Though a US release date has yet to be decided upon, Japan needn't wait too much longer for Hayao Miyazaki's long-awaited return to the directing chair with The Wind Rises, as the Studio Ghibli film is due out there in under one month's time (July 20th). History tells us it won't come stateside until about a year from now, which makes this initial teaser for the film such a pleasant sight.
Following what many perceive to be their pinnacle in Toy Story 3, Pixar would appear to have lost their mojo and slipped from the pedestal that critics and viewers alike had placed them upon. With a track record as impeccable as the company's was when starting out, backlash was to be expected the second they stumbled, and with a run as long as they enjoyed it’s no wonder there’s been such an outcry against them.
Upon hearing news of Girl Meets World, I set about re-watching episodes of Boy Meets World to mark the occasion, as well as to gorge myself on nostalgia. My trek back through the series started with me picking episodes out at random, a practice I soon abandoned for fear that it was doing the show an injustice. Infamous for its lack of continuity though it may be – brothers and sisters long since forgotten about, characters vanishing, other characters portrayed by a revolving door of actors, history being rewritten – Boy Meets World functions best when its characters are given the chance to take root inside your heart and you step back to watch them grow.
By breaking this fifth and final season into two, Vince Gilligan and AMC have already made some of the Breaking Bad faithful, myself included, go into veritable withdrawal in the interim between. Now, with the date for the premiere of the last set of episodes finally announced, it'll be longer than anyone initially suspected before we're once again given our Breaking Bad fix.
Apprehensive as I was about Archer's season finale, I wouldn't have guessed it would land as flat as it did and that I would now have an answer for anyone who asks me what my least favorite episode of the show is. I don't intend to argue it wasn't entertaining, as all Archer episodes are, just that it felt off, comparatively speaking, for a number of reasons.
Keeping with the theme, the first episode of Archer's two-part season finale includes another charade, this one more convoluted than all the rest. In order to fund his philanthropic endeavors, Cheryl's brother Cecil lures her and her ISIS cohorts aboard his "chopper-saurus" in an elaborate ruse to get recorded testimony verifying what we've all known since the pilot, that Cheryl is (to use a Weird Al lyric) "two fries short of a Happy Meal."
On Archer, missions never go according to plan, but they've so consistently been subject to sudden twist endings this season that this has had the opposite of the intended effect, which is that those revelations are an expected, as opposed to a surprising, occurrence.
Like last week, "Un Chien Tangerine" hones in on the strained dynamic between Archer and Lana. This time, however, they had another friend along to join the ride. To be more specific, man's best friend, a dog named Kazak who, it appears, has a natural sense of comedic timing.
Archer has proven many times over that it can pair its characters up at random and make each mixture just as golden as all the others, but its creators are also well aware that some, such as Archer and Lana, have been certified platinum.
After last week's Bourdain-centric episode, Archer widened its scope with "Coyote Lovely," introducing enough one-off characters to fill up a station wagon. As is often the case when you busy things up to such an extent, there will be drawbacks.
