Review - Supernatural 7x03: The Girl Next Door

Grade: B-

Wow, Dean. Really? After all you’ve learned and grown in the past few years, you’re still taking a hard line on monsters.

I generally have a lot of faith in Supernatural’s writers room, but it seems like years of development went out the window when Dean offed that pleasant Kitsune, a brain-eating monster with Catwoman’s fingernails. Yes, I know Dean has always taken a very black-white view of monsters, but he seemed to have grown a little over the years, gradually accepting that not all monsters are…well, monsters. Didn’t he?

I’m getting ahead of myself. The Girl Next Door opens with Sam and Dean trapped in Sioux Falls General and at the mercy of the LeviaDoc. Bobby, who is as not dead as originally thought, comes to the rescue, only to find Dean with a broken leg and Sam on his way to becoming dinner. After a half-escape, the three settle in at one of Bobby’s safehouse. With Dean on injured reserve, Sam picks up a case that seems connected one he investigated as a teen, which means…flashbacks!

As Sam starts tracking a mysterious Ice Pick Killer who drains its victims’ brains, he recalls a similar pattern from years ago. Colin Ford returns as young Sam, growing enough that we probably won’t see flashbacks before the boys’ teen years anymore. The young Sam flashbacks are interesting because, for what seems like the first time, Sam is hunting alone. I always assumed the boys stuck together when they were younger and didn’t separate until Sam went to college, so this is an interesting twist on their history. Of course, young Sam is a capable hunter but pretty inept with these young ladies. It’s pretty funny to see young Sam ask his big brother not for advice on hunt but for advice on talking to girls.

With a little advice from Dean and a timely thrashing of some bullies, Sam sparks a cute fledgling relationship with young Amy Pond (for the Doctor Who fans out there), and her mother just happen to be the objects of his and, to his surprise, Dean and John’s hunt. With Sam’s father and brother closing in, Amy’s mother outs Sam as a hunter, forcing young Sam to contemplate killing Amy and her mom. But, young Amy provides him an out by killing her own mother. Obviously, a sacrifice like that means Sam has to let Amy go, with the caveat that she never kills again.

Back in the present, Amy seems to be killing again. In actuality, she feeds on dead bodies, but her son needed live brains to fend off an illness. Amy, as Sam tells Dean, did what anyone would do to save their child and offed some criminals. This development puts this week’s story clearly in the gray area that works so well for Supernatural. It is also a return to the notion that monsters aren’t evil, which leads back to my problem with Dean’s actions. The show has always seen the world in gray terms despite Dean’s moral absolutism. Over the seasons, Dean’s gradual shift from a black/white view to a more balanced vision of the world and creatures in it has been one of Supernatural’s strengths. Yet, seeing Dean kill Amy, in front of her son no less, is either a bold step or a discouraging misstep. Dean’s actions are also going to cause a brand new rift between him and Sam, as Sam specifically asked Dean to let Amy go. Thus, we have another slight regression, as the brothers are back to hiding things from each other, something I thought they’d learned not to do, especially after Sam’s openness about his mental wall.

Thankfully, it looks like next episode will directly address Dean’s actions. How effectively it will address those issues remains to be seen, but Dean has to feel the pain for this, either by his own hand or others. If not, Supernatural’s writers will come off as painfully inept, and they’re better than that. Aren’t they?

On the side:

Besides the Amy Pond reference, this episode is stacked with easter eggs. Anybody else catch the ad for My Bloody Valentine, in 3D, or the Batman: Under the Red Hood t-shirt on the convenience store clerk?

Review - Real Steel

Grade: B

Yang: Awesome robot-on-robot violence that rivals Transformers; a surprisingly heartwarming story centered on human beings rather than CGI creations; a classic Speilbegian tale of a boy with daddy issues and his robot.

Yin: Jackman is playing Wolverine with a kid; the kid (Dakota Goyo) is a love-hate character; May insult Transformers fans with its ambitions to replicate over-the-top robot action; a classic Speilbegian tale of a boy with daddy issues and his (fill in the blank with fantastic creature).

In-Between: The main robot, Atom, learns to dance like Justin Bieber. Take that as you will.

Who watches boxing these days? Honestly. I occasionally hear people talking vaguely about organizing a fight party, but, outside of a few whispers from folks old enough to remember when Mike Tyson was actually a pugilist, I don’t hear much in the public consciousness about the sweet science. The media has, in particular, long left the sport behind, with the most recent kerfuffle over the Mayweather-Ortiz bout being the most significant ping on the cultural radar in years. So, when Hugh Jackman’s character, ex-prize fighter Charlie Kenton, in the new Rock’em Sock’em Robots movie (and make no mistake, this is Rock’em Sock’em Robots: The Movie), Real Steel, tells his son Max (the chipper, fey, Bieber-esque Dakota Goyo) that the fight game left humans behind decades ago, it’s a not-so-subtle commentary on the very real phenomenon of sports fandom abandoning boxing.

