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TV Review: Gotham “The Mask” By: Brandon Wolfe After last week’s narrative pyrotechnics concerning Gotham City’s ensuing mob war and the Penguin’s key role in it, ‘Gotham’ shifts back into procedural mode, a mode that it still hasn’t quite cracked how to do well with. With the more interesting story threads largely moved to the backburner this week, Gordon and Bullock are back at work on a more standard case, and the episode suffers for it. “The Mask” concerns a financial firm that exercises the unusual hiring process of having its young hotshot prospects fight each other to the death for a seat at the table, all to satisfy the whims of its deranged CEO, Richard Sionis. When the body (with the gruesome addition of a severed finger in its mouth) of a failed prospect is recovered, Gordon and Bullock begin poking around and begin to notice that virtually all of Sionis’ charges around the office bear some form of battle scarring. This all leads to a confrontation between Gordon and

TV Review: Constantine "The Devil’s Vinyl” By: Brandon Wolfe ‘ Constantine ’ is still plugging right along. “ The Devil’s Vinyl ” is very much a case-of-the-week outing, but it allows the series to continue to color itself in. More so than last week’s episode, this entry provides a fair amount of detail on the world that John Constantine inhabits and the players that share that world with him. While the story at its core isn’t terribly vital, that which we are provided in the service of said story certainly is. We open with Zed tracking down Constantine’s lair, using the clues afforded to her in her sketched visions. After finishing some weird blood ritual that isn’t explained to us, Constantine is headed out the door to Chicago to investigate the odd circumstances surrounded the apparent death by suicide of a music producer that John befriended in his pre-demon days when he was embarking on a singing career. Zed, whom Constantine and his associate Chas still don’t entirel

TV Review: Gotham “Penguin’s Umbrella” By: Brandon Wolfe “ Penguin’s Umbrella ” is the best episode of ‘ Gotham ’ aired thus far. Which isn’t to say that it nullifies every problem the show has displayed since its inception, but it shakes off the procedural stupor that has enveloped the series since the pilot. That mob war we’ve heard about incessantly for weeks finally heats up and we start to see how Oswald Cobblepot fits into the mix. “Penguin’s Umbrella” is a pivotal episode in ‘Gotham’s’ burgeoning mythology and it gives us our first indication that the people behind the show might actually have some idea of what they’re doing after all. Cobblepot coming forward to reveal his notable lack of death has saved Gordon from his impending arrest for the man’s murder, but it immediately places him in a much more precarious situation, for now not only does Bullock want Gordon dead for his betrayal, but so do Fish Mooney and Carmine Falcone, who dispatch several henchmen to eliminat

TV Review: Constantine “The Darkness Beneath” By: Brandon Wolfe ‘ Constantine’ is still in the process of putting itself together. Much of the legwork done in the pilot episode was all for naught as the show opted to change its course after that first outing was shot. As such, all of the material focusing on the character of Liv Aberdeen, the young woman initially being groomed to become John Constantine’s companion, was chucked out the window. This leaves Episode 2, “The Darkness Beneath,” with the task of setting Constantine up with a new partner, which it does in the form of Zed (Angelica Celaya), a young woman with some kind of psychic connection to Constantine, manifesting itself in visions that she sketches on paper. Zed meets Constantine when the latter comes to a mining town in western Pennsylvania to investigate a disturbance where a miner was immolated in his shower (Constantine’s other partner, the seemingly immortal Chas, stays behind due to an outstanding warrant f

TV Review: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “A Fractured House” By: Brandon Wolfe The list of things that ‘ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ’ did right in its first season is extremely short. In fact, there’s just one thing on it: The post-‘ Winter Soldier ’ reveal that Agent Ward was secretly a member of HYDRA all along. Ward, up to that point, had been the blandly handsome lead agent aggravatingly bereft of any personality. He stood as a totem for the entire show: dull, stiff and generically unenjoyable. Making him a turncoat didn’t solve all the show’s problems, but it shook it up enough to remove a doldrum or two. And, being fair, a series taking its chiseled lead and turning him into a treacherous killer was gutsy in a way that ‘ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ’ didn’t seem capable of being. The question ever since was how ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ was going to screw up its lone victory. When was it going to decide to backtrack on Ward, whitewashing his crimes enough to get him back on the t

TV Review: Gotham “Spirit of the Goat” By: Brandon Wolfe Donal Logue has proven himself over a span of many years to be a talented, perfectly enjoyable actor. Playing a sarcastic crank like Harvey Bullock, Logue should be the saving grace of ‘Gotham,’ livening up the dour proceedings with a snappy line. But in “Spirit of the Goat,” Bullock takes center stage for once and it becomes more evident that the show has no idea how to use what should be a huge asset. With the material working so fiercely against him, Logue can only do so much, especially when forced to speak lines as musty as “The press is gonna have a field day” and “The whole thing’s gonna come down on us like a ton of bricks.” The series imprisons Logue in a tomb of blandness, neutralizing what should be a regular source of vibrancy. The episode begins on a flashback to ten years ago, back when Bullock was a young cop with a bit more life behind his eyes. Pursuing a serial killer called The Goat, a lunatic who w

