Glen Weldon

When we asked our trusty Pop Culture Happy Hour listeners to vote for the Best Muppet, we knew they'd come through. Over 18,000 votes were cast; over 150 different Muppets received votes.

Yes. Some brave, beautiful, misguided soul voted for H. Ross Parrot. As Best Muppet. That is a thing that happened.

Much will, and deservedly should, be made of the setting of the gorgeously wrought Disney film Raya and the Last Dragon: A fantasy world drawn from a variety of Southeast Asian cultures.

No reasonable filmgoer came away from a screening of Guillermo del Toro's 2013 film Pacific Rim or its 2018 sequel (directed by Steven S. DeKnight) thinking, "You know what that needed? More lore."

As you watch Supernova — writer/director Harry Macqueen's light-on-dialogue, heavy-on-emotion tale of a gay couple coming to terms with the fact that one of them is experiencing early-onset dementia — you keep getting struck by the amount of trust the film places in its two leads.

Which makes sense, considering that the two leads in question are Colin Firth, as British concert pianist Sam, and Stanley Tucci, as American novelist Tusker. The latter is the one who is losing himself, and who seems, of the two of them, much more sanguine about it.

Things Resident Alien has in common with previous television series like My Favorite Martian, Mork & Mindy, ALF and 3rd Rock from the Sun:

1. Main Character: An alien (or aliens).

2. Premise: The alien/s in question is/are on Earth, attempting to pass as human.

3. Reasons Hijinks Ensue: See 2., above.

"Bob Ross was wrong," grumbles musician/actor John Lurie, in a voice grown so gravelly it's like listening to a rock tumbler. It's late at night, he's bent over the watercolor he's painting in his home on what he only refers to as "a tiny island in the Caribbean." Between each sentence he delivers to the camera, the rhythmic peeping of tree-frogs outside his window reasserts itself.

"Everyone can't paint," he continues. "It's not true."

Wonder Woman 1984 premieres in theaters and on HBO Max on December 25.

As much as 2017's Wonder Woman came steeped in muddy browns and muted grays, every frame of its sequel Wonder Woman 1984 radiates bright, retina-sizzling neons and pastels. That stark contrast goes beyond their respective visuals — it extends to their very different emotional landscapes and narrative drives.

It has been a momentous year for everything we consider TV.

A pandemic, civil rights reckoning, streaming war and presidential election shook up the industry in a dozen different ways. It blurred lines between genres, platforms and story forms, while also encouraging us to develop our own, deep rabbit holes of favorite media. So when our team of four critics sat down to figure out what we liked most onscreen this year, we each had a lot of stuff on our lists no one else did.

"We must do what we're told!"

"But why, Father? Why?"

"... I'm afraid."

That sudden, self-lacerating epiphany comes near the end of the animated film Wolfwalkers, debuting on AppleTV+ on Friday.

It's not the kind of tidy object-lesson generally served up in movies made for kids, which tend to run more in the Believe in Yourself/Follow Your Passion/You are Special vein.

The term "Oscar bait" is one of the more deeply cynical notions tossed around by film critics and — increasingly — audiences. There's something smugly dismissive about it, certainly, and its rise to prominence in recent years doesn't reflect any uptick in one specific kind of cinematic performance. After all, Hollywood's been cranking out films featuring actors nobly struggling with various physical and emotional challenges since its inception.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope math: By my reckoning, this represents the 1,523rd review I have written over the course of my career to feature the phrase, "an underused Judy Greer," and I am officially sick of it.

But writer/director Alan Ball's achingly well-intentioned melodrama Uncle Frank, which premieres on Amazon Prime on Wednesday, November 24th, has even more to answer for. Because it's not just an underused Judy Greer (sigh) who spends the bulk of the film languishing on the sidelines.

Before we chew over the new LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special, reader, it behooves us to embrace the historical perspective. We must cite precedent, examine trend lines, peruse the vicissitudes of causation. For only then may we place it in its rightful cultural context.

In Showtime's six-episode series Moonbase 8, about a group of pathetic astronauts-in-training living in isolation at a mock moonbase in the desert, the comedy is sometimes broad (John C. Reilly's blustering buffoon of a team leader), sometimes dry (Fred Armisen's passive-aggressive science officer), and sometimes ...

Nothing's quite what it seems to be in the Amazon original series Truth Seekers, which re-teams (sort of) Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, the duo who starred together in the brilliant British series Spaced, as well as in the genre-mashing comedies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End.

