Big Mouth season two is something that I didn’t expect to enjoy more than season one, but it succeeded. Whether it was being adaptive to the humor to make it less shocking or the delving of characters to make us understand them and wish for them to be happy. Season 2 of this show takes us on a huge roller coaster ride and it does not hold back on the recurring issues of puberty and hormones.
It also introduces us to the shame wizard as a new threat to Maurice and Connie (the monsters) as their influence will counteract with him, who’s only purpose is to impose self conscious thinking and doubt on the kids and make them feel ashamed and insecure about their feelings. We learn more about the kids as the season continues and toward the last half, things really get kind of crazy and can lead up to some nice future tie in episodes in season three. In a spoiler free review, we will talk about the introduction of new characters, the growth of some of the main characters and the lore of the monster verse that does get explored later on in the last couple of episodes.
Season one ended with Jay and Jessi starting some sort of relationship and running away, which ultimately leads to nowhere. Andrew and Maurice are still becoming corrupted by the hormones and Nick finally got his monster, who is ancient and the same monster that Coach Steve has, which does not bode well for Nick at all. The second season continues to delve into the characters continuing to learn more about their sexuality.
Exploring it either by kissing with their fronts or as one character does, hump a stuffed animal. It is only when we meet the new character, The Shame Wizard, who gives characters the uneasy and ashamed feelings about how they are acting and the even borderline feelings of depression that plagues them, when interacting with their fellow students. I like the introduction of him because in the first season, it seems like even though all of the kids were going through puberty, they were subtle about it and they didn’t show any kind of emotional attachments or understanding.
With the Shame Wizard around, he whispers to all the characters and gives them self-conscious thoughts, almost makes them shun sex and be introverted, not expressing their raging hormones. It is a nice addition because the monsters cannot do anything to the Shame Wizard at all and even though they try to outsmart him, it never succeeds. Adding him, makes it easy to not subtract any of the extra characters that take up this universe.
The main four characters have some roller coasters of emotions going on. Nick, starts learning about his monsters (plural but not really a spoiler) and is trying to figure out why they would give him some awkward and unnatural advice. Andrew just continues going down the rabbit hole into depravity and sexual awkwardness, shunning himself away from the girl he likes and even his close friends.

Big Mouth
Jay has continued to embrace his sexuality and goes full force into loving it without any hesitation with inanimate objects or people. Jessi is a sad case, still dealing with the fallout from last season with her parents drifting apart and like many teenagers, lashes out in anger because she wants to fix it and cannot. She has the biggest drop in emotions which leads to a new character being introduced only for her sanity. Keeping the spoilers away, I will not reveal it mostly because I’m not sure if it’ll come back in season 3 and turn into a plot device for her character arch.
Toward the end of season 2, we see the monster world of emotions and hormones. Every monster has a place they reside at and an office building, where they work. It’s a nice Monsters Inc. kind of place where the everyday emotion-monsters go about their usual routine, talking about their human clients and discussing progress and other issues. I love this concept and I hope that they’ll go back to it, having the humans travel to the monster world possibly creating some major issues and situations that cannot be solved in the human world.
Season 2 took all the awkward elements of season 1 and continued to add more and more, making it something special. It still has the cringe humor with Coach Steve and maybe some weirdness coming from some of the kids and their hormones, but it’s nothing that we cannot relate to. With the addition of some new characters, a new monster world and the continuing story arcs of the four main kids and their emotional ups and downs, it does make it addicting. A coming of age story that just happens to be rated MA. I enjoyed season 2, season 3 should be quite fascinating when it comes out.

