunken stupor he asks the doorman who recently suffered a heart attack, “What did you see when you died?” The ad Don pitches for the Hawaiian hotel reminds everyone of death and suicide (something Don clearly did not intend for). 

If Don is failing to be good at being Don Draper (or not I guess if you see this self-destructive behavior as typical Don), well, then it’s nice that someone has taken up the mantle of being Don (minus the constant identity crises and necessity for affairs). Peggy Olson has come a long, long way. As previously stated, people tend not to change in the world of Mad Men, but when they do it’s often sudden and drastic, and such was the case when Peggy couldn’t take Don’s continual berating any longer. I’d like to have seen Don run into his protégé, but it’s possible Don’s decline and Peggy’s rise will be paralleled. I’m more surprised that Peggy being a female head copywriter didn’t play a bigger role in her story. Her newly mustachioed, long haired boyfriend Abe says she’s too harsh on her underlings, but otherwise it’s largely overlooked.  

Everyone is largely haunted by their past in this premiere and the real big changes of the 60’s are starting to catch up to them faster and faster than ever before. The sideburns are long, the pot is in abundance, and the violence is on the rise.

Stray Observations:

-Sally is really taking her teen angst seriously. Nicely played by Kiernan Shipka.

-What’s funnier from the scene where the cop pulls Betty over? The officer responding to Grandma Francis awkwardly name dropping Harry with “I work for the state of New York. I have my own boss” or Sally saying “I hate cops” after the fact?

-The Kodak wheel from season one has returned but has lost much of its nostalgic luster for Don.

-Sign of the times: Betty doesn’t care that Sandy is smoking.

-The series has mostly moved away from Betty’s relationship with her mother but here we’re reminded that her mother had a massive and terrible influence on Betty.

-Stan has an incredible beard now. He also keeps in touch with Peggy and overhears her conversation with her boss Ted. He suggests that Ted likes her. Peggy seems slightly infatuated at least.

-Peggy’s co-workers are pretty useless. The one guy re-enacts the Tonight Show act that led to the ad’s re-working but it’s pretty half-assed, and no one can seem to come up with any other information on the specifics of the incident. Her copywriters are lazy and fail to come up with any good ideas.

-The camera operator tells Don “I want you to be yourself”. If it was only that easy!

-Roger flips out after seeing his ex-wife with a new man. Change is not being accepted by Roger even as he nominally admits that something has to change or his life is merely a straight line towards the grave.

-Not sure what to make of Bob who keeps trying to get his foot in the door with members of the ad agency. Without being asked, he provides catering to the funeral. Ken Cosgrove gets to tell him off though, seemingly as an excuse to give the character screen time.

-Joan is giving Roger the cold shoulder.

-Don mistakenly switches his military issued lighter with PFC Dinkins's, the man he meets at the bar, and spends much of the episode worrying and fixating on it. The other lighter said "Dick Whitman" on it.

Grade: A-

Game of Thrones - "Dark Wings, Dark Words" - Review

 "Themes are for eighth-grade book reports," Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff recently said about the overall intentionality he and D.B. Weiss provide to the show. That's a frustrating notion not only because it's unavoidable for themes to exist in a work whether you try for them or not, but because it also makes you wonder just how the hell the show we're watching is structured if not around theme. I bring this up because though I enjoy Game of Thrones, it's a show that often feel like every sequence was filmed great and then the editors were forced to parse out all these various elements together. The result is a soap opera-ish level of disassociated scenes that lead to episodes ending wherever (any old place that is) rather than in a place that appears to have been built towards knowingly for maximum impact.

Now I'm not someone who's huge on distilling out themes. When I pick up on them I feel all savvy and sophisticated, but I don't go out of my way to try to figure out what they might be. In fact, I tend to watch shows for characters more than for themes, and this is especially the case with Game of Thrones. I watch for what's Arya up to this week and what the story is trying to say about her, or Tyrion or Bran or Jaimie, and so on. This is what I suspect a lot of us do because mainly why we're told to be invested in any one of the many stories being shown is that there are one or two characters central to that story who are worth following. I could care less about Gendry and Hotpie, but I care deeply about Arya. I don't mind stopping in with most of these characters and finding where their story is at, but it does sometimes make what we're watching come off as arbitrarily strung together. Why do Jaimie and Brienne get less screen time than Bran or Arya? They could have had more scenes and I'd still have been very amused by their mismatched team-up.

The problem isn't just Benioff and Weiss though. The problem also comes from the series being an adaptation. I always found the weaker entries in the Harry Potter film franchise to be more about fan service than about actually creating a fully formed story that worked within the film medium. Similarly, adapting the show just to adapt it and adapt indvidual elements as well as possible leads to a consistently fragmented quality to the show.

