or something I've heard referred to as irrelevant and out of touch with society for years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, aka AMPAS, aka the organization that runs the Academy Awards, sure did blow up film Twitter yesterday. The Academy announced three new changes that will impact how the Oscars work starting next year.
I mentioned this in the review of the Curtain Call DLC, but I'm really impressed with how well Behavior Interactive have taken control of their game after buying the rights back from Starbreeze. They're fully invested in their new cosmetic store, coming up with fun and clever designs for all the unlicensed characters that add variety to the look of the game. The "wear the darkest clothing to hide" meta is losing out to the sheer joy of dressing Claudette in a tie-dye broom skirt or Ace in a bright pink sweater. You can still hide and look stylish.
More importantly, they are committed to constantly adding in new content to the game. The mid-season patch was only two weeks ago and we're already at a new seasonal event. This new event also patches the broken Tinkerer II bug and a few other major issues from the mid-season patch.
In Clinical, a psychiatrist shifts her focus from trauma patients to more everyday concerns after a traumatic incident with a former patient. A young woman attacked her in her office after her treatments did not go as planned. The psychiatrist is making great progress until a trauma patient begs her for help. Giving her time to the new patient is enough to send her own life spiraling into a nightmare of anxiety and hallucinations.
Clinical has the bones of something good. This kind of psychological thriller can either be really effective or really dull. The plot, though predictable, is well-written and does add up to a cohesive whole. It's just not executed well.
On paper, Veronica has no right to be as good as it is. The plot description is riddled with horror cliches, including the dreaded "based on a true story" text. There's even a marketing campaign for its Netflix release about how people are turning it off because it's too scary to finish (at least a dozen of those articles popped up shortly after the release, and more followed--it's purely advertising, and it’s good).
It's a horror film about a teenage girl, immature for her age, attending a Catholic school and caring for her siblings while her single working mother runs a bar to keep everyone afloat. The girl decides to use a Ouija board to summon the spirit of her dead father and unleashes a living hell on her family instead. Complete with creepy stern nuns, rampant hormones, mysterious cuts and bruises, and not one, not two, but three significantly younger children who are equally creepy as they are cute, and you should have, in 2018, a mess.
I'm a reality TV junkie. Give me a talent show and I will watch it. Give me unscripted reality and I will...not change the channel, but maybe not actively invest in it. I'm old enough that my high school jazz band used to go hang out after rehearsals and watch the first season of Survivor. The viewing parties continued into the summer and tensions grew high over whether Richard really deserved to win with that attitude.
My tastes have softened considerably since then (although the aggression and shock value of the first few seasons of Real World will always hold a place in my heart) and I'd rather watch kind, talented people get a chance to show off what they can do with constructive feedback. This is more the Great British Bake Off or Chopped style. Bring the best who will do the show in, let them show off what they can do with clear skill even if they fail the challenge, and hand a nice prize to whoever performs the best.
Making It is NBC's craft version of this format and it's just a delight.