The amount of enjoyment you get out of Netflix's wan remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 swooning gothic romance Rebecca depends entirely on how familiar you are with that original film, and the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier from which it was adapted.

As you consider whether you should invest in Hulu's Helstrom, which features a pair of squabbling sibling demon-hunters from the pages of Marvel Comics, you should know that the series has already been condemned.

Netflix's 2018 series The Haunting of Hill House was a gorgeous ghostly journey that arrived at a too-tidy destination. Based loosely on the Shirley Jackson novel, it chronicled the way violence leaves a hole in the world, and how trauma lingers, shaping memories and sundering families.

It uh ... it was a lot more fun than that sounds, though.

If seven seasons' worth of Mad Men's Roger Sterling taught us anything, it's that watching John Slattery in Smug Jerk Mode is dependably fun.

Inspired, at least in part, by critic Stanley Kauffman's challenge to gay playwrights to ditch all the hinting and coding and veiled metaphor so as to honestly and openly depict the lives of homosexuals in their work, Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band debuted off-Broadway in 1968.

The structure was simple and not, to any regular theatergoer, unfamiliar: Over the course of an evening, characters gather, get drunk and turn on one another. Things get said that cannot be unsaid. Secrets are revealed. Curtain, house lights up.

Does it even matter that it's fall? We're stuck inside much of the time, anyway, and new TV shows come at us all year round. Well, yes, there's reason to celebrate precisely because of how the pandemic disrupted things. Broadcasters couldn't develop new material, thanks to production being halted. So, viewers watched more streaming services. Even HBO, FX and Showtime were forced to push back some of their best material to ensure they could get through the long summer.

"What did you do today to earn your place in this crowded world?"

It's a question one particular character in Amazon's new eight-episode series Utopia demands of others, frequently. Given that the Amazon show is adapted from the first, six-episode season of a well-regarded 2013 British series, you may find yourself demanding something similar of various scenes and characters in the comparatively overlong and overstuffed US version, and even — ultimately — of the show itself:

"Plucky" is one of those words that doesn't get out and about much anymore.

Something about it feels off, a bit — regressive, condescending, even vaguely sexist, as it's usually only seen in the company of the word "heroine" these days.

The first episode of Luca Guadagnino's We Are Who We Are opens the way his film Call Me Your Name closes: in extended close-up of a young man's face. In the 2017 movie, the face belonged to Elio (Timothee Chalamet), who stared into the fireplace, wracked with sobs as he nurses his first heartbreak. In the eight-episode HBO series, which Guadagnino directs and co-writes (with Paolo Giordano and Francesca Manieri), the face in question is that young Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer).

I'm Thinking of Ending Things premieres on Netflix on Friday, September 4.

Cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt's recent work in TV animation — she designed the look of Bojack Horseman, and created the series Tuca & Bertie — is bright and bold and cartoony, shading occasionally into the absurd. But on both shows, that absurdist strain gets folded so deftly into the established visual texture that its essential weirdness ceases to register. Bojack may have been peopled with (animaled with?

Here is a list of things that the HBO series Lovecraft Country, premiering Sunday, August 16th, has in common with the 2018 film Green Book:

1. Setting: Jim Crow-era America

2. Acting: Subtle, nuanced performances (Viggo Mortenen's dese-and-dose Green Book gangster notwithstanding).

3. Subject: Story features a road trip involving a travel guidebook written to inform Black people where they can safely eat and stay. (Green Book: Entire film; Lovecraft Country: Opening episodes only.)

The prospect of spoofing Star Trek represents nothing new under the (binary) sun(s). The franchise has become an institution, and mocking institutions remains a thriving American cottage industry. Saturday Night Live started taking whacks at Trek way back in the '70s, as did MAD magazine, and the short-lived sitcom Quark.

"Go for a walk," urges Jane (Jane Adams), whose friend Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) has just called her sounding distressed, "or maybe watch a movie."

Amy sighs despondently. "A movie's an hour and a half," she says.

Been there, Amy. Am there, more often than it's comfortable to acknowledge. The events of 2020 have sent us all spiraling, albeit along different pathways, but one widely expressed common element is how difficult it's proving to muster the amount of sustained concentration required to sit through a film at home.

It's called The Go-Go's.

That's it. Just The Go-Go's. The new Showtime documentary about the first all-woman group to write their own songs, play their own instruments and snag a #1 hit doesn't come with a subtitle. That's notable because subtitles, in documentaries, often serve as thesis statements, organizing principles, saying, here is the throughline, the thematic infrastructure, of this film.