Andy Andersen

Is real justice possible, or is it just an illusion? It’s the question Perry Mason poses to the jury in his closing statement this week. And it’s the question the show has been asking us all season.

Wowwww folks, we finally got some big reveals in the penultimate chapter of our little Perry Mason mystery here. That moment when you find out who the big baddie is and what exactly they have been scheming on this whole time, and you’re left with that “Oh, shit, now what?” feeling. I love that for us. Holcomb wasn’t kidding when he said Brooks McCutcheon was into something “bigger than anybody this town’s even thinking about,” and I dunno about you all, but I saw this one coming about as clearly

Nothing like an unlikely ally or secret foe to come in and shake up a mystery, huh? In tonight’s episode, we get both, and they bring some serious heat to the case. Our unlikely ally comes in the form of Detective Gene Holcomb (Eric Lange), a real “better the devil you know” job for Mason & Co. And we know Holcomb: a heavy-hitting dirty cop out to get his bag and improve his station and eke out his own healthy share of the American Dream.

Perry Mason’s “Chapter Ten” picks up exactly where the previous episode left off. A camera bulb flashes over McCutcheon’s newly discovered corpse, and we know the wheels are already in motion. Someone’s gotta pay fast. And you can sure as shit bet it won’t be the author of this ol’ conspiracy.

In every great mystery, the world is an onion. And somewhere, slumped in an office chair behind a moving wall of light, shadow, and cigarette smoke, there’s a “detective” slowly peeling back its putrid layers. Each one reveals a fact or clue or piece of violent aftermath that, in turn, reveals some nasty hidden truth of the world. And when we finally get to the center, all we’ve got to show for it is the full view of a grand illusion.

while Crimes of the Future certainly dishes out its own, uh, moderate blend of Cronenbergian grotesqueries, it plays less like The Fly or Videodrome (or whichever Cronenberg film grossed you out most) and more like Blade Runner (incidentally celebrating its 40th anniversary this summer) — a moody, hazy, contemplative sci-fi dream noir with a reluctant "detective" in metaphysical transit at its center.

Based on Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book, Under the Banner of Heaven is the true-crime story of a double murder in Utah in 1984, perpetrated by one of Mormonism’s many fundamentalist splinter groups, that’s juxtaposed with the early frontier-justice days of the LDS Church. For your humble recapper, a lapsed Mormon born and raised in Provo, Utah, this miniseries is sure to be one helluva prolonged “TRIGGERED” meme, so let’s get right to it, eh, brothers and sisters?

Boy, we’re in the thick of it now, aren’t we, folks? Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the game of sex, drugs, and crime in the city, you find the board beneath your feet is like six levels of 3-D chess deeper than before, and bravado is no substitute for true prowess. Main players on all sides are lost in the weeds right now, and as things stand, it’s tough to see who’s got enough of either to come out on top.

“The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” This is more or less the central thesis of BLOODY ORANGES, the new French end-times black comedy/satirical thriller from director Jean-Christophe Meurisse. It’s a quote from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, popping up on the screen at the halfway mark when things go from absurd to absurdly violent in a kaleidoscopic slow-burn trip through the banal collapse of western civilization in the foul year of our lord 2020.

Damn, welcome to episodes four and five of Tokyo Vice, where everything heats up. We last saw Jake Adelstein in the custody of the yakuza in the final moments of “Read the Air,” seemingly ready to break the next barrier and get closer to what’s really happening. We also left Sato at his own crossroads — in deep shit with Hitoshi Ishida (Shun Sugata), head of the Chihara-kai crime family, for beating the hell out of a fellow yakuza — offering up a hot tip that will hopefully prove his loyalty.

Thirty seconds into Tokyo Vice — Michael Mann’s dank-ass return to the collective, vice-coated neon-TV dreamscape — and dudes are strappin’ on their bullet … uh, knife-proof vests under dark suits and lacquered hair, to which I say: Hell yeah. The pair of lonely dudes in question are expat reporter Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) and Tokyo PD detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe), and together, they’re taking on the yakuza.

“The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell,” wrote William S. Burroughs. “Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.” Few images feel more malignant today than Hollywood’s potent, illusory image of the American policeman.

Jerry Garcia's favorite movie was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 comedy/horror mashup that he says gave him "a general fascination with the bizarre" that would fuel his music career. "There are things in this world that are really weird. I don't think I knew that before I saw that movie, that there are things that are really weird, and there are people who are concerned with them," Garcia said in "The Movie That Changed My Life" in 1995. "That became important to me, and I guess I thought to myself, on some level, I think I want to be concerned with things that are weird. […] It seems like fun."

Hey hey, it’s October 2021 which means it’s Spooky Season and fuckin’ Bond season. Daniel Craig’s final 007 outing is finally out after a year and a half of COVID delays, and since this’ll probably be the last time I have a calendared excuse to write about James Bond for a while I figured I’d indulge in a not-so-humble, non-definitive ranking of every Bond movie.

Hey hey, goin’ a bit off the usual script this week. Haven’t done a straight review of a new release on here before (I think the closest we ever got was our rapid-fire convo about Mank) but I saw the new Candyman over the weekend and for various reasons — chief among them my nagging sense of conflict with the calcifying critical consensus — I feel compelled to get my full two-cents out there in the ether.

Jesus, we’re halfway through 2021 already. Didn’t want to let any more time pass without givin’ y’all my favorite movies of the year so far now that we’re on the downslope.

It's summer y'all, which means it's time to cozy up with some sungrown bud and indulge in the great tradition of summer movie watching. Whether you're hitting the vape and venturing into a cool, dark theater to escape the heat, catching a cult classic at a retro summer evening drive-in, or just throwing a classic summer comedy on your TV at home while nursing an indica from your favorite bong, there's no summer-movie experience you can't successfully augment with a little cannabis.

The question of ‘what to watch’ can become an overwhelming proposition fast, especially if you’re stoned, couch-locked, and faced with an ever-multiplying mess of major streamers on your TV. In the age of infinite content options, curation is key. That’s why we’re giving you a roundup of top-shelf streaming options to hit up with your next evening joint, edible, or casual vape.

If you've spent any amount of time smoking weed and watching movies, you already know the two activities make an ideal pair. You might say film is the most psychotropic art form, engaging multiple senses and modes of thinking and feeling at once for an experience that, at its best, you can intuit sensorily as well as emotionally. The late filmmaker and legendary stoner Robert Altman once described the ultimate cinematic experience as such on The Dick Cavett Show in 1972.

1981: it’s the witching hour in America. A recession is in full bloom and Ronald Reagan’s promise to “make America great again” remains, for good or ill, unfulfilled. Strung out between the aching, post-’60s come-down nihilism of the late ’70s and the neoconservative free-market mass-consumption orgy of the Reagan era, the masses occupy a strange, pre-apocalyptic no-man’s-land moment in American culture, and so do the movies.