The greatest asset for Game of Thrones is simultaneously often its biggest hindrance: its source material. George RR Martin’s book series has a vast world and great characters to draw upon, and part of the success of the series comes from relying on these aspects of the book. But by the same token, A Song of Fire and Ice is an increasingly sprawling series. There are characters in far flung locations that often seem to have nothing in common other than that they exist within this same world. Each book in the series provides MORE. More characters! More locations! More conflicts! And the series on occasion feels like it’s sometimes just trying to keep up with all these new developments, adapting them but not necessarily making them work nicely as an hour of television. Sometimes it’s easy to watch an episode of Game of Thrones and largely enjoy it, but if I were to say “Hey, remember that one scene with Sam?” You might scratch your head and go, “Oh yea. I totally forgot about that”.

Which sometimes means you may not even notice that certain characters are completely absent. Until I thought about it, I didn’t realize Dany was missing, nor Davos. It’s likely best they didn’t appear though because this episode couldn’t help but feel like it was less of an episode of television and just a lot of mostly really cool things that just happened to all have been mashed together with some semblance of relationship.

Sometimes the episode nailed creating the necessary connections to make these disparate events have cohesion. Watch Catelynn sadly mourn her treatment of Jon only for a perfectly chosen cut to Jon being schooled by Mance Rayder about the nature of the wildling army. Then watch as warg Orell (Mackenzie Crook) describes the destruction at the Fist of the First Man and then how we pop in on an exhausted Sam collapsing. These connections worked so well that these series of scenes flow one into the next despite their large distances from eachother. Elsewhere though this doesn’t occur and it begins to weigh on the episode.   

   

“Dark Wings, Dark Words” largely functions as Season Premiere Part Two: Revenge of the Missing Characters. There are so many major characters by this point in the series that the show is forced to spend much of this episode reintroducing us to a number of characters we still had yet to see until now.  Many of them are very welcome sights to see, but because it’s so many characters previously without storylines developed, the episode feels like it’s backtracking to catch us up on the situations of these previously absent characters. It ultimately gives the episode a feeling of being stuck in second gear, even if things do feel like they move forward as a whole much more. The series tends to be a slow build that doesn’t truly kick into high gear until halfway in a season so it's easy to forgive this slow going. But even by standards of moving pieces around, this feels like a fair amount of tablesetting. 

The episode mainly has two problems. It’s, like I said before, an episode that’s partially reintroducing characters, but it’s also an episode that’s reminding us of certain characters’ existences. The latter storylines really do come off as merely reminders. For instance, Sam and Jon get only one scene each. And while I like Tyrion and his relationship with Shae, this can't help but seem like the writers trying to shoehorn a popular character in when he really doesn't have much to do this episode. Other returning stories do, however, get pushed forward though, such as Margaery and Sansa (more on that later). Meanwhile, some of the choices for the characters who we didn’t see last episode feel somewhat arbitrary; we probably could have seen Arya, Bran or Jaime and Brienne last episode if it weren’t for time constraints. 

And some of these stories just have elements that are awkwardly handled. We have even more new characters! It’s a buy one character get another free sale here on Game of Thrones. Those two youngins who’ve joined up with Bran are the Reeds. They should have been introduced last season but the writers chose to push back their appearance until this season. In some ways, that wasn’t a half-bad decision. Season two already was feeling overstuffed and the Reeds don’t start to play a really significant role until events that will soon be taking place, and it’s nice to finally have somebody explain these dreams Bran is having rather than it being vaguely answered away as magic! But damn if Jojen and Meera don’t seem to come out of nowhere. I enjoyed the performances of Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Ellie Kendrick, and they immediately inhabit these roles in a way where they quickly feel as if they’ve always been there. But overall it’s another example of the show stuck with a character or plot occurrence and the writers finding it difficult to translate it to the new medium.  

The show always feels strongest when it’s at King’s Landing. This is the core of the show and it’s where the political machinations at the heart of the series reside. Characters don’t come off as if they’re just moving from point A to point B on the map.  Being stuck in one location actually proves to be fruitful. These characters can’t exactly run from their problems and so they’re forced to confront them. They’re goal isn’t getting to the Wall or to Riverrun; instead, they’re forced to deal with whatever inescapable human drama is currently taking place in the capitol. 

Which leads me to my next point: can we stop and admire the Tyrells? Because, man, oh man, are they ever the group of badasses. We already had hints of Margaery’s skill at manipulating circumstances to her benefit, and she continues to excel at this; after a bit of useful information is extracted from Sansa (more on that in a second), she plays Joffrey to a tee. Joffrey is a boy pretending to be a man; yes, he’s an awful, awful person, but he’s one easily duped by sweetly cooing Margaery who is a clever, clever girl and feigns praise and plays into Joffrey’s weird sadistic tendencies. I’m assuming she learned this cleverness from her grandmother because Olenna (played exceedingly well by Diana Rigg) is wonderful; she’s, for one thing, damn funny. But she also cuts through the bullshit and sees things exactly as they are. Olenna coaxes a fearful Sansa (Sophie Turner makes this fear palpable) for the true nature of Joffrey (“He’s a monster”). 