Despite sports fans generally ignoring the once-dominant spectacle of pro boxing in favor of MMA tourneys, moviegoers have not abandoned movies about boxers. In the past year, audiences have seen awards heaped on David O. Russell’s The Fighter while smaller pictures like the MMA drama Warrior draw consistently positive reviews. Why? My theory: America, despite being top dog for decades, has always loved an underdog story, even more so now that the country is sliding right into underdog status among world powers. Real Steel is the perfect flick to satiate that taste and it does so by combining the mainstream audience’s ‘love’ for a calculated combination of gloss and heart. Run Transformers into Rocky, add a dash of Over the Top and a pinch of The Iron Giant and witness the unsurprisingly fun, but shockingly heartfelt, Real Steel.

Real Steel follows Jackman’s Charlie Kenton as he scrapes out a living by fighting remote-controlled giant robots with jackhammers for fists and wicked names like Ambush, Zeus, Midas and Noisy Boy. Kenton is a bit of a deadbeat, a could’ve-been-contender with a propensity for welching on debts. When he loses two robots to separate hubris-inspired tragedies, he is forced to find something, anything, to keep him in the game. To complicate matters, the son he long abandoned, Max, has resurfaced after the death of his mother, one of Charlie’s old girlfriends. Forced to hold onto Max for the summer after making a deal with his son’s adoptive parents, Charlie is now backed into a corner where he just may have to bond with the son he never wanted to know. Things turn around for the Kenton boys when a trip to scrap yard leads them to discover Atom, a sparring robot with a smile carved into its faceplate and, maybe, a soul. Atom is special because he is the rare robot who doesn’t require remote control—he shadowboxes—and can, literally, take a licking and keep on ticking. With a new robot in tow, the three begin a journey to learn about each other—Charlie and Max teach Atom how to fight, and dance like Justin Bieber, while Max teaches Charlie how to be a father—and climb their way from unknowns to genuine contenders, in the ring and in life.

Real Steel seems terribly hokey at first glance. Nobody asked for a Rock’em Sock’em Robots movie, but now we have it, and it’s so much fun that it qualifies as something audiences didn’t know they wanted. This is a far better merging of the Speilbergian, an executive producer on the film, ethos with contemporary tastes than Super 8 ever was. The fights, alone, are amazing. Taking a note from Michael Bay’s Transformer epics and delivering ridiculous robot-on-robot violence in far clearer manner. Director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum I and II, and Date Night) shows a much better command of an action scene with CGI ‘bots than Bay did on his first time out. While Steel doesn’t come anywhere close to the carnage of Transformers, particularly Dark of the Moon’s assault on Chi-town, it is still frenetic and colorful enough to match, and surpass, some of Transformers' lesser action scenes.

One thing Real Steel has over Transformers is the necessity of the human performances. Real Steel is about people first and that bodes well for the schmaltzier material, which keeps scenes between humans from appearing like a stopgap. Jackman is adequate as washed up ne’er-do-well, but much of what he brings to the table is just toned-down Wolverine. Dakota Goyo actually carries more of the movie as Max, building a makeshift father-son relationship with Atom that recall’s Brad Bird’s underrated animated classic The Iron Giant. While Goyo carries a lot more of the film than the trailers would lead one to believe, he can be grating. His character was obviously based of the kids from 80's blockbusters, either total enthusiasm or overwrought attitude and angst. There will be no in-between in how audiences respond to him. He’s either adorable or insufferable. Evangeline Lily shows up for a few scenes as the daughter of Charlie’s former trainer who probably, definitely is in love with Charlie, but offers little more than a voice of concern or support when necessary. The ever-reliable Anthony Mackie is also hanging around the edges of the proceedings as an underground fight promoter, being underutilized, as usual.

Thankfully, the story has enough heart to overrun the stock performances. The underdog fight plot and the father-son reconciliation threads are typically win-win scenarios, and those threads are even more effective when woven together. Audiences may not be moved to tears, but even the most jaded viewers will feel that weird warmth in their left ventricle, if only for a second. Between the solid action and legit amount of heartwarming, Real Steel proves to be a surprisingly entertaining, and slyly moving, summer flick stranded in the middle of Oscar season. It may not knock audiences out, but it will surely make them smile.

Review - Supernatural 7x02: Hello Cruel World

Grade: B

Cas is gone, but Dr. Sexy M.D. is still on the air. Somehow, the Winchester’s world just got a little bit darker.

