The Critical Corner

In a TV landscape that has been massively filled up with so many shows based on comic book properties with all different kinds of quality, no other show makes me more sad with its current state like "The Flash". The original spin off of the now defunct "Arrow", once the beacon of hope of what a great superhero show on network TV could be, has truly fallen to new lows. Despite a sign of some hope with its sixth season finally reversing a downward trend that hit its nadir with the fourth and fifth season, nothing could have ever prepared us for the pile of awful that awaited us for the majority of Season 7, even as it tried to pick itself up at the end. Obviously, there will be a big desire to point fingers and for heads to roll as to why the recently finished Season 7 turned out the way it did. One can easily point a finger to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which most famously forced the improved sixth season to end prematurely, and make filming new seasons much more...

          The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Disney+ experiment has been interesting to say the least. With their first two forays with "WandaVision" and "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier", we saw the MCU willing to experiment with its format and add extra depth to characters that were at best the side focus to the main coarse. At the same time, the shows were plagued by obvious flaws, like a lot of side stuff that was left frustratingly underserved by the time the show's came to a close, and an inability to bring their respective series to both a satisfying close and a sense that what we just watched would feel entirely essential once we started diving back into the movie realm, particularly after their positioning in importance to the next few phases of the franchise. It was the big question hanging over the third MCU show this year, "Loki". Would it follow the same pattern established by the previous two series?      "Loki" is an interes...

When Marvel announced their initial slate for the MCU's Phase Four, the project I was looking forward to the most from the initial offerings was definitely "Falcon and the Winter Soldier". Even before the pandemic shuffled things around (this was going to come out after "Black Widow" and before "The Eternals" and "WandaVision"), I was looking forward to this simply because both "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Captain America: Civil War" are my top two favorite movies of the entire MCU. The later movies of the "Captain America" trilogy stood out to me not just because they were some fine action movies, but married their action to thrilling, thought provoking themes you don't see elsewhere in the MCU. Anchoring those movies obviously was Chris Evans' Steve Rogers who proved to be the heart and soul of this shared universe. With "Avengers: Endgame" essentially retiring the character seem...

  It's crazy to think 2020 was the first full year where the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't release a single piece of content since 2009. With the COVID-19 pandemic closing down theatre chains across the globe, and Marvel's production pipelines being halted mid production, the start of the MCU's Phase 4 didn't go according to the original plan. If things had gone differently, by now we would have already seen movies like "Black Widow" and "The Eternals", and we would have gotten the MCU's first TV show under the Marvel Studios umbrella, "Falcon and the Winter Soldier" with the fourth show in the schedule, "WandaVision" next in the pipeline. As we all know, the order of things ended up being way different. And to Marvel's credit, "WandaVision" works surprisingly well as the opening salvo for their new phase of content. If there is anything you can takeaway immediately from "WandaVision", is that th...

Hello! Now that I have made the list of my honorable mentions (you can read it here ), it's time to talk about the ten games that made an impact to me in the year of our Lord, 2020. Without further ado, here is the list: TOP 10 GAMES OF 2020 10. Resident Evil 3 2019's remake for "Resident Evil 2" remains one of my favorite survival horror games of all time. The amount of care and detail Capcom poured into a remake which puts many new game releases to shame is something that has stuck with me, and left me craving for so much more. Thankfully, Capcom was able to slightly satiate my hunger by releasing a remake of what I've learned is one of the more polarizing entries in the series, "Resident Evil 3". I'll be upfront and say this remake doesn't reach the highs from "Resident Evil 2", and in some ways it is a step backwards by being a game more focused on the action than the tension filled moments of the previous game. Despite this, the le...