It’s not as if all the elements outside of King’s landing are without merit. Jaimie and Brienne are a winning pair and their odd couple relationship is very fun to watch. Maisie Williams is just Maisie Williams and so she’s so damn enthusiastic and passionate about playing Arya that it’s hard not to be pleased she’s back even if this isn’t the strongest bit of story the series has given her to date (although, the Hound crosses paths with her in problematic fashion so that’s a plus!). But the Robb-Catelynn material is skipping a few steps in storytelling as it tries too quickly to get these characters where they need to be. Similarly, I like Mance’s explanation of the precariousness of the wildling militia and their motivations (the whites, of course), but it feels like just an excuse to stop in with Jon. 

My review could without question go on much, much longer, but I’m already way past a thousand words and I promised to cut these down. This is a step down from last week’s episode; there are too many stories for this episode to function as a standalone effort. For instance, not enough has been done with Brienne and Jaimie to justify the ending (as solid of an ending as it may be). I wish we could have gotten a few more scenes there. But I wish that of a lot of these stories, and there are still characters missing because it’s jam packed in the first place. These stories all are mostly very disconnected, despite being mostly good in and of themselves. 

Stray Observations:

-Isaac Hempstead-Wright (aka Bran) is starting to hit puberty from the looks of it.

-HODOR! I don’t have anything to add except Hodor.

-Cersei’s control issues continue in abundance. She can’t win over Joffrey, no matter how hard she tries. It’s rather fun to watch Cersei lose control. Lena Headly plays this side of the character really well. It helps that we get such terribly offensive lines from Joffrey as: “Intelligent women do what they’re told”. Cersei’s story is one of a woman trying to be something that the medieval world of Westeros just isn’t accepting of. Like Arya and Brienne, she’s a female trying to do “mannish” things and getting backlash for it.  

-Sansa and Shae’s relationship felt forced in the second season (like simply something for the characters to do), but it’s quickly become a relationship that works really well. These are two women in very tricky positions that could turn bad quick if they’re not careful.

-Worst Introduced Character of the Week: Lord Karstark. Perhaps he was introduced last episode, but heck, I didn’t pick up on it if that was the case. All you need to know is that he isn’t all that pleased with Robb’s marriage. Also, Robb left Roose Bolton at Harenhal and Bolton's men were the people who ran into Jaimie and Brienne at episode's end.

-If you’re not quite sure what’s going on with Sam, don’t worry, he’s being taken in the direction he needs to be taken in. Same goes for Jon. (At least: fingers crossed)

-Brienne and Jaimie’s swordfight was really well done. Nice to see two of the series best fighters come to blows.

-Riverrun, for those unclear, is the Riverlands equivalent of Winterfell and the birthplace of Catelynn. They’re going there because her father died, but also because they no longer have Winterfell to go to and they need more troops.

-“Men only want one thing from a pretty girl” – Shae’s got the right of this. Littlefinger doesn’t do things willy-nilly.

-Catelynn learning of the “death” of Bran and Rickon is chilling. The series is very good at making little pieces of unknown information lead to devastating consequences.
-Where in Seven Hells is Varys?
-Arya's efforts to leave the Brotherhood Without Banners are thwarted by the Hound recognizing her.
-Ser Barristan Selmy's reveal last week can't help but feel slightly pointless since there's no Dany in this episode.
-If Theon's story is confusing that largely stems from the fact that (minor spoilers) he doesn't have chapters in the book being adapted and so the writers are fabricating events. They're also withholding certain information and skipping a few story beats, but we'll see where they take this.

Grade: B

A Potential Reduction in Output

Technically my official job is to be a student, and not as this blog might have you assume a film and television critic. I love watching, thinking, and writing about movies and television shows. And my biggest regrets is that I'm not able to put up more reviews and content than I already do. I know I've been slowing down in my output recently and that's a trend that's likely to continue until at least mid-May when my finals are over.

Reviews, and hopefully a few thinkpieces, might be posted before then, but I make less of a guarantee. There are a number of shows I hope to keep up with but I can't say with certainty that I will review something or that it will be put up on this site immediately. Trust me, I intend to make up for it during the summer when I hope to watch God-awful amounts of shows and movies.

Until then I'll keep up with the shows I have been reviewing as best I can, including Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, The Office, and The Vampire Diaries. I also plan to review Mad Men. But we'll see how that turns out. I apologize in advance. I do reviews because they matter to me and I enjoy doing them. And I hope that you keep tuned in and please comment when a review inspires a response from you.