Mark McPherson's Blog, page 6

“G20” Review

G20 is a frustrating action thriller because it seems to stumble so close to being a revenge fantasy fit for 2025. Here is a film where a Black female president becomes an action hero as she beats the crap out of terrorists trying to destabilize the world with AI and crypto. Obviously, a film like this came out too fast to be so perfect for the era of eroding freedoms and crashing economies, but it still has the bittersweet taste of highlighting a history that could’ve been and an action pictur...

“Y2K” (2024) Review

It’s a strange sensation to now be at an age where recollections of AOL, CD burning, video stores, and VCRs are now ingredients of a period piece. Within minutes of Y2K starting, there’s an onslaught of that nostalgia, watching a teenager’s browser dart between buffering Realplayer for news and loading up a Flash game. Peppered with a soundtrack of the era, a film like this should send me straight back to when I was 14. But I’ve grown up since then, and while retro commercials and vaporware sme...

“The Amateur” (2025) Review

Theoretically, The Amateur offers a refreshing subversion of the globe-trotting action-spy thriller genre. Instead of casting a beefy tough guy who can shoot guns and kill easily, this film casts as a wiry guy who can barely hold a pistol and is highly hesitant to pull the trigger. His character is smart enough to build a bomb, making this thriller more a case of brain over brawn. In small doses, the film does have some of those smarts. For the most part, however, it falls back on ma...

“Common Side Effects: Season 1” Review

In the spirit of Twin Peaks, Common Side Effects is an adult animated series that starts with an alluring premise and spins it into realms of the surreal, philosophical, and absurd. It’d be easy to see this idea of immortality from one perspective, but creators Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely never make their show that easy to figure out. They also know how to find just the right moments of comedy, treating a story of conspiracy with earnestness amid its odd designs of characters with big heads a...

More Than Muppets: A Case for Sesame Street

I love Sesame Street. I love its puppetry, parodies, and positive messaging on educational and moral topics. It was equally entertaining as it was informative, teaching lessons of sharing, acceptance, inclusion, and empathy. It is everything that conservatives hate, which is why they’ve been trying to dismantle this television institution for decades.

In 1969, the Children’s Television Workshop debuted Sesame Street. The show combined puppets, live-action skits on a city street, and colorful...

“Freaky Tales” Review

Freaky Tales and its anthology of odd tales in Oakland in 1987 are coated in the haze of the 1980s, but not a distinct one. Sure, there are specific scenes that have some familiar staging. There’s an interconnecting alien green force that takes the form of a flying automotive, recalling similar scenes from Repo Man, but the green also turns people into vicious warriors akin to the Loknar from Heavy Metal. However, the film can never be fully pinned down to one particular type of film or even a ...

AI Slop and Misreading Studio Ghibli

Some of us didn’t notice what was said in Studio Ghibli’s animated films. We watched Princess Mononoke and salivated over its breathtaking animation, more mesmerized by the colorful fantasy characters than listening to any important words they had to say. The battle between humanity and nature didn’t resonate. In 1999, I could hear snickers from children in the theater when Ashitaka’s arrow decapitates an attacking soldier, giddily surprised the cartoon they’d convinced their parents to let the...

“A Working Man” Review

Even though A Working Man is based on a novel by Chuck Dixon, part of me wants to believe that director David Ayer just whipped up another movie like The Beekeeper on the fly. Despite being armed with already-written source material and some screenplay help from Sylvester Stallone, this familiar action-revenge picture has many half-thought ideas. It falters so much between B-movie absurdity and gritty brutality that it never settles on a tone and ends up being a mess, more admirable for its stu...

“Hellboy: The Crooked Man” Review

After the sloppy staggering of the previous Hellboy reboot, having a lower-stakes story like The Crooked Man seemed like a solid idea. Aiming with the direct inspiration of a Hellboy comic series with creator Mike Mignola himself co-writing the screenplay, this project seemed like it’d come closer to capturing the same magic from Guillermo del Toro’s films and avoiding the slop of Neil Marshall’s adaptation. While Crooked Man certainly has its own style more distinct from the previous iteration...

Anime Detour 2025 Panels

I’m back for my 20th year of Anime Detour in Minneapolis, MN. As always, I’ve got another fistful of panels to rave about everything from Toonami to VHS tapes to weird Japanese movies to movies in general. Here’s what’s on tap this year.

Toonami Rewind

Friday 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM in 2F Greenway IJ 

Relive weekday-afternoon Toonami with this hosted collection of classic promos and stories from this gateway era of anime.

YouTube Poop Forever 

Friday 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM in 2F G...