Bald Move Prestige - The Exorcist (1973)

Special thanks to Stephen Moore, whose original commission of Home Alone we thoughtlessly trampled upon during our holiday revelries.  For his make-good podcast, he has selected the classic 1973 horror film, The Exorcist.  Directed by William Friedkin and starring Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max von Sydow, and Jason Miller, it tells the harrowing tale of a mother who turns to Catholic priests as her last hope when her daughter gets possessed by an ancient evil spirit.  I’ve got to be honest, I was skeptical that the film would hold up, but does it ever.  Not only does it still manage to be genuinely disturbing, but it elevates the form of the horror flick into a generally excellent film in terms of art.

Watching Dead - A Walking Dead Podcast - 809 – Honor

Jim and A.Ron are here to say goodbye to Carl, and to have the debate about whether or not we should be saying goodbye in the first place.  While acknowledging this is an above par episode of The Walking Dead by AMC Studios standards, it commits several offenses, chief among them the decision to undercut a fairly effective scene of a father and surrogate mother saying tearful goodbyes to their son with yet. More. Morgalizing.  Everyone involved is too good for what they’re doing, perhaps even including us, but we’ll be here to continue to catalog the decline of a once great television empire.

Bald Move Pulp - Altered Carbon Season One Wrapup

We spin up Netflix’s Altered Carbon after we’ve decanted it for a few weeks, to see what we make of it in our final analysis.  Cool concepts, excellent design, and decent sci-fi action are slightly undercut by sometimes silly and hammy execution, and a failure to take ideas to their logical conclusion.  Still, we’re always down to ponder futurism and human singularities, so we dig it.  It will be interesting to see if and how they decide to proceed with future seasons!

Bald Move Prestige - Annihilation (2018)

We’ve just seen Annihilation, and boy are our minds blown.  Written and directed by Alex Garland and starring Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaacs, Tessa Thompson, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, it features a plot that it is alien, wondrous, unfathomable, and terrifying, with visuals to match.  It compares favorably to The Arrival, and is the kind of movie we wanted Alien: Covenant to be.  It’s just too bad that Paramount had so little faith in the film, in our eyes they had something special on their hands, and we feel sorry for the international audience that is going to see this for the first time on the small screen.  For everybody in the US, Canada, and China, go see this film!