Movie
Joy Ride Is An Extremely Raunchy And Hilarious Comedy

Joy Ride is an extremely raunchy and hilarious comedy that takes the mantle of ensemble risky
comedies that at times, leave your mouth on the floor. Joy Ride focuses on two best friends
Audrey and Lolo (Ashley Sullivan and Sherry Cola) end up getting roped up into a trip to Asia,
they end up on gals pal cross-continent trek to find Audrey’s long lost birth mother so she
doesn’t lose a huge business deal.
The chemistry in this movie is superb. Every character has their moment to shine and there’s
rarely a scene where you don’t get a belly laugh. I was shocked at how crazy and bold this
movie got, continually pushing the line to get a laugh. The movie does a good job of getting to
the point and getting to the scenes that really make you chuckle. There are some editing choices where the story flies by some stuff, and it feels a little incomplete, but never at the expense of really enjoying being around for the journey.
I thought that this was a sleeper for this year and certainly a movie worth watching with your
friends some weekend. It’s great to throw on if you want a laugh and really just enjoy some
great actors riffing off each other. The focus on culture was a nice touch and really elevated the movie to another level. While I would say if you’re easily offended, this movie is not for you – if you’re looking for a no holds barred comedy, Joy Ride is a trip worth taking.
Events
Who Doesn’t Want To Wear The Ninja Suit Of Snake-Eyes Or Dress Like The Mandalorian?

Hasbro has had their pulse app out for a while now. It allows for access to items to buy, preorder, and a look into future projects and releases. It also allows for a very cool thing most nerds (a group of which I am a proud card-carrying member) have always wanted, the ability to make yourself into an action figure. I’ve contemplated making one for a time but, I finally got my chance to get my hands on one at Comic-Con this year. Now, of course, I had to wait in line as it was a pretty sought-after item. Who doesn’t want to have themselves wear the ninja suit of Snake-Eyes or dressed like a Mandalorian? I was approached by one of the booth staff as I was showing my nephew all the cool ways we could get him his own MIles Morales action figure with his face (as he’s a massive fan) and invited to take a seat and scan our faces into the Hasbro Pulse app with the help of their awesome team and make this dream a reality. My wife was with us, so of course she got in on the fun too. We scanned our faces in and it was very simple and quick. Then we all selected our figures to add our heads to. We all chose Power Rangers(Me as the Black Ranger, my wife chose the pink ranger and the nephew got the red ranger). Then we were told that we needed to wait about 4-6 weeks and we’d have our custom action figure team in our hands. This was a major part of our Comic-Con adventure and definitely, a memory my wife and nephew won’t forget (as it was both of their first Con ever). Thank you to Hasbro for being so generous(also getting me brownie points that home) and I highly suggest checking out Hasbro Pulse and all the cool stuff it has to offer.
Movie
The Last Voyage of the Demeter: Double-knock on wood!

