Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture

Spring TV 2023 – Apple Edition

I know it’s been a while, but I have been watching stuff even though I haven’t been writing about it all. Colour me surprised when I renewed my Apple TV+ subscription in order to catch the latest and final season of Ted Lasso, only to end up watching several more series (and one documentary film)….

Must-See Winter TV 2023

I am normally the last person to say anything is “must-see”, not because I don’t believe in great TV and movies, but because I am a firm believer in the diversity of tastes and “to each his own”. However, it’s been a while since I’ve posted about TV shows, sadly because I haven’t been super-excited…

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – Movie Review

There’s nothing like a smart mystery to get our minds going. We want to see if we can figure out whodunit before the answers are revealed. Yet paradoxically our secret hope is that we won’t guess, but will be so cleverly surprised that our jaws will drop instead. Glass Onion is one of these well-crafted…

Avatar: The Way of Water – Movie Review

Watching the sequel to James Cameron’s ground-breaking animated epic, Avatar, I was looking forward to an expansion of the fictional world of Pandora. In the climax of the first movie, we got a brief glimpse of the other Na’vi people around the planet, seeing tribes apart from the Omaticaya tribe who had been the focus…

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – Movie Review

Wakanda Forever was both a movie about grief and about war. Two of the biggest topics in human life, but Marvel tackles them within a single movie. After the loss of T’Challa, the Black Panther from the first movie (who apparently died of an unnamed illness — mirroring the death of actor Chadwick Boseman, who…

Fantasy TV for Fall 2022

As a fan of fantasy stories, I am loving that this post-Game of Thrones resurgence of the genre is making a big-budget run at streaming success. Previous seasons already gave us The Witcher and The Wheel of Time (sadly neither have become my favourites), and now we have a few more series bringing their tales…

Animation Reviews: Lightyear, Sing 2, The Sea Beast, The Bad Guys, Belle, and Bubble

Growing up with a lot of Disney, I’ve always loved animated movies. So even as a middle-aged adult, I enjoy catching up with a lot of these movies. These days there are a steady flow of them coming to theatres and streaming channels, and their visual quality and production values seem quite high. The only…

The Gray Man – Movie Review

Even with the big budgets and big stars, Netflix movies have still seemed a bit mediocre to me. Nevertheless, The Gray Man looked like a fun action, spy-fi film that I would enjoy. Though the tale of an assassin going rogue and being chased by his own agency has strong Bourne echoes, the idea of…

Thor: Love and Thunder – Movie Review

After watching Thor: Love and Thunder, I really have no idea what the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s current “phase 4” (of which this movie is the midpoint) is really all about. For the most part, it’s been a bunch of new characters that haven’t exactly made a huge splash, and a few middling stories/sequels with established…