What I've Been Writing While Not Writing on Substack
Widow’s Bay, Spider-Noir, Annihilation, and more
I’ve done what I hoped I wouldn’t do again: abandon my newsletter and Substack in general for several months. I had my reasons. I was fed up with the platform’s disastrous algorithm, the terrible content that gets rewarded on here, and my lack of enthusiasm for most recent TV shows and movies. On top of that, my lovely grandma passed away in April after turning 86, and I had to fly back home after two years of hiatus. It was a sad trip for obvious reasons, but I stayed for two weeks because I was planning to visit in June anyway.
I’ve also been working in the meantime. For those of you who don’t know, I’m a staff writer at BGR now on a weekly basis (alongside writing the occasional review for Looper once a month or so). The site mainly covers techy stuff, but not too long ago, they launched an entertainment section that I became a part of. We mainly cover sci-fi and horror (old and new), but there are outlier (at times completely out of nowhere) pieces too. As an attempt to finally return and continue The Screen, I wanted to pick out a few articles and share them with you to see what I’ve been up to in the past few months (you can also check out all of my writings on BGR here).
Features, Recommendations, and Listicles:
- Widow’s Bay: One of the few currently airing shows that’s giving me life lately and that I absolutely adore. Midnight Mass meets Stephen King and Parks and Rec (sorta).
- Annihilation: I revisited Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina, which is still his second-best film to date.
- Scavengers Reign: After bringing up this wonder of an animated masterpiece several times, I’ve finally had the chance to write about it in length. A little taste: “There’s an inherent, viscerally formidable horror of the unknown in Scavengers Reign. It’s gory, unnerving, and oftentimes repulsive (especially if you have an aversion to plants, fungi, and spores), but never short of fascinating.”
- 5 Great Yet Underseen Superhero Films That Flopped at The Box Office: I bet you can’t guess the one with Ryan Reynolds.
- Starman: One of the weirdest yet strangely gentle ‘80s John Carpenter sci-fis I’ve ever seen.
- The X-Files: Home (S04E02): I wrote about the most fucked-up episode of the show (which also got banned) that I wanted to cover here as an entry in my An Hour of Peak TV column, too.
- Stephen King’s first cameo in George A. Romero’s Knightriders is a fun little trivia.
Reviews:
Spider-Noir: I was underwhelmed by it (everyone seems to gush over it, though), but it’s a fun watch for Nic Cage and film noir diehards, I guess, if not much else.
Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair: Bryan Cranston and his bunch returned to the small screen, and with them came a terrific storm of nostalgia for a sitcom that was big but perhaps not big enough in the aughts. One of the few revival shows that actually delivers.
I won’t make any promises — it never works out well for me — but I intend to get back to writing (outside of work) here soon.
P.S.: The header image is from Steven Soderbergh’s latest, The Christophers, another curious and quite un-Soderbergh-like comedy drama that he nailed with aplomb. Ian McKellen steals it, naturally.
Widows Bay is so much fun!
Widows Bay is the only thing I’ve really loved in a long time. All of the characters are so well conceived.