Category Archives: Reviews

’Frankenstein’ Not Quite Sum of Its Parts

buy cheap Latuda online Guillermo del Toro has never met a monster he didn’t love.

modulo His Frankenstein, now streaming on Netflix, is a love letter to the misunderstood and the malformed, a visual sonnet draped in fog and candlelight. It looks extraordinary. It feels monumental.

Yet somewhere inside all that grandeur, the heart seems faint.

Oscar Isaac gives Victor Frankenstein an elegant mania, a man cracked by ambition and remorse. Jacob Elordi’s Creature moves like a wounded stag, huge yet careful, his face a map of awe and confusion. Mia Goth’s Elizabeth softens every room she enters. The cast performs with precision and poise, a company that knows its world is painted in tragedy.

The film’s look astonishes. Dan Laustsen’s cinematography turns stone to smoke, shadow to velvet. Lamps bleed gold. Snow drifts in slow suspension.

For a while, that beauty carries the story. But then the pulse starts to fade.

Scenes stretch longer than they should. The film, over two and a half hours, begins to labor under its own weight. Its elegance overshadows its urgency.

The deeper fault lives in the spirit. Frankenstein wants sorrow and awe, and it earns both.

But true horror breathes colder air. Last year’s Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’s fevered hymn of shadow, plague, and lust, captured the era it reached for. It felt carved from early cinema.

Frankenstein follows another path. It mourns rather than terrifies. Elordi speaks through gesture and breath, his Creature learning love and loss simultaneously. Isaac lets guilt bloom, then hides it beneath control. Their shared scenes hum with voltage, often literally.

Sound gives the world body. Wind grinds over stone. Sparks snap from coils. Heartbeats rise beneath strings. You can feel the room’s pulse.

Del Toro still finds grace in corners. A candle gutters at the right moment. A child’s toy rests where it shouldn’t. His world feels tended, handmade, personal. No one directs wonder like he does, and no one finds such kindness in monsters.

The film’s finest passage unfolds in snow. The Creature learns cold, solitude, and small mercy. The camera gives him space to build a soul. Those minutes achieve what the long middle never quite sustains.

Frankenstein becomes a painting rather than a pulse. It reminds you how gifted del Toro remains, but also how indulgence can dull even a master’s edge.

The film’s beauty glows like a cathedral, every corner perfect and patient. The story inside that cathedral feels funereal, as if the soul it once housed has quietly slipped away.

It’s a grand, gorgeous vision. It just never quite comes to life.

’The Chair Company’ Reclines to Cringe Gold


Tim Robinson makes agony feel like art.

His new HBO series, The Chair Company, turns everyday office life into a study in discomfort. It’s part corporate comedy, part fever dream, and all Robinson, a performer who can wring laughter from a pause and panic from a smile.

He plays Ron Trosper, a mid-level employee at a furniture company that seems both ordinary and deeply strange. The job looks routine, but the tension inside every meeting, hallway, and lunchroom feels oddly alive.

Robinson feeds on that tension. He treats politeness as pressure, awkwardness as poetry. Each glance, each nervous cough, builds until you can almost feel the walls close in.

Few comedians understand humiliation like he does. Most chase jokes. Robinson chases the silence after them. He has a gift for the long beat, the half sentence that collapses under its own weight, the look that lasts too long.

Every episode of The Chair Company becomes an endurance test for empathy. You root for him, you cringe for him, and you can’t turn away.

The supporting cast plays it straight. Lake Bell as Barb Trosper anchors Ron’s personal world, Sophia Lillis as Natalie Trosper matches his strain in the family rhythms, Will Price as Seth Trosper reflects the generational gap he can’t bridge, Joseph Tudisco as Mike Santini becomes an unlikely ally in the mess.

Their restraint highlights Robinson’s unraveling so the awkwardness lands harder. The results feel real, like a memory you wish you could forget.

Director Andrew Gaynord shoots the show with a quiet rhythm that suits Robinson’s chaos. The lighting hums with gray unease. The office walls feel too close. The air itself seems stale. Out of that dullness comes something explosive.

Each episode builds toward a small disaster: a presentation that collapses, a team-building exercise that implodes, a meeting that stretches into madness.

Robinson commits completely. His eyes twitch with suppressed fear, his voice trembles under fake confidence, his entire body becomes an instrument of discomfort.

Cringe comedy demands precision. Too much cruelty breaks it. Too much self-awareness dulls it.

Robinson understands that embarrassment can be both tragic and funny, that laughter often hides sympathy. His character never tries to be absurd. He simply tries too hard to be normal.

There’s one caveat: sometimes the cringe cuts deep enough to make you physically react. There are moments when you shift in your seat or look away. But that reaction proves the show’s power. Robinson’s discomfort becomes yours. It feels shared, and that shared pain creates a strange form of joy.

The Chair Company does what few comedies attempt. It turns human weakness into something beautiful. It finds rhythm in failure, grace in self-doubt, and truth in the absurd theatre of office life.

Robinson doesn’t just play a character. He plays a condition, one that feels familiar to anyone who has ever said the wrong thing at the wrong time and kept talking anyway.

It’s the year’s most uncomfortable show. And one of the funniest.

Go Dodgers! (or The Upside of Fair Weather Fandom)

My heart belongs to the Detroit Tigers.

I have too many memories inside old Tiger Stadium to pretend otherwise. Jason Thompson’s smooth swing. Rusty Staub’s weird choke-up on the bat.

Those ghosts stay with you. If the Tigers ever met the Dodgers in the World Series, there’d be no doubt where I’d stand.

But the Dodgers don’t make a bad bridesmaid.

They won a thrilling seven-game World Series over the Toronto Blue Jays that is already considered classic. It had everything: back-and-forth leads, heroic pitching, and a finale that felt scripted by baseball gods.

Game 7 in Los Angeles will live in Dodger lore. The Dodgers took it 5–4, becoming the first team in 25 years to repeat as champions. They broke innumerable records in the march.

And that’s the beauty of being a fair-weather fan. It’s a vastly underrated quality in a sports fanThink about it: You can enjoy the hair-raising tension without having it fall out with disappointment. And if your fair weather team sucks, you can just swap them for a team you like for its grit, or its unlikely heroes.

Despite their colossus budget, This Dodgers managed both.

Shohei Ohtani reached base nine times in a single game earlier in the playoffs, a record-tying performance that felt mythic. He put the Babe in Ruthian.

Then came Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who arrived in Los Angeles already a legend in Japan. He won three games in a seven-game World Series, including games 6 and 7. By the end, he had written himself into Dodger history before his second season even began.

The Dodgers finished with 104 wins, another ring, and another parade that will stretch from downtown to Chavez Ravine. And it will include translators. I wonder if FOX will mute them.

Sure, I would have rather seen a parade on Michigan and Trumbull. The Tigers will always own my heart.

But this fall, the Dodgers earned my applause. They were the bridesmaid who stole the spotlight.

And for once, it was a helluva wedding.