Adapted and written largely from the Captain’s Log chapter of Bram Stoker’s magnum opus Dracula, The Last Voyage of the Demeter tells the story of Dracula’s journey by ship from Carpathia to London, and what happened to her crew in the interim.
So here we are in Bulgaria, middle of 1897, and Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) of the Russian schooner Demeter is here to take on some strange cargo from some unknown client and transport it to Carfax Abbey in London. In need of some extra hands, the Captain sends out his capable Second Wojchek (David Dastmalchian) to scout for some, and initially the roving black doctor and aspiring philosopher Clemens (Corey Hawkins) is passed over in favor of more work-roughened men. The adorable cabin boy of the Demeter, Toby (Woody Norman), narrowly misses being crushed by the mysterious dragon-marked crates being loaded onto the ship, saved by Clemens himself and switched out with the superstitious sailors running from the Demeter like they had been poisoned by the sign of Dracul. And now, armed with some nine or so crewmen, Doc Clemens, and Captain Eliot himself, the twenty-four strange what looks like coffins adorned with dragon signs brought mostly safely aboard, the Demeter can make for open water and the Hell that awaits them there.
The duty of showing Clemens around the ship falls to a cheerful Toby, who proudly shows him the living areas, the Captain’s quarters, the very-large cargo hold, the galley and kitchen where the overly-devout Joseph (Jon Jon Briones) cooks the crews meals, the various above decks, even the sails, and the rigging are all at least touched on, and the livestock pens that Toby himself is in charge of, including the handsome good-boy doggy Huckleberry, or just Huck. We the audience get a very clear feeling of what it’s like to actually be aboard the Demeter, just how large she really is, and what living on a ship for months at sea is really like, the reality and practicality and the dangers of it.
Everyone more or less settles in for a hopefully uneventful voyage, taking mess around the common table and exchanging ideas or aspirations for when they arrive in London early thanks to the fair winds, and receive a handsome bonus for their troubles. But that involves being alive and making it to London to spend said bonus and pay, and the coffin crates spilling dark soil from the motherland and disgorging all sorts of other nasty secrets, have some serious plans to the contrary.
First, it’s the livestock, innocent and shrieking in their locked pens as a monster takes great furious bites out of their necks, and of course, the creature just straight up ruins poor doggy Huck. Then there’s the fully grown girl that gets dislodged from an open coffin-crate, covered in bite scars and as pale as death, she eventually starts interacting and talking after several blood transfusions from Doc Clemens, Toby learns her name is Anna (Aisling Franciosi). And then, as the weather turns foul and the winds begin to be a serious problem, the attacks turn toward the remaining humans onboard the Demeter.
Most people these days are familiar with Dracula, that gorgeous cunning vampire Elder who can supposedly transform into a bat or a wolf, seducing women to voluntarily offer up their veins like an unholy sacrament, a being at once beautiful and powerful, but also horrific and murderous if given half a heartbeat to smell your blood. This is not Dracula.
Instead, the creature that hunts the humans occupying the Demeter is an absolute monster, not a single human feature left to it, barely even recognizable as humanoid-shaped, instead boasting not just full-length bat wings but an entire exo-skin of bat membranes that can be used for feeding, a mouth full of needle-like teeth akin to a predator of the deepest darkest parts of the ocean, those yellowed Nosferatu eyes that will not tolerate light in any way, and of course giant pointy bat-ears. This is a thing, a grotesque straight from the depths of Hell, and no amount of glamor magic can make this Dracula (Javier Botet) seem like anything other than what he, is – a parasitic demon who only wants your blood. There is no reasoning with it, no trapping it, not even really any talking to it (kinda hard to talk when your throat has been ripped out), and, like the much more frightening Dracula stories of old, no amount of pure faith behind a symbol does anything other than give false hope.
Coming face to face with an actual abomination does different things to different people. The formerly delightfully foul-mouthed Abrams (Chris Walley) dissolves into a blubbering mess; poor Larsen (Martin Furulund) didn’t even get to see his own death coming; and it turns out Olgaren (Stefan Kapicic) wants to live so badly, he’ll suffer becoming a blank-eyed Renfield if that’s what it takes. All of Cook Joseph’s purported pure faith didn’t stop him from trying to take the coward’s way out and didn’t save him anyway when the sound of unnatural bat wings descended on him. I find that kind of irony delicious. Dear Anna, resigned to her fate to be eternal food for the horror that terrorized her village, nevertheless wants to try and save whoever is left of the Demeter with her own sacrifice, and there aren’t many. Wojchek of course wants to kill Dracula, but for all his logic and solid practical nature, has no experience whatsoever with this sort of thing, and sure doesn’t want to sacrifice the Demeter, the beloved ship he called home that was promised to him by Captain Eliot himself, in order to destroy that demon. Even poor sweet Toby isn’t safe from the creature’s clutches, and what happens to the cabin boy of the Demeter is what finally sends Captain Eliot over the blooming edge. And who could blame him? For this sort of thing to happen during the last voyage of such a proud, solid ship as the Demeter, is some serious bullsh*t.
To leave such a film open for a potential sequel, especially when called the last voyage of something, was a pretty hefty ask, and somehow the filmmakers managed it. I personally think a different version of Van Helsing, the infamous vampire hunter, teaming up with a certain black doctor who nurses a serious grudge against Dracula, could be a kickass sequel. Until then, experience the doomed final journey of the Demeter and her poor crew in all it’s bloodstained glory, in theaters now!