Category Archives: Reviews

Death Takes a Holiday (and a Back-End Deal)


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I know that people used to die in the movies. I’ve seen it.

In Jaws, the shark bit Quint in half. There was no getting him back. Just a final scream, some crushed ribs, and a bellyful of gristle for the great white. It was final. It was brutal. It was the movies.

But that was then.

Now? Quint’s probably getting his own prequel series. A gritty reimagining of his years aboard the USS Indianapolis, starring some Chris or Hemsworth or hybrid of both. Death doesn’t end stories anymore—it greenlights them.

Dying, in Hollywood, has become non-lethal.

You can blame—or credit—any number of sources. The resurrection of Spock in Star Trek III. The never-ending murders of Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers. James Bond, blown to bits in one film and sipping a martini in the next.

Don’t get me started on superheroes. Dying is just part of their training montage. And with a handy multiverse, even the past need not be a nuisance.

Once, character death meant something. It was punctuation. A period. A warning that the stakes were real and the story mattered. Now it’s a comma. Or a mid-credit scene.

The shift started subtly. Serial heroes like Tarzan and Zorro in the 1930s never aged, never bled, never lost. But they weren’t killed and brought back—they simply never died.

That changed in the blockbuster era, when audiences began to accept, even expect, that no matter what happened, a franchise could retool itself.

Studios noticed. They had no reason not to. When killing off Superman in the comics sold millions, they saw something profound: death doesn’t end narrative—it extends it. It sells T-shirts. It creates buzz. It gives you a chance to “go darker” in the next one.

That’s when death stopped being a plot point and became a marketing strategy.

And maybe that’s the real change: we’ve stopped mourning our favorite characters because we know they’re not really gone. They’re on a break. Doing yoga between trilogies. Waiting for the next reboot, spinoff, or timeline retooling.

It’s not just that Hollywood doesn’t believe in death. It doesn’t need it. Not when you can resurrect anything with CGI, a new actor, or a well-funded nostalgia campaign.

So yes, people still die in the movies. But only the extras. Only the ones without merchandise.

Quint? He didn’t die. He just hasn’t been retooled yet.

And when he does return, I bet he’s got a revenge story. And streaming residuals.

’Horror Story’ Almost Haunts


Netflix’s Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story is the latest entry in the streaming service’s polished true-crime catalog, and like so many before it, it draws you in with careful craft and a sense of moral purpose—only to leave you with the queasy sense that something’s missing.

The series is stark, methodical, and thankfully avoids the genre’s worst instincts. There are no cheap dramatizations, no ominous reenactments, no gothic voiceovers trying to outdo the horror.

Instead, it leans on archival news footage, survivor testimony, and newly unearthed police recordings. These tools make the story feel chillingly immediate. For those unfamiliar with the case, it’s shocking. For those who know it well, it still unsettles.

But what British Horror Story gains in tone, it loses in shape. The pacing feels off, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide whether to create a portrait of evil or a procedural of how it was uncovered.

The result is a story that feels suspended in midair—gripping while it plays, but evaporating the moment it ends.

Worse, it omits major players like Anne Marie Davis, Fred West’s daughter and a central witness in Rose’s prosecution. The documentary never mentions her, a baffling gap that undercuts its claim to telling the full story. It also closes without context—no text, no follow-ups, no “where are they now” summation. The series doesn’t so much end as stop.

There’s power in restraint, yes. But not in absence. And this case—like all serial murder cases—is as much about survival and aftermath as it is about horror.

Fred and Rose West succeeds in bringing dignity to the victims and restraint to the genre. But its refusal to fully close the circle robs it of the resolution its viewers, and its subjects, deserve. It’s a good documentary. It just needed to be great.

Fifty Years And Still Wishing


Fifty years ago, Pink Floyd released an album that felt like a sigh.

Wish You Were Here had no radio-friendly singles, no obvious hooks, and followed a monumental success (The Dark Side of the Moon) that sold more than 30 million copies.

And yet, it may be the band’s most emotionally resonant work—a mournful, ambient, oddly intimate meditation on absence, loss, and disillusionment.

You don’t sing along to Wish You Were Here. You absorb it.

The album opens with the ghostly hum of a synthesizer, like a transmission arriving from deep space. Then comes Shine On You Crazy Diamond—a nine-part suite split across the album’s start and finish, and a tribute to Syd Barrett, the band’s founding frontman who had been lost to mental illness and drug abuse.

The lyrics (“Now there’s a look in your eyes / Like black holes in the sky”) are devastating. And they’re delivered without sentimentality, just sorrow.

Roger Waters, who wrote much of the record, later called it “a requiem.” David Gilmour’s guitar playing—especially on “Shine On”—became its own language: yearning, lyrical, grieving. He didn’t so much solo as speak.

Between the bookends of Shine On are three tracks that bite deeper than their gentle tones suggest.

“Welcome to the Machine” is a snarling indictment of the music industry, delivered through synths that hiss and churn like a corporate combine. “Have a Cigar” lampoons record execs in their own voice, with Roy Harper singing the role of a clueless label rep who asks, “By the way, which one’s Pink?” It’s funny until you realize it’s almost verbatim from EMI boardrooms.

And then comes the title track.

“Wish You Were Here” is deceptively simple: just a 12-string acoustic guitar and Gilmour’s wounded vocals. But it cuts straight through—more elegy than song. Waters later said it wasn’t just for Syd. It was for anyone who’s ever been emotionally absent. And maybe for themselves.

The production was more organic than its predecessor. Gone were the heartbeats and clocks and tape loops of Dark Side. In their place: space. Air. The sense of a band playing together, not just producing a record, but trying to reach someone who wasn’t there anymore.

At the time, it was misunderstood. Rolling Stone gave it a lukewarm review in 1975. But decades later, Wish You Were Here has aged not just well—but hauntingly. It now feels like the record that understood what the band didn’t say aloud: fame had isolated them, grief had sobered them, and the machine had won something.

Still, Wish You Were Here remains, a half-century on, Pink Floyd’s most humane album. It doesn’t rage against the void. It speaks to it. It sends signals into the silence, hoping someone’s still listening.

Maybe that’s why it still plays like a message meant for us—wherever we are.