TV Review: Constantine“Non Est Asylum” By: Brandon Wolfe John Constantine , the “exorcist, demonologist and master of the dark arts” protagonist of DC’s ‘ Hellblazer ’ comic series, has made an appearance once before in the realm of live-action, portrayed by, of all people, Keanu Reeves in a 2005 film. Constantine , in the comics, is blonde and exceedingly British. Keanu Reeves is not those things. And though that film and Reeves’ performance are stronger than their reputations would suggest, such stark changes imposed on the character right out of the gate didn’t set him up to succeed with his fanbase. NBC’s ‘ Constantine ’ is, to its credit and forgive the dumb pun, hellbent on setting the character straight. Portrayed by Matt Ryan, the character is blonde and British as all get out, he maintains his trademark rumpled, trenchcoated look and possesses the proper surly demeanor. All that’s missing, despite his constant tinkering with a Zippo, is the character’s penchant for ch

TV Review: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “A Hen in the Wolf House” By: Brandon Wolfe It’s gotten to the point where one watches ‘ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ’ in a predisposed state of defeat. Any time the show does something that sounds promising on paper, it finds a way to make that thing fail in practice. Take the show’s casting of Kyle MacLachlan as Skye’s mysterious father. MacLachlan is a fantastic actor. If given a halfway decent role, he would absolutely crush it. But here, he’s handed a villain role that might as well be torn from the script of an old Van Damme film. He’s angry and he monologues and he grabs women threatening by the throat. Any imposing schmoe could play this role, so why waste Kyle MacLachlan’s valuable time with it? Because this is ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ and wasting people’s time is all it knows how to do. The show adds another new face this week as Adrianne Palicki joins the cast as Bobbi “Mockingbird” Morse. Initially presented as a hard-bitt

TV Review: Gotham “Viper” By: Brandon Wolfe ‘ Gotham ’ is still a show very much in the throes of trying to figure out just what it is that it wants to be. Up until this point, the series has seemed to exclusively take Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy as its inspiration, with its grounded reality and poker-faced seriousness. But “Viper” throws a wrench in that paradigm by introducing a drug, called Viper, that is surreptitiously distributed on the streets of Gotham and turns anyone who ingests it into a superhuman rage monster. All of a sudden, we are unexpectedly thrown into the deep end of superpowered villainy. It’s not necessarily unwelcome, as Nolan’s insistence on excising the more fantastical elements of the ‘Batman’ universe was often maddening, but it’s something that ‘Gotham’ could have eased us into to make the shift less jarring. The first instance of Viper-related crime happens at a convenience store just around the corner from where Gordon and Bullock

V/H/S: Viral Review By: Brandon Wolfe 2012’s ‘ V/H/S ’ found a new spin on the now-ubiquitous found-footage subgenre, employing the device in the service of a horror anthology. Essentially ‘Creepshow’ with camcorders. Telling five short stories about horror caught on amateur video, the film was a decidedly mixed bag. While the segment “Amateur Night,” about a succubus terrorizing a bunch of frat-boy creeps, was a hugely effective piece of work, the other segments ranged from solid to decent to lousy. Even so, the film maintained enough of a free-floating sense of dread throughout its various chapters to be held as a qualified success. I never saw its sequel, but the consensus there also seemed to indicate enough high notes were peppered in among the low to award the film some merit. But now the second sequel, ‘ V/H/S: Viral ,’ has arrived and it doesn’t receive quite as much as its predecessors by way of partial credit. Gone is the sense of white-knuckle foreboding that the or

St. Vincent Review By: Brandon Wolfe The film career of Bill Murray has become neatly bifurcated over the last couple of decades. Murray started out as the droll wiseacre in comedy classics like ‘ Caddyshack ,’ ‘ Stripes ’ and ‘ Ghostbusters ,’ a mode he largely remained in until being reinvented as a seriocomic indie darling by Wes Anderson in ‘Rushmore,’ the mode in which he’s operated ever since. Turning in a parade of performances as sad sacks experiencing midlife crises, the contemporary Murray has little in common with the unflappable sly dog we knew and loved in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and though Murray’s dramatic work has birthed many gems (chief among them, his work with Anderson and his role in Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Broken Flowers’), many fans have longed for the Murray of old to reemerge. In the early going, ‘St. Vincent’ seems like it might meet the two Murrays in the middle, acting as a hybrid of the wily old Murray from comedies of yore and the new, melancholy Mur

TV Review: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “Face My Enemy” By: Brandon Wolfe If “ Face My Enemy ” is about anything - beyond ‘ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ’s usual “Find Object X before Bad Guy Y does” gobbledygook - it’s about Agent May. May has been a frustrating character on a show that doesn’t really have another kind. The show has painted her from the start as the stoic warrior-woman, an agent so focused on her duties that she doesn’t have much left over for anything like a personal level. This is a workable character type provided you build upon it over time, finding cracks and hidden layers in the character’s façade. With May, ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ has never really done that because the show doesn’t appear to know how to build upon anything in any sort of skillful manner. It can insert its characters into the requisite dramatic moments that shows like this require, but enhancing and nurturing basic character-building? There’s no evidence as of yet that such a skill is in thi

TV Review: Gotham “Arkham” By: Brandon Wolfe All shows need a grace period of varying length when starting in order to find themselves, which is why criticizing ‘ Gotham ’ is proving a bit challenging. How many of its multitude of flaws are growing pains that can be worked out and how many are intrinsically part of the package? The show, quite candidly, has not been very good thus far, but some of the best shows ever aired have had very rocky starts before achieving greatness. ‘ Gotham ’s’ issues don’t seem fleeting; they feel like significant design flaws that won’t be corrected anytime soon because they likely are not recognized as flaws by those in charge. Still, in spite of these hunches, the fourth episode of a pilot season is a bit early to throw something with so much potential onto the scrap heap. All we can do sit by and hope that our time in the trenches isn’t for naught. Arkham Asylum is the ‘Batman’ hallmark that gets the spotlight this week in the aptly titled “Ark