I want to take a moment to lament what is, ostensibly, the last we’ll see of Cas for a while, hopefully. When Bobby asks Dean how he’s holding up in the face of Sam’s hallucinations, the rise of the Leviathans, and the “death” of Cas, he mentions that Dean just lost one of the best friends he’d ever had. Hindsight being 20/20, Bobby’s right. For the past couple of seasons, Cas and Dean were, at times, closer than Sam and Dean, despite Cas’ weak grasp of human emotion. So, when Dean fishes Cas’ trenchcoat out of a river after Cas explodes into an ink stain and releases the Leviathans into the local water supply, it’s a tough moment. Cas was a welcome counterpoint to the brother’s constant angst. His lack of any discernable emotion besides confusion was necessary in a series that saw its leads become more hopeless with every episode. Cas wasn’t the brightest sign of hope, but he was never trapped in his own despair like the Winchesters do.

Now, it seems like the fellas won’t be getting that break Dean was looking for last episode because the Leviathans are loose and they’ve already started wreaking havoc. The Leviathans are essentially a cross between Supernatural’s demons and vampires. They possess any unlucky souls who, in this case, ingested the polluted water then they maneuver themselves into positions and places where they can unlock their bottom jaw and become Pez-like people eaters. Like Supernatural’s demons, these new beasties have a pecking order. Apparently, there’s a Big Bad leviathan behind everything, but he/she/it is relaying its orders through a leviathan inhabiting the man who was once The Shield’s Capt. Aceveda (Benito Martinez). A few more leviathans have possessed a pair of teens from a local swim team and another inhabits an innocent young girl. In an effort to circumvent the pattern of Supernatural’s baddies being young women, the little lady leviathan quickly switches to the body of a cheeky surgeon.

The leviathans’ need to satiate themselves leaves a trail of bodies that hits the news, landing them right on the Winchesters’ radar. Normally, this is the point where Sam and Dean mount up for one of their DIY-style hunts, but our boys have learned from their past mistakes. Sam fesses up to his hallucinations, letting Dean and Bobby know exactly how bad it’s been. Dean is only shocked for a second before he benches Sam, and Sam agrees. All the while, Lucifer—Mark Pellegrino delivering finely-tuned villainy that tiptoes between unnerving and hammy—is poking at Sam—who is spending most of his time field stripping and cleaning his guns—urging the poor kid to kill himself and rejoin him in the cage. It occurs to me that Sam has been constantly besieged by mental torment since the first episode, and now, seven seasons deep, is no different. As much as Dean needed that break from hunting last season to live a normal life, I can’t help but think Sam needs it a lot more. While any Supernatural vet knows the boys will always face torment, with Sam more often than not getting the lion’s share, this feels like a retread of many of the Sam arcs from years past, but this time, at least, the brothers have learned enough to avoid avoidance and try to head the problem off.
With Sam benched, Dean on the hunt and Leviathans on the loose, everything seems totally disjointed until Bobby gets a call from Sheriff Jody Mills, last seen in Season Five’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. See, Sheriff Mills was in the Sioux Falls, SD hospital for a routine appendectomy when she spotted LeviaDoc kidnapping his dinner. Bobby wisely leaves Sam by his lonesome and thus at the mercy of Lucifer, who lures Sam to an abandoned warehouse tailor made for suicides. Dean arrives just in time to pull Sam back, thanks to dropping a GPS on him earlier in the episode. This all sets up the standard Winchester heart-to-heart albeit with a lot more honesty than the average post-game wrap between these two. Of course the post-game wrap came about ten minutes early so there was more left to this fairly stuffed episode.

When the boys get back to Bobby’s, they run into Captain Leviathian who gives Sammy a pipe to the head before Dean manages to drop a car on him. Worse for the wear after their first run-in with the Leviathan, Dean and Sam end up in a ambulance on its way to Sioux Falls Hospital while, back at Bobby’s, Captain Leviathan proves that dropping a car on them isn’t enough to slow a leviathan.

This episode was mostly a place setting ep. Hello Cruel World merely put all the players in place and set the stage for the conflict between the Winchesters and the Leviathans that will form the spine of the season. Compared to last year, this is a much more serialized approach, which isn’t a bad route for a series as seasoned as Supernatural. I know and most longtime viewers know that eventually Supernatural will get around to the one-off episodes that are its bread and butter, but, for now, this is a solid way to build the season. Hopefully, the Leviathan arc won’t get buried, forgotten like some of the major arcs introduced early last season. As long as the writers keep with this momentum, we’re looking at the beginning of one of Supernatural’s most promising seasons.