Andy Andersen

Creative copywriter, film & TV critic, cannabis reporter, and pop culture obsessive located in Long Beach, CA. 

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Vulture •

Special Ops: Lioness Recap: Wheels Up

“If we play this right, it’s over before it’s begun.” Our penultimate special op picks up right where we left off, both time- and vibe-wise. Everyone in Langley’s clacking away on laptops and pacing and fast-talking through 15-second phone calls. And Kaitlyn Meade, as always, knows just what to say to sum up the whole damn thing. We always double down. Go big or go home, get rich or die tryin’ — it’s the mission or bust. The emperor wears no clothes, and someone’s liable to catch a glimpse.
Vulture •

Special Ops: Lioness Recap: They Choose It All

Damn, this Lioness program is turning out to be a real drag for our girl Cruz, and we’re just now getting into a real episodey episode of these Special Ops — keeping the action and the plot and all the emotional beats a-movin’. Cruz gets her first real round of spy games in, and some of the boys on the team even get a naughty li’l side quest. Action’s moving, plots developing, and characters are emoting tight little morsels of soap-western wisdom from the TV cowboy poet himself.
Vulture •

Special Ops: Lioness Series-Premiere Recap

Special Ops: Lioness, the latest Paramount+ show from the prolific cowboy whisperer extraordinaire Taylor Sheridan, opens cold on a job gone wrong. Joe (Zoe Saldana), head of a covert CIA operation tasked with flipping the mothers, wives, girlfriends, and acquaintances of male terrorist leaders, is trying to get her undercover operative out of a terrorist compound in Syria before the whole thing goes up in smoke. Her team, locked and loaded, circles the compound in a chopper, awaiting orders.
Vulture •

Perry Mason Recap: Today’s Newspaper Wraps Tomorrow’s Fish

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
Vulture •

Perry Mason Recap: Lucky Me

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.
Vulture •

Perry Mason Season-Premiere Recap: The Illusion of Justice

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.
Vulture •

Under the Banner of Heaven Series-Premiere Recap: What We Find Broken

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?
Nightmarish Conjurings •

[Movie Review] BLOODY ORANGES

“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.
Vulture •

Tokyo Vice Recap: Choose the Right

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.
Vulture •

Tokyo Vice Series-Premiere Recap: What Really Happens

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.
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